Juba to Bor, South Sudan, April 2014
‘Missionaries, mercenaries and misfits,’ said the man behind the hotel bar. ‘Everyone here’s a lunatic with nowhere better to be, but if you find the right one, they might be able to help you get north.’
Two days after we had been dragged to the Blue House, I was prowling the hallways of Bedouin Lodge – a popular hotel crammed between an abattoir and a graveyard where dogs regularly dug up human remains – intent on finding a way to further our expedition. The morning after our arrest, our equipment had been returned and the spies’ specious charges all dropped – half of me understood that, when the soldiers had found nothing suspicious, they had decided to let us go; but I also suspected they had been looking for money, some kind of bribe. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to stay in Juba long. The problem was how to go further. Allam had prepared papers that would allow us – mindless government agents aside – to get to the city of Bor, a further 120 miles downriver. But, after that, there were still five hundred miles before the border with Sudan.
The man in the hotel bar was Andy Belcher, a white Kenyan pilot who had turned hotelier and refused to leave Bedouin Lodge even when Juba erupted into ethnic violence. Belcher was a gregarious man with a sardonic sense of humour; you had to have a certain kind of mania to live and work in a warzone.
‘I can . . .’ Belcher began, ‘. . . make some introductions.’
‘Introductions?’
He gave me a knowing smile. ‘Leave it with me, Lev.’
Boston crossed the bar and went into the hotel lobby. Once or twice he tried to venture outside, only to reappear moments later, seemingly unwilling to wander too far. In the past days, I’d been watching him closely: he was peculiarly skittish, refusing to engage me when I’d tried to broach the subject of his family and what they would make of me dragging him further north. ‘You are not dragging me, Lev,’ he kept saying. ‘I want to see the river’s end.’ My dream, it seemed, had become Boston’s too, but every time I considered taking him further I remembered Matt Power and felt my stomach tighten.
Belcher spent the next days introducing me to a roster of every defiant ex-pat he could find, while I sourced out every remaining aid worker and NGO in Juba, only to hear the same: to travel north was to invite disaster; if one side didn’t kill me, the other certainly would. Alone among them, only one of Belcher’s contacts thought differently. Three nights later, I walked into the bar at the Bedouin Lodge and, in a fog of cigarette smoke, Belcher introduced me to Ken Miller.
Miller was not the first suspicious associate that I had met thanks to Belcher. There had been a man known to all as Commander Dan, a sixty-year-old former Catholic Irish priest who’d had to leave the church for marrying a Dinka woman and running guns for the rebels under the pretence of aid work. But Miller seemed different. Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and dark glasses, he seemed to have modelled himself on a rogue CIA agent from a Bond film. Belcher had described him using only three words: ‘Mad as fuck.’
‘Everything’s possible,’ he said in a thick Scottish accent, as I took my seat. ‘What’s the plan?’
There was no plan. At this point, I was running out of ideas. ‘I’ve got papers that can take me to Bor, but after that . . . I’ve tried every NGO, every aid worker. The UN are running a barge down the Nile to Malakal, but nobody there’s returning my calls.’
Miller nodded. There was a funk about him that told me he was stoned, seeing me through a miasma of smoke. ‘It’s all about the cash. Cash can get you anything you want. How much have you got?’
‘Not all that much . . .’
‘See,’ drawled Miller, ‘you could walk to Bor. That should be okay. But, go on the west bank, through Lakes State. Then you have two choices. Stay west and go up to Wau or Yei – stay away from Bentiu, mind you; those Nuer are planning an attack any day now – then cross in Abyei and Sudan. But you’ll need to avoid the Nile . . .’
‘It’s the Nile I’m walking.’
‘Aye, but the rebels are regrouping and they’ve just got a resupply from Ethiopia. They will attack before the rains come. That means you’ve got less than a month.’
I caught Belcher watching from the bar and was reminded of what he’d said: Miller knew what was going on with the rebels because he’d travelled every inch of the country, smuggling guns, supplies and vehicles to every militia out there.
