The Black Nile

Chapter SEVEN
After several months and uncountable visits to the Sudanese embassy in Cairo, I was blessed with a new visa, one that would allow me to travel in both the north and south without restrictions. I was uneasy as I packed for my return. I would be alone for the second half of my journey. Schon was back in the piney woods of North Carolina serving drinks. Matthew was in London, grinding out his PhD thesis. And Alexandre was in Cuba shooting photographs. My flight reached the Sudanese capital in time for the biggest khamseen in a decade. A dense static of orange grit came screaming from the desert; it filled the sky and trapped Khartoum’s eight million souls in a suffocating and radiant silica heat. Fine sand infiltrated under the metal balcony door of my room at the tatty Badr Hotel, leaving six-inch dunes at the foot of the bed. Still more blasted in through the plastic vents of the broken wall-mounted air cooler, scourging my eyes, ears, arm-pits and lungs. I had just finished duct-taping a black Hefty bag over the unit when the power went out, killing the fluorescent bulb, the creaky brown ceiling fan and the television. I filled my water bottle from the hot brass bathroom tap and sprinkled it onto the floor to suppress the dust. I dumped another bottle onto my greasy scalp, felt my way to the bed and tried to sleep with a wet undershirt molded over my face.
When the dust cleared in the morning, my new hacking cough and I caught a United Nations flight to Malakal. At last, I was back. I hitched a ride from the airport and jumped off at the outskirts of Shilluk Avenue, the city’s long main street. This sprawling malarial town of mud huts and walled compounds had somehow become my favorite in all Sudan. I wanted to reacquaint myself with it on foot.
A mile into this triumphant march I had sweated dark bands through my tan travel shirt and green construction pants and was lurching with every step under two packs. Cutting three bags down to two was an achievement if you were flying coach to Phoenix, but it didn’t mean dick while trekking in the Sudan. Despite all the lessons of my first three months on the Nile, I was still overweight and understrong. Were all those bungee cords necessary? Was Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem really crying out to come along?
Four flip-flopped boys in rough sweatshirts and wide, frayed dungarees shouted from the road as they bobbed past on a wooden flatbed cart. I took two heavy bounds and jumped on, landing almost neatly on my hip. The gray-patched donkey slowed for a couple paces and then adjusted without protest to its new cargo, yanking us along the slippery road and into Malakal’s late-morning scrum of minibuses, camels, motorcycles, asses and Land Cruisers. “Kef?” I asked, shaking leathery hands all around. They indicated they were very well indeed, riding through the sun in the biggest town for miles, punchy cigarettes cradled in their ebony fingers and gripped in chalk-white teeth. We approached the Ottoman-era mosque and the mudded square of the Jallaba district, Malakal’s merchant center. I mounted the sidewalk with a high step, made way for three tall, gray-haired Shilluk men and ordered a mint tea from the shai lady squatting with her pots by the corner. The mild-mannered crone received my order without looking up, and continued her conversation with two pretty younger women as she poured water from a white plastic jerrican labeled “Carbolic Acid” into a squat tin kettle and fired up the kerosene stove with a piece of straw lit off her cheroot. I took a seat on a low metal stool strung with blue plastic cord and watched as she sprinkled bits of tea, like tiny curled beetles, into a three-inch glass. She reached into a rusted can for two dried sprigs of mint and had shoveled three scoops of sugar into the glass before I snapped out of my reverie and told her that was plenty, thank you. She poured the now boiling water, gave it all a swirl with a pinkie-sized spoon cut from a tin cooking oil container and handed me the drink on an engraved metal serving tray. I was puffing my lips and blowing on the thermonuclear refreshment when a white Nissan Patrol SUV—the kind with air-conditioning, cup-holders and seat belts—braked to a halt in front of me. The passenger-side window slid down with an efficient whirr, and in the shade of the cab I made out the Mongol features and striped Soviet-style commando shirt of the driver, a Kyrgyzstani military observer I’d met in the winter.
“Newsman! You’re back! Where did you go? You missed all the fun.”
I leaned on the passenger door and used the arctic blast inside to cool my tea.
“I told you to stay around,” he said, drumming his hands on the steering wheel. (He hadn’t.) “You missed some real fighting. Real action, SPLA, militia, the SAF, everything, and everyone had a piece of the mess. The Indians finally got to show their tanks! Let me tell you newsman, Upper Nile, south Sudan, these people are f*cked. The town was looted, two, three times, by both sides—both sides. It is everyone for himself here. But it’s better now. More stable. It was a necessary evil, even with three hundred people dead. Yes, you heard two hundred, but I am telling you—it was at least three hundred. This government can’t count money, much less their dead. They only count cows.”
Now, the military observer said, Gabriel Tang and Malakal’s other warlords were out of the picture. Their forces—those that survived the November rout—were still in town but would be absorbed into one of the Joint Integrated Units in a confected demonstration of the new southern unity. (“Unity!” he barked, turning up the AC.) The northern garrisons were preparing to leave and had already begun barging heavy equipment and ammunition north to Khartoum, signs of a historic withdrawal. Soon Malakal would be without Arab troops for the first time since its founding in the nineteenth century. The town was still thick with soldiers, police and militiamen, but the rowdiest elements were now confined to the Sudanese Armed Forces base, and they were no longer allowed to carry their weapons in public. “There you have it,” he said, his blue eyes shifting to the two-way radio as it squawked out an inquiry. “You missed a real party. Who knows? Maybe they party again.” I stepped back from the clean white ride and he raised the window and was gone. I finished my tea and stepped down to the street.
