Ajok

Ajok is the supreme being of the Lotuko of Eastern Equatoria, the maker of the world and of the first people and the master of the sky. He is characterised as fundamentally good and life-giving, yet quick to wrath when human beings slight him. The best-known Lotuko myth explains the finality of death: in the first age Ajok would restore the dead at their kin's request. When a woman's small child died in her husband's absence she pleaded with Ajok, who brought it back to life; but the returning father, enraged, killed the child a second time. Ajok, insulted, swore that never again would the dead be revived, and so mortality became irreversible for all people. Rain, on which the cattle-keeping and cultivating Lotuko depend, is his to grant or withhold, and the human rainmakers are understood as channels of his power rather than independent gods. His name belongs to the same Nilotic family of divinity-words as Shilluk Juok and Acholi Jok, and among neighbouring and closely related communities such as the Lokoya and the Lango of Sudan he is invoked as Naijok.

Domains

• creation
• sky and rain
• life and death

Powers

• creates the world and its people
• grants or withholds the rain
• restores the dead, then withdraws that mercy

Epithets

• the good and the angry god — the benevolent yet wrathful high godParrinder, Geoffrey. African Mythology. London: Hamlyn, 1967. (secondary)

Sources

• Ajok (also Naijok) is the supreme creator and sky god of the Lotuko/Otuho, regarded as essentially benevolent but capable of anger when offended.: Seligman, C. G., and Brenda Z. Seligman. Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1932. (primary); Scheub, Harold. A Dictionary of African Mythology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, s.v. Ajok. (secondary)
• In the Lotuko origin-of-death myth a woman begged Ajok to restore her dead child; Ajok did so, but when the child's father killed it again in anger, the offended god decreed that henceforth the dead would never return, so death became permanent.: Abrahamsson, Hans. The Origin of Death: Studies in African Mythology. Uppsala, 1951. (secondary); Lynch, Patricia Ann, and Jeremy Roberts. African Mythology A to Z. 2nd ed. New York: Chelsea House, 2010, s.v. Ajok. (secondary)