by Majok Marier
The older guys, Dut and Kau, looked out for me and they looked out for Matoc and Laat. Matoc was a little older than me, and Laat was near the same age. That is our culture. If you have a child and the child is young, parents look out for him. But if you grow up to be older, you can be responsible for anybody. You can defend people. That’s what happened for us. People would see children going by themselves. There would be groups, and they would have an obligation to help them. As I said, very often our parents and grandparents were training us to survive, to be able to do for ourselves, if something happened to them.
If the parents are gone, older sisters may be in charge. When we were at home, some soldiers or animals or illness could come, and the parents could die, or the mother could die in childbirth. Someone would be responsible—a brother, a sister, or a grandmother. Now if anything happens, you have to make a life like other people who know their parents. The people in our country never know what may happen. If you don’t train your children to be strong, they won’t survive. So that is part of our culture.
When we boiled the sorghum, that’s what we ate, and the two of them—Dut and Kau—were the ones to do the cooking. We might gather three stones on which to perch the cooking pot over the fire. We would be allowed only to put some grain in the gourd for them to cook. But otherwise, they cooked for us. (Only later at the refugee camps did we cook for ourselves.) For three months, when we were in Poktub, the only place we were able to stay for a while because we bartered for food, we ate sorghum grain, cooked. The rest of the journey, when it came time to cook something, Kau and Dut would do this. We didn’t cook that often, because we had nothing to boil. But when we did, it would be during the day because a fire at night would give us away to the enemies. We kept grain boiled during the day in our gourds and ate from it at night.
Walking barefoot at night, Dut and Kau would guide us. They did many things to take care of us. Later when we were in the camps, we were separated. I did not see Kau at all. Maybe he went back to Sudan while we were in Pinyudo. I did see Dut once before the camp collapsed and he went back to our home village at Adut Maguen—actually the new village nearby, as our original village was destroyed.
When we first came to Pinyudo and for about the first six months, things were very hard at the camp—people were dying of starvation and disease after their long journeys—and the camp was just getting set up by the UNHCR. Then about May to June of that year, 1988, everything was changing. You could get a blanket and share it with another guy. So I saw Dut, and I gave him a blanket.
Besides the responsibility to care for younger children, another thing in our culture is shared stories; at Pinyudo, during the evening hours we would tell the stories like our grandmother would tell us. The stories would help us to be close to our families. And it would take our minds off the fact that we had no food. The really skilled people were the ones who could narrate where they are from and who their people are. For instance, I could tell about my father’s name and my grandfather’s, all the way back to seven generations. Then I could do the same on my mother’s side. And then someone else would tell about their family names. After that, people would know you, and sometimes someone would come to me and say, “So and so is close to you; he is one of your relatives,” because he would recognize the names.
It helps in marriages because you cannot marry your cousin, so people need to know who your family are; in fact, marriages cannot be negotiated until family members and older people in the villages are consulted in great detail while a marriage is being proposed to determine who are the family of the proposed bride and groom so that cousins will not marry cousins. Sometimes mothers don’t have time to discuss your relatives, but a grandmother can tell you these stories and these family members’ names.
We had these community gatherings in the evening at Pinyudo and also at Kakuma. Agar and Malual and Cic—all Dinka tribes—would meet in their own groups. Agar have ways that are different from Malual and Cic communities. We would tell these stories in these gatherings. We have some common stories, such as Lion stories and Fox and Hyena.
In the story of Fox and Hyena, Fox is the one that is always cheating everybody. The one who gets fooled is Hyena. Fox would say to Hyena that he was going to take Hyena to a bee hive and let him get the honey out. But the Hyena says, “I see you Fox—today, I’m going to eat you because you fool me every time.”
So the Fox shows him some honey and he tastes it and he says, “What is that?” Fox says, “If I show you, you are going to eat me.”
And Hyena says, “No, I won’t eat you.”
So Fox took the Hyena up there in a tree and he tied Hyena up near the honey cone. Our people have a way to help the bees make and keep the honey. It’s a cone, with one side open. It’s a long cone, made out of bamboo. They make it like a box, and it has holes on each end. Then they just hook a noose on one and they have a little box and a way to retrieve it. They find a tree with two branches coming to a Y to sit the box between, so the bees can go in there and make honey. So they had to tie the Hyena to the tree.
“I’m going to tie you up here and then you can eat all the honey you want, and then I’m going to come back,” Fox tells him. He ties him up and says, “Don’t touch the box. Now I’m going away from here.” When the Hyena puts his hand in there all the bees sting him and he just cries. That’s a story that we tell.
Another story we tell in our area because we have a lot of lions who attack and eat people.
There are some people in Rumbek—they are not Agar Dinka, they are another tribe, so we Dinka often get confused with them—who are believed to be lions as well. In the day they are persons. At night they turn into lions. So they are going to eat people. People say, “That is not going to happen because you can’t turn a human into a lion.”