I walked past the mosque and saw that thousands of rough bricks were piled along the north side of the boggy town square. Maybe the struggling city administrators would get the field paved before the rainy season hit its stride in a few weeks. This, I nodded, approving and proprietary, is just the kind of visible public works project Malakal needs. Turning south, I pushed my way into the packed Nile Commercial Bank and waited two hours with thirty other men to change money. It was payday at the United Nations mission and local employees were trying to convert their dollar salaries into new Sudanese pounds. In the south, the Sudanese dinar had given way in my absence to a new model currency. Where the dinar was seen by southerners as an Arab currency, another face of northern oppression (the dinar’s Latin origin, dinare, notwithstanding), the new pound was yet another symbol of the new, peaceful Sudan. These notes were printed in both English and Arabic, and they featured beautiful engravings of flora and fauna from both regions. The ten-pound note was printed in shades of violet and blue, and it paired a Bedouin camel with a longhorned cow; two clasped hands were superimposed over a gnarled but thriving baobab tree. Today, however, the bank was running low on notes of all kinds and the men I’d wedged myself among were beginning to fear they wouldn’t get the cash they needed for rent, medicine, school fees and the dozens of dependent (or freeloading) relatives that each was obligated to support. “Relations are like locusts,” a driver for UNICEF muttered as we rode out the sweaty scrum.
I changed just a hundred dollars, unwilling to dig into my groin pouch for more in front of so many witnesses, and tromped outside. The room I’d mooched from Jeremiah before was now unavailable, but at his recommendation I tried ADRA, the Adventist Development & Relief Agency, headquartered nearby in a walled office compound. Ter Majok, the local head of office, greeted me there with a Thuraya satellite phone on his ear and two Motorola VHF radios at his side. His local mobile phone lay on his desk, struggling for a signal. He was one of hundreds of young rebel fighters who’d migrated from combat duties to relief work during the war, a small elite of educated soldiers. ADRA’s guesthouse across town had a spare bed, Ter confirmed. It was twenty-five dollars a day. There was a kitchen if I wished to cook. He couldn’t guarantee privacy.
South Sudan’s rainy season hadn’t officially begun, but the preseason was in full swing. An overnight downpour had turned much of Malakal into a slush bowl. The wide roads behind Shilluk Avenue had been reduced to a viscous jellied earth. The ditches bloomed an intense green algae and the smaller side lanes hosted fevered schools of minnows. We roared through these streets in Ter’s stripped-down Land Cruiser, racing past family compounds clad in tall reed fencing, riding invisible currents of wet paste. Ter jerked the wheel like a bargeman negotiating a villainous stretch of river while I braced my knees against the peeling dash and squelched the urge to cry out. He charged up one street, only to find a mud sea—complete with a family of Muscovy ducks—blocking the way, and doubled back with a horrible spin, fishtailing 180 degrees to the left and then back to the right to propel us forward across the slime. An old man and a boy crossing the street bounded out of our path, a leap from mud to mud to earth, landing safely on a patch of high ground, clothes and dignity intact. We whipped around another corner, clotted a pair of tethered cows with a coat of finely milled Upper Nile loam, cut across an empty field dotted with a few outbuildings and slurshed to a stop outside the ADRA guesthouse.
The guesthouse compound, one of three on this stretch of road, was fenced in sections of cement and corrugated steel. It was a modern setup: A long cinderblock house with steel roof and barred windows took up the right half of the plot; a cobwebbed kitchen hut sat in the rear left corner, near a shower stall and a black polyurethane water tank. The remaining yard was crossed with clothesline and decorated by a few small flowering bushes and a young papaya tree.
We crossed a ditch on an old plank, stepped through the metal gate and entered a broad main room lined with string beds. Several young ADRA men slept here, a rotating cast waiting for assignments in the hinterlands. (A picture of Christ hung from the wall, one of those compassionate Anglo Jesuses who look like they’re about to kiss the female lead.) Next door were my quarters, a large room with two beds, two windows overlooking the yard and two more that opened into the hall. A ceiling fan was bracketed to a steel beam, and a single fluorescent light fixture was mounted high on the wall. The place looked clean and felt secure. It wasn’t free, but I could cook my own supper and brew my own morning tea. “It’s perfect,” I told Ter Majok.
Crossing the wet road and the drying field to go shopping, I kicked up waves of spooked grasshoppers. Dozens of hawks hovered above in the warm medium blue, each waiting for that one right . . . there.
Everyone, I learned over the next few days, had a different version of the November battle: The SPLA brigadier, a Dinka, downplayed the role of his Nuer militia allies. The Middle Eastern UN security officer couldn’t keep the tribal factions straight. An Indian peacekeeper took credit for the “peaceful resolution.” I had to look hard for evidence of the fighting—scattershot pocks in the walls of some of the better compounds and an occasional crater in the unpaved streets. A damaged tukul could be rebuilt in a matter of days—all one needed was mud and straw. Politically, too, the city seemed well repaired. Gabriel Tang had been hustled onto a plane to Khartoum in the aftermath of the carnage and barred from returning to Malakal. John Malwit had decamped to Phom Zeraf to mismanage as he saw fit.
