The Black Nile

Chapter FOUR
We said grateful goodbyes to Tarek and took a two-hour taxi ride down a series of progressively smaller trails, to the riverside hamlet of Panjala, where I hired a boat downriver to Nimule, at the border of Sudan and Uganda. The sole passengers in a green thirty-five-footer, we were back on the Nile, happily so, slipping past floating baubles of hyacinth, with elephant grass, rocks and trees lining the shore on our left and familiar miles of papyrus jungle bending to the breeze on the right. Schon looked wistfully down at his scuffed and unopened fishing case. “They got electric catfish up here,” he said. “Three hundred fifty volts, generated by electrolytes in the chest. They shock their prey and eat it. And they communicate with electricity too. Maybe I can still get a line in.” Half an hour into the ride, the pilot warned us to put our cameras down. We were nearly there.
The Nimule landing was a crumbling concrete dock haunted by the mournful rusted skeleton of a long-ago destroyed customs house. We entered a small guard shack, where a young man, a teenager really, sat behind a wooden table; an AK-47 with a weathered wooden stock leaned casually against the wall behind his chair. His desk was decorated with a handkerchief-sized flag of the Government of South Sudan and on the back wall were framed photographs of the late John Garang and of Salva Kiir.
“Hi,” I said, puzzled. “This is Sudan?”
“Yes,” the teenager said from behind his sunglasses. “This is New Sudan.”
“Sudan.”
“Yes, Sudan.”
I breathed with the same vertigo I’d felt on the floating pad outside Ksike. “But the map shows Nimule in Uganda, not Sudan.”
“I don’t know about any map,” he said, his voice rising. “This is Sudan.” Schon looked at me in alarm. “Do you have papers?” the gunsel demanded. “What is your business?” Apparently my maps were wrong. Uganda might be home to a border crossing called Nimule, but the town itself and the river port were squarely in Sudan. The young guard may have been new to his job, but he carried the easy contempt of border agents everywhere. We unzipped our bags and handed over our passports and our blue SPLM travel passes, as I recovered my composure and summoned the smiling bonhomie that had carried me past suspicious border agents in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Schon, conditioned by his years as a champion alcoholic and the collisions with authority native to such a vocation, maintained a humble and diffident silence. The young gatekeeper hunched over our passports, paging mine from front to back, stamped our blue travel cards and leaned back on his chair. “So. This is New Sudan checkpoint. What can you give me?” I looked at Schon, who had involuntarily raised an eyebrow. What did we have for him? “You must have something for me inside those bags.”
My stomach churned and then the churning stopped. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “As you can see from my documents, I’m an American journalist. I would hate, just hate, to have to write about how the new Sudan looks a lot like the old one. Was this Dr. Garang’s vision? Bribes for boy soldiers? A lot of Americans have given a lot of money—millions, tens of millions—to help the people of south Sudan. I’m sure they would like to know how that money’s being spent.”
He smiled a hating smile and twisted a pen in his long fingers, and an adult voice came through the barred window and said, “Let them pass.” It was the boy’s superior, a tall and skinny man, gap-toothed and wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a worn T-shirt, green army pants and flip-flops. “Where are you staying in Nimule?” he asked. I told him the name of an American aid group; a friend of a friend had arranged for us to spend the night at their compound. “When is your car coming?” he said.
There was no car. I didn’t know a soul at the place—the plans had been made by my contacts in Kampala. We would walk, I said. How far could it be? We hired two boys with bicycles to help us port the gear, the bigger bags balanced across their seats, and started up the grass-lined road from the checkpoint. The landscape was the same as in northern Uganda but it was clear we were in a different country: A little boy chasing a metal hoop took one look at the two whites and shouted in Arabic, “Khawaja!” Two hours later we limped through the gates of the aid group’s compound; it was located miles outside town. It hadn’t occurred to me to check.


