Over Christmas we read Dave Eggers ‘novel’ “What is the what?” The inverted commas around ‘novel’ are because the story is actually true and the book is an autobiography of the narrator which has been fictionalized. The reasons for this are explained in the book and in material which can be found on associated websites.
The story:
Valentino Achak Deng was born a Dinka in Marial Bai, South Sudan and as a six year old saw his village raided and razed by the Arab militia (murahaleen). Believing his parents had been slaughtered along with most of the population he fled with other boys on foot. After many months walking and many horrifying experiences (this is a SIX year old boy navigating land mines, lions, crocodiles and rivers choc a block with the bodies of less ‘fortunate’ souls) he arrives along with hundreds of others who have joined the journey, from villages in all directions and all destroyed, in Ethiopia and the relative safety of a refugee camp. That safety was shattered by the conditions at the camp, and eventually being forced to flee to another refugee camp in Kakuma after being fired upon by soldiers. The camp in Kenya was their home for over ten years.
America eventually takes him and thousands of the refugees (along with many lost girls of Sudan) and Achak is now a prominent speaker about and advocate for the South Sudan story. He heads his own foundation and has recently seen a small school built in his home town. Many other Lost Boys have returned to South Sudan prior to its independence in July last year to be a part of the new Government and to participate in the rebuilding of the country.
Background:
The Lost Boys of Sudan is the name given to the groups of over 20,000 boys of the Nuer and Dinka ethnic groups who were displaced and/or orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005), about 2.5 million killed and millions of others displaced. The name "Lost Boys of Sudan" was colloquially used by aid workers in the refugee camps where the boys resided in Africa.
Most of the boys were orphans separated from their families when government troops and government-sponsored militias systematically attacked villages in southern Sudan, killing many of the inhabitants. Many avoided capture or death because they were away from their villages tending cattle at the cattle camps (grazing lands located near bodies of water where cattle were taken and tended largely by the village children during the dry season) and were able to flee and hide in the dense African bush. Presumably orphaned, they traveled by foot for years in search of safe refuge, on a journey that carried them over a thousand miles across three countries to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. Over half died along their epic journey, due to starvation, dehydration, sickness and disease and attack by wild animals and enemy soldiers. It has been said they are the most badly war-traumatized children ever examined.
Some of the unaccompanied male minors were conscripted by the Southern rebel forces and used as soldiers in the rebel army, while others were handed over to the Government by their own families to ensure protection, for food, and under a false impression the child would be attending school.
The war impacted girls too. When villages were attacked, girls were reportedly raped, and women and small children (boys and girls) were taken to the north to be used or sold as slaves. When arriving in the camps in Ethiopia, the boys were placed in boys-only areas of the camp, but according to Sudanese culture, the girls could not be left alone and were placed with surviving family members or adopted by other Sudanese families. When the resettlement program was initiated in 1999, one of the requirements was that the children must be orphans. Because these girls had been living in these family units for up to 9–14 years, they were no longer considered orphans and therefore, were not eligible for the resettlement program. As a result, relatively few of the Lost Girls were deemed eligible for resettlement.
By 1992, UNICEF had reunited almost 1200 Lost Boys with their families. However, about 17,000 were still in camps in the area as of 1996. (Can you imagine the connected impacts in this figure? Mothers and fathers not knowing who is lost and who isn’t? Kids growing up having to accept their families are gone, family histories forever fractured, lost connections with siblings...)
In 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed between the North and South of Sudan allowing free access to Lost Boys/ Girls and Sudanese Diaspora from around the world to return to their homeland. As a result, many are now returning to South Sudan to pay it forward and help in the rebuilding of their war torn country and to provide humanitarian aid and support. In January 2011, 99.47% of South Sudanese voted to separate from the north and become an independent nation. Some Lost Boys and Girls now hold positions in Government of South Sudan
The Sudanese community in Melbourne and Sydney were among the first in the world to participate in the vote.
Sad to report there has been a return to violence and ghastly village raids again in South Sudan in recent weeks. The history of Sudan is one of colonialism and tribalism, British and Egyptian Imperialism, artificial borders to support cultural imperatives, Oil as ammunition for territorial control, Arab and African conflict and domination, a regime being propped up financially by Bin Laden’s million and the subsequent pay back by the US in exchange for intelligence gathering.
In a world where life is less and less valued, humanity is diminished under the weight of labeling, sloganising, globalisation and the invisibility from some of our social networking and technology (where is the ‘heart’ in Facebook, where is the emotion in an email or Tweet?)it is easy to dismiss this sort of horror. Two million people dead, if that was a virus or a natural disaster imagine our outrage or concern. One hesitates to entertain the idea that because ‘they’ are not ‘us’ we can push the horror aside. Maybe it’s ‘over there’ and too far away BUT Haiti was far away too, the Holocausts of Germany and Bosnia, Uganda and Cambodia were not ‘here’ and yet we were moved and enraged by them (eventually). I wonder how many of us would know what Darfur is about; we might remember George Clooney championing the cause and trying to get it into the mainstream media?
It’s sometimes hard to bear the idea that we lived at the same time as this happened isn’t it? Sometimes we feel helpless in the knowing. Hope is only something that comes with knowledge and an open heart.
What to do? Well whatever it takes and whatever you can I guess.
I commend the book to you and I refer you onto the below two sites for more eloquent and personal information.
http://www.valentinoachakdeng.org/
http://www.lostboys.org.au/ (Sudanese Lost Boys Association of Australia)
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