Still, nearly every aid worker I had known in Malakal, including the team that had taken me to the cholera-stricken militia camp, had been evacuated, and most hadn’t returned. Projects worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—for clinics, roads and agricultural development across Upper Nile state—had been delayed for months or scrapped altogether. The hardy souls from the UN mission, however, had remained through the fighting.
Walking back to the guesthouse early one evening, I came across a broad plain of drying mud, its surface curling in a million places with thin, chipped layers of earth. I took a step and tested. Just as I hoped—a skimcoat of wet dirt hugging a slab of solid firmament. A track of shallow hoofprints seemed to confirm this. Eight confident paces later I plummeted calf-high into a crease of quickmud that filled my left boot and somehow my right shirtsleeve. I pivoted out of the stew, and as I pushed back to the guesthouse it occurred to me that surely the Nilotic tribes must have excelled at the daily challenge of reading mud, generation passing to generation the secret of how to tell an externally dry puddle from one that is truly dry or a genuinely shallow patch of muck from a hidden man-trap.
I knocked on the ADRA gate and saluted the old watchman, made a right into the house and a left into my room and found I had a roommate. He sat on the edge of the opposite bed, barechested in scarlet and cream sweatpants, reading a Bible opened onto his knees. He was smallish, moonfaced and just a bit thickset, with none of the long features of the Nuer, Dinka or Shilluks whose tribes converged on Malakal. The Bible pose gave the man the look of a ten-year-old Sunday schooler, despite the peppering of moles across his cheeks, brow and chest.
We shook hands. “Ah—so we are staying here together. I am John. John Ivo Mounto.” His English was lightly accented, and delivered with a humbleness that verged on apology. “I am from Maban, to the east, near Ethiopia. That is my home place, but I am living now in Nebraska with my wife and my daughter. The government have asked me back to Maban to make an investigation of the conditions. There has been trouble. Babalala Marsell, the commissioner, was killed in Maban by unknown people, ambushed with panga at night. They asked me to report what is going on there.”
The American Midwest was a popular destination for southern Sudanese refugees, thanks to the work of Lutheran missionaries. Tens of thousands of southerners had relocated there; very few ever returned. “You came all the way from Nebraska to investigate a murder?” I asked.
“Not that, no,” he said. “It is the county, the villages—they wanted to know what is going on now with the present commissioner, the man who replaced Marsell. I am well-known there. I was the first man to rebel against government troops in Maban, in 1984. I was a catechist. They arrested me more than three times for teaching Christians. They wanted everyone to be a Muslim, and I can’t accept that, so I joined SPLA.” With those credentials—the first man in Maban to take up arms against the Islamists—John Ivo had set his sights on taking control of his hometown. “Now I am contesting for commissioner,” he said. “The present commissioner, Ali Kata Oshi, is not cooperating with the community. He is not well-known. He is a Muslim pretending to be Christian. They are accusing him of cooperating with Dawa Islamiya.”
I had been advised by a contact of mine to see Ali Kata Oshi if I made it into the oil areas north of Malakal. Now John Ivo was linking him to Dawa Islamiya, a radical Islamic charity that had a reputation during the war for abducting African boys from the streets of government-held towns and forcing them to adopt Muslim identities.
“It is an Islamic program for non-Muslims,” John Ivo said of the charity. “In Maban they give the people basic assistance, while there is a political program underground. They are giving clothing, giving food money and then opening Koranic schools.”
In Maban, he said, “there are no services or facilities. They live off tree roots for medicine. In some areas people have to go seven or eight hours to find water. Since the peace treaty, nothing has changed. The Arab army is still there. Everything is controlled by those in Khartoum. They took the shingles off the school and used them to cover their bunkers. They left land mines everywhere. People don’t know if there is peace because they have seen no changes.”
I’d heard these complaints since I first crossed into Sudan in the fall. The people—largely uneducated tribesmen, bludgeoned by thirty years of war and dislocation—wanted a peace dividend, and they wanted it now. They knew there was oil, and they knew someone was selling it. Their leaders, most of them uneducated rebel officers, were struggling to govern. “Can it be true that nothing’s different?” I asked. “The peace treaty may have taken people from zero to one, but that’s still something, isn’t it? You’re telling me that one year into this, there are no schools, nothing?”
He listened with patience. “There is a small primary school near Jamam,” he said. “It has two teachers, both Koran teachers, not qualified teachers. I asked why. They said, ‘It is not a government school. If the government wants English, it should build its own.’ This school is Arabic and Koran. It had almost fifty students. It is true what you say—times have changed, and they cannot force you now in the way they used to. Now, they will come to you as a father—‘We will bring you this and this. We can give you this and we want your kids to enroll in a religious school.’ They teach them just the basics of Koran. Then those kids are to bring the others.”
Still, he said, “In some ways it seems like it’s better than before. Before, we couldn’t have evening prayers. Because the Christian prayers start with a drum and they said, ‘We don’t want to hear your drums.’ ”
We’d been standing for fifteen minutes, just inches apart—my interrogation had started the moment we shook hands—and realizing this, I slipped off my canvas tote bag and sat on my bed. The power was still on and the metal ceiling fan pushed the moist air around like it was a new element. John Ivo said he’d been in Malakal for six months waiting to see if the authorities in Juba would name him commissioner of Maban county.
