Seed of South Sudan

by Majok Marier

  A stranger might join us while we were walking, but we were careful who we allowed to join us. We would always ask, “Why are you here?” “Where are you from?” “What tribe are you?” If his story sounded like ours, that he was fleeing the soldiers, and he seemed to know the names of local villages, then we would allow him to walk with us. Sometimes we did not have a good feeling about a person, as though he could be a soldier or another enemy. When we stopped to rest, my uncle or I would suddenly jump up and say, “Let’s go!” and then we five would walk quickly away, as though we had to go fast. Usually that worked to keep us safe.

  The next morning after our first day on the path, we rose and walked in darkness. We did not know the country, we did not know the threats, but we kept walking so that we could get as far away from the shelling and killing as we could. We had talked to people on the path the day before and we heard there were refugee camps in Ethiopia. That was many, many days away, and we knew it would be an extremely long trip, even if we had no obstacles. On a straight line, it is probably a distance of 400 miles, although we had no way of knowing it at the time. And there were plenty of problems.

  On the third day, we came to a village, Pankar, and the houses there, like many in that area, were built up high. We arrived at night, so we did not see the land around. We were among a group of people who had been traveling together, even though we did not talk with those whose language we did not share. The villagers allowed us to sleep under their homes, where the children slept. The rest of the group slept out from the houses in nearby fields. In the middle of the night, we all woke up when a lioness stole under the house and tried to grab one of the children. We screamed, and the lion roared, then ran away. Everyone was suddenly up, and frightened for their lives. All were running around screaming, trying to see where the animal was. There were SPLA soldiers in the area who came to help when they heard the lion and the sound of people crying; they went looking for the lion and its mate. Often the male lion is in the grasses waiting while a female attacks, and the male catches those running away. But the soldiers found no lions.

  At the suggestion of the villagers, all the children and we three boys and my uncle and those who were sleeping under their houses moved inside, and all those sleeping in the fields moved into the space under the houses. The lion did not roar again, but it was a scary night.

  Sometimes in those first days we walked in a group of as many as fifty to a hundred people. There was not much talking back and forth as we did not understand their language, but they were mostly Dinka. Whenever we would stop to rest, the groups sat under trees based on their home. They were there; we were here; we did not mingle. I understand weddings and family gatherings in America can be like this; one may wonder about who those other people are, but people in the bride’s family gather in one area, and same for the groom’s, and within these groups sometimes there are other subgroups that mostly talk to each other.

  The Dinka is a very large tribe in Sudan, and it is only in Sudan. It is not in other countries. But there are many subgroups of Dinka, such as my group, the Agar Dinka, and within the Agar Dinka there are Agar Dinka and other Agar Dinka; I was from a village north of Pacong, and Laat was from another village south of Pacong. Matoc and my uncle were from a settlement south of Pacong, but we are all Agar Dinka. There are also subtribes of Dinka such as the Cic, and Aliab; I could not understand the language of any of these. There are other subtribes: Rek, Malual, Tuic, and Gok. At the time I could not understand these, but as a result of my experiences over the years with different dialects, I am able to understand these Dinka languages.

  It’s as though the experience of the Civil War and displacement in refugee camps created a common language, as if at the wedding mentioned above, all the guests were told they must dance with each other and in the process they found they had many things in common and became fast friends afterwards.

  Southern Sudan has been known as the Sudd, or swamp, through history. It’s the land at the upper end of the White Nile River, surrounded by swampy areas that often slow this giant river’s flow. Every schoolchild learns the Nile is the world’s longest river, and it is generally considered the longest at 4,130 miles, or 6,650 kilometers. From southern Sudan to a point north where the Sobat River joins it, the White Nile is surrounded by reed-choked backwaters. During the dry season, one can walk through this area, but during the rainy season one cannot. This was beginning of the dry season, so we could walk a good part of the way through the river country.

  Before reaching the Nile we had to cross two other rivers. When we reached the Na’am River, which is not too far from Pacong, we swam across it. As young children, we learned to swim in the Na’am, and that helped us in our journey as we did not have to search for a way across. Similarly, we crossed the Payii River. I understand many American children do not learn to swim, and this is a great disadvantage to them, I think, because in this life-and-death emergency, we were able to cross on our own.

  This is Majok standing beside the River Na’am, near the site of Adut Maguen village, with a relative. This was the first river they had to cross while escaping the village firing.

  We passed through areas where the people were Dinka, but of a different subtribe. We were Agar Dinka; these were Cic. We stayed in a Cic village named Tod. Then we moved to an Aliab area—those people actually spoke our dialect—and spent three days in one of the villages called Panliet.

