Sudan: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  Akin had no idea where she was. Although the other prisoners had been marched away from their villages, Akin had been transported unconscious in the back of the raiders’ truck. When she awoke, her surroundings were totally unfamiliar, and she had no sense of how far she had traveled from Mondala or in what direction. She couldn’t have run away, even if she’d dared, because she didn’t know which way to run. The realization that Mondala was completely lost to her, as unreachable as the stars in the night sky, frightened her almost as much as the soldiers.

  The purple haze of Sudanese dusk began to settle in, and the long shadows of the trees—ebony, hashab, mango, acacia—dissolved into the approaching darkness.

  Akin plodded along at the end of the line. She forced herself to take a step and then another and another, and resolutely refused to allow her mind to process the events of the last 12 hours. She fixed her gaze on the back of the young mother in line ahead of her. Now and then she caught a glimpse of the woman’s baby; his doleful, half-open eyes peeked at her over his mother’s shoulder.

  All of the captives were hungry. They’d had nothing to eat since breakfast—hours ago in another life, in a world that no longer existed. They’d only been allowed a brief water break at a stream in the forest. The soldiers carried food with them. They reached into their knapsacks for hard bread and fruit that came from their supply truck and ate as they rode along. The captives stared at the food; hunger gnawed at their bellies. They were learning the first of many hard lessons about slavery—they were property, and their owners would never invest anything more in them than the bare minimum to keep them alive.

  As the sun dipped below the horizon and the color of the sunset drained out of the sky, the raiders steered their exhausted band of hostages toward a particularly thick stand of trees to spend the night.

  When they reached the grove of palms and acacias, a few of the riders dismounted and herded the women and children under the boughs of a large palm tree set off by itself. The captives willingly complied and sank down on the cushion of palm fronds atop the soft grass and weeds that grew around the tree’s massive trunk.

  Since none of the hostages had ever owned a pair of shoes, their feet were tough. But the paths around their village or the pastures where they herded cattle hadn’t prepared them for hours of forced march through thickets and over miles of stony trails. Their feet were bruised, sore and bleeding, and they wanted nothing more than to sit down.

  Akin collapsed in a heap a rope’s length away from the young mother. The little girl had watched the black, velvet sky gobble up the golden sunset, and as the world around her descended into darkness, so did she. She was an 11-year-old child who’d been kidnapped, ripped away from her life by monsters worse than the demons that stalked her most terrifying nightmares. She was alone, famished, tired and scared, so scared the ball of fear rested heavier in her stomach than her hunger. She wanted to cry—no, scream. She wanted to jump up and run away as fast as she could back to her village, her family and her world. But she wasn’t even certain that her family and her village existed anymore. She hadn’t seen her brother die, but she’d watched the soldiers kill dozens of her friends and neighbors. Had her mother survived the attack by the Arab on the black horse? Akin wondered. What had happened to her brother and sister? And her father--where was Papa! The image of his face produced a yearning in her heart so intense it was a physical pain in her chest. Oh, Papa, come and get me! she thought. Please, come and get me and take me home!

  For her whole life, her father had stood between her and every bad thing in the world. She had cuddled up warm and secure in her father’s care every day that she could remember. When she lay down on her woven straw mat on the dirt floor of the tukul at night, she fell innocently asleep. She was safe. Papa was there; Papa wouldn’t let anything hurt her. But now, in the blackness of this night, Papa was gone. She faced the first night of her life on her own, and she was so scared, so terribly, terribly scared.

  Akin started to cry. Not out loud. It hurt too bad to cry out loud. She didn’t want to hear the sound of her own grief. She cried silently, her tears streaming down her face and dripping off her chin.

  Then she lay down and curled up in a fetal position among the palm fronds. She tried to be small, so small no one would see her or take notice of her at all. Mercifully, her exhaustion overwhelmed her, and she fell asleep.

  Sunrise over Mondala found Idris Apot where he had been at sunset, seated outside the door of his tukul beside the dead body of his only son. Aleuth had been up all night, too. As she sat by her husband’s side while the first rays of the sun shot light into the valley, she pulled herself out of the fuzzy cotton of shock and forced herself to focus on the child she had carried, nursed, clothed, bathed, played with, prayed for and loved for almost a decade.

  She reached out and took his cold hand, his left hand, the other one was... Silent tears ran down her cheeks.

  Though her head wound was not life-threatening, Aleuth had a mild concussion. She suffered waves of dizziness, and her vision was sometimes blurry. The neighbors who had carried her unconscious to the village after the attack had refused to allow her to return to the riverbank when she came to. She only learned that her son had been killed when Idris walked up the path to their home with the boy’s limp body in his arms. As soon as she learned that Akin had been kidnapped, Aleuth went mercifully into shock. She had sat in the dirt beside her husband and their son’s body overnight, staring blankly into the darkness.

  But with the morning came reality. She and Idris had to bury their son.

  Shema sat beside her mother and held on with both hands to the hem of her mother’s bloodied sack dress. Neither of her parents took much notice of her. She hadn’t spoken a word since the attack, except the strangled “Mama!” that told Idris where to find his wife.

