In Victorian times, the early explorers did not have it easy on their expeditions into Central Africa. Many planned their travel by river, either going east on the Congo or south on the Nile. This allowed them to use their boats as a base of operation, a safer option than camping out among hostile tribes, voracious animals, and disease-infested swamplands.
At that time the one feature most often mentioned in regard to Africa was water, and the fact that once you passed through the northern deserts, the interior seemed to hold immense quantities of it. Given the amount of rain that fell on the center of the continent, travel by boat made sense, and it worked on the Nile, at least until you reached that part of the White Nile (Map 1, p. 17) that spreads out into the Sudd. From there, in order to proceed by boat it was required that a path be cut through papyrus or other swamp vegetation. To cut such a path from the water’s edge was, and still is, a formidable task.
Fortunately, explorers like Samuel and Florence Baker could employ legions of Egyptians and local natives. Sam, as he was known to friends, was wealthy and could afford to watch from the safety of the upper deck of his steamer while hired men went into the shallow water, naked but for their loincloths spattered and stained with black mud, to fight their way through the morass. But too often the men needed urging on or had to be protected from wild animals. Otherwise, the boat stuck fast and they had to walk through the swamps on foot, whereupon Sam would find himself wading into papyrus so thick it was the stuff of nightmares. The cutting crew now advanced in front of the steamer, hacking through the dark, pungent rhizomes, while a second crew followed, struggling forward with a heavy grappling hook and thick rope, or hawser. Once hooked onto a mass of plant material, a third crew on deck started a creaking, groaning winch that took up the slack and allowed the vessel to creep forward. Behind them stretched the newly opened channel, in which a flotilla of small craft wallowed, while directly in front of them the water was black with decomposed plant matter dredged from the bottom, and crowded with pieces of rhizomes floating on the surface. The peaceful, fragrant environment of the swamp was shattered as the expedition churned up great bubbles of swamp gas from beneath the swamp which erupted, releasing methane and sulfurous stinks. It was as if they were wading into an enormous pit of sewage.
The Bakers were on their way to discover the source of the White Nile at Lake Albert in Uganda, and on occasion had to abandon their boats and make their way along with the surging mass of humanity that comprised their expedition. At every step they were confronted by vegetation as they plunged forward through rivers or along muddy swamp bottoms or flooded lowlands; and their baggage didn’t help matters. They had brought with them tons of provisions, rifles, ammunition, spare clothing, 21 donkeys, 4 camels, 4 horses, and 80 bushels of grain as a food supply for the 90-man army and boat crew. They were also saddled with crates and barrels of trading goods to barter their way through the kingdoms of the unknown. And they expected at any moment to meet tribes of savage people as they made their way east toward Uganda, looking for the lake said to exist somewhere in the western Rift Valley.
Always on the move, their passage through valley swamps made my forays into Nakivubu swamp look like a picnic.
My wife had never stirred since she fell by the coup de soleil, and merely respired about five times in a minute. It was impossible to remain; the people would have starved. She was laid gently upon her litter, and we started forward on our funeral course. I was ill and broken-hearted, and I followed by her side through the long day’s march over wild parklands and streams, with thick forest and deep marshy bottoms; over undulating hills, and through valleys of tall papyrus rushes, which, as we brushed through them on our melancholy way, waved over the litter like the black plumes of a hearse. (Sir Samuel W. Baker, The Albert N’yanza, Great Basin of the Nile, 1866)
They both survived the ordeal, as did their observations on the swamp plants of the Sudd, where they measured the heights of selected papyrus plants at 18ft and also found that the average umbel was 4ft one inch in diameter. They were made even more aware of the umbels because they provided a modicum of shade. If they were hacked down or pushed aside, a gap opened through which the sun blazed directly. The heat, and many days of trudging through endless papyrus swamps, must have been a living hell for them, but they survived and in the end it made them famous.
I’ve often wondered what would happen if the Bakers were to make the same trip today. In some ways it would be an entirely different experience, but in other ways things wouldn’t have changed much. On their 1862 expedition, setting out from Khartoum they met armed resistance in many places in the south from Arab slavers; then deep into the region they found themselves embroiled in tribal wars, which were a serious problem and a daily threat to their lives. Once they crossed the border into Uganda they fell into the clutches of Kamrasi, an early murderous king of what was then called Unyoro.
