Emma's War by Deborah Scroggins

Author:Deborah Scroggins [Scroggins Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80885-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

Part Four

“They call it ‘my war,’ ” Man Gac told me, “that I brought it, but there was nothing that I spoiled, which I can find in my head, which I can think of. There is nothing which I spoiled that I know.”

—Eleanor Vandevort, A Leopard Tamed, 1968

Chapter Seventeen

EMMA INFORMED the coordinator of programs at Operation Lifeline that she would be moving to Nasir. He was disappointed and puzzled. She had been doing such good work in Kapoeta that it seemed a shame to leave. But Emma argued passionately that by going to Upper Nile, she might open schools that would save thousands of boys from being forced to join the rebel army. Reluctantly the coordinator agreed to let her try. The rains had just begun when the UN plane dropped her off near the ruins of the American Presbyterian mission, a little ways downstream from where Gordon’s lieutenant Nasir Ali had waged his war against slavery.

The area had been open to foreigners only a short time, and it retained a stunned, dreamlike quality, as if it had not quite awakened from the isolation and violence of the previous six years. Already strange things had started happening to the khawajas there. An overweight American nurse paddling in a dugout back to Nasir from vaccinating some villages on the Sobat came down with grievous stomach pains. The nurse’s cramps were so agonizing that her worried colleagues steered the canoe to the riverbank to see what they could do. To their amazement—and evidently to hers—she gave birth there in the mud to a baby boy. The distraught aid workers managed to get nurse and baby back to Nasir, where they radioed for an airplane. By the looks of the baby, his father must have been Sudanese. But the nurse never told anyone the father’s name, and she insisted she had not known she was pregnant. After recuperating in Nairobi Hospital, she took the baby to America. Later she returned to Africa on her own.

The incident reminded some of another ill-fated romance between a white woman and a southern Sudanese man at Nasir. In the 1920s the first single white woman sent to the American Presbyterian mission had made the mistake of encouraging a young Shilluk convert to woo her with poems and songs and maybe more. In the Sudanese view, the match had much to recommend it. For a start, it offered the Americans the entrée they claimed to want into southern Sudanese society. But the colonial and missionary authorities were horrified. Declaring the woman insane, the American mission shipped her off to Switzerland. Her lover was taken to Malakal and clapped into prison. Years later I found a note from a British administrator in the Rhodes Library at Oxford making derisive reference to the incident: “Miss T.’s swain is languishing in the Malakal prison. The Americans are saying she was sent to them from a foster home—as if that were an explanation for idling with a naked savage.”

I first heard of

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