by Cola Bilkuei
Before my father married his second wife, which happened when I was about six, my parents would sleep in the other hut. Mostly we kids slept in the cows’ hut, unless the weather was really bad – and even then my parents didn’t like to share their hut with us!
My father was a hard worker and probably appreciated what little space was his by nightfall. Actually, when I think about it, it wasn’t that he was a hard worker; in fact he was probably lazy. He didn’t have a set role in the village, like a hunter or a builder, although he was often appointed to go to other villages and buy cattle.
For some seasons when I was a child, my father lived in the city of Bentiu, the capital of Unity State, or al-Wahda. Bentiu, seven hundred and fifty kilometres south-west of Khartoum, was two or three days’ walk from our village, and had a lot of oilfields around it. My father worked there as a wildlife officer for the government. When he came back to the village, rather than work, he preferred to boss others around and point out the shortcomings of those who were actually doing the work.
He liked everyone to think he was a hard worker; he was the sort of man who boasted a lot, and if you didn’t know him you would be forgiven for thinking he was the toughest, hardest working person in the village. Truthfully, that title would have been shared between my uncles and the younger members of my family, including my mother, my brothers and sisters, and my cousins – everyone in the family, in fact, except my father! But he made sure his reputation for industry spread far and wide. That was one thing he definitely worked hard at.
I had four brothers and two sisters. One of my brothers died as a baby – I was too young to know what was going on and don’t really remember anything about it. The eldest of us all was my sister Ajok, followed by my brother Mijok, my brother Monyleck, the baby who died, then me, my younger brother Thonager and the baby of our family, my sister Athien.
During the day my father’s four brothers and my own elder brothers would look after the large cattle and I was given the calves. I was small for my age so it made sense that I looked after the smallest of the cattle. But there were a lot of them – up to two or three hundred. First thing in the morning I would be given the job of cleaning up after the cows, picking up their dung and mess once they had been milked. This usually resulted in me getting covered from head to toe in cow dung. It was bad enough most days, but unmentionable if the cows suffered from diarrhoea the night before! Every day Thonager and I would collect the dung and put it out in the sun to dry. It was then used as fuel for the fires we lit every afternoon around 4 pm to keep the cows warm and to ward off mosquitoes. Sometimes these fires were so dense it would seem as though the whole village was burning down. My childhood memories are saturated with the smell of cow dung, whether it was fresh or burning.
Nothing was ever wasted in our village. After the dung had been burnt, the ash was used. We smeared our bodies with it. This was not so much for decoration as to show that we were men with a real job: to protect the cattle. Without the painted-on ash we would be considered too clean, too lazy and too much of a target for teasing by men and older boys, who would say that if we were too clean we looked like girls. It wasn’t just for show, though. In Dinka culture it is of prime importance to protect your cattle – if you looked like someone who didn’t work and get dirty, you might be placing your cows in danger of being stolen.
We also used the ash in our hair. Mixed with cow urine, it created a soft paste that would sit on the surface of our hair, lasting up to two weeks. When it was washed out it would leave our hair lighter coloured and straighter, which we liked for celebrations. I think it also made our hair grow faster! Hair was one of the few things we had to compete over. Our mothers would cut it with old blades and create circles and patterns of hair which we, as kids, thought were very fashionable.
Late in the morning I would milk the cows with my brothers, Mijok and Monyleck. As soon as Thonager was old enough, he helped out as well. It was important to keep the calves away from their mothers, to prevent them from suckling and using up all the milk. Milking was done by hand into thirty or forty dried gourds. Without any refrigeration, milk couldn’t be kept, so every family had its own cows and its own milk. Nobody bought or sold milk – because everybody had it! Milk was one thing there was never any lack of.
When we finished milking we would sit together as a family and drink the fresh milk. The rest of my day would be filled with looking after the calves, while Thonager tagged along, doing what he could.
If a cow was having trouble producing enough milk, or if her calf had died, we needed to help the cow along. The best way of doing this was for someone to place their mouth over the cow’s vagina and blow into it, while rubbing the teat. You would do this until you felt the teat fill with milk. The worst part was that sometimes when you blew into the cow, the cow returned the favour by kicking you or, even worse, filling your mouth with urine. You soon learnt when to turn your head!
Our cows were the centre of our universe. Sometimes I thought they were given more importance than the people in our village. The cattle were always treated with respect and when our village got together at night to sing, more often than not we sang about our cattle. The songs would tell of how strong the bulls were or how beautiful the cows were and how they were admired for helping to keep our village alive.
Everyone else would make up songs about their cattle to sing at our night-time gatherings, but I was always frustrated because I could never come up with a song about mine. As a child I was very shy and found it hard to perform in front of what seemed to be such a big crowd. There was too much at stake. If you couldn’t sing well, you were mocked – you would not get a wife, you would not be important or successful, you were not a real man. I loved my cattle and wished I could honour them as everyone else did, but I got too nervous to think. I still get nervous in front of groups, even if I know the people. But nothing is as scary to me as trying to think up a song about my cattle in front of my village.
