The Black Nile

Chapter SIX
For the next five days our diesel-powered dormitory pushed through one of the world’s biggest marshlands. We followed the main branch of the White Nile, known as the Bahr al Jabal, or mountain river, which curves to the west and northwest along the outer borders of the Sudd, and avoided the tighter channels of the Bahr al Jadid, or new river, formed by massive flooding in the 1980s, which takes a course down the middle of the swamp.
Each of the JIU men had been issued a mosquito net and a new foam mattress with a colorful floral cover. While Moses’s crewmen and two Sudanese passengers slept on beds at the rear of the boat, the JIU men colonized the front, some in hammocks, others taking places inside and on top of the stripped white Land Cruiser. Alexandre and I resumed our spot on the pilothouse roof.
Alexandre and I quickly fell into a routine of sleeping, eating, reading and sleeping some more. I was well into one of those summer afternoon naps that sends you deep into the muck, dead still and sweating, when James, a student en route to collect a scholarship from the Anglican bishop of Malakal, woke me and said it was time to eat. “Thanks, man,” I mumbled. “I’ll get some later.” A few minutes later he was back.
“They won’t eat until you and your friend have eaten.” Nor would they serve James. I sat up, cracked my knuckles and stumbled to the front of the boat, where one of the Equatorians was using a stick to stir five gallons of overcooked rice and beans around an aluminum cauldron sitting on a pile of coals. He handed me a metal plate and I thanked him in Arabic. It was a heaping serving, with traces of onion and no salt that I could discern. I ate it all, rinsed my plate from a jug of river water and sat next to James on the repair platform.
“James,” I said, “can you help me a second?”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell a Dinka from a Nuer. I’ve been looking and looking and I just can’t figure it out. You’re a Dinka, and you have these vertical marks on your forehead, like an eagle clawed you—don’t get me wrong, it’s handsome, it looks good. But I’ve met Dinka who have those horizontal scars across the forehead. And these taller guys in the JIU, they have horizontal lines, but they’re Nuer. I can’t figure it out.”
“Oh,” he said jovially. “That’s easy. This”—he pointed to the ritual scar on his forehead, a vertical stalk with shoots coming out the sides like a series of stacked Vs—“is Bor Dinka. The lines you are seeing that go across, those are for the Nuer, and also for the Dinka from Bahr al Ghazal. They do it the same as the Nuer.”
The horizontal scarring, usually five or six raised lines or creases running along the forehead, gives the brow a permanently furrowed appearance and makes the bearer seem wise and noble beyond his years or standing. These long cuts were apparently filled with ash, which made the ripples stand up in bold relief. Some people, however, had weak and less impressive scars, created in haste or by an unskilled cut-man. These were shorter, perfunctory, not as deep.
Still, I was confused. “How do the Nuer and the Dinka from Bahr al Ghazal set themselves apart from each other if they wear the same scars? Isn’t the point of the scars to show who you are and who you aren’t?”
“The point of the scars is to show you are an adult,” James said. “Traditionally, you cannot be treated as an adult and cannot take part in important decisions unless you have the scar. This is not as true today as it was in the past, as many educated people do not take part. But there is another way that Dinka and Nuer look different from each other, and this is the teeth. We take out these”—he raised his upper lip to reveal gaps where two canine teeth used to be—“while the Nuer take out these teeth on the bottom. So you see it is really simple: If it is up here, Dinka, and if it is down there, it is Nuer.”
I am not infrequently beset by dreams in which I find myself ripping out my own teeth, and while these dreams are marked by manic determination, copious blood and, finally, extraordinary regret, they are never accompanied by actual pain. I doubted this was the case in real life. “Doesn’t that hurt, when they knock out your teeth?”
“It does hurt,” James said. “But you must not make a sound. That is a great humiliation. Not just the boys. The girls too. You suffer it in silence, and then you are an adult.”
Later that afternoon the barge slowed to meet two fishermen in a dugout canoe, each of them naked save for black Hugo Boss briefs that covered their genitals and not very much of their posteriors. “That is some kind of fashion, eh?” Alexandre said as they haggled with the crew.
“America should ship its obese to Sudan, teach them how to live,” I said. “Those dudes are fit.”
“It is not a regime I would like to follow,” he said.
The crewmen bought four or five lungfish and a catfish from the canoers. The catch was hacked into four-inch sections with a machete and thrown into the empty cauldron with water and salt. That night, two plates appeared on the roof, each with a hunk of fish in broth and a small jerrican of water. We washed our hands, passed the can back to the man at the ladder and ate the strong-tasting fish with our fingers, tossing overboard the skin, bones and black bowel. Around nine that evening the boat slowed and stopped. The spotlight came on as a crewman dragged the mooring pike through a patch of papyrus and onto shore. “Are we stopping?” I asked.
“The crew maybe cannot go all night,” Alexandre said. “They would be tired in the morning, I guess.”