‘Otherwise, from Bor, you could try and make contact with the rebels and get into Ayod, then get a rebel escort up to Malakal, and then hand back over to the government. It’s the front lines you’ll have to worry about. Normally, I’d say go up the Jonglei Canal – but, if you try that shit now, you’ll get fuckin’ shot, me laddie.’
Miller was speaking with such nonchalance that, for a moment, his vision sounded possible. He slumped back in his chair, taking a long drag of his cigarette. ‘I’ll come with yer!’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘It’ll only cost yer seventy-five grand. US dollars, cash. New bills, of course.’ He must have seen the way I was staring at him, trying to suppress my astonishment, because then he said, ‘That would be all in. No expenses required.’
Slowly, I stood and backed away, stepping out of the cloud of sweet smoke that surrounded us. ‘Let me think about it,’ I said.
The last thing I heard as I walked out of the bar was Miller mutter, ‘Aye, you do that, laddie . . .’
That night, I found Boston kicking his heels nervously outside the hotel. Across the rooftops of Juba, the sky seemed steelier each day – a sure sign that the rainy season was descending from the north.
‘Boston,’ I said, ‘we need to talk.’
Boston tramped along the hotel wall, where the brickwork had been opened up by the spray of automatic rifles. He had been like this for days, pacing up and down like a captured tiger, eager to get back on the road – to be anywhere but here.
‘What did Miller say?’
‘Miller’s after money. It’s hand him everything and risk failure, or get to Bor without him and risk failure. It’s a no-win situation. The only hope is getting to Bor on Allam’s papers and making a decision there. This expedition’s thrown enough at us already that . . .’ I paused. ‘Miller says to take the west bank, through Lakes State and into Unity. Once you get past Terekeka and Minkaman, you reach the edge of the Sudd. Seems that’s the way to get to Bor.’
In an instant, all the nerves evaporated from Boston: ‘When do we leave?’
I steadied myself. There was something I needed to say, a thought that had been blossoming in the back of my mind ever since we had crossed the border into South Sudan. ‘Boston, we’ve been travelling together for four and a half months. Day in, day out, we’ve never been further than a few metres apart. I don’t think I can say that about another human being in my life. So . . .’ I hesitated. ‘This isn’t an easy thing to say, so I’m just going to say it: Boston, you’re not coming with me to Bor, for a start your visa is about to run out, and it’s just too dangerous. Come to Terekeka by all means, but after that I just don’t know.’
At first Boston didn’t speak. Perhaps he had known, all along, that sooner or later, I would have to tell him this. But it seemed he was only gathering his thoughts: ‘You can’t do this, Lev. This is my expedition too. Above everything else, I want to see the pyramids. I want to see the sea.’
‘I should never have brought you into South Sudan. You know as well as I do what’s waiting up there. It’s walking into a warzone. Miller says the rebels are planning another counter-attack. It’s fight and fight back all the way to Sudan. Look, it’s one thing taking risks for myself, but it’s another doing it for somebody else. And . . . think of Matt Power. You have a family, Boston. You should go back to Kampala, be with them.’
‘I have been in warzones before, Lev.’
He said it with steeliness, and I could see the desperation in his eyes: he wanted to see this journey through. I didn’t want to tell him the other thoughts that had been circling my mind – that, even now, Boston had stopped being a guide, that, once we reached Sudan, he wouldn’t even know any of the native languages. The truth was, he had stopped being a true guide some months ago; first and foremost, he had become a friend. He’d looked after me when times were tough and, on more than one occasion, forced me to my feet when walking was the last thing I wanted to do. But, now that he was a friend, the thought of risking his life outweighed everything else.
‘Come to see the Sudd but after that, unless your papers come through and the security improves, you’re going home, Boston,’ I said – and, after that, we said nothing, just tramped back into the bar, where Belcher was waiting with two cold beers.
