The Black Nile

Chapter EIGHT
I crowded into the white United Nations chopper with a platoon of Indian peacekeepers. The porthole windows sent wide shafts of light boring across the dim cabin, illuminating a metal floor piled with duffels, the sides lined with narrow benches. I sat at the back, stretched out my legs, then stood up and grabbed a set of acoustic earmuffs from a thin cord stretched across the cabin. The engine kicked on and thrummed for a moment, sending up nimbuses of dust before the chopper beetled on fat tires down the run-way and hauled us off the ground.
The soldiers were tall and wiry, the fruit of India’s northern Hindu belt, most of them mustached, wearing pressed green camouflage uniforms. When I worked as a reporter in South Asia, I was often asked by Indian airport security officers: Where are you from? From America. But where were you from before that? The beard and black Easy Rider hair convinced the airport bulls I was some kind of Afghan or Arab. Now my interrogators’ army cousins were trapped in a metal can several hundred feet above the Nile, waiting, I imagined, for the unkempt stranger to scream “Allahu Akbar!” and light them up with an explosive satchel. The Hindu jawans would die in black Africa, and vultures would feed on their charred guts, something that would never happen in India—vultures there being nearly extinct.
From the air the river appeared swollen and slow, the sum of the Bahr al Ghazal and the Bahr al Zeraf and the Sobat and its other tributaries, all of them pushed together into a single White Nile that would descend from central to northern Africa over two thousand miles. At Khartoum it would meet its energetic sister, the Ethiopian-born Blue Nile, and forge its way north to Egypt. There, at the dry lip of the Sahara, the Nile was everything—the sole source of life for the more than seventy million people clinging to its banks. As I hovered over Malakal, it was plain that life here went on well beyond the river’s grasp. Clusters of tukuls sat in clearings amid the trees as small herds of cows ambled through the scrub. I pulled out my old Nikon, unbolted the latch on my porthole and, while my cabinmates pretended not to notice, shot a roll of black and white out the open window.
We landed thirty minutes later at the UN team site in Melut, an arid base for the foreign military officers whose job it was to track armed groups the peace treaty had officially made idle. The military observers and a team of police monitors were backed by a protection force of several hundred Indian soldiers. As in Malakal, they had brought everything they needed direct from home. Their jeeps were Mahindra & Mahindra; the bottled water was Bisleri. (I allowed myself a moment’s hope that I might cadge a plate of channa saag from the mess hall.) The landing zone was hot, graveled, dusty. I grabbed my rucksack and walked with what I hoped looked like confidence through the fence and onto the base proper in search of a friendly face. My UN press card hung from my neck on a chain, though it only applied to the UNMIS headquarters in Khartoum and had no official currency here. I’d had my boots shined on Shilluk Avenue in Malakal the day before, but they were already the color of the dun earth.
The team site looked like a proper military camp—ready for the worst. The perimeter was dug out with machine-gun nests and sandbags and razor-wire fencing, and I saw at least two pieces of light artillery. I walked past long lines of small modular housing containers—all of them empty, their windows dark and their white walls coated with grit—and came to a row of office trailers alive with the hum of air-conditioning and clomping feet, behind which sprawled big canvas tents where the Indian forces bunked, trained and stored their equipment. The five trailers were bolted together side to side—five doors, each holding a potential accomplice or a possible spoiler.
Where to knock? Nowhere, I decided. One bad interaction could get me put off the base a mile out of town without a single contact. Surveillance was the better course. I leaned on a Land Cruiser and pretended to talk on the Thuraya whenever a man in uniform walked past. After fifteen minutes of babbling words like “payam,” “Sector Three” and “duty station” into my phone, I saw a dark-skinned Arab in street clothes leaving one of the trailers. At last, a civilian. My quarry, Bilal, was a Sudanese employed as a civil affairs officer. The first nonmilitary person permanently assigned to Melut, he was alone there and would make, I hoped, a valuable ally.
Bilal gave me a ride north into the town. On the Nile side of the road, under a stand of baobab and doum trees, sat the new village hall, a brick-and-concrete complex of half a dozen offices, the seat of the county commissioner. There were no hotels in Melut, but perhaps, my new friend said, the commissioner could place me with a local family. The official guesthouses were already filled with military observers, he explained, while the housing containers I’d passed on base still lacked furniture and electricity. We peered into the commissioner’s dim office, but the boss was away at Malakal, a staffer said, reclining with an orange Fanta on a red velvety couch. Tomorrow the executive director—Melut’s number two—would be in, and I could speak with him.
Bilal brought me across the road to the small souk, where we took tea and coffee in the pleasing shade of a sun-bleached tarpaulin canopy. “I am new to this post but I can tell you the situation is very difficult,” he said, picking a cardamom seed from his cup.
“You think I won’t find a place to sleep?” I asked. Already I was imagining a night spent on the steps of the commissioner’s office, or in the bed of my new friend’s pickup. It would be difficult planning a foray into Paloich without a base to work from.
“It’s not that,” he said. “I can ask after your lodgings with the militaryobservers. Some of them are on long-range patrol and won’t be back for days. Maybe you can take a bed from among them, the commander permitting. Your true difficulty is in Paloich. Everyone from the international community—the military observers, myself, even the chief of mission in Malakal—is kept away from the very subject of oil. No one from outside, no NGO or humanitarian, will bring you there. And if they cannot take you there, they cannot take you out if things become unmanageable. The oil is too important to allow a journalist. You are not safe there. There is a bus to Renk that passes through Paloich. You can view the town from the bus. But you are in danger were you to step off.”
