Seed of South Sudan (3 page)

Young Dinka in a cattle camp near Majok's village wears ashes for decoration and shows off his young bulls.

I did not attend school, but schooling was planned for me because my older brother was not going to attend. In Dinka families, one son attends, usually the oldest. But for some reason, my brother was not going to school, and it was I, when I was of age, who was to travel to a school building about 12 miles from our village. Because of the dislocation caused by war, I first learned my ABCs in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, 300 miles from my home. And I learned English rather than Arabic as is the Sudanese custom.

That one day during the end of the rainy season, in October or November, my pastoral life changed. Tanks, Hummers, and soldiers of the Sudanese army began an assault on our village. They started from the police station, where soldiers from North Sudan were stationed. In the past, these stations often would be attacked by rebels, militiamen from the Southern Sudan tribes, the Sudanese Liberation Army. But there were no rebels around in our area when these attacks began—North Sudan was warring on South Sudan, and they used the excuse that rebels were hiding in our village to destroy it. In fact, at this time, the rebels were just across Sudan's borders with Kenya and Ethiopia, a distance of about 200 miles.

There was a great deal of noise, smoke, and confusion as tanks moved into the area outside the village. Bombs fell, soldiers burned huts, streams of choking, blinding smoke were everywhere and people were running, gathering everything they could: belongings, food, mats, on heads and underarms. Children cried. There was much scurrying about, screaming, mothers calling for children, children for their mothers.

But I was not in the village—I saw the smoke, heard the gunfire and shelling, and I just kept moving, looking for a safe place. I went to the next village and found only burned huts and scattered bowls used for cooking. There were old and young, men and women, girls and boys, people and cattle on the paths at first. I kept walking with no belongings, looking for a place. But everywhere there was smoke, fire, burned-out homes and the menace of soldiers. We'd go toward the trees, which at this time were losing their leaves, so they offered only a little cover. And there were dangerous animals where there were trees. We just kept walking, trying to avoid the green clothes of the military. We tried to find out what was happening, where we would be safe.

Pretty soon it was just young males as the women and girls could not keep up, and the men stayed behind with them trying to make a home wherever there were villages that were far away from our home and where locals would allow. The danger was everywhere—families could be wiped out as the soldiers advanced to these villages that hadn't been attacked. The villages could run out of food and send newcomers away.

Ethiopia was where most of the goods that came to our area came from; there was little trade from the North. The South has little connection to the North economically, culturally or socially, and the very bad roads in our area went east, not north. We knew not to go north, and certainly not to Rumbek, a large town, because that's where the attacks were spreading from. We decided to walk far, far away so that we would be away from danger, and then we would try to find food and shelter.

My grandmother told me the civil war would come to our village. Even more important and powerful, she and my mother taught me many skills to survive on my own. In Dinka culture, children are trained how to be strong because their parents tell them that they do not know what can happen to them. Parents show their children many things that could happen in the future.

I recall my grandmother talking to me when there was an incident about a year before full-out war came to our area. Our small village, Adut Maguen, is south of a larger one, called Pacong. One night, at Pacong, rebels of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) attacked the police station. The government troops were occupying the station in a stepped-up effort to quell the rebels; the rebels, local tribesmen, were attacking the police station at night.

My grandmother heard gunshots, but I was sleeping. When I woke up my grandmother called me and asked me, “Did you hear a gun sound last night?”

“No, Momdit, I didn't. What happened?”

“Anyanya attacked Pacong last night,” she said.

“What is Anyanya, Momdit?”

“They are people who fight the Arabs.”

“Why did they attack the Arabs?”

“My grandson, you are young, you do not know Anyanya. If Anyanya is going to fight again, I will die before this war.” (These were tribes that fought the Arabs in a civil war many years earlier than the civil war that caused me to leave my village. Anyanya was a combination of Nuer, Lotuko, Madi, and other groups as well as Dinka tribesmen that fought the Arabs from 1969 to 1972. During that war, the Sudanese Army (SA) descended on the village and killed indiscriminately.) She wanted to die rather than have the Army kill people as they did then.

My grandmother said that I would not die in this war, even though she would die. I remember my grandmother told me this war was going to kill many people, and some would leave the country. She took care of me well there in the village and showed me how I could live alone without a parent's support. She told me to stay happy no matter what bad situation I had.

She told me Dinka men were the strongest, smartest, tallest—handsome and proud.

“Do you know what Monyjang means?” A new word. It sounded like
mon yang
.

“No, Momdit.”

“Monyjang is the only man of the men.”

It was interesting for me to hear that name, and it made me proud to be Dinka. I believe cultures can help people to survive in difficult situations like what the Lost Boys and Lost Girls had in 15 years of journeying in South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya. South Sudan has been rich in traditional activities, and this kept the boys and girls alive. I believe South Sudan's different tribes and traditional cultures keep the people together, and make their lives rich and exciting.

