2006 - What is the What (45 page)

The new military strictness was an annoyance, but otherwise we felt strong and no one was dying. Most of us were still gaining weight, and could work and run. There was enough food, and the food, in fact, provided the one reliable excuse for avoiding the afternoon work. In our groups of twelve, we were each assigned one cooking day, on which that boy was allowed to skip school and the work detail afterward, because that boy busy was ostensibly cooking for the other eleven others. Food was distributed once a month, by truck. We were sent to carry it back to the camp, where we stored it in a series of corrugated sheds. The bags, full of corn flour, white beans, lentils, and vegetable oil, were as big as many of us, and often had to be carried by pairs.

Every twelfth day was my free day, and that was a good day. In the nights leading up to it I fell asleep smiling, and as the day approached my mood bubbled closer and closer to giddiness. When it arrived, I slept in after the Eleven had gone to the parade grounds and to school, and once awake, I thought about what I would cook. I thought about it on the way to the river to fetch water, and I thought about it on the way back. Soup was just about all we could make for lunch, but when it was my turn, I tried to make a soup that was not lentil. Lentil soup was the everyday soup, and most of the Eleven were content to cook it and eat it, but being the leader of the group, I tried to do something better on my cooking days, something that would make the Eleven feel extraordinary.

I would check the supplies we had to see if there was an extra portion of something that could be traded. If we had an extra ration of rice, for example, I might be able to trade it for a fish by the river. With a fish, I could make fish soup, and the Eleven very much liked fish soup. While they were at school, I would be busy, preparing the soup and thinking about the evening meal. But preparing soup doesn’t require all the hours of the day, and allowed for some leisure. Even if an elder found me lounging, I could tell him, ‘I’m a cook today,’ and the elder would be silenced. Being a good and responsible cook was essential.

I was an excellent cook, but serving the soup was difficult at first. When the camp began, there were no plates or utensils, so the food, and even the soup, was served on the bags that had held the grain. The bags were sturdy and made of woven plastic, so the food would stay on its surface without soaking through. After many months, we were given utensils, and some months later, plates were distributed, one aluminum plate per boy. No one ate breakfast in all the time we were at Pinyudo, but after a time, we began to drink tea in the morning, though tea was not distributed. We would have to trade part of our food ration in the town for the tea and sugar. When we had nothing to trade for sugar, or there was no sugar in the shops, we learned how to hunt bees and extract honey from their hives.

I was cooking one day when one of my neighbors, a round-faced boy named Gor, rushed toward me. It was obvious he had news, but he and I weren’t friends, and he was visibly disappointed that because no one else was around, I would have to be the recipient.

—The United States has invaded Kuwait and Iraq!

I didn’t know what Kuwait or Iraq were. Gor was a smart boy, but I was stung by his knowledge of world affairs. I had assumed we were getting the same education at Pinyudo, and yet there were inequities that were difficult to account for.

—They’re rescuing Kuwait from Saddam Hussein! They’re bringing five hundred thousand troops and are taking back Kuwait. They’ll get rid of Hussein!

Finally, after feigning understanding for a few minutes, I swallowed my pride enough to ask for a thorough explanation. Saddam Hussein was the dictator of Iraq, Gor told me, and had been supplying guns and planes to the Sudanese army. Hussein had given Khartoum money and nerve gas. It was Iraqi pilots who flew some of the helicopters that strafed our villages.

—So this is good, I asked,—that the United States is fighting him?

—It is! It is! Gor said.—It means that soon the Americans will fight Khartoum, too. It means that they will remove all the Muslim dictators in the world. This is definitely what it means. I guarantee this. God has spoken through the Americans, Achak.

And he went off, in search of more boys to educate.

This was the prevailing theory for some time, that the war in Iraq and Kuwait would lead, inevitably, to the toppling of the Islamic fundamentalists in Sudan. But this did not happen. The fortunes of the SPLA were not promising that year. Battles and territory had been lost and the rebels, as might be expected, began to eat their own.

One morning at ten o’clock, an assembly was announced. School was called off and we poured out of the classrooms.

—To the parade grounds! the teachers ordered.

I asked Achor Achor what the assembly was all about, and he wasn’t sure. I asked another elder, who snapped at me.

—Just get to the parade grounds. You’ll enjoy it.

—Do we have to work this afternoon?

—No. This afternoon is education.

Achor Achor and I walked to the grounds, our moods buoyant. Anything was better than work in the afternoon, and very soon we were sitting in the front row of a growing throng of boys. There was an SPLA commander, Giir Chuang, at the camp that week, and we assumed the assembly was called to honor him.

Commander Secret was there, as was Commander Beltbuckle and Mr. Potential Food and Mr. Kondit and every other elder at the camp. I looked for Dut, but didn’t find him. His presence at the camp had been sporadic for many months, and the boys who had walked with him concocted theories about him: that he was now a commander in the SPLA, that he was in college in Addis Ababa. In any case, we missed him, all of us, that day. I looked around and saw that most of the boys assembled were close to me in age, somewhere between six and twelve. Very few were older. All the boys were grinning and laughing, and soon they were singing. Deng Panan, the best-known singer of patriotic songs and a celebrity among the rebels, stood before us with a microphone. He sang of God and faith, of resilience and the suffering of the southern Sudanese at the hands of the Arabs. A cheer rose up as he began to sing the words written by one of the boys in Pinyudo.

We will struggle to liberate the land of Sudan

We will! With the AK-47

The battalions of the Red Army will come

We’ll come!

Armed with guns on the left hand

And pens in the right hand

To liberate our home, oh, ooo
.

Meanwhile a platoon of fifteen soldiers marched into the grounds and assembled themselves in a straight line, shoulder to shoulder, facing us. Next, a line of men, bedraggled and tied together by rope, were pushed into the parade grounds. Seven men, all of them looking malnourished, some bleeding from abrasions on their heads and feet.

—Who are they? Achor Achor whispered.

I had no idea. They were now kneeling in a line facing us, and these men were not singing. The SPLA soldiers, in clean uniforms, stood behind them, AK-47
s
in hand. There was a man, one of those tied to the rest, sitting directly in front of me. Quickly I caught his eye, and he stared back at me with a look of unmitigated fury.

When Deng Panan finished his song, Giir Chuang took the microphone.

—Boys, you are the future of Sudan! That is why we call you the Seeds. You are the seeds of a new Sudan.

The boys around me cheered. I continued staring at the tethered men.

—Soon Sudan will be yours! Giir Chuang yelled.

The boys cheered more.

The commander spoke of our potential to repair our beloved country once the war ended, that we would return to a ruined Sudan, but one waiting for the Seeds—that only our hands and backs and brains could rebuild southern Sudan. Again we cheered.

—But until there is peace in Sudan, we must be vigilant. We cannot accept weakness within our ranks, and we cannot accept betrayal of any kind. Do you agree? We all nodded.

—Do you agree? the commander repeated. We said that we agreed.

—These men are traitors! They are deviants!

Now we looked at the men. They were dressed in rags.

—They are rapists!

Giir Chuang seemed to have expected a reaction from us, but we were silent.

We had lost the thread. We were too young to know much about rape, the severity of the crime.

—They have also given secrets of the SPLA away to the government of Sudan, and they have revealed SPLA plans to khawajas here in Pinyudo. They have compromised the movement, and have tried to ruin all we have accomplished together. The new Sudan that you will inherit—they have spat upon it! If we let them do it, they would poison everything that we have. If we gave them the opportunity, they would collaborate with the government until we were all Muslims, until we begged for mercy under the boot of the Arabs and their sharia! Can we let them do that, boys?

We yelled no. I felt that the men should surely be punished for such betrayals. I hated the men. Then something unexpected happened. One of the men spoke.

—We did nothing! We raped no one! This is a cover-up!

The protesting man was struck in the head with the butt of a gun. He fell onto his chest. Emboldened, the other prisoners began to plead.

—You’re being lied to! a tiny prisoner wailed.—These are all lies! This man was also struck with the butt of a gun.

—The SPLA eats its own!

This man was kicked in the back of the neck and sent into the dirt.

Giir Chuang seemed surprised at their impunity, but saw it as an opportunity.

—See these men lie to you, Seeds of a new Sudan! They are shameless. They lie to us, they lie to us all. Can we let them lie to us? Can we let them look us in the eye and threaten the future of our new nation with their treachery?

