Seed of South Sudan Read Free

above the ground—not only to avoid lions and other predators, but to escape the floods of water that would course through during heavy downpours). The rest of the year, usually from December to the end of March, we would create dry season camps near shrunken rivers so that we could have access to water for our animals and ourselves.
    Our cattle are the focus of our lives. In Sudan, a person’s wealth is completely tied to how many cattle he owns—rather, how many a family owns, as there’s not a lot of distinction between the individual and the family. Cattle are acquired through marriage, and everyone marries. The haggling over cattle for a woman’s bride-price, for instance, is a major community event, observed by all the village people. Everyone knows everyone’s business in this village—and it is everyone’s business, as many are related. But more about the bride-price and bride-wealth later.
    On a typical day, at the age of seven, I would rise from a mat on the dirt floor where I’d slept matches-in-a-box style with my older and younger brother. My sister and mother would already be up, making a fire and beginning preparation for the meal that would be taken at lunch time by the rest of the family there in our home, and that would be carried by the rest of us to the grazing fields. There is no breakfast—we would go to the water source (pots of water that my mother and sister had fetched), and wash our faces. My mother would have prepared our lunch to carry to the grazing fields with us.

    Young boys watching cattle near Pulkar, South Sudan, as Majok was doing in 1987 when the Sudanese Army attacked his village of Adut Maguen.

    My job was to untie the cattle and lead them to graze on the grasses not far from our home. I would do this with my older brother and my cousins. Twenty cattle had to be rounded up into groups, tethering them with ropes strung around their necks held like so many balloon strings. Once we were out on the grasslands, we’d make sure we had all our cattle in one location and keep an eye on them so that none strayed. We knew our cattle by color patterns. In fact, Dinka names are actually colors of cattle. My name, Majok, signifies a black and white pattern in Dinka.
    When the cattle were settled in a particular area, we could relax some and play with other boys who were doing the same thing with their families’ cattle. By about noon, we’d take out our first meal of the day, groundnut paste rolled in a banana leaf. Afterwards, we’d chew on a sorghum plant stem. These grazing fields were not rolling grasslands as you might picture in the American West or large pastures such as you see in rural Georgia and Tennessee or the Midwest states. Mostly they were areas of man-high grasses, which the cattle munched all day long.

    Young Dinka in a cattle camp near Majok’s village wears ashes for decoration and shows off his young bulls.

    I did not attend school, but schooling was planned for me because my older brother was not going to attend. In Dinka families, one son attends, usually the oldest. But for some reason, my brother was not going to school, and it was I, when I was of age, who was to travel to a school building about 12 miles from our village. Because of the dislocation caused by war, I first learned my ABCs in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, 300 miles from my home. And I learned English rather than Arabic as is the Sudanese custom.
    That one day during the end of the rainy season, in October or November, my pastoral life changed. Tanks, Hummers, and soldiers of the Sudanese army began an assault on our village. They started from the police station, where soldiers from North Sudan were stationed. In the past, these stations often would be attacked by rebels, militiamen from the Southern Sudan tribes, the Sudanese Liberation Army. But there were no rebels around in our area when these attacks began—North Sudan was warring on South