I do know that some people see us as funny because the Dinka men cannot cook, according to our culture. Women are the only ones who know how to cook in Dinka culture. This is a guideline of Dinka culture that keeps men away from the kitchen. We had many rules in our community to inspire people to work hard, learn responsibility and respect people. These rules led us to work hard in America. We are responsible people, and we help our own people, friends, relatives, family and parents.

Now, I do cook Dinka food for myself and for my fellow Lost Boys in Clarkston, Georgia. Our foods are usually rice with meat, chicken, and lots of vegetables. And I have a Dinka wife, and now a daughter, but I will not have two wives, as is the custom in my village. While I value much that is Dinka, I am changing a bit.

An outsider is probably confused by all the tribal names in the South Sudan area. It is probably not unlike the differences in regions here in the United States. I understand that there are great rivalries among football teams from different states or areas, such as Georgia vs. Florida, or Auburn vs. Alabama. Or you could think of very popular Super Bowl opponents. However, instead of playing games against each other, young men of the tribes in South Sudan were trained as warriors, and many have long traditions of fierce fighting to protect their various areas in South Sudan.

Something that is difficult to understand is the lengthy history of our culture. The Dinka and the tribes like them have been in existence since the time of the ancient Egyptians and before. There is a lot of focus on Egyptian culture, probably because of the exceptional pyramids, religious temples, and the pharaohs' burial sites that have yielded gold, pottery, mummies and many other persistent reminders of a long-ago culture. The excitement has been great, especially since the discovery of untold treasures in Tutankhamen's grave. But the sources of the Nile—the White Nile and Blue Nile, where many southern Sudan tribes live—were mostly unexplored by Europeans, the writers of much of the world's history, until only recently, relatively speaking.

Our knowledge of the history of the area of southern Sudan, including the Rumbek area that Majok comes from, is clouded by the absence of permanent structures and written records. Geography and tribal patterns of self-sufficiency kept the area isolated; yet cattle-keeping and other traditions are similar to those in Africa's oldest civilizations, and indications are that trading with other areas developed over the years. Yet until 1841, the White Nile area, a dense swamp inundated by floods from May to December every year, was never explored; only in that year did a Turkish viceroy of Egypt send an expedition through the White Nile and Blue Nile areas to find the headwaters of the river, in Uganda. European impacts followed.
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To understand southern Sudan, it's important to look at Sudan's history, and at Egypt's history as well. Since the early 1960s, studies of 20th century artifact rescues have yielded many new discoveries, and more are occurring every day.

It is well to remember that in ancient times, Egyptians and Nubians mingled in Egypt and in Nubia, and that Nubia's highly developed African culture rose before the ascent of the Egyptian dynasties. Some of the kings in ancient Egyptian times were from Nubia. The region was in what is now Sudan, north of present-day Khartoum, the country's capital. In the Old Testament, it was referred to as the Kingdom of Kush. Khartoum is at the juncture of the White Nile and Blue Nile rivers, which flow north and form the storied Nile River. Upper Nubia developed around the third and fourth cataracts of the Nile, and included the royal cities of Kerma and Meroe; Lower Nubia fell between the first and second cataracts; both areas offered access to much-prized gold fields and emerald mines, as well as a door to the valuable products of sub–Saharan Africa.

“Much material in Lower Nubia now lies under Lake Nasser, permanently flooded after the construction of the Aswan High Dam, while some Upper Nubian sites have been destroyed by the completion of the Merowe Dam at the Fourth Cataract,” writes Marjorie M. Fisher, editor with others of
Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile
. “Nubia's indigenous language, which might offer further insights, was not written down until the Meroitic Period (mid-third century BC to mid-fourth century AD), but the language, although deciphered, can be understood only to a very limited extent.”

So those wanting to understand about this culture “must explore the region's relations with Egypt, as well as the indigenous sources of data,” Fisher writes.
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Researchers wanting to view the remains of the Nubian physical culture, fortunately, are able to see the remains documented and removed in several museum collections, including many in the United States. In the early 1960s, when the Aswan High Dam was being built, an effort to salvage artifacts was begun.

“Before the world lost much of its precious heritage, an international rescue campaign was organized under the auspices of the United Nations Scientific, Technical and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),” an article in
American Visions
states. “Participating foreign missions were offered half of the discoveries that would otherwise have been permanently lost. Several American museums and universities participated in the UNESCO Salvage Campaign, and their share of finds forms the backbone of the major Nubian collections in this country.

“The very concept of rescue archeology—and the foundations of the Nubian collections at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Oriental Museum of the University of Chicago—originated in Nubia at the beginning of the century, when the first (and smaller) dam was being erected near Aswan in 1906,” the article continues, then details how these discoveries enabled the identification of several previously unknown cultures, and a completely new view of the Nubians, now seen to be rivals at times to Egyptian power.
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