JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — A South Sudanese prophet — as the story goes — wielded a sacred stick during a tribal battle in 1878 and summoned a deadly thunderbolt that struck down rival fighters.
That stick is known as Ngundeng Bong's dang, and not only has its reputation as a magical and dangerous weapon lived on, but it also plays a role in the latest cycle of violence in the world’s youngest nation.
The dang has emerged as a contentious relic in the quarrel between South Sudan President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar, who took ownership of the stick years ago. Machar is believed by his followers to be the gap-toothed, left-handed man who would become president in fulfillment of Ngundeng's prophecy.
While that sustains Machar’s struggle, it also makes him a target for his opponents. Kiir and Machar are from different ethnic groups. Kiir is Dinka, the country's largest group, while Machar — like Ngundeng — is Nuer, the second largest.
Fighting exploded along ethnic lines when Kiir and Machar disagreed in 2013. Kiir claimed Machar was plotting a coup. Machar then launched a rebellion that became a deadly civil war in which an estimated 400,000 people were killed. Machar returned as Kiir’s deputy following a 2018 peace deal that has collapsed.
Now fighting has escalated so badly that authorities are ordering civilians to evacuate rebel-held towns. That's despite the fact that Machar is under house arrest and accused of treason. A South Sudanese general was recently filmed urging government troops to “spare no lives.”
Some rebels, including a militia known as the White Army, believe they are fighting to fulfill Ngundeng’s words and finally install Machar as president.
Douglas H. Johnson, the British-American historian who brought the dang back to South Sudan, compares the stick's authority to a parliamentary speaker's mace, needed for official business to proceed.
Machar is said to keep the dang as a religious object, using it to galvanize political support, according to Johnson and others who spoke to The Associated Press.
“Very much of the conflict is linked to spirituality,” said Mawal Marko, an independent researcher in Juba. "Most of the people fighting, especially the eastern Nuer, you find so many fighting in the name of Ngundeng.”
South Sudanese mythology abounds with cruelty, and the fight between Kiir and Machar is the latest installment of the hatred Ngundeng himself witnessed and later sought to stop: Dinka against Nuer, Nuer against Dinka.
Ngundeng’s prophecies were expressed in songs that even today some people play on the internet, searching for revelations about their country's fate. There can be disagreement on the literal meaning of Ngundeng’s words.
“If we look at a prophecy progressively, there is always room for doubt,” said Christopher Tounsel, a historian of greater Sudan who teaches at the University of Washington, speaking of Ngundeng's prophecies.
“That’s the most powerful thing: What people think and what they feel. That is the thing that can be the most impactful — not what it is, but what people perceive to be.”
Ngundeng, who died in 1906, is believed to have predicted his country’s independence. He foresaw violence. And he is said to have prophesied about a messianic Nuer leader for South Sudan who lacked the facial marks of his tribe, was left-handed and gap-toothed, and had been with a white woman. Machar is said to check those boxes.
“We know it can have power,” said Alex Miskin of the Rift Valley Institute think tank, speaking of Ngundeng’s dang. “Can (Machar) speak power into that stick? That is something I don’t know.”
“Who has the stick and what is the story may make some people a bit frightened” of Machar, said Miskin.
The dang was fashioned from the root of a tamarind tree and decorated with copper wire. It is about 110 centimeters (three and a half feet) long. One end of it broke during the 1878 battle won by the Nuer. Afterward, Ngundeng would say the dang was broken; there's no account of him using it so successfully again.
The dang was inherited by Ngundeng's son, who was shot dead trying to use it against colonial troops. He is said to have cried when he raised the stick and nothing happened.
Collected as a trophy, the stick was presumed lost forever until it was discovered in the British town of Bournemouth by Johnson, a prominent South Sudan specialist. He bought the relic and sought to return it to South Sudan, which didn't have a museum.
Machar, as the highest-ranking Nuer leader in a government then at the cusp of independence from Sudan, received the dang in the South Sudan capital of Juba in 2009. A white ox was slaughtered in a ritual overseen by Machar, who was photographed holding the dang aloft.
The dang’s return was seen as a national event. Kiir welcomed its arrival in a statement that warned the dang should not be used to wage war.
While serving as the vice president, Machar kept the dang in his house and showed it off to visiting Nuer leaders, said Johnson. “In a way, he was using this as a cultural object, something of interest to the Nuer rather than to South Sudan, to bring in other people as part of his coalition," he said.
Johnson recalled that the dang looked ordinary in an umbrella stand when he first saw it. But if Machar has the stick, it wouldn’t be surprising that Kiir “would be worried that it was out of the control of the government,” he said.
The AP was unable to reach Machar for comment. His spokesman, Puok Both Baluang, said that freeing Machar would be “synonymous with the release of peace.”
