Most of the displaced were cattle-owning people from the floodplain of the Upper Nile―Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk―jet black and tall as trees. Scorning the long white jellabia, preferring western clothes, male Southerners maintained a defiant look, as though they owned the place. But they owned nothing. The vast majority were living in bidonvilles on the periphery of the urban area, where the city meets the sand, in houses made of cardhoard and flattened tin cans. Or on rubbish tips in the industrial zone, between mountains of toxic waste. There was no firewood to be had; little work; they had to pay for water, so they could barely afford to wash. Winter was coming and they were cold at night. These were people from the warm South, a land that had once flowed with milk and honey.

Milk and honey. But little else. As far as modernity is concerned there is not much in the Southern part of the country. Barely any infrastructure to destroy. The region is a casebook victim of underdevelopment. Or a beneficiary, depending on your point of view. There are just a few hundred miles of malfunctioning railway in Southern Sudan, five or six hospitals, a mile or two of paved road, barely any commercial agriculture. There is land, though, and there are rivers. And the subsistence economy of the floodplain―agricultural and pastoral―affords its inhabitants another kind of wealth.

“From the besieged, government-controlled cities of the South came photographs of marasmic four-year-olds with stick limbs and oversize heads. They looked like extra-terrestrial beings.”

For pastoralists this wealth takes the form of cattle, huge auroch-like beasts, the great-horned descendants of the extinct wild cattle of the Nile valley, interbred with lateral-horned zebu imported from Asia in ancient times. The Nilotic-speaking peoples of Sudan, chiefly the Dinka and their neighbours, the Nuer, possess vast herds of these cattle. Or they did, before the war. In Khartoum the displaced Nilotes had no land, no cattle: they did not even have goats. The only livestock to be seen were on their way to the slaughter house. And they did not belong to them, not any more.

The famine in Abyei was not the only disaster in Sudan that summer. Floods washed away the shanty towns in Khartoum: displaced southerners and westerners lived in seas of excrement from flooded pit-latrines. And from the besieged, government-controlled cities of the South came photographs of marasmic four-year-olds with stick limbs and oversize heads. They looked like extraterrestrial beings. Tens—perhaps hundreds―of thousands of southerners were still fleeing northwards. There were stories of men, women and children killed, tortured or taken into slavery on the way. The South, it seemed, had become a charnel-house. The Dinka, some of these stories claimed, were facing extinction.

The last claim was hard to credit. Smaller ethnic groups in the borderlands between North and South might have been decimated and driven from their territory. But the Dinka boast a population of considerable size. There are―or were before the war―more than a million Dinka, maybe two million. They are the largest single ethnic group in the South. Their territory is a thousand miles across. And they form a politically active ethnic bloc with articulate spokesmen in Khartoum and the outside world―war or no war. Despite their primarily pastoral mode of life the Dinka cannot be considered an archaic remnant, yet this was the way some people were talking in Khartoum.

Oxford 1975

Many years before, in 1975, the first Sudanese I met had been a Dinka from Abyei, on the north-south border. I was a graduate student in anthropology at Oxford University. I had a meeting with my supervisor, Godfrey Lienhardt, author of a masterwork on Dinka religion, to discuss a paper I had written on the ethnology of the Nile basin. I found him with some visitors, one a former student of his, studying a map I had drawn that showed the distribution of speakers of various southern languages.

I was introduced to the visitors, first to the Commissioner of Upper Nile Province, then to another notable from the same area, and finally to Francis Mading Deng—Godfrey’s sometime student—who had recently been appointed Sudan’s ambassador to the Scandinavian countries.

Francis Deng’s father, Deng Majok, had been the paramount chief of the Ngok Dinka of Abyei and Francis was the author of several books about the history and ethnography of the Dinka people. He pointed at the map I had drawn, to an area just beyond the border of the southern region. The shading I had assigned to the Dinka blurred into that of the Misseriya, an Arab cattle-keeping people to the north who share dry-season grazing areas with the Dinka of Abyei.

“It appears,” he said, “that you have given the village of my birth to our Arab brothers.”

“And,” said the Commissioner of Upper Nile, “it seems that you have put my own village across the border in Ethiopia…”

It was particularly unfortunate that the part of Dinkaland I had unwittingly annexed to the territory of the Misseriya included Francis Deng’s home village, a little way north of the town of Abyei. My only excuse was that all the other Dinka tribes apart from the Ngok―there are more than twenty—are within the territory of southern Sudan, that is to say the non-Arab, non-Muslim part of the country, while Abyei is in the North. Unmindful of this anomaly, I had handed a sliver of the Ngok area to their neighbours, the Arab groups to the north, cattle-keeping herdsmen who are in constant competition with the Ngok Dinka for access to water and grazing. In truth, despite the fact that the area is part of the northern province of Kordofan and is frequented by Misseriya nomads in the dry season, the entire district is the territory of the Ngok Dinka.

At independence Francis’ father, the Ngok Paramount Chief, had judged that the future of his people would be better served by remaining in the North, closer to the power centre of the country, than by cleaving to the Southern region with the other Dinka tribes. Not all Ngok notables agreed with him. Throughout the seventies there was talk of a referendum to resolve the anomaly of Abyei—a referendum had been specified in the peace agreement that ended the first civil war in 1973. But the political state of the country was not amenable to such adjustments.

Now, ten years on, as I mapped out our route to Abyei, my cartographic error no longer looked so innocent. The Misseriya inhabitants of Kordofan, allied with the Government, seemed bent on following the logic of the North-South boundary and annexing the Ngok Dinka lands. Abyei was under military occupation; most of the Ngok had been displaced from their villages; and the Misseriya militias moved freely through their land.

The place of garbage

The day after our conversation with the Dinka street vendors in Khartoum I visited Hillat Kusha, a huge shanty town across the Blue Nile, in Khartoum North. I went with a Dinka colleague—I’ll call him Majak Kuol—who had agreed to accompany Mark and me on our journey to Abyei. Majak was from Abyei himself; he had made a study of relations between Southern pastoralist groups, of which the Dinka are the largest, and Baggara Arab groups such as the Misseriya with whom they share grazing grounds. Majak knew about shanty towns too: he lived in one.

To get to Hillat Kusha we followed the railway north to the city limits. There, in an ash-grey wasteland where dust and smoke swirled in the wind. were two separate settlements. Combo and Hillat Kusha proper. In Arabic hillat kusha means “place of garbage”. Twisted metal, broken glass and human faeces littered the black sand. Women picked through the refuse in search of scraps. Somehow amid the squalor they managed to keep their clothes bright and clean. The reek of illegal home-brewed merissa beer and distilled aragi hung over the settlement. The raised voices of drunken elders could be heard in the shade.

The Dinka chief at Hillat Kusha was sober, but he’d had enough of outsiders’ inquiries. Why these questionnaires? he demanded of Majak. All these questions and no blankets. What we need is blankets, not questions. Why do they send big fish like you to eat up us little ones? And what is happening to this information we give you? What is the government doing with it? Why all this talk about us Dinkas? Why are they directing these things against us?

