Seed of South Sudan

by Majok Marier

  I was one of tens of thousands of Sudanese boys who, when the conflicts between North and South that began in 1983 reached our village in 1987, began a long search for escape, a way to find food and water and to find peace that would enable us to survive, to grow into manhood. We eventually walked to Ethiopia where we found refugee camps. But we were forced back to Sudan because of Ethiopia’s civil war, and sought shelter in Kenyan refugee camps for 10 years.

  Most people became aware of the Lost Boys in 2001, when, like me, some of them began to arrive in the States. But their agony began in 1987 and did not end until 2001, when most were resettled here. Now we ache to solve the long-standing problems between peoples in our region that forced the journey in the first place. And we want to make sure that the deaths and suffering in refugee camps, a greater tragedy heaped on top of already tragic circumstances, don’t continue in the future.

  My life in my village, in the Lakes region eight miles east of Rumbek, consisted of tending cattle that my mother owned. My father died when I was very young, and I don’t remember him. We lived in a village of about five hundred people, most joined in some way with others through marriages and blood relationships. Other family members around me were a grandmother and her brothers and their families, my mother’s brothers and their families. We lived in two camps year round; we lived in our permanent home during the rainy season (thus the building above the ground—not only to avoid lions and other predators, but to escape the floods of water that would course through during heavy downpours). The rest of the year, usually from December to the end of March, we would create dry season camps near shrunken rivers so that we could have access to water for our animals and ourselves.

  Our cattle are the focus of our lives. In Sudan, a person’s wealth is completely tied to how many cattle he owns—rather, how many a family owns, as there’s not a lot of distinction between the individual and the family. Cattle are acquired through marriage, and everyone marries. The haggling over cattle for a woman’s bride-price, for instance, is a major community event, observed by all the village people. Everyone knows everyone’s business in this village—and it is everyone’s business, as many are related. But more about the bride-price and bride-wealth later.

  On a typical day, at the age of seven, I would rise from a mat on the dirt floor where I’d slept matches-in-a-box style with my older and younger brother. My sister and mother would already be up, making a fire and beginning preparation for the meal that would be taken at lunch time by the rest of the family there in our home, and that would be carried by the rest of us to the grazing fields. There is no breakfast—we would go to the water source (pots of water that my mother and sister had fetched), and wash our faces. My mother would have prepared our lunch to carry to the grazing fields with us.

  Young boys watching cattle near Pulkar, South Sudan, as Majok was doing in 1987 when the Sudanese Army attacked his village of Adut Maguen.

  My job was to untie the cattle and lead them to graze on the grasses not far from our home. I would do this with my older brother and my cousins. Twenty cattle had to be rounded up into groups, tethering them with ropes strung around their necks held like so many balloon strings. Once we were out on the grasslands, we’d make sure we had all our cattle in one location and keep an eye on them so that none strayed. We knew our cattle by color patterns. In fact, Dinka names are actually colors of cattle. My name, Majok, signifies a black and white pattern in Dinka.

  When the cattle were settled in a particular area, we could relax some and play with other boys who were doing the same thing with their families’ cattle. By about noon, we’d take out our first meal of the day, groundnut paste rolled in a banana leaf. Afterwards, we’d chew on a sorghum plant stem. These grazing fields were not rolling grasslands as you might picture in the American West or large pastures such as you see in rural Georgia and Tennessee or the Midwest states. Mostly they were areas of man-high grasses, which the cattle munched all day long.

  Young Dinka in a cattle camp near Majok’s village wears ashes for decoration and shows off his young bulls.

  I did not attend school, but schooling was planned for me because my older brother was not going to attend. In Dinka families, one son attends, usually the oldest. But for some reason, my brother was not going to school, and it was I, when I was of age, who was to travel to a school building about 12 miles from our village. Because of the dislocation caused by war, I first learned my ABCs in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, 300 miles from my home. And I learned English rather than Arabic as is the Sudanese custom.

