Boy Soldier

by Cola Bilkuei

  I went to the bus station to sleep, but it was unsafe. There were a lot of street kids, a lot of drunk people, and still everyone was looking at me as if I was an alien. To them, I was either a threat or an opportunity. I wouldn’t survive the night, I could tell that straightaway.

  It was now around 6 pm. I was walking along and I looked up: towering above me was a mosque. I had run out of ideas and options – I had tried everything. For no other reason would I ever consider going into a mosque.

  This was the first time in my life I had gone into a mosque. Muslims had killed my ancestors, my grandmother, my brother, my friends and relatives, and they had destroyed my country. Muslims were our historical enemy. As Dinka children, we had always played games in which Muslims were the baddies. We had been taught to hate them from birth. Muslim aggression was the reason I was here, not at home.

  But I didn’t really think of these people as Muslims. I thought of them as Malawians – they were black, they were not like the militias from northern Sudan, and they looked identical to the Malawian Christians. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about the irony of seeking help from Muslims. I was thinking that they would ask me difficult questions about the Koran, or have me perform their rituals, and catch me as a fake. I was more worried about being found out than reflecting on the ironies of my situation.

  Inside the mosque everyone was washing their feet, hands and face ready for prayer. I joined the queue and followed their lead with the washing. At least I hadn’t been thrown out yet. We went into the mosque and lined up in rows. I went to the back row and stood by myself. The imam then led the prayers and everyone followed him. I didn’t know all the words, I was just mumbling. The only words I knew, from Sudan, were ‘Allah Akhbar’ (God is great) and ‘Mohammed rasul Allah’ (Mohammed was sent by God). When these words were used, I lifted my voice and made myself heard. Throughout the rest of the prayers, I mumbled quietly, trying not to attract any unwanted attention.

  Halfway through, I realised that I had in my pocket a New Testament Bible I’d been given by the Catholic priest in Mzuzu. I thought that if they found the Bible on me I would be burnt alive in the mosque.

  The prayers ended and everyone went outside. Some of them gathered around me, and the questions started: who was I, where was I from? I gave them a Muslim version of my name – Ahmed Chol. They were all happy that I was speaking in broken Arabic, and thought my Arabic was good. They believed I was Muslim. I felt proud on the one hand that my masquerade was working, yet I also felt bad because I was betraying my own religion for the sake of getting help.

  They asked me why I had left Sudan. I told them the Christians were killing Muslims like me. I told them that my family had fled and were now all living in Saudi Arabia. They offered to buy me a plane ticket to see my family there. I told them I didn’t have a passport. I told them that an uncle was flying in from Saudi Arabia to meet me in Zimbabwe, and that he would help me with my passport.

  These good, generous people offered to give me the money that I needed to travel to Harare the next morning. They asked how much money I wanted. I didn’t want to say anything, in case they realised that my story was a lie. I told them instead that I just wanted a ticket. They promised it to me and then the prayers resumed. I grew tired – I was exhausted from this constant praying with my five-word vocabulary. I told them I wasn’t feeling well and wanted to go to sleep. They gave me a place to sleep in the mosque compound.

  The next morning, two Arab men with very long beards and wearing djellabas drove up to the mosque in a dark green sports car – an Audi. The roof was up. They spoke with the sheikh and handed him some money. As I watched, something amazing happened: the roof of the car started to come down all by itself! Then it closed up again! I had no idea what was happening, and was afraid to ask. It wasn’t until years later, when I was in South Africa, that someone solved the mystery for me. There were cars with roofs that went up and came down. Amazing!

  Anyway, the money they gave the sheikh was my bus fare, and the next thing I knew I was in a bus travelling south-west to the border between Malawi and Mozambique.

  The bus arrived at nightfall, so I had to sleep in the border town. A stop was good, because it gave me a chance to have a look around the border and plan how to get across it.

  At nine the next morning, I arrived at the checkpoint. There were a lot of trucks carrying goods between South Africa and Malawi, but what I noticed most in my anxious state was the number of border patrol police. They were everywhere.