Majak explained that we were not the government, that the agency we worked for was helping displaced Southerners elsewhere in Sudan and was trying to find the best way to help people here. But we knew the chief had a point. In Hillat Kusha they had seen more relief workers than they had seen relief. They had seen journalists and television crews; but they had never seen themselves in a newspaper or on TV. There were no TVs in Hillat Kusha. And no electricity. And the stories were not published in Sudanese newspapers.

So what was happening to the information? I could not tell him. I did not know either.

At Hillat Kusha I met a young man from a village in the South where I had lived in the early 1980s, Pacong in Lakes province. The village as I remembered it was a place of shade trees and, to the north, endless grassland. The people of Pacong and its surrounds lived, not in the hope of relief supplies, but by the labour of their own hands, by cattle husbandry, farming and fishing. I was hoping to talk to someone about this life, the life they had been forced to leave, and to confirm some of the names of Dinka clans and tribal sections. It seemed, though, that the young man could remember fewer than I could myself. Distance and merissa were eating up his memory. Or perhaps he was just tired of questions.

“All these questions and no blankets. What is happening to this information we give you? What is the government doing with it?”

There’s a promise that anthropologists, coming from outside, make to the people they live with and write about: “We are asking all these questions,” we say to our hosts, “so we can write down your history, so your children will know it.” The undertaking may well be heart-felt. Field anthropologists tend to identify strongly with the people they live among. They fall in love in the plural, with peoples and cultures and have an investment in their well-being. But a promise like this rang hollow on the rubbish tips of Khartoum. No one knew what would become of children born in this place. It seemed unlikely that any of them would ever learn how to read, let alone read what outsiders wrote about them. And many would die before they got the chance.

That night we drove back along the airport road by the line of social clubs that service the local elites in Sudan: the Army Club, the Armenian Club, the Greek Club, the Arab Club. Here expatriate workers mixed with Sudanese, those middle-class Sudanese who had managed to sustain their standard of living amid the wreckage of the national economy. From a tent in the garden of one of the clubs came the sound of music playing. It was “The Rivers of Babylon”, the Melodions’ reggae setting of Psalm 137. The words of the psalmist of Israel wafted towards the new mosque by Suq Two as the moon rose over the airport.

By the Rivers of Babylon
Where I sat down,
Yea and I wept
When I remembered Zion.

Drought, floods, locusts. War, famine, pestilence. And the pale horse of death. With the cataclysm in the South and the diaspora of southern peoples, it was beginning to seem that the disaster in the South was of biblical proportions.

During the time I was in Khartoum, there was a flurry of peace talks outside the country between the government and the Southern rebels. There was talk of a ceasefire and a constitutional conference. Abolition of the shari’a laws was the rebels’ first demand; but the government, with military backing from Libya and Iraq, showed no signs of retreat from Islamization. So fighting continued in the South and refugees continued to come. It was the fifth year of the war. Among people of good will in North and South there was an air of desperation. “Peace,” said a headline in a Khartoum newspaper, “is the milk of birds.”

Rebellion in Sudan had started long before, in 1955, even before the country achieved independence from Britain; civil war gathered pace in the 1960s. The first war ended in 1972: the current war began a decade later. The country is fatally divided: North and South: centre and periphery; Arab and non-Arab; Nilotic and non-Nilotic; Muslim and non-Muslim. The first civil war was fought by southerners on a separatist platform. But no war of secession in Africa has yet succeeded: Biafra. Katanga, Western Sahara and Eritrea stand as warnings to would-be secessionists. If such wars worked, the face of the continent would be quite different. North-eastern Africa, certainly, would he comprehensively balkanized. A giant country like Sudan, the biggest in the continent, would cease to exist.

In 1972, after seventeen years of war in the Sudan, the Southern separatists had settled for regional autonomy. There were ten years of peace, more or less, but the Khartoum government became increasingly dictatorial. In the early eighties, with southern autonomy abrogated and the country half bankrupt, and an oil strike in the South and Islamic law imposed in the North, southerners took up arms again. This time the stakes were higher: the rebels’ programme involved transforming the politics of the whole Sudan, not just the South, redirecting economic and political development to areas outside the central zone. This would end, they said, the hegemony of the Khartoum elites, composed of the members of a few powerful Arab lineages―politicians, army officers, business men and leaders of religious brotherhoods―the elite that had, directly or indirectly, controlled the country since independence.

The rebel forces, calling themselves the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, were led by a Southerners, a Dinka, Dr John Garang de Mabior, a former Colonel in the National Army with a doctorate from Iowa State University. By 1988 the year I returned to Sudan the SPLA controlled the greater part of the rural South. The government held the bigger towns, but by a thread.

The Survey Office

In Khartoum I visited the Sudan Survey Office close to the Presidential Palace. It was a house of maps, an oasis of charm and efficiency in the midst of Sudan’s general bureaucratic decay. There were women in high-heeled sandals, with gold ear-rings, wearing tobs that billowed underneath the ceiling fans,  the scent of sandalwood wafting across the counter. For five Sudanese pounds, less than a dollar on the currency black market, they would sell you 4,000 square miles of desert or forest—or mountain or swamp or savannah. Their fingertips were tawny with henna, dark as earth; their nails painted silver, like pools in a desert. At their command young clerks scaled great wooden edifices constructed of metre-square pigeon holes stuffed with bales of maps and charts. The clerks extracted whichever you wanted of the 150-odd sheets it takes to cover the expanse of the Sudan. Then they  were rolled into a tube and wrapped in an old copy of one of Khartoum’s daily newspapers, Al Usbu, maybe, or Al Ayyam.

Most of the maps had clearly remained unchanged since the country was first surveyed in the 1930s. Despite civil wars and political upheavals, little in the rural areas of Sudan has changed. “Sacred baobab tree”, a map may say, alongside an arcane symbol in the middle of a vast plain. “Many cattle camps”, “Open grassy area”, “Unsurveyed”, or “Major Titherington followed this route in 1931”. Some of the sheets, particularly those covering the Libyan desert in the North-West, are great blanks; others are dense with rivers, footpaths and human settlements.

The maps I was eager to see bore the names of southern places: Malakal, Rumbek, Wau, Nyamlell, Abyei. The sound of these words had once made me quick with longing for the South. Now the shadow of death lay over them. I gazed at the map of Abyei District, covering the area south to Aweil, between the river that the Dinka call Kiir (and the Arabs Bahr-el-Arab) and one of its tributaries, the River Lol. The North-South border followed the Bahr-el-Arab form a distance, then left the river and zig-zagged and forth across the swamps and grazing lands between the two.

In the House of Maps, women in high-heeled sandals, with gold ear-rings, their tobs billowing underneath the ceiling fans, the scent of sandalwood wafting across the counter, their fingertips tawny with henna, dark as earth; their nails painted silver, like pools in a desert.

It was more than a decade since I had made my  cartographic error in Oxford. Since then I had come to know Southern Sudan at first hand. With my finger I traced the route I had taken to Aweil eight years before. The villages in that area had been the most densely populated in the South, and the richest in livestock, their cattle byres heady with smoke and the exhalations of animals. Now many of those byres and villages were empty, burned to the ground by marauding militias.

