by Cola Bilkuei
My father taught me many things about the war. At nighttime, he loved to have a drink and call us around the fire to tell us stories about his past. He told us how Sudan had gained independence in 1956, after the British colonists left, when he was a very young man. We had no idea what 1956 meant or what white people looked like or where they came from, so our father educated us by telling us about the British and their colonial wars. He said that within a year of independence, fighting broke out between separatist southern rebels – Anyanya (‘snake poison’) – and the government officials from the north. The British had kept us and the Muslims separated, but after independence we were lumped together within one country. He said the reason for the fighting was that the Dinka had the best land, water, oil and cattle, and the Arabs from the north wanted to take it from us. They also wanted to steal us for slaves, we were told. Most of what I knew of Arabs came from my father, though I do remember some Arab traders coming to the village to exchange salt, sugar and tea for our maize, sorghum, goats or cattle.
Our family did have some links further back with the Arabs. My great-grandfather Bilkuei and his brother and sister were taken as children to be slaves in northern Sudan, and then in Egypt. As an adult he came back to Khartoum and became a Muslim. His owner, an old lady, was happy with the way he worked, so she gave him one of her daughters as a concubine. (He still has some descendants in Khartoum.) But then he was visited by his ancestors’ spirits, who called him back to the south. When he returned to his Dinka home, people were entranced by his experience and his spiritual powers. He cured people and animals of disease, and was given cattle, wives and land. This was how our sub-tribe had been formed – in some part thanks to his life among the Arabs. But that was long ago now.
My father had joined the Anyanya in 1955 and fought with them, on and off, until 1972 when a peace agreement was reached and signed in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Over the next eleven years of peace he divided his time between working outside the village as a wildlife officer for the government and working the cattle with the family. Ajok, Mijok and Monyleck were born towards the end of the war, then came the baby who died. I think I was born between 1976 and 1978. After me was Thonager, and finally Athien who was born around 1981. I remember being offered my baby brother and sister to hold, but I was too scared of dropping them and ran away.
In 1983 Arab militias started to appear in the villages, carrying guns and riding in on camels and donkeys. The militias were unofficial bands of Muslim fighters who did not wear government army uniforms but were armed and paid by Khartoum. They were to do the government’s dirty work while the rulers could pretend to look the other way. At gunpoint they stole cattle and children. The peace between the north and south was breaking down again, and soon another civil war broke out, with the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army – the military wing) and SPLM (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – the political wing) on one side and the government army and the militias they supported on the other. The militias would come in first to terrorise the people, and then the government soldiers would follow up to take over and establish control.
The SPLA was founded by a Dinka leader, John Garang, following an internal struggle in the Anyanya. The Anyanya had splintered already, since 1972, between those who accepted the peace and those (the Anyanya II) who had wanted to maintain the fight between 1972 and 1983. The movement Garang founded in 1983 was more of a student movement, made up of younger people, who took over the Anyanya’s bases in Ethiopia.
This time my father and my two elder brothers, Monyleck and Mijok, joined the SPLA and went to war. My father went first in 1983 but fought close to home, so he would often return for a couple of days after stints of three or four months. He didn’t talk about what had happened, telling us we were too young to be asking questions. I have to confess that we weren’t too scared for him when he was gone. Things were more relaxed and we had more freedom without him. But of course we celebrated when he came home too.
Mijok joined the SPLA in early 1983, Monyleck in 1984. Both were sent to Ethiopia for training. The Ethiopian government, which was antagonistic to Khartoum, had long given sanctuary to the Anyanya, and then, when John Garang formed the SPLA, his new army was able to take over these bases over the border. Ethiopia was a communist state backed by Russia and Cuba, but supported rebel movements throughout Africa more to spread its power than to advance its ideology. The driving force of the SPLA was always to defend southern Sudan against the incursions of the government, not to set up a communist state.
My brothers would be gone for two years, and we would never hear either of them speak a word about what they had been through or how they had been trained. It was as if those two years didn’t exist for them.
While they were away, life at home continued more or less as usual, except that we all had to work harder to fill the gap left by my brothers. My sister Ajok would look after more of the cattle, as would Thonager and I. The baby of our family, Athien, was still too young to know what was going on. She spent most of her time helping our blind grandmother, my father’s mother, around the village. Athien became her eyes, describing everything she saw and leading my grandmother everywhere she wanted to go. Everyone loved Athien – she was beautiful, kind and, perhaps because of her constant attachment to my grandmother, she seemed like an old soul.
Ajok, being the eldest, took on what she saw as our father’s role – disciplining us children. I don’t think I’d ever been slapped so many times in my life! Ajok and I had never been very close, and her assuming my father’s role during that time didn’t do anything to improve our relationship.
Over the next few months it was obvious that the fighting was getting closer and closer to our village. We were now hearing gunshots in the distance on a daily basis. Mainly we’d hear them in the morning, when they would pierce the quiet air. With my big brothers and our father gone, the time had come to make a decision on whether we should stay or go. My mother decided we should leave.
