PEARLS OF PEDIGREE

By Rejoice Kur

This is one of the stories inspired by a childhood journey with my family from Raga to Wau, towns in western Bahr el Ghazal in the southern part of the Sudan in 1987. What had prompted me to write the memoir had been the events that had followed the South Sudanese attainment of a sovereign state.

This is a story that depicted what was sought after even before my birth. I came along and joined the march to demand for equal status. For me most parts of the story had been tough. In my writing, I had to take an expedition of self-composure. I had to take my forethought into an anticipated future and come back to write with that visualization. I had to withdraw my sentiment from what could call for vengeance and speak up for what the child had stood for. Within it is a reflective memoir about the power of a good cause and a family who believed in the triumph of the people. In their enactment, they raised a child within a time disguised by war and social discords. In a subtle journey along the lines of family relations and social associations, the story evolved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jul 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369492574

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Pearls Of

Pedigree

Rejoice Kur

Copyright © 2023 by Rejoice Kur.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/21/2024

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Preface

Section One

Countryside Raga

The House On A Hill

A Restitution To Hope

Section Two

The Search For A Lost Country

The Novice Notebook

Another Begining

When Learning Becomes A Life’s Story

An Enduring Theme

Section Three

A Moral Dispensation

The Pursuit Of Hope

Prologue

I was then a girl who was growing within the particulars of the disparities in ethnicity, creed and one of the making of a persuasive Sudanese story.

Preface

This is one of the stories inspired by a childhood journey with my family from Raga to Wau, towns in western Bahr el Ghazal in the southern part of the Sudan in 1987. What had prompted me to write the memoir had been the events that had followed the South Sudanese attainment of a sovereign state. This is a story that depicted what was sought after even before my birth. I came along and joined the march to demand for equal status. For me most parts of the story had been tough. In my writing, I had to take an expedition of self-composure. I had to take my forethought into an anticipated future and come back to write with that visualization. I had to withdraw my sentiment from what could call for vengeance and speak up for what the child had stood for.

The memoir began in Raga town in a chapter that presented a reflective writing about my family. The hardest part in writing this whole story I have to say, I would give them the credit for creating in me a great deal of courage, in many prospects, I had to say, ‘they set the bar too high.’

In the time we had arrived Wau in the winter of 1987, we stayed in a residence that belonged to the Sudan Council of Churches. One of the ordeals that occurred was my grandfather’s arrival afterwards when he had been persecuted in Raga in a day that had defined a journey of a lifetime. We met in that house on a hill in grievous silences to strengthen our determination in what we all had become part of one way or another. The traces of the journeys of each one of us had carried the massage in connected anecdotes even the ones we lost, their memories remained in the story.

As the story proceeds, at some time my mother was left as the head of the family. There were two contrasting events at the beginning, the parade of the Independence Day and the ravaging war of the second south Sudanese struggle for autonomy. The range of events depicted were the changes in the ruling system that had occurred, and the corresponding strives that had amplified the complexity of the daily life and what had been the paramount anticipation at the time.

That had led to the section about the lost country where a series of significant events and associations with counterparts from opposing ends of the Sudanese story while we were living in Wau town in Bahr el Ghazal. One of my dedicated involvements was being employed by the commission for the rights of non-Muslims in the national capital Khartoum in 2007. It was a depiction of the pragmatism of what the girl child had stood for.

I would like to reveal the girl child in this short memoir, her struggles, persistence, and resolves in the face of surmounting odds. I would like the reader to discover that what sojourned in our labor are the good that we assembled from the ashes of the great effort.

