The Black Nile

Chapter FIVE
Fiscal discipline was lost as a second week in Juba bled into a third. In addition to my $35-a-night room at Palica and the $12 UN lunch, I added dinner at Juba’s sole pizza parlor, the Café de Paris, where a plate of spaghetti and tomato sauce started at $10, not counting the beer and South African wine. Such luxuries were necessary, I told myself, a fattening up before the river barge left, whenever that would be. In a land largely without roads, the barges were the major economic lifeline, pushed and dragged downriver by diesel-powered flatboats that were villages unto themselves. Each of these vast cargo trays was covered by a convex corrugated metal lid. Dense townships of plastic huts and lean-tos, cooking fires and tea ladies grew on these sun-hot slopes, and I was anxious to join them for passage to Malakal. I bought heavy sackloads of canned food and sweet crackers, a bucket and rope to haul water and a new bottle of iodine for the inevitable cuts to my feet and hands. I wondered how I would possibly carry it all. I wondered if Schon’s Wal-Mart tent would slide into the drink while I slept. Until that moment of truth, I felt I deserved my pizza and wine.
I was bent over my notebook at the café late one night when an accented voice called my name. It wasn’t the first phantom I’d heard address me in my solitude. But this one called out again, and I looked up to see the Gallic handsomeness of Alexandre Godard squinting at me from a table across the room. I’d met Alexandre at the very beginning of my journey, on the flight from Cairo to Uganda. We were somewhere over Sudan in a nearly empty plane when he turned back in his seat and said, “Excuse me, I don’t wish to bother you, but do you know of any hotels that are not too expensive in Kampala?” He was a Parisian photojournalist, an impetuous one it seemed. When news broke that the LRA leader Joseph Kony might be making a public appearance, Alexandre had jumped the first flight he could find in hopes of shooting the ruthless enigma. I’d given Alexandre a ride into Kampala, me with my hundred pounds of contingency planning, him with just two small carry-ons—one filled entirely with black-and-white film and two Leica cameras—and dropped him at the door of Kampala’s seedy Tourist Hotel, where a sign ordered patrons to leave their “arms and ammunitions” outside. “It’s the only place I know,” I’d said in apology. “It’s a little rough.”
Alexandre hadn’t batted an eye. “It will be fine.”
Now, two and a half months later and three hundred miles north of Kampala, he was waving me over to his table. “Ah, so you made it, Dan! The Nile, you are doing it?”
“I’m almost doing it,” I replied. “My barge north keeps getting delayed. It’s been weeks. I’m dying here.”
Alexandre nodded, and looked down to focus on some stray morsel on his plate. “There is another barge,” he said finally. “Not the government one. A humanitarian group. They are going to Ethiopia on the Sobat River. I am taking it in two days. It is not my invitation to make, Dan, but I will ask the one who has brought me on. Come here tomorrow night. You will definitely find me here—I am sleeping on the roof.”
I wasn’t sure how close the Sobat River was to Malakal; that it wasn’t in Juba was all I needed to know. Two days later I woke late and stepped out of the guesthouse, through the gate into the lane with its tall old trees, past the men’s dormitory with its drumming and hymns and onto the Juba road. It was a pleasant eighty degrees. I walked past the radio station and the mosque to the dusty parade ground, where police were being drilled in the arcane art of parallel parking.
I turned onto a side street and found Alexandre riding in the back of a dented old Land Cruiser pickup, bracing himself on the roll bar, a few duffels and rucksacks at his feet. As I jogged over to him, the truck stopped and a small pale wraith of a man in wrap-around sunglasses exited the driver’s side and walked into a building. A bearded, ginger-haired young man came out of the passenger side, Matthew LeRiche, Alexandre’s ticket north. He wore a plaid nylon camp shirt and a tan canvas cap, browned by years of sweat, that read in embroidered letters, “Explore Newfoundland, Inc.”
“Hey, good to meet you, Alex told me you might be coming along,” he said. “More the merrier.”
“I don’t want to intrude on your deal,” I said. “Another interloper might be one too many.”
“I’ve learned it’s always easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.” Matthew grinned. “So you might as well come along. Besides, the barge is owned by NPA, Norwegian People’s Aid, and John’s brother runs the NPA show in Sudan. With him lurking about they’re not likely to say no. We’re off to the port now, should be leaving this afternoon. I’ve been waiting a month for this.” The wraith—John, apparently—came out of the building, got into the cab without speaking and started the engine. I climbed into the back with Alexandre and we bumped down the familiar route to the port.
“Thank you, Alex,” I said, and I meant it. Whatever was coming, he could have had it exclusive. Instead he’d brought me along.
“That’s all right,” he replied. “I would not have liked to leave you stranded.”
