Citizen Akoy

by Steve Marantz

  In the hallways of Central Akoy exuded humility. A star-struck freshman, Jacob Bigelow, walked past him and shouted a greeting. “He stopped and asked me my name,” Bigelow recalled. “He said he was glad to meet me.” If he felt otherwise, nobody was sure. Akoy could be as opaque and smooth as a politician. “He’s got the same look on his face at all times,” Tra-Deon Hollins told a reporter. “You wouldn’t know that he’s mad at you unless he tells you.” Said Behrens: “He knows how to work whatever room he’s in. He knows how to talk to his seventeen-year-old friends and how to talk to the boardroom full of adults.”

  Akoy penned an essay for the Louisville Courier-Journal in which he predicted Louisville would win the Final Four, which it did. He wrote of Pitino, “The things that Coach P has done over the years are tremendous. He is at times said to be crazy, but I think I’m ready.” And he wrote of himself, “I have done all I could in high school, and now it’s on to college. I call it the journey to being like Bill Russell. I have one more state championship than he does, so that’s a good start.”

  Akoy traveled to Louisville to play in the Kentucky Derby Festival Basketball Classic. Back in Omaha he won an award for outstanding male academic athlete given annually at the B’nai B’rith Sports Banquet. The award, after his early struggles in school, defined him in a way that sports-only awards could not.

  The 2013 O-Book, volume 116, was published. It featured tattoos and body piercings of students and a poll that ranked Rihanna as favorite artist and Kanye West’s “Mercy” and Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” among top songs. It saluted “Champ High’s Dynasty” and offered a reflection from Akoy: “Goals are set before dreams are made. I had the goal and dream to win four straight state championships and I’ve done just that. Now I’m setting goals and dreams for college.”

  May was filled with graduation events. On the last day of May Akoy packed his bags and sent out the final tweet of his high school career. “It’s been great Omaha, NE. Time to move on to the next chapter of my life. I’m on my way to my Louisville Cardinals!!! L1C4!!!”

  Akoy’s college career began with a tweet on June 1: “Flat Tire on the way to Louisville! Terrible way to start!!!”

  He made it to Louisville for a few days of orientation and while there opened an Instagram account. In August, back in Omaha, he dropped by Central, in summer recess, and ambled through the quiet halls. He poked his head into the principal’s office and saw that it was empty. Then he settled into the big chair behind the desk and propped his size 16s atop it. They were on ample display when in walked Edward Bennett, who had been named the new principal upon Bigsby’s retirement in June.

  Bennett cleared his throat. “Hello, sir,” Akoy said. “I came back to see if things were okay.”

  Years later Bennett remembered the moment. “I felt honored,” he recalled. “Akoy was Akoy. He hadn’t forgotten about us.”

  19

  Repatriation

  To return or not was the question a South Sudanese refugee could not avoid. Repatriation was as personal as it was perilous.

  A much-admired naturalized Nebraskan, Lam Chuol Thichuong, was among those who returned. He had come out of a refugee camp in Ethiopia, resettled from Minnesota to Omaha in 1998, worked as bilingual liaison for the Omaha schools, and earned a degree at UNO. Sworn in as a U.S. citizen ten days after the 9/11 attacks, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served a tour of duty in Iraq. After his tour he returned to Omaha, worked at the Charles Drew Health Center, served on the board of the South Sudan Community Association, and helped his wife raise two daughters. But his homeland called to him, and with the help of an Omaha connection, Miyong Kuon, Thichuong landed a job as personal aide and secretary to autonomous South Sudanese vice-president Riek Machar in 2007. Then civil war erupted, pitting the Nuer-based opposition of Machar against the Dinka-based government of Salva Kiir. When shooting began on the night of December 15, 2013, President Kiir’s soldiers gunned down Thichuong, thirty-nine, and his brother Pal in the streets of Juba.

  Among the Nuer partisans was Miyong Kuon, who in the early 2000s had worked as an ESL paraprofessional at Central while he raised his younger twin brothers. As an undergraduate in journalism at UNO, Kuon had interviewed Machar. When the 2005 peace deal granted autonomy and an option for independence to South Sudan and Machar became vice-president, he hired Kuon as a communications aide. From then on Kuon split his time between Omaha and South Sudan. Six months after the vote for independence in 2011, Kuon stood outside the United Nations in New York with the delegation from South Sudan as it hoisted its new flag for the first time. In 2012 Kuon and Thichuong arranged for Machar’s first visit to Omaha. After civil war broke out in 2013 and Machar fled to Kenya, Kuon followed him. Subsequently he shuttled among Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the site of peace talks; New York, where he represented Machar’s followers at the United Nations; and Omaha, to be with his wife and five children.

  In 2015 Kuon had arranged for Machar’s second visit to Omaha. For help he turned to an old friend, Lol Kuek (Central 2002), who had changed his name to Changkuoth Gatkuoth while a student at UNO. Changkuoth, which means “Sunday” in Nuer, had been his given name in Sudan, and Gatkuoth was his late father’s name. He worked as a microbiology lab technician for Hormel Foods in Minnesota and had a wife and four children. Yet his belief in Machar’s cause was such that he returned to Omaha to help organize his visit. Later he posted a video in which he described the Dinka as “imperialists” who are compelled to subjugate the Nuer.

  Gatkuoth mulled a return to South Sudan to join a friend and fellow Central graduate, Gatong Gatluak (2000), who had been a member of the South Sudan parliament. After civil war erupted, Gatluak joined the army of Machar, near the Ethiopian border, and was promoted to the rank of general. “Many of my friends went back to South Sudan to be soldiers, and they want me back there as well,” Gatkuoth said. “I have little kids to take care of, but I’m definitely thinking about it. I’d rather be part of it and do what I can to fix it.”

  A plea for unity and peace came from NBA star Luol Deng, who brought his second South Sudan Unite festival to Omaha for three days in 2016. “This event is about unity, it’s about us coming together and sharing positive energy and helping each other,” said Deng in a public statement. Deng acknowledged a “lot of negative energy and negative news” about his event. Some of the Nuer in Omaha blamed the violence in South Sudan on his father’s political organization, the Dinka Council of Elders, alleged to exacerbate tribal divisions. Deng said that the festival was not about politics, tribes, or money. “I know there’s a lot of hurt and pain,” he said, “but by us coming together we can really work on a better future for South Sudan and all of us.”

  Civil war escalated, and more refugees fled. “The new arrivals in Uganda are reporting ongoing fighting as well as looting by armed militias, burning down of homes, and murders of civilians,” UNHCR reported. The humanitarian organization Doctors without Borders reported from its clinic in Juba that the injured “included children as young as two years old who had been shot when armed men broke into their homes.” Famine and cholera deepened the misery in South Sudan. An estimated 50,000 had died in the conflict, while 1.69 million people were displaced internally, and 831,582 had fled to Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda, the UNHCR reported in July 2016.

  In late summer 2016 Akoy took me to Mason School Apartments, where he had lived his first six and a half years in Omaha. He guided me through the hallways and pointed out the stairwells and vestibules of his youth. He peered through a door that faced a parking lot to the west. “Fourth of July fireworks out there,” he recalled. “The kind you launched at one another. I loved the Fourth.”

  Akoy ran into a young South Sudanese woman he greeted with a hug. Nancy Peter had been his neighbor at the Mason and was still a resident with her mother, Bernadita. Like Akoy, Nancy Peter was born in Khartoum and had fled to Egypt at a young age. She came to Omaha in 2004 as a nine-year-old, an
d within a year she and her mother had moved into the Mason. She was close to Akoy’s age, but because he hung out with the older south Sudanese boys, she had kept her distance. “It was frowned upon for girls to hang out with guys if you were younger,” Nancy recalled. She made friends with Akoy’s younger brother, Maguy, and spent many happy evenings at the Agau apartment, sharing in Adaw’s spaghetti dinners. After Akoy’s family moved from the Mason, she had not watched Akoy play basketball, although she was well aware of his celebrity. “All the little kids in Omaha looked up to him, especially the Sudanese,” Nancy recalled.

  Nancy invited us into her first-floor apartment, where Akoy hugged Bernadita, who wore traditional African garb. We were beckoned to sit and were offered tea and water. Nancy talked about how most of the South Sudanese had left the Mason and that residents were predominantly African American and white. The walls of the hallways, which had featured colorful African mosaics, had been painted over by new management. “My guess is they wanted to cover up the tribal stuff to appeal to non-Africans,” Nancy said. Akoy and Nancy updated one another on school. Nancy was at UNO in pre-med with an eye toward pediatrics. Akoy had switched his major from pre-med to anthropology and English. “Thinking about the law,” he said.

  Conversation commenced between Akoy and Bernadita in Arabic. Bernadita wanted me to know that Akoy and Nancy were “good kids” who brought honor to their parents, according to the translation Akoy provided. They talked about South Sudan’s ongoing civil war. The fighting in South Sudan had to stop, Akoy and Bernadita both agreed, and the United States should intercede to negotiate a truce. Bernadita liked President Obama, but she hoped the next president would do more for South Sudan. The South Sudanese had so many needs, from schools to hospitals to utilities to basic necessities like shoes. “It’s important to help the people in South Sudan,” Bernadita said.

  Talk came around to repatriation, as often it did among South Sudanese refugees. For young Sudanese Americans who were born in Sudan, such as Akoy and Nancy, repatriation was both an act of conscience and an affirmation of progressive American values. Nancy had gone back to Juba, South Sudan, in 2015 to visit her father, who worked for the United Nations in transportation. He had once lived in the United States, but his green card had expired, and he could not return. “I liked being there because everyone was African, and they weren’t denying where they were from,” Nancy said. “I felt more at home.” Nancy said she wanted to work in South Sudan as a doctor, for the United Nations or for Doctors without Borders. Akoy nodded as if he had thought at length about repatriation. “I’ve always wanted to go back home,” he said. “I want to help, if basketball works out.” He cited Dikembe Mutombo, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who had become an NBA Hall of Famer. “A lot of players like him are active in going back to their country, taking money to have things built, being vocal for the community. That’s what I want to do. If I play pro ball, there are benefits that come with that. I would love to go back and see where I was as a kid.”

  Not much was left to say. Akoy hugged his hosts again, promised to stay in touch, and lost himself in thought as we left the Mason. He had been so courteous and gentlemanly with Nancy and Bernadita that he connected himself, unknowingly, to a thread of Mason mythology. It had been related to me by Mabel Boyd, who had worked at the Mason School as a secretary, and by Raydelle Meehan, who had taught at the school in the 1970s.

  Legend has it that a little boy named Frederic Austerlitz attended or visited the Mason School after the turn of the century. When he was six or seven, Austerlitz moved to New York City with his sister and mother and launched an entertainment career. He took the stage name of Fred Astaire and became America’s most iconic song-and-dance performer, smooth and urbane and polished, the embodiment of suave. If you’re a baby boomer like me, you know because your parents were his fans. If you’re younger and you don’t, go to YouTube and watch “Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth—Amazing dance scene.”

  Omaha records show that young Austerlitz, born in 1899, attended the Paul Street School, now known as Kellom School, in north Omaha. But Boyd and Meehan believed that Austerlitz may have attended the Mason for a short time, or at the very least visited it on a return to Omaha, and perhaps performed an impromptu dance. They believed the archived records of the Mason School, boxed in a South Omaha basement, would bear them out.

  I wanted to believe the legend for the lovely karma it created. If it was true, then Akoy, as a boy in the Mason Street Apartments, ran the hallways where Fred Astaire’s feet had skipped and danced a hundred years before. As he grew in size and stature and rose to the top of Nebraska schoolboy basketball, Akoy channeled Astaire in his elegance and panache. Had he played in top hat and tails, he would have been perfectly at ease. The same was true off the court.

  That a South Sudanese refugee could fashion himself as an American ideal said a lot about Akoy and something about America. The debate about who should get in and who should not has gone on for most of our history and no doubt will continue. The beauty of America is that whoever gets in can be like Fred Astaire. Or not. They can return to their native land. Or not.

  20

  Getting It Right

  The South Sudanese diaspora displaced thousands of refugees to the land down under, where basketball was embraced with a passion. In Australia the first South Sudanese National Basketball tournament was held in 2003 with four teams. Basketball, said organizer Manyang G. Berberi, not only served health and recreation, it helped refugees integrate into mainstream culture. In 2009 team managers throughout the country formed the South Sudanese Australian National Basketball Association. By 2017 the South Sudanese Australian National Classic—as the tournament came to be known—featured more than fifty teams and six hundred players.

  A club in Blacktown, a western suburb of Sydney, sprang up in 2006 to nurture South Sudanese refugees. Called Savannah Pride, the club’s stated mission is to provide “well-rounded development for boys and girls with basketball programs, education programs, homework support and cultural guidance.” Within a couple of years it began to funnel its best players to private high schools and colleges in the United States and Canada. One of those players, 7-foot-1 Thon Maker, was the top draft pick of the Milwaukee Bucks in 2016. America had no counterpart to the Australian association, but South Sudanese American hoopsters thrived nonetheless. When Akoy left high school in 2013, up to thirty had played or were playing for American colleges.

  The Omaha Talons formed in 2012 in the mold of Savannah Pride. Conceived and run by Koang Doluony, the first South Sudanese player to make a name in Nebraska, the Talons sought to empower the South Sudanese community. Doluony had played at Indiana State and UNO, gotten a degree in criminology, and started the Talons to engage South Sudanese youth in personal growth and economic uplift. The club also gave him a podium. At twenty-six he was a serious and articulate student of history and politics with concerns about the South Sudanese diaspora and South Sudan.

  On a sultry late August evening about thirty of the Talons, most of South Sudanese descent, drilled and scrimmaged at an indoor gym in north Omaha. Akoy was on hand to help Doluony and his assistant, longtime friend Ty Gatuoch. There were drills for the younger players, Akoy’s eight-year-old brother Akol among them, and there were scrimmages for players from the mid-teens to early twenties. The Talons counted up to 150 youth for their big events, many drawn to basketball by Akoy’s success. While the Talons practiced, Doluony found a quiet stairwell away from the action and told me what was on his mind, which was a lot.

  “A kid this morning missed his bus to school, thirty minutes from school,” Doluony said. “I had to go pick him up, so as I’m driving him to school, he tells me he had three workouts the day before, and he’s had nothing but ramen noodles in his stomach for the last two days. His mom isn’t able to go grocery shopping or take him to school because she failed her license test because she doesn’t speak English and can’t go to the DMV and have a way of passing t
he written test, and there’s no system in place that can help her meet those standards. This kid is in school all day, and he’s playing a game at 7 p.m., and the only thing he’ll have in his stomach is the school lunch, which doesn’t even feel like food when you eat it, but that’s all he’ll have to eat. He will stay after school until that game, and he won’t get home until 10 p.m. His parents won’t be at his game even though the other parents are.”

  There was frustration in his voice as Doluony described the struggle of the South Sudanese diaspora. The school system, for instance, provided only one teacher who spoke Nuer, the most common South Sudanese dialect in Omaha. Resettlement services were inadequate, he said: “The city should be taking time to mentor our mothers and fathers, helping us understand housing, employment, business startups, voting rights, and the political process. To this day we feel segregated. . . . I know it’s not just the South Sudanese community, but it’s every community in Omaha where everybody pretty much is on their own.”

  The struggle was internal too. In Africa, Doluony said, the South Sudanese “interpreted the world through our feelings in an intuitive culture,” which sprang from minimal government and possessions. America was about logic and institutions and material wealth. “In order for me to really survive I have to leave the Sudanese aspect at home and get my brain to where I can logically navigate things I have to do. I have to pursue money and figure out a way to materially keep up.”

  Doluony offered up his own bittersweet journey to explain the challenges of assimilation. His father was a pastor who at one time oversaw four Christian churches in the Upper Nile region of south Sudan. In 1986 his family moved to Ethiopia, where for the next thirteen years they lived in two refugee camps. Koang was born in 1990, the fourth of seven children, in Dema, Ethiopia. In 1999 the family was admitted to the United States and was resettled in Rochester, New York, which proved to be hospitable, except that it lacked a south Sudanese community, and Doluony’s mother felt isolated. So in 2000 the family moved to Omaha. “Part of my mother’s desire to move was to have peers, other women, to be with,” Doluony said.