In the morning we caught a ride into Nimule, a longtime SPLA stronghold. The town had forty-five thousand people, almost half of them refugees, most of them living in broad neighborhoods of grass-roofed mud huts. Downtown was a collection of one-story cement and brick shops and warehouses clustered on the Juba road. Nimule had been cut off from the rest of the south for much of the war; in some respects it had become an annex of Uganda. Ugandan shillings were as prevalent as Sudanese dinars and the local mobile phone network, Gemtel, was Ugandan as well. The easy Nile we had crossed to reach Sudan turned livid north of Nimule in a rolling set of unpassable rapids; for half a century technocrats had dreamed of raising a dam there to electrify the south. For now, they were still struggling with basic roads and sanitation.
Schon and I had missed the daily bus to Juba, a hundred miles to the north, so I hired a truck driver to take us. He was hauling cement, part of a growing trade with Uganda. The border, closed for most of the civil war, had been thrown open, and Juba was rich in dollars, thanks to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the United Nations peace mission. The same cash gravity that drew fresh tilapia from Lake Kyoga was now carrying us up the Nimule road. But it wasn’t carrying us very quickly. The route out of Nimule included a fair number of hills, and we ground up it like we were carrying, well, cement. Our wheelman rarely made it into third gear as we ascended hills covered in speckled green scrub and passed stretches of roadway lined with signs warning of land mines and clusters of burnt-out armored vehicles.
We’d considered paying 30,000 Ugandan shillings each to make the journey in the back of a flatbed truck before I flagged down our current chauffeur. The flatbed came barreling up behind us now, spewing a long tail of dust, and passed us on the left, leaving nothing to spare on the one-lane road (a reasonable course considering the land mines). It clipped off our passenger-side mirror and would have taken my elbow too if I hadn’t pulled it back. Our driver, hunched over the steering wheel, sucked his teeth in annoyance and said nothing. Still, I didn’t envy the poor souls in the back of the flatbed standing in the open with goats and chickens for company, and I made the mistake of saying so. Right then our truck started misbehaving, the steering suddenly loose, clunky and loud. The driver eased us down the hill and pulled over in front of a short row of shops, shimmied underneath and came out with the top half of a sheared bolt from the steering linkage. Schon and I settled under a band of shade outside an empty roadhouse while the driver caught a southbound minivan. Our truck wasn’t the only patient in this roadside ward. Another lorry, an old British model, sat with its hood up, two members of the crew asleep underneath, while a Ugandan man in torn blue coveralls and flip-flops fixed a crack in the radiator. He said his name was Chibsi Cola, and he was welding the radiator using a car battery, jumper cables and what appeared to be the lead slug core of a nine-volt transistor battery. “I used to be a soldier in the presidential guard during the time of Obote,” he said. “It was high life. We trained in Zimbabwe. We trained in Korea, the North Korea.”
“What was that like?” I asked.
“Oh, it was very different,” he said, squinting against the tiny bursts of yellow sparks. “Their tactics involved using lots of ropes and rappeling; we hadn’t trained in ropes before.” What about Korea? “I didn’t see Korea. I saw an army base where they were training us. I think in that country they eat lots of cabbage.” He’d fled in 1986 after Obote was overthrown, and lived in a refugee camp in Zambia for nearly a decade before returning to Uganda. Now he drove a truck. “It could be worse,” he said. “I was sure they would kill me when I came back. They had invited us, yes, with amnesty. But you never can know.”
Five hours after he left us, our driver reappeared and installed the new steering bolt. We piled into the cab of the truck—Schon, the driver, his assistant and me—only to find we had additional company. Reclined in the back of the cab was a plump Ugandan schoolmistress, Viola Saonko. The driver had picked her up in Nimule, another paying passenger. Viola was one of hundreds of Ugandans taking advantage of the wide-open southern economy. She sold truckloads of Ugandan vegetables in Juba and also owned a tanker truck that peddled water.
“So how’s business?” I asked.
“Business is very good,” she purred. “These Sudanese, they don’t know business. They have got nothing. We bring everything they need.”