In Aweil, I remembered, I had whiled away the time losing at cards with the Police Chief. Where was he now? In the North? In Ethiopia with the SPLA? These days in Sudan you had to make discreet inquiries to learn the whereabouts of your southern acquaintances. Behind these inquiries lay a further implied question: were they alive? Many were dead, victims of war or its camp follower, disease.

I spread the map of Abyei out on the counter . The clerk who fetched it for me watched me curiously as I followed the road to Aweil with my finger. I could see he was a southerner.

“Have you been there?” he asked me in English, rather quietly. “That is my village. People are suffering, dying there. Many people come here now. We are all suffering.”

He told me he had sixteen relatives staying in his two-room house, most of them depending on his meagre salary, around forty dollars a month. In Khartoum, where every southerner with a home or an income has a dozen dependents, the kinship support system is reaching breaking point. Sooner or later some of those relatives would have to move out. And they would have nowhere to go but the shanty towns.

On my last day in Khartoum I visited Dr Priscilla, the sister of Robert Maker Joseph, who had been my research assistant in Rumbek eight years before. She was a doctor, working for the Sudan Council of Churches, an ecumenical organization with a burgeoning relief programme. Her brother Robert had been a student in Alexandria, home on vacation when we worked together in Rumbek. In 1985 I heard that Robert had joined the SPLA, and, in 1988, in May, that he had been killed in action at Bentiu, site of Sudan’s first oil well, the optimistically named Unity I.

In her makeshift office Robert’s sister and I discussed the problem of the huge numbers of the malnourished and sick in the shanty towns where she worked. We talked about the news from the South, about the current peace negotiations, about her brother’s death. I gave her a copy of the book he helped me write. I described the day, seven years before, when I had last been in his company. We had cycled to Karic, his home village, in the territory of the Duor, a Dinka section that had been involved in a year-long tribal feud with their neighbours, a feud that had left twenty-eight dead. It seemed quite shocking at the time. Twenty-eight!  And now, how many had died as a result of the present war?  How many thousands and tens of thousands?

Back then, in 1980, a week or two before that trip to Karic, Robert Maker and I had taken one of the victims of the clan fighting to the hospital. The man had a spear through his thigh. There was a drunken orderly on duty at the hospital. He came from another part of the South.

“Fucking Dinkas,” said the orderly, unwisely. “Fucking Dinkas. Alwavs fighting. Never stop. Fighting, Fighting.”

“Only when provoked.” said Robert calmly. He was a handsome man, sweet-natured, with reserves of  patience. “And we are not fighting now.”

The youth with a spear through his thigh was treated and recovered. He was lucky. Robert took up arms against the government three years later. He had no such luck. He was killed in the first wave of the SPLA attack on Bentiu. Guns made it much easier to get killed. They upset the balance of violence.

Leaving Khartoum

On the first day of November, All Souls’ Day, the three of us left Khartoum: Mark, Majak and I. Driving south out of the city I felt elation: road fever, relief at leaving the urban wilderness and its derelict underclass, joy at the prospect of seeing village Africa again, the Africa that endures despite famine, civil war and economic collapse. As we drove south out of the city we dodged roadblocks and spirals of black smoke from truck tyres set on fire by rioters. They were protesting against the food shortages that afflicted the city. There was no sugar on the open market in Khartoum; no milk; no milk powder; and often no bread. There was anger in the market place.

At the edge of the urban area was a tent city established for victims of the floods. Then came the desert: scrubby grass left over from the rains, a few fields of stunted dura, spiky thorn bushes. No trees and no shade. The road from Khartoum runs close to the White Nile, parallel to the river at a few miles distance, but you wouldn’t know it. The river has no tributaries for six hundred miles. Everything was grey, the colour of stones. A German construction engineer was supervising the resurfacing of the road. As we drove past I saw one of the labourers kneeling to say his morning prayers on the virgin blacktop, as though it was a prayer mat that he had just unrolled.

We drove all day through the desert. There was a week’s journey ahead of us. Every mile brought us closer to the grasslands, closer to the West, and―for Majak―closer to home. We reached the bridge at Kosti at dusk. Here we saw the river for the first time since Khartoum. It was half-choked with water hyacinth, a floating plant with gaudy purple flowers that has blocked many of the great waterways of Africa. The town was crowded with Dinka families travelling away from the places we were going to.

In Kosti the hardtop ended. At nightfall we left the river and headed west on a pale sandy road. Dust swirled in our headlights. Mark had learned a lesson from the suq truck drivers: he liked to drive after dark, when the night kept the engine cool. As I dozed on a kapok mattress in the back of the pick up, I could hear him trying to raise the office on the radio: “Calling Khartoum. Calling Khartoum. Do you read me? Do you read me?”

El Meiram

Two months earlier, Mark had been in El Meiram, a small town near the Bahr-el-Arab, about fifty miles west of Abyei. Reports had begun to come through to the aid agencies working in Sudan of another influx of southerners, along the railway that runs from Aweil, a Dinka area, into Southern Kordofan. They did not travel on the train; they walked along the tracks, women, children and men. Now they were congregating at the railway station in this remote outpost, in territory claimed by the Misseriya, the tribe whose militia had been responsible for the raiding in Abyei district.

In September, towards the end of the rains, Mark had set off for El Meiram with an Oxfam water engineer. Their Land Rover got stuck in the mud and they walked the last eighteen miles to the police post in a tropical rainstorm. There they found a two-man medical team from Médecins Sans Frontières and about 5,000 destitute Dinka. The Dinka were naked, emaciated, without shelter or possessions. They were dying at the rate of fifty a day. Unburied bodies lay on the ground covered in flies; vultures pecked at them; there were no tools to dig graves; some of the corpses had been dismembered by hyenas in the night. A Unicef team responsible for supplementary feeding of malnourished children had given up and left when the rains set in three months before. Nearly all the young children had died. The two French doctors were the only source of help. And the doctors were themselves in an advanced stage of exhaustion.

After two days at El Meiram, Mark set off back north. In England the agency sent me his report. The mortality rates recorded at El Meiram were the highest in the world, several times higher than at Korem in 1984, when the BBC broke the news of the Ethiopian famine. Mark said it was the worst thing he had ever seen.

In  his mid-twenties, Mark was a veteran of disasters―it doesn’t take long to be a veteran in the relief business. Until recently he had been working in Somalia; and he had run a refugee camp on the Chadian border during the last great catastrophe in the Sudan, the Darfur famine of 1984-85. He liked working with the Sudanese, and the racial antagonism that persisted between northerners and southerners bothered him. In the place where he worked this antagonism was hard to forget.

Mark’s base was in Al Da’ein, one of the towns we were to visit on our way to Abyei. Al Da’ein is a railway town in Southern Darfur, the tribal centre of the Rezeigat, Arab cattle-keepers like the Misseriya, whose territory also borders that of the Dinka. In 1987 Al Da’ein had been the scene of a massacre of hundreds of defenceless Dinka migrants, men, women and children. They were shot or hacked to death in the streets of the town, or burned alive in boxcars in the railway station while the local police absented themselves.

There had been no official investigation of the massacre and no charges brought, though survivors still living in the town were able to identify dozens of the perpetrators. The facts of the case had only become public knowledge thanks to the efforts of two northern Sudanese intellectuals, Suliman Baldo and Ushari Mahmud, university teachers from Khartoum who, on their own initiative, wrote and published a report on the events. They were interrogated and imprisoned for their pains.