I had seen the NPA barge but, assuming all the boats were controlled by the River Transport Corp., I hadn’t inquired about it. She was a flat-bottomed self-propelled craft, about thirty by seventy feet. The pilothouse, clad in green fiberglass siding, sat directly atop the engine room, with four windows overlooking the canopy-shaded deck. The flag of the new south—the Sudanese tricolor remixed to represent the new dispensation with the black band on top, red band in the center and a green Islamic band on the bottom, all set against a blue triangle—fluttered ragged from the roof. Hanging below that was the flag of NPA, three human figures locking arms around a green cross. A big spotlight sat on the roof, as did a .50-caliber heavy machine gun.
We sat in a circle of white chairs under the trees and waited for the head of the local NPA office to arrive. “So,” I said to Matthew, “what’s the plan? I don’t see any of these cargo flats lashed to our barge. What’s it carrying, besides us?”
“It’s an experiment,” Matthew said. “They want to see if they can deliver relief along the Nile and then up the Sobat to refugees in Gambella in Ethiopia. It’s extremely remote and very expensive to supply, so if the barge can do it, they’ll be able to expand their aid and do it cheaper. The only other way is by air. I’m supposed to be in London, finishing my PhD, but I can’t resist a last fling, especially on this barge.
“It’s a special barge,” he added. “It has a special history. They’re going up to Bor to pick up some JIU for security, and after that it’s on to Malakal.”
The JIUs, or Joint Integrated Units, were an optimistic feature of the north-south peace treaty. The agreement stipulated that Sudan would have two armies—the Sudanese Armed Forces, controlled by Khartoum, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, controlled by Juba. The JIUs were staffed with soldiers from both forces. Historically, such integration schemes, in which former enemies don the same uniform and forget all that spilled blood, take years, decades even, to reach peaceful fruition, and so far the JIUs were following that precedent. SAF and SPLA soldiers in the same JIU typically bunked, ate and trained in separate camps, or on opposite sides of the same camp. The week before, a southern JIU soldier had been shot dead by his southern platoonmates after he suggested they bring plates of food to their northern counterparts who had just broken the Ramadan fast. The Upper Nile region was still dangerous—it was home to recalcitrant militias and warring clans. But I doubted these forces were the answer.
“Aren’t JIUs a bad idea?” I asked. “Angry, unstable?”
“These are Cirillo’s guys,” Matthew said of the platoon that would be guarding the barge. “They’re pretty reliable.” Thomas Cirillo Sowaka was an important southern officer who commanded one of the better-equipped JIUs. The apple-cheeked Canadian appeared to have deep connections in the SPLA. Before I could ask Matthew about this familiarity, he slouched in his chair, his eyelids fluttered, the whites of his eyes appeared and he went to sleep. I’d never seen a man fall so swiftly from full to suspended animation.
I passed a couple hours sipping tea and chatting with the policemen billeted at the port. The middle of the grove was temporary home to a small camp of families waiting for barges north. They lived under tarpaulin lean-tos with their children and bedrolls and jerricans; tiny shops selling tea and smokes and hot snacks had grown around the camp to make it a proper little village. Near the water’s edge, pale John was in quiet smiling conversation with an extremely tall, thin and dark-skinned man wrapped in a deep red tartan shawl. The man carried a spear with a long steel blade at the top. He was a picture of grace.
“That guy looked positively Maasai,” I told John when he came back.
“That’s because he is.”
“There are Maasai in Sudan? I thought they lived down in Kenya and Tanzania.”
“He’s from Kenya,” John said, a bit of Scotland in his voice, a ton of Africa in his many wrinkles. “He walked here. They do that sometimes, just set off and walk, take a little work where they can find it and keep going. They’re the greatest. I love them.”
“And you were speaking—”
“Swahili,” he said, the of course unstated. “So you want to join them on the barge, eh?” he said. “Shouldn’t be much trouble.” The late morning turned to afternoon and soon the local NPA boss appeared and gave his permission. An hour later the captain, Moses Moel Anyong, arrived at port and Matthew pulled me over to introduce us. The captain was tall, not a giant, at least a decade older than me, with a long face and downturned lips. He had the personal gravity of a man accustomed to being obeyed; this despite the Eminem T-shirt. The captain looked at me without warmth and said, “In two hours we leave.”
I hitched a ride into town and was dropped at the guesthouse with ninety minutes to go. I collected my things, stuffing, unstuffing, cursing and stuffing again until I had four bags: rucksack, raid pack, tent and a sack of food. I quick-marched down the hallway to the office to settle up, found it empty, turned away and ran into Father James, who was in charge of the Palica center, and Marian Okumu. “You can fix your accounts with Marian, and then I will drive you to the port,” he said.
Ten minutes later I ran into the courtyard and saw through the fence that the priest’s red pickup truck was gone. “Where did he go?” I wailed to no one in particular. “He said he’d take me. The boat leaves in an hour.”
A thickset nun in gray and black habit sat by the gate in animated conversation with three or four lay people. Someone had just dropped a bit of good news. “AlHAMdullilah!” she cried, slapping her thighs.