The challenge of surviving Juba, with an economy geared toward aid workers and diplomats living off generous per diems, would be more punishing than the heat. Most foreigners lived in deluxe tented camps where the accommodations started at a hundred dollars a night and rocketed up from there. There was little public transport, and a car and driver cost a hundred dollars a day. But I had an advantage that I hoped would save a fortune. My friend Greg, a Cairo-based expatriate, had recently been appointed chief of mission for a small NGO in Juba. Greg was stranded in Egypt, a victim of the same diplomatic pissing match that had spoiled my Sudan visa, but he had left instructions that Schon and I could stay at his organization’s new guesthouse.
We crawled north, through landscape that National Geographic and Wild Kingdom had taught us to recognize as classic Africa savanna, all of us sitting tight in the musky cab. Soldiers from the SPLA stopped us at several checkpoints, and we could see units of the Ugandan People’s Defense Force as well, deployed into Sudan to track the dreadlocked child soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Juba was hosting peace talks between the Ugandan government and the LRA, and fear and paranoia were high on both sides: The LRA, gathered for the first time at two camps in south Sudan, feared they would be massacred by Ugandan forces. The Ugandans and the southern Sudanese feared the LRA would rampage if they didn’t get their way at the negotiating table. It made for a lot of armament.
The truck pushed on over the long-suffering road, rarely reaching thirty miles an hour, as the orange sun disappeared behind the scraggly hilltops. Well into nighttime, my satellite phone started buzzing with text messages: Greg’s logistics man, Samuel, was getting worried. He came in his Land Cruiser to retrieve us, and we met on the road fifteen miles outside town. Samuel, tall, thin and strong in a white short-sleeved shirt, grabbed my arm like we were family and ushered me into the front seat.
The cruiser was a workingman’s cousin to the plush model Tarek drove; manual windows, no chrome, two rows of bench seats running along the sides in the back. We brought Viola with us and picked up half a dozen hitchhikers on the way, and nine hours after leaving Nimule, we finally reached home. A slice of heaven just off Juba Day Road, the compound had solar- and generator-powered lights, wireless satellite Internet during the day, unlimited tea, Nescafé and bottled water, and a bathroom that was cleaned each and every afternoon. We bunked for two happy nights in the quarters of a staffer who was away in the field before moving across the road to a less cozy nest. The workmen renovating Greg’s guesthouse were far behind schedule, so we pitched our now moldy tent on the concrete floor of the house amid piles of construction debris.
“Still,” I said as I unrolled my sleeping bag and jealously eyed Schon’s foam pad, “it beats paying.”
“If you say so. It’s your dime. Your back, too.”


Juba was a spread-out, starved and broken-down colonial construct straining under the weight of thousands of returning refugees and newly arrived aid workers, a bullet-pocked village of 160,000 people with seven miles of paved road, down from the sixteen miles the British had laid. The entire south, a region the size of Nigeria, had just sixteen miles of blacktop and since independence had known even fewer years of peace: a small interval between the first civil war (1955-1972) and the even more destructive second civil war (1983-2005). There simply hadn’t been enough time for development to take hold. A government-controlled garrison during the civil war, Juba had been constantly under siege by the SPLA. Now it was crawling with fighters from the victorious rebel army. But the liberators and the liberated appeared to have an uneasy relationship. Not far from our guesthouse, the burnt shell of a new Toyota Hilux pickup sat overturned. The driver, an officer fresh out of the bush, had struck and killed a child from one of the refugee camps that lined the road. Residents had poured out of the nearby huts and beaten the driver nearly to death.
I converted some of my cash to dinars at a dry goods store, and we walked the two miles downtown for a breakfast of fried liver, toast and fresh mango juice. I left to look for a newspaper, and Schon had a sour look on his face when I got back. “Here’s something I do not understand,” he said as I sat down. “They put in flush toilets that are designed for the user to sit on, and there is never a goddamn toilet seat on them. And I want to know why. Do people steal them?”
“Most people don’t have toilets,” I said. “Why steal a toilet seat?”