If I had had my way, I would have headed north without any minders – but the ever-watchful Allam insisted that I take two local gunmen as protection. After some delay, and protracted negotiations with a local security officer about how far they would come and how much of a ‘tip’ I’d give them – despite their being SPLA officers with government salaries – I awaited my new companions with a heavy heart. ‘This is Africa,’ I had to keep reminding myself, refuelling on yet another plate of over-smoked tilapia. ‘Nothing comes for free.’
The two men who walked into Bedouin Lodge were both Dinka, NCOs in the SPLA. Shorter than I’d imagined, they marched up, wearing mixed uniforms and flip-flops on their feet. Each carried an AK-47, but there was something open and friendly about their faces that immediately endeared them to me. Nevertheless, if these were to be my companions on a perilous trek north, I wanted to get off to an appropriate start. The guards Allam had supplied for us on the road to Juba had all let us down.
‘Okay, you two,’ I said, thoroughly fed up with mutinous soldiers. ‘We are walking to Bor. Not driving, not hitch-hiking. Walking. Understand? By foot.’ I pointed at my feet, but the pair only looked at me, expressionless. ‘We will sleep wherever we can, and eat whatever we can,’ I continued. ‘I am told you two can be trusted, that you’re strong men.’ For the first time, they nodded enthusiastically. ‘I am told you will not complain, that Dinka are the very best soldiers, and that you will not run away or give up.’ Solemnly, they shook their heads. ‘Good. I will pay you well, but you will not get a penny until we arrive. Do you understand?’
The elder of the two, who introduced himself as Ariike, began to rummage in the child’s schoolbag over his shoulder and produced a dog-eared notebook. ‘Sir,’ he said with an unusual smile, ‘let me write this down.’
He produced a pencil.
‘Warking de Nayl,’ he wrote at the top of the page, stopping once to look at me. ‘An exhibition to wark thru Youganda, Ruanda, Tazmania, Kenya and Ethyopia.’
‘That isn’t quite what . . .’
He looked at me with an earnest frown. ‘I was a teacher of English and speak it perfectly. See?’ Proudly, he pointed at the gibberish.
‘Excellent!’ I said. ‘Then there can be no mistakes.’
‘You will sign?’
I took the stubby pencil from him and scrawled my name at the bottom of the page. An agreement had been reached, a contract signed. I had two new guardians on the way north, and it was time to see how far we could get.
Heading north out of Juba, the river soon became a vast entanglement of channels banked in vast swamps and flat, lush flood plains. All around, the grass was kept short by the thousands of cattle that roamed the river looking for new pastures, all under the watchful eyes of their herdsmen, members of the Mundari tribe. Back in December this area had been torn apart by rebel fighters, who had swarmed through the villages massacring all the foreigners and soldiers they could find – but now the district was safe, thanks almost entirely to the efforts of the Mundari themselves. The Mundari are traditionally cattle herders and agriculturalists, but their reputation as a peace-loving people is matched only by their capacity for violence in times of need. That, a local woman told us, was the reason even a white man could walk this stretch of the river unmolested: where the Mundari held sway, the rebels were too frightened to come. I could tell why. The Mundari live on a diet of milk and fish, but look as if they supplement it with steroids. They are as imposing and statuesque a people as any in Africa.
The Mundari are also a very stoic people. One day, I was passing the fishing village of Terekeka which lies on the west bank of the Nile as it begins to widen and become the Sudd. I’d been looking for a place to sleep, when one of the soldiers suggested we take a boat across to one of the islands and make camp amongst the Mundari herdsmen. Thinking it was better than the usual corner of a filthy police station, I heartily agreed and we took passage on a tiny rowing boat. Twenty minutes later, having navigated the floating islands of matted rushes, we spotted what we were looking for.
‘There they are!’ shouted Ariike with glee.