Today, the same region of Sudan is fraught with danger as armed aggression persists between North and South. And once you reach Uganda’s northwest border, Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army still roam at will. The easiest and safest way to traverse the region is to fly over it. I can picture Sam and Flooey (his pet name for Florence) as they take off and fly to the shores of Lake Albert (named by Baker and dedicated to the Prince Consort). Their light chartered plane would land at Pakuba airstrip in Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park (named by Baker after the president of the Royal Geographical Society). In organizing their flight, it would be best to fly out of Malakal in the Sudan, since that would take them right over the Sudd. We know Sam would be able to afford this because in Khartoum, in addition to his small private army, he bought a paddle steamer, tons of provisions, and two sailing barges to carry his expedition south—an expensive operation even by the standards of those days.
One hitch in his travel plans today might be the fact that charter flights could be difficult. There are exceptions, such as Air Cess, a small airline operated for years in Sudan by the recently jailed Viktor Bout, the arms dealer nicknamed “the Merchant of Death.” It happens that he was not the first to bear that title. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, was called that in a premature obituary and was so upset by the moniker that he was inspired to create the Nobel Prizes.
On their hypothetical flight, I’m certain Sam would relax over a cold beer as he watched the papyrus swamps sweep by down below. He loved beer. On the eve of his departure from Africa in 1865, he marked the end of his four-year near-death cycle of wild adventure by staying at an English hotel in Egypt where the hotelkeeper had “Allsopp’s Pale Ale on draught.”
Their only contact with the Sudd on their modern air trip would be the photos they would take from the plane’s windows, or the view that the modern traveler has flying over such an exotic tropical region. And they would have had the pleasure of seeing papyrus from a distance.
There is something about flying over papyrus that excites the imagination in a pleasant way, versus how the imagination runs wild with darker thoughts when trying to move through it, whether it’s over the Sudd, or the swamps along the shores of Lake Victoria, or the inland valley swamps of Uganda, or the wide green bands of papyrus that nestle along the banks of the Victoria Nile. Those light feathery umbels from the air look like soft green fluff down below, an impression that is heightened by the thought that this is a rare sight. Like virgin rain forest, tropical savanna, tundra, or the spruce forests in North America, you are looking at a vegetation type that has not changed in hundreds of years; and if it does change, chances are it will never look the same again. In 2009 the British movie and TV star Joanna Lumley flew over the Sudd on a trip from Khartoum to Juba and photographed what the Bakers would have seen on a similar trip.1
In the 21st century, European birds on their way south to Africa are mightily in need of food and a quiet, safe place to sleep after passing through the deadly air of southern Europe. Fumes pumped out of refineries into the sunny Mediterranean atmosphere turn into a toxic haze that affects any bird that lingers in the region. The Eurasian cranes that make it through have been on the road for 2–3 months, passing through Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, riding thermals and flying with slow, powerful strokes, traveling at 45mph as they search out a safe route through the Levant.
White storks follow the same route but have a much longer way to go; their migration to South Africa will take them on a journey of 6,200 miles. Both cranes and storks follow thermal air currents that are not found over the oceans, so they must find one of the flyways on land that will carry them through the Middle East and down into the Jordan Valley. The cranes travel in pairs; a crane couple may flank their young on either side during migration flights, whereas storks, though monogamously attached for life, do not migrate or overwinter together. As they land in the swamps in the Jordan Valley, the crane couple and their young will probably find much company, because 25,000 other Eurasian cranes overwinter in a place there called the Huleh Valley. Many roost in the shallow water of close-by Lake Agmon, shaded in the evening and early morning by papyrus, which is now encouraged to grow there. The cranes have become such a valued tourist attraction that they are fed by the Reserve staff; this serves also to keep them away from neighboring fields and from damaging local crops.
The white storks will probably not hang out more than a day or two at the Huleh Swamp “bird motel.” After resting for about 12 hours they will push off, perhaps stopping along the way in one of the brackish, highly polluted marshes of the Nile Delta, such as Lake Manzala. Shortly thereafter they will make their way south along the Nile to the great papyrus swamp of the Sudd. This is where millions of other birds overwinter or pass through on their way south. The Sudd is the least polluted of any stop so far on its route, and right now it’s probably a very quiet place.
