Children Are Diamonds

by Edward Hoagland

  Her family (another wife of her father’s had accompanied them, with three children) had brought along a plaited basket containing millet and mangoes for her to eat, in case we weren’t able to feed her. Somebody must have watched at the gate to see whether we were going to take her in, then run home when we did. They said to Ruth that hungry times were coming again—right?—and when the hunger was at its worst the Arabs would attack. Yes?

  Ruth shrugged and nodded. “We’ll bring her back when it’s over, with her eyes like a fish eagle’s.”

  Instead of refusing the food, Ruth paid them for it and distributed the four precious mangoes to the two girls, Otim, and her toddler. The radio’s chat that day had been bleak. No NGO had food deliveries in the pipeline. Even the U.N.’s own camps had had their rations cut to fifty percent of minimum requirements. Their cash flow hadn’t matched the pledges. But we could hear hoo-rah calisthenics from the recruits in the training camp next door, and saw one jog by with a grenade launcher on his shoulder. In a sense, this Western ethic of whisking the most incapacitated children off to safety, rather than the more able-bodied souls, seemed incongruous to a subsistence tribal society, where, of course, for survival purposes the strongest adults ate first during hard times so that the clan could continue to function—but it was no more so than other strange events, like that the food sacks spewing out of the anus of an airplane five hundred feet up should take the leg off the woman who had radioed for it. Or the power locally that Ruth appeared to have despite being less competent, rational, or well-supplied than the Norwegian doctors, for example, across the river and up the road. From spying on her, people knew about her witch’s globe and spirit stick and mysterious Labyrinth. Yet these potent U.S. government agents showed up periodically, also, met with top commanders, and shortly afterward would vanish through other channels. Whereas I assumed they were using Ruth and our half-assed, amateurish organization merely because Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, and the rest of the classy ones wouldn’t allow connivances such as that, a lot of folk naturally imagined that Ruth must be linked with these guys, who, ducking in and out, were either a conduit for weapons or emissaries for deeper negotiations. Thus the favoritism we were showing to walleyed children might be explained as witchcraft, in line with Ruth’s mirrored globe and Labyrinth, or else as some eccentric humanitarian impulse emanating from the luxurious nation which had allowed a quarter-million blacks here to starve to death in 1988, when it was allied with Khartoum, but now was helping feed the same tribes, because it wasn’t.

  Our audience—Bol’s and mine—under the tamarind tree grew to include haggard parents as well as their children, plus children who had been pushed near the front row specifically to attract my attention because they were handicapped: bent over with cerebral palsy, perhaps, or a spleen that felt as hard as china from malaria, or who were blind, or scarred by yaws, or lame from rickets or a broken bone that had not been set at the time of the accident and needed to be rebroken in a hospital, or a piece of shrapnel in them that had never been removed. Even a layman could have noticed how their vitamin deficiencies had weakened them. It was pitiful, exasperating, and, to let off steam, Bol and I joked about having a drink someday in the Acropole Hotel in Khartoum, or the Fairway in Kampala, watering holes where he had hung out with—slept with—off-duty aid workers during his student days, unlike Ladoku, who’d never traveled beyond Malakal and Juba. That his government didn’t care if its black population starved or fled into exile was now a given, but what had become new was the rebels’ attitude, holding their own civilians as bargaining chips instead of letting them evacuate to where there was food. Bol had had an affair with a Dutch blonde who now worked in Geneva, the last he’d heard, though no one here had received mail for years. Friendships with expatriates always ended with the person who possessed a visa leaving: money and a passport relegating you to being a piquant abbreviated adventure. And since I was not a Red Cross girl, no hope of marriage, with eventual European citizenship, dangled in the offing. The fantasy involving my cooperation was for Bol to hide under my car seat and somehow get to Kampala or Kenya, where an affiliation with an NGO might provide him a foothold, teaching refugee kids where the SPLA wouldn’t snatch him off the street as a traitor.