  That one day during the end of the rainy season, in October or November, my pastoral life changed. Tanks, Hummers, and soldiers of the Sudanese army began an assault on our village. They started from the police station, where soldiers from North Sudan were stationed. In the past, these stations often would be attacked by rebels, militiamen from the Southern Sudan tribes, the Sudanese Liberation Army. But there were no rebels around in our area when these attacks began—North Sudan was warring on South Sudan, and they used the excuse that rebels were hiding in our village to destroy it. In fact, at this time, the rebels were just across Sudan’s borders with Kenya and Ethiopia, a distance of about 200 miles.

  There was a great deal of noise, smoke, and confusion as tanks moved into the area outside the village. Bombs fell, soldiers burned huts, streams of choking, blinding smoke were everywhere and people were running, gathering everything they could: belongings, food, mats, on heads and underarms. Children cried. There was much scurrying about, screaming, mothers calling for children, children for their mothers.

  But I was not in the village—I saw the smoke, heard the gunfire and shelling, and I just kept moving, looking for a safe place. I went to the next village and found only burned huts and scattered bowls used for cooking. There were old and young, men and women, girls and boys, people and cattle on the paths at first. I kept walking with no belongings, looking for a place. But everywhere there was smoke, fire, burned-out homes and the menace of soldiers. We’d go toward the trees, which at this time were losing their leaves, so they offered only a little cover. And there were dangerous animals where there were trees. We just kept walking, trying to avoid the green clothes of the military. We tried to find out what was happening, where we would be safe.

  Pretty soon it was just young males as the women and girls could not keep up, and the men stayed behind with them trying to make a home wherever there were villages that were far away from our home and where locals would allow. The danger was everywhere—families could be wiped out as the soldiers advanced to these villages that hadn’t been attacked. The villages could run out of food and send newcomers away.

  Ethiopia was where most of the goods that came to our area came from; there was little trade from the North. The South has little connection to the North economically, culturally or socially, and the very bad roads in our area went east, not north. We knew not to go north, and certainly not to Rumbek, a large town, because that’s where the attacks were spreading from. We decided to walk far, far away so that we would be away from danger, and then we would try to find food and shelter.

  Grandmother’s Words

  My grandmother told me the civil war would come to our village. Even more important and powerful, she and my mother taught me many skills to survive on my own. In Dinka culture, children are trained how to be strong because their parents tell them that they do not know what can happen to them. Parents show their children many things that could happen in the future.

  I recall my grandmother talking to me when there was an incident about a year before full-out war came to our area. Our small village, Adut Maguen, is south of a larger one, called Pacong. One night, at Pacong, rebels of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) attacked the police station. The government troops were occupying the station in a stepped-up effort to quell the rebels; the rebels, local tribesmen, were attacking the police station at night.

  My grandmother heard gunshots, but I wa
s sleeping. When I woke up my grandmother called me and asked me, “Did you hear a gun sound last night?”

  “No, Momdit, I didn’t. What happened?”

  “Anyanya attacked Pacong last night,” she said.

  “What is Anyanya, Momdit?”

  “They are people who fight the Arabs.”

  “Why did they attack the Arabs?”

  “My grandson, you are young, you do not know Anyanya. If Anyanya is going to fight again, I will die before this war.” (These were tribes that fought the Arabs in a civil war many years earlier than the civil war that caused me to leave my village. Anyanya was a combination of Nuer, Lotuko, Madi, and other groups as well as Dinka tribesmen that fought the Arabs from 1969 to 1972. During that war, the Sudanese Army (SA) descended on the village and killed indiscriminately.) She wanted to die rather than have the Army kill people as they did then.

  My grandmother said that I would not die in this war, even though she would die. I remember my grandmother told me this war was going to kill many people, and some would leave the country. She took care of me well there in the village and showed me how I could live alone without a parent’s support. She told me to stay happy no matter what bad situation I had.

  She told me Dinka men were the strongest, smartest, tallest—handsome and proud.

  “Do you know what Monyjang means?” A new word. It sounded like mon yang.

  “No, Momdit.”

  “Monyjang is the only man of the men.”