The spectre of ethnic conflict haunted relief workers. Although only two of the Dinka displaced settlements were in Rizeigat territory, the events in Al Da’ein, it was becoming clear, were part of a wider pattern of violence involving repeated raids by Rizeigat militia in the Aweil area, where the great majority of Dinka migrants came from. Aweil had been the most densely populated area of the South and the militias had seemingly been given carte blanche by government authorities to loot and burn. Hundreds of thousands of Dinka cattle had been stolen and driven into the North.

Cattle are the pastoralists’ famine reserve. If the harvest fails there is still milk and meat, or a cow can be sold for grain. With their cattle gone, when the militias burned their crops, the Dinka villagers had nothing to fall back on. On top of that came the impositions of the SPLA: rebel units might demand anything they had. Nor was there food to be found in the southern towns under government control. From Aweil, a hundred miles south-west of Abyei, came rumours of mass starvation and epidemic disease. Here, as in other parts of Africa, the equation is simple and cruel: war plus drought equals famine. So the Dinka were driven inexorably northwards.

Mark, Majak and I drove late that night and all the next day. In the west of Sudan a road is not always a road. Sometimes it is a river-bed; sometimes it is a railway track; sometimes it narrows to deep ruts that snag the transmission and bring small cars to a halt. Roads divide and re-divide into a maze of tracks, like a river delta. And in the rainy season a road may become a river. When it rains there are long stretches of black cotton soil to contend with, viscid self-mulching clay that has the wheels of your vehicle spinning helplessly, smoking with the friction, digging in deeper and deeper.

This was the high road to the hunger zone. During the Darfur famine of 1984-85 trucks struggled along it for weeks to reach the West. We were fortunate; it was the dry season now and we were travelling in a new vehicle with no engine trouble. It only took us twenty-four hours to drive the 250 miles from Kosti to El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan.

El Obeid

In El Obeid we spent an afternoon with Kuol Deng Majok, Paramount Chief of the Ngok Dinka. He was Majak’s kinsman and one of many half-brothers of Francis Mading Deng, the writer and diplomat who I had first met in Oxford fifteen years before. We found Chief Kuol in a rented house near the railway. He was himself, as he told us, a displaced person. Now he was waiting in El Obeid for a chance to return to Abyei.

The Ngok, Chief Kuol explained to us, were on the front line of the conflict between Arabs and Dinka: so they had been the first to be affected by the war. Although the leadership of the tribe had dissociated itself from the Southern rebels, this availed them nothing. Misseriya Arabs with automatic weapons looted freely in the Abyei area in 1984 and 1985, the first years of the war, stealing cattle and abducting women and children. It was a return, said Chief Kuol, to the last years of the nineteenth century, when Arab raiding parties had attacked Dinka villages to fuel the slave trade.

On Christmas Eve in 1986, an Arab raiding party had appeared on the outskirts of Abyei with stolen cattle and a line of Dinka prisoners―men, women and children―tied to one another with ropes. The police did nothing; the army did nothing. Each got their share of the spoils. The attitude of the authorities in Abyei was that the Dinka were supporters of the SPLA, so they were free to treat abducted Dinka as hostages, as a human shield.

Chief Kuol himself had been smuggled out of the town for his own safety. Since he left there had been a continual stream of his people through El Obeid, abandoning Abyei for the North. And there had been no government action against the militias. He reckoned that the majority of the Ngok people had now, like him, been forced to abandon their home territory.

The migration of the Ngok after 1986 was matched by an influx of other Dinka tribes into Abyei. The militias had begun to raid villages further south, deeper into Dinkaland, where there had been no previous contact. People in these areas did not abandon their homes until they were reduced to starvation. Arriving in Abyei they found an unfriendly administration in league with the militiamen. Traders were charging hundreds of pounds for a sack of dura–sorghum, the staple crop of Sudan. The roads were closed because of the rains. It was these displaced Southerners who had finally made the headlines, after several thousand of them had died, drawing the international media to Abyei. After them, there would be more on their way, more driven to the north. For everyone who left Abyei, or died there, there was another to take their place.

El Da’ein

We left El Obeid the following day. In the small towns and villages further west we came across more and more communities of Dinka migrants. They were working as share-croppers or day labourers, or as domestic servants. As in the larger settlements of Dinka displaced in Darfur, where Mark had been stationed, the dry season had brought water problems. In a village of four or five thousand people with a single functioning water pump, a sudden increase in the population could be counted on to provoke a crisis, one exacerbated by local attitudes to Southerners as racially inferior, as unbelievers, as slaves. Southerners were the last in line to quench their thirst, after the cattle and camels. We watched Dinka forced to wait all morning for Baggara nomads to water their herds before they could draw water for themselves.

It was hard to avoid stories of atrocities committed by the militias. This woman had been raped; this man tortured and castrated; that man’s wife had been killed in front of him; a boy of ten had been kidnapped and kept for two years as a servant, beaten when he tried to escape, and finally killed. There were clearly many Dinka still in captivity in Darfur and Kordofan.

Five days after we left Khartoum we arrived at Mark’s base in El Da’ein. There we heard over the radio that a medical team had finally managed to get to Abyei. There were four expatriates―a doctor and three nurses―and a number of volunteers from the Sudan Red Crescent. It had taken six months, from May, when Carol Berger’s article first appeared, until October, for relief agencies to be given the go-ahead by the Government to mount a relief operation. For the last two months the  International Committee of the Red Cross had had a transport plane, a Hercules, ready to fly from Khartoum. Oxfam and the Save The Children Fund had nurses on standby; there was a doctor from Médecins sans Frontières waiting to leave; grain was stored in sheds at the airport. But the government would not allow them to move.

“They’re killers, aren’t they?” I asked him. “Of course,” he said “And so are the SPLA.” “But you know,” he added. “I’d sup with the devil to get food to Abyei.”

In October the relief agencies managed to conclude an agreement with the government to allow them to work in Abyei―or so they thought. When they got there they were turned back at the airstrip: the army commander refused to let them disembark. They tried again: they were turned back again. Now it seemed, after many thousands of unnecessary deaths, they had finally been allowed to stay and work.

I’d spoken to Carol Berger on the phone before I left England. She thought I should steer clear of the relief business. Aid agencies in Sudan were compromised, she said, because they worked through the government. It was the government itself that had created the problem that the agencies were trying to solve. If the government had modified its attitude it was only to save face internationally, and because it needed relief supplies to feed its own forces. Food was a weapon; Abyei was a war zone. Without official recognition of this, the agencies were giving legitimacy to a government that was betraying its own citizens.

“It’s a wicked business,” Carol said. “You wait and see.”

Over the radio from Khartoum we learned of the new difficulties facing the members of the relief team. Yes, they had been allowed to stay in Abyei, but there were restrictions. They had no radio transmitter so they could not communicate with Khartoum except when a plane came. They were confined to the hospital and not allowed to move around the town, so they had no way of knowing the extent of the malnutrition and disease they were dealing with. They were not permitted to observe the distribution of the food that was coming in on the Red Cross plane. Nor were the Red Cross officials who had brought it.