“John,” I said, “is oil an issue in Maban? I’m heading to Melut and Paloich after I leave Malakal.” Thar Jath wasn’t the only southern locality to fall in the name of petroleum. The region between Malakal and Renk, on the north-south border, was full of such stories. Maban and Melut counties alone had lost more than fifteen thousand people during the war. The oil fields where they once lived were controlled by Petrodar, a consortium dominated by the state oil companies of Malaysia and China.
John Ivo looked down at the bed and closed the Bible. “The population knows nothing about oil. They don’t allow people to enter the oil areas. I went to the oil management in Maban. I sat in the manager’s office. He said, ‘We are ready to help. We are ready to do some schools.’ He was just talking. In the oil areas, people are arrested and never seen again. Their Arabic is poor, so the local people don’t get jobs. The companies hire people from the north—they are trusted. You say you want to go to Paloich. That is not my place, but let me tell you this: Paloich is now called Falluja—that is the name the Arabs gave it.”
I asked John to tell me what it was like flying into a peaceful Sudan, one where southerners held high offices in Khartoum. Had he reunited with long-lost relatives after twenty years away? But he avoided the personal and pulled the conversation back to his fact-finding mission. With some seed money from the U.S. Agency for International Development, he’d organized a conference in Maban of local legislators and tribal elders to assess the community’s needs and priorities. It was the kind of grassroots work that was just now beginning in much of the south, remarkable only because it hadn’t ever happened before. Still, he said, Ali Kata had tried to shut it down.
“The commissioner heard about this conference and came back from Khartoum and Renk. He said, ‘On whose authority are you here?’ He said, ‘This conference is not going to take place.’ He left, went to Renk and sent a deputy down to declare the conference canceled. I said, ‘If you want to cancel it, call Juba or call the governor of Upper Nile.’ Instead, he sent a colonel from the SAF, Khartoum’s army, to cancel us. He came at night, before it was to begin. I told this colonel, ‘I cannot cancel this conference. Tell the commissioner I am holding this conference.’
“So the conference began and the commissioner appeared on its second day with fifty militia. The leader had a rank of captain. The SPLA stopped them at the gate and told them to lay down arms. They refused. It got heated. I am back in Maban, and again I am facing these guns. Finally the elders spoke to the commissioner and he agreed and came to join the conference. He came in and he’s just sitting there, uncomfortable. I said to him, ‘I’m not coming here to create a problem, I am coming here for peace, to tell people about the peace agreement and what the peace agreement wants us to do.’ I have a right to do this. I am not a foreigner—everyone knows me. I am the first man to fire a bullet in this town.”


The next afternoon I was sipping tea on the sidewalk in the Jallaba district when a white Toyota pickup stopped in front of me. I was on my third cup, waiting for a man who had said he could get me an appointment with the Shilluk reth, the king of the Shilluk tribe. It was a lark, but an interesting one. The reth’s influence had eroded during the civil war, but it wasn’t every day one had the chance to meet a king. Only I didn’t get to meet the king. The three men piled out of the pickup and stood around me and asked for my passport. “Who are you?” I asked. They were intelligence, they said, and they wanted me to come with them. All three were Arabs. None were armed.
“But how do I know you are intelligence?”
Because we are. You are to come with us.
“I will show you my identification,” I said, “but I’m not going anywhere until you show me yours.” I handed them my passport and my Sudanese press card, issued the week before in Khartoum. They seemed relieved to see that. Still they insisted I join them. I insisted I would not. I’d been bantering with a pair of men on the sidewalk; they had faded away. The small crowd of onlookers stayed small. Some grew bored and left as newcomers lingered to watch the standoff between the hairy khawaja and the Man.
“Are you Christian? I am Christian too,” the mustached operative said. “It is all right. You can come with us. It is just two minutes.” None had an ID card. None had ever been asked for an ID card. They were perturbed by the request. “We are not police,” one pointed out.
I tried to stay breezy in my tone, but adrenaline was seeping into my blood along with, just maybe, a little white American dudgeon. “Come on,” I said. “Be professional.” Then I ordered another tea. They conferred in Arabic and one left on foot while the other two stayed with me and their Toyota. I told them about my Nile trip. This pleased them as much as my refusal vexed them.
In time their supervisor appeared, hot and angry. He shoved his Arabic-language ID into my face, like a cop when you demand his badge number, and jerked it back when I tried to hold and actually read the plastic card. He was shaking as he ordered me into the pickup. Just a year ago, no one would have dared mock the orders of a security man. I acquiesced and stepped into the bed of the Toyota. The mustached one said, “No, Daniel, you ride in the front with me.”
“I’m happy in the back,” I said.
He gave me a look that said, Cut the shit, and I got into the front and we drove off. The others were left to walk back to headquarters, or maybe to graft a free taxi ride. We made two right turns behind the mosque and stopped outside a butcher shop, where coarse cuts of goat and cow hung by steel hooks in a haze of blackfly. “Daniel, I’ll be right back,” he said. “One minute.”