  It was interesting for me to hear that name, and it made me proud to be Dinka. I believe cultures can help people to survive in difficult situations like what the Lost Boys and Lost Girls had in 15 years of journeying in South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya. South Sudan has been rich in traditional activities, and this kept the boys and girls alive. I believe South Sudan’s different tribes and traditional cultures keep the people together, and make their lives rich and exciting.

  I do know that some people see us as funny because the Dinka men cannot cook, according to our culture. Women are the only ones who know how to cook in Dinka culture. This is a guideline of Dinka culture that keeps men away from the kitchen. We had many rules in our community to inspire people to work hard, learn responsibility and respect people. These rules led us to work hard in America. We are responsible people, and we help our own people, friends, relatives, family and parents.

  Now, I do cook Dinka food for myself and for my fellow Lost Boys in Clarkston, Georgia. Our foods are usually rice with meat, chicken, and lots of vegetables. And I have a Dinka wife, and now a daughter, but I will not have two wives, as is the custom in my village. While I value much that is Dinka, I am changing a bit.

  An outsider is probably confused by all the tribal names in the South Sudan area. It is probably not unlike the differences in regions here in the United States. I understand that there are great rivalries among football teams from different states or areas, such as Georgia vs. Florida, or Auburn vs. Alabama. Or you could think of very popular Super Bowl opponents. However, instead of playing games against each other, young men of the tribes in South Sudan were trained as warriors, and many have long traditions of fierce fighting to protect their various areas in South Sudan.

  Something that is difficult to understand is the lengthy history of our culture. The Dinka and the tribes like them have been in existence since the time of the ancient Egyptians and before. There is a lot of focus on Egyptian culture, probably because of the exceptional pyramids, religious temples, and the pharaohs’ burial sites that have yielded gold, pottery, mummies and many other persistent reminders of a long-ago culture. The excitement has been great, especially since the discovery of untold treasures in Tutankhamen’s grave. But the sources of the Nile—the White Nile and Blue Nile, where many southern Sudan tribes live—were mostly unexplored by Europeans, the writers of much of the world’s history, until only recently, relatively speaking.

  HISTORY OF SUDAN AND EGYPT

  Our knowledge of the history of the area of southern Sudan, including the Rumbek area that Majok comes from, is clouded by the absence of permanent structures and written records. Geography and tribal patterns of self-sufficiency kept the area isolated; yet cattle-keeping and other traditions are similar to those in Africa’s oldest civilizations, and indications are that trading with other areas developed over the years. Yet until 1841, the White Nile area, a dense swamp inundated by floods from May to December every year, was never explored; only in that year did a Turkish viceroy of Egypt send an expedition through the White Nile and Blue Nile areas to find the headwaters of the river, in Uganda. European impacts followed.1

  To understand southern Sudan, it’s important to look at Sudan’s history, and at Egypt’s history as well. Since the early 1960s, studies of 20th century artifact rescues have yielded many new discoveries, and more are occurring every day.

  It is well to remember that in ancient times, Egyptians and Nubians mingled in Egypt and in Nubia, and that Nubia’s highly developed African culture rose before the ascent of the Egyptian dynasties. Some of the kings in ancient Egyptian times were from Nubia. The region was in what is now Sudan, north of present-day Khartoum, the country’s capital. In the Old Testament, it was referred to as the Kingdom of Kush. Khartoum is at the juncture of the White Nile and Blue Nile rivers, which flow north and form the storied Nile River. Upper Nubia developed around the third and fourth cataracts of the Nile, and included the royal cities of Kerma and Meroe; Lower Nubia fell between the first and second cataracts; both areas offered access to much-prized gold fields and emerald mines, as well as a door to the valuable products of sub–Saharan Africa.

  “Much material in Lower Nubia now lies under Lake Nasser, permanently flooded after the construction of the Aswan High Dam, while some Upper Nubian sites have been destroyed by the completion of the Merowe Dam at the Fourth Cataract,” writes Marjorie M. Fisher, editor with others of Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile. “Nubia’s indigenous language, which might offer further insights, was not written down until the Meroitic Period (mid-third century BC to mid-fourth century AD), but the language, although deciphered, can be understood only to a very limited extent.”