We returned to the base, the both of us now standing watch outside the office trailers, until he spied our man. Bernard was Belgian, with brown eyes that carried the tint of suffering so often found in Western soldiers serving under senior officers from the Third World. He didn’t hesitate when approached. “Of course,” he said, looking up at me. “You can stay in my bunk. It is not a proper hotel, but it is comfortable enough.”
“Look, Commander,” I said, “I don’t want to take your bed. I mean, I’d rather sleep outside. I heard there might be empty bunks. Isn’t that an option?”
His mustache gave an impatient twitch. “I can offer it precisely because it is my bed. I will sleep here in the office. Two nights of air-conditioning and privacy would be a change—a pleasant change.”
At that Bilal, the trim Sudanese, faded diffidently out of frame; my mark, it seemed, had found his own. I killed the rest of the day at the team site while Bernard waited for his commanding officer, a Tanzanian colonel, to okay the arrangement. He let me check my email on his Dell—“A very good computer, from Belgian intelligence”—and then drove me to his quarters at the guesthouse. The observers occupied three cement bungalows overlooking the Nile on a plain behind the commissioner’s office. A walk of sorts, lined with sandbags, led from the gate to steps and a narrow porch hovering four feet off the ground—you never knew when the river might jump its banks. Like most towns in Sudan, Melut didn’t have a municipal water system. The observers washed and cooked from giant plastic bottles provided by the Indian protection force and they showered at the UN base. Each of the three bedrooms, one no more than a deep hallway, held two sets of bunk beds, a toddler-sized desk and an assortment of foot lockers, towels and dirty socks. Bernard had a bottom bunk in one of the bigger rooms.
The observers appeared to come in pairs so that no man would spend his tour trapped alone among a babel of alien officers. Bernard’s fellow Belgian was on long-range patrol; so was the counterpart of his roommate, a Panamanian army captain. Neither would be back for days.
We dined that night on canned tuna (Bernard’s), Emirati Ritz crackers (mine) and the last of his jibneh, a Sudanese feta, all of it washed down with tumblers of Tang from a jar I’d bought in Malakal. Then he took his bedroll and left for the quiet and cool of the office. I smoked a Sherman’s on the porch, said good night to a Cameroonian major resting in green bikini undershorts in the hallway and to two Peruvians in the other room and lay down to read a few pages of Michela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz. “You must be tired,” someone tells a boy soldier, part of the long column of juvenile fighters that has just taken Kinshasa. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve walked all the way from Kampala.”
I dreamt I was swimming to Khartoum through hot black water and woke up gasping, cocooned in heat, the mosquito net trapping the air, my hair wet with perspiration. Bernard’s roommate was already up and dressed. I groaned hello and went down for another hour, which only drained me further. It was 9 a.m. and already Melut was irresponsibly hot. I dressed, walked to the porch and washed my face from one of the giant bottles. “Don’t get it in your mouth,” one of the Peruvians warned. Returning to the souk, I took tea and cookies and a single spotted yellow banana. Nothing was happening here. Melut seemed as much a township as a town. It grew away from the road in three or four patches of mud homes and shops, but the long view was dotted with tiny homesteads and camps and herds. A single-story brick schoolhouse hugged the road, but it appeared empty—no children in the windows or playing in the clods outside. I wiped my eyeglasses with a handkerchief, smoothed my pants as best they would allow and walked back across the road. The darkened commissioner’s office was hopping today, the couches and sectionals thick with men in uniforms, safari suits and street clothes.
Acwil Abwek Ayiik, Melut’s second in command, was a broad man behind a broad desk. Over the next ninety minutes he addressed visitors in a mixture of Dinka and Arabic while a tiny moonfaced woman in an orange wrap floated in and out on quiet feet to serve tea and soda. When the flow of supplicants and subordinates had finally dried up, he turned to me.
“I am hoping to learn about oil,” I said, introducing myself. “I’ve heard rumors that people are being forced from their homes to make way for oil exploration. Is that still taking place today?”
“This oil, it is a resource we need for the new Sudan,” Abwek said by way of a nonanswer. “We are stuck with these oil companies—the CPA says oil contracts can be revised but cannot be abrogated. They came during the war, when all the people had been removed from the land. The companies are not willing to compensate or even to provide services to those who have been removed. But still it is different now.” The difference was consent: Under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, local communities had to give their approval before exploration and extraction could begin, and permission was not forthcoming. Abwek and the entire southern leadership knew of the blood that had been spilled and the lives ruined over oil exploration. They also knew the south couldn’t live without it. If the fledgling state was to survive it needed companies like Petronas and Total to drill, pump and sell. Just the week before, the community of Khor Adar had rejected a drilling request.
“We are trying to persuade people to take this chance, to let them go,” he went on. “But the whole process was derailed. They did not let them. It is the only source of revenue we have at this juncture. The people have not organized and determined what they want. There is no organized list of conditions. There is just opposition. The local people want their share of the oil revenue. I too want my share—the state government receives a portion, but no part of that is sent to the counties. Just yesterday there was a riot in Paloich.”
“A riot?”
“Two hundred people rampaged, smashing cars in the night.” He sighed. “They want jobs and there aren’t any. We have a legal system now; it isn’t for them to go smashing. There is a government labor officer in Paloich. If you are aggrieved you can take your grievance to the court. We have been trying to represent them. To the oil company we say, ‘Know your limitations. The CPA is fragile. ’ We enrolled 560 people for jobs, but they hired none. They just bring people from the outside. So last night one group went to the company there. They went to make a fight and advanced on the refinery. The Petrodar security and the JIU met them and arrested many people, maybe four hundred. I am sending someone to Paloich today to make an investigation. If you come tomorrow I can tell you more.”
