YOU DON’T HAVE to go,” said Neal Shapiro, Dateline’s executive producer. “I want to make that clear to both of you. This assignment is entirely optional.”
Producer Lisa Hsia and I looked at each other. We were in a meeting with Neal, as well as with NBC vice president David Corvo and NBC’s lawyer in charge of network standards David McCormick. Everyone looked grave.
“I know,” Lisa said.
“We want to,” I added.
“Do you have visas?”
“We’ll have passports but we won’t be clearing customs in Sudan,” Lisa said. “As far as the government knows, we won’t be there. They don’t want anyone to document what’s happening in the south. If we are going to prove there’s slavery, this is the only way.”
“Now let me get this straight,” Neal continued. “Once you get there, you will be on your own. No car, no truck. You’re hundreds of miles from anywhere. If the militias strike, how do you get out?”
“We’ll use our satellite phone to call the pilot at the air charter company,” said Lisa, who’d researched the trip meticulously.
“And how long will that take?”
“A day.”
Everyone was quiet. There were some things research couldn’t fix. Then Neal said, “I can’t tell you how careful I want you to be. Both of you.”
I appreciated Neal’s warning, but it didn’t lessen my resolve to journey to the largest country in Africa, to cover an outrage which had gone virtually unnoticed.
The background went like this. Civil war had racked Sudan for thirteen years, and the Muslim fundamentalist regime in the north had declared a “jihad,” or holy war, against Christians in the south, a tribal people known as Dinkas. But now international rights groups, including Christian Solidarity International, were reporting that thousands of women and children in the south were being bought and sold as slaves. Chattel slavery in 1996. It was almost incomprehensible. Since President Omar al-Bashir’s regime denied the charges, we decided to sneak into the country to learn the truth for ourselves.
As committed as I was, the timing was terrible. During my years as a reporter I’d missed my share of Thanksgiving feasts, family gatherings at Christmas, and New Year’s Eve toasts. There was always next year. Except this time. In 1993 my Richmond roommate, Lisa, had married Lewis Powell, a boyishly handsome, intelligent attorney who wore the mantle of being the son of a U.S. Supreme Court justice lightly. They’d just had a daughter, and I was honored to be Hannah’s godmother. But going to Sudan meant I would miss the christening. While Lisa was supportive, I could hear the disappointment in her voice, and it was clear she worried about me and didn’t entirely understand my desire for yet another dangerous assignment. Not surprisingly, neither did Mom. As for Andrew, he urged caution but sounded increasingly preoccupied with his single life in Tokyo. I tried not to think about who might be keeping him busy as I headed to JFK.
My producer, Lisa, and I flew to Sudan with a team including a South African camera crew and Baroness Caroline Cox, Deputy Speaker of the British House of Lords and president of Christian Solidarity International. We landed on a dirt strip where a group of tall, thin men and women waited. Everyone pitched in to help carry the numerous boxes of gear back to the village, a collection of huts on a tributary of the Blue Nile. The surrounding countryside was bleak, as most trees had been cut down for firewood and there was no need to fear lions. Game in this part of Africa had long ago been killed for sport or sustenance. When I spotted a pretty bird and asked its name, I felt a wave of sadness for both the people and their wildlife when the gaunt translator replied, “Food.”
We pitched our tents next to a bullet-riddled shell of a building, eating a dinner of military rations, or MREs, as the baroness explained the situation in the south. Several times a year, an army train would rumble through the region, flanked by well-armed but unpaid Arab militias for whom human beings were often the spoils of war. “They tend to kill the men and they tend to take women and children as human booty,” the baroness explained in a voice of quiet indignation.
“And when will the train come through?” I asked.
The translator hesitated. “Sometime very soon.”
That night, as I had so many years before in Nicaragua, I slept with my boots by the door of the tent flap.
WE KNEW THAT the only way for families to rescue loved ones was to buy them back at a slave auction, which was held in a small market eight miles away. As there were no cars, we set out on foot, carrying heavy gear, for the three-hour hike. We started out at daybreak to beat the heat.
As we trudged along the path across the baking earth, we chatted with our Dinka porters, some of whom had learned a good bit of English. At one point one man paused to talk to a few local herders, and by their gestures I realized I was the subject of conversation.
“What was that all about?”
“I am not sure you wish to know.”
“I wish to know.”
“Well then. That man wants to know if you are for sale.”
“What!!” I stopped in my tracks to stare at him. “We’re on our way to do a story about slavery—and you’re talking about selling me?”
His laugh was loud and immediate. “Oh, this is very different! This man wanted you as a wife!”
“Oh yes, that’s totally different.”
“Besides, he made a good offer.”
In spite of myself I was curious. “Purely from an informational point of view, what was my price?”
