by Cola Bilkuei
The commander gave the order for the soldiers to raise their guns, and shouted: ‘Ready . . .’
Just as we thought they would fire, the two boys were cut free and ordered to move to the side. One of them couldn’t walk, his legs having gone limp with fear. The boys were barely out of the way when the sound of AK-47s filled the air.
The two men lay lifeless on the ground. The parade, still silent, watched as the commander walked behind them and kicked them. He knew they were dead but as if to prove a point he drew a pistol, aimed at their faces and shot them again at close range.
By now I was shaking. I barely heard the commander speak as he ordered us all to file past the bodies and take note of what would happen to us if we chose to break the law. Within minutes everyone did as they were told. We were all made to look. As I went past I was horrified to see how the two men’s bodies had been shredded and their faces torn apart. To this day, of all the guns I’ve heard, I can still hear those AK-47s and I can still see those two men as they fell to the ground.
It was through fear that they trained us to be able to keep secrets in case we were captured by government soldiers. For these exercises, we were split into two groups, one fighting the other. When we had captured our mock enemy we would interrogate them. If we were successful in getting information out of them, they would be in trouble – big time. Not only was the individual in trouble but the punishment would be extended to the rest of his group as well.
So, if in a real situation someone divulged information to the enemy, they knew what the consequences would be: the rest of the group would be killed by our own military police. It was better to be beaten to the point of exhaustion or even to sacrifice your own life than to risk the lives of all those around you. This was drummed into us: better lose my own life than be responsible for the loss of a hundred others.
There was one way of getting treated well in the camp: being good at sport. The UN would often come in and hold sporting events. These provided great photo opportunities so that the UN could look good to the rest of the world and people could say, ‘What a great job they’re doing – look how the children enjoy their sport!’ Little was done to get to the truth behind the happy images, and the UN’s photographers lapped it all up. If there was a soccer match, a volleyball game or a race of some kind, the winner would be celebrated by the leaders of the camp. The winners would get special privileges – for a short time they might even be treated as human beings.
This inspired me to play soccer, but unfortunately I was never picked on a team because I was too small. (I was always too small!) I watched as everyone around me got to have a go. I practised kicking a ball every night and during my spare time on the weekends, but no amount of practice was going to help me grow, and I would never make the team.
A grand final soccer match in the camp was something to see. I remember one particular game in the early evening when up to 10,000 people gathered to watch. Soccer was a distraction from the harsher realities. It provided us with something to smile about, something to cheer for. As the game got underway clouds of sand rose into the air, the crowd screamed and the tension in the camp was lifted. As each goal was scored the supporters started to sing and jeer the opposing team. One group sang out, ‘Where are Group 12?’ and another group sang back, ‘Group 12 is in the pocket!’ Translation – Group 12 has already lost!
There was always work to be done in the camp but for the duration of the match it was like a holiday – everyone was happy. That game was one of the few truly good memories I have of what should have been my childhood. Everyone cheered the final goal with what seemed like one last burst of happiness. The winners marched back to camp, singing and yelling all the way, imagining the glory of their prize, which might be extra clothes or a week of meat or light working duties, while the losers marched back as soldiers sinking back into the depression of camp life.
After the game was over we sat and ate what little food we had for that night. The food was never cooked properly and always had too much oil, water or salt. Many got diarrhoea and some of the children died as a result.
That night of the soccer final I remember eating the bean soup I had been given but thinking how bad it was. You couldn’t refuse food or you would simply go hungry. That night the food was undercooked and smelt as though it had gone off. I gagged as I ate. Trying not to bring attention to myself, I forced the food down – a decision I would live to regret.
As the night dragged on I began to feel sick. At first it was my stomach. I felt as though I wanted to vomit, and eventually I did – throwing up so many times that I lost count. It was around midnight when the sickness suddenly became worse. I was now suffering from diarrhoea, I was sweating and I felt weak. In Sudan diarrhoea can be a matter of life and death. I knew boys who had died waiting for treatment. I became stressed just thinking about it. I also knew that the officers in the camp got angry at the children who were sick, as if it was somehow something we asked for or could control.
I struggled to my feet and tried to run the eight hundred metres from my shelter into the bush. I didn’t make it. Instead I made a mess of myself, dirtying the clothes I was wearing. I was drenched in diarrhoea. The smell was strong and awful. I was afraid it would attract animals from the bush. I imagined being attacked by a lion and being too weak to run or defend myself. This was not just a fantasy – many of the children went missing in the bush, never to be seen again. Lions were often seen around before or after the disappearances. Sometimes the children would be found half-eaten. As I thought about these things I began to realise that I was in danger. If I went back to the camp dirty I would be punished for sure. The longer I stayed in the bush, especially in the middle of the night, smelling as I did, the more likely I was to be the next child found half-eaten.
