Walking the Nile

by Levison Wood

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this, Lev?’

  I turned to Boston. We were standing on the edge of Adjumani, facing the border – though there was no road to speak of, only untamed bush. ‘I was going to ask you the same question. You don’t have to come with me. It wasn’t part of our agreement. You could go back to Kampala, to Lily and the girls. To Jezu Adonis.’

  But Boston only said, ‘I would not leave you to it alone!’ At first I thought he was being brotherly and felt almost touched. Then his face broke into one of his wildest grins. ‘Without a guide, Levison, you would not even make it to the border.’

  We began to walk.

  There is no road to Nimule that runs parallel to the Nile so instead we hacked our way through the bush, following the curve of the river. The Nile widened here, running east for some miles before tracking north again, and on its banks elephants still roamed. Ordinarily the herds lived in the Nimule National Park on the South Sudanese side of the border, but sometimes they would swim across the river in search of better grazing and trample Ugandan crops, uproot Ugandan trees, and generally leave destruction in their wake.

  The first sign of Nimule, as with many other African villages, was the phone masts reaching into the sky. The tower rose out of the scrub but, before long, I could hear the rumble of trucks coming from the south, the buzzing of motorbikes and the barking of feral dogs. ‘Must be a main road near here,’ said Boston, and before we knew it we had stumbled onto the track. Soon, we were standing among the shanties. Nimule was as busy as Adjumani before it; the refugees who hadn’t yet made it to the camps were lingering here and some, it seemed, had even made the frontier their home. Juice sellers lined the road and radios blasted out the latest news from the frontline. Somali truck drivers sat around chewing khat and Sudanese Arabs in white jellabas smoked shishas. People of all nationalities crowded the street, dodging lorries full of Ugandan supplies bound for the empty stores of Juba, the capital of South Sudan.

  ‘It’s the Wild West,’ I said as Boston and I made our way to the checkpoint. My nerves were already intensifying, because neither of us had the appropriate visa to get into the country. I hadn’t been able to get one before leaving home because of the outbreak of war, and Boston had decided too late that he was accompanying me this far. Not having a visa isn’t always an issue in a continent where a fistful of dollars still goes a long way, but I was feeling increasingly on edge.

  ‘It’s enterprise,’ said Boston. ‘Opportunity. An African knows where to make a fast buck. There are people who specialise in it. The second they hear of war, off they go.’

  It wasn’t just Africans, I reflected, as we joined a queue at the checkpoint. Businessmen from all over the world were here to make a quick buck. So were the NGO workers – it was a mistake to believe some of them weren’t here for the money as well. As the traders, merchants and soldiers headed north, the refugees – some in rags, some in shiny new suits – headed south. Nimule was a place in constant flux. Slowly, we made our way down the line.

  It took a long time to reach the front of the queue at the checkpoint but, when we handed over our passports, our entry to South Sudan went without a hitch; the border guard didn’t even look at our visas before stamping the pair of us out and barking for the next in line. There was no turning back now. Without looking back, we walked across a stretch of barren no-man’s-land where Ugandan soldiers mingled with their South Sudanese counterparts. On the South Sudan side, the immigration building was virtually empty – there could not have been too many tourists looking for visas, and, within five minutes, we had been granted a two-month entry stamp and were being welcomed by a beaming equatorial official. ‘Welcome to South Sudan,’ he said, with a smile that spoke of a thousand things.

  In the scorching light of the South Sudanese morning, a figure was waiting. Outside the immigration office, he watched us through dark glasses, reflecting the sun. Wearing boot-cut jeans and short-cropped hair, his barrel chest and biceps threatened to tear open his shirt. As if to complement the look of a human monolith, his neck and shoulders bulged.

  A shovel-like hand extended and grabbed mine in such a crushing hold that I couldn’t have torn away, even if I had wanted. ‘Alright mate!’ he said, with a perfect English accent. ‘How’s it going? Welcome to the republic of South Sudan! Tamam?’

  ‘Tamam?’

  ‘It means cool, good, awesome . . . Well, something like that. It’s Arabic.’

  Ignoring Boston’s suspicious looks, I said, ‘Well, in that case, Tamam to you too.’

  ‘It’s me,’ he said, lifting his glasses for an instant. ‘Andrew Ray Allam.’

  Now this smiling behemoth made sense. I’d been expecting to meet up with a man named Ray Allam somewhere this side of the border, but hadn’t anticipated his being at the checkpoint. All I knew of the man was what I’d heard from a friend back home, who’d helped arrange the logistics while I’d been dealing with Matt’s death. Allam was a military man, somebody who could advise me as we tried to make a way north. He was newly promoted as a colonel in the SPLA, on a part-time basis – a sort of Sudanese reservist, whose day job was to arrange logistics for television crews and journalists. The SPLA was the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, South Sudan’s newly official military force, which had begun as a guerrilla organisation in 1983 and finally won the country’s independence in 2011. It was now engaged in suppressing the ‘rebels’ of the current crisis. If anybody could help me continue the expedition by navigating between the shifting sides of the conflict, it would be Allam. Or so I hoped.