Meanwhile Mark, Majak and I set out from El Da’ein for Babanusa, a railway junction in Kordofan where some of the survivors of El Meiram had ended up. Before leaving, Mark’s drivers prevailed on him to perform an initiation rite for his new Land Rover. A sheep was slaughtered and Mark was instructed to dip his hands in the blood, then make handprints all over the white bodywork of the car. The effect was striking, as though a violent crime had taken place. It was in this strange livery that we set out on the last leg of our journey.

Babanusa train station

Desert rose trees bloomed in the sandy soil. Their trunks were silvery and obese, like dwarf versions of giant baobab trees, wreathed in dark pink flowers. A red-bark acacia exploded with white doves. At a town called Kilekli we stopped to watch blacksmiths at work in the market place, their hammers glinting in the sun. They had cannibalized abandoned trucks and were beating the steel leaf-springs into broadswords. We stopped at two towns where the Misseriya militias were reported to congregate: Abu Matariq―a name that means “Anvil”, an echo of the nineteenth-century slave trade― and Abu Gabra. In Abu Gabra we talked to two Dinka men who were looking for their sons, abducted by militiamen. We bypassed Tibbun, where, it was rumoured, a weekly slave market had been established, and arrived at Babanusa at midday.

The survivors of El Meiram were living under plastic sheeting and in abandoned boxcars on railway sidings. Most of them had walked the seventy miles from El Meiram to El Muglad, then a further twenty to Babanusa, hoping to get a train eastwards, to get them out of the hunger zone. Some had stopped there in the hope of being reunited with their families. In El Meiram desperate parents had given―or sold― their children to local Arab farmers as cow and goat herds. Other women and children had been kidnapped. These abductees had to be ransomed back, or they might be sold as slaves. There was a camp for the displaced Dinka nearby, but we were not allowed to speak to any of them; smiling security men escorted us away.

I managed to talk to a Sudanese medical assistant in the grass-roofed clinic where he and two nurses were ministering to thousands of malnourished adults and children. As we were speaking a woman gave birth. Her child was still-born. They brought it to her wrapped in a white cotton shawl. When she saw the child was dead, the mother would not touch it; she rolled over to face the wall. Half an hour later she was dead too.

In Babanusa there were boxcars loaded with grain donated by the European Economic Community, destined for Aweil, the epicenter of famine in the South. The EC grain had been there for more than a year. The grain cars were said to be waiting for an army escort. The government’s justification for the delay was that the SPLA attacked railway convoys. Yet we knew that military supply trains from Babanusa had been passing through El Meiram every month in the dry season on their way to the army garrison on the Bahr-el-Arab. A railway worker took us aside and explained what was happening with the trains: the relief grain that arrived in Babanusa and El Muglad, he said, was commandeered by local government officials. Some of it would go to the army; some would turn up for sale in the market.

“Why should they let food go to the Dinkas,” he said, “when they are hungry themselves?”

It was to be another two months before a relief train got through to Aweil. About eight thousand people died there during the rains. And when the aid arrived, as in Abyei, no witnesses to the distribution were allowed. In this part of Sudan human greed and the legacy of slavery were combining to exacerbate still further the evils of war. As Carol Berger had said, it was a wicked business.

A party in El Muglad

The next day we drove to El Muglad, the heart of Misseriya Humr territory.  It was the last place in Kordofan where there was any semblance of civil, as opposed to military administration. As in Babanusa there was a large camp of displaced Dinka by the railway. In Bahanusa we had been forbidden to speak to them; in El Muglad we were not even allowed to visit the camp.

There was just one international relief agency working there. We arrived at a awkward moment. The agency had arranged a supper party for local dignitaries. But that morning the Government’s war of attrition on relief organizations had escalated. An order had come from Khartoum expelling all foreign organizations and all aid workers from South Kordofan. It looked as though the soirée the agency had organized might turn out to be an envoi―for them and for us too. Yet the field officer, a genial Irishman, was unphased by the news. He was accustomed to alarms and excursions. And by lunchtime, miraculously, the expulsion order had been revoked, at least provisionally.

In expatriate aid circles the field officer had a certain fame. At the height of the rains that year, when no one else was able to get to Abyei, he had succeeded in moving five hundred sacks of sorghum to the town, on the backs of donkeys. To do this he had hired local militiamen to accompany the convoy. He made no bones about it. The priest in Abyei had sent him a message: dozens of Dinka arrivals in Abyei were dying every day. The only way to help them was to employ the same militias who had driven them from their homes. There was no choice, he said. Nothing moved between El Muglad and Abyei without their say-so.

It was a heightened version of the dilemma facing all relief organizations that make deals with warring parties to get access to victims, a practise analysts refer to as “negotiated access”.

“They’re killers, aren’t they?” I asked him.

“Of course,” said the field officer, fingering his beard. “And so are the SPLA.”

“You know,” he said. “I’d sup with the devil to get food to Abyei.”

On the north-east side of the town there was a field of skulls. Corpses had been thrown there in the last months of the rains when the grass was tall. Now the grass was pale and dry, revealing the shame of people too weary and ill to bury their dead.

At dusk the guests arrived for the party. In the yard of the house, under the mango trees, a table was laid with food and flowers. Easy chairs with seats woven of bright orange nylon cord were arranged in a square. On one side sat the Misseriya elders in snow-white jellabias. They had fine white cotton scarves thrown over their shoulders and turbans perched on their heads like whipped cream. They clutched heavy walking sticks and murmured discreetly to their neighbours while waiting to eat. On the opposite side of the table sat the agency staff. Government officials in western dress were at the end of the table: the chiefs of police from Babanusa and Abyei, the army commander and the head of military security in El Muglad.

Next to the head of military security, and engaged in intimate conversation with him, was a small man in a pale-coloured safari suit. He was also clutching a walking stick, the symbol of political authority throughout the continent. The field officer raised his eyebrow to point him out to me.

“That is the head of the Misseriya militia. He’s Al Capone. If he says ‘Kill’, they kill.”

Next to the head of the militia and the head of military security sat an Arab trader with a gold-toothed smile. He, it seemed, was the go-between. Majak recognized him from the days of his childhood. The trader had grown up in Abyei. Like quite a few Misseria, he had a Dinka mother. “He was just a truck driver then,” said Majak.  It seemed the trader had grown rich on famine. He owned many houses in El Muglad, including the one were staying in, which the aid agency rented from him. We were, in a sense, his guests. It was he who had arranged the donkey train that took the relief supplies to Abyei. Mark mentioned that we were planning to go to Abyei ourselves. Soon, unasked, the trader was arranging an escort for us. There was a whispered conversation and a nod from the head of the militia.

“We’ll protect you against the SPLA,” he said.

We knew that the problem on the road to Abyei was not the SPLA. The SPLA had never come that far north. It was not from rebels that we needed protection: it was from the militiamen themselves. Nevertheless, it seemed wise to allow ourselves to be persuaded. By the end of the conversation Mark and I found we had arranged to meet the trader for breakfast the next day to pick up a militia escort.