  In this tumultuous landscape, spooling, ballooning complexities, with the sky cascading cloud changes overhead, I assumed that a sort of perimeter of safety surrounded my last walks. With a wink and a nod, our State Department and Western intelligence agencies determined where genocides were allowed to occur and where not. Eighteen American rangers had been killed in Mogadishu and twelve Belgian soldiers in Kigali, and Somalia and Rwanda were thereupon abandoned to the mercies of their warlords. In Zaire and Angola our interventions had been less pretty to begin with, where civil wars then killed millions and more. But Arabs were the villains here, and so first Israel, then finally the U.S., had shown up, wanting to bleed them. No one knew who I was, but even the Lord’s Resistance Army didn’t want to mess with white people. In fact, Ya-Ya learned she could bar the gate, not to soldiers but to ordinary people, by virtue of our flimsy theoretical authority—much in the way the roadblocks you encounter might be only a slender stick propped on a tripod of twigs that you could push over with your foot, though you might be promptly shot if you did. Ruth was going to leave herself as a decoy, a reminder that aid must be requisitioned, allotted for here. Officialdom perhaps would ask, Is Ruth still at her place? Like a shaman, she would exercise shadowy powers.

  But I’d walk with one of these soft-spoken, educated individuals who were intimidated by their prospects—others beside Bol and Ladoku. The tactics of the war did not delight them, or the actual killing, and they worried about the orphans they were caring for (though unable to voice their doubts) and the internecine shooting of black at black, not Arab. “They are helping me to understand your history,” I explained to a camp policeman who became suspicious of our conversations.

  Ladoku had Madi cousins in a forest village beyond the far side of the river that he could have run to, if he’d wanted to go back to living barefoot on sorghum beer brewed in jugs in the ground, as well as relatives trapped behind the minefields surrounding Juba, whom he hoped the Lutherans were feeding. But if there were dissident Dinkas, they lived isolated in the bush hundreds of miles away. Although the rebels did need university graduates, the ones they trusted were writing propaganda and giving interviews at the Hilton in Nairobi, or schmoozing in Dar es Salaam, where military stuff was shipped from, or finagling in Addis Ababa to reestablish supply lines that had been cut off by the change in dictators. Meanwhile, they’d ordered no paper and pencils for the new generation, and neither had we.

  Bol remembered scribbling away on an exam with a roomful of other candidates for foreign scholarships in Khartoum, knowing that the winners would go to Germany, London, Minnesota, or Denmark, find a postgraduate post of some kind, perhaps, and never need to return. In retrospect, it may have been a life-or-death competition, because a Dinka suspected of apostasy was in greater danger than any mere Madi. But Bol’s scores weren’t high enough. He’d gone to wintry Moscow instead, where they made sure you came back.

  Earlier, on the riverboat through the Sudd from Juba to El Obeide—American Catholics were teaching children in Juba, and British Anglicans in Malakal then—after he had won his berth from secondary school to the University of Khartoum, he had slept on the deck like the others who couldn’t afford to fly. The war, back in 1970, still in its Anyanya, or “Snakebite,” phase, was fitful, so that was how people went—hoping to strengthen their local schools with what they learned. A handful of businessmen and other students were also aboard, including three Tanzanians who were headed clear downriver for Cairo, to Islam’s greatest university, along with humbler passengers, such as women and their plentiful progeny, plus a goat or chicken with its legs tied, and a lone spearman catching a ride to shorten his hike.

  A Greek trader and his Armenian counterpart had rented the two ca
bins on the bridge deck, and three or four smaller operators, each with a half year’s pile of village supplies and goods, had spread out below. A couple of soldiers were on the boat as well, which might have spooked the three Muslim boys from Tanzania on their way to Cairo if they had thought about it at all, but soldiers were a commonplace in Africa, a postcolonial sign of self-governance and independence. They’d deliberately set off to go the slow way, they told Bol when he made friends with them, from Pan-African idealism, in order to cover the length of the continent from Dar es Salaam by boat, bus, and train, firsthand and on the ground. Their famous elder statesman Julius Nyerere, the African leader most respected by the Europeans, preached a transborder egalitarian mosaic, a nonsectarian brotherhood of unity, ujamaa, and socialism. They spoke Swahili and English, not Arabic as yet, but had been taking lessons; and how proud their parents were that they had been accepted at Al-Azhar University, beginning their advanced education so promisingly. For Bol, too, the momentous start seemed auspicious, and the Pan-African ideal he was hearing novel and glittery—Muslim, Christian, and traditional animist to now chum along nontribally, nonracially.