In the distance, on a bare grassy bank, stood what I hoped would be welcoming hosts. Ten men, utterly naked except for loose pieces of cotton covering only the bare essentials, stood guard to a corral in which several hundred head of long-horned cattle lowed. Smoke poured out of campfires where cow dung was burnt as way of protection against mosquitoes, both for the cows and people. As I jumped off the boat, an enormous hand appeared out of the crowd to help me up.
It was the biggest hand I’ve ever seen, and unsurprisingly attached to a behemoth of a human being. His name was Sirillo, and he pulled me onto the island like he was lifting a rag doll. Seven feet tall, in his spare hand he carried a spear that seemed like a toothpick compared to his massive muscular frame. Slung across his naked back was an AK-47 with a feather poking out of the barrel for effect. ‘Welcome!’ he said with an honest smile.
At twenty-two, Sirillo was the head of the clan youth, and, leaving the elders to relax, was in charge of keeping the cattle safe and settling matters of the community. I looked around. Naked children, covered in ash, were busy rubbing more into the hides of the cows. Some of the young men were wrestling each other whilst women, bare-breasted, looked on to decide who would be their husband. Boston and I gleefully joined in the proceedings, covering ourselves in ash and trying to keep our dignity whilst being thrown to the deck by teenage boys twice our size. It was a moment of beautiful serenity, an island of peace in a land ravaged by war. There were hundreds and hundreds of cows, just returned from grazing and now pegged out with bells around their necks. Walking through them was a perilous business, as horns, some of them five feet long, were shaken in disgust at our intrusion. Some of the women were milking the cows, and would often drink straight from the udders.
As Sirillo was showing us to a bare piece of grass on which we could pitch tents, a cow began to piss nearby. Suddenly, there was a commotion and three grown men ran towards the cow as fast as they could. But it was Sirillo that won the day. Pushing the other men aside, he put his head straight under the cow and took what can only be described as a golden shower. As I stood watching in utter disbelief, Ariike grinned wildly. Sirillo stood back up and rubbed the urine from his eyes.
I was speechless.
‘It’s good for your hair,’ said the giant.
‘Makes it go red, and then the ladies like it.’
Still speechless.
‘And, anyway, we don’t like to wash in the river.’
‘Why ever not?’ I finally uttered.
‘Too dangerous,’ said Sirillo, looking solemn as he peered over his shoulder to the mighty Nile. ‘Too many crocodiles, they always eat people.’
Of course, I knew of the danger of crocodiles – but in most places where humans live, the crocs stay away. The chances of getting eaten are usually pretty slim.
‘Not here,’ he said. ‘They are monsters. My brother was eaten by a crocodile.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ I said, again on the verge of speechlessness. ‘When was that?’
Sirillo, covered in piss and glistening in the sunset, looked at me benevolently.
‘At eleven o’clock this morning.’
He shrugged his shoulders, picked up his spear and weaved his way through the cow horns and smoke back to his home, a teepee of dried grass. In the golden light of dusk, it looked like nothing so much as a bird’s nest.
The time had come to say goodbye to Boston. For some reason there had been a mistake at the border office and he’d only got a month instead of two, and what’s more, the fighting was intensifying and I wasn’t prepared to put him in danger. We’d spent a solemn week north of Juba, but since our conversation things had been difficult in the knowledge that he was going home. We’d hardly spoken, and when we did it was just the mundane, daily practicalities of the walk. We’d reached the edge of the Sudd, and for Boston, the end of his journey. Standing on the banks of the Nile, we kept the goodbye short and I made Boston the promise that one day we’d meet again, and with that he got into a minibus which had been idling, waiting for fleeing Dinka from across the swamp. Without so much as a rearward glance, the car disappeared down the dusty road. In a moment it was gone, lost in the bush – and so was Boston.
It wasn’t until some hours later, as I was poring over a map of Lakes State and trying to synthesise all the information Miller had given me that the prospect of heading into the wilderness without Boston began to feel real. Boston had been my ally and protector for so long that being at the mercy of strangers was going to feel strange. I tried to shake off the feeling. I was going to miss his tales of Congolese misadventure, his wildly inaccurate conspiracy theories – not to mention his pigeon hunting – but I had started this expedition alone and that was how it would have to continue.
