“ZAMBAKARI”

 

PART ONE

SUDAN

CHAPTER ONE

Nagero Town, Bahr al Ghazal State, Sudan

      

March 1984

It was nearly 8am, and dear goodness, Arketa thought, the day was already hot and steamy like the tea she was about to prepare. She padded from her bedroom to the detached kitchen wiping sweat from her face and fanning the loose skirt of her pajama, the tailor-made dress that hung loose from her shoulders to her ankles. Nothing underneath, thank goodness. Not the American pajama, no. This cotton frock was made by the local seamstress for wearing at home in the hot Sudan weather. Arketa loved tropical heat but a collection of days hovering at a stifling 90° had been more than enough.

 

 Arketa was a privileged young woman, living in the government provided brick house some distance away from the main village. Her London educated husband was the regional minister of agriculture. Even her marriage to Joseph had been successfully arranged by the elders of their highly respected families. “Ress-pect” Arketa would say, once English became the seventh of her required languages. In March 1984, she was a wife, the mother of a three-month old baby boy and greatly assisted by the companionship of a mother-in-law who did truly care for her. The month of March brought three significant observations: the promising end of the dry season, Arketa’s twentieth birthday, and the first anniversary of her marriage to Joseph Taban whose name, according to tradition, she never used.

 

Arketa explains that until a baby arrived, the familiar address between spouses of the Belanda Viri tribe ran something like this—“Hallo?I am talking to you-oo.”Or, moving into the other’s space, one said, “I am calling you.” After baby Elario’s December birth, things became easier for Arketa and Joseph—pronouns gave way to titles. According to tradition, Arketa called her husband “Daddy of Elario.” Joseph addressed his wife saying, “Mom (or Mother) of Elario, I am speaking to you.” 

 

With the rainy season now only weeks away, demands on Joseph ramped up. Fields needed readied for planting. In Nagero, rows of vegetables stretched from the town’s cluster of family huts (mud-walled, grass-roofed tukuls), to the forest’s edge: Okra, corn, groundnuts, sorghum, simsim, pineapple, cassava, yams, even rice. Fruit trees grew in abundance: banana, guava, mango, orange, and papaya. Joseph oversaw acres of land, Arketa and her mother-in-law prepared the family’s large garden behind the house. 

 

The only things slender Arketa needed to buy at the central market were salt and soap—everything else came from the garden, the river, or the hunter’s spear. When she did walk to the market, or the two miles to the famous Nagero stream to fetch cold, clear water, or the three miles to the big Sue (Sue-way) River for fishing, she wore a long skirt or robe and kept her breasts covered as befitted a married woman.

 

Life was good but not easy in Nagero, or in any town or village of south Sudan—no running water, no electric power, no telephones, few health services, and only an occasional building not made of mud and grass that required diligent upkeep. But hearty people provided food and protection and firm tribal traditions that kept communities strong. Until very recently, about the only thing people of Nagero feared was the approach of a wild animal that wandered in from the jungle. 

 

Is anyone in a papaya tree?“Get out!” An elephant can take down a tree faster than a man can scramble from one. The baboon will run from people but the elephant, lion, the leopard? No.  But now, rumors and realities of violence lodged in Arketa’s mind. 

 

When she padded from her bedroom passing the sitting room, Arketa glanced at the teak front door and thought about opening it—for some slight breeze perhaps—but she thought again. Fear ruled in favor of keeping the lock secured. Her world was no longer safe.

 

Nine months earlier, one cool June day, Sudan’s President Jaafar Nimeiri had abolished the autonomy of the mostly Christian south and declared all Sudan an Islamic state under Shari‘a law. Within weeks, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army organized and Sudan’s Second Civil War slid across the south. Fear rightly captured the minds of the people. Rightly. Two million civilians would die in the next fifteen years. 

 

By December 1983, when Arketa’s son was born, too frequently village drums beat out warnings of invaders. By March 1984, news of senseless killings spilled into the western state of Bahr al Ghazal, into Nagero town. Fear, and good reason for it, consumed Arketa Zambakari. Birthdays and anniversaries no longer captured the mind’s attention.