“What if I went with him? I could see for myself.”
He glanced at the Fanta bottle on his desk, and rose. “Just a moment.” He left me with my tea and appeared in the doorway fifteen minutes later. “Come with this man here. He is going to Paloich to make inquiry. He can take you.”
“He” was Pancien Acwiel, the SPLM chief in Melut county. He looked thinner than me (which is saying a lot), but, like all Sudanese I had met, was stronger than his size implied. I learned this as we walked down the front patio steps to his green Land Cruiser and I headed straight for the back. He gave a short wordless push that redirected me with professional wrestler force against the front passenger door, paused for my rebound, pulled the door open and shoved me inside with a nudge to the small of my back. Smiling, and a little sore, I looked over my shoulder and saw the car was packed with three silent women, two unsilent babies, an old man in a brown woolen watch cap and enough bundles and packages to fill a subway car. I was glad to be up front, sitting between Pancien and his driver, with plenty of room for my tote bag filled with notebooks and the Nikon on my lap. The wheelman gunned the engine and blasted us forward atop a plume of dust. No one spoke.
Melut, Paloich and points north were a jurisdictional gray area—officially controlled by Juba and Malakal, but dominated by northern military intelligence, northern-aligned militias and private security forces of the oil companies. They kept the juice flowing to Khartoum and they kept the details secret. Local officials walked a fine line between asserting legal authority and bowing to the hydrocarbon imperative.
We raced south on the asphalt road past the SPLA compound, the UN team site and garrisons belonging to the SAF and their militias before hooking a left inland on a dusty track that dipped and twisted over dry creek beds and patches of stubby brown grass. In time this track was shadowed by a newer road of dense orange laterite stone, its base transected by arrays of narrow steel culverts. The new road, the only one that existed in the rainy season, had been built by Chinese workers to ensure access to the oil fields. These roads were notorious in the south for their lousy drainage. They dammed the landscape, soaking part of the floodplain while depriving farms and herds on the other side of their seasonal lifeline. Satellite photographs compiled by the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan show how between 1999 and 2005, significant acreage of agricultural land was ruined by this particular road. We left the dirt track and crossed over to the new road and soon its surface grew smoother and straighter. Small white signs printed in English and Chinese began to crop up—Adar 4; Heglig 2—pointing to different side roads and the wells they serviced.
We drove through oil concessions that stretched from the Sobat River north to Renk, all of it controlled by Petrodar. Hundreds of villages had been cleared by armed militiamen and Russian-made bombers to make way for the wells, and thousands of people killed. Still, this stretch of Upper Nile hadn’t seen the worst of the oil displacement. During the 1990s tens of thousands of southerners were slain in Unity and other states to the west to clear the land for oil concessions now controlled by companies from China, Malaysia and India.
The ride to Paloich now took us past the Kotolok refinery, which looked impressive, but what did I know of refineries? It rose from the dirt, an industrial mirage, a metal-stacked complex of silos and pipes, a bit of the Meadowlands or Bhopal dropped in the scrub waste of Upper Nile. Distance and speed made it impossible to discern any people behind its tall fence—the engineers from China and Malaysia and from the north, the skilled workmen, the laborers, the cooks and drivers and sweepers, all of them vetted for their jobs by Khartoum’s military intelligence directorate. I leaned past Pancien, bracing my left arm on the peeling dash, and shot frame after frame of the filthy Oz. More than one hundred thousand barrels a day moved through a pipeline from Kotolok to the Al Salam port on the Red Sea for shipment to China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and India. There had been a village on the site of the oil facility, but it was overrun by militiamen in 2005, a month after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
When we reached Paloich itself—a wide cast of tukuls and markets and nothing else really—we pulled into a complex of mud huts. Some had metal roofs, some grass; some were fully enclosed in reed fencing and others were open or partly open. Pancien and I stepped out to the dense sunshine and then ducked into the hot shade of one of the grass-roofed tukuls. Inside, eight men in plainclothes and two policemen sat on plastic chairs and wooden benches. Pancien pushed me into a plastic armchair and sat on my left and explained in Dinka who I was. Conversation resumed, and then the room went momentarily dark as an SPLA major squeezed his bulk through the doorway and sat at my right. He was a grizzly of a man, with a full beard and rough hands. His tan chocolate-chip camo uniform bore a JIU patch and he carried a two-and-a-half-foot swagger stick of carved teak with a three-inch slug of ivory at the tip. It was soon apparent that he’d led the JIU forces that had helped break the riot. He and the others discussed the incident for a very long time, the major’s voice less conciliatory than those of the others, while I pulled at a bottle of water and tried not to doze off in the gelling heat. Just as I was closing my notebook to end the charade that I understood a word they were saying, a clean-cut young man in a Hawaiian-print shirt came in. With one hand Pancien lifted me out of my chair and with the other he clamped the new entrant’s wrist. “You go with him,” Pancien said. “He is judge coroner, SPLA. He can tell you what you want to know.” Judge coroner turned out, after some modifications to my ear, to mean lieutenant colonel. We stepped outside and walked thirty feet to a fenced-in dirt yard, where we sat in the shade of a giant banyan while a few other men lolled and took water from a jerrican draped in wet burlap to keep it cool.
