Out of Exile: Narratives from the Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan

By Craig Walzer, Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng

Decades of conflicts and persecution have driven millions from their homes in all parts of the northeast African country of Sudan. Many thousands more have been enslaved as human spoils of war. In their own words, the narrators of Out of Exile recount their lives before their displacement, the reasons for their flight, and their hopes to someday return home. 

Included are the stories of: 

ABUK: a native of South Sudan now living in Boston, who survived ten years as a slave after being captured by an Arab militia. 

MARCY and ROSE: best friends, who have spent the vast majority of their lives in a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. They remember almost nothing of their former homes in Sudan. 

MATHOK: who struggled to find opportunities as a refugee in Cairo, but eventually fell into a world of gangs and violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Jun 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642595529

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers, a former professional stundman, is the editor of McSweeney's and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

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BENJAMIN BOL MANYOK

AGE: 45

TRIBE: Dinka Rek

BIRTHPLACE: Gogrial, South Sudan

INTERVIEWED IN: Jebel Aulia camp, Sudan

WE DON’T PLANT TREES

The Jebel Aulia camp is home to forty-five thousand Sudanese. The vast majority were displaced by war from their homes in South Sudan and Darfur. The camp is located in the desert southwest of Khartoum. Homes there are made of mud and straw. There is no electricity or running water. Everything is coated in the desert dust of the Sahara.

Benjamin Bol Manyok has lived in Jebel Aulia for fifteen years. He is well over six feet tall and built solidly. He wears long dress shirts with brightly colored prints.

Benjamin spoke about his life while sitting in the Kodra schoolhouse, a single long, empty room made of corrugated iron. Benjamin is the principal of Kodra. He told his story in Arabic. The interview ended when Sudanese police entered the school and dismissed everyone present.

In 1962, I was born and was named Benjamin Bol Manyok. I am of the Dinka Rek. Like many born in the south of Sudan, I do not know my birthday, as we do not have birth certificates.

I was born in a small village called Gogrial, in Warab state, the north-central part of South Sudan. It is the same village where Salva Kiir comes from, the current Vice President of Sudan. It’s a place where they farm and herd goats. My village was one of the biggest in Warab state, a real town with neighborhoods and centers. Right now it’s one of the worst-damaged areas in the South. It was one of the last places where they fought before the peace came. There was no electricity in the village even before the war. Now it’s worse.

My father was the area’s police officer; he held the job from 1922 until he retired as an old man. It’s not like many places you probably know of, where policing is a twenty-four-hour job. He had time to have another job on the side, working as a farmer on his land and herding goats. My father was an orphan as a child, no father or mother, no brothers or sisters, so that really drove him to take care of us. Even when he grew old and retired as a police officer, he always stayed devoted to raising his children.

And there were many children! You could say he was a ladies’ man—he had eleven wives. Myself, now, I have four wives. So you could say I learned from him pretty well. That’s why he married eleven women, so he could have a big family. I have wanted the same. Yes, yes, I’ve been a ladies’ man for some time. When I was seventeen I had my first child; my oldest is a son in his late twenties. I have twenty-one children total, and, well, some of them are out of wedlock. But I know them all, and nine of them are with me right now in Khartoum. The others are with my family in South Sudan. I let them stay there, because in the North the lessons are in Arabic, but in the South they learn English.

My mother was the seventh of my father’s eleven wives. She passed away in October, 2006. I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years before her death. My mother was a very smart woman and a leader, and she became the head women’s representative in our county. She was our local leader until the day she died. No other woman had ever held such a position.

By the time she passed away last October, she’d become a very well-known and respected woman. Many government officials from the South came to my brother’s house in Khartoum where we were mourning.

My mother was rooted in the land and insisted that we have the same roots. Even during the war, when my children reached the age of three or four, my wives would take the children to my mother’s house in the south of Sudan. My mother didn’t like the idea of the children being raised in the environment of Khartoum. She wanted our children to be raised as southerners in our southern land, no matter what.

I have five brothers and two sisters from my mother. With all of my father’s wives, there were fifty-one children total. My father would split up the wives—in one neighborhood he’d have three of his women living together, in another district there would be five. So whenever my father would spend time at a house, it would be a special event, and we’d all eat with him, all the children of different mothers.