A nervous young man was circulating among the guests. He wandered about the compound with a camera round his neck, but did not use it. He told me he was a journalist on a Khartoum paper, Senabil, the voice of the Islamic Front. He was a Misseri from Tibbun, where the slave market was supposed to be. He spoke good English and, since he was a journalist, I felt free to ask about this. He moved aside so that no one could hear.

“What is going on is bad,” he said. “But you have to remember that we are tribal people. All of us―Arab, Dinka―everyone. Even I―I am a Muslim, but I am also a Misseri. I practice rituals that are not Muslim at all. There is a tradition to everything we do, a tribal subtext.”

“What’s that?” I said, aware that he had not answered my question, and startled by the modish language.

“My people are Arabs,” he said. “But they are Africans also. It is their way. They come out of the forest on horses. They think everyone is their slave. They take cattle. But when they take cattle it is not just for them. It is for the good of the tribe. They are not thieves. They are not rebels. They are sociable―what is the phrase?

“Social bandits?” I ventured.

“Yes, yes, that’s it” said the journalist, “Sociable bandits.”

At that moment the only other expatriate in El Muglad arrived. He was a British employee of Chevron, the company that has the lion’s share of the oil concessions in Sudan. He was wearing a white T-shirt with red lettering. In the twilight I could not quite make it out. One of the Misseriya elders gave it an uncomprehending glance. The journalist studied it intently.

“What does that say?” he asked. I looked again. The man from Chevron bore a message on his chest of such terrifying inappropriateness that I hesitated to gloss it. Luckily few of the guests would be able to read it at all.  What it said, I told the man from Senabil, was this: “Fuck the World with Yuppie Condoms.”

He did not laugh. Perhaps the T-shirt also had what could be called a tribal subtext. It was an unhappy expatriate’s gesture of contempt for his hosts. The jargon of social theory and the language of the T-shirt both seemed hideous, given what was what happening fifty miles from where we sat. Words had become unhinged from events; and we were bystanders, taking refuge in subtexts and meaningless obscenity.

I looked at our car and the bloody handprints that Mark’s local employees had him make on it, then at the Misseriya elders at the party with their beautiful white jellabias. Sociable bandits, indeed. What was happening behind this screen of lies and hypocrisy? Burning, looting, pillage, killing, torture, rape. The massacre in Al Da’ein had happened just the year before. The same thing could happen again. It was already happening.

Approaching Abyei

The following morning Mark and I woke with the same feeling. In our conversation with the gold-toothed trader we had gone too far. We felt embarrassed in front of Majak. To arrive in Abyei under the protection of a militia was not the right way to start. We drove to our breakfast appointment discussing how we could get out of the arrangement. In the event the trader was all smiles and shrugs. He wrote a letter of recommendation for us to a fellow-trader in Abyei, clearly reckoning that any transport operation we might set up would require his services anyway. As we talked a police sergeant stepped into his shop and exchanged a word with him. The policeman left with a fifty-pound note. The trader sighed.

“Their salaries are so low.” he said.

As we got up to leave we saw the leader of the militia we had met the previous day crossing the street; we moved away rapidly and drove out of town.

We drove—a single vehicle—following the railway south of the town. The track passed pools of lotus flowers. Crossing the watercourses, still deep with mud from the rains, we had to straddle the rails and bump along the cross-ties. After a few miles, we branched west from the railway, hoping we had chosen the right road. Majak had not been this way for a long time. There were no other vehicles. A man was riding ahead of us on a donkey, a huge rusty spear under his arm like Don Quixote, an anachronism from the age before automatic weapons changed all the rules.

We saw Dinka boys herding Arab cows and goats. One of them was clearly malnourished. He needed a stick to walk. He was about six years old. We stopped to speak to him. His mother, he said, had given him to an Arab on the journey northward, because she had no food. Further on we saw two boys in rags walking along the road towards us. They froze when they saw the car. We halted and Majak got out and spoke to them in thong muonyjaang, the language of the Dinka. They told him they were brothers: the elder was nine, the younger five: they were running away from their Arab master and trying to rejoin their mother in El Muglad. They did not know what had become of their father.

We gave the boys some food and money, but their chances of making it without being recaptured did not look too good. Further ahead we saw a group of Misseriya under some trees. They also were on donkeys, but rather than spears they carried GM3 rifles, a type used by the Sudanese army. They were not in uniform. They motioned us with their guns to stop and we did so. I stowed my camera. Mark kept his foot poised over the accelerator. They asked where we had come from and peered in the back of the car, staring at the bloody handprints on the body-work. Finally they waved us on.

We were now entering what had once been Dinka territory. There were deserted villages with rusting water tanks, unused pumps and charred huts, and fields reclaimed by the bush. The vegetation became lusher and the woods thicker as we travelled southwards, though it seemed many trees had been burned by forest fire. The road was rough and the daylight was fading and we were becoming anxious. In Kordofan there was a ban on travel after dark. If we were benighted outside Abyei town the authorities would likely use it as a pretext to expel us. We did not know if officials in Abyei had been advised of our departure from El Muglad; such messages had a way of not getting through.

Finally, at nightfall, we came to some  homesteads on the outskirts of Abyei. The town looked eerie, swathed in smoke from cooking fires, with a faint glow on the trees as though the undergrowth was alight. As we passed the first buildings, a soldier in camouflage ran out from the shadows, zig-zagging, maybe as a tactical manoeuvre, or maybe drunk, or recently aroused from sleep.

“Sebit!” he shouted, or that was what it sounded like. “Halt!”

The sentry crouched down in the road with his rifle pointing at our the windscreen. Mark hit the brakes and doused the headlights, switching on the cabin light so we could be seen. The sentry demanded a password that we did not have. He asked where we had come from, though he knew there was only one possible place. We were accompanied to the town and taken to a nearby compound where the expatriate medical team was staying. They were already abed. Most of them were sleeping in truckle beds under the trees, with mosquito nets shining in the moonlight like sails in harhour. The policemen, off-duty in their long white jallabias, drifted among them.

Arrival in Abyei

In the morning Mark and I registered formally with the chief of police. Rather to our surprise, he gave us permission to move around the town. A soldier accompanied us. The army had burned the huts towards the southern side in order to discourage infiltration by the SPLA. We were not allowed to go there. We could just make out a bare mound under a tree: the grave of the former Paramount Chief of the Ngok, Chief Kuol’s father, Deng Majok. Close to the airstrip was the army compound and beyond it were the ruins of the Harvard Project, an idealistic, ill-fated scheme that Francis Mading Deng, the Ambassador, also a son of Deng Majok, had set up between the wars, intending to make Abyei a model of integrated rural development for the Sudan.

Abyei is a small town in normal times: a market place, a street of shops, three schools and a sprawl of grass huts. The dry season is the busiest and most populous period of the year, when the harvest is over and people move between the surrounding villages and the cattle camps near the rivers. The rivers are low then and travelling is easier. In normal times the inhabitants of the area would have been coming and going from October until May, when the rains come again and planting begins.

But 1988, of course, had not been a normal year. Many left their villages to come to Abyei, but few went back. The seasonal movement had become a one-way ticket. The physical infrastructure of the town had shrunk―the army had burned whole sections to the ground―while the population of the town had tripled or quadrupled. The numbers of people in Abyei had been even greater before, of course, but malnutrition and disease had taken their toll. The rains were plentiful that year, but the harvest had been pitiful: no one dared plant and risk attacks from the militias. The only good thing was that the rains had brought fish. The dry season is the fishing season in Sudan; in Abyei, it was clear, fish had saved more lives than relief agencies.