He gave me the basics. In the early evening or late afternoon, some boys had started throwing stones at cars in Paloich. They made a run for the refinery, where they were beaten back by the JIU and arrested. More had been arrested today, by the JIU, the police and new soldiers who had been sent from Malakal. Malakal? Additional prodding revealed these were the same fighters, including Gabriel Tang’s rump forces, who had rampaged in Malakal the other night. They had been shipped out of town and put to use breaking heads in Paloich and Melut. “And the prisoners?” I asked. “Where are they?” Some are right here, he said. “May I see?” He stood and left the enclosure.
We crossed the dirt patch, past the tukul where Pancien was meeting with the others, to a gray shipping container sitting on concrete blocks at the top of a tiny hillock. The lieutenant colonel gave an authoritative-looking wave to two guards lampreyed to the shade nearby. We stepped up to the container and talked to the prisoners through a barred window of welded rebar. They were all local men in their twenties except for a forty-six-year-old schoolteacher from Malakal who had come months before looking for work. The boys had spontaneously started throwing rocks at Petrodar vehicles around 5 p.m., they said. The teacher too picked up a stone but was arrested before he could hurl it. Others had been seized that morning; security officers had swept the streets for young African men, grabbing whomever they found. The dozen prisoners sat on the clean metal floor and crouched against the hot metal walls and asked for water. I handed my bottle through the bars (I regretted drinking from it inside the tukul) and they somehow divided it with dignity and without haste though most hadn’t seen a drop for more than eighteen hours. “I have been here seven months,” said Paul Thomas, the teacher. “Life in Paloich is very terrible. There is nothing for the local people. The young generation is fed up and I am fed up also.” He wore a stained T-shirt with a pen stuck into the right breast pocket; the pen struck me as a totem of his higher education. “This is for China,” a young man, Manny Kuak, called out. “And the Arabs in Khartoum. Everyone is being beaten—all those who are black.” I felt a silent urgency ripple off the lieutenant colonel and quickly turned my attention to the one and a half English speakers in the container, teased out a quick just-the-facts narrative, stepped back, and got off a single shot from my Nikon before running out of film, when a man in uniform came bitching at us in Arabic. The lieutenant colonel quickly steered me away, clockwise around the container and down the hillock, briefly out of the angry man’s line of sight, and back toward the tukul where Pancien was debriefing the JIU major, an apparently safer zone. I reloaded the Nikon and asked the colonel to take me around town, but what I really wanted was another pass near the rear of the jail, where a few pairs of arms now stuck out of another barred window. I was looping in that direction when a dozen men barreled at me from a gate in a tall fence at the far side of the yard.
“Put-it-away,” the colonel said evenly. I put it away, too late.
“What are you doing here? This is not your business,” barked a man in dark green uniform, advancing double-quick-march. “Who gave you permission?” he shouted. My field of vision narrowed to the man’s furious eyes, his brow speckled with new sweat. I could see he was breathing as hard as I was. He was afraid and angry and I was afraid and not, and that, for a second, gave me traction. “Good afternoon,” I said, smiling and extending my right hand. “My name is Dan Morrison and I am a journalist visiting Upper Nile.” He took the hand without enthusiasm, but the civil introduction slowed his fury. “And you are . . . ?”
“I am Captain Michael, and you have no business here. This is not your concern. Not your concern.” The other men had spread into a circle around me. The lieutenant colonel had disappeared. Twenty yards to the rear, hovering near the gate, two Arab men in street clothes, one wearing a pistol in his waistband, watched the encounter. The circle tightened and so did my chest. I would be arrested, deported, my film and notes confiscated and destroyed. The military observers would catch hell for sheltering me. I was wondering how I would get another visa after this one was revoked when Pancien pierced the ring in long power strides and said in Arabic—though my translation here may be rough—“F*ck you, boys. New sheriff in town.” He gripped my arm and yanked me away, smiling for the first time in our short acquaintanceship.
“I’m really sorry about this,” I said.
“You are with us,” he replied. “They cannot touch you.” Then he bade me wait in the colonel’s shady enclosure until the Land Cruiser returned from dropping off the other passengers. From behind the fence I heard them argue for a few minutes and then each side, north and south, went back to its own patch of sovereignty. After a half hour of sweating in the shade I heard more commotion outside and, standing on my toes, watched from over the top of the fence as seven more young men were taken from the back of a truck and locked in the shipping container. Pancien didn’t seem bothered by the confrontation when he finally summoned me for the ride back to Melut on the Petrodar highway. “What kind of trees are those?” I asked, pointing to the scores of succulents that rose across the floodplain.
“Wells,” he said. “The roads lead to wells.”
008
Back in Melut, I walked the mile from the commissioner’s office to the UN team site, narrowly missing opportunities to hitch a ride on a passing pickup and two donkey carts. I was lightheaded and sweating when I reached the front checkpoint and the two Indian guards there asked me into their fortified tent. They were friendly, professional, happy to talk and to use the conversation to probe my background and intentions. Though they had seen me arrive on a UN chopper and watched me drive in and out of the base with colonels and majors and civilian administrators, they now needed to check me out. I was, after all, on foot. “You don’t mind if I call my commanding officer to verify your status?” I didn’t. The call to the Tanzanian colonel was swift and the junior of the two Indians wrote me into the visitors’ log and apologized thrice for the inconvenience. We said goodbye and I walked onto the team site, the gravel road lined with inverted plastic bottles filled with water and buried halfway in the berm for use as nighttime reflectors. They kicked back a greenish glow when headlamps passed over.
