by Majok Marier
SEED OF SOUTH SUDAN
Memoir of a “Lost Boy” Refugee
Majok Marier and
Estelle Ford-Williamson
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1497-7
© 2014 Majok Marier and Estelle Ford-Williamson. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: Majok Marier standing amid sorghum grain near Pulkar, South Sudan. Plants were sustenance on much of the journey.
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
To the many refugees who died fleeing along the paths and in the camps where we lived in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya and to those who continue to suffer in conflicts in Africa.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Map of Majok Marier's Journey
Map of South Sudan
Preface
Introduction
One: Don’t Drink the Water
Two: Walking in the Wild
Three: Where Was the World While We Walked?
Four: Seed of Sudan
Five: Fleeing Ethiopia
Six: Kakuma Refugee Camp
Seven: Change Is in the Air
Eight: America’s Struggle Ends Sudanese Airlifts
Nine: A Dinka Finds a Bride
Ten: The Beginning of Many New Things
Eleven: Stories of South Sudan
Twelve: Celebrities and Friends of South Sudan
Thirteen: Infrastructure
Fourteen: South Sudan’s Future
Fifteen: Warriors in a Different Kind of War
Appendix: Aid Groups in Ethiopia and Kenya
Notes
Bibliography
List of Names and Terms
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who helped me on my African journey:
Yar Chol Gueny, my mother; Alek Chol Gueny, my aunt; Ajok Mabor Malek, my wife.
Dut Machoul Beny, my uncle on the journey; Kau Riak; Akec Rang; Mading Amerdit; Kolnyin Nak Goljok; Chol Dhukpou Welken; Chol Wang Gar; Chier Malual Mayom; Mangar Maker Anyar; Langudi Poundak Reec; Laat Poundak Reec; Garang Ngong Malok; Bol Maliet Kumo; Chol Bayok Yiak; Laat Deng Reec; Mading Cheny Malok; Matur Riak; Matur Chol Makerlit; Ayat Deng Ayat; Agar Matak Awur; Majur Akol Acipia; Nyier Malek Nyach; Mapuor Mabor Pur; Makuol Akuei; Amal Madol Athieu; Manyang Mawut.
Mapour Majok Daung; Ngor Kur Mayol; Bol Deng Bol; Thiik Ayai.
Ater Akec Malek; Toul Ayat Mabil; Mabor Kau Akec; Daung Deng; Makuei Jok; Nypen Abbas Tong, Lost Girl.
Atak Juac; Akec Awolich; Matoc Kout; Madong Mading Ater; Mayom Maker; Malual Marier Maliet, my eldest brother; Abol Marier Maliet, my brother; Lela Marier Maliet, my sister; Mading Arialgu Maliet; Achol Makoi; Maker Amala Maliet, my cousin (father’s brother’s son) ; Nyakor Manyang Mager, cousin’s daughter; Mabak Machar; Mamer Tur; Mou Malong; Yai Malek; Mangar Ayii; Laat Mathou; Awan Magal Ater; Marik Ngang Marik; Deng Akoon Deng King; Makoi Cithol Kotjok; Malek Cithol Kotjok; Juac Gor; Bishop Yel Nhial; Father Madol Akot; Father Mathiang Machol; Lual Deng Majok; Chier Arop; Chol Machol.
And those who have especially helped me in America:
Mama Gini Eagen; Father Greg Kenny, CMF; Father Jim Curran, CMF; Father Jose Kochuparampil, CMF; Janis Sundquist; Helen M. Coelho; Ann Mahoney; Jennifer Moore; Jennifer Mann; Judy Maves; Bill Snodgrass; Elizabeth Crosby; Mary T. Steele; Patricia Shafer; Suzy Blough; Cyndie Heiskell; Mustafa Noor; Lutheran Services of Georgia; Corpus Christi Catholic Church, Stone Mountain, GA; Mothering Across Continents.
Preface
Western journalists in the bush country of southern Sudan in the 1980s reported seeing long lines of young boys walking in groups, sometimes very large groups. Overcoming language barriers, they asked the boys who they were. Piecing information together, the journalists learned they were boys whose villages had been burned by the Sudanese Army, and they were on the way to safety in Ethiopia. Aid workers eventually found them gathered where they’d been told to go—in refugee camps, or later, just in large fields that could accommodate the huge numbers where aid workers would then set up a camp. They were skeletons, only skin and bones, and when they arrived in one newly created camp, Panyido, they began dying of exhaustion, hunger, and disease.
Eventually there were tens of thousands in Panyido Refugee Camp. And then that one collapsed in 1991 during a rebellion in Ethiopia that toppled the Communist dictator. So they were forced on the paths again, to other camps.
