Seed of South Sudan (2 page)

We hope you will read with interest about a part of the world you may not know. And know that your support in buying this book will go toward improving lives in the small villages. Portions of the authors' earnings go toward building water wells and literacy programs in two area villages—mine and Stephen Chol Bayok's.

Thank you for reading our stories.

—
Majok Marier

My first memory of the journey that was to last for many years was my uncle making a shoulder strap for a gourd and placing it on my chest. The whole thing scratched, as the strap was formed from twisted palm fronds, and they were very dry. They connected to a gourd that held my water supply. I didn't like the rig placed against my bare chest, and I tried to push it away.

While I struggled, my uncle looked at me through stern eyes, narrowed snake-like. Like most Dinka men who'd come of age, his lower teeth had been removed, a tribal custom. His mouth looked scary to me.

His brow carried six long scars, proud reminders of the ritual knife cuts and deep bleeding he withstood with no painkillers, marking his entry into manhood a few years before. There was no doubt my uncle was a strong warrior. But he must have sensed that he was going to use something other than force with his young nephew—actually his grand-nephew, as he was my grandmother's younger brother, part of a very large extended family I'd left behind.

I remember him telling me I would die if I did not have water. He was going to have to go on, and the others would also have to leave me, and I would die of thirst. He wasn't angry; he talked to me softly like he always did when he was trying to convince me of a logical way to do things.

I was little and my head barely reached the stomach of my grandmother's brother. Breathless from running down the path away from my village, I had come upon him in another group of people as I ran that morning. I had fled because the village was on fire—I could see huge flames leap up over the tall grasses where my cattle grazed—and I knew that the war had come to Adut Maguen. I ran barefoot, frightened by fire and smoke and the sound of tanks and gunfire. War had been predicted, and that morning I heard the sound of it in my village. War was right there.

By noon I grew weary of the trek, and I was hobbling, trying to slow down. I encountered groups of men and women, other boys, people from other villages, but kept pushing on. When I saw the tall, lean figure of young Dut Machoul, I was glad to see an older person I knew.

I walked fast because I wanted to escape the Hummers and the smoke and tanks and gunfire, but my uncle, who was probably 17, with legs much longer than mine, quickly caught up. He then tried to help me with a supply of water.

I guess I did not want to carry something so scratchy, and I must have thought water would be ahead, and I'd get it when I needed it, but Dut set me straight right away. First he pulled me into the remains of a burned village to find dried gourds that had been part of someone's household. Then he made the makeshift rope to hold the gourd high up on my chest to allow my arms to swing with my steps.

After I'd finally agreed to wear the offending gourd, we stopped near a puddle of still, dirty water and he put water in the gourd.

I resisted again, because it was heavy across my chest. Again, he put me on the right path.

“You are not going to drink this water until you see the next water,” he said. “You need to just wet your mouth with it. Until you see your next water, you must put only enough in your mouth to keep from getting too dry.”

And that's what I did. If I'd not done that, running a water-soaked finger over the inside of my mouth on a regular basis, I may not have survived. Later the same day we encountered a cousin, Kau, and Dinka boys about my age, Matoc Kout and Laat Mathou. They were from the Rumbek area where I lived, but I did not know them before. Because they were Dinka, and we spoke the same dialect, we walked together. My uncle helped them with water gourds as well, and we journeyed long and hard together, eventually for a thousand miles through three countries.

During the many weeks and months of that dry season, without food, clean water, and without our families, we kept asking: When can we stop? When are we going to get to a place where we can rest? Where are we going? The answers might well have been “Never,” and “There is no such place,” and “We don't know.” For we walked and walked for months and months, in the middle of the night, and late at night. We never knew the answer to the question: “How long can we stay?” For there were many reasons to pick up and run again.

This is the way Majok's people build their homes in Pulkar, South Sudan—high up to escape lions and other predators.

I was seven years old in 1987, and my home was built up high to keep us safe from the lions that would roam the rural area outside Rumbek, Sudan, near where I was born. Our village, Adut Maguen, lay about eight miles southeast of Rumbek, and south of the village of Pacong. (All of this area lies in what is now officially the country of South Sudan, but the birth of that nation followed much suffering and death, and it is this story I will relate in the next pages.) In this small village, my mother took care of us, my older brother, my younger sister and younger brother and me. However, our fates changed when the war came to our village. The struggle that followed colored my entire life, as it tore apart my home village and thrust me onto a path I could never have imagined. I had to leave with other Lost Boys, to walk barefoot for years, exposed to lions, hyenas, enemy soldiers, hostile tribesmen, thirst and starvation. We spent most of our young lives in a search for food, water, and freedom.

While I have stopped walking across Africa and have settled here in the United States, I feel I am still on a journey, with a goal of making others see the conditions of the country I come from and the section of Africa I left. I also want to open others' eyes to the sometimes desperate situations once some help is found in refugee camps in an effort to improve the lot of those whose lives are deeply affected by those experiences.