“Twenty cattle.” I gave him a sharp, probing look, and clearly thinking he’d offended me with a low-ball offer, he hastened to continue. “He has several wives already but was willing to make such an offer because you are—different.”
I’d considered many dangers in taking this assignment, but being traded for cows hadn’t been one of them. But as I smiled, ready with a quick retort, he added, “The man did have one question. He wanted to know how many children you have.”
“I’m not married. I don’t have kids.”
He looked shocked. “What? No children?” He shook his head. “That is very sad. You are a poor woman indeed.”
And suddenly an amusing situation wasn’t funny at all. In fact, his comment stung like a slap in the face. I opened my mouth to argue that I was an independent, successful professional woman. But what was the point? It wouldn’t change his opinion. Besides, infuriated as I was, I was also alarmed at how much his offhand comment had shaken me. With nothing to say, I took a shot of already warm water from my canteen and tried to remind myself why I’d wanted to come to Sudan in the first place.
For me the assignment wasn’t just professional—it was personal. At thirty-five years old, I’d lived in New York for four years, long enough for the city to feel like home, especially since my mom had been born there. But I was also a daughter of the South. During the Civil War, Richmond, just two hours south of Washington, D.C., had served as capital of the Confederacy. Even today the city’s most beautiful street, Monument Avenue, is a Southern Hall of Fame, with statues in honor of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and J. E. B. Stuart. In fact Ginger’s younger sister Dona married Stuart’s handsome, upstanding great-great-grandson.
Richmond has changed over the years. Indeed, the most recent statue on Monument Avenue is of an African-American man armed only with a tennis racket. Once banned from the city’s whites-only courts, tennis great Arthur Ashe now shares an address with those who fought to create a country in which he could have been a slave. Much as I loved Virginia and being a Virginian, for me being born in the South also meant feeling both sorrow and shame regarding the disgrace of slavery. The thought that slavery might still exist was not just barbaric, it was obscene. After all, a Virginian had written the Declaration of Independence, with that stirring promise that all men are created equal, and my own liberated life made it impossible to imagine one person owning another.
I THINK I expected some Hollywood version of a slave market—a wooden platform where the overseer cracked his whip while men, women, and children were paraded. But this auction was clandestine. At the edge of a large open market where the local Dinka people came to buy sugar, flour, and cattle, a slave trader aptly named Chain lurked under a copse of trees. While he was dressed in long, flowing white robes, the bony, sickly-looking boys and girls huddled together in the shade were dressed in rags, as if they might still be wearing the clothes they’d had on when they’d been kidnapped, as long as five years before. Nearby, families had gathered, hoping to find long-lost children. But buying a child’s freedom cost hundreds of dollars, and most of these families were penniless. That meant Baroness Cox, an outspoken opponent of slavery, would now be in the awkward position of becoming an unwilling participant in an ancient, ugly transaction. She had brought thousands of dollars raised overseas to purchase as many slaves as possible. Now she must haggle with Chain.
“What price freedom?” she said in a voice choked with outrage, each time a child was brought forward and a wad of money changed hands.
One little boy told us, “We were forced to herd livestock. If we complained, they beat us.”
I asked another, “When was the last time you saw your mother and father?”
He looked down, kicked at the dust, and I saw the scars on his ankles left by the ropes which had kept him tied to a post so he wouldn’t run away. “Four years ago,” came the desolate reply, and I thought I would weep. No chance to run or chase or kick a ball. No one to hug him when he tumbled, no one to kiss him good night. Four years. Half his short, tragic life. The little children told of how they’d been fed little more than scraps thrown to a dog, how they’d sometimes been so hungry they’d eaten grass. But some stories were too terrible to tell, and could be glimpsed only in the haunted look in their eyes. Beatings. Rapes. Murders. Memories of fathers who had been shot, of brothers and sisters lost, never to return.
As the bartering continued, it felt indecent, as if some sort of stain were seeping into me. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Chain was every bit as ruthless as I’d expected, snatching bills, shoving children. I wanted to jump in, grab that little girl with her dirty brown hair and knobby knees, that little boy with his wobbly lip, scoop them in my arms, and flee. How could my ancestors have done this?
When the whole awful business was over, Baroness Cox sighed with relief. She had liberated fifteen little boys and girls, paying the equivalent of five hundred U.S. dollars for each, and the children were now enveloped by waiting mothers and fathers. “It’s such a distressing situation to be part of that words cannot convey the distaste of being part of that transaction, but what do you do?” she told us. And yet she had no qualms about what her organization was doing, dismissing any suggestion that paying to free the children would increase the number of children kidnapped and enslaved.
“That’s rubbish. Slavery was going on before we ever came.”
The baroness told us the best chance of eliminating the slave trade would be to bring world attention to the plight of those in southern Sudan, in the hope that international pressure might bring an end to the wretched practice.