  Since I had left my village, Adut Maguen, this next part of the journey was the hardest. The Nile is very broad, especially as there are swamp areas adjacent. There are mosquitoes on the Nile that will eat people alive, but we had no mosquito nets, blankets, bedsheets, or houses to protect us. It was not possible to swim; we had to wait for a local boat, and that took three days of waiting. In that time, we had no food to eat that would help resist the effects of the mosquito attacks. Many people got sick immediately because of the insect assaults. It was now a week since I had left my home, and it was starting to be very difficult; I had never experienced anything like this in my young life.

  The Nile, which has miles-wide swamps and very swift tributaries, presented a real challenge. The streams going into the Nile are very fast. Three or four miles upstream from the Nile, these tributaries are easy to cross. But near the Nile, the stream might be as wide as a large dining room table is long, but very swift. A man who was part of the larger group we were with jumped in to swim across and he emerged completely naked. The rest of the group laughed at him, saying “Don’t try that again!”

  So we had to wait for a boat that could take us across. And we had to cross the Nile in stages, because of the streams. It took us a total of three days. We started out at 2 p.m. at a place called Achum Shore. We crossed that swamp and eventually came to the actual River Nile. It took all day to cross, and we spent the night on the other side. We had to cross water again because there was a branch coming out of the Nile that had a very high current. We found another stream and crossed that as well. After that, we found a way to get out. It was actually a large swamp.

  There was mud and a lot of tall grass. We didn’t get a boat, so we walked through that mud all day and came out in the evening. We wore a brown gooey mess on our bodies. This kind of stream was different from that formed on the inside of the river where currents could be very fast. The swampy expanses just flowed out of the river and just died somewhere. The water stayed there, stagnant. Everywhere you go in that area, there is a lot of water.

  Once on the other side, we walked again, still avoiding the main road that the SA tanks and Hummers could travel. We crossed the road at night, and continued on walking for several days until we reached Poktub, where there was construction activity, now halted, for the building of the Jonglei Canal, a huge project involving Egypt and Sudan. This canal was to be 224 miles long, would connect two sections of the White Nile, and enable some water that now goes to Egypt, which, by law, gets most of the water, to be diverted and channeled into many communities in
South Sudan. While it seems to be for a good cause, there are many problems with the project, chiefly that the South Sudanese have never been allowed to be at the table during any of the planning. They want to discuss possible impacts on their entire section of Sudan and its alteration of patterns of life throughout the area. The project stopped in 1983 when the war broke out and has not been resumed.

  But there was activity in Poktub; we could get food. All along our journey so far we had been limited to boiling corn and the parched seeds from sorghum stalks near our route. One time a day only, when we stopped around noon, we ate these meager rations. Poktub was the site of extensive roads, cranes and bulldozers, all assembled for the project, even though now they were mostly still. There were people who would give us food, or allow us to trade work for food, and so we stayed there three days, gathering our energy and filling our bellies. We were able to get squashes and groundnuts and other foods we had not eaten since we were in our villages.

  Majok amid sorghum grain growing near Pulkar, South Sudan. Plants were sustenance on much of the journey.

  Our goal was to get to Ethiopia, because we kept hearing there was a refugee camp there. The Arabs could not reach us in Ethiopia, and we could grow to manhood and go to school. Yet there was a large desert between us and the border. It was important to replenish our energies before making that trip. We needed to find some way of staying more than a night or two. For the first time, we were able to devise a way to stay in a location long enough to get plenty of food and water and rest.

  For the first time, because we were good inventors, we created a kind of home for three months.

  What we found was that there was a lot of metal trash there due to the construction project—building materials, old tires. We learned we could take a sheet of discarded iron, beat it into a bowl shape and then make handles from other iron scraps. Residents could pour durra wheat and sorghum into the pan. They would give us grain in this pot—and then we would give them the pot. They didn’t have a way to go to town and get things they could cook with. They had to cook with clay pots, and these had to be replaced often due to burning. And we needed the grain to eat.

  That is the way we survived that area. We tried, but there was nothing we could do, workwise. If you went to local people and said you needed food, today they would give you something, but tomorrow they would say, no, we don’t know you. So we came up with this way to create a chisel and then we used it to cut the other tools, and then we made the pots.

  The local people in Poktub called these pots “Bahr el Ghazal.” Dinka people live together in their own communities, and they want to know where you are from. If you go to the north, they know you are from the south, and they want to know your region. So they named us the Bahr El Ghazal because that is our region in Sudan. And they gave the same name to the pots.

  We also made sandals from the rubber tires. I understand Americans call these “Jesus boots.” They are a flat sole with loops attached for the big toe (what we call the “big thumb”) and a strip across the middle of the foot. These pieces we nailed to the sole. The shoes were very practical and they would not come off the foot. We had two different styles.

  The residents loved our products, and the community benefitted. We even developed a pan large enough to cook a goat. With these products, we could trade for grain and other foods to eat.