I leaned out the window and looked at the donkey carts and the shoppers and considered stepping out and walking away. Two small boys approached, maybe ten or eleven years old, in thin white school shirts and tan shorts. They wanted money, they said, speaking something that wasn’t Arabic and wasn’t English. I told them I didn’t have any. The taller of the boys tapped my platinum wedding band. This was his proof that I had money. He was himself wearing a gold necklace, and this I reached out and pinched between my thumb and forefinger to show that he too had money. It dissolved like a dry leaf and the remainder slid down his small chest into the dirt. He looked at me, his eyes wide. I was mute. Money! I thought. I must give him money. As I reached into my pocket for a small bill, the operative returned, dropped a side of lamb into the back, jumped into the cab and roared us away. Wait! I said. Wait! I pointed dumbly at the boys, growing smaller. He drove on and they disappeared.
We regained Shilluk Avenue on the south end of town and turned onto a wooded brick drive that led to a large colonial bungalow that overlooked the Nile. Tall antennae waved in the breeze. I was led to a chair on the porch, where two older men joined us and began gently to ask just what I was doing in their town. A tall, neat-looking man with a Glock on his hip stood farther back. They all nodded abstractly as I described my journey but sharpened when I mentioned the reth. “What is your interest in the Shilluk nation?” one said, wary of outsiders meddling in Malakal’s delicate tribal balance.
I don’t know anything about the Shilluk, I admitted. I just thought it would be interesting to meet their leader. They were satisfied in less time than it took to finish the chilled mango juice one of the underlings had brought me. Did I wish to stay for tea? Very kind of you, I said, but I must be going. But let me ask: Do you arrest many people in Malakal? The gentler of the men, cool in his gray safari suit, gave a small smile. “Not anymore,” he said. “But in the old days—that was something different.” We shook hands, and I slowly walked down the porch steps, across the brick driveway and back into daylight. An hour later I found my contact. The reth wasn’t even in Malakal. He was downriver in Pachodo, his traditional seat of power, on the western bank, out of my reach.
That night, back at the ADRA guesthouse, I asked John Ivo to tell me more about his journey from Maban to Nebraska.
“I joined the SPLA in 1984. I was a government wildlife officer. I recruited some young men. After nine months of training in Ethiopia, we came back as the Maban Battalion. We attacked Maban for two days from south of the Yarbus River, our first battle. We fired mortars into the town, 100-millimeter. We fought until 1989, when I was transferred to Torit in the south for military and civil administration training. Then Lam Akol and Riek split the SPLA. Then I was arrested.”
In 1991 Lam Akol, a Shilluk, and Riek Machar, a Nuer, tried to unseat John Garang as leader of the SPLA, igniting a civil war within Sudan’s civil war. Backed by arms and air power cynically provided by Khartoum, they pounded John Garang’s Dinka-dominated forces and sacked Bor in the Dinka heartland. As a native of Upper Nile, where the breakaway faction was strongest, John Ivo’s Dinka superiors would have viewed him, a member of the tiny Maban tribe, with paranoid suspicion during those years of panic and retreat. “For eighteen months they kept me in an underground jail. First, they tortured me. They put us in the generator building of a Catholic school in Torit. We were nine officers. They took us out one by one, kicking, beating—they tie your back, asking why you did this, have you been sent on a mission? One day they took me as a ringleader because I speak different dialects, more than five languages. They accused me of coming to recruit people against SPLA. I said I cannot do that—it is my cause also. Then I was transferred to the Nimule jail. There were fifty-one in the jail there, under the ground, with no light, almost no water to drink or for washing. Nine died from disease. The humanitarians knew there was a jail, but they didn’t know where. The guards would put a tarp over the door and play dominos during the day. Finally someone escaped to Adjumani when they brought him up for interrogation. He told the humanitarians, ‘Look for where the soldiers are playing dominos.’ After three days of negotiations with the Red Cross, the jail was opened at nine-thirty in the morning. When you come out, it makes you dizzy. It’s like the trees are moving. You have to sit down. It was December 1992, before Christmas. I spent three months in Kampala for treatment. Some of us, they lost their minds. The SPLA asked me to come back and fight in Blue Nile, but I said no, and I went to United States as a refugee. I lost a lot. I had three wives, but they were married to my uncle and to my brothers after the funeral rites. Everyone thought I was dead. I had six children—they are with those other families now. In Kampala I met a woman from Equatoria, from the Bari tribe, and we started a relationship. We got married in America and attended the college at University of South Dakota at Vermillion. She is a registered nurse.” I tried imagining John Ivo’s first exposure to the Great Plains winter, to the bleak flatness of Vermillion. To fat healthy cows that nobody fought over. To Kroger. “What did you study there?” I asked.
“I took up military science,” he said.
My mouth, jaw and eyebrows had begun to ache from grimacing through his story. This last bit liberated my face—it slackened in disbelief. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re held in an underground jail, accused as a traitor, tortured by your own guys, you lose your wives and children, you see men go mad and die in the dark, and the first college classes you take in America are military, what, military science? Did you really still want to return to fight for these same people?”
He looked at the window and the cooling light. “I dismissed this in my heart,” he said. “They did not know what they were doing. It was a tribalistic thing. It was the way of our leader, the late Dr. John Garang. The first priority was Dinka Bor, then Dinka Bahr al Ghazal. They dominated the promotions and training. It was a time of communist ideas and all the young Dinka were being sent to Cuba. They didn’t know.”
This ability to let bygones be bygones was, to me, one of the strangest features of Sudanese politics. Riek Machar was loathed by many Dinka for his role in the Bor massacre, but he was also at that moment vice president of the autonomous Government of South Sudan—Salva Kiir’s number two and chief mediator of the peace talks between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army. Lam Akol, meanwhile, was serving as Sudan’s foreign minister, a plum job that he used to defend Khartoum’s conduct in Darfur, even as his southern comrades condemned it. (The consensus among southern politicians was that it was better to have Lam shilling for the Arabs abroad than making trouble in the south.)