I entered school at a young age and studied well. I was growing up between the civil wars, after the Addis Ababa agreement ended the first war, so in my youth there was peace. We were free, and I could be educated. I went to secondary school in my state, to a place called the Toch Institute, and graduated in 1977. I slept in the dormitories, made friends, was a good student. You could say that high school was like university at that time, because once you entered high school you could choose classes to prepare you for the job you would like. I chose education and teaching.

At first, the people close to me scorned my decision to become a teacher. My father wanted me to be a police officer, like him. I had many brothers that went to university; my father saw my older brothers going off to study, and I think he saw me as the last opportunity for someone to follow his path as a police officer. He would ask me, Why are you doing this? But I would not be deterred from my path of teaching. I am a natural teacher; I was born for this job. After my father retired from the police, he was appointed a member of the teachers’ council in our area, which would advise the local schools. Through his work with the school, he started to appreciate my choice.

When I graduated from school I was qualified as a teacher and I was given a job at the local school immediately. At the time, students and teachers were pretty relaxed. The school building was a nicely sized mud hut with a zinc roof. We had some books, we were able to teach, and we taught well. There was respect for teachers—each teacher was given one cow, so we’d always have milk to drink and we were never hungry. We had farms and fruits, we could fish in the river—we never heard a story of somebody going really hungry. We received a small salary, but we didn’t have to spend it. We might buy a radio, or some new shoes; we could be comfortable and save. We needed nothing. It’s not like now, where a family depends on a salary for food. There and then our salary wasn’t important, because we had cows, we had land to farm, we had nature.

It was different being a teacher back then. At the time the rules said you could beat or whip a child for misbehaving, but I really didn’t follow that rule myself. Sure, sometimes you’d have to resort to whipping a child, I guess, to put him on the right path. But back then it was done too often. It’s good that these days it’s more frowned upon to do such things.

SIMPLY A MATTER OF EQUALITY

I remember when the war started in the early 1980s. I was about twenty years old. Our village was a population center, an important area with police and government offices, so of course the SPLA—the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the resistance—grew there. The leaders were mostly former government officials who had turned away. I told my family I hoped to join the SPLA, but my father absolutely refused. His main goal was to keep his children close to him.

I supported the war. There were problems for us, for our people, and they had to be solved. It was simply a matter of equality. We would ask the government to do simple things for us, a bit of development, and they would refuse. It was just filled with corruption. And of course, we weren’t free. The best example is when the sharia laws came, and we suddenly had to follow Islamic laws. They told me that if I break an Islamic law, I could go to jail for it. But I am a Christian!

In sharia law, if I steal something, they can cut off my hand just for stealing. The alcohol issue was big.¹ At wedding parties, if you did not bring the local brew—merissa, we called it—what was the point of going to the wedding? Say you love a girl and you want to marry her, but your father doesn’t want you to, because she will cost a dowry of many cows. You might agree with the girl to run away—it’s pure love, it’s no harm, but sharia law would say it’s not a marriage, and therefore it deserves a real punishment.

DEAD GOATS AND DONKEYS EVERYWHERE

It was 1986, and I was a teacher, a husband, and a father, when the bombing started. Before we were bombed, the SPLA leaders had information of what was coming—remember, they had histories in the government, they had connections. The SPLA would try to calm us down, saying, They’re not coming here to bomb you, they’re coming here to bomb us.

Before the bombing came, the SPLA units crossed the nearby river. When the first strikes came, I was in a classroom hosting an examination. It was an important testing session for students from grade six through junior high school. The blasts came and came, and we hid in the corners.

That first day, we fled the area to a village nearby, but we came back the second day to collect our things. It was chaos when we returned. You’d see dead bodies on the roads. We dug through the houses and you could lift up a piece of rubble and see a dead man, or dead animals—there were dead goats and donkeys everywhere. It seemed everything was killed. In truth, I guess about twenty people died.

We could tell the SPLA were scared. The next day the government chased them, bombing the place to which they had fled, and the government took control of our village. After that day, we just left.

My parents stayed in a village close to our own. I decided to go farther. My mother agreed with my decision to leave. Really, I think she was scared that if I stayed in the village area I would join the SPLA, like most of my brothers already had. But I decided I wouldn’t—it wasn’t necessary for me to join to prove my manhood. Instead I needed to take care of what we had left. My father took many of his cows and some savings, and gave them to me. I left and I am still gone, to this day, twenty years later.

