Boy Soldier

by Cola Bilkuei

  After I had been there for six months, I was taken in for a long interview with a frightening panel of officials: a UN protection officer, the transit camp manager, a welfare officer, two guys from the Central Intelligence Organisation and another person from state security. Their main purpose was to find out why I’d come to Zimbabwe and to decide whether or not to give me more permanent residency papers.

  They peppered me with questions:

  ‘Why did you come to Zimbabwe?’

  ‘Why didn’t you stay in Kenya or Tanzania?’

  ‘Why did you leave Sudan?’

  I told them the truth: I left home because of war, I left Kenya because life was not good, I left Tanzania because I didn’t feel safe.

  ‘Now you are here,’ they asked, ‘what if there is war here, where will you go?’

  ‘I will not go anywhere,’ I said, trying to demonstrate my loyalty to Zimbabwe. It felt like a big trap and I had to pick my way through the questions as if they were landmines.

  ‘If Zimbabwe is in trouble,’ I said, ‘I will stay here to protect Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is my home.’

  My interviewers burst out laughing. I was just telling them what they wanted to hear. They were used to this, but they’d never heard anyone play the game so enthusiastically!

  Some weeks later I received a permit stamped STATUS GRANTED AS AN ALIEN.

  My new status had a catch, however: I had to leave the transit camp. They came and removed my tent and camping equipment, including my blankets. These I wouldn’t miss. During my time in the camp, I would wake in the mornings with my whole head covered in fibres from the blankets. These fibres were soon to be found all through my clothes. If you looked after them properly, the blankets lasted thirty days. If not, they’d last seven days. Our nickname for the blankets was ‘seven days’.

  Once I was outside the camp, the government gave me nine hundred Zimbabwe dollars a month. This immediately turned out to be inadequate. Renting a room in a house would cost six or seven hundred a month, and I could not simply walk out onto the streets and find a job.

  Instead, I did what many others did: I slipped back in and camped with friends, unauthorised. Some other Sudanese and I would jump the fence each night. Security would come and check all the houses and tents. They knew who should be there and who should not. If they found us, they kicked us out – or we’d escape before they caught us. But we had nowhere to go outside, so eventually we made friends with a security guard and gave him food so he’d let us sleep in the camp undisturbed. Unfortunately he was soon replaced, and the new security guard was not as cooperative, so we gave up.

  I started renting a house with a couple of Sudanese guys in a suburb of Harare called Arcadia. We weren’t cut off from life in the transit camp – we just weren’t allowed to sleep there. An organisation called the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) sponsored me to go to high school, once I had handed over my nine hundred dollars for the first month. The camp then let me farm poultry as well. I helped look after thousands and thousands of chickens, and would sell the eggs. When the chickens became big, we killed them, processed them and sold them as meat. Then, with the profits, we could pay the ICMC back.

  During the days we’d hang around the camp, going to English classes, doing activities in the compound like playing basketball or cultivating cabbage, onions and tomatoes. The different nationalities formed into groups and fought each other. There were always problems between the different nationalities. The disputes were petty: people would all want to cook at the same time, but there were only so many stoves and so there would be fights; people would throw your food off the stove if they found it there. In the end I knew I would be better off outside the camp, but it was hard to break loose because it was so difficult to exist on the nine hundred dollars a month.

  Because I came from a country without a proper education system, and I’d only learnt bit by bit in different camps in different countries, I was behind with my lessons. I felt it keenly. By now I was about twenty years old, and my reading and maths standard was no better than a twelve year old’s. I couldn’t seem to understand simple English, which was extremely frustrating. It just wouldn’t go into my brain.

  With the other Sudanese in the house, we pooled our money for rent and food. The sponsorship didn’t provide for books or uniforms, so we had to buy our own textbooks and exercise books and decent school shoes. As a result, sometimes we had to go to school with an empty stomach. All I could think about in class was how hungry I was. In the end, if I didn’t have any money for food, I wouldn’t go to school.