What chance did ideology have in this world of shifting alliances and situational ethics? Garang had been a Marxist when Marxist states like Ethiopia and Cuba were paying his freight. Later—or even simultaneously—he was a pro-Western reformer backed by a network of American church groups. “I’ve heard him argue persuasively for southern independence and I’ve heard him argue just as persuasively for the unity of Sudan, both within the space of a year,” a United Nations relief official in Malakal told me. Whatever worked.
I spent most of the next day waiting out the rain when John arrived and lit up the room with a bottle of Ethiopian ouzo. “You are a man of influence,” I cheered, and seized the bottle while he left to rescue two glasses from the kitchen. The label had Amharic script running along the top, white on blue, over an engraving of a tall stag with long barnacled antlers. The bottom read, “Distilled and bottled by Sylvana Testa & Sons Liquor and Soft Drinks Factory, Addis Ababa.” It was the coolest thing I’d seen since sipping tea in northern Uganda from red Coca-Cola mugs that read “Vladivostok Bottling Co.”
We each drank a healthy glassful, John sitting at the edge of his bed, me sitting cross-legged against the wall in mine. He was hunched slightly forward, his body sinking into the mattress. I didn’t know how he dressed in Omaha, but in Malakal there was nothing in his bearing or possessions to suggest someone who had spent ten years in the United States. His primary piece of luggage was a knee-high polyfiber bag with a tin zipper and two narrow looped handles. A picture of the New York skyline, complete with Twin Towers, was screened on one side; the Paris skyline decorated the other. His briefcase was a hardshell Samsonite knockoff, his shirts and slacks and tracksuits all appeared to have been bought on the local market and his shortwave radio was a Chinese no-brand. The candle on my bedside table (mine because John insisted I take it) threw a small yellow light on his face and cast a large, lumpy shadow on the pale wall behind. The lumpy beast gestured with soft fins as John Ivo spoke of the gulf between Maban and Nebraska. “Little Telly—she doesn’t understand where I am, or why I am here,” he said. “I try to tell her I am helping our people.”
Late that night, well into sleep, came real reason to celebrate. John’s mobile phone rang—a special occasion in itself, considering the overwhelmed network—with word that a political caucus in Juba had named him the new commissioner of Maban county. Hours earlier we’d been talking about what it would mean for him, leaving his family, his seven-year-old daughter, struggling to bring up his native place. He would visit the United States but twice a year. There was no chance that his wife would relocate to Nairobi, much less Maban. The commissioner’s pay was about $3,000 a month, much more than he made as a hospital translator in Omaha—and tax-free, I noted, which got a rare laugh out of him. Now it was all real. He asked his friend to double-check and the man called back, confirming it. John spent the night pacing the compound, listening to the radio and drinking ouzo. Twenty-three years after leaving Maban and joining the rebels, he would return as head man. As I drifted off, I thought I heard him breaking the news to his wife. The celebration had left his voice.
That morning, I asked if as commissioner he would get a swagger stick like the generals carry. “All those who joined with me, they are major generals,” he said. “For me, they said, ‘You have been away.’ So I will be a brigadier.” It’s all based on time served? “Yes,” he said, “that and favors. If your friend is in power you get promoted. It is meaningless.” I was pouring myself the dregs of the prior day’s tea while John got dressed. No gaily patterned shirts today. It was a black African-style safari suit. “I will go to see the governor.”
It threatened rain all that afternoon, low clouds in bands of dark and less dark, giving over to short spells of drizzle. The later sun burned hot, drying the roads a bit, before the sky opened up for real and the city reverted to muck. Maybe, I thought, I could salvage the evening by catching a ride to the UN mission’s weekly happy hour at their camp near the airport.
I left the compound after an attempt at cleaning myself up, my old Nikon and a rain jacket stuffed in a tote bag. In the field directly across the road a European man in long denim cutoffs and a green T-shirt was walking casually toward a cement-block shed, a pail slung over his shoulder. I put two and two together and figured he was an aid worker and that I might get a ride with him. But two and two didn’t equal beer; it equaled Jesus. Simon and his wife, from Holland, six Egyptians and a pair of Sudanese had come down from Cairo to celebrate the way of Christ. They had flown to Khartoum and traveled by bus to Renk, Melut and now Malakal, making their way south by the route I would soon be taking north. That very day, he said, they had visited Malakal’s prison to lift the spirits of the detainees. They had sung songs.
“You sang hymns? In what language?”
“Not hymns,” he said. “We are not evangelizing. Not at all.” The prisoners, he said, sang in their own language and the visitors strummed along. I couldn’t right then think of a more abject misery than life in a southern Sudanese prison. A group of foreign visitors strumming their guitars to my native tunes would at least break up the day. Simon introduced me around. There were two Egyptian girls named Dina, a southern Sudanese refugee who lived in Cairo, a young Egyptian man and Simon’s wife. The rest were asleep in the metal-roofed shed. Simon was tall and very thin, with close-cropped hair and a spare goatee. The girls looked like upper-middle-class daughters of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, with shiny black shoulder-length hair and snug blue jeans. Were they Copts? Simon eluded the question. The Dinas pretended they didn’t know English and looked with suspicion at my hair and beard and the dirty cuffs on my slacks. It was curious. I had planned my trip for months—read books, purchased equipment, taken out insurance, struggled for visas and permits, and here this group had simply hitched themselves to the Spirit and cantered into town with nothing more in mind than making people feel good.