It was anything but quiet on the 10th of January in 1983 when “Sarah” was very much alive. But who (or what) is “Sarah?” Sarah is—or rather was—one of the largest freestanding machines ever built. In 1983 Sarah appeared in an article in Time magazine, and the world then learned how she had been brought to the Sudan to cut an open canal 220 miles long in a province called Jonglei. The canal would be 15ft deep by 170ft wide, the longest open, continuous ditch in the world, a ditch whose express purpose was to divert water from the Sudd.
The concept of a Jonglei Canal has been floated since colonial times, the idea being that a canal bypassing the Sudd would result in a great saving of water in the main river, since 60% of the water of the White Nile is lost here through seepage and evaporation. Bypassing the swamp would increase the water in the main channel of the Nile by at least a trillion gallons per year. Northern Sudan and Egypt would benefit from this; indeed, they had already begun including this gain in their onward planning in anticipation of the completion of the Canal, and hundreds of thousands of acres of land to be irrigated were set aside within their parched landscape just for this.
Egypt especially was in need of water, as it doesn’t rain there. The only water Egypt receives is from the Nile, so Egypt is constantly looking for new ways to increase the flow of the river. The population growth in Egypt has long outstripped production of food and, as mentioned previously, this population growth, combined with neglect of the water supply, land, and industrial pollution, has left Egypt as one of the world’s largest food importers. They buy about 6.5 million tons of wheat a year. They also lose a great deal of their own water due to pollution, so they are in constant need.
The contract to dig was awarded to French construction and investment companies, and by 1980 Sarah had been assembled and was hard at work. She was named after the daughter of a Sudanese official, and had originally been built for use in Pakistan to dig a large open canal between the Indus and Jhelum rivers. The “roue-pelle,” or “bucketwheel,” had several large self-propelled sections joined to each other with girder-like connectors. The working head was a 40ft-high wheel with 12 buckets that plunged down into the soil, lifting 3 tons with every scoop. The scoops were emptied onto a conveyor belt and the soil carried to the embankment, where it was dumped.
In the course of a single day, 25 operators were required to work three eight-hour shifts, and it used 10,500 gallons of gas every 24 hours. Eight stories high and weighing over two thousand tons, it required a million spare parts, and must have been a joy to the owners when a buyer was found.
The local tribal people would stand and watch it in wonder. To top it off, oil had been discovered not far from the region and Chevron had been given the go-ahead to start pumping crude into a pipeline that would take it to Port Sudan for export. All boded well, though in the process the Northern Sudanese government had consulted only Egypt and the World Bank, a necessary step as financing was needed for the canal. Egypt ultimately invested $100 million, and presumably international donors provided the rest of the $260 million required to start it up. By January 1983, when the Time magazine story was published, the canal was already visible as a straight line on satellite images. Sarah could be detected as a dot on the end of a very, very long exclamation point.
The only thing lacking in all this was any response from the Southern Sudan, other than some grumbling. Perhaps it was assumed that, since the oil and water were to be extracted from the South, the South would profit from spin-offs of one sort or another, and thus be placated. Exactly how this would happen was not spelled out to the public by Northern Sudan or the Egyptians, whose business interests in their race to reel in the extra water and profits therefrom left them with little interest in the discontent of others.
Toward the end of 1983 the South finally let everyone know their feelings, and they were not good.
The first sign of trouble was a kidnapping that took place in November 1983. Following that, the canal workers were apprehensive, and rightly so, as the following year eight workers were kidnapped by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and the machine was attacked. It stands today, bullet-pocked and rusting on the spot where it came to a halt. The SPLA also attacked the oil-drilling installation in February 1984, kidnapping and later killing three of Chevron’s employees. In 1985 Chevron closed down its Sudan operation, by which time the Second Sudan Civil War was in progress. It lasted 22 years, during which time 1.9 million people were killed and 4 million had been displaced. But what exactly had driven the South Sudanese to such initial acts of violence? And how did it escalate so quickly?