It looked like Bernard and the other military observers were having a meeting, so I went into the office trailer next door and cooled my body to the sound of the air conditioner and their muffled voices until Bernard’s exasperated howls crashed through the wall: “This person is a guest of the United Nations! They brought him here! It is only natural, and courteous—common courtesy—that I offer him a place to sleep.” I sat very still and pretended they weren’t talking about me and then bolted outside when I heard a car door open. One of the Peruvians had left the meeting and was driving back to their quarters. “Don’t worry,” he said as we pulled up to the guesthouse. “Everything here is politics.” The Tanzanian colonel, it seemed, was having second thoughts about my presence.
Across the Nile a deep curtain of black cloud was coming our way like an advancing army. “It’s a khamseen,” the Peruvian said. Narrow dust devils, tall as town houses, swirled in and out of the approaching sandstorm. Overhead a checkerboard of black-and-white clouds moved with speed from the east toward the river. Heavy rain pelted us, dimpling the earth, and stopped the sandstorm’s march at the west bank. On our bank, cool rain and breeze prevailed. On the other, hot wind and dust. In between, the Nile moved, black and silky under the late-afternoon light.
That night, as Bernard made Belgian frites, “the best in all Sudan,” I walked through a way-camp on the riverside to buy fried fish from the traders and migrants waiting for a boat downriver. We ate bony breaded perch on the porch with fries and a mash of round cucumber, onions and garlic that was a valiant if failed experiment in making the most of what was around. Over bottles of Tusker, Bernard told me harrowing tales of Internet love, Eurostyle, that boiled down to this one lesson: It is not an expression of carnal desire when a twenty-two-year-old Russian ballerina asks for your bank information. It really isn’t.
In the morning I carried my bags across the road to the souk and bought a ticket for the bus to Renk, the last city in southern Sudan. Through the window of a small wooden shack the ticketmaster took my money and printed D-A-N on the narrow-ruled lines of a desiccated ledger. He tore a square printed receipt from a tissue-thin sheet and handed me the chit in his open palm. “Can I sit in the front?” I asked. “With the driver?” He nodded. “With the driver, I mean. Up front?” He nodded again, slowly this time, as if to a moron, and scribbled a word or two more in Arabic next to my name. “Shukran, ya hadritak,” I said—Thank you, O Sir. I loaded up on bottled water and mango juiceboxes and bought a chrome flashlight at a nearby stall: Tiger Head brand, made in China. It had an LED bulb and ran on D-size batteries that so closely bordered the artisanal I could almost make out the impressions of the prepubescent fingers that had rolled the bare lead cells into their shiny paper sheaths.
The bus was facing south on a slight incline near the roadside. Painted a happy blue, it was a hybrid creature, with a fifty-foot wooden-slatted passenger compartment bolted onto the back of an old Smith’s diesel lorry—a truck so antique that the grille boasted a vestigial slot, like an inverted keyhole, for an old- fashioned crank starter. To say the truck was a Smith’s was but to guess based on the faint lettering on two dials embedded in the dashboard, one of them upside down. These gauges indicated nothing besides the possibility that someone had once aspired to measure the truck’s amperage and oil pressure. Outside, I stepped onto the bumper and peered into the engine compartment while a crew of boys topped off the water and oil. The motor was clean, and had the simple look that old motors do—a radiator the size of a Times atlas, a battery the size of a milk carton and the valve cover with a cream enameled look to it, like an old crock pot. There were no markings on the engine, not even faint ones, that could whisper its original make or model.
Bernard drove by as I was hoisting my rucksack to the roof to tell me that more prisoners from Paloich were being kept at the nearby school. “You didn’t have to risk yourself going to the place of the riot,” he said. “The rioters have come to you.” But it was too late for new interviews with these new wretches—my bus was about to leave and I had become a liability to Bernard. The passengers were gently pushing onto the bus. Some of the men wore jallabiyas, others shirts and slacks and a half dozen were in fatigues and carried AKs. The women, wearing batik-style wraps of violet, brown and blue, mixed easily with the men. I climbed into the front seat, followed by two of the bus’s five-man crew. With passengers on, the cargo loaded and the engine at the ready, the driver now got in and said hello with a quick jut of his chin. He had short graying hair and wore oversized aviator sunglasses that set off the faint horizontal scarring on his brow. He gave the impression of one who had been plying the roads of Upper Nile since before there were roads. He pulled the choke knob and then reached under the dash to a jumble of faded red wires and thumbed their exposed ends into a ball. Then he let out the clutch and we rolled forward a few feet before he popped it into low gear and the engine growled to steady if geriatric life. I wanted to laugh as I squinted through the smoky windshield at the road ahead.
The driver eased it into second and then third gear and after a moment I realized he wasn’t going to turn around and take us north along the Nile—his route, I now realized, pointed twenty miles inland, past the refinery to Paloich, before turning north to Renk. He ground on for an hour through the dust track Pancien and I had followed the previous day before switching to the murram road, slowing to ease the bus past potholes and jagged patches of broken roadway with the same deftness my friends on the barge had displayed dodging sandbars in the Sudd. After another forty-five minutes we pulled to the side and idled while two of the crew leapt down from the roof and popped the hood. One of the boys wrapped his hand in a faded red rag and twisted off the radiator cap. His colleague fetched a jug that had been resting at the driver’s feet, just under his seat, and poured in a thin stream of water until it overflowed. The first boy, his white tunic somehow both filthy and shining, replaced the cap and gently secured the hood, and then together they climbed in their sandals back to the roof, using the open window as a foothold, even as the driver put the bus in gear and steered us back onto the road.