  I was very nervous; I was sure I would be arrested at the border. Across the road from the checkpoint was a small restaurant. I was so hungry, I felt as though my stomach was trying to tell me that this would be my last day. I felt I was about to die unless I had food.

  After warily crossing the road, I entered the restaurant. As soon as I stepped inside I noticed a Malawian immigration officer sitting eating his breakfast, steam rising off a fresh cup of tea. I nearly had a heart attack! I didn’t know what to do. Should I run or should I stay calm? Sit and feed the hunger in my stomach, or scramble to some dark safe corner? If I had wings I would have flown away – if only I had wings. I was mumbling prayers to God in so many languages that even He must have been confused! My prayers became so frantic they combined into a tribal chant. I started to call on my African ancestors for help. Why did they not respond? Instead of the immigration officer vanishing into thin air, he finished his tea, looked straight at me and walked over. This was the end! He would ask for my passport, he would ask for my papers, he would ask many things. Please God, I prayed silently, open the ground and swallow me up now!

  He was wearing a grey uniform and had a moustache and a large belly. He began to speak, asking questions but not those I had expected. He asked how I was, and where I was from. I was too wary to speak. I cautiously told him in English that I was from Sudan. He gave me his hand and said: ‘Welcome to Malawi.’

  I was confused and wary, but in spite of my suspicions I couldn’t help being happy. He was helping me! Before I could say any more, I gave him my biggest smile.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You are a brother from another mother!’

  He laughed. He told me he knew the suffering of my people and spoke of how he had followed Sudanese history. At that moment I was relieved beyond belief. Even if I was arrested now, someone was going to stand on my side.

  But after this warm conversation, he said he had to leave to go back to his office. I watched him go, and made a terrible mistake. Not only had I forgotten to eat, I had forgotten to ask his name and take his details. I cursed myself. How I was going to contact him if I got into trouble? My good friend had just vanished. He didn’t care that I was illegal – he just cared. And I had let him disappear into the crowd.

  I decided to act as rapidly as possible – to get across the border into Mozambique. This seemed as though it was going to be the hardest part of my journey, harder than anything that I had done before. Maybe I was worn down by everything that had happened, but there was always a battle inside me between fear and hope, and at this point my fear was winning.

  When it came to the border crossing, I was almost breaking down. I couldn’t think straight, I was so afraid. I had to settle my mind and concentrate on doing one tiny thing after another. If all these things added up, I told myself, I would arrive at my destination. I needed a plan that was carefully thought out and broken into simple steps. I don’t know if I was going insane or if what I was about to do was an act of genius, but either way my thought processes had slipped into fantasy.

  I had noticed that the border was lined with trucks, one after the other in a never-ending line. To me, they meant a screen, protection from official eyes. I decided I was now going to be an actor in an action movie. I set my scene: I was a street kid on the run from the law. To escape I would crawl in slow motion, hiding behind the row of trucks to get to the other side of the border. My character had to have many layers to be believable. I pretended to
sniff glue as I went along, so that if I was caught they would think I was crazy. If they did catch me I would act like a crazy man, ranting and raving.

  On my hands and knees I crawled, sniffing my empty drink bottle, giving the performance of a lifetime. I made my way beneath the parked trucks; I edged slowly towards the border. I was much more scared of the immigration officials than I was of trucks running over me. No one seemed to see me – was my performance going to waste? As I finally crossed, making it safely to the other side after crawling on a road behind a line of trucks on my knees, I decided I would give myself the award for best international border actor in a drama or documentary.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mozambique

  I WAS IN MOZAMBIQUE for little more than twenty-four hours, but it was an eventful day in my life, to say the least.

  There was no border fence between Malawi and Mozambique, but after my successful impersonation of a crazy glue-sniffer I still had to walk ten kilometres from the border to the first Mozambican town. It was the morning of a very hot day, and I was carrying my possessions in the usual way: I wore my three T-shirts one over the top of the other. Over them I had a nylon rain jacket, despite the heat. I wore tattered jeans and worn-out black school shoes from Kenya. In my pockets I carried my toothbrush, my pocket New Testament Bible, and a handful of Malawian kwachas. I still had no identification papers of any kind.