Before events in Somalia, Rwanda, and even Darfur—suffering and death on an unimagined scale—southern Sudan was embroiled in a civil war the tragedy and scope of which the world was only learning. In 2000 and 2001, refugees from Sudan began arriving in U.S., Australian, and Canadian cities and towns. They’d acquired the name the Lost Boys of Sudan, after the orphan boys who followed the fictional Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s play. National and local media in Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Nashville, Kansas City, Phoenix, Jackson, Mississippi, and many others wrote articles and produced news stories on these men, and some women, who’d come to live in their midst. Now, 13 years after their arrival, the civil war that cast them onto uncertain paths, the longest civil war in African history, has been settled. These men, and the many fewer women who came, can now carry on in their new lives.
This book tells the story of these young people through the eyes of a young Dinka man who was seven when the Sudanese Army attacked his village and he fled east to find safety. Majok Marier is now 33, and his story is told to share the day-by-day experience of his survival story and to bring readers up-to-date on his life and on those of others he met along the way. The account of Stephen Chol Bayok is also included, along with the stories of some of the many people who helped these young men in a world so far from their experience that they continue to be in wonder.
In addition to first-hand accounts, other resources, including news accounts and books on the conflict in Sudan have been consulted to provide understanding about this particular country and its culture, especially the customs and traditions of the Agar Dinka, and how Western, European and African nations have figured in the events that brought the men here. Majok’s account is shown in Roman text, while text written by the co-author (as well as a short contribution by Stephen Chol Bayok) is in italics. In addition, sections providing information about people who helped the young men and historical background on South Sudan are indicated in the Table of Contents.
This is the first major work by a Lost Boy since the new nation of South Sudan was formed in 2011, and it includes recent news of several of the Lost Boys and their current lives. The scars of the journey are still there, but there are many lessons for people from other countries in this story of persistence and courage in the face of horrible odds against survival.
—Estelle Ford-Williamson
Introduction
It was the end of the rainy season, the start of the dry. The long grasses our cattle grazed on were beginning to harden, and their green was draining away. Gunfire erupted; I could hear the sound of tanks and soldiers attacking our village some distance away, and smoke circled in the air. The war we’d been hearing about—a war on every southern Sudan village in a vicious attempt to control our people—had come to Adut Maguen, my home.
With that fateful day, everything changed in my world, and a 14-year journey to find safety began.
I fled, and was joined by others: my great-uncle, a cousin, and two other boys, Matoc and Laat. We walked for months before finding a refugee camp, but that was not the end of our misery. Through the many changes and difficulties, my family’s strong bonds and traditions kept me going, though there were many times it would have been easy to give up. The opportunity to come to the United States provided a safe home, but challenges followed as well. When the war finally ended and my friends and I made plans to return to find our families, I was prevented by not having travel documents arrive in time. I began writing this book so that I could deliver a message on paper I was not able to deliver personally to those in my country, especially the young.
This book details my life, but also the lives of other Lost Boys in order to update this story for the many who became interested when we first arrived in America. It shows the importance of tribal culture in helping us survive. It shows how we have become good Americans, but with a strong passion for those at home and a determination to build a new South Sudan through the knowledge and skills we are gaining here.
The book is also a call to correct the wrongs in Africa, to ensure that what happened to us does not happen to future generations. There are those who still suffer in active conflicts as well as in refugee camps, and we hope to help them.
South Sudan is a country with an economy based on cattle keeping and a society based largely in rural villages. Changes are coming. Oil is being developed, much-needed infrastructure is growing, but the growth will be guided by the culture’s gifts: respect for what our elders tell us, working within the traditions of the cattle culture, consulting to avoid conflict, and believing we can develop our country and its rich resources while still treasuring and enhancing people’s lives in the small villages.
We hope you will read with interest about a part of the world you may not know. And know that your support in buying this book will go toward improving lives in the small villages. Portions of the authors’ earnings go toward building water wells and literacy programs in two area villages—mine and Stephen Chol Bayok’s.
Thank you for reading our stories.
—Majok Marier
One
* * *
* * *
Don’t Drink the Water
My first memory of the journey that was to last for many years was my uncle making a shoulder strap for a gourd and placing it on my chest. The whole thing scratched, as the strap was formed from twisted palm fronds, and they were very dry. They connected to a gourd that held my water supply. I didn’t like the rig placed against my bare chest, and I tried to push it away.
While I struggled, my uncle looked at me through stern eyes, narrowed snake-like. Like most Dinka men who’d come of age, his lower teeth had been removed, a tribal custom. His mouth looked scary to me.
His brow carried six long scars, proud reminders of the ritual knife cuts and deep bleeding he withstood with no painkillers, marking his entry into manhood a few years before. There was no doubt my uncle was a strong warrior. But he must have sensed that he was going to use something other than force with his young nephew—actually his grand-nephew, as he was my grandmother’s younger brother, part of a very large extended family I’d left behind.
I remember him telling me I would die if I did not have water. He was going to have to go on, and the others would also have to leave me, and I would die of thirst. He wasn’t angry; he talked to me softly like he always did when he was trying to convince me of a logical way to do things.