Outside Juba, we’d enlisted the services of a young Ugandan man named Siraje, to help ferry our packs further north. For a week, we walked north through the Central Equatorial State, through tiny villages where food was scarce and where the locals, desperate since December, stared at us warily. Harbouring a foreigner, here, had seen more than one person murdered when the rebels last swarmed through, and every few kilometres the road was blocked by police barricades and army checkpoints. Very quickly, I was glad for the two Dinka accompanying me north: at every village, they somehow charmed the local chiefs into allowing us the use of an empty schoolroom or police station for a camp; at every roadblock, they regaled the security officials with tales of my derring-do – explaining to the commanders how I’d been walking for five years through a hundred different countries. My voyage was growing in the telling – and, by the time we had crossed into Lakes State, it turned out I had walked through Liberia, Senegal and Ghana, spending a million dollars along the way. With Ariike and his comrade John at my side, I didn’t have my paperwork checked once.
The further north we pushed, the more visible the signs of war. Some nights, we heard short volleys of gunfire, somewhere in the indeterminate distance. Once, a blistering quake seemed to tear open the sky, only for silence to quickly resume. But clearer yet were the convoys that ploughed the same roads. On the main roads, the Red Cross were in action, ferrying supplies further north; sometimes they moved alone, and other times alongside UN trucks, peacekeepers bound for the centre of the conflict. There was a UN compound in Bor that was still staffed; perhaps that was where these soldiers were heading. Along the way, we scavenged whatever news we could. The rebels, we were told, had just attacked an oil refinery in Unity State, directly north of Lakes State itself, and still held the key town of Ayod, on the Nile’s east bank. The main road between Bor and Malakal was still closed – and, more than anything else, this gave me pause for thought. I had meant Malakal to be a key staging post on my journey to the Sudanese border; I was going to have to rethink those plans.
The town of Minkaman sits on the border between Lakes State and Jonglei State, with only twenty miles of entangled papyrus swamp separating it from Bor. Here, the Nile forms the border between the states, plunging into the brown vastness of the Sudd. From a distance, it was clear that Minkaman had been transformed. The Red Cross trucks we had seen ploughing the Juba–Bor highway had been bound for here, because Minkaman was no longer the small fishing settlement it had once been; now it was a sprawling expanse of white-plastic sheeting, tents, homes built around cars, and open-air campsites. What had once been a small fishing village had become home to more than 80,000 displaced people. Some of them had come from Bor itself, but the vast majority had come from the further reaches of Jonglei State. Fleeing the rebels – who still controlled great swathes of the state – the refugees had found, in Minkaman, a place to survive.
The camp was dominated by a succession of walled, barbed-wire enclosures, the base of operations for each of the NGOs who had come here. Flags were flying, declaring not nationalities but charitable organisations. Every tree along the riverbank had become the home to a family. Children still scampered in the shade beneath those trees, while the branches suspended pans, cooking utensils, mosquito nets and all the other household possessions with which the refugees had escaped. Drums were beating, sounding out the gathering of new committees or makeshift churches, the kind of institutions a camp like this needs to keep itself from sliding into anarchy. In many ways, Minkaman was a miracle, a city sprung up from nothing, in a matter of months.
Down at the port, I chartered a motor boat that would take me out onto the swamp. It was the only way I could make the crossing to Bor and find out if there truly was a way forward. At the small dockside, I bid my SPLA stalwarts goodbye, and climbed into the boat. Siraje, too afraid to return to Juba alone, clambered in afterwards, helping to haul aboard the packs. Soon we were assailed by refugees hoping for a free ride – some citizens of Bor eager to get back and rescue more of their possessions, some traders working the water between here and the city, others soldiers returning to base in town. We took as many as we could, only driving them away when the boat could take no more.