I interrupted. “Excuse me, do you know where Father James went?”
“You sit,” she said in her sandy voice. “He will be back at three.” I remained standing in the confected hope that he would return, and when that hope dissolved my curses became steadily less sotto and more voce. There was a white sedan parked outside near the gate.
“Whose car is that?” I asked, and one of the laypeople pointed to a young man sitting with the nun. “Can you take me to the port?”
“Thirty thousand,” he said.
“Three thousand?” Fifteen years had passed since the dinar had replaced the old Sudanese pound, but northerners and southerners alike still quoted prices in the latter, adding an extra zero. “Three thousand is too high. I’m just going to the port.”
“Eh!” he said, his lip curled in disgust. “Petrol is expensive. It’s sixteen thousand a gallon.”
“It may be sixteen hundred a gallon,” I said, again fixing his decimals, “but you’re not burning a gallon to go to the port, it’s just two miles.”
The nun and the driver both started shouting, the young man reiterating the price of gas, while the nun castigated me for quoting the prices in the actual currency of Sudan. “The thousand system is the system of the north!” she said. “We don’t recognize it. We don’t recognize it.”
“So the pound system isn’t from Khartoum?” I asked. “Where did it come from, Angola?” and at that she blew up.
“You are trying to dominate us!” she shrieked. “You and your white-man reasoning—you want to dominate. I have been to America, it is very expensive. African people have to pay lots of money. You should pay too. They work like slaves. It is slavery!”
I modulated my tone and was able to talk the angry bride of Christ down to twenty-five hundred, beat back a last-minute rally in which she said the driver would cost extra and waited for the young man to finish his bottomless mango drink. I picked up the gear and followed him out the gate. He passed the old sedan and opened the door of the sister’s new Mitsubishi Pajero. He drove without speaking and I arrived at the port with fifteen minutes to spare to find Matt and Alex sitting exactly where I’d left them. The captain had gone for more ammunition.
By six o’clock it was clear we weren’t going anywhere. John got me a bed at the NPA guesthouse, I walked to the United Nations compound for dinner and later caught up with Matthew and Alexandre at Café de Paris, where the Canadian lolled into a mini-coma the moment conversation lagged, only to spring again to life when an interesting or important point came up. It was a satisfying last night in town.
We met at the port the next morning and waited again until early afternoon, when Moses came off the barge and waved us over. In the cool darkness of the canvas-roofed cargo area we stashed our gear—Alexandre’s two small bags, Matthew’s rubberized waterproof duffel and my four albatrosses. The place was packed nearly full with boxes, bags of maize flour, slick yellow jerricans of cooking oil, flats of gluco-biscuits and the stripped body of a white Land Cruiser. Two tight paths ran down the length of the musty enclosure to the engine room, with its immaculate twin diesel motors, and a narrow walkway connected the port and starboard sides. To the right was a small metal workbench; to the left, a steel ladder. A crewman directed us up, past the shallow landing and the door to the pilothouse, to the roof, where a few men in fatigues sat cross-legged around the .50-cal.
“You wait here,” he said, and we did, watching as dozens of passengers were squeezed on board for the ride downriver. I tried to count them as they came on and lost track. I tried again later that evening, but each family had sequestered itself quietly on the nooks and ridges of the stacked cargo like discreet cliff dwellers. A floating repair platform—a kind of mini-barge—about fifteen by thirty feet was lashed to the right side, the words “RED CROSS II” stenciled in stubby capitals on its side. This was piled with a wooden bedframe and headboard, a half dozen wooden benches and scores of stavelike lengths of sugarcane.
“This is nice, eh?” Alexandre said. “We have the best seats, with the best view.” It was true. Twenty feet above the Nile banks the mango and doum leaves shushed in a slow wind and the water seemed to breathe. Two hours after we’d come aboard, the engines turned over and a crewman dislodged the mooring, a steel pike and cable, wedged into the crook of an old mango tree. We inched away from the shore, pivoted to face north, and began moving at a crawl, slowly gaining steam. My skin sang at the new breeze, the dustless air. We passed the riverside camps where aid workers drank cocktails by the Nile and soon the city was behind us, followed by the site of Gondokoro, Juba’s predecessor, a trading post where African slaves were assembled for shipment downriver to the markets of Shendi and Cairo. There was nothing on the patch of bush to suggest the commerce in humans that had taken place there.
The sprawl of tukuls gave way to scrub and big sky. A man came up the ladder, not quite as lean or as tall as Moses or the other crewmen, his face softer. “How are you?” he said, trading handshakes. “I am Michael, the radio operator. The captain says you will sleep up here tonight. Is that all right? You won’t fall off?”
The roof would indeed be crowded; a solar panel the size of a desktop ate up some of the space, as did the machine gun. “It’s heaven up here,” Matthew said. “Besides, I’ll make sure to sleep in the middle.”
“We’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s perfect.”
