Seed of South Sudan Read Free Page A

Sudan, and they used the excuse that rebels were hiding in our village to destroy it. In fact, at this time, the rebels were just across Sudan’s borders with Kenya and Ethiopia, a distance of about 200 miles.
    There was a great deal of noise, smoke, and confusion as tanks moved into the area outside the village. Bombs fell, soldiers burned huts, streams of choking, blinding smoke were everywhere and people were running, gathering everything they could: belongings, food, mats, on heads and underarms. Children cried. There was much scurrying about, screaming, mothers calling for children, children for their mothers.
    But I was not in the village—I saw the smoke, heard the gunfire and shelling, and I just kept moving, looking for a safe place. I went to the next village and found only burned huts and scattered bowls used for cooking. There were old and young, men and women, girls and boys, people and cattle on the paths at first. I kept walking with no belongings, looking for a place. But everywhere there was smoke, fire, burned-out homes and the menace of soldiers. We’d go toward the trees, which at this time were losing their leaves, so they offered only a little cover. And there were dangerous animals where there were trees. We just kept walking, trying to avoid the green clothes of the military. We tried to find out what was happening, where we would be safe.
    Pretty soon it was just young males as the women and girls could not keep up, and the men stayed behind with them trying to make a home wherever there were villages that were far away from our home and where locals would allow. The danger was everywhere—families could be wiped out as the soldiers advanced to these villages that hadn’t been attacked. The villages could run out of food and send newcomers away.
    Ethiopia was where most of the goods that came to our area came from; there was little trade from the North. The South has little connection to the North economically, culturally or socially, and the very bad roads in our area went east, not north. We knew not to go north, and certainly not to Rumbek, a large town, because that’s where the attacks were spreading from. We decided to walk far, far away so that we would be away from danger, and then we would try to find food and shelter.

Grandmother’s Words
    My grandmother told me the civil war would come to our village. Even more important and powerful, she and my mother taught me many skills to survive on my own. In Dinka culture, children are trained how to be strong because their parents tell them that they do not know what can happen to them. Parents show their children many things that could happen in the future.
    I recall my grandmother talking to me when there was an incident about a year before full-out war came to our area. Our small village, Adut Maguen, is south of a larger one, called Pacong. One night, at Pacong, rebels of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) attacked the police station. The government troops were occupying the station in a stepped-up effort to quell the rebels; the rebels, local tribesmen, were attacking the police station at night.
    My grandmother heard gunshots, but I was sleeping. When I woke up my grandmother called me and asked me, “Did you hear a gun sound last night?”
    â€œNo, Momdit, I didn’t. What happened?”
    â€œAnyanya attacked Pacong last night,” she said.
    â€œWhat is Anyanya, Momdit?”
    â€œThey are people who fight the Arabs.”
    â€œWhy did they attack the Arabs?”
    â€œMy grandson, you are young, you do not know Anyanya. If Anyanya is going to fight again, I will die before this war.” (These were tribes that fought the Arabs in a civil war many years earlier than the civil war that caused me to leave my village. Anyanya was a combination of Nuer, Lotuko, Madi, and other groups as well as Dinka tribesmen that fought the Arabs from 1969 to 1972. During that war, the