There was a thok-thok-thok as thumb-sized waterbugs assailed the spotlight, the barge and us. I smoked my tenth cigarette of the night, and went to sleep with a new coating of DEET smeared on my sleeping bag and on the brim of my hat, only to wake at three o’clock with the barge again in motion and raindrops pelting us in the dark. We got our things together and made for the ladder.
We paused on the landing, where the door to the pilothouse was open. I peered into the dark bridge and it was a moment before I realized Moses was standing just a foot away from me, his mouth open, eyes deep in the river, his hands jerking the wheel every few seconds as he chased hidden channels we couldn’t and never would see. Finally, still looking forward, he said loudly, “This is a place for work now. You go down to sleep.”
I descended the wet steel ladder and walked past the thrumming engine room toward the left-side railing to watch the river and the rain and was promptly pulled back by my collar and prodded into the rear of the barge by a crewman. “You sleep, there,” he said, pointing to a sagging foam mattress supported by two benches. Michael’s bed was on the left, a proper string bed with a metal frame, and he pushed it against ours to share some of his space.
We woke up to a radio playing Sudanese pop, loud conversation and clanging metal tools. The barge had been in motion the rest of the night, steering down channels marked by drifting colonies of hyacinth and loose islands of dense vegetation—the sudd, or obstructions, for which the marsh was named. Alexandre and I were served too-sweet tea in red plastic mugs and a pack of gluco-biscuits to share. At the front of the barge, the JIU men were stripping down their own .50-caliber gun, meticulously washing each part in diesel. Individual soldiers were doing the same with their Kalashnikovs. Their AKs were a motley arsenal. Some showed a lifetime of careful maintenance, while others appeared cobbled together from a variety of cannibalized and ill-treated weapons. The barge now had two heavy guns at the ready, one on the roof and one on deck.
I was sitting with Michael on the roof that afternoon when he pointed to a spot in the reeds, a patch no different to me from any other, and said, “There. Mayen. That’s where we made the ambush. March 1992.” There were two boats, he said, the barge and a smaller craft, hidden away on the western side of the Nile. They opened up on a government troop barge with heavy machine guns and small arms in the dead of night, cursing and taunting the northerners as they gunned them into the crocodile waters. “In what language?” I asked.
“In Arabic,” he said. “It’s the language we all know.”
“Were any of your men killed?”
“No. Many of theirs died. I don’t know the number.” The long war had been a decades-long series of such engagements—skirmishes, ambushes and full-scale battles, all of them unknown to anyone besides the combatants, the civilian victims and a tiny number of aid workers, journalists and academics. There was so much unseen waste—and so much hidden valor.
Now Moses and his crew feared they would be the ones falling prey to an ambush on the water. In a day or two we would reach the northern edge of the Sudd and the confluence of four Nile tributaries—the Bahr al Ghazal from the west, the Sobat from the east and the Bahr al Jabal and Bahr al Zeraf from the south. It was a region of overlapping hot zones. A barge of Indian peacekeepers had taken fire there months earlier. Canadian helicopter pilots working for an oil company had been kidnapped nearby.
“Khor Fulus and Atar,” Michael said. “They’re at war.”
“Those are people?” I asked. “Warlords?”
Michael shook his head. “They are places. Counties. Well, they are one county, but Atar wants to be separate. So they are fighting.” I took my Sudan map from the raid pack and spread it out on the roof. “Very nice,” he murmured, running his finger down the river from Bor, stopping a quarter inch short of Malakal. “Here is Khor Fulus. Here is Atar. And here, more important,” he said, pointing to the northern bank of the Nile as it bent to the east, “is Phom Zeraf, where is Tang, Gabriel Tang. He is a SAF general with his own militia. He refuses to join SPLA. He still wants to fight. It is a matter of time.”
Moses and the gray-haired chief engineer joined us and I stepped back so the three of them could delve into the map, matching its written features against their decades of experience. When they finished, Michael and the chief folded and refolded the map in a vain effort at returning it to its original form. I reached in and accordioned it back into shape. The chief said something in Arabic and everyone laughed.
“What was that?” I asked.
Michael wiped his brow. “Kull rajul ya’rif kayf yujami’ zawjatuh ,” he said. “Every man knows how to f*ck his wife.”
I found my Thuraya satellite phone in the raid pack and brought it to the front of the barge. An aid official in Juba had suggested I call a friend of his in Malakal for help in finding lodging. I had been trying for days to reach Jeremiah, and was surprised when he finally picked up on his mobile. “Ben told me you are coming,” he said after I introduced myself. “There is not much available in the way of guesthouses, but I think I have something. It will be ready when you get here.”
“But I don’t know when that will be,” I said. “Are they holding the room? Do I have to pay for the days they’re holding it? What’s the rate?”
