My Perfect World

 

Paamenn was a typical small African village, in which I was born and grew up as a young boy, situated on the east bank of river Nile in the Upper Nile region of Sudan. Like in many other villages, manyata (huts built of mud and grass) was the traditional form of dwelling. But, as far as my memory goes, it was one exceptional, beautiful village, which my choice of words could never bring to life exactly as it existed in the eyes of my childhood.

My memories would go back far into that marshland that lies between the semi-savanna morass in the north and the tropical equatorial regions in the south. And the Nile, running to the north, parallel to a range of mountain peaks that only become visible in the early mornings and late evenings within sunrise and sunset limits, lies in the west. To the east lies savanna marsh, and beyond it, a deep evergreen equatorial forest rich with wildlife.

Due to the long rainfall season, the main activities in the village were farming, cattle breeding, fishing and hunting. When the rain falls, the Nile floods one-third of the marshland, creating a swamp of endless streams teeming with hippopotamuses, crocodiles and venomous snakes. The most important of all these streams was Agoo, from which the village obtained its fish supply in the height of the season.

In the peak of the rainy period, when the Nile reaches its optimum and the savanna marsh entwines with equatorial forest in an intense and intimate natural intercourse, my village nestles in a lush green bed of nature. If it were not for its baobab trees, which prevented the cohabitation of wild beast and human under one roof, it would have made a wonderful fairytale setting. Beauty beyond description.

I still remember those tranquil and radiant mornings, full of savanna sun rays penetrating through thick forest, ringing out with cuckoos’ and robins’ melodies into the night. It was here I lost my virginity to the immortal beauty of nature. It was here I first learned my values, unaware of the world at large. It was also here that a feeling of belonging to a larger family of humanity was instilled into me. It was like being in a paradise on Earth. But, of course, it was not a perfect world with no price to pay.

For, during the 1955 civil war, led by a separatist movement known as Anya Nya in the south, many villages in the region were razed. Government forces invaded many of them and massacred their inhabitants. The villagers were accused of treason. The central government wanted to extinguish the movement, and to do so it first had to deter and eliminate the peasants’ support in the countryside. And, in the grip of these atrocities, my village suffered enormously and was left crippled and nursing its own pains and sorrows.

I was very young and ignorant of the world beyond my horizons. I thought that my village was all that existed in the entire world, and whatever lay beyond it was a world behind the darkness, inhabited by fairies. In other words, my village was the centre of the universe and its people were all that mattered to me. I lived in a world where every man was a father, every woman a mother, every girl a sister, every boy a brother and every old man an uncle or a grandfather. It was a perfect world, where everybody did belong.