The diarrhoea continued, and I couldn’t move. I collapsed, exhausted, in the bush. Suddenly I heard a noise. I couldn’t tell if it was a pack of animals or people from the camp – it was hard to hear over my pounding heart. Weak and confused, I tried to pull my pants up. Diarrhoea still flowing, I stumbled as I tried to run. Behind me, the sound of dry grass crunching beneath heavy feet was growing louder by the second. I now heard voices and knew it was the officers from the camp. I heard the voices of some children too, shouting out directions for where they thought I was. I ran as fast as I could but I felt as though my legs were barely moving. The sound of their voices grew louder and meaner. Without warning I felt blow after blow around my head and body as the officers ordered the children to beat me.
I tried to yell and tell them how sick I was, but no one was listening. Instead of the other children going easy on me, it was as if they were taking out all of their frustrations on me instead. Tears began to flow down my face. I cried as I’d never cried before. How could those I had suffered alongside be so viciously attacking me? What had I done to deserve their hatred? I remember crying so hard and for so long that my tears eventually dried up, despite the agony continuing. The sound of their screaming voices seemed to drown into a high-pitched ringing as I felt each kick and thud pound me further into the ground.
Later I crawled back to clean myself up with some cold water and sleep with my platoon. The next day, tired and exhausted, I was paraded in front of the whole camp. I hadn’t been allowed to change, and so by the time the sun had risen the smell coming from my body was unbearable. Flies were swarming around me. There were so many flies it was as if they had formed a new layer of skin over my body. All I could think of, though, was the reaction of the 1500 children who stood watching in silence. Among them were those who had spent the night torturing me. I wondered if any of them cared, if any of them felt anything at all now that they could see how helpless and weak I was. The humiliation was much worse than the physical pain.
Before my ordeal was over, I suffered another beating in front of the camp and was made to do push-ups until I could feel my body break. I had to listen to the entire camp sing, in military chorus: ‘I will not sh
it close to my camp again.’
All this took place in the heat of the morning sun. I was so dehydrated I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I wanted my mother.
Finally, when they were done with humiliating me, they left me lying face-down in the dirt and moved off for their day’s training.
What seemed like hours later, the nurses came and scraped me off the ground. I spent two weeks in the camp hospital – why, I wondered, would they now nurse me back to health? Were they not pleased with what a good job they had done at making me so sick?
But in its terrible way, this part of my training worked just as they intended. After I had recovered, I returned to my group, desperate to prove myself. Knowing how the officers didn’t like children who were sick or complained, I was determined to show that my strength had returned and I was now strong enough to hold a gun.
It wasn’t the first time I’d held a real AK-47 – I’d sometimes carried one at home to protect our cattle – but it was the first time I’d had a gun of my own and the first time I was expected to use it as a weapon of war. I felt proud. It was a symbol of maturity, or at least I thought it was. I felt that now I would be respected and no one would pick on me or beat me.
We were only allowed to use our guns in practice around the camp, aiming at targets to improve the accuracy of our shot. When we did other exercises such as running or planning for attacks, we would use wooden replica guns. This was to get us used to holding the guns in the right way and to having them with us wherever we went.
When we were old enough to hold a gun properly, we were considered ready to fight. Because I was still young and skinny, they kept me at the camp to fatten me up. I would have to wait for my time to come. The main reason I was not allowed to go and fight was that they didn’t think I could carry an AK-47 and ammunition. They didn’t know how old we were – we didn’t even know – so we were assessed more by our size and strength. Some boys would stand on stones to seem taller. At my size I couldn’t fool them, I was still too small. I was disappointed – I had come here to join the SPLA, to fight, yet it was beginning to seem that my future was to be a worker in the camp, to collect firewood and do the worst jobs for the others. It was going to be years before I grew big enough to be selected to go to the frontline. I wasn’t a soldier but part of the army’s backbone for a long war, and I hated that.
***
My cousins Wour and Ngor were lucky enough to be put in Group 11 together. I only got to see them on weekends, although I could call out to them in their barracks and we could have conversations. I needed permission from the officers to see them, but these attachments were discouraged, so I only saw them about once a month. They were struggling as much as I was. Bol and Mayer had gone to a place called Bilpam for training, instead of Pinyudo. I heard that they had moved back to Itang and were waiting to be sent home again to fight. My cousin Chol was somewhere in Pinyudo, but I could never find him. The army did everything they could to break these family ties. To this day I have never seen him again. Family members have told me that he is a radio operator in the Sudanese army.
In the camp we were given a basic education: taught our ABCs, how to write our names and how to do rudimentary maths. Our classes were divided the same way as our military training groups, so I was in Group 12 with thirty others.
In Group 12 I had one friend called Seji Cholgak, whom I’d known back in Panaruu. He had been in a different basila on the march, but we were in the same basila here in Ethiopia. We stayed close together. It was us two against everybody else, and we didn’t trust anybody. We were both quiet and passive, and got pushed around by stronger boys.
This wasn’t an environment where you were expanding your world – you just wanted to get through each day unharmed. I found boys from other tribes strange and frightening, and also other Dinka boys who spoke unfamiliar dialects, but I did my best to establish a name as someone not to mess with. There was a boy from the Nuer tribe called Duop, and he and I got in a fight. With Dinka, biting in a fight was seen as acceptable conduct, and as Duop wrestled me I planted a lot of bite marks on his arms. He and his Nuer friends left me alone after that – I had a reputation as a nasty biter, and that was okay by me.