  We agreed that he would meet us at several junctures on the journey north – first, here, at Nimule, and later on the outskirts of Juba, the capital city, which was now held safely by government forces. Further north, things became more problematic, with several key towns along the Nile being fiercely contested, but that was a bridge to be crossed another day. For the moment, Allam led us around Nimule as we resupplied our food and provisions. The town was incongruously calm – the only signs of conflict were the refugees passing south, back into Uganda. Breeze-block mansions and restaurants lined the main Juba road, and among them, Allam had found us a compound-style hotel. In the morning, he told us, he would introduce us to the rangers who would escort us north, through the Nimule National Park – but, for the moment, it was time to hear his story.

  ‘I was twenty-one when I arrived in England,’ he told me, in the hotel bar. ‘Before that, I’d escaped the civil war by heading to the north – to the side of the enemy. I’d been told that was the place to receive a good education, but when I got there I met an Englishman who arranged for me to get refugee status in the UK. When I arrived, I couldn’t speak a word of English – but they sent me to college in Winchester and I studied hard. I ended up with a diploma in media studies and was on track to get a good job in England . . . but I couldn’t stop thinking about my homeland, about Africa. In the end, I came back. I wanted to serve the SPLA, so I volunteered as a soldier. But they said to me – Andrew, the pen is mightier than the sword. And the camera is even mightier than that! So use your new education, and be our voice. Well, that’s exactly what I did. I reported for the government, and worked in media, telling good news stories – victories and so on . . .’

  ‘Propaganda?’ Boston said, in his usual brusque style.

  For the first time, Allam’s teeth flashed menacingly – and I thought I caught a glimpse of the true man, beneath his jovial exterior. ‘Yes, my Congolese friend. Propaganda! The stories we told were an important way of winning the civil war, and South Sudan finally getting its independence . . .’

  ‘And then?’ I asked, wanting to steer Boston away from quizzing him further.

  ‘That was twenty years ago. I’ve been in and out of South Sudan and England ever since. I have a family in England – in Dorset, where my beautiful wife lives – but I make my money here. Who’d have thought it? I make money here in Africa and send it back to my family in England! This is a topsy-tu
rvy world, my friends . . .’

  After Allam had left, promising to send our arrangements for the start of our trek tomorrow, Boston muttered, ‘He is not the man for us, Lev.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Boston? He’s already sorted the rangers for us to . . .’

  ‘He’s a government agent.’

  I was used to this by now – Boston seeing spooks everywhere he turned – but, this time, his assertion didn’t seem nearly so wild.

  ‘I promise it, Lev. A part-time colonel with the SPLA, helping media and foreign guests? He’s a spy, Lev. He isn’t here to help us. He’s here to keep an eye on us, to make sure we’re who we say we are.’

  ‘Well,’ I began, ‘we are who we say we are. If Allam can help us cross this country . . .’

  Boston laughed – as much at me as at the situation. ‘He won’t help like you think he will. He’s a government man. Do you really think they’d want us walking in areas they don’t hold, where they can’t control the people we talk to, the things we see . . .?’

  I had to concede: Boston had a point. I lay awake for a long time that night, thinking of the strange pact we had made with this strange spy catcher.

  There are almost three hundred kilometres of river between Nimule and Juba, and in the morning we set out, guided to the edge of town by Allam himself. Before we embarked properly, there was a surprise awaiting us. Outside Nimule, where the Nile does a sharp northerly turn when it hits the hard rock of the Nimule plateau, a tamarind tree was growing from an outcrop of smooth boulders. Beneath that tree’s gnarled branches, a collection of village elders awaited our arrival. Allam was grinning as we approached, and one by one he introduced me to the chiefs of the area, and of the Madi people.

  The Madi have made this part of South Sudan their homeland for many generations – and, though nobody really knows from where they came, Madi folktales suggest they may have emigrated from Nigeria to find a new home here, along the banks of the Nile. Certainly, the Madi had already been living here for aeons when Samuel Baker first explored this part of the world, following the Nile upriver from his base at Gondokoro, a trading station that sat on the river near present-day Juba. It was here, at Nimule, that Baker first set eyes on the plains of northern Uganda, and succeeded in travelling further south along the river than any other white man. To his great relief, he was greeted with open arms by the local Madi chiefs, who quenched his thirst with a cup of their famous tamarind juice. And, to my surprise, today, they were going to treat me exactly the same.

  Three old men and their wives presented me with my own tamarind juice. Soon after, a troop of village ladies in traditional clothes appeared from beyond a hillock, formed a circle around me and started to dance, with the leader of the group banging on an oxhide drum. The rest of the women held papyrus wands and shuffled in unison.

  As we watched, Andrew Allam winked at me. ‘I thought you might appreciate a “Baker’s Welcome”. They adore him here. He’s like a god.’