As we began the slow navigation through the papyrus channels, a single droplet of rain landed on my head.
I looked back at the white-plastic sheets suspended from trees, at the tents and open-air campsites where people were living. ‘What will happen to all the refugees when the rains really come?’ I asked.
The man at the tiller only shook his head; he did not want to imagine the answer.
Some hours later, Bor loomed above our little vessel. The journey had been spectacular. Cutting through the wind, we had soared across miles of Sudd, through tangled fields of papyrus and reed. Sometimes the channels were only two metres wide; this was a landscape only a true local could properly understand. Under the boatman’s direction, we weaved north and east, driving legions of storks before us. Sometimes we rounded tiny islands where more refugees camped – internationally displaced persons (IDPs) who hadn’t made it to the greater camp at Minkaman but still preferred the solitude and relative sanctuary of the swamp. At least here, there were plentiful fish to catch, and the threat of sudden violence was kept at bay by the miles of entangled papyrus. This, I thought, was as good a place as any to wait out a war.
At my side, a young Dinka soldier clung to the edge of the boat. Garang was twenty-seven years old, returning from Minkaman to join his unit in the city. Already a soldier for thirteen years, he had joined the SPLA as a child to fight against the Arabs, and had since risen through the ranks to become a sergeant major. Now, he told me, he was only a part-time fighter, taking up his gun only when it was needed. ‘I fought with the Dinka Youth when the Nuer rebels came to take Bor,’ he said. ‘The city’s changed hands four times now, but it’s back under government control at last.’
‘Bor belongs to the Dinka then?’
‘It’s more complicated than that. Some of the rebels want to think of it as just government Dinkas fighting Nuer rebels, but . . . I don’t hate the Nuer. In fact, my girlfriend’s one. But I do believe in government, and I do believe in unity. The rebels need to understand that we’re all one nation. And the only way to make them understand is to defeat them here.’
The port in Bor was ramshackle, but somehow it buzzed with activity, stevedores and fishermen pursuing their daily business as if this was not the epicentre of a war. Among them, a rabble of different soldiers moved back and forth. Siraje and I had not left the docks behind by the time we knew we had crossed the front-line.
Soldiers, policemen and hundreds of armed civilians flooded the muddy streets. We walked on, barely speaking a word. My only idea was that, once here, I could find some soldiers to accompany me northwards, convince them to hand me over to the rebels, and then pay them to shepherd me through the rebel-controlled territories until, eventually, I reached Sudan. There would be no shortage of soldiers to ask, but suddenly I doubted whether any would agree.
The streets leading into the heart of the city had been razed. Blown-up tanks rusted at the sides of the roads. Death was everywhere. Mass graves had been the only way to bury those who were killed, and before we had reached the city proper, I could see the freshly churned earth where victims had been buried.
We hadn’t reached the town centre when a voice hailed us from a roadblock and, seconds later, SPLA soldiers flocked to our sides. In my urgency to retrieve the papers Allam had given me, permitting me to travel as far as Bor, I explained about the expedition. The soldiers scrutinised the papers carefully. When they instructed me to follow, I knew there was no other choice.
The soldiers led us deeper into Bor’s old town. On the banks of the Nile, a cathedral had been raked by gunfire, portions of its stone wall charred black by fire, and a grave dug for the seventeen clergymen and nuns who’d been murdered here a few weeks before. The market place was empty, burnt to the ground three months ago, and ATMs hung from walls like eyeballs from their sockets. Everywhere, the walls were daubed in crude graffiti: FUCK YOU NUER! declared one pillar. DINKAS DEFEATED! exclaimed another.
After navigating several patrols and checkpoints, the soldiers deposited us at the state compound in the middle of town. It was here that the state governor’s representatives gathered, co-ordinating the defence of not just the city but the whole of Jonglei State. The local SPLA commander was sitting under a tamarind tree as we approached, surrounded by men in camouflage uniform. Many of the militia were sporting sunglasses and flip-flops, and all crowned their heads with a simple black or maroon beret. The madness of the moment put me in mind of some terrible ’80s action movie – only this was real.
