SHORTLY AFTER THE ATTACK, DAD returned home with his platoon for a brief visit. From inside our hut, I watched him adjust the AK-47 on his shoulder and spit on the ground. Two men stood before him, clad like Dad in brown SPLA uniforms, as he gave them an order.
DAD: Let us assess the area since we’ll be spending some time in this village. We must be on high alert at all times and keep an ear out for when we will be ordered to join headquarters.
SOLDIERS: Yes, Comrade Duany!
They saluted him and greeted my mother with a grunt as they walked away.
Dad placed his AK-47 in a corner and sat on a piece of cowhide. Mum handed him a wooden bowl into which she’d spooned some freshly cooked kööb, a special-occasion meal made from a type of African couscous mixed with butter and dried fish. He tasted the food without comment.
ME: Dad, why did those men call you “comrade”?
Luckily, my father was in the mood for answering questions.
DAD: We are all comrades in the great army. Those Arabs up north think they’re better than us, but all people are equal—or will be, anyway—when we build New Sudan. You see, Ger, those Arabs are the ones that attacked you recently. They are our enemy.
I didn’t fully understand, but I wanted to. So I risked his wrath at my stupidity.
ME: But I heard our enemy was called Anya Anya II.
Dad barked at me.
DAD: Yes, the Anya Anya II are also our enemy. But they hate the Arabs too, so in that respect they are our allies. However, they don’t want the Great Society; instead, they want southern Sudan to secede from the north completely. That’s why they fight us. But we will defeat them. Now, no more questions!
My dad’s shifting emotional states always unsettled me. Mum once told me Dad had been less brusque, even kind, before the civil war, before my earliest memories, but the soldier’s life had changed him. He now seemed to be preoccupied by the bigger, heavier matters of Sudan.
Anya Anya II and the SPLA were one and the same people, with different visions for our people’s liberation. The SPLA, under the leadership of Dr. John Garang, believed in something called New Sudan, where all the diverse ethnic and religious groups of Sudan would coexist peacefully, national resources would be shared equitably, and representation in government would be proportionate. Anya Anya II, on the other hand, believed in the immediate separation of the principally Christian south (which was where I came from) from the predominantly Islamic north, with each of the two Sudans enjoying complete autonomy. It was an ideological divide of a people who were all pursuing equality and fairness, especially for minorities (Sudan’s southerners, who were darker than the northerners, were considered a minority). It was a vision that would find a point of convergence decades later when the south became an independent state.
Anya Anya II fighters were predominantly from my Nuer ethnic group, but Dr. Garang was from the other large ethnic group, the Dinka. The Nuer and Dinka would come to have a long-lasting political rivalry that consigned the entire south Sudanese liberation movement and later the independent nation of South Sudan to a near-permanent state of internal strife. However, when Dr. Garang launched the SPLA, leaders within the Nuer community would overlook Anya Anya II and side with the SPLA. My father was one of those who stood by Dr. Garang from the word go, putting his shared, bigger national agenda ahead of any ethnic ties that might have led him to join his fellow Nuer tribesmen in Anya Anya II.
In 1983, with the offer of Soviet funds and a new impetus brought by the likes of Dr. Garang, my people took up arms once more against our oppressors. In between the civil wars, the various ethnic groups of the south had fought over individual rivalries, so it had been a long time since southern Sudan knew peace. Ideological conflicts emerged, and AK-47s became common household items to kids like me.
I was torn, trying to decide which path I wanted to take to prove I was a man. I wanted to receive a Nuer initiation into manhood, like Uncle Tut, but I also wanted to take up arms and fight for the SPLA, like Dad (though I didn’t understand the war’s complexities). My older brothers Oder and Chuol were already at an SPLA training camp in Bonga, Ethiopia, and I felt envious of them because they seemed to have joined the ranks of men. For the moment, Dad’s AK-47, standing there in the corner, taller than I was, was off-limits to me. But to my childish way of thinking, shooting that gun, joining the SPLA, and attacking those who had attacked us were the highest goals to which I could aspire and would finally confirm my manhood in the eyes of my short-tempered, preoccupied dad.