YOU’RE FROM GOGRIAL AND YOU’RE STILL ALIVE?

After the bombing I walked to Wau, the closest city to home. The journey was two days of walking, following the river straight south. The SPLA used to bother me a lot along the way, stopping me on the road and asking me questions: Where are you going, why are you going? You see, there was a government checkpoint coming before I could enter Wau. The SPLA was worried that I was going to give information away to the government in Wau. They asked many questions, and I would answer until it was clear I had become annoyed, and then they would let me pass.

The SPLA was right, though. When I came to the checkpoint outside of Wau, the government soldiers interrogated me: Where is the SPLA? How many guns do they have? These soldiers could also look at me and see I was educated; I couldn’t simply act dumb. So when they asked me simple obvious questions like, Is the SPLA in your village? I would say yes, because we all knew that. But I could lie when it came to the details and secrets, and tell them I knew nothing.

In Wau, I used my father’s money and cows to try to become a businessman, buying wheat and selling it for profit. It did not go so well. It was difficult to make money in general, and if you got really rich, then soldiers would steal from you or kill you. The government had hired a special militia to deal with the Dinka. These men would come to me as a businessman and demand my allegiance to the Northern government. They would come in and demand prices—they’d come in and say, Sell that radio for seventy-five, for a hundred pounds. That radio wasn’t even for sale; I was selling wheat! But they’d make their prices and I had to accept. If I said anything wrong to them, they could kill me, and I knew it.

In Wau, we would hear news of the war, through radio and from mouth to ear. I would get messages from my parents sometimes—every day there were new refugees coming from the villages to the city, and they would bring news. After several months, I sent for my first wife to come to the city. In addition to my business, I had been hired by a primary school, and I was pretty interested in sports, so I was not only a teacher at the school but a basketball coach, too. I had earned some respect among the people.

I stayed in Wau for a few years, but I could never feel relaxed there, and I couldn’t feel safe. There weren’t many bombings around us, but for me, it wasn’t bombs, but people that were my trouble. I remember the moment I decided to leave. Government army officers came to my home and told me they wanted my old Land Rover truck. It was the rainy season, and they wanted to use it to pull other cars out of the mud; they wanted it for their missions. I said no. I told them, If you want my truck, you can rent it or buy it from me. One of the head officers was there, a notorious man in town. He kept staring at me as I was saying this. I remember him staring. He asked, Who is this person? I told him where I was from, and he said You’re from Gogrial, and you’re still alive? He continued to stare. After that, I sold my stuff, sent the animals to my mother, and I moved.

WHAT IS HE GOING TO STEAL?

At that point I had a choice between returning to my village or going to Khartoum. I decided to go to Khartoum, because the route from Wau back to my village was loaded with checkpoints, mines, ambushes, and more. You know what’s funny? I actually paid the government to take me with their own plane to Khartoum. I went to the airport in Wau and found some sympathetic soldiers there who got me a seat on a flight to Khartoum. So I took a plane and left my woman in Wau. I was nervous that if we both had gone together, the authorities would get suspicious and would know that I would not be coming back—I was scared they wouldn’t allow me to leave. By myself, I could tell them that I was just going to Khartoum on business and I would be back. I did not come back.

I arrived in Khartoum in 1992, I think. My brother and cousin were in the military, living right by the airport, and I stayed with them at first. It might seem strange that they were Southerners and in the government, but there were many Southerners, many Dinka, in the Khartoum forces. The army paid money, gave jobs. It was just work in the city, not fighting in the South. There was no passion in the job. It was just a job. As for the war going on, people would switch sides all the time. I could put it like this—if I’m a soldier and you’re an officer, and if I have problems with you, I could just quit and switch sides. It would happen all the time, even at the highest levels. Loyalty was always changing. Factions would split off from Dr. John Garang² and would sit down and try to have an agreement with the North. And then the North would lie to them, and they would reconcile with Dr. John. It wasn’t about switching sides or loyalties by that time. People were just tired of the war, and they would do anything to make it go away.