Michael stayed to chat. He was forty-one. He held the rank of sergeant major, and had been a soldier since he was seventeen. A Dinka from Duk Fawil in the Dinka heartland, he’d been readying to leave home for university when the civil war started in 1983. He’d been assigned to the barge for nearly fourteen years, and was apparently the most educated member of the crew. Like them, he was both a soldier of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and an employee of Norwegian People’s Aid. “You’re with both,” I said.
“Yes, both,” he answered.
“And therein,” Matthew said, the narcolepsy taking temporary leave of him, “lies an interesting story.”
“See, back in ’91, some of the worst days of the war, the Red Cross had a small river barge running out of Bor, delivering aid inside the Sudd marshlands to the Dinkas in Jonglei state. It’s pretty impenetrable, as you know, and was more so during the war. The barge had a limited capacity, so they had a new one, which could hold sixty tons, specially built in England, shipped over to Mombasa in pieces and trucked into Bor, where they assembled it. The government saw this, and they—not unreasonably—lost their minds, thinking it would be used to move rebel armor down the Nile. So they banned the Red Cross from operating it. And it sat there. The Red Cross is completely nonpolitical, and they couldn’t risk their operations elsewhere in Sudan by defying Khartoum over the barge. Meanwhile the SPLA was getting ready to just seize it, ’cause there’s a famine going on, and the people need food. And the government is sending Antonovs over Bor to try and bomb the thing to the bottom of the Nile, but the bombs get caught in the wind and keep missing the mark.
“The solution was this: If the Red Cross isn’t allowed to take sides—can’t even brook the appearance of taking sides—why not give the barge to an organization that can? That’s where NPA comes in. While the rest of the aid community was bending over backwards to appear impartial, NPA said, ‘The hell with it. We’re on the side of the people, and in south Sudan, that’s the SPLA.’ They’re a bit different from the other groups, they’re an outgrowth of the Norwegian labor party and the trade unions, so there’s that militant aspect the other groups don’t have.”
While the United Nations and the aid groups operated only where Khartoum allowed them, an arrangement that favored the north and its southern proxies, NPA’s staffers worked only in rebel-held areas, and in close coordination with the SPLA’s social services wing. They abandoned the Jonglei region when the fighting got too hot, but the aid vessel’s crew of Dinka fighters did not, and it became, for a time, a warship. Then it was camouflaged and hidden away for years inside the vast Sudd marshlands, where it awaited its next act. After the peace treaty was signed, NPA returned to the Sudd, bestowed seven years of back pay on the crew and reclaimed the barge as a humanitarian vessel.
I asked Michael if the barge had ever been involved in combat. “In 1992,” he said with a faint smile, “we ambushed a jallaba steamer full of reinforcements. I will show you when we reach the place.”


We retrieved our sleeping gear from the cliff dwellers and made camp on the roof along with two crewmen. The sun took hours to set, casting sky and river in a single blue penumbra. When at last it disappeared, the barge’s spotlight came on, a bolt of semisolid white light that zigzagged over the water’s surface in search of sandbars and thick patches of hyacinth. We dined on canned tuna and bread, and a crewman brought us lengths of sugarcane to strip and chew for dessert. Sometime around midnight the barge stopped at a patch of bare dirt and a stand of trees on the western bank. The anchor pike was driven into the ground and most of the passengers and cargo were off-loaded into the inky night to walk to their homes in the roadless hinterlands. I stayed on the roof, wetted the exterior of my sleeping bag with insect repellent and slept as the spotlight drew armies of flying bugs into its siren beam.
I woke the next morning to a slight chill and the sound of Alexandre and Matthew conversing in French. They hadn’t yet risen; Matthew was still in his sleeping bag atop a thin inflatable sleeping pad, and Alexandre, who didn’t carry a sleeping bag, was wrapped in a windbreaker. I sat up, pulled my eyeglasses from my shirt pocket, wiped the lenses with a handkerchief and did a double take. “Hey man,” I said to Matthew. “What’s with your face?”
“What?”
“Your lip. It’s—it’s big.”
He felt around his mustache and beard and winced as his fingers prodded his lower lip, which had overnight swollen to twice its size. “Got a mirror?” I opened the raid pack and handed him mine. “I guess something stung me. My mouth’s kind of numb, come to think of it.” He beamed. “Maybe I’ll discover a new disease.”
“You can always submit yourself as a case study if your research doesn’t work out,” I said. “And what is your research, by the way?”
“War Studies, King’s College,” he said. “I’m looking at the impact of humanitarianism on the civil war.”
“So this isn’t your first time in Sudan.”
“I’ve been coming since 2003,” Matthew said, “interviewing commanders, aid officials, the like. Got enough for a pretty good history of the war. But the dissertation’s the main thing. What about you, Alex? First time?”