I slouched low as we approached the refinery and lower still when we entered the town. The blue bus made several slow dusty circuits around Paloich in search of passengers. The place seemed deserted, a square mile of flat and dry and empty markets—weathered wooden stalls and bare tables under thatch or plastic covers. I hadn’t seen much of the town the day before. It seemed more a location than a settlement, a place with enough importance that the locals had given it a name, but it appeared the markets had come with the new road and the oil. It was quiet—there was no radio in the bus, of course, and no one spoke. We passed two checkpoints, slowing at each while the driver traded niceties with the cops there and I tried to look away without appearing to be looking away. Finally at a metal barricade on the main road we came to a complete stop and two soldiers approached from the side and started chattering at me. They pointed to the police shack across the road, this view blocked now by another bus pulling into town from the opposite direction. “I’m going to Renk. Is this the bus to Renk?” I said with exaggerated volume, playing it stupid, but they weren’t deterred. After a couple minutes of my stalling, they ordered the two boys on my right out of the cab and the smaller of the two soldiers reached in for my arm. I pulled a copy of my passport from the raid pack and turned to the driver. “Do not leave without me,” I begged, pointing to the floor. In my shitty Arabic I said, “Inta hinna,” You here, and I repeated it. “Quais?”
“Quais,” he said, and I slid toward the waiting goons. The soldier took my arm and yanked me out, all without prejudice, really, and I walked with the two of them across the road; the driver got out and reassuringly followed. Had word gotten around about the foreigner at the jail yesterday? Was I f*cked? Or merely inconvenienced? The dim shack appeared to be a sort of interagency node for traffic coming in and out of Paloich. A policeman in a light blue uniform sat at an old metal office desk. Sitting on stools and a bench were three men in well-pressed military fatigues. There were also two men in plainclothes with trim mustaches and pistols tucked in their waistbands, clones of the pair I’d spotted observing my confrontation at the jail, and of the angry security officer who’d rousted me in Malakal. Trouble, when it came, would come from them. Everyone looked on in the quiet as I handed the police officer a photocopy of my passport and my press card from Khartoum. He looked briefly at the passport copy and stared at the press card before handing it around the room. “What is your name?” he said.
“Ah, Dan,” I replied, shaking his hand.
“Adan? You Muslim?” I looked around the room with a mien of sincere regret. “I’m sorry, no,” I said, compulsively placing my hand over my heart, “not Muslim.” Someone said something in Arabic and they all laughed, and one of the mustachioed men said from the back, “No Muslim, okay. How you like Sudan?” Sudan was beautiful, I said, jamila, and they laughed again. We shook hands all around while the policeman opened his side drawer and dropped my passport copy atop a pile of similar sheets (all of which appeared to be printed in Chinese). With that, I stepped outside into the bright desert wasteland, the nubs of grass and low bushes clotted with plastic shopping bags, and walked with the driver back to the bus.
About two hours outside Renk, the trusty Smithy cleared its throat, went quiet and coasted ten feet to a stop. We had run out of gas. The passengers filed off without complaint as the driver and his crew took turns peering into the empty tank under the chassis. They squatted on the road and didn’t say much. The empty steel tank didn’t say much either. After a while, many people crawled back inside to escape the sun. I squatted with several men and boys—Arab, Dinka, Shilluk, Nuer—in a two-feet-wide band of shade on the right side of the bus. From time to time someone got up and walked into the field to piss. They all did so sitting on their haunches. Was this practical or cultural? Were they squatting because it’s the neater way to piss if you’re wearing a jallabiya? (Not that most of them were wearing jallabiyas.) Or was it modesty? Keeping your thing well out of view, below sin’s radar? The sun kept moving and our band of shade narrowed and this sun, today, really did burn.
New Austrian-made long-haul trucks passed in ones and twos carrying loads of steel and pipe on their flatbeds; none stopped. After about forty-five idle minutes a southbound bus pulled over and offered fuel. A search began for a hose to siphon diesel from its tank into a jerrican and after fifteen minutes of watching the crew rummaging under and behind the front seat in their various kit bags, I almost offered them a rubber tube from my water filter. (Sanity for once intervened to keep my mouth shut and I would like to thank it, again.) In time they found a hose and someone drew the short straw and was sent to suck a few liters from the other tank. They crossed the road and poured it into ours but still the engine wouldn’t turn over when we tried a groaning push start. They popped the hood again and the driver removed six small bolts sitting under the cylinders until diesel bled from each. Then we all gathered around, me near the front, and pushed until the machine rolled, caught, sputtered and failed. Three more tries and we were back under the power of internal combustion. The driver put the truck in neutral, the gang added more water to the radiator, this time from a black goatskin, and we were away, slowing every now and again to dodge herds of goats and cattle being driven across the road.
The landscape was one of desert floor and low trees, many of which appeared to have been burned for charcoal. These small dead husks were set in the earth as far as I could see in either direction. I gathered we were about an hour away from Renk when, as the driver moved to shift from third to fourth, the unthinkable happened: The gearstick broke off in his hand with a quiet snap, right at its base. He looked at me through his plus-size aviators and I looked back and shrugged. “Wasn’t me, man.” He looked down at the top of the gearbox, over to my boots and back to my face, and I shrugged again. He gave a small shake to his head, corrected course like a schooner captain and stuck the gearshift out the window for the crew up top to gape at. Then he reached across me to his number two, asleep against the door, and tapped him awake.