It all comes back to water and what makes a “water war.” The North Sudanese and the Egyptians did not realize (or care), but the South was very much aware that drying out the swamps would open up the entire Sudd area for irrigated mechanized farming. The mechanized farming schemes, mostly managed and owned by Northern Sudan businessmen, would lead to a land takeover and a disruption of traditional life. In addition, many felt that draining the swamps would allow Northern government troops to move military equipment and troops more quickly into the South, where tensions had already been brewing. At least 1.7 million Dinka, Shilluk, Nuer, Murle, Bari, and Anuak live in the region and would be directly or indirectly affected.
According to Dr. Mohamed Suliman, Director of the Institute for African Alternatives (IFAA), if the South lost the water, they would lose the war. He felt that the ecological degradation that had gone on unabated in the North would happen in the South as well if the swamps were drained. Water for irrigation was one of the most important factors in the war. Oil was also important, but not as important as water, and he felt it was significant that the first attacks by the SPLA were directed against the Jonglei Canal, not the oil exploration companies.
Today, Sarah sits beside the unfinished canal, like the statue of a widow grieving the aftermath of a war in which her whole family was lost. Events have passed her by. The Southern Sudanese held elections, elected a president, and also passed a referendum that made them independent. Discussions continue on the fate of the Jonglei Canal and the permanent and seasonal swamps of the Sudd. Although ethnicity, cultural identity, and religion were major elements among the causes of the war, so was a “justifiable mistrust of the project from Southerners who saw the North and Egypt benefiting while their own lives were irreversibly changed” by the draining of the Sudd.
One large concern on the part of environmentalists throughout the world is the prediction that if the canal were to be dug, the swamps are bound to suffer. If the seasonal swamps of the Sudd were allowed to dry out, what would be the fate of the 450,000 Dinka, Shilluk, and Nuer who use the seasonal swamps as dry-season forage?2 Many thousands of them gave up their lives in defense of the swamps.
And what about the migratory birds and other wild animals who feed in the seasonal swamps and take refuge in the permanent swamps? The canal planners had commissioned studies that predicted that the canal would have a larger effect on permanent swamps than on the seasonal swamps. Papyrus dominates the permanent swamps and therefore would be the most affected. Was it a good or bad option that the wild animals associated with papyrus would suffer more than the humans? It seemed like a choice made by the Devil.
The original plan for operating the canal held out the promise of a compromise, which some people viewed with suspicion. It called for managed flooding of critical areas. Managed flooding meant that floodplain areas could be watered where cattle would drink and forage grasses would grow. On the other hand, it encouraged farming of some swamp areas that would definitely be allowed to dry out.
Despite the project planners’ careful calculations based on prior wet and dry cycles, the real results seemed impossible to predict. In the conclusions of the extensive impact assessment of the canal made in the ’70s and ’80s, it was stated that “A simple hydrological model of the kind described is certainly not the perfect and ultimate way of predicting the effects of varying the throughput. But the implications are extremely significant and suggest the need for imaginative operating regulations if the economic interests of the people of the Jonglei area are to be taken into proper account. There are guidelines here for any future canal authority; those who control the sluice gates . . . will, to a large degree, control the environmental conditions of the Sudd region [emphasis mine].”3
Considering also, as stated in the impact assessment, that there were “weaknesses in the powers and structure” of the managing authority, and relations that were “far from harmonious” between the governing bodies, there is a danger that without a rigorous management scheme, a reliable (and costly) computer model, and a staff trained to carry it out, managed flooding by the canal operators could be a very dicey proposition.
In the impact assessment, little attention was given to the question of what would happen to papyrus in the Sudd if the swamps were allowed to dry out and die. Presumably these swamps have been in place since before 12,000 B.C., and we know that papyrus is a great producer of peat. In Uganda and Rwanda, the depth of organic peat material laid down by the plant can be extraordinary. In the Egyptian delta, the peat that was left behind by the ancient swamps still survives in a layer of up to 10ft, covered over with a layer of soil 16–43ft deep.4 In the Sudd, the peat is close to the surface and there is little information about how much is there. One survey, done by a team from the US Dept. of Interior in 1983 in search of energy sources, mentioned a report of “peat-like soil” in the region to depths in excess of 3–4ft.