We walked through the centre of the town. There was a scattering of brick and cement buildings―schools commandeered by the army. The suq―the food market―was virtually empty. In the crowded huts behind the suq lived the famine victims. Not everyone looked hungry there: the worst cases were hidden. Sick children and old people were cowering inside the huts, their skin in folds. One struggled to rise to her feet to greet us, but she did not make it. The very old and very sick could not get to the hospital; the medical workers were forbidden to leave the hospital and go to them.

Back at the hospital we found members of the medical team at work. They were administering MUAC tests to children, measuring their middle and upper arm circumference to check how malnourished they were. The children were given coloured wristbands to identify them as participants in the supplementary feeding programme. This entitled them to a mixture of dried skimmed milk, sugar and cereal, an aid staple called Unimix, which was brewed up in oil drums over charcoal fires in the hospital grounds. The hospital had no water supply. The water came in drums from the pump near the airstrip.

All over the town were children with pencil legs and ballooning bellies wearing the tiny wristbands issued in the supplementary feeding centre. They wore them like jewellery. Some had nothing else to wear. Some were too weak to walk and had been carried by their siblings a mile or more from their huts to the hospital. Many had perpetual diarrhoea, which kills weak children very quickly. In the hospital they were given rehydration fluid, water with one teaspoonful of salt to half-a-dozen of sugar. The measuring spoons bore instructions engraved into the plastic. They read: “Do Not Use If More Salty Than Tears”.

There were few Dinka men under the age of forty in Abyei. The population was mainly women and children and old men. The young men had been killed. Or they had stayed deep in the hush with the remaining cattle. Or else they had joined the SPLA. As we walked among the huts near the suq, though, we were startled by the sight of half-a-dozen tall, sleek-looking youths―Southerners, bare-chested, with red berets and guns, They strode past us looking straight ahead and did not acknowledge our greeting.

When Majak addressed them in the Nuer language they finally replied, though gruffly. They were members of yet another militia, Anyanya II, rivals of the SPLA, a group that was now backed by the Government and known as the Friendly Forces. Many members of Anyanya II had abandoned the government side and gone over to the SPLA, but not these. They had safe passes from the army commander. In one section of the town they had even set up a machine-gun emplacement. It was pointing directly into the market place. Hospital staff explained to us that the Nuer militia were exploiting their position in order to loot the displaced Dinka, their traditional rivals and neighbours. They had stolen all the fishing nets donated by aid agencies. In the whole town only the Nuer and a few Arab traders had cattle.

We were forbidden to visit the church, but in the open space in front of the barracks we held a snatched meeting with the Italian Catholic father who had alerted the expatriates in El Muglad to the situation in Abyei earlier that year. He told us that the local church representative on the food distribution committee in Abyei had just been arrested. Now the Church, which had arranged the relief supplies, was prevented from distributing them. At the height of the famine, he told us, he had fed 7,000 people in one day.

“Seven thousand,” I murmured to Mark, whose father is a bishop. “That beats Jesus feeding the five thousand.” Then I felt ashamed, because the priest was old and ill and yet had done much more than we had for the people of Abyei. Fortunately he was also hard of hearing.

We spent the night with the medical team again. In the morning we accompanied members of the Sudanese Red Crescent on a burial detail. On the north-east side of the town there was a field of skulls. Corpses had  been thrown there in the last months of the rains when the grass was tall. Now it was pale and dry, revealing the shame of people too weary and ill to bury their dead. Vultures and hyenas had spread human remains far and wide. Officials of the Red Crescent were collecting the scattered bones to bury them in a single grave. The officials were northerners and they made much of the shame of bodies left unburied.

“We even gave them money to bury their dead,” said the team leader, an Arab doctor. “but they took the money and then left the corpses in the grass.”

“But what would you have done if you got money when you were starving,” I asked. “Wouldn’t you feed the living first?”

The Red Crescent doctor turned back to the bones without answering. They had dug a very shallow pit for them. The bones would soon be gnawed out of their graves again.

I walked across the plain with Majak counting skulls, noting the size of the skeletons. Adults and children seemed to be represented in equal numbers: on one skull traces of Dinka tribal marks were visible: lines across the forehead in a broad V-shape. The flesh would have been cut as part of the initiation rite that most Dinka boys undergo in early adolescence. Tiny zig-zag cracks where the cranial bones were joined together flickered across the skull. Everywhere there were bones. In the distance women moved to and fro in the woods with bundles of grass and firewood on their heads. Beyond the field of bones, the sight of women working provided a glimpse of a normal existence. Famine or no famine, in Sudan, as elsewhere in Africa, it is women who do the fetching and carrying

A glimpse was all we got of the situation in Abyei. Someone―maybe someone in Khartoum―had been talking to the chief of police. Overnight his mood changed.

“Why are you here?” he kept asking us. “We do not know why you are here.”

Finally he turned to me and said: “You will have to leave on the next plane.”

In a better world it would have been the police chief, not me, being asked this question. And Majak would have been the one asking it. What was this northern government official doing here, in a town half-burned to the ground, conspiring to conceal what was happening from the outside world and obstructing the provision of assistance to its inhabitants? Here was Majak, back in his home town after years away, finding it destroyed and under military occupation. He showed exemplary restraint. He told me later he had steeled himself to think of Abyei as another place altogether, a place where he had never been before.

Why are you here?  I explained that I was there to assess the effectiveness of the relief programme. But the authorities in Abyei did not seem to think that it was a relief agency’s job to assess its own programme. Or, for that matter, even to administer it. In particular they did not think it was an agency’s job to know anything about the condition of the people it was trying to help―especially if those people were Dinka, causing the government so much grief , and dying in such awkward numbers. In Sudan the function of relief agencies has come to be to protect citizens from their own government. They are not very effective in doing this. But still the government does not take kindly to it.

Through the tiny window of the plane we could see the Kiir River—the Bahr-el-Arab—the watercourse which intermittently forms the border between North and South. It twisted through the grasslands like the cracks in a skull.

In Abyei it seemed the worst might now be over, for this year at least. What we were seeing, in fact, was not famine, but its aftermath. Maybe five or ten people a day were dying when we arrived. Some of the food that had been sent―but only some―had actually reached the needy. And some of the medicines had been used to treat the sick. As late-comers to the famine, what we saw was the survivors. It was oddly uplifting. These were people who had experienced terrible deprivation, but had managed to stay alive. Most of those still living would recover if the relief programme continued. Majak and I discussed with our colleagues the need for fishing nets to replace those that had been stolen by the Nuer militiamen; Mark talked to the nurses about a plan for reorganizing the hospital.

The plane I was being forced to leave on was due in the morning. We had one more night in Abyei before the expulsion order came into effect. After dark we were supposed to be confined to our quarters, but the Red Crescent doctor seemed to be on close terms with the military. He insisted that I go under his protection to the Dinka dancing ground. “Their culture is very primitive,” he confided, “but it is interesting to observe.”  It was the tribal subtext raising its head again―the racial superiority, the distancing language, the avoidance of the matter at hand.