“Not to worry,” he replied tartly. “The room will be ready. There is no charge. I have to go now. Call when you arrive.” Then he hung up, with no time for my thanks. I always feel better about taking kindness from strangers when they give me that extra thirty seconds for obsequious gratitude. Jeremiah apparently didn’t care about my needs. I returned to the roof and stared for an hour at the unending vista of languid water and waving papyrus before the first smoke appeared. It was miles away, a cone of black rising from some spot deep in the swamp grass. It wasn’t the smoke of a smoldering dung fire, like we’d seen at the cattle camp. Something was burning, with no sign of what might have caused it.
“What do you make of that?” I asked Alexandre.
“It is more than one place,” he said. “Look, behind that one, there is another part burning.” The Sudd, or part of it, was on fire, the flat horizon billowing ash every half mile or so. For an hour we motored through thick smoke and at times passed near enough to feel the flames on our arms and faces and to hear their solid insistent roar as fire consumed miles of papyrus, leaving behind charred white stalks topped with crisp blackened poms. The fires had to be man-made, but they were spread over such a wide area that I couldn’t see how that was possible. Michael suggested someone had tried to burn down a patch for cultivation and things had gotten out of hand, but there was no way of knowing. I counted three crocodile snouts moving from east bank to west to escape the flames, but these were the only signs of life, human or animal, that I could see. Alexandre and I shot roll after roll of the strange inferno.
The barge had been running almost twenty-four hours a day for the first three days. Now as we neared Phom Zeraf, where some of Gabriel Tang’s forces were based, Moses and his crew traded speed for caution. We started dropping anchor for the night, making us prey to the mosquitoes. I slept under a pink bug net I’d purchased in Bor, the top supported by my pack, the bottom anchored by my boots.
With Malakal approaching, the crew and the soldiers prepared for shore leave by taking bucket baths off the open back of the engine room and scrubbing their civilian clothes on the repair platform. I leaned on the railing and watched a JIU man apply more vigor to cleaning a white pair of low-top sneakers than I would apply to the cleaning of a wound. For a platoon stationed on the outskirts of Bor, Malakal was the big time. We now shared the river with a growing number of boats, long steel launches porting people and animals and sugarcane and flour up and down the river. We passed groups of SPLA men bathing in the Nile outside a base south of town, followed by the colonial-era promenade with its tall trees and its World War I memorial and the stately buildings where the administrators from London and Cairo once sat. Dozens of steamers, two- and three-story passenger boats that had plied the route between Juba and the northern city of Kosti, now sat low in the water, rotting through rusted hulls. Civil war had ended the age of steamers and economics would ensure it never came back.
We berthed at Malakal’s long river port and waited on the barge for an hour while Moses announced himself to the authorities. Then we were released. With little ceremony, I gave Moses my last bottle of Johnnie Walker and a box of doxycycline and took my leave. Alexandre planned to stay for the ride down the Sobat; I left him with one of the Nalgene bottles, some packets of mosquito repellent and Schon’s foam sleeping mat. I shook hands with the crewmen and the soldiers from the JIU, left my business card with Michael, strapped on my bags and walked down the wooden gangplank.
For the first time in many weeks, I felt I was on something like familiar ground. Malakal was just four hundred miles from Khartoum and I breathed easy at the sight of the traders and shopkeepers in their jallabiyas, and at the Ottoman mosque and the dusty town square behind it. The city’s Arab character meant development; it meant consumer products; it meant the possibility of comfort. The old historians and geographers say that Africa begins at Malakal, but that’s only if you’re traveling upriver, from Cairo and Khartoum. I, coming downriver, in the opposite direction, felt the waning of Africa and the beginning of Arabia. “To the north lie the Sahel and the desert, Arab and Muslim,” the historian Robert Collins wrote. “To the south sprawl the Sudd, the Nilotic plain, and the Lake Plateau of Africans with different cultures, languages and religions. Like any border town, Malakal belongs to neither world, absorbing some of the best and most of the worst of each.” In addition to the Dinka and the Nuer, another tribe was prominent in Malakal: the Shilluk. The Shilluk nation had been a major force on the Nile for four hundred years before its borders were pared by Turkish-Egyptian and then British forces until it was finally absorbed into colonial Sudan. Where the Nuer lacked a centralized political authority and the Dinka’s traditional power structures were almost equally horizontal, the Shilluk had long possessed their own kingdom; they still had a nominal king, known as the reth, who continued to carry symbolic weight.
Like Juba, Malakal had been squarely in northern hands during the war. It was now part of the autonomous south, but Khartoum’s influence remained strong. Thanks to a power-sharing provision in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the governor was a member of the Islamist-led National Congress Party, who ruled the north with an iron fist. (The SPLM, in turn, had received several governorships in the north, part of the peace treaty’s emphasis on unity and power-sharing.) A strong Sudanese Armed Forces garrison remained in Malakal, as well as military intelligence units that operated out of sight.
Malakal straddled many lines—between Africa and Arabia, between the competing tribes of the Upper Nile region—in all kinds of interesting and dangerous ways, but in those first hours, as I walked through the port gates onto the main drag to wait for Jeremiah, I allowed myself to believe that I had left an area of potential chaos and bloodshed and was entering one of order. In Malakal, I was sure, it wouldn’t take a .50-caliber machine gun to make me feel safe.