On weekday mornings we would march to school singing political songs, praising our military high commanders and the success of the SPLA, while mocking or criticising the government. The schooling took place in buildings made of mud walls with wooden roofs held up by three big poles. There were no chairs, so everyone had to go to the forest to fetch a rock or a pile of mud to make a seat. The teachers used a blackboard and chalk, and we were allowed to take turns writing on the board. No electricity meant that every time it rained it grew so dark that we couldn’t see the blackboard, so we stopped working.
Classes also took place outside in the open air, where we would copy out our dictation with our fingers in the dirt. It saved on exercise books. We did have two books, one for writing and one for maths. But we were not meant to waste a single line of paper. For every mistake we made, the teachers would hit us with a stick.
I hadn’t been to school back in my village, so there were kids my age who had learned much more than I had. I was learning the equivalent of kindergarten, at the age of about twelve. It was discouraging to see others know so much more, but I was also afraid of getting beaten, so I struggled hard.
The typical school day would finish around 5 pm, but we would have to stay in class until 6 pm doing our homework. Then we would march back to camp, singing the same songs about the glory of the SPLA.
School at Pinyudo was compulsory even if you were sick. Only if you were on cooking duty, which included fetching water to drink, were you allowed to miss school. About ten children would do the chores for ninety others. We would only eat once a day, usually at night. To be honest, cooking duty was always more fun than school – at school we would be beaten for not counting or getting our alphabet right. When we did cooking duty, they left us alone.
Cooking duty also gave us a chance to enjoy the food, because we could cook it right. Food was our way of teaching other lessons that were more useful than school, such as ‘Be good to me or I won’t give you good food’.
School wasn’t entirely bad. We learned some basic science, such as the parts of the human body. There was a little bit of Christian education from going to church on Sundays. We learned agriculture by planting and tending cabbage, tomatoes and onions in the school fields, a few hectares of land beside the classroom block. Tending the garden was almost as good as being on cooking duty. We would hide a small container of oil and some salt to take out, so that we could eat in the field. The soil was good and the tomatoes grew tall. But overall it was not a good way to learn. I wanted to go to Itang and learn – there was a private school system there, but of course I had no money and no freedom to go back there.
Only one boy in Pinyudo spoke English: Emmanuel Jel, who was in Group 9, He could communicate between the Sudanese and the UN. Later in life, he was taken to England and became a famous rapper.
Arabic was taught in the schools in Pinyudo: broken Arabic, not formal. They thought it would be good to learn the language of our enemies, and it was the official language of Sudan. A lot of the military language, in training, was also Arabic, or a variation of it. Arabic also helped you become a boss – you needed it if you wanted to be a leader.
Education was new to me, and I could see boys who were proud of what they had learnt. I had no school background from Panaruu, so I had to learn the hard way. At the beginning, a boy challenged me to write my name, and I couldn’t. He teased me, so I told myself, ‘I’ve really got to learn to write.’ When I saw my name written by another boy, it looked cool – I said to myself, ‘I have to do that.’ Then, in our groups, there were competitive spelling games in which you lost points if you made mistakes. I loved to play these games and to win. There are many motives in the world to get yourself educated, and mine were not exactly ordinary. But they worked, and I was s
oon ambitious to learn more.
I spent two years in Ethiopia, which seemed to take forever. There was so much time devoted to training us to be ready to fight, yet nothing ever happened: we weren’t fighting, and we weren’t given leave. It seemed as though we were stuck in camp forever.
Finally I came to a decision: I had to go back to Sudan. I was tired of the camp. I wanted to defend my family and my village – it was what I was trained for, what I was waiting for. I didn’t even know if my family were alive anymore, but I had to find out. What was the point in staying in Pinyudo forever? I hated it, and saw some of the worst things in my life there. I was afraid that in order to survive I would need to become as bad as some of the other people, who had learnt to do worse and worse things to get by. You always made enemies, people were always taking your possessions, and you had to defend yourself. If I stayed there, I knew that the need to survive would turn me into an animal. It took a long while to come to me that I had to leave, but once I decided, the need fell on me with full force. I had to leave right away. I could think of nothing else.
Looking back, I realise I had no idea what I was wishing for, nor any idea how soon my wishes would be turned into nightmares.
When it came down to it, leaving wasn’t so hard. In the end I wondered why I hadn’t tried to go earlier. I heard about a group who was being sent to a town called Nimule in southern Sudan, on the border with Uganda, to be trained as policemen and agricultural bosses. Every time the SPLA captured a new town, they would send men there to secure the place by acting as police and running the town’s affairs. If the fighting returned to that town, these men would be converted back into soldiers. I asked if I could go with them. The military refused, so the day the group were due to leave, I took a can of water and another of maize meal and crept out of the camp. I hid in the bushes outside the perimeter. If the military couldn’t find me, they couldn’t stop me.