  Our housing there was an abandoned steel cargo container. It became very hot during the day because the weather near Ethiopia was very hot. We couldn’t go in the container, it was so hot. At night it would get really cold; but we had no choice. At least we were safe, and we managed to stay in one place while we prepared our bodies for the difficult desert crossing.

  But always there was the question of where we would go if things became less friendly there. We knew they’d soon have all the pots and sandals they needed, so we made plans to leave.

  We were all set to leave to walk to the next place, and all of this was in preparation for reaching the very difficult desert areas nearer the Ethiopian border. Just as we were preparing to leave, the construction site caught fire, and the residents told us we had to put out the fire. There were no buckets, or anything with which to put out the fire. We had to carry water from the river to the fire in just our hands, and that did not do much good. Still, when we tried to leave, the people told us we could not leave or they would beat us or worse, so we had to keep at it. We ran back and forth, back and forth, from river to fire, and only after three hours were we able to put it out. We were very late starting on our journey for that day.

  It was from this time that we entered Nuer territory; those are lands held by the Nuer, a separate tribe from the Dinka, and there is a history of enmity between the two. Over time, territories for each group have been worked out, but when one group comes among the other tribe, there is often trouble. Each village we came to was burned out. We walked in that area for seven days, and everywhere the villages were burned. On this first part of our trip into the Nuer area, we were so late that we had to walk from midnight to 4 a.m. We rested until dawn, and then rose and tried to get water, but they would not allow us to get water; some boys with spears were ranged around the water well.

  Instead, they forced us to walk further away—a distance of four hours—to get water. This was in an opposite direction for our path eastward, so we basically had to rest, go walk eight hours to get water and come back, and then go through the whole process again. We did this for several days, trying to get enough water in our bodies to withstand the heat of the desert that was up ahead. So we circled around for several weeks, never making headway to our destination. But the people would not allow us to use their water.

  In Sudan, most of the villages have been settled and claimed by custom, but most have been uprooted and moved due to dire weather conditions, war, or other reasons. There are not firm government borders as there are in U.S. cities and towns. An area is defined by a tribe or clan establishing itself—often running off another, weaker group. So when a small group of strangers such as us arrived in their midst, the reaction of local villagers was suspicion. If five came now, then how many of our people were following, just waiting to take over the area? So staying very long in one place was not possible. The more we needed of their precious resources, the more worried they were and the more aggressive they became in seeing us gone. This pattern repeated itself in many communities, because in Sudan as in much of Africa there is such competition for water, food, land, and other resources.

  The next part of my story shows this in horrid detail. When we were finally able to start on our journey to the desert, we experienced the most difficult conditions: we had to walk for two weeks, and for three days we saw no water at all. I had followed the advice of my uncle, Dut Machoul, to not drink water until we could see water, but to only wet the inside of my mouth, with the water I had. However, we wondered what would happen in the desert, as it was even dryer than the place where we were. And there were violent people who lived in the desert, or who may be traveling through.

  We walked for two days in the Akobo Desert; we were without any water for eight hours, and we were very, very thirsty and weak because of the intense heat and thirst. Then a scene unfolded that could never have been imagined. We came upon a pool in the middle of the desert at Dochan, but we found there had just been a battle between enemy tribes fighting for the water, and there were dead bodies all over the land near the water.

  Later, I found out that the Nuer people heard we were coming and that they came to the pool because of us. They heard we were walking and coming to this area so they were waiting for us because they thought we might have a lot of valuable things they could take from us. But they found instead the Murle people, their enemies they often fight—raiding each other’s cattle—so they fought there at the pool and then they ran away, leaving the bodies of the dead.

  We were just going to sit under a tree around the pool that was clean, with no dead people near it. It was really trou
bling for me to see a dead person for the first time in my life. Dut Machoul told me that if I did not make myself strong and ignore the bodies, then I would die like those people lying there. That made me think of how I could improve myself to be active all the time, to be the most active person in our group. We stayed there for several hours, but left as soon as possible. The place smelled bad and we feared for an attack that could occur some time sooner or later.

  A man who was also resting beside the pool told us which way to go after we left the pool so we could avoid hostile locals. Not only that, he had a gun with him, and he killed antelope that had come to drink from the river. So on that day, we cooked and ate meat that he gave us. Fortified with water and meat, we embarked on what we hoped would be the last leg of the trip inside Sudan.

  This part of the trip was one of the most difficult. We ran low on water and food, but we were pushing hard to gain the Ethiopian border. After a day and a half past the pool at Dochan we totally ran out of water, so we drank our own urine. We were very close to another of the main threats to our lives on the journey. In addition to wild animals, thirst, enemy soldiers, starvation, and unfriendly natives, there was one other killer: loss of hope. We were close to it.