Now when we encountered the herds, the driver would put in the clutch, rev the engine—both to keep the rpms up and to alarm the livestock—and pilot a course between the dumb and the not as dumb. (In addition to air bags and a Bose entertainment system, the bus also lacked a horn.) At the approach of the bus, the skinny herdsmen and herdsboys, wrapped in white muslin shawls and carrying long walking sticks, would turn toward us with hospitable smiles, as if welcoming friendly aliens, slowing the dolorous progress of their mute meat across the road. Our last such crossing of the animal shoals was, if not a display of artistry, at the very least one of professionalism. A pretty, russet-colored veal stopped dead center in the road and our man had to brake, keep the rpms high, cut hard to the right and again to the left, bring the clutch out slow and still keep us moving. I slapped the driver’s arm in congratulation and he grinned, eyes fixed on the road.
The herds couldn’t stop us, but the heat could. With Renk almost in sight the driver put in the clutch and coasted us to a stop so the mobile pit crew could refill the radiator. We’d been in third since the stick broke; it would be impossible to get moving again in so high a gear. I pointed at the four bolts that secured the top of the gearbox and the driver nodded. He called out to the crew and a quarter-inch wrench was handed down through the passenger-side window. The engine still idling, his foot still on the clutch, the driver pulled up two layers of thick black rubber mats and passed them to the roof, revealing a floor of ancient wood and steel. The nub of the broken gearshift stuck out of a square black metal cover, which he unbolted and removed. Inside, two opposing steel brackets sat almost floating in a tight pool of sputtering oil. The driver again called out and a ten-inch slotted screwdriver appeared at his window. Bending at the waist, foot still on the clutch, he pried the left-hand bracket forward to neutral. Then he took his foot off the clutch, wiped his face with a washcloth, depressed the pedal again and pried and ground us into first gear. And so we moved. After dropping the washcloth over the gearbox to suppress the hot oil splattering on our legs, he let out the clutch one last time and we rolled back onto the road, and slowly gained speed. Soon enough it was time for second gear, and he bent down again, brushed aside the washcloth and pushed and grunted us there while I held the bucking steering wheel close to steady.
He kept it in second the rest of the way, and the bus crawled along the jellied asphalt, dodging animals and their companions until, hours later, we coasted down into the sprawling bus depot outside Renk. Once my bags were freed from the roof I thanked the driver and grabbed an autorickshaw into town with the first mate, who was taking the broken gearshift to be welded back onto its stem. He jumped out in front of an open-air metal shop and I asked the rickshaw driver to help me find lodging. He stopped every few blocks to ask strangers if they knew of a hotel. None did. It was now past six o’clock and Renk was quickly growing dark. The town of grass huts was set back from the Nile, with a few neighborhoods of cement and brick shops and the compounds of the well-to-do, and not a flophouse among them. At last, during our second circuit through what passed for the commercial district, I spotted an UNMIS Nissan SUV making a cautious U-turn around a deep rut and nearly mounted the hood to keep it from pulling away. The SUV’s driver was a West African army major, blessedly anglophone; his local translator was riding shotgun. Their team, he said, was on patrol in Renk, staying at the local commissioner’s guesthouse. (I, meanwhile, had been staying at this major’s permanent quarters in Melut, courtesy of Bernard.) He was reluctant to offer me a bed, and recommended I find Renk’s commissioner and ask him myself. It was well past business hours now; the commissioner could maybe be found at home. The translator got out and spent a good minute explaining the route to my driver. I gave them my exhausted thanks and we revved on. The driver twice called out to passersby to refresh his directions, each time altering the three-wheeler’s course by a good thirty or forty degrees until, half an hour later, we had motored across town to a sandy street of walled yards and a prominent brick compound with mounds of bricks, gravel and reed poles piled outside. It was a substantial home, built on a corner plot with two steel doors, one for cars and one for people. We got out and knocked. After a moment a metal bolt slid back and the door was opened by a golden-skinned young girl of maybe ten or eleven wearing a simple black cloak, her black hair piled on her head under a knotted rag. She looked at me and without a word closed and bolted the door. We listened to her bare feet as they ran away, and to the measured longer strides of another person approaching. The door opened again to reveal a woman wearing a floor-length bronze gown with veins of dark embroidery running down the middle: the lady of the house. She looked at us in polite curiosity. She really is lovely, I thought, and, despite myself, I wondered if she was Arab or African, when the answer was that she was both, all Sudanese being Africans. Her gaze was direct, from wide-set eyes over a narrow nose. Her hair was pulled back and covered. Gold earrings—little links of dangling gold—twinkled against her jawline.
The driver explained my situation and she stepped back from the doorway and gestured me inside with a brief turn of her palm. It was a nice spread, with a broad, swept-earth courtyard surrounded by five outbuildings. She left me and returned dialing a Samsung phone. After speaking for a moment, she handed it to me. It was her husband the commissioner on the line, currently in Khartoum on business. “How can I help you?” he asked in clear English. I told him how I had come to his door, the journey through Sudan, the bus ride from Melut and my now acute need to spend the night, on the floor if necessary, at his official guesthouse. “You are of course welcome,” he said. “You can stay where you are, at my home, in my guestroom. My wife will cook for you. But there is something that puzzles me. I am not the commissioner at Renk. I am commissioner at Maban.”
“You’re the commissioner of Maban?”
“Maban, yes.”