So there’s a guy who has a bull, a very nice bull. So what happened is, this guy followed him everywhere. He followed the bull owner into the forest and asked him:
“Do you know this place?”
“Yes,” the man said. “I graze my bull here.” The man who was following him then knew he might have neighbors nearby, and if he called out, they would come running, so he did nothing. They moved to another area in the forest.
“Do you know this place?”
“Yes, I know this place. This where I had my cattle last year.”
Woman straps hand-made pots onto bamboo sled to take to market. Note cloth for carrying pot on head at left.
“Do you know this place?” the second man would ask at the next site.
“No, I don’t know this place.” Then the person/lion said, “Just wait here.”
He then ran to the other side of the bush. He hit his head on a tree, and he turned into a lion. So he came back and attacked and ate the man.
There are many mistaken beliefs about people in our part of South Sudan being part lion. When you go to northern Bahr El Ghazal province and say, “I’m from the Agar Dinka,” people think you are a lion. The impression that they have, because the lions bring trouble to their area, is that we are lions. Most of the people laugh about us. They say, “These people are part lion. So during the day they will be people, but at night they will go and turn into lions.”
In fact, there is a group, a tribe, not Agar Dinka, but they reside in the Lakes State, and I think that is why we get confused with them: We are in the same state. So people think of Rumbek, they think the lion people. In fact, these people, called Malual Aguek Bar, are 100 miles from Rumbek. But we all, Agar Dinka and these Malual Aguek Bar people, live in the same state. Our province, Lake Province, became Lake State after independence. There are other small tribes, like Cic Dinka, like the Atot tribe, and Gok Dinka—these people are close to Rumbek and when they go to different areas, people call them Agar, but they are not Agar. They are different groups within our state. So there is confusion about the Agar and these lion people.
These Malual Aguek Bar people—they live near Yirol—they do believe they are
part lion, that they have a relationship with a lion in their ancestors. They think they have special powers over the lion, and that when a lion comes, it will not eat their people. They worship lions sometimes. They say that, if a lion comes around, they can make a sacrifice, and the lion will just turn away.
In our groups in Pachala and Kakuma, we heard people say “You (Agar) are the lions, the people who turn into a lion at night.”
We told them: “You know what, if you go to the whole of Sudan, we are the people who build the tall buildings more than anyone in southern Sudan, all of Sudan, because of the lions. If we are lions, why do we build these tall houses because the lions eat us?” We laughed about the fact the others thought we were the lion people.
So what we were saying is, it’s not true. Also, it doesn’t happen. How can someone turn into a different animal? How do you put that big hair on your head, or how do you get all these claws and they go back in? How do you change all those things at the same time, and then return to a human being? That’s what people actually believed; people who had not been to our area believed it was true. We believed the same thing of the people from Malual Aguek Bar tribe, that they are close to the lion.
When we came together in the camps, people began finding that what they thought about us is not true, that it went back to the Malual Aguek Bar people, who believe they have a special tie with the lion. You cannot be human and an animal. Nothing happens like that.
When I was seven and fleeing my home, and we were three days from my village, in Pankar where the lion attacked us, I thought about the stories I knew about lions. We were downstairs on the ground and we were crying, and the people who were up above were laughing about those crying under the house, and I was thinking, these people may be close to these animals. Maybe one of them has returned to the animal, and is making that sound, the roar of the lion we heard. Later, we went upstairs to sleep, as the people realized there was danger in our sleeping below. So I guess I decided they were not part lion after all, as I slept upstairs near them.
And there is the story we learned about a guy called Anyeth Makou. When this man appears in the village, people say he comes with the lions, so children should be up in their house at night. (Often people sleep under the house at night because it is cooler in hot weather.) When you hear anything at night, then just be quiet, and sit there. Don’t do anything to call attention to where you are. When we were children, there was no arguing with this. If Anyeth Makou was around, you went upstairs!
The other thing that we believed of the Malual Aguek Bar people when we thought they ate people is that they were animals who might survive death. When one of them died, they had to bury that person deep and sit there and pound on the grave for seven days so that he wouldn’t jump out of the grave. People told terrible stories about this, and most credited the Agar Dinka, but it was this other group. All these stories they told to keep people in fear. But many people still believe them. If I go up to northern Bahr el Ghazal, they will say, “You are people who eat people.”
However, in our groups, people began finding that what they said about us is not true. In fact, many nights we told these stories, and we laughed as we heard what people thought we were. Such laughing and joking took our minds off our empty stomachs, as there were many nights like that, when we were very hungry. We came to see that these stories were made up mostly, that the lion-person was a myth, probably created to make us fear other people; if our parents made us fearful of people who were part lion, maybe we would not stray into areas where we would be unwelcome or unsafe. Or if children made a fuss about sleeping upstairs when parents felt they should, word that Anyeth Makou was in the area and the lions came with him might inspire a child to seek the higher place at night.