I chatted with Simon until the gorgeous dusk—cloudy, backlit by the low moon—switched itself off, and then picked my way west to the UN headquarters, where by now everyone had left for the night. I turned and walked back to the guesthouse, mudding my boots on the way.
The power was out at ADRA, the room quite warm. I lit the candle nub, drank the remains of my ouzo from the night before, polished off the last of my ginger cookies and sat listening to John’s shortwave. Pushing the dial down into a valley between the other-worldly squeaks and whines, something truly exotic—an American Bible program—came into the clear. I leaned toward the sound, and in the dull planar tones of another universe, a midwestern woman was asking the host if the prophetic impulse wasn’t an aspect of the Holy Ghost and, if so, how then could each person have it? How indeed? The journey so far had shown my prophetic gifts to be nil. After several days of lumbering alone through Malakal I feared I was losing track.
No one in the United States cared about a months-old spell of terror and death in south Sudan. They barely cared about Darfur, and Darfur was the rage. I needed a thread that would take me from Malakal to the oil areas, a thread to connect this stop to the next and the one after that. I needed for something to happen and I feared I might plod through the next two thousand miles as I had plodded through Malakal that day, without luck and without connection. “You make your luck,” I said to myself. It was a rebuke: Today I hadn’t made any. Would I snap out of it? So far, the Holy Ghost hadn’t given any sign. I switched off the radio, blew out the candle and fell to sleep.
John came back sometime in the night and in my slumber I could hear him laughing with others in the courtyard, their celebration punctuated by a series of pops and bangs. I could understand his joy, but this—fireworks, at this hour!—was too much. In my annoyed slumbering fog I in time noticed that the fireworks were happening in many places at once, not just in our courtyard. And they weren’t fireworks.
Gunfire was popping outside our gate, near the Sudanese Armed Forces barracks up the road, and, it seemed, everywhere else.
I sat up on the edge of the bed. You should be on the floor, I said to myself, and sat there some more as my ears trained to bursts of automatic gunfire, some close and some very close, and to the creepy skin-crawling sound of ululating men running by. I got down and squatted on the cement floor and pulled my flashlight from under the mattress. Where was cover? To the left were windows into the courtyard. To the right, the bedroom door of thin sheet metal, followed by the wide hall and a steel door to the back walk. Safest, I thought, to take a piss. The outhouse at the end of the walk was windowless cinderblock and would give me full cover and time to clear my head. I dashed out, took a long one and tried to think. Would they come over the wall? They were coming over the wall. What would I do? They would kill me no matter what I did. I didn’t want to die in the toilet, cowering over a shitty hole in the ground. I left the outhouse in a low crouch and against all sense I pressed my eye to a small hole low on the fence to see three shirtless men sprinting in the mud past the compound, rifles in hand. One appeared barefoot. All they had to do was leap over the drainage ditch that separated us from the road. One warrior, his spiderweb-scarred chest clear for a second in the moonlight, seemed to look directly at me. He made the sound, the same creepy war call, and I pulled my head away and duckwalked back into the house.
John, Ter Majok and the other ADRA boys were sitting in the dark living room. What the f*ck is going on? “They are shooting,” someone said. Who? “Militia. It was a shootout with police.” Outside was well lit—a full moon and low clouds alive with horizontal tendrils of lightning.
“I saw it driving here,” Majok said. “Two cars, a joint patrol, were heading to the SAF barracks when paw-paw-paw-paw! You see?” he said to James, another ADRA man. “I was right to change my route. We could have been in the middle. I came a different way.” Apparently, a police patrol had come across some of Gabriel Tang’s fighters walking armed outside the SAF base. The gunfight erupted when they refused to lay down arms. Even in his absence, Tang was toxic to the city’s peace.
Everyone was reclined on lawn chairs or on string beds listening to the gunshots advance like a rippling breeze over the town. I sat on the floor in the corner, keeping my head below the windowsills. After fifteen or twenty minutes, Ter went outside to peek over the fence. “They are moving,” he whispered. After more waiting they opened the gate a foot and he peered out into the street. He gave a quiet order and they threw the gate wide while he sprinted to his abandoned Land Cruiser, cut the machine a hard ninety degrees and drove it into the compound. I heard bursts of AK-47 fire. I heard the single pop-pops of handguns and I heard the whooom of rifle rounds passing close, very close by, parting the air and sound itself like they were flesh. I went back to my room and sat on the floor in the corner. I ran my thumb along my sternum and ribs and thought about how fragile this body is in the face of physics, of that single round during the November fighting that had passed through two metal fences, a trailer wall, and ended up in a friend’s filing cabinet, a pristine pointed stray that just ran out of momentum.