 

° °  °

 

Phoenix 2010           

In her home on a day much hotter than any she suffered in Sudan but without the suffocating humidity, Arketa served African biscuits and hot tea to me, the white woman listening, the person with permission to learn, and to record her story. Arketa’s light heart laughed easily and warmed our new acquaintanceship with hospitality and ease. We settled together on her large, enveloping sofa, chatted while I set up my tape recorder and turned to March 1984. 

 

“In dah kitchen dat morning, I was not happy.” As Arketa spoke, she dropped clasped hands between her knees, and braced her forearms on her slightly spread thighs. Her mood darkened. She rubbed her right thumb against the opposite index finger in a worried way; shifted her weight toward the edge of the couch, and shut her eyes. I studied her body language, wondering.

 

°  °  °

 

In the detached kitchen that morning, Arketa and her mother-in-law talked as they built the cooking fire, she said. Arketa ladled clear stream water from a large clay container and set it to boil. She reached into a hanging woven basket, retrieved and tore dried adingidingi leaves gathered from the river’s edge and dropped them into the boiling water. No one had what the British called tea. She was familiar with it but no one drank it. The women inhaled the fragrant, medicinal steam. Once the hot brew resembled the color of hibiscus, they would pour it. 

            

“That day?” Arketa said, “Sometimes, dah spirit lets you know dez things. My mother-in-law just say, ‘You know what, my daughter? Dah dream I had last night was very bad. I didn’t slept, all night. Just prayer.’” The woman’s deceased husband came in the dream, telling her to take the baby and go away. ‘Go!’he said adamantly.

            

Arketa loaded tea and groundnuts onto a large mahogany tray, moved to the sitting room, and noticed the heavy teak door ajar. Joseph, she thought, had done what she had hesitated to do. She, her husband, and her mother-in-law sat in locally made teak chairs, with Joseph in his usual place closest to the door. Next to each chair was a small teak table upon which rested imported porcelain teacups, bold in color and design. Within minutes, suckled and satisfied, three-month-old Elario slept on his mother’s lap. “His head to my right, his foots to my left.”

 

Ordinarily, morning tea provided an unhurried hour devoted to light conversation and plans for the day but ordinary no longer applied. Nagero was rife with rumors of killings, of dangerous men coming from the north. These men, the jallabawere nothing new. These Arab peddlers had traversed Bahr-al-Ghazal state even before the mid-nineteenth century. Traditionally, Muslim men moved through mostly Christian villages of South Sudan in convoys with cattle or small things like sugar or clothing to sell in market places. By the nineteenth century, however, South Sudan—land of the black people—had been visited and frequently brutalized by, outsiders: Egyptians, British, Belgian, and homegrown Ottoman influenced Arabs. South Sudan was regularly ruled or raided by those seeking power over the Nile, taxes, tribute, labor, slaves to deport and slave-soldiers, ivory, elephants, teak, mahogany, copper and, eventually, and oil.

 

“Dey were like businessmen,” Arketa said of the jallaba; small scale operators. She quietly pushed the story forward. 

 

“Dez men are black, like us. We know dey are good in dah daytime but at night? Killing. Killing. We didn’t really know, was dis person good or was he dangerous? Because now war is on. First dah southern Anya-Nya rebels, den dah SPLA is fighting dah north.

 

“SPLA,” I said. “Sudan People’s Liberation Army?”

 

“Ummm, under John Garang, yes, but dah Belanda people, my people, are not war people. We are only watching, listening. Dis was not a good time in South Sudan.” 

 

°  °  °

 

Arketa had been told not to go out unnecessarily—not to worry unnecessarily, but to be aware. Especially after the kitchen conversation, she was troubled enough that over tea that morning she confessed to her husband that she didn’t feel safe in Nagero. She wanted to leave. They had a car. Why couldn’t she go to her mother in Yambio? With a firm nod, her mother-in-law agreed.