  There was an SPLM office in Harare, in the same building as the African National Congress, who were now governing South Africa. When we had problems, this was where the Zimbabweans would send us. Sometimes I would go to the office on the weekend with the other Sudanese boys and sit with the officials to talk about our difficulties. They financed their operation with a bar that was very popular with wealthy Zimbabwean and foreign men. We would see politicians and dignitaries from all around Africa visit the bar, buying a lot of alcohol and giving the SPLM some money in the process.

  Now that I had residency in Zimbabwe, I was no longer scared that the SPLM would kidnap me to recruit me into their cause back in Sudan. But this didn’t mean the SPLM was helpful. The head of the SPLM office was called Dr Benjamin. We’d tell Dr Benjamin about everything we needed and how frustrated we were, how we needed help to afford housing and education, and how we couldn’t contact our families. By now, my people in the south of Sudan were suffering starvation – the next phase of the government’s assault. Unable to win the war, the Arab militias were destroying the crops and livestock. Things at home were worse than they had ever been.

  Dr Benjamin did provide us with some help. Through him, I got a message about my father. He had been shot in the leg during the fighting, and his friend and bodyguard had been shot dead. I couldn’t speak to my father myself: like all the messages that came through, it was second- or third-hand.

  Sometimes Dr Benjamin helped by giving us shoes, but he could only patch things over temporarily. Ours were the kinds of problems that never ended.

  Obviously, though, I was happy to hear my father was alive after so long without any news of him. Hearing your father has been shot isn’t always good news, but it was for me! Still, I felt distanced from him. I was a different person now, compared with when my mother had died. I wasn’t so close to home, and my final destination, by now, was somewhere different from Sudan. I didn’t know where, but I knew it wasn’t back at home. Nonetheless, I thanked God that my father had only been superficially wounded.

  Soon after I heard about my father’s injury, our frustration boiled over. We were sick of the SPLM clearly doing very nicely in Zimbabwe, without passing on any assistance to us. So with two of my friends – Benjamin Bol Bol and James Makur – I went into the bar and smashed all the glass bottles. Dr Benjamin had collected beer bottles from around the world, and in our rage we smashed them all. Dr Benjamin, who carried a gun at all times, came in and screamed that there was ‘A coup! A coup!’.

  The police came and arrested us, and we were put into a prison cell. We were hassled by other prisoners until we told them we were inside for murder. Then they left us alone, and we had a comfortable space around us to sleep.

  Because Dr Benjamin was saying we were staging a ‘coup’ – he said, incredibly, that we had been sent by the Sudanese Embassy to disrupt the SPLM – some officers of the Zimbabwean Central Intelligence Organisation came to interview us. They wore dark glasses and were very cool, but we knew them. They’d been regulars at the bar! Soon it was obvious that we were just frustrated young men, not political operatives, and the last body we would ever work for was the Sudanese government. We convinced the CIO agents and the police that we were just angry at the lack of help we got from Dr Benjamin. They even took our side. When we refused to eat the prison food, and the police feared we might starve ourselves to death, they ba
dgered Dr Benjamin to send us better food. After a week we were released without charge.

  For the first time, Australia came into my plans. I’d heard about a distant cousin of mine called Mayoum Mijok who moved to Australia in 1998. His mother’s father and my father’s father were brothers. That made us cousins, or uncle and nephew – sometimes these relationships are too complicated to untangle! All I knew about Australia was the little I’d been taught in Uganda. But it didn’t matter that I only knew a tiny bit about Aborigines and kangaroos. A country like Australia offered me untold dreams.

  I called Mayoum and asked him to send me a form for resettlement. I filled it out and took it to the Australian Embassy, who told me that I needed a recommendation from the United Nations. I took it to the UNHCR office, and they said they would get back to me. I never heard from them again. Despite my efforts to locate it, they couldn’t find my form or any record of me. I suspect my case was thrown into the too-hard basket.