John poured some ouzo and drank deep. Then he walked into the dark kitchen, probably the safest room save the toilet, and sat there on a lawn chair in gloomy darkness, surely thinking of Nebraska and seven-year-old Telly. He came back twenty minutes later, slumped into bed and was soon snoring. I pulled my sleeping mat from the rucksack and lay on the floor in my sweaty clothes. During a lull in the shooting the bullfrogs emerged, at first slowly and then with gusto, reclaiming their sonic territory. The birds joined in, followed by the pariah dogs and the asses in an evening chorus. It went on thusly past dawn. At least once an hour someone would start shooting and the toads of Malakal would go silent and wait the bums out. I heard the last shots sometime after 5 a.m. Along the way I dreamt I was looking through a pile of sensitive documents, maybe Somali, with a colleague who was a star reporter at a well-regarded newspaper, but I wasn’t clear if the documents were mine or his or ours or just there for the taking. Was I glomming? Was he? The scene shifted. I was in New York, and Rudolph Giuliani was belittling me at a press conference. This had happened many times during my days reporting from City Hall, but on this occasion all the other journalists were joining in the ridicule. As if to salve that mental welt, I then dreamed I was on the precipice of seducing two long-limbed young women I had happened across at a backyard swimming pool. But the prospect of straying from marriage, even in slumber, only brought additional stress. I awoke aroused and with a migraine, stinking of panic.
I sat up at six, having slept no more than an hour, and most of that in ten-minute parcels. In the open field across the road a cluster of cows lay hobbled in a semicircle, each waiting to be milked by a man in a turban working the teats of a contented Sudanese Bessie. Women in long Shilluk tunics walked down the road in groups of three and four, and near the gate children poked at ticks in the dirt, comparing prizes. All appeared normal again after the passing storm of Kalashnikovs and testosterone. I crossed the road to check in on the foreign churchpeople. They were already stuffed into a minibus, their luggage piled high and strapped on top. The two Dinas were almost in each other’s laps, pressed against a window on the van’s left side, sorrow and fear and the memory of fear plain on their puffy faces. They would never again leave Egypt. Hell, they would never leave Cairo. “It was very close, and very bad,” Simon said. “It could get worse today because tensions are very high.” He said this with authority, but I was doubtful: He was even greener than I. “How are your spirits?” I asked. “It’s not good,” he said. “Some were very, very scared.”


It was time to leave Malakal. Upper Nile’s oil areas beckoned. I convinced the head of the UN mission to get me onto a helicopter bound for Melut, ninety miles to the north. The chopper would represent a break from my plan to use local transport, but it would drop me inside the UN peacekeeping base in Melut, where I hoped to find a place to sleep. There were no guesthouses for more than two hundred miles north of Malakal. It wasn’t safe to camp, and in any case, I’d left behind Schon’s tent to cut down on the weight I was carrying.
Packing up, I went looking for someone to hand an envelope with $225 in rent for Ter Majok. I heard voices in the back, from the strip of concrete that led to the latrine, and walked through the metal doorway to see Bern, an ADRA official, squatting over the pavement, head down, with tendrils of blood pouring from his clean scalp. Two men were crowded around him murmuring in Nuer.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he said. “It is a traditional treatment.”
“He had a headache,” one of the men said.
I brought out a couple alcohol swabs from my kit and daubed some of the blood off his face with a gauze pad. The incision by his right temple was a real bleeder. A smaller cut on his forehead had stopped on its own. A box of double-edged shaving razors, each wrapped in wax paper, sat on a deck chair. “Hold this on the cut,” I said with false authority. “Don’t move. And maybe sit where your head is up higher, not pointed down.” He shifted to one of the chairs and leaned back, his tan loafers dotted with tiny mites of blood, his gray dress slacks untouched, his blue tartan polo shirt bundled up around his neck, blood pooling in his sternum and navel.
“I’ve had the same headache for twenty years,” he said. “I have tried everything, just everything. I’ve had MRIs and CAT scans and they don’t show anything. So I tried this, and maybe it’s helping.” A pile of deep red blood, wide as a hubcap, dried on the concrete. (The ants will be at that, I thought.) “Most people in Nebraska would not agree with this,” he said, squinting through the blood and sweat. “But most people in Nebraska would not travel where I travel. It is always on one side—sometimes the left, the whole of the left side—and other times it will be the right. Maybe it is the change in weather, or the change in time. Everything that seems plausible is undone by something implausible.”
This phrase piqued my spirits. Now, I thought, it’s really morning. “So one hemisphere rages at a time, and never both,” I said. “What if you had it the two sides at once?”
“Then I would die,” he said gravely.
He was a refugee from Upper Nile, had spent some time in the United States and now worked in ADRA’s Middle East office, based in Cyprus. “This man, he is a traditional doctor, a local doctor. People line up to see him. He fixes all kinds of problems—head injuries, pain, broken bones.”
“Well, your blood looks very healthy,” I said.
“I think you passed a liter,” someone else added.
We walked through the house to the courtyard, where he sat down and prepared to wash his head with a pail of water. “Just leave it for now,” I said. “You want the bleeding to stop.” He doused his skull as I carried my backpack through the gate to the ADRA Land Cruiser. When I went back in for my second bag the blood was again running down his face. I went to the car, pulled more gauze from my kit and used his hand to press against it. “Just hold it there. For a long time.” He nodded, maybe a little annoyed. “And give this to Ter, please,” I said, pushing the envelope into his other hand. The ADRA driver gave a honk and I jogged back. We splished through the mud to the airport. On the way, I saw the big rough bricks behind the mosque being sold and trucked away by private buyers. They weren’t for the public at all. It seemed nothing was.