            

“What is wrong with you?’ her husband asked. Arketa had nothing to worry about, he insisted. He reminded her that she was only weeks past from giving birth, only days past traveling from her mother’s home in Yambio where she had recuperated after Elario’s birth—280 rough miles away. He argued on her behalf. The distance was great, the drive requiring, the road utterly unreliable, “Too tough,” he said. 

 

°  °  °

            

“It was not our usual happiness that day.” 

 

Arketa studied me, to see if I understood the gravity of the situation. Satisfied, she continued. Ordinarily in March, she explained, after tea, Joseph stepped out to oversee hectares of land. He checked in with workers who guarded fields against animals, rodents, and encroaching jungle growth. In the time it took a guard to sneak away for a smoke, mongoose and rats could ruin an acre of groundnuts. Not watching? Monkeys make off with the corn.

 

Ordinarily, once Joseph left, Arketa and her mother-in-law returned to the kitchen to tidy things, and to start preparations for a large afternoon meal. If the day before they had soaked cornmeal in water they now added a bit of wheat flour to make Kisura, the pancake-like bread. Their favorite—okra with peanut butter—was a frequent go-to meal. Cassava, both leaves and roots, could be fixed in multiple ways. Fu-fu? Whether from ground cassava, corn, maize, or sorghum, the soft bread-like fu-fu was as much a part of everyday as reporting on the weather. Often, the women prepared sweet potato, or fruit, or sometimes, locally grown rice and beans. In swarming season, crisply cooked termites were served with sweet cassava--bigtermites. Those with “big red heads.” Arketa had lived on little else during her pregnancy—termites and mud from the mound. Occasionally, they served cured meats and nearly as often as fu-fu, they included their beloved simsim—sesame.

 

But, on that particular March morning, Joseph drained his teacup and as he did, the heavy front door pushed open. 

 

°  °  °

 

“My heart is like,bump!” As she spoke, Arketa released her grip on the Phoenix day.

 

“I say in my head, ‘People coming in without knocking? What is going on? I see their hands is black, like us, but on dah face everything is covered but dah eyes and nose. I know right there, dey are Muslim. 

            

“Oh God. Something is wrong; people coming in!Five of dem, each wearing dah jellabiya, dah long white clothes of dah Arab.” Each man wore a small white cap that reminded Catholic Arketa of the religious hat the Pope sometime wears. Each one carried a knife.

            

Fear seized her mind. Slender black hands lifted sleeping Elario from her lap and placed him on a nearby chair. The man turned back and with those slender hands forced Arketa to the floor, being the first to rape her. In swift succession, two men went on Arketa, two others on Joseph’s mother. Men’s bodies in loose white swirled through the room doing in God’s name what they came to do. 

 

Arketa couldn’t think, couldn’t remember the day or the date but she couldn’t stop hearing sounds that slammed together—tipped furniture, grunts of struggle, grunts of forced rapes, women’s cries, slicing sounds. She couldn’t stop the sounds.

            

“I believe the time they was raping us was dah time the one with the big knife was killing my husband. I talk of dis now? My eyes is right dehr.” 

 

°  ° °  

 

Did Joseph cry out? Did he say anythingbefore his death? Arketa didn’t hear her husband’s voice. No. Mayhem, multiple rapes, murder; and a three-month old baby slept through it all on a wide teak chair; nothing else to remember but a door left ajar. 

 

Arketa lay still. The only movement in the room was the tears falling from her closed eyes. She expected men to return, to rape again or to kill her. She wouldn’t mind being killed, she thought. But, she wasn’t thinking, really. Her mind was parched, battered along with her body, muddled, filled with unidentifiable buzzing and shrill sounds. She couldn’t focus it. She lay still until Joseph’s mother spoke her son’s name but received no answer.

 

Arketa lifted herself to a sitting position. Without thinking, she wiped her wet left hand on the skirt of her pajama. She looked left to where Joseph had been sitting but there was no one in the chair. She saw her husband’s head on the floor to one side of the chair, his body, on the other side. Blood carpeted the floor. Joseph’s leg was moving. Like dah chicken when you cut off dah head,she said to me--dah bottom of dah chicken still running; dah leg thrashing.It was like that. At the time, thinking was like trying to put squares in round holes. Thinking was looking for something sensible that can’t be found. Thinking was noise. 