Despite his detention, the 73-year-old Machar remains a formidable opponent for Kiir, who has governed without an electoral mandate for 15 years. Authorities say elections will be held in December. But a vote without Machar on the ballot and which returns Kiir as president would be seen as disenfranchising the Nuer.
Their military rivalry began in the bush in the 1990s, when Machar led a breakaway unit that drew accusations of treachery against him during the long war for independence. Amid the split, forces loyal to Machar carried out a massacre that targeted the Dinka, angering Kiir and others.
Fighting among southerners briefly undermined their struggle for independence, and sowed lifelong distrust between Machar and Kiir. Machar remained influential because he had the loyalty of Nuer fighters.
Kiir suspended Machar as his deputy in September after Machar was accused of remotely playing a role in an attack on a garrison of government troops. Machar regularly appears in a cage in the criminal trial he says is politically motivated. It is unclear if Ngundeng's dang is still kept in his house.
The stick “is the heritage of South Sudan,” even though it isn't at the building in Juba that holds national archives, said archivist Peter Tako.
“We hear it is with Riek Machar,” Tako said of the dang. “I don’t even talk about it.”
The dang, he said, was a sacred item “embedded” with the kind of political authority that made him feel unqualified to discuss it.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
FILE - South Sudan's President Salva Kiir, right, and Vice President Riek Machar, left, attend a Holy Mass led by Pope Francis at the John Garang Mausoleum in Juba, South Sudan Sunday, Feb. 5, 2023. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)
FILE - In this Saturday, May 25, 2019 file photo, South Sudan's President Salva Kiir arrives for the swearing-in ceremony of Cyril Ramaphosa at Loftus Versfeld stadium in Pretoria, South Africa. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)
FILE- South Sudan's suspended First Vice President Riek Machar, right, sits in the dock with seven others charged with murder, treason, and crimes against humanity at the Freedom Hall in Juba, South Sudan, Wednesday, Sep. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Florence Miettaux, file)
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the Holy See's role in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”
Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”
History’s first U.S.-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Monday.
The sweeping manifesto is about safeguarding humanity in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Leo raised the slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fueling.
Black American Catholics, activists and scholars have long called for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings, beyond generic apologies for the involvement of individual Christians.
“It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”
Shannen Dee Williams, historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of American Black Catholic nuns, “Subversive Habits,” welcomed the apology as a "monumental step toward the kind of essential truth-telling and reparation that many Catholics have prayed and worked to witness.”
“The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy," said Williams. “Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about the church’s leading roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery--and thus by extension the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today.”
The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican authorized Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.
In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all possessions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.
The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.
Nicholas V’s permissions to the Portuguese were confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481 and Pope Leo X in 1514, according to the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”
Spanish kings received the rights for the Americas.
In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. The Vatican insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and weren't to be enslaved.
In his encyclical, Leo recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, long after many countries had abolished it. Before that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, church institutions and even popes — Gregory the Great — had slaves, Kellerman said.
In acknowledging the 15th century papal bulls, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’”
Leo said it wasn't possible to judge the morality of the decisions with today’s standards.
“Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he said.
The pope said that the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized.”
“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached,” he said.
Leo said that the church must firmly condemn all forms of trafficking related to the digital technological revolution “if we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith.”
Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said Leo needed to acknowledge and atone for the church's complicity in historic slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological enslavement.”
“For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much needed apology from the pope,” said Butler, who is Black.
Kellerman, the scholar, welcomed Leo’s apology but said more needs to be done to further acknowledge how the Catholic Church legitimized and expanded slavery.
“Pope Leo has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this admission and apology today,” he told The Associated Press. “Hopefully a future document will explain in more detail the church’s involvement with slaveholding. As a scholar I have some quibbles with the wording, but this is a truly remarkable moment.”
During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade on behalf of Christians who participated in it, but not the popes. In a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, which was the largest slave-trading center in West Africa, he denounced the injustice of slavery and called it a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian.”
According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were Black, listed in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole or a free person of color. His family tree includes slaveholders and enslaved people, Gates wrote in The New York Times.
During a visit to Angola last month, Leo prayed at a Catholic shrine at the site of an important hub of the African slave trade during Portugal’s colonial rule. While at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, Leo recalled the “sorrow and great suffering” Angolans endured for centuries, but he didn’t refer specifically to slavery.
Winfield reported from Middletown, Connecticut.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Pope Leo XIV speaks during the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV listens to Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, right, during the presentation of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV, left, attends the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV, left, arrives with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin for the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, right, talks to theologian Leocadie Lushombo during the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV holds the pastoral staff as he celebrates the Pentecost Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, Sunday, May 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