I sat on the steps under one of Shilluk Avenue’s covered sidewalks and watched the mashup of north and south: the Arab merchants in their jallabiyas moving among the old Shilluk men with their customary pink tunics tied at the shoulder over collared shirts and cotton slacks, their brows dotted with a row of black pill-sized ritual scars, the local women in their gauzy, multihued wraps. This was the old town’s financial hub—just far enough from the Nile to escape flooding, but sufficiently close to the river port and the customs house for businessmen to keep an eye on their stock. Two-and three-story cement buildings lined the avenue for fifty yards, the upper stories jutting out and shading the street below. Arab and a smattering of Darfuri traders—black Muslims from Darfur—sat fanning themselves in the dim recesses of the dry goods stores, while younger African shopboys worked the wooden counters, weighing out portions of dried lentils, garlic and beans and wrapping bundles of tomatoes and onions in faded Arabic newsprint.
Farther inland, past the mosque, came the homes of the well-to-do, where many of the aid groups kept their offices. These were stucco and concrete-block homes with corrugated steel roofs, sporadic municipal water, barred windows and high walls. After that came the poorer suburbs, where Malakal’s different tribes clustered in segregated districts fronted by muddy yards, stray chickens, rooting children and blowing trash.
Bor had hummed to the local, Malakal sang the cosmopolitan. I bought a bottle of water and scanned the window of a pharmacist’s shop, taking in the old-fashioned safety razors, the teething ointment and the skin-whitening creams—Fair & Lovely, Skin Success, Bio Claire.
A slim man of middle height approached and presented his hand without smiling: “Jeremiah. I hope your trip was comfortable.” His large serious eyes were framed by small ears, sharp cheekbones and a high unscarred forehead.
I suppressed the urge to effuse and said, soberly, “Very good to meet you. How is everything?”
“Things are good, thank God. Would you like to see your accommodation?”
We had a tug-of-war over the bags, which I barely won, and we set off with me carrying the rucksack and the tent and Jeremiah toting the raid pack, a small crucifix swinging on its chain as he walked. We took a broad side street past the mosque and moved deeper into the town to a white-walled compound. I followed him in through the gate, past the main residence and into a large outbuilding, where a screened-in porch led to two doors. Jeremiah opened one and pointed me into a ten-by-ten room with two beds, a small barred window and two yellow lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling.
“It’s great,” I said. “How much?”
“I told you,” he replied. “There is no charge.”
“You know the owner?”
“I am the owner.”
Jeremiah had inherited the property, and it would have made a fine home for him and his wife and daughter. The compound was a fifteen-minute walk from his office at an international aid organization, and it was close to Malakal’s shopping district and to the hospital. Instead, he chose to live outside town, a thirty- minute bicycle ride during the dry season, a ninety-minute walk during the wet. Why?
“When you live away from the city your relatives have to make an effort to visit,” he said. “Therefore they don’t. If I lived here you would not have room to walk for all my relations. They would want to be fed and they would never leave and I would be responsible to them. This is the African way. It’s like quicksand.” Instead, Jeremiah, a Christian, let an Islamic charity use the main house as its regional office, preferring their humble rent payments over those wealthier tenants who might be harder on the property. Jeremiah’s uncle acted as a caretaker and took in boarders who slept in my room and in beds on the screened porch.
“Is anyone else staying here?” I asked, dropping my bags on one of the beds.
“He will sleep outside while you are here. He doesn’t mind,” Jeremiah said. “Let me show you where to eat.”
“This is your first time in Sudan?” he asked as we sat down at a dirt-floored restaurant to lamb kebabs and rounds of bread served on greasy metal plates with hunks of raw onion on the side.
“It’s my first time in the south,” I said, crumbling a clump of salt over my kebab. “I spent about a month in Darfur in February.”
“Darfur,” he said, shaking his head. “Let me ask you. Where was all this attention when we were being killed? Three million died. Where was the uproar? And Palestine. What is it about Palestine? A chicken is stolen in Palestine and the whole world hears of it. That is why I’m helping you. So maybe people can hear about this place.”
According to Jeremiah, the war wasn’t quite over in these parts—the trouble in Phom Zeraf had actually taken up residence in Malakal. A main provision of the peace treaty stated that there would be only two armies in Sudan’s new Government of National Unity. Fighters in the various southern militias, most of whom had been aligned with Khartoum, would have to either join the SPLA or move north to join the Sudanese Armed Forces. Most of Gabriel Tang’s men had chosen the southern army, but he and a few hundred holdouts refused to go along. “He wants to be commissioner at Phom Zeraf and at the same time to remain a major general in the SAF,” Jeremiah said. The southern government had rejected such a deal and instead named one of Tang’s former lieutenants, John Malwit, as commissioner. Despite this appointment, Malwit, who had a reputation for corruption, couldn’t actually set foot in his district under threat of death from Tang’s forces.