“I have been in the north,” Alexandre said, plucking a tiny toothbrush and a minuscule tube of paste from his wallet-sized shaving kit. “I have driven down from Ethiopia into Blue Nile state. From there I went north and went on the ferry from Port Sudan across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia. It was years ago. I had a Land Cruiser, a very good model, the old HJ60, and I had a small, how do you say—un fusil à canon scié?”
“A shotgun?” Matthew said.
“Shotgun.” Alexandre nodded. “But cut down. Sawn off.” He held his hands about two feet apart. “I had the gun wrapped in black paper on a little shelf, here, at the ceiling. For protection. And when I got to Jeddah, they kept the car overnight for customs police to search it. I thought I was finished. Dead. My life in a Saudi Arabian prison.” He laughed.
“So what happened?” Matthew said, still checking his lip in the mirror.
“I went to the port the next day, the officer came and threw me the keys and I drove to Jordan like nothing was wrong. They didn’t find it. I don’t know if they even looked.”
Alexandre had been an architect before falling hard for photography. He worked mostly for international charities, documenting their overseas work, and when he wasn’t doing that he traveled to satisfy his wanderlust. He’d driven across the Middle East and North Africa and had been as far south as Madagascar. A purist, he refused to make the switch to digital. “I have to make the image myself, with my own eye,” he said. “I produce the negative with my own hands and the prints the same way too, in my own darkroom. They are always making bigger sensors for the digital cameras, but these still cannot record the same information that the silver bromide crystals can hold on a roll of film.”
Michael, the radio operator, appeared at the top of the ladder bearing thin loaves of bread, like frankfurter buns, and a box of Egyptian-made sesame halvah bars. Another crewman handed up a pot of sugary black tea. As we breakfasted the scrub trees and bushes began to fade from the shore and the way ahead became flat as glass, the current imperceptible, the land increasingly defined by forests of papyrus that dwarfed what Schon and I had paddled through in Uganda. The single river divided into meandering channels that the crew read from memory.
We were approaching the Sudd. For thousands of years this giant swamp—more than fifty thousand square miles, as big as England—had repelled invaders from the lands to the north. The British explorer Samuel Baker described it as “a vast sea of papyrus ferns and rotting vegetation, and in that fetid heat there is a spawning tropical life that can hardly have altered very much since the beginning of the world.” In AD 61 the Roman emperor Nero, who controlled Egypt, dispatched troops up the river to find the source of the Nile. They returned with reports of “immense marshes” that were too dense for all but the smallest of one-man canoes. It wasn’t until eighteen hundred years later that a Turkish naval captain, operating under orders from the Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali, was able to penetrate the swamp, reaching as far as Gondokoro. Slaves and ivory were soon flowing north on the Nile. This was the beginning of what Dinka lore calls the time when “the world was spoiled.”
And still something about the swamp was remarkably unspoiled. Later that first morning, we passed a man-made clearing in the papyrus on the western bank, a floating homestead with a reed-roofed tukul, a small black dugout canoe, racks for drying fish, rows of cultivated sorghum and a naked family of four standing by the river’s edge watching us pass. They were all—mother, father, son and young daughter—leaner than lean, rippled with muscles, with posture to make a yogi envious. They stood in a row and waved with open smiles like the goodest people in Creation and Michael grabbed two bars of halvah and hurled them over the water and onto their floating patch, calling out something in Dinka.
While Alexandre prowled the barge with his Leicas, Matthew and I climbed down for a look at the pilothouse. It was a shallow bridge, painted white, with just a few simple instruments and enough room for a man to stand at the steering wheel without his back touching the wall. There were two wheels, actually—one for each engine—and when the barge bottomed out on a sandbar the crewmen would stand side by side cranking the wheels and goosing the throttles in unison to Moses’s barked instructions. Behind them were two doors leading to the private cabins of the captain and the chief engineer, to their left, a small table with a radio, Michael’s station. From the windows we could see, at the very front of the barge, a crewman in green coveralls delicately probing the depth of the river with a fifteen-foot wooden pole, much like they did on the Mississippi in Mark Twain’s day.
We passed the time chewing sugarcane and dangling our feet in the water. Very late in the afternoon, I spied a blanket of smoke ahead on the eastern bank, a Cairo-like haze hovering over an acre of cleared land. “What is that?” I said.
“Cattle camp,” Matthew replied. I had read about cattle camps but hadn’t yet seen one. A hundred pale, tall-horned zebu cows had been tied to stakes for the night by their young wardens, two boys not older than twelve. One boy wore a tiny red Speedo, the other, yellow shorts and an undershirt just a little dirtier than the one on my back. The haze was smoke from dung fires burning to protect both the herd and the boys from mosquitoes and tsetse flies, and the boys were dusted head to toe in ash. The camp was unusual in one respect: The boys didn’t appear to be armed. There was nothing more precious than cattle. Raids were common, and deadly. The boys stood by the water and watched us pass; they didn’t return our waves.
