Songs of a War Boy by Deng Thiak Adut & Ben Mckelvey

Author:Deng Thiak Adut & Ben Mckelvey [Thiak Adut, Deng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Published: 2016-10-24T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

SOME TO JUSTICE, SOME TO FATE

After the peace was signed into law, many of the Sudanese who had run to Australia planned their return. The peace agreement stipulated that the south would have limited autonomy for six years, paving the way for a referendum on independence that was planned for 2011.

In my lifetime there had never been a time of hope in the south of Sudan like that time. John came back to Sydney after the peace agreement but by then I realised he was not returning to us in a permanent way.

‘There will be a new country, Deng, and that will be my home,’ he said.

I had mixed feelings about what John was doing. I understood his excitement about the possibility of the birth of this new country, and that he now felt fealty to our family in Sudan, but John had laid roots in Australia. He had a family here – children – and that meant he had responsibility. I was there for John’s children, but I was not their father. I couldn’t completely condemn him, though. After all, he wasn’t moving to the United States, but back to the villages of my youth to improve the war-ravaged lives of the people living there, and there were also many months that he couldn’t live in Sydney anyway because of his skin condition.

Before he left I sought John out for advice. I had decided I wanted to apply for a course of university study and, as the graduate of an Australian university, I wanted to know which school John thought I should apply for. John told me that the answer would depend on what field of study I was looking to take on.

I told John I wanted to study environmental science. It was a dream I’d harboured for years without ever admitting. The Nile River has been the wet centre of my soul since I was born, and I thought about it often. During the war I’d heard of a plan the north had to divert water through the Sudd wetlands – a tributary of the Nile – back up to the north of Sudan and Egypt. The project, which was to be called the Jonglei Canal, would essentially end fishing and agriculture as many of us Dinka knew it.

As I got older I started to understand that that project would have been a cultural genocide for our people. The canal project was only abandoned when the war consumed the south, and I’m sure would have been resumed if the north had managed to destroy the SPLA.

A giant abandoned French-made digger sitting out in the Jonglei swamps is all that remains of the project, but I often thought about what Sudan would have been like for a Dinka fisherman’s son in a land with no access to fish or grazing ground for our cows.

The canal was an omnipresent thought in my mind, even though I’d expunged most other thoughts of Africa. When I told John of my prospective

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.