  The ten days or whatever it would take, after the towns of Mongalla and Bor, to bumble through the papyrus-and-water-hyacinth-clogged maze of Africa’s largest swamp, the Sudd, which sometimes twisted a hundred miles or so in any direction, could be used by them in learning Arabic from new friends, such as Bol, and observing the “wading peoples,” both Dinka and Nuer, along the banks. There was also an Acholi agriculturalist on board who’d been helping the U.N. inaugurate a potato-growing project up in the cool climate of the Imatong Mountains. The captain was a Lebanese, but the deckhands were Shilluk; they took frequent soundings for him, and fended the vessel off sandbars and drift logs with their long poles. All worked a twelve-hour shift, then tied up to some tree stub in an oxbow at sunset. Second only to Conrad’s famous river route up the Congo as far as a tinpot boat could navigate, this was the legendary excursion, and the heart of the Cape-to-Cairo jaunt that so many British had notched on their belts when they controlled the two Rhodesias and right on up to Wadi Halfa, toward the Valley of the Kings, when most of the continent was colored red.

  Herons, egrets, ibises, buzzards, guinea fowl, whale-headed storks flapped every which way over the dugouts of lanky men wielding fishing tridents. The boat stopped at hamlets of huts only a yard above the water to let people off or to leave freight, with cattle browsing in the shallows, their left horns sometimes trained a certain way by the gradual application of weights, while a herder, proudly dusted with ceremonial dung ash, poised upon one leg, the toes of the other hooking that knee so that it jutted out quite jauntily as he leaned on the point of his fighting spear, with his fishing spear dandled in his free hand. Whether Nuer or Dinka, these were people of sufficient numbers that they hadn’t needed to bother learning a common language like Arabic or English to speak with other tribes, and they stared with more interest at the cargo on the deck than at the foreign or inferior strangers. The captain, although he was ethnically a Lebanese Arab, had been born to shopkeepers in Malakal and gone onto the river as a boy with his uncle, who had been a pilot during the British era, and then married a daughter of the King of the Shilluks. The Shilluks were a river tribe located just northward of the Nuer and Dinkas, sharing Malakal with the others as a hub, and, though less numerous, were knit rather tighter as warriors, if only because they had a king, so that their tough neighbors seldom fooled with them.

  Bol said that although a few happy-go-lucky shots were fired at the boat near Terekeka, and later at Malek, once it entered upon the clayey tangles of the swamp, where the main-stem current became practically indecipherable and the raucous birds and rumbling hippos exercised their own hierarchal tribalism, while mama crocodiles defended their primordial nest sites along the bank with plunging roars and splashes, guns gave way to more antique, intuitive weapons. The strategy was not to rile the locals.

  Bol loafed on the fantail, trading Dinka words for Swahili or Urdu and the collectivist vision of the Tanzanians. He would come visit them in Cairo, he promised, and maybe they would all do postgraduate work together in Copenhagen or Amsterdam. The war of south versus north might be sputtering elsewhere, but in this trackless morass of tricky braided still water segueing into primeval lakes and bogs—where, according to the record books, half of the Nile’s water up to this point evaporated—when they dropped off a thousand pounds of rice and five hundred pounds of sugar and salt at Shambe, plus generator parts and gasoline, people reached for handfuls of mud to keep the bugs off as the bow touched shore. The water wildlife was so loud and headstrong, you’d think man hadn’t been invented yet. It was glorious, interminable, splendid, appalling, but the middle-class city boys from Dar es Salaam, who were used to the servants in their families’ compounds taking care of all their necessities, worried because the jars of drinking water and satchels of cornmeal and other staples they’d brought to live on, apart from bananas and fresh fish, might run out. Such was the Africa of Bol’s grandparents, but not theirs. They prayed five times a day, kneeling toward Mecca.