Soon we reached Bor. The barge passed a rusted half-sunken steamer and a waterfront strip where women washed clothes and men slaughtered livestock. We moored at Moses’s camp on Bor’s northern outskirts and the crew mustered on the covered deck. Moses came down from the bridge in crisp fatigues and shined boots, a John Garang button pinned over his heart, and addressed them in Dinka for several minutes. He turned to the chief engineer, said a few more words, and the chief gave him an elaborate salute—marching in place, his right hand moving slowly to his brow—before dismissing the crewmen. “You come,” Moses told us, and we followed him across the gangplank and into his camp: ten fenced-in acres, with a vegetable garden where giant green pumpkins basked in the sun, a half dozen tukuls, scores of fifty-gallon oil drums, and, sitting in the swept dirt near a circle of benches and lawn chairs, a green wooden ammunition crate bearing the stenciled label “PARTS OF TYPEWRITER.”
I pointed to the clearing and asked Moses if I could pitch my tent there. “No,” he said. “You are my special guests. You will stay in the new hotel, Freedom Camp.”
“We’re good to camp out here,” Matthew said. “Dan’s got a tent, I’ve got a tent.”
“We don’t need a hotel,” I added. “We’ll really be fine here. Happy, really.”
Moses was unmoved. “Come.”
We followed him past the armed guards and through the gate and walked a half mile south to a fenced-in camp modeled on Juba’s ritzy expatriate villages. They charged forty dollars a night, enough to set us grumbling, but we had no choice. Moses was captain, and this was where he wanted us. Freedom Camp had thirty army-style tents, each with a single bed, a lawn chair and a small card table. There were two outhouses, each home to its own resident plague of toads, and a bathing enclosure for private bucket showers. A big metal barn served as the cafeteria and bar, with a diesel generator to keep the beer cold and the satellite TV running. We registered and crashed after a buffet dinner of goat, potatoes, cabbage, rice and beer.
In the morning we walked down a sandy path through patches of tall yellow grass into Bor town. A major Dinka capital, Bor had the feel of a prosperous frontier burg. The market district was full of shoppers, women in ankle-length dresses, young men in Western T-shirts and slacks and the male elders strolling the muddy streets in leather cowboy hats and long robes. They carried small clubs or swagger sticks—no two the same—and smoked pipes fashioned from hammered steel and brass. Bor was their town. Where Juba struggled with the tension of its refugees, the SPLA, the local Equatorians, the foreign peacekeepers and a growing population of aid workers, Bor’s identity was straightforwardly and unmistakably Dinka and had been for centuries. John Garang was a Bor Dinka and the SPLA had been dominated by them and by the Dinka from Bahr al Ghazal to the west. It was here that the first shots of the civil war were fired, and it was here that raiders from the rival Nuer tribe struck in 1991 after the rebel movement split along tribal lines. More than two thousand people were killed and thousands of cattle stolen before the city was retaken by the SPLA.
“Nobody believed Bor would fall,” Matthew said, as we wove through the stalls selling Goodwill clothes, detergent, pangas and framed prints of Garang and Salva Kiir. “People were traumatized by the symbolism as much as by the actual destruction.” It took more than a decade for the rift between the rebel factions to be even partially repaired.
Moses met us at the hotel during lunch with news and an edict. He would be leaving to visit his four wives, each of whom lived on a separate homestead in the interior, and he had to see the local JIU commander about acquiring a detachment of troops for the Sobat. We were not to enter Bor without Moses as an escort, he said before leaving. We were trapped. “Anybody want to take bets on when he’s coming back?” I asked.
Diversion came in the American form of Lola Dee Toloba, a social worker from Washington State who had come to Bor with a group of Episcopalians looking to link development projects in south Sudan with donors and volunteers in the United States.
Matthew and Alexandre had been bent over sheets of drawing paper designing an amphibious Land Cruiser that we would one day pilot up the Nile and the Atbara River into Ethiopia. They were calculating water displacement and propeller gear ratios when Lola asked to join us. A large woman with sensibly short blonde hair, her flesh running from pale to pink in the southern heat, she continued fanning herself as she turned away from CNN and walked over to our table.
Lola wasn’t a professional aid worker, nor was she a proselytizer. She was a uniquely self-motivated Samaritan. “I was sitting at my computer at work one day at the old St. Helen’s Hospital in Chehalis,” she said. “It was October of 2000. I was looking up the Post-Intelligencer about the Department of Social and Health Services, because we had been getting a lot of negative press, and there was an article which included a picture of three or four young men. I can still see that picture—these long-legged, very darkcomplexioned young men. The story was about their journey to the United States, and as I read the story it was as if God were speaking to me through the screen of the computer. Like a lightning bolt the decision was very clear. The article said there were agencies looking for homes to host the young people coming in from south Sudan. I knew my husband would not agree with the idea God had for me, but I have always had a strong connection to people of African descent. I just knew it: Here was my duty and responsibility to care for these children. I felt the farm I had would be a good place. I had a sister and my parents nearby, so the kids would have a ready-made family. The five children had lived together and now they would stay together. My husband was not happy about three, let alone all five, so I found a family to place the two older boys in our community, but they were with us nearly every weekend.”