And I want to detail what the Lost Boys are doing in America today and what our hopes are for our home country. We are men now, although we do not mind if you call us the Lost Boys. For this brings to memory the life-and-death struggle we faced as youths in Eastern Africa and reminds us that we have survived a brutal life, and have been very fortunate. We hope the way we live out our lives here in America reflects the gratitude we feel for this new life. Finally, I'd like to show how the bloody fire of the civil war flung us onto continents far away from our home, but we are forming a new generation of leaders for the new South Sudan that has been created out of our suffering.

Many people have heard of Darfur, which has been called a genocide; Darfur is located in the western part of Sudan. However, the tragic attacks in South Sudan predate the conflicts in Darfur, in my country's western section. I believe it is important that others know the details of the conflicts and become familiar with the causes and the impacts of these wars, as there is no hope for this large section of the African continent unless the world understands more.

Sudan, which spans both sides of the equator, was Africa's largest country until recently. In January of 2011, according to a peace agreement that concluded our bitter civil war and was signed in 2005, there was a vote to decide if Sudan should be two countries. The vote was overwhelmingly for independence, spelling a new day for the new nation of South Sudan. There is much to do to enhance the existing framework in our area to build our nation. Darfur remains another effect of the punishing Arabic regime in Khartoum, and it will be dealt with, as Darfurians are largely our African brothers and sisters. But first we need to set things right in South Sudan. The solution to one depends on the solution to the other.

I was one of tens of thousands of Sudanese boys who, when the conflicts between North and South that began in 1983 reached our village in 1987, began a long search for escape, a way to find food and water and to find peace that would enable us to survive, to grow into manhood. We eventually walked to Ethiopia where we found refugee camps. But we were forced back to Sudan because of Ethiopia's civil war, and sought shelter in Kenyan refugee camps for 10 years.

Most people became aware of the Lost Boys in 2001, when, like me, some of them began to arrive in the States. But their agony began in 1987 and did not end until 2001, when most were resettled here. Now we ache to solve the long-standing problems between peoples in our region that forced the journey in the first place. And we want to make sure that the deaths and suffering in refugee camps, a greater tragedy heaped on top of already tragic circumstances, don't continue in the future.

My life in my village, in the Lakes region eight miles east of Rumbek, consisted of tending cattle that my mother owned. My father died when I was very young, and I don't remember him. We lived in a village of about five hundred people, most joined in some way with others through marriages and blood relationships. Other family members around me were a grandmother and her brothers and their families, my mother's brothers and their families. We lived in two camps year round; we lived in our permanent home during the rainy season (thus the building above the ground—not only to avoid lions and other predators, but to escape the floods of water that would course through during heavy downpours). The rest of the year, usually from December to the end of March, we would create dry season camps near shrunken rivers so that we could have access to water for our animals and ourselves.

Our cattle are the focus of our lives. In Sudan, a person's wealth is completely tied to how many cattle he owns—rather, how many a
family
owns, as there's not a lot of distinction between the individual and the family. Cattle are acquired through marriage, and everyone marries. The haggling over cattle for a woman's bride-price, for instance, is a major community event, observed by all the village people. Everyone knows everyone's business in this village—and it is everyone's business, as many are related. But more about the bride-price and bride-wealth later.

On a typical day, at the age of seven, I would rise from a mat on the dirt floor where I'd slept matches-in-a-box style with my older and younger brother. My sister and mother would already be up, making a fire and beginning preparation for the meal that would be taken at lunch time by the rest of the family there in our home, and that would be carried by the rest of us to the grazing fields. There is no breakfast—we would go to the water source (pots of water that my mother and sister had fetched), and wash our faces. My mother would have prepared our lunch to carry to the grazing fields with us.

Young boys watching cattle near Pulkar, South Sudan, as Majok was doing in 1987 when the Sudanese Army attacked his village of Adut Maguen.

My job was to untie the cattle and lead them to graze on the grasses not far from our home. I would do this with my older brother and my cousins. Twenty cattle had to be rounded up into groups, tethering them with ropes strung around their necks held like so many balloon strings. Once we were out on the grasslands, we'd make sure we had all our cattle in one location and keep an eye on them so that none strayed. We knew our cattle by color patterns. In fact, Dinka names are actually colors of cattle. My name, Majok, signifies a black and white pattern in Dinka.

When the cattle were settled in a particular area, we could relax some and play with other boys who were doing the same thing with their families' cattle. By about noon, we'd take out our first meal of the day, groundnut paste rolled in a banana leaf. Afterwards, we'd chew on a sorghum plant stem. These grazing fields were not rolling grasslands as you might picture in the American West or large pastures such as you see in rural Georgia and Tennessee or the Midwest states. Mostly they were areas of man-high grasses, which the cattle munched all day long.