  Akec had been one of the men assigned to dig graves. When he finished, he went to Idris’s tukul and looked down in pity on his grieving neighbors.

  “I have made a resting place for Abuong,” he said simply.

  Idris nodded. He got up on one knee, leaned over and carefully lifted Abuong’s cold, stiff body. Akec helped Aleuth to her feet. Then the four of them, three adults and a little girl, set out for the burying ground to lay a nine-year-old boy to rest.

  When they reached the freshly dug grave, Aleuth fell to her knees and began to wail. She rocked back and forth and beat her fists into the soft earth as her soul cried out in agony. Shema patted her mother’s shoulder, her eyes dry. Something inside the five-year-old child had clicked off and shut down; she was as emotionless as a stone.

  As soon as Idris shoveled the last scoop of dry dirt into Abuong’s grave, Aleuth stopped wailing. It was done. Idris helped her to her feet and steadied her as he walked with Akec and Shema back to the village.

  Idris said nothing when they reached their tukul, just picked up his traveling sack, the one he carried with him when he went to hunt or trade in other villages, and began to pack it. It didn’t take long; he didn’t own much and needed little of it where he was going.

  Aleuth watched in wonder.

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  He put the sack over his shoulder, picked up his long ebony spear and stepped out of the tukul. His eyes were steely, set and determined. But when he looked into his wife’s face and saw the fear there, he softened. He didn’t want to cause her additional pain, but he had to do what he had to do.

  “I must go,” he said simply, then turned and began to untie their lone surviving zebu, slowly unwrapping the knotty, twirled rope from around the wooden peg.

  “Go? Go where? And why are you unleashing the cow?”

  When he had made his decision, Idris hadn’t even considered what he would say to Aleuth. Now, he couldn’t seem to find any words at all. There was too much pain in his heart to speak, so he gritted his teeth and continued to untie the family’s only cow.

  “Idris?” There was so much misery in her voice it brok
e his heart. He stopped, turned to her and did his best to explain.

  “I could not think of Akin before.” He stopped. Then started again. “I had to grieve for Abuong, and my heart is broken for him. But he is gone, and now I must not think of Abuong. Now, I must think of the living. I must do what I can for the living.”

  “The living?” Aleuth stared at Idris, her mind spinning.

  Idris replied with one word, dropped it like a pebble into a stream. “Akin.”

  Aleuth was dumbstruck.

  “What can you do for Akin?” she cried out in anguish. “She is gone. The trackers lost the trail in the woods. She is”--Aleuth sobbed out the word--“gone!”

  “She is alive!” Idris shot back, his voice as hard as a stone.

  “And we must pray for the mercy of God to be upon her!”

  “I will pray for the mercy of God. But I will also put feet on my prayers.”

  Other villagers had heard the raised voices and drifted closer to listen to what was going on. In the Dinkan culture, the wife accepted whatever her husband said as the will of the family. Something odd was happening between Idris and Aleuth Apot.

  Unmoved by the sudden audience, Idris gathered the rope tied to the cow and looked at his wife. His look was kind, but he did not waver.

  “I must do this,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “Go where?” Aleuth asked, with shell-shocked incredulity. “I just lost a son and daughter. Am I now to lose my husband as well?”

  Though his voice was stern, his eyes pleaded with Aleuth to understand.

  “As long as I have breath in my body, my daughter has hope. I am going to find Akin and bring her home!”

  There was complete, stunned silence. Aleuth was so shocked she could form no response. A few of the nearby villagers actually gasped audibly. One of the elders stepped forward. It was against custom to interfere in the affairs of another, but these were extraordinary times and the old rules didn’t seem to fit anymore.

  “There is nothing you or any of us can do for Akin,” he said. “If a whole village full of men was helpless against them, what could you hope to do alone? We all loved her, but she is gone.”

  Idris turned on the old man.

  “She is gone until I bring her back! My daughter knows that I will not mourn for her as if she lay cold in a grave like Abuong. She knows her father will not abandon her. She knows I will not rest until I find her.”

  Aleuth stared at her husband in disbelief. “But why are you taking our cow? It is the only one we have left.”

  Idris addressed Aleuth, but he was talking to all the other villagers who had gathered there as well.

  “I can only fight fire if I have fire of my own. I go to find fire. I will go to Bentiu...”

  Bentiu!

  The villagers were shocked. The city lay hundreds of miles to the north. Akec was the only one among them who had ever been there. Some of the other villagers had been east to Juba, but Bentiu was four times as big. And dangerous. It was said to be a very dangerous place.

  “I will find someone in Bentiu to help me find Akin. And if not there, I will go somewhere else. But I will not stop, I will not rest, I will not give up until I find a man like the Murahaleen to fight the Murahaleen.”

  He spit out the word “Murahaleen” as if it tasted foul in his mouth, and without another word, he turned and headed out of the village, his lone gray-and-white zebu plodding along contentedly behind him.

  Aleuth stood and watched him go, too surprised and shocked even to cry.

