The Ten-Year-Old Man: Unwavering Resilience to Self - Restoration

By Philip Pitia Lako

This book describes what life was like for me as a boy in the village and cattle camp, and some of the brutal cultural traditions of the Mundari tribe, from growing up in an African village, to becoming a child soldier in the civil war zone that was Sudan in the 1990s, to escaping to a refugee camp in Kenya and then ultimately a new life in Australia.

At the age of ten, my childhood was brutally interrupted when the Sudan People's Liberation Army rebels took me from my village under the pretext of education. The removal resulted in prolonged suffering from the rebels and constant attack by the Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army. Moving from camp to camp, in poor health and malnourished I wondered how adults could be so cruel, manipulative and unthinking. The practices employed by the army were tantamount to child abuse, deprivation of human rights and liberty. The suffering resulted in trauma which still affects me today.

In 2000, I escaped to Kenya to seek refuge. Although there was shelter, rationed food and basic security in the camp, being a refugee was the defining moment for me — a glimpse of hope was felt. At first, I thought, I had arrived in a place where dreaming could be possible, only to realise that hopelessness and despair were invading my life again. The ordeal lasted for four years at two different camps in Kenya before resettlement. I arrived in Australia in 2004 and my life changed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780228828945

Book preview

Part 1:

Village Life

Chapter 1

A day in the village

The cock crows early in southern Sudan, around 3 a.m. and again at 5 a.m. It is the alarm clock for the village. In between, birds sing their morning glories to welcome the new day.

Family members woke up at different times, depending on age and therefore their role in the village. When there was no hunting, my father and brother would get up around dawn, to go to the farm. My sisters would get up at 6 a.m. to sweep our home compound. When the cooing pigeons, the crowing cock, and the chirruping, chirping, twittering, tweeting, singing and whistling birds didn’t wake me up in the morning, the sound of the broom contacting the sand did. The sound is therapeutic and, even now, makes me appreciative of the Mundari and other cultures that embrace the division of chores.

Most of the time my mother got up with the girls, though sometimes she got up earlier than my sisters. After sweeping the compound, breakfast, usually porridge, was prepared by my mother or one of my sisters. Once breakfast was ready, my mother or one of my sisters would take it to my father and brother working in the fields. They could spend the whole day at the farm, with meals delivered to them from time to time.

When I got up, I would look for my datum, my teeth-cleaning twig, to brush my teeth as I watched the morning sun making its way up above the savannah forest, with exhilaration, accompanied by the singing birds and the fresh morning air. Many in the village would also be enjoying the morning glory and sunrise.

Once I finished cleaning my teeth, I would wash my face, collecting water from the pot standing near the kitchen—a fence of long logs erected vertically in a circle with a gap to enter and exit. Cooking happens in the centre of this kitchen. Going into the kitchen is restricted to the females. Since I was not actually entering the kitchen and because I was a little boy, no one would make a fuss about my being by the entrance. But for male youths, young adults, and men, regularly entering the kitchen could attract unwelcome attention across the village, in some instances across the entire tribe, as songs were composed referring to the unusual behaviour. That behaviour could affect the future, causing difficulty in finding a partner or earning the respect of peers. I was therefore mindful each time I collected water from the pot.

My childhood home consisted of three buildings—a storage barn and two African huts. One of the huts was a kondoré, a circular house constructed of wood and grass on a platform raised about one-and-a-half metres off the ground. Underneath ran a constant parade of lizards. Recently harvested sesame, sorghum, millet, and ground nuts were bundled up and suspended from the rafters, protected from the insects and rodents that raided the barn and preserved by the smoke from the fire that occupied the centre of the building. There were no rooms, no windows, and no beds. Our family slept on mats made from dried papyrus.

My Village -Jaai Credit: Jemuk Wani

As a small child I spent a great deal of time in those huts, confined due to a serious, chronic whooping cough. My mother tried everything she could to cure it, but after a year I was still unwell. I was basically glued to my home, unable to go out. I became so emaciated that I could not walk. As the illness progressed, I became shy and less confident, aspects of my personality that probably persist today.

My mother tried many herbs in an attempt to cure me. When none of these worked, she decided to try a traditional mixture of bat and lizard meat. While initially my parents had to trick me into eating it, I soon realised how good it tasted and did not hesitate to eat it all. Unfortunately, this old-fashioned remedy didn’t work either, and I endured another two years of illness before the condition spontaneously cured itself.