‘Let us start at the beginning. I have seen your papers, but I would hear it from your own mouth. Who are you?’
‘My name,’ I began, ‘is Levison Wood. I’m . . .’ It felt churlish, all of a sudden, to say ‘explorer’, so instead I told him I was a geographer, leading an expedition to walk the length of the Nile. I showed him the press cuttings I had saved from Uganda, my papers from Andrew Allam, spoke about how two SPLA soldiers had valiantly guided me from Juba to Minkaman. ‘I’m here to pass through,’ I finally explained. ‘To follow the west bank north.’
The local commander paused a moment, as if to scrutinise me further. Then he gave an emphatic shake of the head.
‘Now is not a good time to be in Bor, not for an Englishman, not even for South Sudanese. Do you know what is happening here, Levison Wood?’
I told him I did.
‘If you truly did, you would not be here, asking for soldiers to take you north. The UN base in town has just been attacked. We cannot tell what happens next. My advice to you is to leave Bor and not think of this expedition again. This is a war.’
The local commander afforded us four soldiers to escort us across town, to the ruins of the South Sudan Hotel. What we found was a compound in ruins. The South Sudan Hotel had once been one of the most progressive places in the newly formed nation, a place for international leaders and businessmen looking to invest in the new country to stay. Now, it was an empty shell. Hunching close to the river, its walls were strafed with bullet holes and, in the road outside, a minibus had been destroyed by more gunfire. Across the hotel courtyard, the doors had been kicked in or torn from their hinges. Windows were shattered, and I could see the black marks where fire had licked up the walls.
The manager had little to say – only as he showed us to rooms along the veranda did he reiterate what the local commander had said: this was no place for a foreigner to be, and certainly not a white man. Dinka soldiers, he said, had stormed the UN compound in town to attack the Nuer who had barricaded themselves there. In the fallout of the attack, the UN peacekeepers had opened fire – forty-eight Nuer now lay dead, along with seven Dinka, and a group of Indian peacekeepers. As he left, I found I was grateful for the protection the local SPLA commander had given us – but the thought grew in me: what use were four men against a city spiralling out of control?
For a few hours, the South Sudan Hotel was our refuge. Only when hunger started to gnaw at my guts did I return to the veranda, to find Siraje in his room next door. It was time, I told him, to venture back into town – if only to find something to eat.
Under the watchful eyes of our SPLA guard, we left the compound and ventured back into Bor. The heart of the old town was awash with armed civilians. Everywhere, eyes turned to follow us; groups of Dinka gunmen loitered on the intersections, dissuaded from approaching only because of the armed guard. This was no time to explore what Bor had to offer, and the guards led us to an Ethiopian restaurant, where we hurriedly ordered food. Even here, the diners were armed to the teeth: AK-47s hung across shoulders or rested in laps. Eyes considered us from every corner. By the time the food had arrived, I could tell Siraje had lost his appetite; the terror, visible on his face, was hardening in his gut.
‘They think we’re UN,’ he whispered.
‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘We’ll be back at the hotel soon – but you have to eat . . .’
Our bellies filled, we left the restaurant in haste. Dusk was already settling – or perhaps it was only the storm clouds thickening overhead – but we had not yet reached the compound when a man lurched out of the shadows between two buildings and staggered into the street to confront us. In a second, he had cocked his rifle, raising it up to point directly at me.
He was screaming in a language I didn’t understand, but the hatred in his eyes eclipsed all words. His eyes rolled madly. In an instant, Siraje threw his hands into the air; in another, the SPLA guards had their weapons raised, striding in front of me to drive the man back. There was a terrible moment in which nothing happened and everything was possible; then the man lowered his weapon, hawked up phlegm to spit at the ground, and slunk off through the door of a nearby house.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
One of the soldiers answered: ