Sudan: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  “You do not have to tell me vhat you do not want to tell me. I’m a nosey old man and--”

  Ron didn’t let him finish. “You need to understand that what we’re doing in Sudan will very likely get our names crossed off General Bashir’s Christmas card list.”

  “That vould be a shame,” the doctor said. “I understand he sends out bright, shiny red ones.”

  Masapha was totally lost, but he smiled as if everything the two men said made perfect sense.

  There was no good humor in Ron’s voice when he continued. “You’re probably better off not knowing anything about us but name, rank and serial number. But you asked. I’m working on a story about the slave trade in Sudan. When I’m done, the world won’t be able to pretend it’s not happening.”

  “Good!” the doctor said. “All the killing, all the...” His voice trailed off. “The Arabs will not stop unless the vorld makes them stop. I do not want to treat babies with limbs blown off. I want to go back to immunizations and nutrition.”

  Ron told the doctor about the slave auction.

  “Everything we shot, and the equipment we used to shoot it, is in that canvas bag your sweet wife said we could store in the bottom of her pantry.”

  Masapha spoke for the first time.

  “Can you tell us the way that is most safe and short to get to the capital? We have to send from this country our information.” He smiled. “It will be like to Khartoum dropping a plane load of bombs on their heads.”

  “Vhat you have you must take very great care to disguise. Government soldiers go through everyting that is shipped into or out of Sudan—everyting.”

  Then the doctor told them about a “reasonably decent” road four or five days’ journey by jeep from the clinic that would eventually dump them out in Ed Da’ein. From there, they could travel more bad roads to Khartoum.

  “There is noting between here and that road except plenty more noting, so you will need supplies. After lunch, vhy don’t you drive me into Lusong. I need to check on zum patients, and you can get what you need for your journey.”

  Ron and Masapha dropped the doctor on the outskirts of the village and continued down toward the dock on the river. They pulled up in front of the only store in town, a dilapidated structure in danger of immediate collapse, and purchased dried fish and beef jerky for Masapha, pork jerky for Ron, fresh fruit and two cans of petrol.

  But they discovered they wouldn’t need the gasoline after all. When they stepped out of the store with their supplies, their jeep was gone. It had been stolen.

  Akec had arranged for six villagers to accompany Idris to tend the cattle and goods until they could be exchanged in Rumbek for money, the language of the Westerners and Arabs. Then he, Magok and Durak would help Idris search for a bigger lion. Their route to Rumbek took them through the neighboring village of Tiresta the second night of their journey.

  Though that village had not been attacked, they had suffered at the hands of the Murahaleen. A group of two dozen women and girls had been washing clothes at the riverbank when guerillas swooped down and hauled off nine of them. Their best hunters and trackers had searched for days, but could find no trace of the marauders. They just seemed to vanish.

  The village elders had been debating what they should do, and Durak and Akec told them Mondala’s plan. A man stood just outside the glow of the firelight and listened as they spoke. His name was Chewa Enosa. He was a Dinkan farmer who was visiting Tiresta from his home in a village several miles away. When the discussion around the campfire finally ended, he went to speak privately to Idris.

  “My brother, Michael, was an SPLA soldier until he was wounded last year,” Chewa told Idris, his voice quiet. “He has only one arm now. As a soldier, he traveled all over southern Sudan fighting government troops. He now lives in Kadriak on the Pibor River.”

  Idris had never heard of Kadriak and had no idea where the Pibor River might be located.

  “It is a town where the SPLA has found many soldiers.” Chewa’s face darkened. “It is an ugly, dangerous place, and there are many mercenaries there. I think my brother would be able to find in Kadriak the kind of man—the bigger lion—you are looking for.”

  Idris was instantly interested, but his experiences in the last few weeks had taught him caution.

  “Why would he want to help us? He does not know me or my daughter.”

  Chewa said his brother would help because he had a personal ax to grind with the Murahaleen.

  “Michael’s wife was a beautiful woman, and one day when she was walking home from the marketplace, she ran into three drunk raiders,” Chewa said. “They took her, all three of them, then beat her with their fists, sticks and clubs so you could not tell who she was when they were finished. And then they left her for dead on the side of the road.”

  Somehow, the woman had survived, but she had suffered brain damage.

  “Her face is pushed in, she is blind, and something is wrong in her mind. Her speech is slow, and she is like a small child again. She lives with her parents in a village far south in the mountains, and when Michael goes to visit her, she does not know who he is.”

  The two men stood silent for a moment before Chewa continued.

  “If you would like to talk to Michael, I will take you to him. He will help you if he can. I know he will.” Chewa paused and looked into Idris’s eyes. “I, too, have a little girl.”

  Idris told the other men from Mondala about Chewa’s offer. Akec knew where the Pibor River was and said that it would be a long journey across the plains on the other side of the White Nile. But they agreed that going there was a better plan than wandering the streets of Bentiu talking to strangers.

  They set out together early the next morning, but instead of making for Rumbek, they headed toward Bor, a city on the White Nile where they could sell their cattle and their other goods and then catch a ferry to the other side of the river.

  They bartered for two days in Bor to convert everything they’d brought with them into cash. Three of the six villagers, the ones who’d accompanied Idris to help with the livestock, left to go home to Mondala. Idris, Durak, Akec and Magok went with Chewa to find his brother, Michael.

  Akec purchased tickets for the five of them on a bus that traveled the 150 miles between Bor and Pibor City twice a week. It was a dilapidated vehicle without a door or front or rear bumpers and so dented and scarred it was impossible to tell what its original color might have been. The bus left Bor shortly after sunup, bounded along the rutted gravel road and did not arrive in Pibor City until well after dark. The bus driver allowed the villagers to spend the night in the bus, and the next morning they set out along the bank of the Pibor River for a town called Kadriak.

  That evening they made camp on the outskirts of town, and Chewa went to find his brother and tell him Idris’s story. Two days later, he returned.

  “Michael has found someone he thinks you should talk to,” Chewa said.

  They met Michael in town, and he led them to a squatter settlement by the river, a collection of shacks, lean-tos and makeshift tents strung together by a labyrinth of interconnecting trails and passageways. It was a place defined by hopelessness and despair, a dark place even in the bright light of day.

  Dirty, naked children darted in and out among the hovels like small animals. Other children stood unsmiling in doorways, watching the group pass, their eyes old and tired, their bellies swollen from malnutrition. Timid young women, their skin tones differing shades of darkness, listlessly shooed flies off the sickly babies in their laps.

  Animal bones picked clean littered the ground; the hum of flies buzzed in the hot, stagnant air; and the choking stench of open sewers filled every breath. Even the uneducated Mondala villagers understood that this was not a normal living environment. Nowhere in their experience had they ever encountered anything that compared to the overwhelming filth and fetid squalor of the encampment; it disgusted and offended them.

  When they came to an alley
between two of the buildings, Michael turned down a narrow passageway. At the end of the passageway, he held up his hand, indicating for the men to wait. Then he opened the door of a small building literally vibrating with loud music. He and Chewa stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind them.

  Idris and the others looked around in wonder and disgust. Empty cans and beer bottles lay on the ground at their feet, along with piles of human excrement. What looked and smelled like vomit was splattered on a nearby wall.

  Suddenly, the door opened, and Chewa indicated for the others to follow him. They stepped into the dimly lit room where an assortment of oil roughnecks, gamblers and other malcontents sat at makeshift tables or on crude stools that faced a bar made of planks stretched across oil drums. A battered boom box rested on the far end of the bar, blaring loud rock music in a language no one in the room understood.

  Most of the bar/gambling hall’s patrons cast curious glances at the tall Dinka tribesmen, Akec towering above them all, as Chewa threaded his way through the tables toward the far end of the building.

  Michael stood near a group of three men sitting at a makeshift table of concrete blocks and wood slabs in a corner of the room that was shrouded in shadow. Idris could not quite make out their faces. Chewa stopped and his brother leaned over and spoke quietly to a tall figure seated in the middle.

  Turning to Idris and the others, Chewa told them, “Michael will interpret for you.”

  The big man in the center of the group said something and his two companions rose and pushed briskly past the Dinkas without acknowledging their presence. Michael motioned for the villagers to come closer.

  “I have already told Omar your story,” Michael said to Idris. “He wanted to see you face to face and tell you his price and his conditions. If you can meet them, he will help you. For a price. He says everything is for a price.”

  Idris studied the seated man as he spoke to Michael, trying to make out his features in the dim light. He was a heavily muscled man, with massive shoulders and a wide, broad chest, where a thick mat of black hair curled out of the V of his shirt. Idris could see several tattoos beneath the dark hair on his arms; one of them was a snake wrapped around his right forearm, the head on the top of his hand, its forked tongue licking out toward his knuckles. The tattoo was so detailed and lifelike it seemed almost real, like the snake was an added weapon Omar could use against an adversary. And in an odd way, that was comforting. The mercenary spoke in a deep, raspy voice, and his smirk—he did not smile—revealed a gold cap on the left of his two front teeth. The brim of his hat cast an ominous shadow, but Idris could make out deep, unblinking dark eyes and a hawkish nose that hooked over a thick black mustache. The man had the face of a predator. The hat reminded Idris of Leo, but he resolutely pushed the memory out of his head.

  “He says that you do not need to know his name,” Michael said. “Omar will do for now. He wants to know if you have brought dinars or pounds.”

  Akec pulled out some Sudanese pounds for them to see and then shoved them back into his traveling pouch.

  “Omar also says he works alone.”

  Idris responded immediately. “I am going with him. I am paying. Besides, he doesn’t know my daughter.”

  A quick exchange followed, then Michael reiterated, “He says he works alone.”

  “Where our money goes, I go.” For Idris, the point was nonnegotiable. “The others will be turning back, but I am going on, with or without him. He can stab me in the back if he wants to, but he will have to kill me to take my money. I will never again give it freely to someone who disappears.”

  After hearing Michael’s translation, Omar snorted a short, guttural laugh and then spoke in gruff Arabic.

  Michael turned to Idris. “He says he will tell you one final time: do not come! But if you refuse to listen, you may accompany him. Just understand that if you cannot keep up, he will leave you behind. If you get hurt, he will leave you behind. He will use you as bait if he has to. You have been warned. Omar works alone.”

  Michael let that sink in for a moment and then continued.

  “He says the price will be five hundred Sudanese pounds plus expenses, whether he finds the girl or not. It will be another five hundred if he brings the girl back alive.”

  Akec stepped forward and laid a handful of bills on the table.

  Another exchange took place between Omar and Michael, this one longer and more animated. When it was over, Michael translated for the group what Omar had said.

  “Another thing is, he says there are to be no questions asked about his methods. He says very bad things sometimes happen along the way. He hates the Murahaleen and the Fedayeen, and it would be a privilege for him to kill any that he comes across—along with returning your daughter, of course.”

  Magok stepped up and spoke for the first time, his words, as always, blunt and to the point. “How do we know he will do what he says?”

  Michael already had the answer. “You don’t. But he’s the best chance you have of getting the girl back.”

  Chapter 12

  Akin and Omina were pack animals. They hauled wood for the cooking fires—armload after armload, from small sticks to logs it took both of them to lift. They carried water for cooking and for clean-up afterward, huge jugs of it, all the way from the river to the cooking tent at the far end of the encampment.

  Their day began in the dark before sunrise, preparing for the morning meal; it ended in the dark after sundown, cleaning up after the evening meal. Every minute in between was filled with drudgery.

  On stomachs so empty the girls were sometimes dizzy, they served food they could not eat. Their clothes filthy rags, their bodies dirty and tormented by spider and scorpion bites, they scrubbed and cleaned the clothes of their Arab masters. They slept in the cold, were tied in their shelter during the heat of the day, were beaten, slapped, kicked, humiliated and intimidated.

  The older girls were raped, too. Every night.

  Mbarka and Shontal quickly discovered that being a slave meant they existed for the sexual pleasure of the men in the camp, and they were handed around from one man to another like what they were—property.

  In southern Sudan just to fatten and trade his horses and camels, Sulleyman al Hadallah had brought only a few of his household servants and staff, and none of his five wives or seventeen children. He and his herders accepted that as Bedouins they must spend time away from their families. But none of them expected or intended to give up sexual activity. Mbarka and Shontal, both virgins and both pledged to be married before the raids, had been deflowered by Sulleyman and then given to any man in the camp who wanted them. Every night, soldiers came for them and took them to the men’s tents. Usually, there was more than one man waiting for them there. And every night or two, one or the other of them would be summoned to Sulleyman’s tent. They always spent the whole night there, and both girls dreaded those nights the most.

  A pretty girl with a well-shaped body, Mbarka had caught Sulleyman’s fancy. He had decided the night he took her virginity that he would give her to one of his sons instead of selling her to a brothel as he had planned. Shontal was a different matter altogether. She was almost as pretty as Mbarka, but there was a deadness in her eyes that made Sulleyman uncomfortable.

  And he was very aware of the other two slave girls as well. He particularly lusted after the little one, the child. He got his greatest pleasure from bedding the young slaves.

  Mbarka held up remarkably well under the humiliation and degradation of unending sexual assaults. Her experiences with the men in the camp had toughened her, made her stronger. Though not defiant, neither was she broken. She was a fighter, a survivor.

  Shontal had neither Mbarka’s courage nor her strength of character. Every encounter with the debasement of rape left her more shattered inside. It grew harder and harder for her to disassociate from the brutality; the psychological shield that protected her soul from total destruction was wearing gradually away.
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br />   Akin and Omina watched in horror as Mbarka and Shontal were dragged away to the Arabs’ tents. Every night when the men came up the hill to their shelter, the two younger girls cringed back into the darkness, terrified that this would be the night strong hands reached out and grabbed them, too.

  Though only the older girls had to endure the brutality of the men in the camp, they all shared an equal dread of Pasha Drulois. In her black dress and turban, she was a daily angel of torment to the slave girls—vicious, brutal and merciless. Decades of cruelty, abuse and humiliation had warped her iron will, twisted her into a bitter, angry woman as callous and ruthless as her master.

  Pasha had a hair-trigger temper. Carrying a heavy bundle of wood too slowly or not fetching water quickly enough would occasion a tirade of unintelligible Arabic and a flurry of blows from her leather camel strap. Its tough surface bit into the girls’ flesh, leaving angry, painful welts. If she hit hard enough, the whip would break the skin and draw blood.

  Since the nightmare morning when the raiders attacked her village, life for Akin had become mere survival, a struggle simply to endure. Though she and the others were unaware of it, their psyches were being transformed, molded into a “slave mentality” that asked for nothing and expected nothing. At different levels, all four had come to accept that they were the property of someone else and that they existed for no other purpose than to serve their master. They were slowly losing all concept of personal rights.

  The only break from the torturous existence in the camp came during trips to the river to wash clothes. It was hard work. The clothes baskets were heavy, the camel fat used for soap was disgusting, and bending over and washing the filthy garments in the river was back-breaking labor. But for Akin, clothes-washing days were the only ray of light in a dark existence totally devoid of hope.

  She longed for river days so she could push her toes down into the sand and feel the water rush over her feet. Trips to the river brought back some of her humanity. The river was a connection, a tiny thread that kept her tied to a life filled with love, an emotion she had not seen a single Arab display toward anyone.