So Malwit sat in exile in Malakal, protected by the SPLA, and Tang, his nemesis, also sat in Malakal, protected by the local Sudanese Armed Forces garrison. There were a dangerous number of armed groups bivouacked in the town: the SAF, which had yet to withdraw to the north, as per the peace treaty; units of the SPLA; a JIU, divided like most JIUs; and Nuer and Muerle tribal militias that had been ordered to assemble in and around the city to prevent them from terrorizing the countryside while the authorities figured out how they might be absorbed or peacefully disarmed. All these forces were monitored by a contingent of Indian peacekeepers, a corps of military observers from a dozen countries and by political officers at the local United Nations mission. It made for a potentially toxic brew. Aid workers were getting robbed at night, and minor barroom dustups threatened to become major battles because every aggrieved illiterate drunk had an army to back him up.
I walked to the town’s four corners, rounding past the large SAF army base and then the SPLA camp on the Nile south of town and tried to make friends at the local United Nations office. I was alone for the first time in my journey, and Jeremiah, a hardworking family man, was seldom around.
There was much to see and learn in Malakal, but I could feel time was running out. My blue south Sudan travel pass was about to expire, and this preyed on my mind. The Sudanese visa in my passport, which was supposed to cover the entire country, still restricted me to Khartoum. I would be forced to make a choice once the travel pass ran out: attempt a run from Malakal to the capital and plead with the authorities to let me continue my journey (at the risk of being deported for violating the restriction in the first place), or withdraw to Cairo and try there for a new, clean, unrestricted visa. Both options were lousy. If I sprinted to Khartoum I would have to bypass the villages of Melut and Paloich in the contested oil areas of Upper Nile. Thousands of people in that region had been forced out of their villages at gunpoint during the civil war to make way for oil development, and there were rumors that such displacements were continuing. In February 2006, eight months before my arrival in Malakal, an acquaintance of mine was driving past a familiar village in the Thar Jath region of Unity state when she noticed something strange. “There was no village,” she told me, “only a wellhead.” Eight hundred people had been forced to move to a swamp without compensation. The order came from their governor, an SPLM appointee who nevertheless was apparently under the sway of oil interests. I needed to see the oil areas, but they weren’t the place to be caught packing a bad visa. If I withdrew to directly Cairo, however, there was always the chance the Sudanese authorities wouldn’t allow me back in.
I was mulling my predicament at the humanitarian community’s weekly happy hour when I met Ana, a Portuguese doctor with a European aid group. They were trying to stanch a cholera outbreak at a militia camp an hour upriver. Would I like to join? The next morning I met the team—Ana, a French logistician, a French nurse and four Sudanese staff—at a spot on the river not far from the governor’s mansion, where I helped transfer a hundred boxes of Ringer’s lactate, an intravenous solution, from the back of a truck to a forty-foot metal launch. To this was added a big blue picnic cooler with a padlocked chain wrapped around it. “What’s that, medication?” I asked.
“It’s water,” the logistician said. “They take it all if you don’t lock it up.” He pulled the rip cord on the Yamaha and we moved south on the Nile, weaving through the islands and channels, passing what appeared, in the tiny distance, to be a group of hippopotamuses wallowing in the weeds, the first I’d seen on the Nile.
“This outbreak has been going on for weeks,” Ana said, ducking out of the wind to light a cigarette. “We arrive, we set up our treatment camp and the first days it’s chaos. They want to be paid to bring water from the river. It’s their own soldiers who are sick and they want money to carry water! We hire women to clean the tents and they complain and steal the mops. The supply cabinet is empty. Where did the supplies go? We tell them not to move from this place, but some of them do anyway—they think they can outrun an epidemic—so now there are two camps with cholera instead of one. At the end of the day I say to the colonel in charge, ‘Here is what we have done today, here is what we wish to do, here are the problems. Do you have any questions?’ And he says yes, he has a question: ‘Are you married?’ I say to him that I am a doctor and I am here in a professional capacity and does he have any other questions. And he does: ‘Are you Christian? What are the Christians of Europe doing to help us fight the Muslims?’ ” She rolled her eyes.
“What’s your specialization?” I asked. “Infectious disease?”
“No,” she said, flicking her cigarette into the Nile, “I’m a pulmonologist. I study lung cancer.”
We tied up to a small dock at Kaldak and unloaded the boxes of IV fluid. The camp was home to more than a thousand soldiers, the bulk of Gabriel Tang’s forces, now loyal to the SPLA. The base and the men had been his for at least a decade, but there was no evidence the place had been settled for months, much less years. The soldiers lived on a sandy plain in base shelters of branches and castoff plastic sheeting, and they seemed to possess nothing save weaponry and a few foam mattresses. They all bathed in, shat near and drank from the river. There was a single pit latrine at Kaldak and the French logistician had dug that one himself. The camp commanders spent their days playing cards and drinking tea by the water, sunglasses perched on their noses and swagger sticks at their sides.