“People will steal pretty much anything, whether they can use it or not,” he said, stubbing out and then relighting his cigarette. “Do they put the crapper in, and they don’t know to put a seat on it? Did they not order toilet seats with the toilets? Can you not get them here? Why doesn’t anybody raise hell about it? And, if they deliberately leave the seats off, why would they do that?”
“Travel constipation?” I asked. “This ought to help your bowels move.” I showed him the front page of the Juba Post: More than forty travelers had been murdered in attacks on the Nimule road the night we arrived in Juba. Some were burned alive, others had their eyes gouged out before they were shot dead. No wonder Samuel had been anxious to get us into town. The road was now closed, and the peace talks were in jeopardy—Uganda blamed the LRA, and the LRA, hysterically, blamed Museveni’s army. Salva Kiir, the southern Sudanese president, had spent his first year in power working to unify the south’s more than ninety different tribes and factions. He had brought a powerful rival of the SPLA into the fold and had forcibly disarmed feared bands of cattle raiders who terrorized the grazing grounds of the sprawling Upper Nile region northeast of Juba. In the summer of 2006, he turned his government’s attention to the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA, under pressure from Ugandan forces, had spilled back over the border into Sudan’s Equatoria region, transplanting its reign of terror to the newly autonomous south. For the sake of his own people, Kiir decided to host marathon peace talks between the madmen of the LRA and the Ugandan government. Now the talks had hit a rough patch, and it appeared that the road massacres were a demonstration by the LRA of its enduring capacity for mayhem.
Amid this chaos, I remained that rarest of creatures in Sudan, a walking khawaja. Tromping through the Equatorian heat, my city-boy lope evolved into an energy-efficient torrent of short choppy steps. Schon and I would wake at seven, run across the street to shower before Greg’s staff arrived, walk downtown for breakfast and the papers, and then walk back across town, past the hospital, the Konyo Konyo market, the cluster of dead armored vehicles—remnants of the SPLA’s failed 1992 assaults—and the old Ottoman mosque, across the red dust field behind the Islamic school, to the Juba port. The site was called a port because boats and barges tied up there, but there was no infrastructure to speak of, just a cluster of flat steel barges and the boats that pushed them.
There, under the shade of towering mango trees and doum palms, Jecob Daniel Djadobe, the Sudan River Transport Corporation’s local agent, sat sipping tea at a card table with a group of customs clerks and policemen. “In one week, the barge will go,” Djadobe said amiably. He said this every day for five days, as Schon’s patience and stamina were pummeled by the sun, the red dust, the constant walking and the heavy rainstorms, which made his joints ache like those of an old person. Schon’s fishing case remained unopened. I had imagined back in Kampala that we might fish from the side of our boat, or off the banks of Lake Kyoga or above Karuma Falls, but that was before we understood the labor and discomfort of traveling rough. Schon might have put a line in the water from the Nile’s banks in Juba, but that would have killed hours of my own time—he was too inexperienced to just leave alone by the water.
When we weren’t haunting the port, we were interviewing Sudanese bureaucrats and aid officials for a basic understanding of the massive effort to turn the south into something like a state after nearly fifty years of war and underdevelopment. Their stories depressed, thrilled and depressed again.
“You never talk about reconstruction in south Sudan,” said one. “It’s construction. There are no war-damaged schools or hospitals—there were never any to begin with.”
“There’s an acute housing shortage,” said another. “The judges of our high court are right now living in a barracks. But the education ministry—that’s a fantastic ministry. School enrollment has doubled in the last year to more than 750,000. And we’ve immunized a million and a half children for measles—that’s the main killer.”
“This is the worst place in the world to grow up,” said a third. “Highest under-five mortality anywhere—one in four die before their fifth birthday. Highest maternal mortality. A girl child here has a nine times better chance of dying in childbirth than of finishing primary school.”