I went first to live with my brother. I quickly got two jobs, one as a referee for the football association, and one as a coach for a small swimming team. I became part of the council of a school in Jebel Aulia camp, a small school named Kodra. Soon I started working in this school as a teacher and a coach. After four or five months, my wife and children came to join me in Khartoum. My family continued to grow. It was weird—I have married two women here in Khartoum, and the dowry of goats was exchanged between our families in South Sudan. The third time, the dowry of goats was paid there, and then the woman was sent up here to be with me.

About a year after coming to Khartoum, I finally had all my family with me and we needed our own place; my brother’s place was far too small. Jebel Aulia was a camp for internally displaced people, for people from the South like me. Plus, I already had work at the school in Jebel Aulia; it had been taking three hours to come to work every day, and that was too much. So I was willing to go. In the camps you could just build a house out of mud, without paying rent. I wouldn’t have to pay for waterworks; I could just go to the local pump and pump water. So it was the smartest move.

I am still here, almost fifteen years later. I’m now the principal of the school here. The land I live on is not really mine, but not many people want to live here, so for a long time I wasn’t so worried about losing the place. Now, though, I hear lots of stories of people being pushed off their land. It’s all up to the planning ministers in Khartoum. Most of the current residents of Jebel Aulia have been transferred here from Khartoum. What that means is this: they were displaced people living in other open areas of Khartoum until the government saw an opportunity for developing that land and sold it off to private investors. People were just bulldozed off the land—police would come, sometimes at midnight, and push them away. So these people come to places like Jebel Aulia. I’d say there are about eleven or twelve thousand people living here now. Millions more like us are all across the corners of this city.

How can I describe this place to people who have never been here? It’s a simple place. We are mostly from the South. Some are from the Nuba Mountains, and others here have come recently from Darfur. We all get along—even the Northerners that have come to live here. Once we’re here, we’re all in the same situation with the same status. So we get along. There are some small troubles, certainly. Even here, we sit and talk, a Sudanese and a foreigner, and a drunken Arab man has come in and told me I should be ashamed of myself for talking to a white man like this. But these are only small troubles. Besides, how could we have crime? I mean, even if someone wanted to commit robbery here, what is he going to steal?

The ground is dry and the air is hot. There’s no chance to grow food. We do have water, because we have hand-pumps donated by organizations. There’s no electricity. We build our houses from mud. Right now, it is the summer rainy season, and two days ago a flood came and my house collapsed, because it has no concrete foundation. Now I will live with my neighbors until the end of the rainy season and then I’ll build another house. This doesn’t happen every year, but it happens when there’s a lot of rain. To rebuild, the people in the village come together—for a day or two, all the men in the village come together and make a start on the house, usually building one room and one rakuba, a tent out of plastic sheets. It is a camp of mud and plastic. And later on I can finish the house and build a wall around the perimeter; that’s pretty easy. Just bake some bricks and stack them and stick them together with more mud and sticks. It will take about seven days to be ready.

A woman here will find work cleaning for a wealthy Arab family, and they’ll give her a few pounds and some leftover food, never enough. If the men find work, they can bake clay bricks, or work as diggers, or clean the streets near the markets. Some people go out of the city to work as farmers. People here are below the poverty line, and they receive no care from the government. There are no hospitals here for us, and children can die easily. There are hospitals close by—just out the school window we can see a shiny new hospital, only a year old. It’s a military hospital, though. It does not belong to us. It’s for the retired military veterans, and for other rich people who buy care, but it is not meant for the public. If one of our children is sick, we would have to pay money to get in. And if we don’t have money, the child dies.

Right now, there are no government schools in Jebel Aulia. My salary does not come from the government, and it cannot come from the students—the classes are free, because nobody could afford them otherwise. For my work as the principal of the school, I receive one hundred pounds—fifty American dollars—for the month from Save the Children UK. In the language of the humanitarian workers, that’s not even enough money to call it a salary—they call it an incentive. But one hundred pounds a month is still better than many schools. Sometimes there’s no money at all, so we have to cut school for almost two months, find some other way for the teachers to make money, and then start classes again.

