by Cola Bilkuei
I moved back into his house in Lalor Park and looked for a job. Soon I came across a company called Selecopedic through some Sudanese guys who worked there. One of them, James, had to go back to university in Tasmania and wanted me to take over his job.
Alex Llavero, the general manager, interviewed me. He asked me if I could do heavy lifting. He wanted to know if I could start right now. I said: ‘Tomorrow?’
This was March 2005. I began assembling beds. My job was called hogring. I used a staple gun to fix the parts of the beds together. It’s dangerous work, and once I clipped my middle finger, injuring it quite badly. I worked there full-time until 2007, and I still work there part-time, assembling mattresses two days a week.
Sometimes I have wondered if troubles follow me around the world. I am an optimist at heart. In the struggle that takes place inside me between hope and fear, hope usually wins. But things have not always been easy in Sydney, and one event in particular made me wonder again if I attracted a cloud of bad luck over me wherever I settled.
On 17 February 2006 I went with two Sudanese friends, Chillim and William, to the 50 Cent concert at Olympic Park. We heard there was an afterparty at the UN nightclub in Oxford Street, so we went there at around 11.30 pm. We got there early, before a lot of the other concertgoers, because William had a car. We paid a $35 cover charge and got our wrists stamped. After reading the promotional material for the party, we had the idea we could even meet 50 Cent and talk to him about hip hop. I’d been playing a lot of 50 Cent records. I hoped at least to get my photo taken with him.
The club was overcrowded and the promise was false. There were other rappers there, including 50 Cent’s crew, G Unit, but we couldn’t get anywhere near them. 50 Cent never came, and everyone was disappointed because we had paid the money believing we would see him. But it was still okay – we had a nice group of five Sudanese guys and five Sudanese girls. Because we had arrived early, we’d been able to get in.
Meanwhile outside, because of the crowding, there were a lot of problems between security guards and people wanting to get in. At around 2 am, our group was ready to go home. When we got outside, Williams Agar, Chillim and I waited for some of our friends who were still coming from inside the club. William went back to look for them, while Chillim and I waited on the other side of the road. A security guy walked straight to Chillim and hit him in the face – without any provocation at all! He just walked up and went whack. There were some other Africans standing around, and most ran away. I didn’t know what was happening. These were the same security guards who had let me in, so I wasn’t scared of them. Then the guard who had hit Chillim walked up and smacked me in the ear.
He swore at me: ‘Fuck off, get out of here.’
Another security guard shouldered me in the chest and pushed me down. I landed hard on the ground, my neck and back whiplashing from the fall. I crawled around, in pain and in shock. Were they going to start kicking me? Was it all starting again?
The police were standing nearby watching all this. The security guys were much bigger than us. The police came up and prepared to apprehend me.
I said: ‘Hang on, they assaulted me!’
Another witness, a white man, came up to talk to the police. They tried to push him away; they weren’t interested.
Eventually an ambulance came and took me to hospital. The police charged the security guard but released him the next morning. A couple of months later we told our side of the story in the local court, and the police spoke too, but the witness didn’t turn up. I was told he was an American actor who had flown home since that night. The security guard had a lawyer, but we had the police, the witness’s written statement, and video camera evidence. Yet we lost the case. It was like Africa, I thought, where justice is turned upside-down.
Since I was assaulted, I don’t have as much respect for the police as I used to. I am an Australian citizen now, so I have no reason to be afraid of them as I was in Africa. But I have learnt that the police cannot protect you, and if you get assaulted, as I was, they sometimes act like it’s your problem. I lost a lot of faith – except in defence lawyers! The case taught me that if I’m in trouble, a good defence lawyer can always get me off the hook.
Ever since then, I have had problems with my back. I had to resign from my full-time job, and I can’t stand up for long periods. It prevents me from doing a lot of things I want to do, and a lot of things I have to do. Australia was the last place I thought I would be injured and live in pain. But I cannot dwell on that. What is a bad back compared with the challenges I have survived?
Today music plays a large part in my life. When I was living in Adelaide I went to a club and saw a DJ called Samrai and another called DJ Kronic. Their DJing involved scratching, and I fell in love with this sound. You could manipulate the record to make a new sound. You weren’t just playing, you were creating. The music on the record wasn’t just something pre-packaged for me to sit down and accept: it was a raw material for me to convert into something else, something new that I invented on my own.
After I moved back to Sydney, I was out walking in Parramatta when I came across a hip-hop shop called Lopez Records. The owner was a well-known DJ, Victor Lopez. I asked if he could help me learn. He said I had to buy a turntable, the 1200 Technics which many DJs recommend because the needle doesn’t stick; then he said he’d teach me and show me the tricks. I went and bought the turntable for nineteen hundred dollars and a needle for three hundred dollars. Vinyl albums cost up to forty dollars, and singles cost more than twenty-five dollars – it’s a very expensive industry! But I bought the records from Victor, and he helped me learn how to DJ.
I’d seen how kids in African communities in Sydney were interested in DJing, but there weren’t many African DJs who had the skills to put on good concerts. I thought I could help teach the kids to DJ. I started teaching friends informally and giving other boys a chance to DJ on my equipment.