I was ill at ease with the people of Juba. The impossibly tall Dinka soldiers and the Equatorian refugees—Azandes, Acholis and Mandaris—might have been Martians. Their world—one of decades-long conflict, biblical suffering and enduring tribal tradition—was completely different from anything I had encountered before. I had more in common with residents of Kampala than either of us had with the people of south Sudan. It lacked the British Commonwealth veneer that added a pinch of familiarity to so much of Africa and South Asia. There was grief in the air, and madness too. Late one night, as Schon and I walked home from visiting the LRA peace talks at the Juba Raha hotel, a movement in the dark caught the corner of my eye and I jerked to the left to face it, my hands tingling, my stomach catching that cold-water splash that says, You, laddie. You may be dead. Standing a few feet away on the slope of a drainage ditch, a naked old man leveled an imaginary Kalashnikov and silently tracked our course along the baked mud road, arms jerking with each phantom shot and recoil, his gritted teeth reflecting moonlight.


“Jesus Christ, it is hot. Hot,” Schon said, chugging a glass of salted Tang. It was our fifth night in Juba. We were sitting by the water tank in the gravel backyard at Greg’s office compound, watching our clothes dry on the line. Schon had made pasta and an oily homemade sauce on the night watchman’s butane stove. In our struggle to save money, it was our third such supper in as many days. He drained some water off the top of the sauce, set the pan back on the burner, mopped his brow with a bandanna and sat next to me on a plastic lawn chair. “I’ve got to level with you,” he said. “I’m pretty near miserable. This may be the most interesting place we’ve been so far, but . . . These walks are a bastard. Even with all the water I’m drinking, every day I get a headache. This might not be for me anymore.”
He had been putting off this talk, and so had I. Schon wasn’t a drag on me—yet. But the day was fast coming. Everything I’d heard about Malakal led me to expect a malarial tinderbox. The war wasn’t quite finished in Upper Nile state—antagonistic militias stewed in camps while their leaders grappled for political power. Clans and tribes were fighting over issues remote to the actual civil war, but their battles added to the region’s insecurity. “I know you’re beat,” I said. “Give it another day, and if there’s no boat north we’ll get you back to Kampala and onto a plane. You said it yourself—this is the most interesting place we’ve been.”
Schon got up and returned with two plates of spaghetti and still-watery sauce. “At this point,” he said softly, “my body’s so worn out that the important stuff just kind of washes past me. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll never look at home the same way again. I’ll never look at education the same way again. That’s what’s been missing here, the whole way, from Kampala to Juba. It’s education. How are you supposed to want something if you’ve never seen it? And we totally take that for granted. I do, anyway. So, yeah, let’s give it another day, but not much more than that. ’Cause I am tired.”
Two mornings later, we arrived at the bus depot and learned the Nimule road had been closed again thanks to new attacks east of the Nile. The direct bus to Kampala, which usually made the 350-mile trip in less than twenty-four hours, wasn’t running. The only alternative was the western route, down tracks that made the Nimule road look like Interstate 80: Juba to Yei down to Kaya, right near the Congo border, then south into Uganda. A ticket would be waiting in Kampala. Schon had two and a half days to make his flight, an easy enough feat with the Nimule road open. Now it would be a race. I looked at my haggard friend, his tortured sneakers, his two packs and the fishing case (which he had taken to calling “this goddamn thing”) and wondered if he would make it.
“Excuse me, did I hear you say you are traveling to Kampala?” He was a Kenyan in his early twenties, about Schon’s height, with short receding hair and wire-rimmed spectacles with lenses barely bigger than his eyes. “I am also going to Kampala. Shall we find some new transport?” Carrington Ochieng Oudah had been a bookkeeper at a politically wired oil company that had set up shop in Juba; he was heading home to Nairobi after six months in the southern capital. He knew the route. He had a cell phone. His only luggage was a small roller bag. And he looked strong. My anxiety lifted at the sight of him. They struck up what appeared to be an instant friendship, two dudes with someplace to be and a lot of miles to get there. As they squeezed into a minivan, I handed Schon two hundred dollars and a fistful of dinars and shillings and took a last photograph of them.
“You stay in touch,” I said. “Carrington, he’ll pay you for the minutes, just make sure he calls me.”