With so many cattle to look after, my father decided that there needed to be a way of dividing up who would inherit them when we became adults. His solution was simple – they would be divided by colour. The black and white cattle would go to Mijok, red to Monyleck, I got the motley ones, and so on. It may not have been an even distribution but we were happy with the idea of it. In any case, the distribution never happened: the Arab militias sent by the government in Khartoum were to come and take most of our cattle away.
I spent a lot of time in the bush near our village, playing with Thonager and other children who had similar jobs to mine. During the dry season – October to April – the flat open ground where the cows grazed was very dusty. But after it started raining in May, the grass grew long and low scrubby bushes would spring up. We would play with mud, using it to build models of houses, cattle and other animals, and people. Our mud people would resemble real people that we either liked or disliked. The ones that we disliked would be destroyed in our mud world and given a mud funeral.
Most of the time I was well behaved, but I was often in trouble for staying out too late with the cattle. I would venture so far into my imaginary mud worlds that I would lose track of time altogether and not return with the calves until it was almost dark. If you lost track of time, or worse still lost track of your cattle, you could be beaten to within an inch of your life. Many things could go wrong if you didn’t pay attention to your cattle. They could stray onto agricultural land and destroy crops; they could be stolen; or they could be attacked by lions or hyenas. If any of these things happened, a beating was sure to follow. If I was beaten too often by someone (such as one of my father’s many half-brothers), they would end up having a ‘mud funeral’ and I would risk repeating the whole process by getting carried away with my revenge.
We often played sport together, sometimes for fun, but sometimes as important preparation. The main games involved fighting with spears made from cane and shields from cowskin or goatskin. These were not real weapons, but w
e soon learned to imitate the way they were used by adults – and for that matter children – in times of war or tribal dispute. My father would make my brothers and me fight against each other, so that he could see what skills we had developed. I was best at stick fighting, whereas Mijok and Monyleck were good at wrestling and throwing spears.
I was always amazed watching Mijok and Monyleck fighting each other. They were so different from one another; Mijok was quiet and gentle, while Monyleck was naturally belligerent and always seemed on the defensive.
He had a lot to be defensive about. Monyleck had trouble fitting in with the rest of the family. He was the only one who had been given the opportunity to go to secondary school and the only one to really experience the outside world. Before I was born, my father would take Monyleck to the town with him. Mijok, as the eldest, had important duties back in the village. As second-born, Monyleck was lucky. Our father had decided that he could be educated and become the brains of the family. He started school in Bentiu, and later went to a school in Khartoum. None of the rest of us went to Khartoum, and I still haven’t ever been there. He would come back with stories of how big it was, how many buildings and cars he had seen. Most Dinka avoided Khartoum, though. It was the capital of our country, but it was also the city of the northern people who had done so much to threaten the Dinka south. Some Dinka who went to Khartoum were recruited into the government army and posted to the south; this was another reason for the men we knew to steer clear of the place.
At this time there was peace between the north and the south, but our father had once been a fighter. What he told us about the war, from my earliest childhood, was basic but still accurate. The people in the north, who controlled the government, were Muslim Arabs. We in the south were black Africans and our religion was a mixture of Christian and tribal beliefs. The northerners wanted our land, our cattle, our water, and finally our oil, and they came to steal it from us. We in the south had to form an army to resist their attacks. This was a rudimentary way of telling the story, but like I said, it was the truth.
School had changed Monyleck, so that when he came back he was different from the rest of us. He thought our father wasn’t looking after us very well, and was neglecting our mother now he had married his second wife, so Monyleck was in a hurry to become independent and lead the family. He always had an independent streak and he often clashed with our father. Twice when he was at school, men from the United Nations had offered to resettle Monyleck elsewhere – in Kenya and the United States of America. Monyleck saw it as an opportunity to further his education and help the family. But our father refused.
When he was at school, Monyleck suffered because he had fewer clothes than the other students. His shoes wore out because our father didn’t have enough money for new ones. Yet when he came back to the village, Monyleck wore his school uniform in open defiance of the elders, who tried to convince him that he was insulting the other members of the family. We other boys went around naked, and even the elders only wore a loincloth, yet Monyleck was dressed like a king. But he refused to obey. He was proud of his clothes. The elders beat him to put him in his place. They didn’t think much of education. I sympathised with him. We smaller kids sometimes got the chance to try his clothes on, and if they’d been ours, we’d have worn them all the time as well. He looked as though he belonged to a different culture, a different place, and as his little brother I was in awe of this.