  The morning after Akin was captured, one of the soldiers untied her, moved her forward in the line of hostages and placed her among three other young girls.

  While the men noisily loaded supplies and gear into the small truck to prepare for the day’s journey, the girls whispered urgently among themselves. Like victims of other catastrophic events, they each felt compelled to tell their stories, to process the horror in the telling.

  The two older girls were from the same village; the third, like Akin was alone. Her name was Omina. At 12, she was a year older than Akin and had been the only child in her family. But she had no family left now. The attacking Arabs had killed her parents and then dragged her away.

  Mbarka was the oldest and had just turned 15. Her mother and her two older sisters had been kidnapped, too, loaded into trucks and hauled off into the night. Bright-eyed and talkative, Mbarka was a sharp contrast to the other girl from her village. Shontal was quiet and reserved. She was barely 14 but looked older. Under the circumstances, that was not a good thing. The terror of the last few days had scarred her worse than the others. She had watched raiders hack her parents apart with machetes. The brown stain that covered most of her skirt was her father’s blood. What she had experienced had almost pushed her into insanity.

  Akin wanted to comfort Shontal when she heard her story. After all, Akin was better off than the others. Her family was still alive! She knew they were. She couldn’t prove it, but it was true. It had to be true.

  “I’m so sorry...” she began.

  But there was no time for comfort. The guards barked orders in a language none of the captives understood. They stood and marched out in single file across the plains of southern Sudan.

  The days blended one into another, and she no longer kept count. Every day was the same as the preceding one, little food, little water, walking to the point of exhaustion. Akin’s brief acquaintance with the other girls quickly forged into friendship in the crucible of horror. The four had a strength together that none of them could have summoned alone; the presence of Mbarka, Omina and Shontal kept Akin going.

  The caravan finally set up camp in a grove of trees beside a railroad siding a few miles south of Wau, a city of about 200,000 on the Jur River almost 200 miles south of Bentiu.

  The raiders marched the captives to cattle cars strung along the track and crammed them inside. Akin and the girls tied to her had been loaded first, and about 60 other women and children had been jammed into the transport after that. Akin was mashed against the back wall; the crushing weight of the other captives and the lack of air made her head swim. It got worse when the sun came up; the cattle car heated up like an oven as the train traveled north toward Southern Kordofan. The slits in the side of the rail car provided minimal ventilation, and Akin gasped for air until she passed out. But she remained upright because there was nowhere for her to fall.

  Finally, the train stopped, and the guards began to unload the captives packed up against her. Suddenly, there was air to breathe. Akin came to and saw the moon through the open door as she stumbled with the others out onto the ground.

  The captives were quickly loaded into canvas-covered trucks. Akin caught sight of the other girls’ frightened faces, their eyes glowing in the bright headlights of the truck behind them. Then the guard slammed the tailgate shut, and the caravan of trucks roared off into the night.

  Chapter 8

  Idris sold his zebu to a farmer in Vulya, the first village he came to after he left Mondala. The man was a Christian, and when he heard Idris’s story, he was so touched that he paid twice what the animal was actually worth.

  Unencumbered by the cow, Idris set a grueling pace. From first light in the morning until it was too dark to see, he walked; his long strides ate up the miles day after day. He only took time for essential rest and refused to stop long enough to hunt for food. He ate berries, mushrooms and wild gourds and scared up enough game to get by—guinea fowl, partridges, pheasants and rabbits. About 10 miles north of Bayom, he almost stepped in a bustard’s nest and feasted that night on the land bird’s eggs. But there were days when he found no game at all; days he walked 30 to 40 miles on an empty stomach and then fell into an exhausted sleep, hungry.

  Alone every night in a strange place as the profound African dark gobbled up the world outside the campfire light, Idris was afraid. He was more frightened than he had been as a boy when he and a friend had hidden all night high in an acacia tree as
a lioness prowled around beneath them.

  But he was certain that wherever Akin was, she was far more frightened than he was. She was just a little girl!

  There was a prayer on his every breath. Sometimes his tears and his pain and his prayer mixed together to form something far grander than a simple man could understand. At night on his knees, he petitioned the God of the universe to protect his little girl, to give her the courage to hold out until he found her. And he would find her, or die trying.

  He asked nothing for himself, but he was strong after he prayed, his fear left him and he felt a peace that could only have come from God.

  Set back from the road in a field on the outskirts of Bentiu, Idris found a particularly tall palm tree on the edge of a small stream. Careful to make sure nobody saw him, he used a stone to dig a hole close to the trunk of the tree, placed his money sack in the hole and covered it with rich, black soil. There were thieves in Bentiu; he needed to be cautious. Idris had never in his life committed an illegal act; today he would search for someone who broke the law for a living.

  Ron lay on the baked sand under the scorching Sudanese sun, shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted at the canvas-topped transport trucks parked below him and at the Sudanese villagers tied up next to them. A small brown lizard scurried across the top of the rocks he had piled up for additional cover, and Ron edged carefully backward on his hands and chest until he was below the crest of the sand-covered hilltop where he and Masapha had set up shop to capture a slave auction on film.