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Schon said. “We’ll talk to you from the road. Right? In a few days I’ll be at the pyramids and a few days after that I’ll be back at the bar, serving the rich and nameless. Then,” he added, “I’m going fishing.” I stepped back from the van, the driver started the engine and they were gone.


I was now alone in a town where I had no friends. Schon had uncomplainingly played the role of cook and quartermaster, shopping for the vegetables and pasta and Tang that made up so much of our daily diet. The common gear that we’d both carried had accrued to me alone; my bags had never been heavier.
On the other end of the balance sheet, my daily budget doubled the moment he and Carrington drove off. I could now afford to spend twenty dollars a day on food and smokes, which meant a daily luncheon at the United Nations compound’s afternoon buffet, a twelve-dollar feast that included multiple entrees, salad, dessert, fruit punch, purified water and tea, all of it eaten under a big white tent where BBC News was often on television. It quickly became the high point of my day.
I resumed my visits to the port, and still couldn’t get a straight answer about the next barge north. I was walking back through the Konyo Konyo market when a familiar voice called out, “Mzungu! You are here!” It was Viola Saonko, our fellow passenger from the ride to Juba, her head poking out the window of a white Isuzu tanker truck. She was heading to the Nile to fill up. Viola made room and I climbed in. On a mud flat south of the port, a half dozen cast iron diesel pumps were lined up along the water, each with a thick plastic hose sticking into the air. Viola’s driver backed the truck up to a pump. A shirtless boy grabbed the cast iron wheel with both hands and threw his body downward, the greasy gears turned, the old pump chuckled to life and in short order Viola’s tank was filled with seven hundred liters of Nile water. She paid the pump’s owner a thousand dinars—around five dollars—hitched up her black cotton dress and climbed into the cab.
“I want to show you something,” Viola said, and pointed the driver toward a nearby refugee settlement. These were villages within the city, established decades before by people fleeing the war in the countryside. The truck wended through the round thatched-roof tukuls, toward the sound of drumming. In a clearing, an intersection of two dirt roads, fifty or more half-naked people were dancing, an unorganized dipping and bouncing, to a steady beat hammered on animal-skin drums and a metal oil can. This was no celebration—their expressions were grim, their skin covered in ash. The old women wore what appeared to be donated brassieres, most of them in shades of pink and purple. “You see!” Viola said, her eyes shining. “Look at that.” She pointed. “They are naked! They are savages.”
I was mortified. “Viola, I think this is a funeral.”
“Yes! And they go naked at the funeral, just drumming and drumming. I heard a story that the first baby they have, they take and kill it. After seeing this, who can doubt?”
The mourners had been at it for some time; tracks of sweat cut through the ash on their legs and torsos. They ignored us even as Viola ordered her driver to make another pass through the outdoor wake. “Please,” I said. “Do we have to look at this? Let’s just go.” Viola said something in Luganda, and we drove away.
“They don’t have God, no morality,” she explained. “They should be made to wear clothes.”
“You know,” I said, “it wasn’t so long ago that Europeans were saying the same things about Ugandans.”
“But I am Baganda,” she said. “We wore garments of barkcloth. We are a moral people.”
“Is that why there’s so much HIV in Uganda?”
“That we got from you.”
An hour later, Viola’s water had been pumped into the black plastic tank of a local family’s brick-walled compound and she had pocketed 10,500 dinars, a 950 percent windfall. Juba’s sixty-year-old municipal water system had been built for a population of seventeen thousand. Everyone else relied on water portered directly from the Nile. “In Kampala, you have to steal if you want to make a hundred dollars a day,” she said with a laugh. “Here I get twice that.” We promised to keep in touch and I jumped out of the truck, while Viola turned back to the Nile for a refill.