Our family fled to what we assumed would be a place of safety on the banks of the Nile, three days’ walking to the north-east. There the trees grew thickly by the river and offered hiding places. We packed up as much as we could carry – some water and blankets – and left our village behind. Some of my uncles stayed to protect and look after the cattle and, if need be, defend our village. It was hard for us to leave because we knew that in other villages the militias and government officials had looted everything, burning down homes and destroying crops. They killed people, took many women and children for slaves, and stole the livestock to take to farms further north or to eat immediately. We didn’t know what we would return to – or if we would return at all.
We walked for days, Athien guiding my grandmother with every step. It was strange for me at first because, as a boy in Dinka culture, as soon as you’re old enough to run you’re taught not to stay by your mother’s side. Even though I saw my mother every day, I was never as physically close to her as my sisters had been. While we walked towards the Nile, however, we all needed to stay close in order to survive. At the age of about eight, as I was then, I found that I liked being close to my mother. She was fairly thin, and very quiet, content to keep her own counsel. While we were walking, I felt like nothing significant could have changed because she was there. The village might have been burnt down, but my mother was my home. It didn’t matter about what had happened to the huts, as long as I was with her.
Once we reached the Nile, for some of the time it felt as though we were on a family holiday. There were no cows to look after and what food we ate now came from the river. I didn’t know how to swim, having had only wet-season ponds around the village, and so I would stand on the bank with fishing lines and hooks. We would fish and eat the grasses that grew along the banks and in the river itself. As I was the oldest boy, I felt like the man of the family, making sure we all had enough to eat and that everyone was happy.
This area of the Nile was narro
w and dotted with small islands on which people had built shacks. We clustered on the banks with seven families from our sub-tribe who had all come to this place. Everything was green and the Nile smelt like fresh rain. It was different from our village, not just the landscape but the sense of living from the river. It was like a new way of life and, despite the fact that we were fleeing from war, it felt relaxed. It was a life I thought I could get used to easily.
But all too soon our new life was interrupted, as the sound of machine-gun fire returned suddenly one early morning. It grew louder and louder – the fighting was coming our way. In a panic we all ran, dropping everything where it was. We were in such a frightened rush we had forgotten that my grandmother couldn’t run. I stopped and offered to put her on my back but I was too small. My mother pleaded with her to at least try to run, grabbing her hand, leading her through the bush. It was impossible. Eventually my grandmother stopped. Resigned to being left behind, she told us to go. The gunfire was approaching closer and closer, and we could now hear soldiers’ voices coming in our direction. We were sure they were government troops. Without saying as much, my grandmother was offering us a clear choice: we could either stay with her and all be killed, or leave her there and hope the soldiers wouldn’t pass her way.
We left her. We tried the best we could to hide her in the tall grass so that she wouldn’t be seen. We cut some more grass and laid it on top of her.
The sun was beating down and we had left in such a hurry that we hadn’t brought any water. If the soldiers didn’t get her, we feared the heat would. With the sound of gunfire almost upon us, we prayed for her and ran.
I can’t remember how long we ran for, but I do remember the guilt of having left a defenceless blind woman to die. We all felt it desperately. She was my father’s mother. How could we explain to him what had happened and why we had left her there?
But there was no time to think of that. We were running for our own lives, and when you are doing that you think of nothing but survival. Eventually we found a safe place to hide among some trees. We waited for the soldiers to pass, all of us anxious about what had happened to my grandmother. As day fell to night the fighting continued in the distance, but it wouldn’t be safe for us to check on my grandmother until the following day.
My mother shook with fear as she tried to keep us all quiet in the dark. My uncle, Duop Mayer, and his family were with us, and as things calmed down he wanted to light a fire and smoke his pipe. Some of the others warned him not to, but he (and my mother) loved to smoke and couldn’t be dissuaded.
We dozed, but were woken suddenly by gunfire very close to us. Frightened for our lives, we all ran in different directions. Duop’s son, my cousin Ajit, was Thonager’s age. He was left behind. I remember him crying out to me, ‘Chol! Chol!’, but I ran, as did everyone else.
Some hours after everybody scattered into the bush, when the gunfire had gone away, we eventually converged. I came across one of my aunties and her son, who were also running. Together we kept walking all night.
By daybreak I was exhausted. The fighting had stopped, or at least I couldn’t hear any gunshots. We met my mother and Athien, and we decided to go back to the Nile. It wasn’t easy to retrace our steps because we’d run through thick bush, but in the afternoon we stumbled across the place where we had left my grandmother. She was lying, quite still, in the grass. My mother screamed out to her and to our surprise she moved – she was alive! Apart from being thirsty and scared, she was all right. The soldiers had fought all around her, never noticing that she was tucked into the bush. Athien, as if nothing had happened, took our grandmother by the hand and led her out of her hiding spot.
