Dut stared at me, blinking with a hard smile.
— He really said this? I nodded.
— And you believed this? I shrugged.
— Achak, he said, and then stared at the fire for a long moment.-I mean no disrespect to this man. But these are not lion-men. They're ordinary Arabs. I'll tell you boys the story of how this happened, though you won't understand all of it. Do you want to hear this?
Deng and I nodded.
— I'm a teacher so this is how I think. I see you sitting like this listening and I want to tell you about this. You're sure you want to hear? Deng and I insisted we did.
— Okay then. Where should I start? Okay. There is a man named Suwar al-Dahab. He is the minister of defense for the government in Khartoum.
Deng interrupted.-What is Khartoum?
Dut sighed.-Really? You don't know this? That's where the government is, Deng. The central government of the country. Of all of Sudan. You don't know this?
Deng persisted.-But the chief is the head of the country.
— He's the head of your village, Deng. Now I'm not sure you'll understand this.
I urged him to try, and so Dut spent some time explaining the structure of the government, of tribes and chiefs and the former parliament, and of the Arabs who ruled Khartoum.
— You boys know about Anyanya, yes? Snake Poison. They're the rebel group that came before the SPLA. Your fathers were probably members of this group. All of your fathers were.
Deng and I nodded. I knew that my father had been an officer in the Anyanya.
— Well, now we have the SPLA. Some of the goals are the same. Some are new. You remember the first attacks of the helicopters? We said we did.
— Well, the helicopters were the governments. They came in response to the actions of a man named Kerubino Bol. He was in the Sudanese Army. Remember when the army was made of Dinka soldiers and Arabs, too? Achak, you remember this, I know. There were many deployed in Marial Bai. I said I did remember.
— Kerubino was a major in charge of the 105th Battalion, stationed at a large town called Bor. Bor is in the south of Sudan, the region called the Upper Nile. The people there are like you, but different. We're all Dinka, but their customs vary. Many clans scar themselves when they reach manhood. You probably have heard of this. There's another town where all the men smoke pipes. We all have different customs but we are all Dinka. You see this? This is a vast land, boys, bigger than you could ever imagine, and then twice as big as that.
Deng and I nodded.
— Good. Now, Kerubino and his men had been there in Bor for some time, and they were content there. Giving power like this to a southern Sudanese was part of the peace agreement with the Anyanya. In Bor, Kerubino and his men were among their people, most had moved their families to the town and they were happy there. They didn't have to work too hard. You have seen these soldiers. They don't like to move much. Then one day, rumors came down that they would be transferred to the north, and this didn't sit well with them, to be stationed so far from their families. This was made worse by the fact that Khartoum wasn't paying them what they'd been promised. So things got worse, and finally loyalists to Khartoum, knowing that Kerubino was planning a mutiny, attacked the 105th Battalion. Kerubino Bol took the whole battalion and fled to Ethiopia. This is where we're going, boys. Bilpam is in Ethiopia. Did you know this?
We stopped the story there. Deng and I had not heard the word Ethiopia before. We didn't know what an Ethiopia was.
— It's a country like Sudan is a country, Dut said.
— If it's like us, why is it somewhere else? Deng asked. Dut was a patient man.
— In Ethiopia, he continued, — Kerubino was joined by a man named John Garang, a colonel in the Sudanese army. He had fled, too. And then the 104th Battalion, stationed in Ayod, also fled to Ethiopia. By this time it was a movement. There were hundreds of well-trained soldiers there, mostly Dinka, and this was the new rebel army. This was the SPLA. And so began this stage of the civil war. Do you understand these things so far?
We nodded.
— When John Garang began the rebel movement, General Dahab was very angry, as was the entire government in Khartoum. So they wanted to crush the rebels. But the rebels were many. They were armed well and they had something to fight for. For this reason, they were very dangerous. And Ethiopia was helping them, which made them even more of a threat.
— So the rebels have guns? I asked.
— Guns! Of course. We have guns and artillery and rocket launchers, Achak.
Deng laughed a giddy laugh and I smiled and felt proud. I convinced myself that the men who had beaten my father were different than these rebels. Or perhaps the rebels had learned better manners.
— The government was very angry about this new rebel presence, Dut continued, — so this is when the helicopters came. The government burned the villages to punish them for supporting the rebels. It's very easy to kill a town, yes? Harder to kill an army. So as men left to train in Ethiopia, the SPLA continued to grow and they even won battles. They occupied land. Things were looking bad for the government. They had a problem. So they needed more soldiers, more guns. But raising an army is expensive. A government needs to pay an army, to feed an army, provide the army with weapons. So General Dahab used a strategy familiar to many governments before his: he armed others to do the work of the army. In this case, he provided tens of thousands of Arab men, the Baggara among them, with automatic weapons. Many were from across the Bahr al-Ghazal. Many thousands from Darfur. You saw these men with their guns. These guns shoot a hundred bullets in the time it would take to shoot a rifle twice. We can't defend ourselves against these guns.
— Why didn't the government have to pay these men? I asked.
— Well, that's a good question. These Baggara had long fought with the Dinka over grazing pastures and other matters. You probably know this. For many years there had been relative peace between the southern tribes and the Arab tribes, but it was General Dahab's idea to break this peace, to inspire hatred in the Baggara. When he gave them these weapons, the Baggara knew they had a great advantage over the Dinka. They had AK-47s and we had spears, clubs, leather shields. This upset the balance we've lived with for many years. But how would the government pay all these men? It was simple. They told the horsemen that in exchange for their services, they were authorized to plunder all they wanted along the way. General Dahab told them to visit upon any Dinka villages along the rail lines, and to take what they wished-livestock, food, anything from the markets, and even people. This was the beginning of the resurgence of slavery. This was in 1983. We had no concept of years.
— Just a few seasons ago, Dut said.-You remember when this began? We nodded.
— They would descend upon a village, and surround it at night. When the village would wake, they would ride in from all sides, killing and looting as they wished. All cattle would be taken, and any animals not stolen would be shot. Any resistance would bring reprisals. Men would be killed on sight. Women would be raped, the homes burned, the wells poisoned, and children would be abducted. You have seen all this I trust.
We had.
— It's worked very well for the Baggara, because their own farms were suffering from drought. They had lost cattle and their harvests were poor. So they steal our cattle and they sell them in Darfur, and then they're sold again in Khartoum. The profits are tremendous. The supply of cattle in the north has increased dramatically, such that there's a surplus, and the price of beef has declined. These were all Dinka cattle, our dowries and our legacies, the measure of our men. Stealing animals and food from these villages solved a great portion of the Baggara's problems, as did the enslaving of our people. Do you know why, boys?