Conflict was already brewing between the locals and the entrepreneurs from Uganda and Kenya. There were stories of shake-downs and robberies. Meanwhile, the Arab traders—who had thrived during the war, along with their partners in the Sudanese army—were now on the defensive. Their supply chain from the north—they got their goods by barge—couldn’t compete with the land route from Uganda. Many northern traders had been burned out in rioting that ensued after Garang died. Now the jallaba were being called to pay ever more serious debts: The week Schon left, three Arab traders were found dead on a mountainside outside Juba, bound and shot execution style. It was no robbery—they still had money in their pockets.
But it would take more than a few murders to erase the Arab stamp on Juba. While the amplified call to prayer had been turned down to modest volume by SPLM order, Arabic was still the common tongue of the south. It was the language members of different tribes used to communicate, so ingrained that the city had its own Arabic dialect, with its own dictionaries. I was speaking with a twenty-three-year-old United Nations employee, a crucifix-wearing Dinka refugee, when she received a phone call informing her that she would soon be returning to her home a hundred miles to the north after fifteen years away. “So you’re finally going back?” I asked. She clasped her hands together and said, “Inshallah.” English was the official language of the new government, but its capital remained the southernmost Arabic-speaking city in the world.


I devoted the first hours after Schon and Carrington left to administrative work. Greg’s second in command, an officious Sudanese with a love for Big Ten college football, had grown tired of the moochers in his midst, so I set to inquiring around town about affordable lodging. By nightfall, with no word from the travelers, I was pacing and chain-smoking. By morning, lying alone on the floor of the construction site—more comfortable now that Schon had left me his foam pad—I had gnawed off my fingernails and much of the finger flesh as well. There were reasonable explanations for the lack of contact: Sudan’s mobile phone network was more than oversubscribed, and it grew weaker the farther south you went; fewer than one in five calls actually connected. Carrington’s phone might have run out of minutes. His battery could have died. I opened my Sudan map and noticed for the first time the Yei route’s proximity to Garamba National Park in the Congo. Garamba was where Joseph Kony hung his hat, along with a few hundred crack LRA troops. Later that morning, I confided my worry to a Kenyan agricultural specialist at Greg’s office, who asked, “Why didn’t he fly straight to Nairobi?”
“It’s three hundred dollars from Juba to Nairobi,” I said, “and then another six hundred to Cairo.”
“Your institution doesn’t have a budget for air travel?”
“We don’t have an institution. It’s a self-funded project.”
The Kenyan cocked his head and seemed to shrink from me. “No affiliation?”
“None.”
“This is Sudan. The roads are dangerous,” the Kenyan said coldly. He saw my face turning ashen—Schon had been my best friend since fourth grade—and added, “I am sure he will be fine.”
Thirty-six hours after they left, I got the email message I’d been waiting for.
O.K.
Sorry for the delay. We just got to Arua. And yes, it was the single most f*cked-up and physically ruinous goddamn trip I hope I ever have to endure. Not too much trouble w/government or militaries. Just extremely tough to get here. I’m still with Carrington. Numerous minibuses and backs of flatbed trucks and a nice, brisk eight-hour walk. Roads washed out, hundreds of trucks backed up, some turned over in the mud.
I’ll describe later, when we get to Kampala. Carrington went and sold his phone to some dude because there was a profit in it for him. Not because he’s inconsiderate of me, but because he’s addicted to making a profit. He’s a good kid. Weren’t for him, I’d likely not have made it.
I got the flight information. Should be smooth sailing from here. Unless I really am cursed. In which case . . .
It’s good to be desperate once in a while. Gives you an appreciation of the looks on people’s faces when they’re desperate and you’re not.
At this, my own desperation eased. Schon was on his way home, but I was still stuck in Juba.