I looked up at his wife in shock. She looked back, almost interested. Was this a trick? I had somehow been delivered to the door of Ali Kata Oshi, the official John Ivo Mounto had described as a stooge of the north, and whom he had just been appointed to replace as commissioner of Maban. “Sir,” I said, “I don’t understand how I got here. The rickshaw was supposed to bring me to the commissioner of Renk. I don’t want to trouble your family. Do you have a mobile number for the local commissioner? I can still try him, especially with your reference.” He clucked. “It is no trouble. Do you like fish? She will cook you fish from the Nile. And halvah, do you like halvah? She will bring that too. You know how drivers are. I am sure he has been asking people for the way to the commissioner’s house. People in that area know I am a commissioner. So they sent you to me.”
It made sense, quick sense really, but still I waited for Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone to walk through the gate or emerge from the outhouse. I paid the driver and made an appointment for him to pick me up at six the next morning for a bus north. This would be my last night in southern Sudan and it was shaping stranger than the day. Mrs. Kata took up the heavier of my two bags and led me around into the brick guest cottage, the most solidly built structure in the compound. Inside were two twin beds with polished wooden headboards and thick foam mattresses, two long couches and a thirty-six-inch television that sat under a tall wedding portrait of the ex-commissioner and Mrs. Kata. The tiled floor was crowded with glass-topped coffee tables that held ashtrays and dark wooden coasters. This was clearly Papa’s preserve, and I had to admit it was cozy. Still: How did this happen? John Ivo had said there was nothing in Maban, no development of any kind. It seemed reasonable that an official there might keep a residence in a proper town, just as officials in Juba maintained their families in the more comfortable precincts of Nairobi and Khartoum.
I showered and brushed under the corrugated steel roof of a clean bathing stall, and was smoking a cigarette on the guestroom’s couch when the first two visitors arrived. They were friends of Ali Kata, one of them a cousin of Kata’s wife, sent to check me out. As with Mrs. Kata, I couldn’t classify them within my extremely limited ethnic vocabulary. Here, literally at the border of northern and southern Sudan, the rigid tribal and religious identities of the “African” south had to a degree melded with those of the north. Over a giant tray of homemade halvah, with a bowl of thick pure honey in the middle, Kata’s friends asked me about my journey, and of my strange trip to this compound. They wore light safari suits and sandals, and described themselves as traders, though one also worked as a teacher in an Arabic-language local school. They invited me outside for tea; some lawn chairs had been set up in front of the cottage.
As we chatted, the homestead was coming to life. A few teenage boys arrived by bicycle, members of Ali Kata’s extended family. A girl appeared at the far end of the compound and stayed there. The men explained the layout: The boys slept in the long-house opposite my brick cottage. The metal-roofed hut diagonally across from us—farthest from the gate—was where Kata’s wife and the girls slept. The next building, with a grass roof, was storage, and then, continuing clockwise, came the kitchen. A young man—another cousin or nephew—stepped through the gate and sat quietly with us, and conversation trailed as the freshness of the shower wore off and fatigue started to weigh on my face and my responses. No amount of tea would keep me awake for long. The servant girl came with two tall plastic pitchers of water and handed them to two of my companions. They walked across the yard, to where the girl had laid out reed mats, and washed their faces, hands and feet. “They’re praying?” I asked Mrs. Kata’s cousin.
“Yes. It is prayer time.” The call was now echoing across town.
“Aren’t you Christian?”
“I am,” he said. “But they are Muslim. The younger one, his mother is Christian. And some of his uncles are Christian. Families in Upper Nile are like that. It is very common. One family can have a brother who works in the church, and another who prays five times a day and fasts for Ramzan.”
“And our host, Ali Kata?”
“Kata is a Christian man.”
“With a Muslim name.”
“Yes. It is very usual here. Many families took Muslim names before the war, during the war. It was easier. The government maybe would give you less trouble. Maybe you can easier get a job.”
Prayers over, they returned and all three said goodbye to me and then to Mrs. Kata. I limped back into the cottage and was taking my shirt off when two of the boys walked in without speaking and absconded with the big television, carrying it to a waiting table outside. Chairs and string beds had been pulled from the storage hut and laid out in a line. Seven children, boys and girls who appeared to range from six to fifteen, were waiting for the night’s entertainment. The older boys carefully walked the set to the table, pulling with it a controller box and plenty of cable. For the first time, I noticed their satellite dish. I had been taking tea just a few feet from it. I pulled the door shut and lay down in my slacks and undershirt and tried not to think. I had only just acquired a weak grip on the fluid political and military alliances that had marked so much of the south’s recent history. Getting a handle on the deeper notions of identity here seemed impossible. Rebecca Malual had wanted the south to be a Christian state. What would that mean for families like this one? John Ivo—as true blue a man as I would ever meet—had portrayed Ali Kata as a quisling. In his absence at least, Kata seemed a pretty decent man.
I was close to sleep when someone knocked on the door and stepped inside without waiting for me to answer. He was a tall, thin, unambiguously black man, another inquisitive Kata cousin. I sat on the edge of the bed and again told my story. I asked him what people did for work in Renk. He said there wasn’t much besides farming, though the farms, like the oil, were controlled from Khartoum, and many of the farmers were northern tribesmen. Ali Kata, he said, was trying to work with the state to market and sell acacia gum from Upper Nile through traders in Kenya, though the volume had so far been small.
“Oh,” I said, “you mean gum Arabic,” the sticky binding agent that puts the bubble in Bubblicious and helps soda go pop.
“It is gum African,” he replied with speed. “Gum African.”