WE ARE OUTSIDE OF TIME

In the years since I’ve come to Jebel Aulia, hardly anything has changed in this place. It is as if we are outside of time. You could say that people get poorer and poorer. Years ago, organizations would come and give us food. We had four medical centers, a tailoring center for women to sew clothes, and sometimes the organizations would come to the schools to bring food. But now there’s nothing! They’ve all gone to Darfur, and since the peace agreement, some have gone to the South to rebuild. But they’ve forgotten us. I have no opinion about the organizations leaving. Maybe Darfur is a better place for them to be than here. Organizations cannot stay with us for our entire lives.

Recently, with nobody looking at us here, the government took the opportunity to pass a new law. Now everyone from outside must have permits to get into camps like this one. It makes it even harder for people to come and help. Basically, these were once camps that were run by aid organizations, but now they are government camps. It has become really hard for organizations to enter.

I do realize that relief has a time and a place—it should not go on forever. When the aid organizations were here, they cared for us much more than the government. They cared for us for years, but then they stopped—and the problem was that we got used to them; we started to depend on them instead of depending on ourselves. I remember they were feeding us for about two years at one point in the 1990s, and then in the third year, when the food didn’t come, we went hungry because we failed to care for ourselves. Once that food does stop, and you’re in need, you need to find work as a carpenter, as a driver, or something. The organizations would come and give us food but they wouldn’t train us in basic skills, so people didn’t learn ways to get money.

Now, when the organizations can come, they’ve learned that when they give us something, they should teach us, too. Now the food has really stopped. We don’t get food for free anymore. Classes and waterpumps, yes. But no food. And the government treats us with talk. They have nothing for us. Even the SPLM people here—the Southern representatives in the government—do not do much either. They come to the camp sometimes and see that we are impoverished. They tell us to live a good life, to be good men, and they tell us that if we feel we cannot survive here any longer, they will provide services for us in South Sudan. I don’t know about that. I do know we are still here.

THE PROBLEM SEEMS TO BE FAR AWAY

I really want to return to the South.

Since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed between the North and the South, I feel less tension among the people—the problem now seems to be far away, among the politicians. If you ask the nation’s people, they just want to go around normally—but once you put politics in their heads, it’s a different story. You go to the universities in Khartoum, you can see a Southerner and a Northerner eating together, studying together, with no problem. The government used to tell Northerners that if you die for us, you’ll be dying for jihad. That’s a key to heaven right there, and so people were convinced by this propaganda. They’d say that if you killed a Southerner, you’d automatically go to heaven. Now those voices are quiet, and the people are quiet, too.

I really think that Dr. John Garang—may he rest in peace—did so much for us. But still very little changes! Everything we can touch is still run by the Arabs—the water, the electricity, the housing, and most of the money belongs to the Arabs. That was the whole point of the peace, that we Southerners would get some control. I believed it was possible when the peace first came.

I remember when Dr. Garang came to Khartoum in July 2005, after the peace was signed. I went out to greet him, and so many others went, too. It felt like six million singing in the streets to greet him! People always think of us as violent people, but on that day, with millions joined together, there were no problems. Transport was moving as usual. If you couldn’t fit in transport, you would walk or share a ride. That day opened people’s minds, when we saw that we could have movement and still be okay.

I went to the city center to greet Dr. Garang. When he arrived he didn’t say anything—how can you express words before millions of people? And on a more basic level, I should say that there weren’t nearly enough amplifiers to let us hear him anyhow. So Dr. Garang could only wave, there was no way to say anything more. We could see he was so happy that he could not stand still. We saw that his people had to calm him down. We sang and shouted. The men danced. We were millions, and we all had so much hope!

When Dr. Garang died, those millions were turned upside down. I was in school on that day. Six hours after he died, I first heard about it. Everything was just a mess. People didn’t know anything because the government information minister was sending out false reports, saying that everything was okay, trying to calm things down. Soon the truth came. I told everyone in school to stay inside. We didn’t know what would happen. I divided the school up, and I sent a teacher to take each group of children home. I couldn’t control my feelings. After the children went home, many older men gathered in the school, and we could not control our feelings; we were all upset, and we did not know what to do. I stayed in my house, and I saw very little. I hear there was violence, but I saw nothing. Everyone felt a great loss that I cannot explain. I tell it to you now, two years later. I am a large man, a leader, a father. And I still cry.