I was little and my head barely reached the stomach of my grandmother’s brother. Breathless from running down the path away from my village, I had come upon him in another group of people as I ran that morning. I had fled because the village was on fire—I could see huge flames leap up over the tall grasses where my cattle grazed—and I knew that the war had come to Adut Maguen. I ran barefoot, frightened by fire and smoke and the sound of tanks and gunfire. War had been predicted, and that morning I heard the sound of it in my village. War was right there.
By noon I grew weary of the trek, and I was hobbling, trying to slow down. I encountered groups of men and women, other boys, people from other villages, but kept pushing on. When I saw the tall, lean figure of young Dut Machoul, I was glad to see an older person I knew.
I walked fast because I wanted to escape the Hummers and the smoke and tanks and gunfire, but my uncle, who was probably 17, with legs much longer than mine, quickly caught up. He then tried to help me with a supply of water.
I guess I did not want to carry something so scratchy, and I must have thought water would be ahead, and I’d get it when I needed it, but Dut set me straight right away. First he pulled me into the remains of a burned village to find dried gourds that had been part of someone’s household. Then he made the makeshift rope to hold the gourd high up on my chest to allow my arms to swing with my steps.
After I’d finally agreed to wear the offending gourd, we stopped near a puddle of still, dirty water and he put water in the gourd.
I resisted again, because it was heavy across my chest. Again, he put me on the right path.
“You are not going to drink this water until you see the next water,” he said. “You need to just wet your mouth with it. Until you see your next water, you must put only enough in your mouth to keep from getting too dry.”
And that’s what I did. If I’d not done that, running a water-soaked finger over the inside of my mouth on a regular basis, I may not have survived. Later the same day we encountered a cousin, Kau, and Dinka boys about my age, Matoc Kout and Laat Mathou. They were from the Rumbek area where I lived, but I did not know them before. Because they were Dinka, and we spoke the same dialect, we walked together. My uncle helped them with water gourds as well, and we journeyed long and hard together, eventually for a thousand miles through three countries.
During the many weeks and months of that dry season, without food, clean water, and without our families, we kept asking: When can we stop? When are we going to get to a place where we can rest? Where are we going? The answers might well have been “Never,” and “There is no such place,” and “We don’t know.” For we walked and walked for months and months, in the middle of the night, and late at night. We never knew the answer to the question: “How long can we stay?” For there were many reasons to pick up and run again.
This is the way Majok’s people build their homes in Pulkar, South Sudan—high up to escape lions and other predators.
I was seven years old in 1987, and my home was built up high to keep us safe from the lions that would roam the rural area outside Rumbek, Sudan, near where I was born. Our village, Adut Maguen, lay about eight miles southeast of Rumbek, and south of the village of Pacong. (All of this area lies in what is now officially the country of South Sudan, but the birth of that nation followed much suffering and death, and it is this story I will relate in the next pages.) In this small village, my mother took care of us, my older brother, my younger sister and younger brother and me. However, our fates changed when the war came to our village. The struggle that followed colored my entire life, as it tore apart my home village and thrust me onto a path I could never have imagined. I had to leave with other Lost Boys, to walk barefoot for years, exposed to lions, hyenas, enemy soldiers, hostile tribesmen, thirst and starvation. We spent most of our young lives in a search for food, water, and freedom.
While I have stopped walking across Africa and have settled here in the United States, I feel I am still on a journey, with a goal of making others see the conditions of the country I come from and the section of Africa I left. I also want to open others’ eyes to the sometimes desperate situations once some help is found in refugee camps in an effort to improve the lot of those whose lives are deeply affected by those experiences.
And I want to detail what the Lost Boys are doing in America today and what our hopes are for our home c
ountry. We are men now, although we do not mind if you call us the Lost Boys. For this brings to memory the life-and-death struggle we faced as youths in Eastern Africa and reminds us that we have survived a brutal life, and have been very fortunate. We hope the way we live out our lives here in America reflects the gratitude we feel for this new life. Finally, I’d like to show how the bloody fire of the civil war flung us onto continents far away from our home, but we are forming a new generation of leaders for the new South Sudan that has been created out of our suffering.
Many people have heard of Darfur, which has been called a genocide; Darfur is located in the western part of Sudan. However, the tragic attacks in South Sudan predate the conflicts in Darfur, in my country’s western section. I believe it is important that others know the details of the conflicts and become familiar with the causes and the impacts of these wars, as there is no hope for this large section of the African continent unless the world understands more.
Sudan, which spans both sides of the equator, was Africa’s largest country until recently. In January of 2011, according to a peace agreement that concluded our bitter civil war and was signed in 2005, there was a vote to decide if Sudan should be two countries. The vote was overwhelmingly for independence, spelling a new day for the new nation of South Sudan. There is much to do to enhance the existing framework in our area to build our nation. Darfur remains another effect of the punishing Arabic regime in Khartoum, and it will be dealt with, as Darfurians are largely our African brothers and sisters. But first we need to set things right in South Sudan. The solution to one depends on the solution to the other.