I went with the doctor to the dancing ground. The moonlight glittered on the river, but the dance was a lack-lustre affair compared to those I had joined in the South before the war, or even those now held in the shantytowns of Khartoum. There were a few dozen girls there, but no young men to dance with them, and little of the virtuoso rhythmic leaping that marks the dancing style in other parts of the Dinka territory.

The army commander arrived with his bodyguard. It seemed that he, too, had a consuming interest in this primitive, backward culture. Or possibly it was us he had an interest in. I was accompanied back to our compound by the Red Crescent doctor, who  clasped my hand warmly while he expounded his vision of the future of his country.

“You know,” he said, “the SPLA has done us a favour by driving these Dinka-Nuer out of the South. Before long they will all be Muslims.”

“Do you really think so?” I said, wondering what he meant exactly by “Dinka-Nuer—distinct peoples with different languages and territory.

“They will all be Muslims and then we shall have solved our country’s problems. There will be no North and South. You wait and see.”

This was the Islamic Front’s official view of the unifying power of Islam and the submersion of indigenous culture under the aegis of a single religion. But it was an ideology that was not working in the North, let alone the South.

“Tell me,” said the Red Crescent doctor, “What else is there that can unify the country?”

There was no easy answer to this question. The answer may be that nothing can. It’s a complicated war. Talking to the northern doctor I sensed, beneath the Panglossian strain in his discourse, under the lies and ignorance and self-deception, a longing to believe that Sudan could really function as a country, that it could become a nation with a government that could see beyond tomorrow.

For him that meant no North, no South, only Islam. In moments of weariness it was possible to wonder whether this might not be better than an endless war. But it was certainly something that Southerners would resist till the end. And a proxy war of the kind being visited on the South was hardly the way to persuade anyone of the benefits of embracing Islam, still less the desirability of its role in state formation.

The drone of engines was audible through the haze. Soon we could see the Hercules circling round the town. Unloading the plane took no time―it carried only 150 sacks of grain, hardly more than fit on the back of a lorry. The runway at Abyei was too short to land with a full load, so supplying the town by air was sensationally expensive. But shipping us out in the empty plane cost nothing at all.

In the belly of the Hercules

It was cold in the belly of the Hercules. The plane was bare. Grains of dura from leaking sacks rolled on the floor like loose ball-hearings. There were only five passengers. Through the tiny window we could see the Bahr-el-Arab, the river the Dinka call Kiir, which forms an intermittent border between North and South. It twisted through the grassland like the cracks on a skull. Far below us was last night’s dancing ground. Beyond it were the killing fields of the South. The land around was flat and brown, the colour of tanned hide; Robert Maker, my research assistant from before the war, was buried somewhere to the east―unless the hyenas had got him.

Down there was the stretch of land where I had mislaid the tribal boundary in Oxford a decade before, the 4,000 square miles that I’d pored over in the map office in Khartoum before our journey south. This was the northern edge of the great southern flood plain, where the pioneers of the Sudan survey―Major Titherington and his ilk―had roamed in the 1920s and 1930s.

For centuries Nilotic peoples lived and moved here without maps, without benefit of modernity, without a state, without a religion of the book. What they had was land and rivers and cattle―and  cultures and religions to match. When I lived in the South  the memory of this era had not yet gone. Displaced in the north, without their cattle or their land, what sort of people would they become now?

It was twilight outside. No lights below. Next to me Majak was staring out of the window.

“Imagine what this country could be like,” he said. “if peace comes…”

I tried to imagine it. In my mind’s eye I saw the displaced Dinka repossessing their land, restoring their depleted herds, men driving their guns into the ground as cattle pegs, bathing in the silver rivers of the South, growing sleek on the milk of the rainy season. I remembered again the day when I had cycled to Karic with Robert Maker, my research assistant. It was peaceful and cool that day, a perfect day in July; the rains had slackened and the ground-nuts were ripening. The road was red with mud; our wheels slipped; we fell off our bicycles. We came to a stream where girls were bathing and cart-wheeling in the shade of a fig tree. Before they noticed us we slipped into the water on the other side, lurking like crocodiles in the reed beds, watching them.

There was a dance in a village in the woods to the north; we could hear the drum from far off. On the road young men walked hand in hand on their way to the dance, their faces and limbs zebra-striped with clay and ash, wearing brass and ivory bracelets on their arms and legs and fantastic turbans on their heads. They sang kêêp and waak, songs that had been composed in the fattening camps, where they had been drinking milk since the rains began. They were songs in praise of oxen, paeans to their red-nosed Makuei, whose hide was the colour of the fish-eagle’s wings, and to Marial with the black-tasselled horn. Later, in Karic, some elders sang an old war-song, kong, full of the hyperbolic threats characteristic of the genre:

My ox Mayom is fearless
He is fearless

My spear is red with blood
We sacrifice to the spirit of the men of Dor
When the moon waxes and when it has waned,
In battle we attack again and again
Until the earth is all plowed up
The earth is all plowed up

Spirit of my fathers, we have a debt to pay
Manyang’s son has spoken; so has Guerlok’s.
Marial’s son has run amok
He is driving the enemy into the ground
Spirit of my fathers, we have a debt to pay

I am a bull, hated by the enemy
The enemy will be destroyed if I use only half my strength
If I am far from home, still they will be destroyed
They will be destroyed

People of Mayen Abyei,
I am a bull, fixed as the rock
A bull, fixed as the rock

Adel, what has made the people so angry?
They are as strong as a python and they are making sacrifices
I speared the ox Makuei in Wunrot
Our generation grinds men into dust

If we hate a thing
We hate it
If we are at peace
We let it be 

We spent the evening transcribing and translating these songs by the light of a paraffin lamp in Robert’s uncle’s house. Much of what I came to understand about Dinka culture―their arts of war and peace, their bravery and intransigence― I owed to Robert Maker. Amid the sadness of the south it was a particular sorrow to know he would never see the book he helped me write.

I imagined the displaced repossessing their land, restoring their depleted herds, driving their guns into the ground as cattle pegs, bathing in the silver rivers of the south, growing sleek on the milk of the rainy season.

If we hate a thing, we hate it… My spear is red with blood… The militaristic traditions characteristic of pastoralist cultures in Eastern Africa have led Dinka communities to take part in both of Sudan’s civil wars, particularly the current one. Landmines and automatic weapons have replaced the spears and clubs of their old war songs. And the language of national liberation has been superimposed on that of tribal identity. Modernity has come to the Dinka through the barrel of a gun. How much of the village life I recorded with Robert’s help can survive the harsh dislocations and violence of the present?  The cattle-rich pastoralists of the past are being transformed by the war into landless labourers, stripped of rights or possessions: villagers who have never seen a town struggle to survive in the cities of the North―in shanty towns like Hillat Kusha, the place of garbage.

If I am far from home, still the enemy will be destroyed…. On the SPLA side schoolboys recruited into a guerrilla army are taught to live by the gun, their minds filled with revolutionary slogans as uncompromising and absolutist as the propaganda of the Islamic Front. Whoever wins the war―if anyone wins― many things will be lost. ★