We Southerners have a new leader now. Salva Kiir is Salva Kiir, and Garang was Garang. They are different men with different ideas. Right now Kiir is working, and in some ways he has the heart of Garang. But I tell you this—Kiir is not a quarter of the man that Dr. Garang was.

SLEEPING IN THE SOUTH

Many people are returning to South Sudan. We wish them well and they leave. Right now when you go to the South, we cannot give them anything. Many of us have family there, ready to welcome us. I did go back in late 2006. I wanted to return to my own village of Gogrial. Everyone around was thinking about building and developing, but I just wanted to go home. Yet I could not go because I had even more pressing business. My parents are dead, but I wanted to visit one of my brothers, whom I had not seen in twenty-three years. He had been fighting as a soldier in the SPLA for over twenty years. Now he lives in Yei, deep in the South, close to Congo. I decided I would visit him instead of my village.

I took my savings and I left Khartoum on a Friday at nine o’clock in the morning, on a flight to Juba, the capital of the South. It was a big event for me. I remember thinking, I woke up in Khartoum and I will be sleeping in Yei, in the South. In the airport in Juba, I called my brother, told him I had arrived, and asked, Where are you? He told me, Wait, I’ll be there in a minute to pick you up. In Sudan you never know how long that really means. But as I was waiting for my luggage, I saw my brother through the glass. We made so much commotion! There was screaming and laughing—I tell you, he was laughing and yelling even more than me. Then I took a step back and saw he was walking with a cane. He had been injured during the war. Suddenly we looked like old men.

I arrived at eight o’clock that evening in the town of Yei. The road from Juba to Yei was a clean route, and I could see the changes. On the way from Juba to Yei, that whole drive, my brother would just tell me stories. I knew the basic story of the war, as not much had passed by me while I had my ear to the ground in Khartoum. My brother showed me the places I had heard of. He drove me by the place where he’d been shot. He would show me sites of little battles. Once he stopped the car and told me to walk with him, told me he wanted to show me something. Fifteen meters from the road, he showed me a circle of mud, and a boot in the middle. See that boot? That’s where a man is buried. He said if we walk for a mile, we would see six thousand more boots along the way. I asked my brother, How did you gather all these bodies? We were fighting here for seventeen days, he said, and after that both sides fell back. Dr. Garang told us to come collect bodies and put them in this one place.

WE WILL COME TO MEET AND KNOW EACH OTHER AGAIN

There is a difference between those who stayed in the South and those who left. There are four different kinds of Southerners, really. First there are Southerners who lived in America, and in Europe; they’re all in a culture of their own now. There are people who lived in other African countries as refugees. There are people who stayed in the South, and there are those who went to the North. Sure, each group has had a different experience and different lessons. As we rebuild, of course, there will be division, with each group and each person coming from a different place. But I have a feeling that after a while we will come to meet and to know each other again. Again, it all comes back to politics—we must think of something, a common cause, to bring all people together.

Some people say there will be separation in 2011 when the referendum comes.³ But it won’t happen, I tell you. We have to have responsible SPLM members, and we do not have them yet. Say we do separate—there might be war inside South Sudan! There are many veterans of SPLA in the South, and they have not fully decided on our future path. I do know that right now, there’s a lot of freedom in the South, unlike here. The thing is, though, we must have our foundation first—schools, hospitals. I believe that if the Northern government would simply help provide that for the Southern people, if they gave us basic services and respect, there would be no need for separation.

Being away from my land for these many years just makes me very sad. That is the only way I can describe it. I am told of so many changes that are happening in the South, and I am sad I’m not a part of it. Soon I will go, once I have a plan for my new life. I look forward to going back and finding the things that I have missed here. I feel it’s not my place to be here, and it’s time for me to go home. I do find myself with a feeling of big hope. There’s money and a future in the south of Sudan.

And here in Khartoum, after fifteen years, I just feel that I do not belong. The land I’m on right now—it does not belong to me. I cannot build something that belongs to me. The people of Jebel Aulia don’t grow trees, because these are not our homes! It would be so much work to grow trees in this soil, and then we say, This is not our land anyhow. That’s the smallest thing I can do once I have my own house: just grow a tree. I come from a family of farmers and goatherds—the least I could do, if this was my own land, would be to have a couple of goats, to give some milk for my children—but there is no grazing land for that here. It is these little things. If you ask my young son, This milk you drink, where does it come from? He would say, It’s donkey milk!