In summer, I would normally wake at about 8 a.m. My mother would already be hard at work. She would generally have swept all the floors and be standing outside at the grinding stone and mortar. On other days, she would already have left for the long journey east to collect wild fruits—lubat, a desert plant, and jujube. Sometimes my mother would go with other women from the village, though at other times she would travel alone. Although she would cover vast distances, she was always able to keep her orientation and never once got lost.

I would hang around at home for a while, trying to establish if there was anything for breakfast. If I was fortunate, there might be something left over from dinner—unrefrigerated of course; we never imagined things such as fridges. More often than not, there was nothing. I would console myself with a drink from the big pot, some fifty litres in capacity, which held cold water drawn from the Nile, before walking down to the big tree in the village where the neighbourhood children congregated.

Dead-end games with the other children passed those mornings away. A version of cricket played with a stone or the nut of a palm tree was a favourite, although occasionally dangerous, sport. Sometimes we would swim or fish.

At midday, I would go back to the house to see whether there was any lunch that day—typically porridge. If there was no tell-tale smoke coming from the chimney, I would just go back to the other children because sticking around the house would mean being accosted to do some errand or other by my mother—sweeping, fetching the smoking pipe or other cleaning duties. If I failed to do these chores I would be punished, which meant being deprived of a meal, receiving lashes from my father or, worst of all, repeated pinching by my mother.

By three or four in the afternoon, an older group of boys would come and take us to hunt rats around the perimeter of the village. After an hour or two, we would gather, light a fire and roast the rats that we had killed. At 6 o’clock, we would head home.

In winter or autumn, my brother Wani and I would be called upon to accompany our father to the farm. We would leave early in the morning with a gourd of water and our tools. The feeling of the morning air was energising and refreshing, as the birds sang from the nearby flowering trees.

No matter how hard our father worked on our plot of land, tending to the various crops and the livestock, he never let his sons help. I think he was afraid of us getting hurt. When I was around five, our only real duty was to scare away the birds, mainly red-billed quelea and red siskin, from the young crops. The rest of the time we were simply required to sit and watch our father, Micah, sweating and singing as he dug the soil, learning from what he did, learning to get used to hard work. I felt daunted by the knowledge that I would have to work like this, too, when my time as a man came.

My family kept sheep, goats, and chickens. For two months of the year, my father spent his days travelling some distance from the farm to chop down the thorny acacias used to build fences and keep livestock off the crops prior to harvest. He cut down and transported the trees by hand—no glasses, helmet, gloves or machinery. As the day heated up, he would begin to slow down. But he wouldn’t stop until our mother or a sister brought lunch. After eating, my father would start working again until evening fell and he took us home. This cycle of back-breaking work never ended.

Dinner was generally the only decent meal of the day. My siblings and I would sit on a mat watching our mother finish cooking on the traditional Mundari fire constructed of three rocks arranged in a triangular shape. A fire is lit in the middle and the cooking saucepan is placed on top. When she finished with the cooking, my mother would bring a plate for my sisters, Ware and Kiden, and I to share, and we would scoop the cornmeal, together with a broth made from vegetables, meat, fish or local beans, into hungry mouths with our left hands.

Chapter 2

My family

My parents had eight children: Jague, Kaku, Lado, Wani, Kiden, Pitia (me), Zande and Ware but, in an environment plagued by sickness and no health provisions, they lost one son during labour, another boy as a teenager to an unknown illness, and a daughter in childbirth.

I was born around 1980 and given the names ‘Pitia’ because I was the fourth boy in birth order and ‘Lako’, a boy who is born succeeding a deceased sibling—a replacement for what was lost. My parents, however, call me by different nicknames: my mother calls me ‘Malija’, while my father calls me ‘Mawut’.

I was born at home in the presence of older women from the village. Home-birthing is a practice that continues today because there are no nearby hospitals. This often has grave consequences. Although people know this can be the result, there is no alternative. Unfortunately, we had first-hand experience of the dangers when, in October 2010, my sister Kiden gave birth to Margaret Gajuk. Immediately after the birth, Kiden experienced excessive blood loss, a postpartum haemorrhage. Most people in the village, including her husband, did not realise that the bleeding was unusual, so no one sought medical assistance. Although the haemorrhaging stopped a few days after the delivery, exactly one month after giving birth to her sixth child, at thirty-two years of age, Kiden passed away.

Death, sickness, tribal violence, political instability and food scarcity were, and still are, common in southern Sudan, but I would still consider my early childhood to have been generally happy. I was fortunate that my birth coincided with a period of relative calm in the wake of the Addis Ababa peace agreement. And perhaps, when you have very little by way of money or food and death seems to be all around, you learn to acutely appreciate the joy created by a loving, close family, or simple pleasures such as a full stomach and a game of cricket with the neighbourhood boys.