That got me involved in voluntary work with the migrant centre in Blacktown. I’d go two days a week to Merrylands Youth Centre, helping kids record their music in a studio. We put on shows to let them perform and display their skills. We hope to do this at other youth centres in the south-western suburbs of Sydney. I’m not the greatest performer, but I am a good teacher.
The big obstacle is the cost of studio time, so I spent about seven thousand dollars setting up a home studio. I’d been setting aside one hundred dollars a week for a down payment, and was able to purchase equipment on lay-by. This is the benefit in Australia of not spending money on a car! To me, a car is no kind of investment. I wanted to use what money I had to learn more and invest in a future.
Now I have the studio set up, kids can make appointments and come to do some recording. There are a lot of talented Sudanese DJs out there who I’m helping to develop. I have some problems with my landlord, who gets complaints about the noise, and when the equipment breaks I have to replace it at great cost. Sometimes I come home from a shift at the mattress factory and there are kids waiting for me who want to work in the studio until one o’clock in the morning. I don’t mind. I see it as a way of eliminating crime. They rap about their life stories, and if they’re doing that they’re not out on the street getting into trouble.
I have a rule: if they want to come to my studio, I don’t want to see them hanging at the train station. If I see them there, they can’t come to my studio any more. If they complain, I say that even their mothers have rules. Most of them, because they want to learn, and have talent, accept that. I also encourage them to find jobs.
Sometimes I think they’re lucky. They spent time in refugee camps and didn’t see the terrible things I saw in Africa. They didn’t lose their family members and their villages. They’re the same age as I am, and they come from the same place, but they have lived completely different lives from mine.
I didn’t learn the alphabet until I was ten years old – most kids have learnt it from the age of four. When I think about educa
tion, I feel that everyone knows more than I do. It’s the same for a lot of African kids. We started learning so late in life, when we go to school in Australia we are such a long way behind. It becomes stressful, to be behind in school when you are older than the other kids in your class, and this can lead to problems at home. So a lot of these kids move out, and get into trouble; what they need is direction. They have so much talent, whether it’s sport or music or anything else, but they don’t have structure in their lives. They have the stories, but with nowhere to tell them they get bored and go to the train station and do drugs and commit crimes, and down it goes from there. A community structure would help them develop their skills and live productive lives. My hope is to provide that structure, and to help them make the transition from talented kids into adults with careers.
Africans form a big community here, but they don’t have a place to focus themselves as a group. The networking that naturally exists among us – we all talk on the phone all the time – doesn’t have a physical place to go. Instead, the place to go is the train station, where people see us as forming a ghetto.
We need leadership and coordination so that we can turn these great young soccer players into Socceroos, these young basketballers into Boomers, these young musicians into big performers. If we don’t organise ourselves and give ourselves this structure, the rest of Australia won’t ever know what we have to offer.
Epilogue
AS I WRITE, IN EARLY 2008, I am sharing a two-bedroom apartment in western Sydney with Biar Deng, a Sudanese guy who has no close family here. Biar arrived here more recently than I did, and has been working and studying accounting while working. I have bought him textbooks, helped him with his study, and advised him on day-to-day problems. I have become something like his older brother, which is nice for me. Not so long ago I lost my little brother, and now I have a new one.
I also have a good friend here called Daniel Magot, whom I met in Ifo. He followed me to Zimbabwe, South Africa and Australia. He works at night as a money-counter for the security company, Armaguard.
It’s with Biar and Daniel that I spend most of my free time. For a while after I was assaulted, I didn’t want to go out in public. We spend a lot of time at home listening to music and watching DVDs or TV. I’m still as shy and quiet as I was in the village in Panaruu. It takes me a while to open up to new people.
Which brings me to the question I have been avoiding: do I have a girlfriend? Am I going to get married soon?
Once day Monyleck phoned me and a woman’s voice answered. She asked him to leave a message. Monyleck believed I must have married a white girl. When we next spoke, he said, ‘You’ve married a white girl and you haven’t told us! You mustn’t keep this a secret!’
I had not married a white girl. The voice of my ‘wife’ was the recorded voice of Telstra Home Messaging.
Following this, Monyleck and my father started hassling me about marriage. My father wants me to go home and get married the traditional way, to a girl he will arrange for me. Also, if I take a wife, our custom dictates that I must also take a wife for my younger brother Thonager, even though he is dead.
But I don’t want a traditional Sudanese marriage. For a start, if I have two Sudanese wives, I don’t think the Australian law will look upon it very kindly. More seriously, I want to work hard and be able to give my kids a stable life. I don’t want my children to live the way we lived. My wife has to be happy, and there will be no beatings.
And I don’t want my children sleeping with cattle.
Many Sudanese men in Australia go home to get married, but they are often afraid of bringing Sudanese wives back here. If I find a wife in Sudan and bring her back to Australia, what will she think? The change would be so overwhelming for a Dinka girl from the country, I don’t know how she would react.
Bol Bol married a Japanese lady he met in Australia, and has a daughter with her. Kuot, like me, still waits for the right one. Most of my friends aren’t married.