  And this was about when a machine gun opened up on the Jubato-Malakal boat, from a nondescript section of the murky channel, before they reached the village of Adok, in a cryptic stretch between Lake Nuong and the Zeraf Cuts, exploding out of the papyrus rushes—as, at the first burst of fire, an otter hit the water with a slap. The guerrillas hiding there were lucky our two soldiers were standing at the bow, just lounging, without their rifles at hand and no place to dive in the extra second they had before the bullets zeroed in.

  The captain immediately swung toward where the gun was, to surrender and tie up, lest it rake him on the bridge next. The problem was to locate the weapon in the featureless riot of vegetation, while his speed remained equivalent to about a walk because of driftwood and other obstacles lurking in the sea of water. His wife, who’d been dressed in jeans and a T-shirt like him, disappeared and reappeared quickly beside her husband in Shilluk robes, all African in her severity and ceremonious regalia, shouting in both Arabic and the language of the Shilluks that without the boat, these lost settlements of the endless swamp would be in deep doo-doo. To begin with, she seemed to Bol to be trying to protect the entire shebang—all of the passengers, the freight, not to mention the structure of the stubby boat, owned by her husband, which was still, two decades later, the only boat Bol had ever been on.

  The guerrillas, half-naked but in fatigue pants, were armed with Kalashnikovs, a pistol, and spears as they swarmed aboard. They were Nuer, fortunately still allied with the Dinkas at this time, so that Bol was okay, once they had checked his knowledge of his birth language and were assured of the truth of his lie that his destination was not Khartoum but Malakal. However, the two government soldiers lying wounded on the rail and bitts at the bow, although they were as black in color as anyone else (they were from Darfur), were executed point-blank and thrown into the river, where no carcass would remain intact for even an hour. The Acholi man who worked for the U.N., introducing the growing of potatoes to the cooler slopes of the southern region, was cleared as well, as soon as he spoke his native tongue and named his village in the mountains, which was Gilo. And the half dozen floodplain women, both Dinka and Nuer, who were traveling locally on the deck with sheep, goats, calves, children, and family provisions, weren’t robbed or molested. Neither were the pair of Shilluk deckhands in any danger. Their tribe was neutral so far in this war that was brewing, and they were set to work instead unloading the commercial shipments of varied stuff—while the captain’s wife shouted, “How stupid can you get?” in Arabic at the raiders, with a fury not comic but rather regal.

  It was hard to tell if she and her husband had a financial stake in what was being stolen off of the boat, although she certainly pointed at the bullet holes that had been shot through the hull and housing with genuine anger. The two traders, the Armenian and the Greek—who were also standing on the bridge—were
more careful in objecting. Their lives were more important to them than whatever was being taken. But she, Bol realized, was really fighting for the captain, who was known up and down the river as a Lebanese Arab, although not a Khartoum Arab. She had draped a Catholic cross around his neck and was telling them that they would have to kill her if they took him, and that the Shilluk warriors would not be neutral anymore, but would descend upon them from Kodok and Malakal in very great numbers—the king, her father, would send them—if they dared to. Meanwhile, the Greek and the Armenian were discreetly buying personal immunity with folded bills.

  This forceful princess wife hadn’t reacted in particular to the killing of the government soldiers, or the checking of passengers’ papers—those who had any. Bol’s Dinkahood had saved him from a body search, which would have revealed his destination. But the three poor college boys from Dar es Salaam were under suspicion at first sight. Their color alone, browner than black; their inability to speak any language known to the Nuer except for English; then the admission papers they were carrying to Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, and their copies of the Koran betrayed them unmistakably as the enemy.

  “Mohammedan,” the fighters’ officer said. He waved off an attempt at a bribe, pointing instead at the crates or sacks the deckhands were laboriously unloading, and called the Shilluks back to leave the whole job to the Tanzanians, after the heaviest, which would have needed a crane otherwise, were done with. They’d also managed to drive off a small tractor on twin gangplanks.