Of course, the donkey doesn’t make it, but it comes from barrels carted around on the sides of donkeys, and the donkeys come to our houses, and we pay to buy some milk. Who knows how pure this milk is? It could come from anything, it could come from powder. My child knows nothing of milk. But in the south of Sudan, I could bring the children out to the farm, and we could milk cows. I could tell them, That’s my cow. I could give them a cow of their own to care for. I know that when we return to the South, my children will quickly come to love the animals. The south of Sudan—in the end, that place is ours.

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¹ Under Sudanese sharia law, production and consumption of alcohol are criminal offenses.

² John Garang founded the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) and was a leader of the rebel movement. For a timeline of independent Sudan, see page 382.

³ As a condition of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, there will be a referendum in 2011 to determine whether the South will become an independent state.

ABUK BAK MACHAM

AGE: 33

TRIBE: Dinka

BIRTHPLACE: Achor, South Sudan

INTERVIEWED IN: Boston, Massachusetts

THE ONLY WORD I HEARD WAS ABEEDA. THAT MEANS SLAVE

Abuk told her story of abduction, enslavement, liberation, and resettlement while drinking tea in her den in suburban Boston. It was clear that she is well-practiced at this: she often speaks at churches and community centers on behalf of anti-slavery campaigns. During the interview and throughout the editing process, she remained insistent that her involvement not be limited to her storytelling alone. She needed to know that we would use her narrative as a platform to launch concrete action for rebuilding South Sudan.

I am from Sudan. I was born in 1975 in South Sudan, in a small town called Achor, in the region of Bahr al-Ghazal. My family was wealthy, but not wealthy with money. In our lives, we didn’t have money. Our cows and goats were our wealth. My grandfather and my father all lived in the same area in Achor. I had two brothers and three sisters. We were close. We laughed and played, you know? We were still young. I was the oldest. I lived with my cousins around, and my grandfather and grandmother, aunts and uncles. We didn’t have a lot, but we had a normal life. We were happy.

My father was a farmer. The children did not work, but we helped around the house. We just stayed home, took care of the animals and checked on the cows, brought the water from the river, washed the dishes, and cleaned the floor. We didn’t have flour so we needed to mill it so we could cook. Most women and girls did that. I would do that. I would take care of the baby cows, and I helped take care of the children too.

In the village, we had a garden to grow something to eat, and there were mango trees. We had a small lake nearby, and the kids would go swimming and fishing. We went into the jungle and looked at animals like monkeys, giraffes, and elephants. When you were sleeping, you heard the sound of a lion. Most boys went to the jungle with the animals, and the girls were usually at home.

At night we danced, sang, and played games. I had a favorite game where you put small beans on the floor to play and took, like, five in your hand, and you had to jump them.

We didn’t have school over there, and we didn’t know how to read. It was hard because when you’re a kid and you need to go to school, you need to go to the city, like up in Khartoum in the North. It’s hard to go and live up there. Most people in the North were Arabs. You couldn’t go to the city because you didn’t know if something would happen there, and when you go there you need to know Arabic; we just spoke Dinka. We had heard some Arabic words, but nobody usually speaks Arabic when you go to the South, just Dinka.

I HEARD THE FIRE

The Second Sudanese Civil War began in 1983. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army SPLA was formed when John Garang encouraged a series of mutinies in South Sudan. Approximately two million people were killed and four million southerners were displaced from their homes during the twenty-three-year war. Abuk’s village was among those affected.

I was twelve. We were playing in my yard outside the house. It was in the morning, around noontime. We were playing and we heard gunfire. Suddenly we heard people running and guns being shot. They set fire to the houses and we all ran in different directions. We didn’t know where to go. The children were screaming, and the people were being shot and killed. Mostly they killed the men; when they saw men, they shot them right away. My father was running; he hid and I didn’t see him, but I thought at that time that he had been killed. I didn’t have any idea because they shot a lot of people, all men. The militiamen wore a jallabiya, a long robe, and something on their head. They spoke Arabic. Some had light skin, but some had dark. Some of them looked like us. They came with horses, all running with horses. They came by groups, like, a hundred or two hundred, village to village.

People said the Arabs were taking control in the South. We had heard that