I had been nodding along at Lola’s story, with its familiar contours of recognition of a distant emergency and the moment of clarity that says Do Something. But to Do Something five times in a single stroke? “You adopted five children?” I asked. “At once?”
“Well,” she said, holding up her fingers to help me keep track. “I adopted just the three—Rachel, Michael and Rabecca—and then there are my two birth children, but my kids are all equal. My husband wasn’t around much longer after that, and so pretty soon I was a single mother of five. Then, in 2003, another young man came to live with us. He, Elijah, was uncharacteristically short, just five-five. He was a childhood friend of my other children. Well, Elijah is now over six-five. My mother claims that he grew so tall from my food and my love. Mary came in 2003 also; she’s a cousin of my kids. So that makes seven.”
She looked at Matthew, who was nodding off, and at his sweat-conditioned Newfoundland cap and said, “I can wash that for you if you want.”
He opened his eyes. “Um, that won’t be necessary, thanks.”
Lola and her group were waiting for a meeting with the governor. In the meantime, they planned a trip to a nearby leper colony. Would we like to come along? Indeed we would. The next morning Lola and the other Episcopalians squeezed into a Land Cruiser while Matthew, Alexandre and I rode in the back of a pickup truck to a spot half an hour south of town. We got out and walked down a squishy path, past the bombed remains of a school, past a pond created by a giant bomb crater, to a ragged village surrounded by trees and thick bush. The residents greeted us with cheers and Dinka-language hymns. We shook hands all around, including with men who had no hands. “Good morning,” I said, pumping the wrist of a cloudy-eyed elder, my palms tingling with psychosomatic infection. Matthew, the social scientist, set to interviewing the local chief, who showed him a log noting ninety-five households in the village.
Soon it was time to distribute the booty. Lola and her comrades had bags of donated castoffs: slacks, children’s dresses, a leopard-print skirt, flip-flops (which drew applause) and a Frisbee (which was greeted with puzzled silence). The chief parceled out the goods, and there was angry talk over how the spoils were divided. Almost everyone’s head was shaved. Women without hands were jostling to try on dresses while the children wailed and the chief took the aspirin and ibuprofen out of the donated first aid kit and gave them to a woman I assumed was his wife. I began to feel repelled.
“I don’t get it,” I told Matthew. “It looks like less than a quarter of the people actually have leprosy. Why do they live out here? Why not live in town, where there’s a clinic?”
“I’m getting the impression they think it’s an inherited disease, incurable,” he said. “I asked the young guys what they need and they told me fishing equipment and building materials. Nobody mentioned medicine. They don’t know how easy it is to treat leprosy.” I left the village and sat at the edge of the bomb crater pond and looked out over the Nile marsh framed by a pair of tall palms, the low clouds all wide and flat, running from black to cotton and black again. I could hear singing from the new church school down the path. The original, built in 1981, was bombed after Garang’s 1983 mutiny; there was little left of it besides the cornerstone.


Moses was gone for five long days. When he returned, dressed in a denim and leopard-print combo topped with a hat extolling the American rapper 50 Cent, he took us on a tour of Bor town that wound up at a dirt-floored snack shop in which he was a partner. There we sat on plastic chairs as three of Moses’s children—two boys and, later, a reed-thin eleven-year-old girl, the very image of her father—joined us. We chatted a bit with the children before they were dismissed, and then Moses set down his Coke and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Alex!” he commanded. “What do you think of my children?”
Alexandre pursed his lips and gave a sage nod, as if he had just tasted an unusually fine Bordeaux, and said, “Yes, Captain. They are very good children. You are very lucky.”
“And my daughter,” Moses said, “she is also good. Strong.”
“Yes,” Alexandre said, nodding, a sheen of moisture on his stubbled cheek. “A quite good child.”
“So you and this girl, you like her, you can be married,” Moses said. “You can be in my family.”
Alexandre paled and swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple scraping up and down the length of his throat, and said apologetically, “Thank you, Moses. That is a very kind way to think of me, but I cannot get married now. My work is too much.”
Moses turned to his next victim. “Matthew! What about you? You should have a Dinka wife. You are practically Sudanese.”
Matthew was now wide awake, his eyes twinkling. “I’m not opposed to the idea of marrying a Dinka,” he said genially. “But I’m afraid my father wouldn’t allow it—he prefers for me to concentrate on my studies, and I have years to go. A lot of years.”
“Good. That’s fine,” Moses countered. “By the time you finish she will be ready. Then you come back and take her to London.”
An engaging silence fell over the unlit shack. Moses had apparently noticed my battered wedding band and, hep to the Western horror of polygamy, spared me the invitation. After a slightly uncomfortable interval, in which he appeared to be formulating a new approach, he asked if we had finished our drinks, and we resumed the tour.