Section One

Countryside Raga

Certain things were improbable to judgment and proscribed to enunciation, like a requisite to the elegant constituents of impartiality or a cry of virtue. It was a life in a time somewhere in abandonment. It had been an undaunted invincible desire to an utmost gain, a demand in existence prior in the evolution of time. There had lived a conventional rendering of a people whose pronounce was extensively applied, whose prudence had crafted the beautification of an occurring point in history, who bore unimaginable weight. They had projected revolutions of whose yields they perceived from distant statuses. In sheer expectations they awaited. Long was the wait. In a decision to navigate the perils of seclusion, they commenced to knowledge and articulation of what might be the route of their advancement. It had begun in the transcendent of an inter-generational bearing. In their desire to interact, they unknowingly blended harsh lines of social divides. It was a discovery that was gradually uncovered when societal advancements phenomena had sided delineations. It became a charge to finding where in the fitting those delineations would not conceal social uniformity. My life amplified as a set to destiny, a confinement to benevolence and a sojourn to conscience. My mother blessed me to the happiness of her labor. Imagining her inherent radiance and enduring anticipation, it might have been the delight of a second birth to her young years and a hopeful reminiscent rendering. She had been a woman with a bearing, an inspiration and counsel. I had dispatched a record silence and acute passivity in trail of a route I considered worthy. I was born in Raga a town to the south-west of Bahr El Ghazal. In my memory’s best depiction, Raga district was constructed close to a curving boundary of an endless conservatory of one of nature’s most endowed splendors. In pictorial reminiscence, it had a rural fecundity of the African savannah. My father named me ‘Bupouch,’ meaning ‘a girl not thanked.’ My youngest aunt named me ‘Govada’ which in all of the possible meanings, is a name used when so many words had been said, an interpretation would be ‘a great deal had been put for this.’ My mother described the time of my birth November 1982 to be a very cold winter so much that among the gifts she had received was a set of woolen blankets. That year, two of my father’s youngest siblings aunt Nyakuch and uncle Michael travelled to Raga and spent the Christmas season with the in-laws. My elder sister Buchay was already a toddler. There is a portrait of Buchay and my aunt Nyakuch that stayed in the family as a reminder of a visit from the distant home. We moved to Malakal in the Upper Nile where my father comes from in the following year. My father, Otor Marko Kur belongs to the Shilluk people, a tribe that resided the Upper Nile region form ancient times. His home village Pakwa is on the bank of the White Nile. Their clan is a linage of the Shilluk Reth Nyikang who moved from Bahr el Ghazal many centuries ago and formed a kingdom that bordered the Funj Sultanate. My Grandfather Marko Kual Kur used to work in Tonga a village to the south of Malakal and my father with his siblings had spent years there and attended Tonga primary school. My mother used to remind my siblings and I when we were growing of the time when we had been to Malakal. We were taken to our paternal grandmother Nyameet Kwot one of her most close individuals I would say. She would remind us that our grandmother was an honest lady and was very accepting of her coming from a different tribe. In all the years of her life she had never talked with that much anticipation about somebody most of the time. We had also met our uncle Joseph Marko who moved to the UAE afterwards and we did not meet him again until we became young adults. My uncle Luke, who is the second youngest son, was in Malakal at the time we were there. We met him again in Khartoum many years afterwards and he would recall that visit and the meet with their cousins. We met our older siblings from whom we had grown apart until in adult years that we found a way to reunite again. My mother would also recount her talks with Grandfather James Adieng Kur who had been among the military officials in Torit a historic town, in 1955. Adieng was Marko’s youngest brother and the guardian of their family when his brother passed away. He had told my mother a narrative of the Torit revolution that she would recount the way she had heard from one of the officials who had been there, ‘the morning of August 18th, 1955.’

We returned to Bahr El Ghazal when the second southern Sudanese war broke in the Upper Nile area in the summer of 1983. We travelled to Raga town where my mother’s family was living at the time. We spent few years in the town before relocating. From a distant recollection Raga township and its outer suburbs was saturated with the unusual complexity of ethnicities and prehistoric interactions. Its tradition treasured semi-peripatetic adventures of the substantial wild. Like a fusion buckle of inherent cultures presumed lost by disconnection. Only an arrival to the town could reveal the nobility in language, sustenance and customs. As much as my recollections could enlighten, the town’s architecture was a combination of administrative quarters and traditional huts. A distance northward was the towns stadium, beyond that was the government quarters built adjacent to another and each build had its fence. The administrative compounds where the constituencies of the district departments were located in my recollections were enclosed by cable structured fences and had flowering shrubs planted within. The town’s main market was within the environs. The town’s airport was some more distance beyond the church and was quite inactive except for few jet arrivals from time to time. The church was located towards the center and was one of the shrines available. The main mosque was constructed on path that meets the Raga River to the north of the town. The arrangements of the suburbs seemed to have been delineated at the advent of the town’s inhabitation and the intended pursuits. Raga town was like the emerald of the tropical forest, a sketch of complex simplicity and calm diligence. My Grandmother was called Khamisa Jajugu after her husband and her house was built across the street from the only church in that side of the town over the span of our stay there. We visited each time we went to the church. That was the home where almost everybody in the family had lived at some point of their growth. There was a mahogany tree standing by the roadside where we had met kids from the neighborhood. It was a setting of family assembly at every visit.