Family relationships

There is a strict division of labour in Mundari culture. My mother’s job was to bring up the children, and to collect and prepare the food. She was the one who taught us the Mundari ways of living, how to be honest and obedient. She was also responsible for teaching my sisters about the domestic duties that would one day be required of them and for showing them how to weed the crops.

As well as holding an esteemed position within the community, my father’s responsibilities centred on farming and hunting. He made sure he introduced his sons to a life where everything depended on agriculture. As we got older, my brother and I would eat with Micah, my father, while the girls ate with our mother. Our father would talk to us as equals, explaining important lessons about values, virtues and living a good life.

In Mundari culture, it is uncommon to find husbands and wives socialising together. Men mingle with men and women with women. They go to their respective groups to socialise—for men, this is usually a tree with shade away from the homes. Nevertheless, my parent’s relationship was mostly a very loving and loyal one. There is only one occasion when I remember them fighting. It was an awful feeling watching my father hit my mother, knowing there was nothing I could do to help as she wept bitterly and he continued to beat her. Fortunately, our neighbours quickly came to her assistance and we avoided a common situation in Mundari tribes, when women and their children flee to their mother’s village to avoid further fighting and allow a cooling-off period.

As parents, Micah and Poni were very protective of us, their children, which is natural I suppose for cultures where children often do not reach adulthood. In ensuring our safety, my father would often wake up at odd times of the night to make sure each of us was okay. When it was rumoured that the Murle tribe were heading west to abduct children, my father and the other men in the village refused to sleep at all.

Our parents were also frightened of witchcraft. Rubökö (plural) or Rube (singular) are people who are envious and jealous of someone else’s fortune or wellbeing. Such people were believed to appear quite normal in the day but would perform magic spells at night while everyone else was sleeping. They were said to defecate on doorsteps and pour blood on doorways as a way of wishing mischief or death on their targets. My father was always vigilant in ensuring that neither he nor any of his family was bewitched by such people, and watched for people entering our home compound at night.

My mother, too, worried about our future—particularly when it came to ensure that there was enough food for her children. I always knew that she was a very loving and affectionate person, but it was only when I returned to her after all those years of being apart that I truly realised the depth of her affection.

From the moment I saw her again, sitting there with her right hand under her chin, staring towards the son who had been stolen from her sixteen years before, I was overcome with emotion. Although I was now a grown man, she grabbed me and sat me on her lap as if I was a little boy. Then she blew into my ears, one at a time, as a sign of blessing. I had never felt such sadness and love.

Micah

None of this is to suggest that my father is a cruel man. Mundari culture is one of the most isolated and extreme examples in southern Sudan, if not in all of Africa, and it is accurate to say that people simply didn’t know any better. Until the 1950s, for example, many Mundari people, particularly those in the villages, did not know that they weren’t the only people living on Earth. At the time, aeroplanes flying over the land were seen as something from beyond this world. As recently as 2006, I met people who told me I was the first person they had ever met who had flown in a plane, and others who did not believe that mobile phones actually worked, thinking of them as a kind of witchcraft.

My father is a very kind, humble and quiet person. Born in Jaai in approximately 1938, he is eighth-generation Mundari and bears the impressive full title of Micah Lako Kenyi Ludeng Pitia Jemuk Lukogi Luwa Lunguang, names that reflect the sequence and gender of the children in the family.

As with most people in southern Sudan, my father’s childhood was affected by the political situation in our country, particularly the Torit mutiny in 1955, which led to the beginning of the first civil war. As a brave fighter, Micah was often called upon during conflicts with other villages. For intra-tribal conflicts, people usually fight in pairs with spears, shields and batons (turē), but when fighting against another tribe, like the Murle, Dinka or Lafon, bows and arrows were commonly used. My father took great pride in wearing a helmet and carrying a sparkling spear that he had captured in a previous altercation during such conflicts.

A slim, handsome man, my father stands 190 centimetres tall. Like other men in the tribe, he typically did not wear clothing around home when we were young. If he was going away from the village, however, he would put on a traditional robe that always made him look very distinguished. Now, of course, most Mundari people wear modern attire unless they are in very remote areas. Things have certainly changed, although no one is quite sure whether that is for the better or the worse.