I looked at the faces of these children, and thought of my new goddaughter Hannah back home, whose life was so different from the lives of children here. I thought of all the stories I’d covered overseas and at home where defenseless children had been the victim of trauma and tragedy—in Somalia, in Oklahoma City, and now in Sudan. And suddenly the pressure I felt wasn’t international but personal.
I had an impotent urge to rescue them all, especially one girl of about nine. She and her mother and sister had been taken during a raid two years before, as her father, Apin Apin Acot, watched helplessly. She sat on his lap, head tucked into his shoulder, as he protectively held his arm around her. “Look at her leg,” Apin told us, gesturing. The girl’s leg had been broken but never reset, so that she would walk with a severe limp for the rest of her life. “She was not born like this. This happened when they took her.” His face showed the anguish of any father unable to protect his child from a desperate fate. And then he told us of his older daughter, who remained in bondage, reserved as a future concubine, and his eyes filled with tears. “She told me death is the only bad thing in life. As long as you are alive, I know you will try to get me out.” I thought I would split apart with the weight of it all.
Yet, to my surprise, as Apin turned to look closely at the little girl on his knee, his worn face creased in the barest of smiles, and there came over his face an expression I could only identify as hope. Hope in spite of the fact that his wife had been raped repeatedly during her captivity, in spite of the fact that his daughter would be crippled for life. And then I realized. He had hope because they were alive. What’s more, Baroness Cox would give him money to purchase his older daughter, and then his family would be united once more. And that was enough for him to believe that, in spite of a bleak past, the future might be better.
As I looked around, I saw the same expression on the faces of others who had been reunited. This was a hope wilder, stronger than I’d ever encountered, a hope powerful enough to crack through an arid wasteland of despair. While they had lost the most precious gift of their lives, that gift had been found. Their children were home. Anything was possible.
THE FOLLOWING DAYS passed quickly, days in which we worked from dawn until the sun slipped over the edge of the world, when we crawled into our tents for a few hours of hot, fitful sleep. One morning we heard the sound of shouting as a group of men came carrying several injured men. It turned out the dreaded train and its trail of bandits had arrived in the region the day after we had, and their village—just fourteen miles away from us—had been attacked by those militias.
One of the men had the most gruesome wound I’d ever seen. He’d been hacked with a machete and he was missing half his face. Without a mouth he was unable to speak, but the agony showed plainly in his tortured, pleading eyes. The others explained that he’d been attacked when he tried to prevent the marauders from kidnapping a child. We managed to get him airlifted to a hospital but he soon died. Only when that same plane returned for us two days later and we took off for Kenya did I dare to relax.
But as the plane rose sharply and danger both receded and compressed, I had an immediate, uncomfortable realization. There had been no time to think of something so inconsequential during the past week, but suddenly I realized that I stank. The smell of my own body made me nauseous, the smell of days without a bath, the smell of greasy hair, and worst of all, the lingering scent of fear. I was trapped on that tiny plane with my own rank odor and equally intense thoughts.
As we flew over that shimmering East African landscape, I suddenly felt lost, as if the cerulean sky were instead a vast, nameless sea and I was alone in a dinghy, shouting for help, but no one could hear me. I was thirty-five years old and alarmingly adrift. I had a new job, a lovely apartment, a life I loved. I had felt independent and free. But after this harrowing, isolating experience, I realized again that I wanted someone, not just something, to call my own. What use was freedom if you became so shackled to autonomy that you couldn’t share your life with someone else?
I’d tempted fate in Nicaragua, the Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, and now Sudan. I’d seen people who’d been shot, macheted, stabbed, beaten, tortured, raped. I’d frightened my parents and sisters more times than I cared to remember, and this world of hard living and too-easy dying was losing its allure.
High above the African plains, it was possible to see life from a distance. And as I looked out the window I finally acknowledged just how badly I wanted to have a child of my own. To feel the kind of love I’d seen on that father’s face. Suddenly everything I had, all that I’d accomplished, seemed insignificant in the face of his blazing devotion. Once I had thought having a child might spell the end of chasing my dreams, but my time in that crucible had reminded me that for many people around the world, having the love of a child was the most important dream of all.
And then there was the question of Andrew. I missed my ex-boyfriend far more than I wanted to admit. He was not a Boy Toy any longer but a grown man who was clearly moving on without me. I needed to make my own plans.
Fortunately, I knew that there was someone I could turn to, someone who could guide me through this turbulence, and I’d see her in just a few days. What’s more, this trip, my third to Namibia, wouldn’t be purely social. When I’d learned about the Sudan assignment, I’d suggested another African story to Dateline’s executive producer—a story about a gorgeous filmmaker who’d spent years documenting the lives of a remote troop of baboons. Neal had loved it, and smiled when I mentioned that the filmmaker was my best friend. So now I would have the chance to talk to Ginger in person about what felt like clashing emotions I was only beginning to explore.