—No! we yelled.

—Can we let such treason go unpunished?

—No! we yelled.

—Good. I’m happy you agree.

And with that, the soldiers stepped forward, two of them behind each bound man. They pointed their guns at each man’s head and chest, and they fired. The shots went through the men and dust rose from the earth.

I screamed. A thousand boys screamed. They had killed all these men.

But one was not dead. The commander pointed to a prisoner still kicking and breathing. A soldier stepped over and shot him again, this time in the face.

We tried to run. The first few boys who tried to leave the parade grounds were knocked down and caned by their teachers. The rest of us stood, afraid to move, but the crying wouldn’t stop. We cried for the mothers and fathers we hadn’t seen in years, even those we knew were dead. We wanted to go home. We wanted to run from the parade grounds, from Pinyudo.

The commander abruptly ended the assembly.

—Thank you. See you next time, he said.

Now boys ran in every direction. Some clung to the closest adult they could find, shaking and weeping. Some lay where they had been standing, curled up and sobbing. I turned around, vomited, and ran away, spitting as I ran to the home of Mr. Kondit, who I found already sitting inside, on his bed, staring at the ceiling. I had never seen him so ashen. He sat listless, his hands resting limply on his knees.

—I’m so tired, he said.

I sat on the floor below him.

—I don’t know why I’m here anymore, he said.—Things have become so confused. I had never seen Mr. Kondit express doubt of any kind.

—I don’t know if we’ll find our way out of this, Achak. Not this way. This is not the best we can do. We are not doing the best we can do.

We sat until the dusk came and I went home to the Eleven, whose ranks had been depleted. We were now Nine. Two boys had left that afternoon and did not return.

After that day, many of the boys stopped attending rallies, no matter what the stated purpose. They hid in their shelters, feigning sickness. They went to the clinic, they ran to the river. They invented any reason to miss the gatherings, and because attendance could not be counted, they were seldom punished.

The stories abounded after the executions. The men had been accused of various offenses, but those implicated with the rape were, according to the whispers in the camp, innocent. One of them had eloped with a woman coveted by a senior SPLA officer, who then framed the groom as a rapist. The woman’s mother, who did not approve of the marriage, collaborated with the accusers, and claimed the groom’s friends had raped her, too. The case was complete, and the men were condemned. All that was left to do would be to execute the men in front of ten thousand adolescents.

I was very close to the age where I would have been sent to train, Julian, but was saved from that fate when we were forced out of Pinyudo, all forty thousand of us, by the Ethiopian forces that overthrew President Mengistu. This, I learned later, had been in the works for some time, and would drive the problems of Ethiopia for years to come. But it began with an alliance between disparate groups in Ethiopia, with help from Eritrean separatists. The Ethiopian rebels needed the Eritreans’ help, and vice versa. In exchange, the Eritreans were promised independence if the coup succeeded. The coup was indeed successful, but thereafter, things got complicated between those two nations.

I was leaving church when the news came. My church was close to the section where the Ethiopian aid workers lived, and when Mass was over we saw them crying, women and men.

—The government has been overthrown. Mengistu is gone, they wailed.

We were told to gather everything we could and prepare to leave. By the time I arrived at our shelter, it was already empty; the remaining Nine had left ahead of me, with a note:
See you at the river—The Nine
. I stuffed what I could of my hoarded food and blankets into a maize bag. In less than an hour, all the boys and families and rebels were gathered at the field, ready to abandon Pinyudo. All of the camp’s refugees covered the landscape, some running, some calm and unaffected, as if strolling to the next village. Then the sky broke open.

The rain was torrential. The plan was to cross the Gilo River and to reconvene on the other side, possibly at Pochalla. At the water, it became evident that groups were not well organized. The rain, the grey chaos of it, washed away any sense of order to our evacuation. At the river I couldn’t find the Nine. I saw very few people I knew. Off in the distance, I caught sight of Commander Beltbuckle, riding atop a Jeep, carrying a broken megaphone, barking muffled instructions. The area near the river was marshy and the group was soaked, wading through the heavy water. The river, when we arrived, was high and moving quickly. Trees and debris flew with the current.