  While I was in Zimbabwe, I was able to make a phone call to England, to Father Joseph who had looked after us in Uganda. I asked him if he could sponsor me to go to a Zimbabwean school. He sent me forty English pounds, and said I’d need to gather some education paperwork. But as I was doing so, I lost his phone number and was never able to contact him again. It made me very sad, almost as if he had died. My friendships with many people on my journey were like this – I knew so little about them, often all I had was one scrap of paper with a phone number on it, a tiny thread connecting me to another country. When that scrap was lost, the thread was broken.

  By 1999, when I was twenty-two or twenty-three and had been in the country for about two years, the Zimbabwean economy began to deteriorate. Suddenly everything was expensive, prices jumping four or five times in one day. Violence spread in the streets, and sometimes we were attacked at night. It just started happening – people were being robbed everywhere, it seemed that either there were no police or there was no longer any respect for the law. There was suddenly a lot of hatred in the air. As ‘aliens’, we felt we were going to be a target for this violence. After all, that had been our experience before. When there is unrest in a country, people turn on the most recent arrivals, as if they are somehow responsible.

  Most of the Sudanese boys had to decide now whether to go back home or not. I didn’t want to return to Sudan because I felt I hadn’t achieved anything. I couldn’t speak English, I had no money. If I went home now, my situation would be the same as when I’d left, probably worse. My mother, my sister, my grandmother were all gone. I hadn’t spoken to my father in years. Southern Sudan was a mess. I felt I had nothing to go back to.

  Others among us wanted to go further, to South Africa, but we knew how hard it was to cross that border without being arrested. With the documents we had, there was no chance South Africa would let us in. But things were quickly becoming very bad in Zimbabwe, and we could see that it wasn’t safe for us to stay.

  ***

  I had a Dinka friend in Zimbabwe called Daniel Jok. His mother was white and his father was a famous Dinka called Dr Francis Deng, who had worked for the UN helping internally displaced persons throughout Africa. Back in 1978, Dr Deng had interviewed my great-uncle Makuei Bilkuei, who respected him very much.

  Daniel was the second of Deng’s four sons. He’d studied in America and was now working in Zimbabwe for a relief organisation. He was living in a nice big house with security cameras – when he invited me there, it was the first time I’d seen this kind of thing. He had a swimming pool and he was very excited when he saw me and my Sudanese housemates in the camera.

  I had heard that Daniel had been giving Sudanese boys money to go to Kenya and South Africa. Some were living in his house. When we sat down, we told him about our concerns. We laid out our entire histories for him. Daniel felt the sadness of our stories in his heart, knowing that his father was from Sudan. Then, very tentatively, I told him things were so bad in Zimbabwe that I wanted to move to South Africa.

  ‘Sure,’ Daniel said, nodding. ‘Call me tomorrow and I will see what I can do.’

  When I spoke to him the next day, Daniel said he would give me five hundred Zimbabwe dollars for my journey. I had to travel south to Beitbridge to cross the Limpopo River. My journey had always been taking me south. South, south, south. It seemed like destiny, but I had a new idea now: I might get across the border into South Africa, hide there, and stow away on a ship to America, Australia or Britain. I had told this to some other Sudanese, who warned me that if I stowed away in a Chinese or Korean ship and they found me in the middle of the ocean, they’d throw me overboard.

  I didn’t tell Daniel this. He just wanted to help me get to the border – he wasn’t involved in people-smuggling. He said the border was electrified anyway, and the Limpopo had crocodiles in it. You could only cross into South Africa via the Limpopo Bridge, but the immigration officials were well organised and they would arrest you. I felt that Daniel was giving me some assistance as a kindness, but he didn’t think I had much chance.

  And to be honest, going to South Africa wasn’t the best option for me. But the idea of leaving Zimbabwe to the north and going back through all those countries I’d been through was exhausting and dangerous. I had come too far to turn around.