My father has always been a well-regarded and respected community member. His role was the management of youth in the village and in the cattle camps. In Mundari land, hard work is a fact of life. In a culture that depends on cultivation of the land, if you are lazy you simply do not thrive. Depending on the time of the year, my father’s days were divided between farming and hunting for gazelles, kukus, antelopes, impalas and—the most prized (and undoubtedly dangerous) game—hippos.

Using a technique passed down through the Mundari generations, Micah was known as one of the most skilled and effective hunters in the village. He always seemed to know exactly where to conceal himself to wait for the hippos to come out of the river to graze. When the moment was right, Micah would strike with the dumi, a specially designed tool with a metal end, a long wooden handle and a loop of wire, which could then be secured to a tree.

If luck and skill conspired, the hippo would be stuck in the wire and could then be left to struggle. These huge beasts could fight for hours and hours as they tried to get the dumi off; the secret of the weapon was that the wire was covered in large teeth, like fish hooks, so that the more the animal struggled, the more securely it was trapped.

When the animal eventually died, the successful hunter informed the men of the village, who would cook and share the hippo’s head between them.

My father used to say that if you have courage, hope, and determination you can succeed in almost any situation. It was a motto that undoubtedly got him through many long days tending his crops and waiting patiently for an unsuspecting hippo. Since I left my parents’ protection twenty years ago, I have remembered those words and tried to remain courageous in situations where there was great despair and where death could be felt. I believe that I am living proof of the truth of these wise words.

Poni

Like my father, my mother is tall and slender, gentle and quiet. Her full name is Poni Beyejo, the name given to a female who is third in birth order.

My mother was born in Pökör in approximately 1951. She too is very hard working and spent most of her childhood helping with the cattle around Terekeka, or in Pökör helping weed the crops.

Micah first met my mother when she was eighteen years old. Flooding in the east, combined with tension from the nearby Murle and Lafon tribes, had caused most of the Mundari people to relocate to Terekeka, west of the Nile. Micah and the rest of his village became lier kare, meaning people who were made homeless because of water. It was on the west bank, in a town called Muduk, that he met Poni, who had gone back to the region to help with the harvest and been similarly stranded by the floods.

In Mundari culture, height and beauty are highly prized in a bride—and my mother had both in abundance. Despite the uncertain situation in which they found themselves, thirty-one-year-old Micah seized the opportunity to secure such a virtuous, beautiful wife and began the necessary arrangements to marry Poni immediately after the floods.

As in other cultures, marriage is an important custom to the Mundari. Unlike other communities in southern Sudan, cows, goats and sheep are used as a form of dowry. Cattle are particularly important to our people, being a form of food and currency as well as a mark of social status. The payment of the dowry is negotiated between the bride’s relatives and the bridegroom, and can range from ten to a hundred cows, and fifty to one hundred goats and sheep. Once both parties have agreed on an acceptable number, the bridegroom must submit a ‘down payment’, with the remaining dowry being sourced and paid over a period of time.

Once the business transactions have been settled, there is a huge traditional dance and people come from all around to attend. Following this, the couple return to the groom’s village—under no circumstances can a newly married man live at his bride’s home or village.

My mother’s and father’s home was therefore established in Jaai, Körsomba, a small, lush village about 145 kilometres north of Juba, the capital of southern Sudan.

My brother, Wani

As he was the only other boy in the family, Wani and I were always close. I was a fairly fearful, weak child, so my big brother always looked out for me. No matter what kind of trouble I got myself into, Wani stood by my side.

We would often hang out together. I can recall one beautiful day when we went out fishing. I rowed the boat along the side of the river, girded by papyri and tall bamboo-like green grasses kissing the fast flowing water of the Nile. Wani stood with a menet, a fishing tool of local design, hoping to find fish eating grass in the shallows.

We were heading back to the mainland, close to the exit point, when a hippo emerged, huge and shining from the water, and not a hundred metres from our boat. Its sudden appearance caused strong waves that shook our little vessel precariously. After a minute it submerged again, only to appear a few moments later—this time only thirty metres from us.

We knew that hippos had upturned boats and attacked and killed their occupants in the past so, of course, I panicked. I was breathlessly rowing toward the tiny inlet, accessible only through dense reeds, where we would land. The angry hippo continued to pursue us, emerging every few metres, closer to our boat each time. Eventually the animal made a desperate—fortunately misjudged—lunge at our boat, missing by a mere metre or two. Perhaps the luckiest thing was that the reeds dampened the waves created by its huge mass, which certainly prevented us from capsizing. From that day, Wani and I decided to go fishing much earlier in the day to lessen our chances of encountering another hippo.