It could be that there is a massive deposit of peat under the Sudd swamp, which in turn would mean a great potential for a peat fire that would end all peat fires. Leaving so many factors to the unknown does not inspire confidence in the canal project, especially when combined with the inevitability of a drought. When dealing with a legacy of peat, a lengthy period of drought can be dangerous when there is no papyrus swamp to keep it fairly moist throughout the drought season. In Indonesia in 1997, an extended drought was responsible for speeding up the drying of peat in a 2.5 million acre project designed to clear swamp forest and plant rice. The result was an ecological nightmare.
In Indonesia, burning is used as an easy way of getting rid of tree stumps in swamp forests, but once the dry peat caught fire, a plume of smoke (white in the spectrometric scan carried out by NASA) rose over the land and remained stagnant over Southeast Asia from 1997 to 1998. Another product of burning dry peat is smog, tropospheric low-level ozone (green, yellow, and red in the same scan) that spread rapidly across the Indian Ocean toward India. The color scan done by NASA that detected the extent of the Indonesian disaster looked like a color photo of an atomic explosion!
In 1997, due to the smog at the height of the peat burn, a Garuda Airways Airbus crashed, killing all 234 people onboard. Low visibility prevented the pilot from seeing a mountainside. Thirteen airports in the area were closed for two months, people were advised not to go outdoors without protective masks, and ships collided on two occasions in the Strait of Malacca; one collision left 29 crewmen missing, presumed drowned.
The burning peat also had an unseen effect on global climate. It is estimated that the peat and forest fires in Indonesia in that year (1997) released between 0.81 and 2.57 billion tons of carbon, equivalent to 13–40% of the amount released by global fossil-fuel burning, and greater than the entire carbon uptake of the world’s biosphere.
The managers of the Huleh Valley swamp drainage project in Israel in the ’70s found to their chagrin that clearing a papyrus swamp of only 15,500 acres could lead to dust-choking chaos. What would happen if two million acres of swamp in the Sudd were to go in the same direction? If a worst-case peat-fire scenario were to play out in the Sudan, it would be catastrophic not just for Sudan, but for the world.
If another African drought set in, such as happened in 2008 and 2009 when the level of Lake Victoria dropped to historic lows, and if the Jonglei Canal were completed as planned, a die-off of permanent swamp in the Sudd could occur. This translates to a die-off and drying out of approximately two million acres of swamp, almost exactly the size of the Indonesian rice scheme that so badly affected the world in 1997. Agreed, the peat layers in Indonesia are extremely deep and papyrus peat layers in the Sudd are still unknown, but who knows, papyrus might rise to the occasion to avenge its destruction. The fires would rage for years.
Peat fires would be only part of the problem in the Sudd. As in the Huleh Valley (to be discussed below), the birds would go elsewhere, the wild animals that take refuge in the Sudd, especially the elephant herds, would move on, while hundreds of thousands of tribesmen and their cattle would lose a hefty portion of the flooded grassland that they depend on for dry-season pasture.
Bad news heaped upon bad news, and still more bad news. The recent oil discovery in Uganda of six billion barrels under and around Lake Albert signifies a major pollution problem in the immediate offing. Lake Albert is one of the sources of the Nile, as Sam and Flooey discovered more than a century ago. After leaving the lake, the beginning Nile River flows on to the Sudd. If the Sudd were bypassed by a canal, any pollutants that found their way into the river would flow directly into the main Nile, and from there the toxic load would be carried downstream to Lake Nasser-Nubia. Within 40 days it would arrive at Cairo, the largest metropolitan area in Africa, which as we know takes its drinking water directly from the Nile.
Often, wetlands go unnoticed because their important filtering capabilities go on without any fanfare; it all happens as the runoff water passes through. In the process the wetlands also act to slow down the release of surface water, a braking action that lowers flood heights and reduces erosion. The bottomland hardwood-riparian wetlands along the Mississippi River once stored at least 60 days of floodwater. Now they store only 12 days because most have been filled in or drained.5
Without the papyrus swamps to filter the water upstream, Egyptians will become as dependent as Louisianans are today on the good faith of transnational petroleum companies.
The Sudd to this day is one of the largest filter swamps in the world in which papyrus is a star performer. But this only happens if it is left undisturbed to work its environmental magic.