It was until around 1985 that my prodigious memory could recall the events that took place. One of my most cherished olden memories was a time when we found one of my younger uncles Marwan returning from hunting in the bush. He had been a student at Sopo boarding school some distance away from Raga and was used to traveling around the distant dense groves in the area. He brought along some gazelle milk. That was considered a smart hunt, only the talented can get a gazelle milk. My uncle in that childhood reminisces was young and was conversant with the wild terrain. Before that year, as I recall from my family’s conversation, we were taken to visit our great-great grandmother Miriam. Of all the things that kept the memory of her existence when I was a child was her name ‘Mariam’. A woman whose presence I gathered years latter to be a voice of her own. ‘Mamm’ they call her in our family, she had walked the vastness of time and space creating a story that had defined a path of a lifetime. She was a woman for a time and for a cause. She was a voice relentless and undisputable. In a disguise to articulate an intrinsic making, a stipulation of the anecdotes and connecting those courageous implications had awakened me to how we related to the constituencies of those accumulative ventures.

My mother comes from the Kriesh people who are part of the inherent tribes of the Bahr El Ghazal region. They had stationed all over the area, from Diem Zubier where her father was born all the way to Raga and its surrounding provincial villages to remote farmlands. In years later, we learned more about Deim Zubier, the village and its people from our great grandmother the daughter of Miriam called Keryom Hassan about the time they had lived in the area. In her narratives, it was a place with historic sites and association to the Turko Egyptian times. She was a young girl when the British administrative officials arrived. My mother’s birth village is called Kuru named after a river. She was born in August during cultivation time. According to great grandmother’s narratives, the year 1960 she was living in Kuru when her daughter arrived almost in labour. When a girl was born, they named her Giulietta Kerozo. The name ‘Kerozo’ is a Kriesh name that denotes ample cultivation and a projection of an abundant harvest. As a child my mother had lived in Deim Zubier, her grandfather was from Golo tribe and was an official in that area. He was later killed as I recall from their stories. In one of their conversation my mother told grandmother Keryom that she went for a walk around the Sudan Council of Churches residence in Raga and found a tomb with her grandfather’s name on it. She had described that to be a very shocking experience. My mother’s maternal side traced their ancestry to the fraternity of the Ambganga clan who speak the Kriesh language in prestigious parlances. They were among the initial wayfarers who built their communities around an ancient mountain that bore the name of the clan. We also have family members from the Aja clan who are majorly Muslims. In connecting with them it would be relatively fair to describe them as the most disseminated and rarely recognized especially in civic communities. They dress in attires of bright silky outfits, a style of African print and a Middle Eastern design. A major fraternity of the Kriesh tribesmen to my knowledge, are called the Mambara Kriesh, they are a distinctive clan of the Kiresh known to have preserved the tribal norms as they had been for centuries. The time we were in Raga, there was a district named after the clan a distance beyond the airport. When we heard drumbeats on unusual days, it would be said, the sound was coming from Mambara. While growing within the environs of countryside Raga, the correlation of the name with the essence of the Kriesh traditional arrangements of cultural depictions were sound. Another significant clan, are the Yama clan of the Kriesh who inherited a nomadic lifestyle that traces to ancient times. My mother’s paternal grandmother comes from the Yama people. Though they are