The treatment center was made up of four rubbery white tents surrounded by an orange plastic fence. There was a single entrance, marked by a red plastic basin of bleach solution. You walked through the bleach on your way in and again on the way out. Similar basins sat at the entrance to the individual tents. Inside, impossibly tall men lay naked or seminude atop canvas cots, each cot with a hole cut out near the middle. The men took liquid by IV and they voided liquid through those holes into plastic buckets that were then emptied into the bleach-treated latrine. They were gaunt and wasted, their skin gray and cracking—far too exhausted to object when I began shooting pictures.
“They’re really not ready,” Ana said during a cigarette break.
“Ready for what?”
“Anything,” she replied. “It’s like they have power now but they never prepared for it. We were in a meeting with the health minister and we said, you know, the rainy season is coming and so cholera is coming. And he said, ‘Yes, who is going to take the lead on that?’ And we say, it’s you. You are taking the lead. Cholera comes every year.”
The medics spent the afternoon treating their two dozen patients and when it was time to go an officer appeared and asked if Ana would have a look at a soldier who didn’t have cholera but was in a bad way. She draped a stethoscope over her neck and followed him. The boy—he could not have been eighteen—sat lolling alone on the sandy floor of a woven-branch shelter, his face a puffy mask of misery. His flesh was swollen, and it hurt him to move; he hadn’t walked in days. Ana checked his vitals and told the officer she would take him to the hospital in Malakal.
I took one side and a soldier took the other and we walked him to the boat. He was surprisingly heavy and he seemed to be struggling to remain silent as we carried him over the gunwale and set him down on the metal floor. We motored back to Malakal and when I held his arm too tightly on the way to the truck he gave a desolate cry for rescue—rescue from me, rescue from pain—and that was the last I saw of him. Later, during dinner, Ana said he was suffering from edema. “Probably his kidneys have failed,” she said. “Kidney failure here means he will die.”


Malakal owed its largesse to the Nile. The city’s location on a high bank ten miles below the river’s confluence with the Sobat made it an ideal spot for British (and later Egyptian) engineers to track the river’s volume. On the north end of town a complex of weathered buildings marked the Egyptian measuring station, once the city’s true center of power. Its bureaucratic offices and other buildings had dwarfed the British governor’s home during the colonial era. I wanted to see the grandeur for myself, so the next morning I walked through the compound’s rusting gate to what was still, despite the weedy neglect, an elegant old house with a broad front porch. Inside, I introduced myself to one of the surprised engineers and was passed to Mohammed Abdelaziz, the director of the station. I asked if he might give me a tour of the compound and he shook his head. “It is forbidden to speak of the Nile.”
Egypt has for millennia viewed the Nile as its property, and Egyptians have been tracking and manipulating the river since the dawn of civilization. Business cards at the Egyptian ministry of irrigation and water resources sport the motto, “Since 4241 BC,” and they aren’t kidding. The Nile was, truly, a matter of national security.
But forbidden?
“It’s right there,” I said, pointing out the window. A hundred feet away, down a grassy slope and past a vegetable garden tended by a shy-looking Shilluk woman, the Nile was shining like gun-metal. Green patches of hyacinth coasted on its surface.
Abdelaziz, a big meaty man in shirtsleeves and dark slacks, had devoted his life to the Nile; as a member of the world’s oldest bureaucracy, he just wasn’t authorized to share. “I cannot help you,” he said. “You must send fax to Cairo for permission.”
“I’ve been to Cairo. The director promised they’d help and hasn’t returned my calls since.”
Abdelaziz seemed unsurprised. “I am sorry.”
“It’s right there,” I said again.
He made a polite gesture toward the door with his hand. Seething, I followed it out.
Egypt’s long shadow over the Nile dated as far back as its business cards boasted. Egyptian forces had followed it deep into present-day Uganda before the British established their colonies in East Africa, and Cairo’s nineteenth-century wealth was derived in large part on the extraction of slaves and ivory from Sudan. Egyptians still looked at the darker-skinned tribes to their south—Arab and African alike—as their little brothers, rightful subjects to be civilized and exploited. It’s a sentiment that persists in Cairo today: Sudan was Egypt’s property and patrimony, stolen away by British colonialists. Sudan’s independence from Britain was opposed by Egypt on the grounds that Sudan was rightfully hers. The Sudanese civil war had been sparked in part by an Egyptian-backed project, the Jonglei Canal, which would have drained the Sudd marshlands, adding an additional sixteen billion cubic meters of water—enough to irrigate two and a half million acres of Egyptian farmland—to the White Nile’s flow, while draining traditional cattle watering grounds. John Garang’s PhD thesis had argued against the project; the canal was three-quarters completed when he bombed it. The canal remains unfinished, an enduring dream in Cairo and an enduring source of anger in the south.