  After the dancing, the chief performed a simple ceremony – first spitting, and then sprinkling Nile water, over my hands. ‘You are now considered as Madi,’ he announced. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Boston surreptitiously wiping his own hands. ‘You are following in the footsteps of the great Sir Samuel. With the Nile as your guide, and God as your witness, go in peace and safety.’

  It was the most foolish thing, but as we set out, that simple blessing gave me succour and, for a little while, I could almost forget the terrible events that had happened in Uganda.

  Allam had instructed us that we would need at least three rangers to guard us as we went north: Nimule National Park was a tiny conservation area with a herd of elephant and occasional hippo, and sometimes the elephants turned rogue and could act aggressively towards visitors. On the morning we set out, though, only one ranger was ready: Severino, a grisly looking warrant officer who barely said a word. The shortfall, Allam explained, couldn’t be helped – given the country’s current crisis, the government was in the process of ‘security screening’. In effect, they were interrogating all of their own soldiers, police officers and rangers to test their loyalties – all a result of recent mass defections. The other two rangers we had been allotted had either disappeared into the system, or not been through their interrogations in time. Severino, it seemed, would have to do.

  North of Nimule, we entered the park. Most visitors to the park, occasional aid workers and the more adventurous UN staff, come to see the Fola Falls, a small set of cascades in the Nile that mark the last real obstacle for boats before the cataracts of the Sahara desert, still a thousand miles further north. By the afternoon, we had passed by the falls, and come upon a crumbling set of brick and timber buildings. For the first time, Severino muttered words: this place, he told us, was called ‘Commando’. It was a place with which he was very familiar – the park’s rangers used it as an outpost. But then, he lifted his hand and pointed to one crumbling shack, in the heart of the others. ‘That’s the place,’ he said. ‘That was Garang’s hideaway.’

  Slowly, we approached. Now, it was only a collection of shattered bricks, gradually being reclaimed by the wild. But Severino was lifting the lid on the story of South Sudan’s origin, and one of the longest civil wars that Africa – and, indeed, the world – has ever known.

  Dr John Garang de Mabior was a Sudanese politician and leader of the rebels who initiated the Second Sudanese Civil War in 1983. A member of Sudan’s native Dinka tribe, Garang had been born in 1945 in the upper Nile region of Sudan. Orphaned at the age of ten, he tried to join the army when the first civil war erupted in Sudan in 1955, but, because of his age, the army sent him abroad to continue his education – first in Tanzania and later in the United States. Garang was a bookish young man and quickly excelled at his studies, but, though he was offered a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, he made the decision to return to his Sudanese home. It was a decision that would ultimately change the face of Central Africa for ever.

  Civil war still raged in his home country and Garang was soon numbered among the rebel soldiers of Southern Sudan, fighting the government in the north for greater representation and regional autonomy. In 1970, the rebel army sent him to Israel for military training, and, although the first civil war ended in 1972, Garang had already taken his first steps towards becoming a career soldier. Subsumed into the Sudanese standing army, for eleven years he rose through the ranks, becoming first a captain and later a colonel. Then, in 1983, his sympathies still with the rebels of the South, Garang masterminded a defection of a battalion stationed in the southern city of Bor. It was the opening gambit in what would become the Second Sudanese Civil War. By the winter of that year, Garang had brought various rebel commands into his control, effectively founding the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, a professional rebel outfit that would resist at all costs the north’s military rule and brutal imposition of Islamic law.

  The Second Sudanese Civil War was to last twenty-two years and cost one-and-a-half million lives, drawing in the armies of Uganda, Libya and Ethiopia along the way. In 2005, after two years of peace talks, a resolution was finally reached – with the southern regions of Sudan being given the status of an autonomous region for six years, before a referendum would decide their ultimate fate.

  What we were looking at here, Severino explained, was the final hideout Garang had used during the most desperate phase of the Second Civil War. In 1993, things were at their lowest ebb for Garang and his SPLA. The Arab army, in support of the Sudanese government, had recaptured the city of Juba and reached the Ashua River, just twenty kilometres to the north of where we now stood. ‘They were broken,’ said Severino, ‘forced into hideouts in the bush and the hills. Lots fled into Uganda. But, somehow, Garang brought them all back together, all those ragtag soldiers from the SPLA.’ It must have been a desperate situation. Allam had told me how his men had been so desperate and low on ammunition that they had thrown fishing hooks in
to the river to slow down the advance of the Arabs. That was back in 1993, at the height of the Second Sudanese Civil War, but somehow, against all the odds, they pushed them back.’

  Looking at it now, it was hard to believe that these tumbledown buildings had been the epicentre of one of the civil war’s most famous last stands. The hut was overgrown by thorns, its windows smashed, reeking of the excrement of wild cats and baboons – but, inside, the legacy of war remained. As I ventured in, I saw bullet casings littering the floor. On the walls, faint etchings in chalk showed the names of commanders, diagrams of tactical formations, lists depicting orders of battle. As I traced my fingers along the brick, trying to imagine what it had been like, Severino grunted and simply waited outside. He was, I was beginning to understand, an old SPLA soldier himself, and had no desire to remember the past.