 

°  °  °

 

Terrified, the women lifted themselves enough into reality to recognize imminent danger. Arketa grabbed her baby and along with Joseph’s mother, slipped out the back door of the brick house. A baby. No shoes. No food—nothing but fear and confusion.

 

They ran through the simsim field, their feet striking stumps of harvested stalks. 

They broke from that field, crossed a small clearing and, heads down crashed through the field of Sorghum. Strong, close stalks, tall as her father’s long spear and nearly as solid challenged the weight of their bodies. They pushed into the bush, away from how things once were, away from how things were meant to be. Crazy with fear, bathed in sweat and shock, they stomped down a small space, gathered and spread large leaves and, senseless, settled themselves. For two days they hid where Arketa’s mother once told her, “If there is trouble, go to this place. I will find you.” Nagero was her mother’s hometown. 

 

“What about dah wild animals? Dah mosqwitos? For two days we don’t sleep. We don’t have water or food. We don’t want it. It was bad, yeah.” 

 

Without lifting her head, Arketa wiped tears with the heel of her left hand and in nearly a whisper said to me, “I don’t want to talk more about it. Dis is something I cannot get out of my mind. I never go back into dat house.” 

°  °  °

2009—Sometimes,

We Hate to Learn Things but, Surely, We Should

I sat stunned.

My mind was reeling like the tape in the small machine on the table between teacups. I turned it off. 

How lightly had I absorbed her words when only a matter of weeks earlier I asked to hear Arketa’s story and she responded, “I have been in this country since 2002 and you are the first to hear my story. It is difficult, Barbara. It is very difficult.” 

 

Who hasn't heard one tragic story or another about African hardship? Millions, for one brutal reason or another are dead. Four million people from Sudan’s past conflicts alone are displaced; thousands of survivors have been torn from their homes and settled in a variety of countries; tens of thousands live out their lives in African refugee camps under barely tolerable or desperate conditions. If cited figures are right, old Sudanese conflicts and civil wars created more than 27,000 Lost Boys between the ages of five and twelve. Orphaned or enslaved, they were forced to flee their homes and subjected to the worst of human atrocities, cut off from customs and culture—separated from families—if families survived the brutalities that created the horrors that created the situation. Scholarly reports describe the pattern of government-sponsored actions against the south such as pitting ethnic groups against one another, as well as the use of starvation, enslavement, bombings, murder, rape and persecution. It’s happening again, even now. It’s all so massive, destruction and mayhem on so great a scale—over there. 

            

“Over there,” represents so many places, so many suffering people. But Arketa brought the effects of it over here, telling a bit of her story first in a wide, upstairs corridor of an elegant Phoenix residence built for the protection of privileged people who need assistance, then through conversations and phone calls. It was no longer millions, thousands, hundreds or even tens. The tragedy of South Sudan narrows down to specific stories, told one at a time. In this case, the story of Arketa Bazia Zambakari, a woman who made a walk like them. A woman whose life was marked by early privilege, followed by unrelenting anguish and trouble met with courage, tenacity, and stubborn determination. 

            

More than half of Sudan’s population was Christian but power lay in the Muslim north where government was seated, where schools were plentiful, where commerce was strong. Northern blacks considered themselves Arab, not African. Northerners chose the word Aswad(black) to describe their brothers and sisters of the south. For themselves they assigned the term, Akhdar, meaning green or brownish. Dr. Francis M. Deng explained it well in his book, New Sudan in the Making:

            “Black is depicted in [Arabic] literature as something not good . . . Indeed, green is seen as the common Sudanese color of skin because it reflects a brown that is not too dark, giving associations with black Africa and possibly slavery, and not too light, hinting at gypsy (halabi) or European infidel forbears. Al-Baquir Mukhtar notes that ‘to avoid describing self as aswad (black), the collective Northern consciousness renamed [themselves] akhdar (green) . . . Whereas a very dark Northerner is only akhdar, an equally dark Southerner is bluntly aswad which is ‘the color of the abid (slave)."