The next day I sought out one of the main players in another, more immediate controversy. John Malwit, the exiled commissioner of Phom Zeraf, wasn’t home at his compound on the south end of Malakal, so I waited outside with a few of his guards. The young Nuer gunmen received me with suspicion and not a little scorn. “You should get rid of that beard,” one said. “You look like a Muslim. I tell you, whoever puts his head on the floor to pray, that man is a terrorist. He should lose that head.”
“What about the Bor massacre? Wasn’t that terror?” I said. “Who’s killed more south Sudanese, the Arabs or other southerners?”
“That’s tribal,” he said, as his friends nodded. “It’s different. We will handle our tribes. You whites should help us kill the Muslims.” I was about to remind him that his salary, and certainly that of his boss, had been paid by radical Islamists for almost fifteen years. Just then two Land Cruisers rolled up and Malwit himself hustled past, hidden in a cloud of bodyguards carrying AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. A half hour later I was invited in. He was seated in a plastic lawn chair, a tired man in a gray two-piece suit, the pants unhemmed, sandals on his cracked feet, his brow a ripple of scars. A servant brought me a bottle of Sprite.
The dispute with his former commander, Malwit said, was about law and order. “We don’t want the forces of bandits to be in Phom Zeraf. If Gabriel Tang wants to threaten the people with the force of the gun then the law should take its course. He should withdraw his forces to the north or face the consequences.”
Oil companies, including a firm with close ties to a New York businessman, were trying to prospect near Phom Zeraf, using their connections with Tang in an effort to bolster their credibility. “They think Tang can give them the right,” Malwit said. “They want to take out the tusks of the elephant and leave nothing for the people.”
Why, I asked, did Malwit think his nemesis was holding on against the SPLA’s superior numbers? What made it worth Tang’s while? And hadn’t Malwit himself been accused of corruption? He responded by insulting Tang’s manhood. “My brother Tang, he doesn’t know the benefit of a child. So he doesn’t care about the future. Gabriel Tang is a criminal. I am a man of peace. My forces are in Kaldak. I left them to the SPLA. I am not a soldier anymore. I am a commissioner, khalas.”
Khalas: It’s finished, end of story.
But the story of John Malwit and his rival Gabriel Tang was far from over. I met Jeremiah the next day for a lunch of fish soup at a restaurant near my residence. “There was some noise at John Malwit’s home last night,” he said.
“Noise?”
“Thirty men attacked with rifles and RPGs,” Jeremiah said. “Some people were killed, two, I think.”
I pulled a fish bone from my gums and set it on the plastic tablecloth. “Last night?”
“Last night.”
“Tang’s guys?”
“Who else? It is going to become very difficult for us all if he does not leave. Trouble is really in the air.”
I still didn’t see it. If Malakal were in peril, I thought, the threat lay in its deadly torpor, not the raft of gunmen who called it home. Microbes and parasites dogged the place. Nearly every family had someone laid low by malaria. Even the internationals, with their superior drugs, were going down with it. Cholera would return in force with the rainy season, and if the government’s response to the outbreak at Kaldak Camp was any indication, the city would soon be on its knees.


And yet. The south’s dim prospects made the bright spots shine all the more. A dedicated group of energized young comers were waiting their turn to lead. Rebecca Malual was one. “She was a child soldier in the SPLA, lost her husband in the war, founded a women’s NGO and now she’s been appointed to the state legislature representing a district northeast of here,” an acquaintance said. “She’s a little more . . . facile than the average politician.”
Malual was in town and was rumored to be dropping by the United Nations offices. I lurked around the UN complex, a colonial administrative building whose giant yard had been filled with office trailers. Inside the trailers, international civil servants worked to monitor the nutritional intake, medical care, human rights, gender rights, protection of children disarmament of combatants, agricultural challenges and emergency humanitarian needs of several million southern Sudanese. There were the riverine police unit, manned by the Bangladeshi army, and the international police monitors, whose job was to watch and nudge toward justice the local constabulary, and the headquarters of the Indian army protection force.
I was leaning in a doorway outside the human rights office when I spotted a tall, dark-skinned woman, conservatively dressed in a long black skirt and a patterned short-sleeved shirt, her hair pulled back and held by pins. I said, “Excuse me, are you Rebecca?” and she smiled, revealing white teeth with a friendly gap in the front. We agreed to meet in a few hours, after she finished a day of meetings.
We met up in late afternoon and walked about eighty yards from the UN offices to a back alley that opened to a fenced compound. It was made up of several stone-walled buildings with tall straw roofs, the first I had seen. “I just need to stop for a moment. My uncle lives here,” she said, adding, “Not my uncle in the sense of whites. It’s my elders’ house.” She chatted for a few minutes in Arabic and Nuer with some relatives who were sitting outside. As we left the compound I mentioned the impressive stone houses.
“Thank you,” a male cousin said. “They are from the British.”