Through the refugee camps, we got to know ourselves, our area, and our people; we got to know other tribes, as we met with them in groups, and played sports and went to school together. And we walked to different areas in Sudan. We went to the Nuer area, we went to Murle area. We went to the Taposa area; we went to Central Equatoria, where they had different tribes—Acholi, Madi, Zande. These are tribes that are near Kapoeta. So we got to know areas that were not our own, and people got to know us.
A Story of Our Leaving Kakuma
Our resettlement and the way it was handled among our people tells a story of the special obligation we Dinka—and the other Lost Boys—feel for supporting those back home. It shows how bound we are to our home, even though we are citizens here and we contribute here and we are Americans in every sense. Yet we are also people with two countries. The decision to leave shows that.
The UNHCR came to the unaccompanied minors group that was going to turn out to be the Lost Boys group. Radda Barnen, the Swedish group that is known in the United States as the Save the Children Foundation, was working with the Lost Boys group, and they and our teachers were involved in the decision about this. They had a lot of questions. How would it affect the boys? What about the new culture? It would be good for us to get an education and establish our lives. They were concerned about this, because if we came here and had a new life and a new culture, they worried it would not work well for the goal of seeing us do something that would be positive for our country. Finally, they decided that it would work if we came to America and then went back and helped people when things got settled in the war. Remember, at this time, it was 2000, and we were far from a peace settlement with northern Sudan.
So they went over with us the negative parts and the positive parts of this decision. They were thinking we could go to school. We could go back and teach other people in South Sudan, or do the jobs that would be needed to establish the systems in the new country. And they were worried that we were young. When we came to the American culture, we might turn in different ways—many would go to drink a lot, and that is not good in our culture; it was against our culture. And it is bad because all our people when they are drinking and drinking, they end up alcoholic. Those were the things they were worried about because drinking was not the thing in our culture.
The elders in the camp advised a lot of people. Any group of people that was leaving, they called them in, and they made a ceremony. They bought a goat or cow and they slaughtered it and the whole group would come and then they would talk to them. These were not relatives necessarily, but older people in their communities in the camps. The elders each gave something he thought the person could get from the United States. Each elder talked. Those leaving had to listen. That’s the tradition during one of these ceremonies. They warned us about drinking, looking for women, forming gangs, and going to drugs. If you are not from that country, don’t take the bad things from that country that will spoil your life, they said. Look for what you are going for. If you go to school, go to school that you choose. If you are working, make money and then do something in your life. So that is the advice that they gave to each of the Lost Boys.
They knew that if you go to a different culture or a different place, you have a lot of problems fitting in. They wanted to warn us about that, but then they told us we should go, and we could come back to our country: “You have to remember us and don’t forget our country.”
“And don’t forget your people,” they said. Then when we would have our community group, the elder would call our name; then we would come and talk to him, and he would give a blessing that nothing would get in our way, and we would be free, and he would say, “Don’t forget about us, and we want you to come back.”
And that’s why people who have resettled here work hard and supply a lot of people with money so they can treat those who are sick in their families. And those who have resettled do a lot of other things, and they keep talking to their families, and they advise them and see how they are doing. And they also help them.
We who have come here try to tell people what is going on in Sudan. We have spoken before people in churches, in school, and among coworkers at our employers’ businesses. Many people thought the war was going on
still, that the war kept going and going, and that people still were dying. So when it stopped in 2005 and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed, we felt we needed to tell people about it. So we did a lot of speaking to groups, and we still do, to educate people about our country. Even though there is peace there is still a great deal to do.
Living in Two Worlds
There have been a tremendous number of success stories of the Lost Boys coming to this country, and there have been some difficulties. Without a doubt, we feel there have been strong successes; many have completed advanced education, most are well employed in fields of work that needed assistance: plumbing old houses and assisting in renovating others, working in the processing plants, being distributors of building materials, working in South Sudan in new areas of infrastructure development. Even some of our group in other cities and other parts of the world that I’ll describe later have become actors or models. But there has been sadness along the way also.
The commitment to one’s people includes making a traditional marriage. This continues no matter what the hardships people endure, and no matter how long the separation from the intended wife. There are many of my friends whose stories are like mine—we work very hard to earn money for cows to pay the bride-prices for our wives, and then we have to wait a very long time to be able to live in the same country, whether in America or in South Sudan or elsewhere. Mostly this is due to the fact that we have to continue to pay for cows purchased, or we have to provide money now for the wife’s and family’s upkeep in Sudan. In addition, if we hope to bring a wife and family here there is an immigration fee close to the cost of the very expensive plane ticket, around $2,400! So that is the bind that young men such as myself find ourselves in. We do not complain, as the process of creating a Dinka family is our tradition, and we want our wives and families to reflect these values. But it does provide a source of stress for us—for family back in Sudan as well as for the young men here.