  So those wanting to understand about this culture “must explore the region’s relations with Egypt, as well as the indigenous sources of data,” Fisher writes.2

  Researchers wanting to view the remains of the Nubian physical culture, fortunately, are able to see the remains documented and removed in several museum collections, including many in the United States. In the early 1960s, when the Aswan High Dam was being built, an effort to salvage artifacts was begun.

  “Before the world lost much of its precious heritage, an international rescue campaign was organized under the auspices of the United Nations Scientific, Technical and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),” an article in American Visions states. “Participating foreign missions were offered half of the discoveries that would otherwise have been permanently lost. Several American museums and universities participated in the UNESCO Salvage Campaign, and their share of finds forms the backbone of the major Nubian collections in this country.

  “The very concept of rescue archeology—and the foundations of the Nubian collections at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Oriental Museum of the University of Chicago—originated in Nubia at the beginning of the century, when the first (and smaller) dam was being erected near Aswan in 1906,” the article continues, then details how these discoveries enabled the identification of several previously unknown cultures, and a completely new view of the Nubians, now seen to be rivals at times to Egyptian power.3

  It is known that several of the ancient Egyptian gods such as Anubia, god of embalming,4 and Isis,5 were Nubian. There were Nubians who were kings in Egypt, and Egyptian kings took Nubian wives. “Nubia appears not to have been exploited unduly by the Egyptians,” who probably did not enslave Nubians, Fisher writes. �
��As late as the Old Kingdom, many Lower Nubian princes and princesses were raised in the Egyptian court…. The intention was that upon their return home, they would promote Egyptian culture in Nubia and alliances to Egypt.”6 Archaeologists of Egypt and Sub-Sahara Africa find a great many links between the cultures, starting from the time before the Sahara became the desert it is now, and before Arabic groups came to live between Egypt and Sudan. In a sense, Sudan is an important source of much that is Egyptian culture and geography.

  There was great interplay between Egypt in the north and Sudan as well as other areas of sub–Saharan Africa. In fact, all of what is now Africa shared much in customs, religion, and cultural objects. Archaeologists point to similarities between the early tools of the area, from bone harpoons to pottery bowls and jars, items that appeared from the Atlantic to the southern part of what is now the Sahara, on up along the Nile, finally reaching into Palestine, as well as similarities in the famous blue crown of Egyptian rulers of the New Kingdom era and the beaded miter crown used in Cameroon in the past (used ceremonially in present-day Nigeria). All of these examples simply suggest that there were ties between what may seem like unlike cultures, ties that date back to the Neolithic period.7

  Yet to look at Sudan as a country today is to look at true contrast. Egypt was eventually ruled by Greek, Roman, Muslim, and Turkish regimes (The Ottoman Empire) before gaining independence. Largely through the dynasty begun with Khedive Muhammad Ali, the country was transformed on a European model.8 Because of that influence, Egypt learned how to tame and dam the Upper Nile, and became (at least until the Arab spring of 2011) a secular country that is more developed than almost any other country on the African Continent; it sits at the north end of the Nile Valley, orienting itself to the Indo-European culture of the Mediterranean. Sudan to its south is a culturally, religiously, and ethnically split nation. Nubia was Christianized and remained that way from approximately AD 580 to 1400. At the end of this time, some areas still remained independent and Christian,9 affecting southern Sudan even today. Arabs, who came in initially in the 7th century but did not exact control for several centuries,10 occupy the north, including the Nubian Desert, the ancient kingdom of Kush, and the capital, Khartoum. The area to the south, inhabited by various African tribes including the Dinka, includes some fertile area, some desert, and what at one time was simply referred to as the Sudd, or Tremendous Swamp. In fact, the swamp is the largest in the world; in Arabic, its name translates as “obstacle,” which it has been for those trying to access the vast lands along its edges.11