Things weren’t always so friendly between us. On another occasion we had been out fishing but had not caught any fish. Wading through the water to higher ground, we began playing around with our fishing spears, or perek, throwing them at each other in fun. I hit Wani on the ankle, the weapon imbedding itself so deeply that we could not remove it until we reached dry land. Wani did not cry as he walked the hundred metres with a spear sticking out of his foot and blood gushing from the wound, but his anger was unmistakable. Once on high ground, he removed the spear and proceeded to beat me so badly that I was unable to speak for days after. It took time, but gradually we rekindled our friendship. My brother venting his anger on me was overwhelming, given that I never before had to handle physical or verbal abuse, due to my nature.

I was a submissive boy who always gave in to challenges, especially when it came to fighting with my peers. I was easily frightened, and hence bullied by my peers. The torment I endured at a young age provided me with the skills of being good at reading people’s emotions and avoiding conflicts.

Bananas were an occasional treat with our meals. My father would bury the unripe fruit on the family plot of land so that it would ripen quickly. Whenever Wani and I were at the farm, we would keep an eye out for recently disturbed ground where our father or another villager might have hidden bananas.

One day we came upon an obviously turned patch of soil and Wani wasted no time digging up the hole, going deeper and deeper until his face suddenly dropped. It wasn’t bananas he uncovered that day, but human faeces. I didn’t say anything as my brother frantically tried to hide what had happened and to get rid of the foul smell. That evening, when our father suddenly asked Wani why he was eating with his right hand, Wani just replied, ‘I’m sick of people and all their rules’. My brother and I looked at each other and smiled.

Chapter 3

The Mundari

The Mundari people live along and are reliant on the Nile river. The main groups within the Mundari are: Mundari Köbura, Mundari Tsera, Mundari Tali, Mundari Yangwara and Mundari Bari. The main settlements are centred on the town of Terekeka, north of the capital of South Sudan, Juba. Other towns are Mangala, Tombe, Tali, Gemeiza, Muni, Tindilo, Rego, Tijor, Rijong, South Sudan Safari, Köwöri and Ku’da. Our livelihood is centred on subsistence agriculture and herding livestock, supplemented by fishing, hunting and foraging. This meant, for me, a life tending cows, sheep and goats.

Sketch Map of the Mundari Tribe Credit: Hon. Paulino Kedia

The Mundari inhabit the low-lying banks and islands of the White Nile. Life alternates between the islands and the mainland depending on the time of the year. Most of the time, we would go to the island in the morning and return to the village in the evening. This was so that we could avoid encountering the Nile hippos and crocodiles that were very observant regarding the movement of people. They knew when the villagers would mostly be living on the islands and had no fear of landing on an island. For people, spending a night on the island when the whole village was still on the mainland was unwise; there was a risk of being mauled by these angry wild creatures.

The relationship between nature and their environment has made the Mundari people tolerant, patient and peace-loving but, when they need to defend themselves, they are also among the most ferocious warriors in South Sudan. Other tribes regard them as the ‘giant ants of South Sudan’. This was, in fact, a compliment: it characterised the Mundari as one of the toughest tribes in South Sudan, though very humble. And it implied that, when disturbed, the people act forcefully to protect themselves. Their fierce behaviours developed in response to cattle rustling by neighbouring communities, mainly the Dinka and Murle tribes to the north and east respectively. Life with the cattle was unpredictable and, because of that, remaining vigilant and alert without compromising the quality of life was an important skill for those in the cattle camp, especially the male adults. Mundari are amongst the least displaced people in the country because they are able to withstand many social, political and natural adversaries.

Jaai was a beautiful place to grow up. Like other villages on the eastern bank of the White Nile, it is situated along the Juba–Bor Road, a bustling thoroughfare along which thousands of people and traders travel daily to the nearest commercial towns, Gemeiza and Mangala. There were at least 1500 to 2000 people in Jaai when I was young; however, this number was later reduced through relocation, murderous intertribal cattle raids and the abduction of children by other tribes, including the Murle, Dinka and Pari.

There are many animals around Jaai, including leopards, lions, giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, elephants and warthogs. Some come into the village looking for water, especially during summer where most of the oases and billabongs have dried up.

Since Jaai is surrounded by tall trees and close to the White Nile, the climate is not too harsh. In the rainy season the landscape around Jaai is green. A variety of tall grasses surrounding the village are used for thatching the houses, such as foxtail buffalo grass, common finger grass and cattails. There are trees everywhere: white acacias, umbrella thorn, acacias, saguaro cactus and organ-pipe cactus. There are