 

Three factors fueled Sudan’s perpetual conflict—ancient yes, but nearly continuous since the early 1950's: Arabization, Islamization and slavery. The division between brothers of the desert north and the rain-rich south could add a new struggle to the Bible: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his siblings, Rehoboam and Jeroboam, and now Sudanese North and Sudanese South. Conflict reigned. 

            

Until I began to read Sudan’s history, I was unaware that in 1972, a remarkable agreement was forged in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, ending seventeen years of civil war. Sudan’s Muslim President Nimeiri pulled it off. He appeared to love the Christian south. When he visited there, and he visited often, he wore Safari suits, not the jellabiya. Nimeiri granted women the right to ride bicycles, and drive cars, even the right to be educated. For a while the Zambakari family felt safe. The south loved Nimeiri but leaders of other Arab nations did not.

            

In 1979, Chevron discovered Sudanese oil—In the south. Money from that oil was intended for deep pockets of the jellabiya. Arab pressure made it hard for Nimeiri to breathe. In 1983, hoping to cling to his waning power, or perhaps because of his timely spiritual conversion, Nimeiri donned Arabic garb, abrogated the Addis Ababa Agreement, re-districted the provinces of the south to weaken its unity, and instituted Shari’a law throughout the nation. Once again floggings and the severing of limbs became acceptable punishment for even minor crimes. The only god was Allah. Not Sunday but Friday became the holy day in all the land. Execution of protestors was commonplace. Sepsis broke through the thin skin of peace; the rottenness oozed a second civil war onto the body of Sudan. Arketa became pregnant.

°  °  °

March 1984

Traveling with the feet of fleeing people, Nagero news reached Yambio, West Equatoria state, where Arketa’s parents lived. The rumor was that all the men of any significance were dead. Arketa’s mother, Lucia, knew the dangers there. She knew that Joseph’s position of respect put Arketa at risk. She knew where Arketa would hide should the need arise. She had selected the place, pointed it out to Arketa, and told her to wait there. She would come for her if needed.

 

Lucia and the family’s mechanic fired up the Land Cruiser and headed north. Ordinarily, in the dry season, the road to Nagero was navigable but regardless of season, rarely safe; nor was it ever wise for a woman to drive alone. One hundred jungle miles as the pied crow might fly; twice that by road and expected complications. Along the way local people were questioned: Is it safe to move from here to there? Have you seen cars coming safely from the other direction? Can we cross the Dura River Bridge without fear? Any trees dropped across the road by rebels? Militia? Muslims? Roadblocks? Bribes?

            

On the second day of hiding, Arketa heard her mother running toward her, shouting, “Quickly! Come!“ She, and Joseph’s mother ran, thrashing their way from the bush through fields, shoving stocks of grain from their faces as they ran. When they broke free, people of the village stood watching, crying.

 

Later Arketa learned that many had been killed on the day of Joseph’s death, people of importance in Nagero’s Christian community. Even “dah big guy of the Catholic Church. Killed.” 

 

On that hot March killing day, Christian voices screamed, “Oh, God!” in Zande, Songo, or Belanda Viri. Northern Muslim men with knives boldly shouted in Arabic as they delivered death in God’s name. Then, silence.

 

Without a glance the women ran past their lovely home. Arketa and her mother climbed into the backseat of the car, Joseph’s mom and the baby sat in front with the driver. 

 

“You cannot-ta stay here anymore,” Arketa remembered her mother saying. Then Lucia asked, “Did you know that Joseph was killed?” 

 

“In front of us,” Arketa answered. “I don’t want to talk about it.” 

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CHAPTER TWO     Bahr el Ghazal State, Sudan

Bazia, Bahr el Ghazal, South Sudan - c.1972

Arketa lay stunned and dizzy, fairly sure her eight-year-old body was dead. Her long fall through a web of branches left torturous music in her mind—bump, bump, bump, thud.The sounds resembled the bouncing beat of the Ganza, the dance of the dead, off a drum made of a stretched elephant ear.