  To my tired eyes, Mozambique looked like a poor but picturesque country. I walked between mountains, along the line of the trees bordering a stream. In the distance I could see farms cultivating fields of maize and people working outside their scattered thatch huts.

  As cars were passing frequently, I decided to stick to the trees, about two hundred metres off the road. There were buses rumbling by, but I didn’t want to hail one because I feared I would be caught and sent back. I knew there were Mozambican police somewhere about, and didn’t want to fall into an ambush. I wanted to at least give myself the chance of running and hiding. As I walked, I didn’t talk to anybody. If I saw a farmer, I would keep him at a distance and return his wave. I could not picture myself talking to them anyway, as I didn’t know anything of the Mozambican language.

  The last time I’d eaten was at the Malawian border – a cup of coffee and a couple of pieces of bread. I was thirsty now, as the sun rose in the sky, but didn’t want to ask anyone for water. On the roadside they were selling mangoes and other fruit but I hadn’t changed my kwachas so I couldn’t buy anything.

  I arrived at the town and sat under a big mango tree to survey the situation. On the road entering the town there was an immigration control station, so I got up and walked about six hundred metres to the right of the checkpoint, through a thickly populated village area. It was the rainy season and the ground was muddy and gluey underfoot. Then I hooked around the back of the border gate, walking cautiously, avoiding people, until I arrived at a bus stop.

  It was early afternoon and I was very hungry. They were selling all sorts of goods, and I wanted to buy something to eat and drink, but I didn’t want to talk for fear of being reported. Timidly I asked the stallholders for prices. Everything was one million. A cigarette was one million. I said, ‘Huh?’ It sounded like a lot of money. So many people were walking around with stacks of money. I became afraid, thinking this couldn’t be real money. But I had to go to a currency changer. They were all milling about, offering the best price and fighting with each other. I changed three hundred kwacha (about fifty US dollars) for Mozambican money, and received a couple of million dollars. I was a multimillionaire! I could have made myself even richer, but didn’t want to change more because I didn’t trust the moneychanger I had chosen.

  The first thing I wanted to buy was a jerry can of milk. There was a place with lots of jerry cans filled with white liquid lined up on the ground. I bought one and got onto a bus travelling on the one road inland into Mozambique. It was a decommissioned American school bus, such as they have everywhere in Africa, but it was no longer yellow; it was very colourful, like most African buses, with scenes painted on the outside that were meant to illustrate the countryside and the destination. The bus was full, and I squeezed into my seat and, feeling that I was mixing in with the crowd, I relaxed.

  As I began to breathe easily again, I sat back and took a good taste of my milk – to find that it was African beer! It looked like milk, but it was the beer they make when they grind maize, let it cool, put in sorghum, ferment it, and leave it for a week. I was familiar with the stuff but it wasn’t what I wanted now.

  There was an old man sitting next to me. I didn’t want to talk to him, but he insisted on chatting away. He called himself a doctor; he was a witch doctor. I was confused; he seemed friendly, but I was still too scared to interact with strangers.

  The minute I tasted the beer, I offered it to him. I thought I’d get drunk, which I definitely didn’t need.

  He took it and drank gratefully. In English, he said: ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘South Africa,’ I said. I was actually planning to go across Mozambique quickly and get to Zimbabwe, but I didn’t quite know how and didn’t want to ask him or to reveal my plans. I don’t know why I said South Africa. It just seemed the thing to say. To change the subject, I asked him where he was going.

  ‘Botswana,’ he said.

  I asked how securely patrolled the border was between Mozambique and South Africa.

  ‘It is very secure,’ he said. I had heard this too. The South African borders were the toughest in Africa. I would be sure to get arrested there. But the old man said the border between Mozambique and Zimbabwe was much easier.