We walked to Shilluk Avenue, jumping one at a time over a patch of sodden grass, and she flagged down an autorickshaw, a three-wheeled taxi common in South Asia. We banged down the road past the state assembly building, made a right or two at the northern end of town near the airport and continued past the cantonment where the Indian peacekeepers stayed, the road increasingly choppy, the rickshaw pitching and lurching over the ruts. “Now you will see how a member of parliament lives,” she said. We came to a wide field dotted with mud-walled tukuls and turned down a path to a rectangular mud house, about thirty by ten feet. “My aunt stays on that side and this is mine,” she said. “Come in.” It was a tidy little room with a bed, a few chairs and a small wooden table holding books, papers and a Scrabble board.
“Maladroit,” I said, studying the board. “That’s got to be worth some points.”
She laughed and set down her purse. “There’s not much to do in Malakal. I am playing Scrabble with myself.” We carried the chairs outside and Rebecca’s aunt served us warm posho, a cassava porridge with sweetened milk, and then withdrew to her side of the house.
“So,” I asked, as we sat down with a view of the sun setting over the muddy plain, “how do you like politics?”
She blinked, and leaned forward in her chair. “I find it a little bit complicated,” she said at last. “I joined the SPLA in 1985, when I was fourteen years old. I was trained in Cuba for three years. I’ve been in the world of the military and I’ve been in the world of the NGO. The military, it is focused. The NGO is focused. The world of government is broad and vague. With the government, it seems not a lot is accomplished. They want a lot of achievement with less commitment. Each finger points to the other. The attitude is that ‘I am the authority, I am the bull.’ It is not the way to evaluate and focus priorities.
“There are so many things that have gone wrong since the peace agreement was signed,” she continued. “We had high hopes, but it seems like nothing gets done—here and on the national level. The SPLM was supposed to receive the governorship of Upper Nile, but the governor today is from the National Congress. We were to have the mining and oil ministry, but they have that as well. For people like me, of my generation, we are very saddened and confused. We don’t know how these things happened.”
We talked about oil, and the rumors that militias and corrupt local officials were still displacing villagers to make way for oil exploration. There were also reports that county registrars were forging land transfers to help the oil companies. “These cases are difficult to confirm,” she said, “and I myself cannot confirm them. But one thing is clear: The peace agreement will not survive if the theft of our resources continues.”
“Isn’t it a giant step to go back to war? You yourself are a widow,” I said. “Your children are in Nairobi?” She nodded. “It must be hard being away from them.”
“It is,” she said. “My mother cares for them, but it’s difficult. My youngest is still a baby.”
“Ah!” I said. “So you’ve remarried, that’s great.”
She set down her bowl of posho and smoothed her skirt. “I did not remarry,” she said. “He said he was leaving his wife and he didn’t, and I resolved I would not be his second wife, his other wife. So I had the child alone.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Do you know another woman anywhere in your community who has had a child out of wedlock?”
“I am the only one, as far as I know.” It was dark now, and the rickshaw had returned to take me back into town. She seemed relieved at its arrival.
I ignored the driver’s honking. “I mean.” I hesitated. “It’s got to be a scandal—both from the tribal and the Christian perspective.”
“My mother is very unhappy about it,” she said with a small smile. “But you mention the Christian perspective and this is a perspective that I think south Sudan needs. Not in my personal case, but as a society. We have been fighting a Muslim state for so many years. I think we need to be a Christian state. Our constitution should say it.”
I was stunned. “But isn’t that the root of the problem? You put God in government and sooner or later infidels are getting shot. Right? And aren’t Christians outnumbered by followers of traditional religions? Most southerners don’t worship Jesus. Besides,” I said, as she walked me to the rickshaw, “what’s the church going to say about polygamy?”
“That,” she said, laughing, “we will never give up. Even my mother, a strong churchwoman, would never turn against polygamy. It is our culture. You won’t get rid of it in a thousand years.”
The day after I spoke with Rebecca Malual, two SPLA soldiers were killed in a firefight with Gabriel Tang’s gunmen not far from John Malwit’s house, a second attack in just a few days. For the SPLA, after a year of provocations, it was the last straw. Tang had to go. But I wouldn’t be there to see it. I had decided against an illegal run to Khartoum. With my southern Sudan travel pass about to expire, I reluctantly cobbled together a series of flights from Malakal to Juba to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, and then to Cairo, where I hoped to obtain a new visa. Twenty-four hours after I left Malakal, the SPLA attacked Gabriel Tang’s home, killing several of his men and taking control of the residence. Tang took refuge at the Sudanese Armed Forces base, and the city exploded. Nuer militiamen aligned with the SPLA—including some of Tang’s former soldiers from Kaldak—overran the SAF garrison. Hundreds of people were killed during two days of fighting, and the city was terrorized and looted by fighters from both sides before a cease-fire was established more than a week later. Jeremiah fled to safety across the river with his wife and baby. Rebecca Malual spent the battle taking cover. Her elderly aunt was among the many hundreds wounded. Bullets, not microbes, had undone the town after all.