When I tell him that I don’t believe in arranged marriages, my dad asks if I will marry a white girl. I say: ‘I will if I find the right one.’
I am scared that once I commit to a girl, she will want a bigger house, a bigger car, more possessions. Most of the girls I have met are a lot more materialistic than I am. They don’t understand what it is to have nothing. There has always been a gulf between me and the girls I have known, and I understand that this gulf has been created by my experience.
Which is all another way of saying I have not found the right one yet!
Whether or not I find a wife, my father is always asking me when I am coming back to Sudan. I always have the same answer: when I am ready.
I don’t know what it will take for me to be ready, but I will know when it happens.
The political situation, at least, is making it easier for me to go back safely. The south and the north have held a power-sharing truce since 2005, and in the 2011 referendum we will decide whether or not to remain one country. Although I have no Internet connection at home, I stay in close contact with Sudanese news through the Internet service at my local library. When I first got onto the Internet in South Africa, at Jacob’s house, the only site I ever went to was the BBC, to find out news about Sudan. Since then, the Internet has made communication a lot easier, and I have a MySpace page through which I make new friends. With my older Sudanese friends, we mainly communicate by mobile phone.
I have learnt how the Sudanese government has turned on the people of Darfur, in Sudan’s west, killing hundreds of thousands. Darfur is getting a lot more attention now than the war in the south ever did. Before, when the south was fighting the government, the Darfurians never sympathised with us. They thought we were just creating trouble, when in fact we were struggling for our own survival. Being Muslim, the Darfurians supported the government. But now that they are under attack themselves, they realise that Khartoum has always had a wider campaign to take by force the resources of other regions. With us it was mainly agriculture, as well as oil and water, and with the Darfurians it is land and oil.
I am relieved that international attention has finally come to the genocide in Darfur. We in the south of Sudan can tell the world that genocide has happened in our country before.
Many SPLA leaders are now in high positions within the Sudanese government, and in the military. I will always have mixed feelings towards the SPLA. They took me from my family and they brutalised me in Ethiopia. But when I look at the overall impact of what they have done, I admire the SPLA. After all, they saved the Dinka from extinction. When John Garang, the founder of the resistance, died in a helicopter crash in 2005, a lot of people lost hope and thought we would be overrun again. But the agreement between the south and the north has held up, and the south has built up good institutions to achieve peace and self-government. My Dinka people have a better future now than when I was in Sudan. In a terrible way, the war pulled us out of our primitive life. Many Dinka have been able to get an education in the West, and they can now go back and give Sudan the benefits of that education. The SPLA’s campaign has been long and bloody, but the modernisation and survival of the south owe a lot to the SPLA and its leaders.
I think a lot about the people in my life, those who have helped me, those who have saved me, and those who have been lost.
My father lives in Bentiu with my stepmother and their two children. In his seventies, he is still working in wildlife for the government.
Monyleck lives in Juba, the capital city of southern Sudan, with his wife and Mijok’s wife. All up they have seven children. He’s still in the army, the old SPLA arm that has merged with their former enemies from the government while we all wait for the referendum.
My cousin Thomas Wour Kuol moved to Canada in 2005. He was resettled from Ifo, in Kenya. He waited in Ifo for ten years. He works in Canada in a factory. After he got there he emailed me, and we have spoken on the telephone.
Angelo Kuot lives in Melbourne and is studying
environmental science. He is in the Australian army reserve, where everyone is impressed by his ability to handle weapons. Kuot is my best friend in the world, and we speak every week on the phone.
Angelo’s brother, Garang, is in Kampala, where I heard he is a pastor. For such a difficult guy, this is something Angelo and I have to see before we will believe it!
I heard that Father Leo, the cranky priest from Nimule, passed away.
Father Joseph and I fell out of contact in Zimbabwe. I have since heard that he has gone to Sudan to work in a church mission.
Father Dominic is still in South Africa. He is very old now, and I speak to him from time to time. He has cancer, but his house is still open to boys who have nowhere else to go. I would love to go there and see him once more. I have promised him that I will one day follow in his footsteps and open a house for boys.
Jacob is still living in Pretoria. Unfortunately he separated from his wife Karin, which made me very sad. He lives with his two kids and his adoptive Sudanese son Peter Deng.
Benjamin Bol Bol, who came to Australia with me, lives in Adelaide with his Japanese wife and their child. He is studying commerical law and accounting at the University of South Australia. We haven’t been in regular contact, but I hope to see him this year.
My cousin Mayoum Mijok went back to Sudan in 2007 to see his family, whom he hadn’t seen for many years. He is hoping to help them start a business and make the most of life in the new Sudan. His wife and children are waiting for him in Blacktown.
James Makur, who I knew in Zimbabwe, has gone back to Sudan where he is serving in the army.
Malual Madut has gone back to Sudan, but I don’t know where he is at the moment.
I don’t know the whereabouts of Matouh, Arop or Samuel, my housemates in Uganda.
Williams Agar, who was in Nairobi with me, has moved to Sydney with his Sudanese wife and two kids.