That night there was a big argument about what had happened to Ajit in all the confusion. His father, Duop, said Ajit had been shot dead while he was carrying him. But others said they had heard Ajit calling out later. We weren’t to find out for many years what had happened to the little boy, but it is a story worth telling. He was captured by the Arabs and taken as a slave to the north. There he grew up and, as an Arabic-speaking Dinka man, he joined the Sudanese army and was posted to the south. He fell in love with a girl, and when he was considering proposing to her she asked him some questions about his family. It turned out that she and he were first cousins! That put paid to the marriage (we have the same incest taboo as Western culture) but it led to a family reunion. Ajit met his mother and father again, and the whole family celebrated to have found him. Nobody talks about the story Duop told, about Ajit being shot.
Days later we returned to our village, not knowing what we would find. As we drew closer we could see smoke rising from where our village stood. When we arrived, we could barely say a word: the government soldiers had burnt it to the ground. Some of my friends had disappeared, either dead or stolen as slaves. Defeated and shocked, we searched for what was left of our huts. Cattle were missing or dead; our maize had been taken, and almost everything else was gone. My uncles who had stayed had fled just in time to avoid being killed and were, like us, returning to see the devastation. We didn’t have much apart from our cattle, but it was the only home we’d ever known. To see it destroyed, destroyed a part of us too.
Our family began rebuilding the village straightaway. New mud-and-grass huts were erected, new crops sown. We worked harder than ever to reclaim what was ours.
Soon my father returned home. It wasn’t long before he found out what had happened with my grandmother. He wasted no time in showing my mother exactly how he felt. He beat her until she fell to the ground, not in private but in front of the entire village. Their relationship was never to be the same again.
With the village rebuilt and life returning to some semblance of normality, we finally had some good news. It was now around 1985 and Mijok was given leave to return home for two weeks. In the two years he’d been gone he’d spent most of his time in training and hadn’t yet fought in the war. The day he came home, our entire village celebrated. Everyone was happy to see him. There was a lot of singing and dancing. A goat was killed, and we ate until our stomachs hurt. Apart from anything else, I think everyone was just happy to be happy.
But his return, and everyone’s joy, was short-lived. No sooner had Mijok arrived than a message came that the rest of his group were about to start their first mission in a town to the south. Bam was a government-held town, where the Arabs had taken cattle they had stolen. Mijok had been waiting for his chance to fight, to put into practice what the SPLA had taught him. It seemed strange when he had always been so gentle and peaceful that here he was, eager to fight. He was so impatient to leave that he barely said goodbye. He wasn’t about to miss the first battle with his new battalion; he wanted to return a hero, not stay behind on holiday while his friends risked their lives.
My mother was concerned that he wouldn’t be safe. Despite his training, Mijok still seemed vulnerable. As a compromise, one of my uncles, Duor Niang, was sent to look out for him. Duor Niang was a civilian but knew how to look after himself. If anyone could look out for Mijok it would be Duor.
Days and weeks passed with no news. My mother, still uneasy, prayed for Mijok’s safe return, calling on the names of our ancestors and also on ‘Nhialic’, the name of God, a deity like the Christian God but named after the ancestors. We fused Christianity with our Dinka religion by believing that the ancestors and God were working together. Our prayers could only be answered if God and the ancestors were mentioned in conjunction. Finally rumours started to circulate that the group Mijok was fighting with were coming home. Sure enough, the following day they started marching into our village. Again everyone was excited. This time Mijok would return as the hero he had wanted to be. Some of the other soldiers were from our village, while others were from surrounding areas. I was excited at the thought that there was to be a huge celebration to welcome them all back.
As the soldiers marched in, wearing their green uniforms and carrying their AK47s, people were yelling out to those they knew. There we
re lots of hugs and tears as different families were reunited. My parents stood anxiously watching, then started asking where Mijok was. My father kept insisting that his son must be up the back of the long line straggling in. My mother wasn’t so sure; immediately she felt sick to her stomach with the suspicion that something was wrong.
By the time the last soldier had marched in, Mijok was still nowhere to be seen. Now both of my parents were worried and my father was agitatedly asking where his son was. A few soldiers tried to calm him down, explaining that Mijok had been sent to another village and would return soon. That night all was quiet and I wondered what had happened to the celebration I had been expecting. The next morning we were doing all our usual chores. I was cleaning up after the cattle, and the little ones, Thonager and Athien, were nearby playing. Suddenly I heard a scream such as I had never heard before. It was my mother. A representative from the army had decided it was time to tell the truth. Mijok was dead.
We were told that he had gone to Bam, the town the SPLA was fighting for, only to find that the combat was all but done. Mijok and Duor Niang had been walking past a rundown house when they heard what sounded like a donkey and some goats inside. My uncle was about to look inside but Mijok insisted on going in first. He had drawn his gun and taken his first step through the door when he was shot and killed. Somehow my uncle managed to escape. Three others passing the same house weren’t so lucky – they were shot soon after with bullets from Mijok’s gun.
My mother raced out of the hut and started thrashing about. She was hitting anything and anyone that stood in her way; eventually she threw herself on the ground, pounding her hands into the dirt. She screamed: ‘I want to die, I want to die!’ The women of the village surrounded her; they were all in shock. Mijok was the first person from our circle to be killed in the war. Instead of trying to calm my mother down, the other women also started screaming. It was a noise I will never forget.