  CHAPTER 10

  South Africa

  I LEFT IN A BUS LOADED WITH ZIMBABWEANS at two or three in the afternoon. I was the only Sudanese on the bus, which arrived at the border at Beitbridge at midnight.

  Everybody jumped out of the bus, and my immediate problem was that if I stayed here overnight I wouldn’t have a place to sleep. There were no hotels in this town.

  There were men in the bus station changing money, and I went around asking them where I could sleep. I went to a bar at the station and grabbed a bottle of beer. As the night drew on, I became scared of being attacked. Everyone in the small bar looked threatening. I went back out into the bus station and asked a moneychanger how I could cross the border. I had experience with this now! He said he’d help me, but I had to pay him.

  ‘No problem,’ I said, ‘I just want to cross.’ I agreed to give him two hundred rand.

  He talked to the bus driver who had brought me, and fixed up a place for me to sleep on the bus. He told me he’d come back at 4 am.

  I slept until the man came with a hired Toyota Cressida and picked me up. He drove for two hours west of Beitbridge, not on roads but on bumpy ground. We arrived at a remote village with houses of thatched walls and corrugated-iron roofs. I didn’t have a bag or anything; all that I had, I was wearing.

  The guy stopped at a house, went in, brought me out a cup of tea, then went back in to talk to the owner. They came out: an old man and two young men about my age.

  It was dawn by now. My friend was going back, but he said these people would take me across the border to the South African town of Messina. I started to become nervous.

  ‘Am I in safe hands?’ I asked him.

  He said: ‘They are going to take you inside South Africa. Inside!’

  That made me feel warm in my stomach. They weren’t just going to take me to the border and leave me to fend for myself.

  Before leaving, the three men had something to eat in their hut and gave me a Coke bottle with water in it. We set off by foot, walking through the bush, hiding whenever we heard someone. We walked for about six hours until we stopped at the Limpopo River, on the Zimbabwean side. I still believed the stories I’d been told: if you put so much as your foot in the Limpopo, a crocodile would jump up and eat you.

  Crocodiles weren’t the only threat. There were helicopters patrolling overhead and we could see police motorcycles moving on the other side. There was a fence on that side, which the men said stretched all the way to Botswana.

  The men knew when the helicopters and motorcycles patrolled. When they did, at a signal we lay down and waited until they had passed.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon, my escorts said the border guards would be havin
g lunch. Too desperate to give in to my fears, I swam and waded across the river at its narrowest point. It only took about ten minutes to get across: myself, the old man and the two boys.

  Now that we were on the South African side of the river but not yet at the fence, we had to lie down and crawl along the ground, like snakes. We crept along to a particular place in the fence, only ten metres from the riverbank. There was a patch of ground there covered with loose grass and sticks. The men had dug a hole underneath the fence. This was their secret!

  They told me to crawl through the tunnel they had dug and walk for about twenty minutes until I came to a main road. But I said: ‘The agreement was that you take me inside, all the way to Messina.’

  One of the boys said he would go with me if I gave him the clothes I was wearing. I said no. I had very little money left, and I’d already paid two hundred rand to get across the border – the promise had been Inside!

  But they were good at this. This was their business. They were thinking of robbing me. I could see it in their eyes.

  I had an idea. I said: ‘Do the police search people?’

  ‘Why?’ the old man asked.

  ‘Because I have a gun.’

  The old man said: ‘Huh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said in my toughest voice.

  They didn’t talk about taking money or my clothes after that. They ran back to the river and swam across.

  But although I’d escaped being robbed or worse, I was on my own now. So much for Inside!

  After crawling through, the tunnel was short and deep under the fence. I walked to the main road as they had directed me. Modern cars were speeding past, making a great noise and wind. I was confused now: I didn’t know what direction the town was. I walked westwards along the road, but it went a long way and there was no town. So I turned around and walked north-east. Every time a car came, I hid in the bushes off the side of the road.