  I think he worked out my story without my telling him. He knew I was adrift and needed help. Before the bus trip was over, we agreed to travel together. I needed someone to communicate for me. What did he need from me? I didn’t know yet.

  Our bus was heading to the town of Tete, in northern Mozambique. We didn’t reach Tete that night. We arrived in a town called Mozauze, about an hour short of Tete, at four o’clock in the afternoon. The old witch doctor said: ‘We should stop and rest here.’

  I disagreed. ‘Why do we need to stop here?’

  He wanted to do some business in this town. He was saying he could cure illnesses, he could help women giving birth, he could bring back love if you’d quarrelled with your wife, and he could help you improve your luck in business. I didn’t have too many options, because I needed a guide, so eventually I agreed to stop there.

  We went to an old hotel and walked up to the reception desk. My companion booked two rooms for us, but wanted me to pay for everything. I’d agreed to pay for the bus all the way to Zimbabwe, but I wanted to go quickly, not stop here and waste time. But I also wanted to sleep, so we stayed.

  We went to our rooms. The paint was peeling off the walls, and people had scratched their names on the walls and the furniture. There was no sewage system—you had to go downstairs for the toilet, and flush it by pouring in a bucket of water. The showers were two floors down, on the first floor, but the taps were outside. So you had to fill a bucket, carry it inside and pour it over yourself, and that was the shower!

  I was tired and wanted to rest, but soon the doctor came to my room. He wanted to sit and drink alcohol. Then he said: ‘What can we eat?’

  ‘Go talk to the cooks,’ I said.

  He went downstairs, then came back. ‘We can eat chicken here, it’s really good.’

  I lay down on my bed and waited. Having to stop in this town with this man, and paying my money for two rooms in a hotel, was putting me in a bad mood. When the food came, I didn’t want to eat it like that – it was just barbecued chicken and maize pap together, dry, on the plate. I wanted food the way I was used to, in a soup. I didn’t want to just pick up a piece of chicken and eat it. It had cost a couple of million, a lot of money.

  ‘Where is the soup?’ I said.

  The doctor told me to ‘bite the chicken and eat it mixed with the pap’. We started t
o argue – about the chicken, about the whole thing. He said he didn’t care for me or my complaints, and left me alone.

  Early the next morning, around six o’clock, we went to the bus station. I bought our tickets to Tete. On the way there we came to one of the longest bridges I have ever seen, a suspension bridge called the Zambezi Bridge.

  It was another hot morning and, as we approached the bridge, people were saying the police were stopping vehicles. This was the last thing I needed, but sure enough, we stopped and two policemen got on. They hassled the driver and inspected all the passengers closely. As a policeman came to me, I stared down at the floor. I was sweating heavily and my pulse thumped in my head. I would be arrested now, and taken who knows where. The policeman hovered over me, then called out to his companion and jumped off the bus, waving the driver on. I could breathe again.

  We arrived in Tete, and as I looked around I could not help noticing how different the people were. Through intermarriage with the Portuguese, the Mozambicans had light skin and long hair. I kept staring; I had never seen people like this before. They were dressed in a more daring, Western style than I had seen before – the girls in miniskirts and the boys with baseball caps turned backwards. They stood in a relaxed, showy manner, with their shoulders slouched, making gestures that didn’t look African to me.

  I told the old doctor I wanted to get the next bus to Zimbabwe – no more mucking around. From Tete you could go either south to Maputo and then cross to South Africa, or go south-west towards Harare. I wanted to go to Harare because it was the shorter way and an easier border.

  But the doctor said he wanted to stay in Tete for a while and ‘do more business’. He’d seen I had money and wanted to waste my time and have me pay for him. He wanted to book another hotel, and he thought that after his success in the previous town I was in his power. We had an argument in the bus station that lasted through the morning. I was so frustrated. It was only a four-hour drive to the border of Zimbabwe. I couldn’t bear to wait any longer! If I stayed in Tete, I would be inviting more trouble. At any moment the police might come and spot me and put me in prison.