006
Most residents of Juba, like the refugees Viola had been mocking, lived in tukuls, low round thatched-roof huts hidden behind reed fences. There were few latrines and almost no running water. The children ran down the roads playing with clattering push-toys fashioned out of plastic castoffs: soda bottles, small laundry detergent tubs and colorful lids carved into crude gears. There was no shortage of raw materials—trash was everywhere in Juba. The people lived on ful—stewed fava beans, a staple in Sudan and Egypt—and whatever handouts their communities could cadge from the World Food Program and other agencies. Those who couldn’t afford the beans themselves subsisted on whatever protein might be found in ful water, the leftover broth. It wasn’t that vegetables and fish weren’t arriving daily from Uganda; it was that no one could afford them who wasn’t on a foreign payroll. The thousands working for the United Nations and other humanitarian and development groups drove the price of garlic and tomatoes higher than what you’d pay in New York or London. Their Sudanese staffers were invariably former refugees who had lived and been educated in camps in Kenya or Uganda. They were the southerners with modern administrative skills. Those who’d stayed behind and endured the fighting and famine had little to offer. They might take jobs as menials and washerwomen at one of the tented camps that housed the foreigners, or as laborers on a construction project.
The foreigners lived in tiny container apartments or in canvas tents that cost more than a hundred dollars a day. For that they received shelter, electricity, three hot meals, bleached drinking water, clean toilets, showers and laundry service, though the Sudanese women refused to wash men’s or women’s undergarments. Each foreigner washed his or her own drawers and hung them to dry outside their billet. Thus each tent advertised the gender and girth of its occupant.
Soon after Schon left, I struck out for Palica, a run-down guesthouse operated by Juba’s biggest Roman Catholic church. Even at thirty-five dollars a night, the place was a godsend; I had a dusty private room with a real if ancient mattress and actual 1960s shower stalls. The church had been a bastion of peaceful opposition to the north during the long years of civil war. Now, with freedom at hand, it found itself at odds with Juba’s new dispensation. The SPLA was grabbing land outside the city for new facilities; villagers and their clergy were beaten and arrested when they protested. Local journalists, many of whom had written for church publications during the war, were now being hauled before SPLA commissars to explain their reporting on the southern army’s abuses.
“These conflicts will pass away,” Marian Okumu, a laywoman at the church, said one morning. “We pray it is growing pains. Before, you could not do anything. You could only smile during the day and cry in the night because the Arabs killed your brother. You cannot have funeral. You are not allowed to even mourn.”
The terror reached a high point in the summer of 1992, when the SPLA twice took, but could not hold, the city. “We went to sleep praying they would be here when we woke,” Okumu said. “We were very annoyed when they failed.”
Annoyed, and frightened. “The government arrested three hundred police and soldiers,” said Robert Kundi, a police constable I’d met while trying to secure an interview with Salva Kiir and his vice president. “All were slaughtered.” We were sitting in Robert’s home, a messy wooden shack, not much bigger than an office cubicle, where he slept alone on a foam mattress under a leaky tarpaulin-covered roof. Robert had a house nearby, a fair-sized tukul, but he’d given that to his brother. “My children have left and my wife is dead,” he said. “My brother and his family need it more than I do.”
Robert had somehow evaded the death lists in 1992, when every southerner in government service was suspected of treason, but his turn came in 1995, when he was arrested and taken to the notorious White House, an army-run torture center. “I knew I was dead,” he said. “They killed thirty men every night I was there. They tied their arms with wire, put them in a trench and buried them alive with a grader. Every night.”
“Good God,” I said. “What would the men say while this was happening?”
He looked at me blankly. “They said, ‘Please don’t bury me alive.’ I will never forget the sound of the grader. They kept me twenty-one days and then let me go. I don’t know why. I kept a journal of that and all the things that happened during the war.”
“You know, and I don’t want to be too forward, but is there any chance you would let me read through your diaries from that time?” Unlike South Africa, Liberia and other countries racked by civil war, Sudan hadn’t set up a truth commission to air the sins of the combatants. Neither the SPLA nor its adversaries in Khartoum were much for self-criticism. In another country priests, imams and tribal holy men would have been saying prayers at the edge of the White House’s mass graves, and forensic teams would have been exhuming the bodies for identification. Here, the dead stayed buried, and no one wanted the testimony of the survivors.
“My brother burned all the notebooks,” Robert said.
“He was being overprotective? He didn’t want you to dwell on the trauma?”
Robert set his tea down on the wood pallet floor. “My brother burns things. He is mentally ill.”