In the late dry season of 2006, in May, I spent the day with Peter Nyot – for what turned out to be the last time – in his birthplace, Rumbek, the capital of Lakes State, in Greater Bahr al Ghazal, one of the three former provinces of Southern Sudan. We spent part of the day in the secondary school he had attended as a boy, at their annual speech day. And he told the students a story I have repeated many times.

I’d lived in Rumbek in the early 1980s, before the start of the north-south war in Sudan. Later, in the 1990s, at the height of the war, I worked as a researcher and aid worker in the areas of the South that were controlled by the insurgent SPLA, the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army. It was at this time that I came to know Peter, a founder of the South Sudan Law Society (SSLS) and one of the outstanding sons of greater Bahr al Ghazal. The SSLS was the first independent professional association in the liberated areas of the South. It is an organisation that has, intermittently, played a critical role in the political development of South Sudan, where the rule of law has frequently been disregarded.

Peter had been born in 1947, towards the end of the colonial era in Sudan, the son of Kok Malok (1911-1971), a government chief from the Rup section of the Agaar Dinka, the principal ethnic group in Lakes. Kok Malok became deputy court president in Rumbek a few years after Peter was born, and Peter was part of the first generation of university graduates from Rumbek. He graduated in law from the University of Khartoum in 1971, then studied at Yale. In the 1980s the civil war made it hard for him to return to the South. But as his book Governance and Conflict in the Sudan, 1985-1995 shows, his homeland was never far from his mind.

In 1999 Peter finally travelled home to Bahr al Ghazal in order to help organise the Wunlit Peace Conference. This was an unprecedented gathering, held under the auspices of the New Sudan Council of Churches, which brought together chiefs and elders from warring Nuer and Dinka communities on the west bank of the Nile (including Peter’s uncles from the Rup section of Dinka Agaar). The Wunlit meeting led – three years later – to reconciliation between the two factions of the SPLA, paving the way for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, the agreement that ended the north-south civil war in Sudan. It was a fitting role for Peter, who was learned, not only in the statutory laws of Sudan and international human rights law, but also in the traditional laws of his own people, as practised in his father’s court.

The year after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, in May 2006, during the late dry season, I found myself, by good fortune, in Rumbek at the same time as Peter. I was running a training course at Rumbek Senior Secondary School. The school, founded at the very end of the colonial era, is the alma mater of two generations of Southern intellectuals; their names, including Peter’s, may be seen emblazoned on the wall of the assembly hall. Two decades earlier, in 1982, on the eve of the 1983-2005 war, President Nimeiri closed the school down: the action triggered a wave of recruits to the SPLA the following year, including teachers who we had both known. Now, at the time of our meeting in 2006, over twenty years later, Rumbek Senior Secondary had just reopened. The school buildings – used to store munitions when Rumbek was under occupation by the northern army – had been cleared of unexploded ordnance and reroofed, and classes were in session again.

Peter and I were guests of honour at the first post-war school prize-giving. It was salutary to listen to Peter’s talk: his knowledge of the political history of the Sudans was unrivalled. He conjured up – for a generation that had never known peace – the coming into being of a new country, South Sudan, the country that was finally to achieve full independence five years later. In Peter’s speech to the students at the prize-giving he stressed the value of learning and independent thinking, he himself being an exemplar of both – an even-handed, forward-looking scholar who did not allow others to dictate his views. Then he told us a story – mainly for the benefit of the students, but perhaps, it occurred to me, for my benefit too.

The story was about a British district commissioner stationed in Rumbek in the colonial era, in the 1950s, who decided to learn the Dinka language, thöng Muönyjang (quite probably the same DC who had made Peter’s father deputy court president). In Peter’s telling, the newly-appointed DC, soon after his arrival, engaged one of the teachers at the Senior Secondary school to give him language lessons.

First thing each morning, the teacher would go to the DC’s office in the town and tutor him in elementary Dinka. After a few weeks he said it was time for a vocabulary test.

“Suppose you are in your office,” says the teacher, “and a visitor arrives. How would you say ‘Good morning’?”

The DC replies, “I’d say ci yi bak.”

“That’s correct,” says the teacher. “And then?”

“I’d say yin apuöl guöp?” says the DC. “Meaning ‘Are you well?’”

“Very good. Or Apuoth aret, as we say in Lakes,” says the teacher. “And what is the reply to this greeting?”

“Acin kë rac,” says the DC. “‘There’s nothing bad.’”

“Good,” says the teacher. “Now imagine that the visitor is standing just inside your office. And you want to ask him to come up to your desk.”

“I say bar tene,” says the DC. “‘Come here.’”

The teacher clicks his tongue in approval; the DC is doing well so far.

“A final question,” says the teacher. “What do you say when the meeting is over and you wish to tell the visitor it is time to leave?”

But the DC doesn’t know the answer to this. (The teacher had taught him bar, to come, but he hadn’t taught him jaal, to leave.) The DC scratches his head in puzzlement unsure if he was supposed to know the word. Then he has an idea.

At this point Peter assumed the role of the teacher, walking towards the edge of the podium where we were seated.

“What could the DC do?” he asked the students.

There was an expectant silence, and he continued. “This is what he does. He gets up from his desk and walks to the doorway of his office. Then he looks back at the teacher, still standing by the desk and says.

‘I walk across the office. And hold the door open. And look back at my visitor. Then I say, “Bar tene… Come here!”’”

The students laughed. Their own spoken English was a good deal better than the District Commissioner’s thöng Muönyjang had been. And the point wasn’t lost on me either. When the laughter subsided, Peter resumed his talk. The story, he said, held a lesson for all of us. If you don’t know how to do something – in life or in language – you need not despair. There’ll be a workaround. You should be inventive, and use your imagination to figure out a way to get round the obstacle in your path.

Today, young people growing up in the South face very many obstacles. It will be a fitting tribute to Peter’s memory – to the memory of this indomitable son of Rumbek – if some of those who heard him speak that day are able to put this lesson into practice in their own lives.