The four of us meandered toward the Nile, Moses exchanging greetings and handshakes along the way. At the riverside a crowd was gathered around a man and two boys busy hacking away at the carcasses of two Nile crocodiles with rusted machetes. The crowd wasn’t gawking—it was buying. The animals were laid out on flattened cardboard boxes. Their meat was weighed on a blue metal scale; the shoppers took it away in thin black plastic bags after paying the lead butcher, whose face ran with sweat but whose tan chinos and red Snoop Dogg T-shirt had avoided even a stray splattering drop of reptile blood. With little left to sell—all but the waxy heads and some loose cuts remained—he threw the feet into the river, wiped his hands on a rag and pulled us aside.
He was a croc hunter, a member of a Dinka subtribe that lived in the marshes and had developed an intimacy with the water even as their cousins ranged the land with their armies of cows. The governor had hired them to kill crocodiles outside Bor. Women and especially babies were being taken from the banks, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Not twenty feet away goat’s blood was running into the river; animals were being slaughtered just yards from where women brought their children to bathe and wash laundry.
“You are from America?” the crocodile hunter asked.
“Well, he’s from Canada,” I said. “And he’s from France.”
“Good. America,” the hunter said. “I want to ask you this question: I am always looking for new techniques. What are the methods for capturing crocodile in your country?”
“Dynamite,” Matthew said.
“Dynamite.” The hunter’s brow furrowed. “That is difficult to come by in Sudan.”


We were just a couple days away from regaining the river. Moses had completed his conjugal visits. He had also been to see the local JIU commander, and a platoon of soldiers would soon be joining us. The crew had begun prepping the barge for launch, moving barrels of fuel to the engine room, swabbing the deck and cleaning their weapons and ammunition—hundreds of 7.64-millimeter and .50-caliber rounds—with copious amounts of diesel. But this progress was too slow for Matthew. After a month in Juba and a week in Bor, he had decisively run out of time and would soon be leaving on a World Food Program plane to Juba, with onward passage to Lokichoggio, Nairobi and London. I bought his Katadyn filter pump (mine had cracked) and his high-tech sleeping pad and stood him an afternoon beer at the Freedom Camp cafeteria. “What kind of name is LeRiche, anyway?” I asked. “It sounds like a cartoon villain. You know, LeRiche versus the Mounties.”
“It’s actually the name of a pirate,” he said as he dropped his waterproof duffel into the back of the pickup that would take him to the airport. “Something my grandfather was always saying, that we’re descended from a fugitive pirate. I’d been hearing this my whole life, so I figured, why not put it to the test? I went into the archives in Greenwich and London, and I found it: In the 1700s one James LeRiche was arrested by a Royal Navy vessel and charged with piracy. But he never made it to court in London. The other prisoners did, but his name isn’t on the docket. So it looks like my grandfather wasn’t just telling stories. And we’ve been lodged in Newfoundland ever since. My grandfather wouldn’t even give up his Newfoundland passport after we were forced to join Canada in 1949. He knew where he came from, and it sure wasn’t Ottawa.”
In the morning Alexandre and I boarded the barge and were joined by a dozen new faces, members of the JIU. They were ten Equatorians—smaller than the Dinka crew though just as hard, some wearing mustaches and even trim beards—and two Nuer soldiers. They were on the barge as security, yes, but also to demonstrate to the Nuer tribesmen who lived along the Sobat that the barge was a southern vessel, and not just a Dinka one. It was an important and potentially lifesaving distinction.
The Nuer and the Dinka—competing tribes of cattle herders—had been at odds since the late 1800s, a rivalry that found full bloody flower during the civil war, when large tracts of the Upper Nile region were controlled by Nuer militias loyal to Khartoum. Most of those forces had been absorbed into the SPLA in 2006, but hundreds of holdouts in the pay of recalcitrant warlords remained in the northern reaches of the Sudd, on the Sobat and in the oil areas north of there. Among most observers, the Nuer were considered superior warriors to the Dinka. Some Nuer clans even used mortars and rocket-propelled grenades during their cattle raids. “It’s basically the most militarized society I’ve ever come across,” Matthew had said of the Nuer. “Everyone has a gun, and there’s no central authority.” (Number one in the badass sweepstakes were the Muerle, who, though numerically small, were the most feared warriors. “They will walk for days without water to raid cattle,” a United Nations political officer once told me. “They will eat dirt.”)
Alexandre and I watched the JIU men muster on deck for an address by Moses. They saluted smartly when it was finished, after which they were drilled in Arabic on the art of the flotation device, slipping on and off the newly purchased life vests at the chief engineer’s command. The lesson was more than a formality. Just a few weeks before, seventy-five SPLA men had drowned south of Malakal when two boats transporting troops collided in the dark. Finally, with a clean deck, clean guns and the buoyancy of its armed guards assured, the barge was ready to go.