One time, Monyleck brought a leather soccer ball and a whistle back from school. He organised a game of football, but he was the only one with shoes and when the rest of us kicked the ball it hurt our toes. He would blow his whistle and laugh at us and tell us to keep playing. Easy for him to say: he was the only one whose feet were not aching!
It wasn’t just the clothes that set Monyleck apart. After he came back from school, he didn’t like to look after the cows because he thought it was beneath him and he started to think that some of our customs were dated. He said that using the ash left over from burnt cow dung to cover our bodies was strange, and mocked us for doing it.
Sometimes I was envious of Monyleck. I could see what a hard time he had, but I wanted to know what he knew and I wanted to see the things he had seen. Even though his experience was so different from mine, I secretly hoped to follow in his footsteps. I dreamed about running away to Khartoum. There had to be a better life than humiliating myself trying to think up songs about my cattle! Under his influence, I started to wonder if our customs were strange. I’d never thought so before – I thought everyone did as we did. But now I began wanting to be like him, to learn about other worlds and to have a life that didn’t involve blowing into cows’ vaginas. I started talking about life outside our village, making up wild fantasies about what people did and where I was going to go. Whenever I did, my mother would bring me back to reality by reminding me of the chores I should have been doing.
***
My mother was a quiet lady. She was thin and of medium height for a Dinka woman. She plaited her hair, and sometimes tied a green cloth around it. She was honest and a good judge of character. A good-looking woman, she smiled a lot and liked to keep the peace between her husband and her sons by making light of things. She didn’t intervene forcefully, though, and at times I thought she was too quiet. There were times where I would be beaten by an uncle or someone else in the community for neglecting my calves, and my mother could never seem to muster up the courage to say anything. She would ask why I had been beaten. When I explained, she always seemed to take the adults’ side regardless of whether or not I was innocent. If someone complained to her about me, she would instantly believe them and give me a beating as punishment.
I don’t think she was trying to be mean; she just wanted us to show respect and be respected by those in the village. My mother was strict about following the rules of our culture, which are very traditional and very different from the rules that I now see around me in Australia.
In Dinka culture, if the children show a lack of respect, the people in the community look first at what the parents are doing wrong. It was important to my parents that the whole family had a good reputation. If I was considered a bad child, the community would judge my brothers and sisters by my behaviour. A bad reputation was like a disease – it was contagious and hard to shake. It could affect everything from how you were treated to who you were allowed to marry later in life. Also, my parents believed that if I showed disrespect to someone, that person – even if they were not a member of the family – had a right to discipline me, including hitting me to teach me a lesson. I was not just a child of one family – I was a child of the community.
Looking back, I wish I could have spent more time alone with my mother. But I was always busy, and she was always busy, and it would have been frowned upon for a boy to be too dependent on his mother. I wish it could have been otherwise.
Throughout the night, even though my brothers and I could sleep around the fires we had lit in the afternoon, we still had to make sure the cows were safe and watch for intruders. The largest cows were put on the outside of a big circle, with the calves and my brothers and me in the middle. This was to protect us from lions, hyenas and any humans that decided to come our way. The big cows knew where to stand, and they were tethered to coloured stakes we had driven into the ground. They weren’t afraid of any other animals, so at night-time they protected us. We also had spears and sticks. It might not sound like it, but it was a restful way to sleep. Maybe we were so tired from working and playing all day, we had no energy left to be scared.
In the rainy season the grass around the village would grow long, high above our heads, and wild animals such as lions and hyenas would venture onto our land. I remember one night a hyena came and killed three of our goats. My uncles heard the goats screaming and started to wake everyone up. We were always taught to make as much noise as possible if we were attacked, both to alert everyone else and to scare the predator. Now my uncles were screaming, ‘Hyenas, hy
enas, hyenas!’ Everyone woke up to see the hyena running off into the distance. We went to check on the goats. Out of the thirty or so goats we had in our herd, one was missing, two were dead and one was half-eaten.
Everyone stayed awake until morning. We knew the hyena would return. Lions usually took their prey away with them, or attacked and didn’t return. Hyenas were different.
In the morning, the older members of the family followed the hyena’s footprints. They knew he wouldn’t have gone far on a full stomach, and he’d been dragging a goat with him. Eventually they found him sleeping, and attacked him with their spears until he was dead. They came back celebrating, with the hyena carcass held high in the air. Hyena meat and juice was said to be good for pain relief, so some of the family would use it for medicinal purposes, and its skin would be used as a rug. If there was one rule that applied to the whole of our life, it was that nothing went to waste.
Even though my father was a wealthy man with a lot of livestock, life was never easy for my family. My father was a strict disciplinarian; he had lived through many years of war, witnessing all kinds of atrocities. In a way I think he was so strict with us as a way of preparing us for our own manhood, our own conflicts, our own wars.
Even when we were very young he would tell us that no man is born at the same time as his father, therefore no man should rely on his father to be there until the day he dies. He taught us to rely on ourselves alone.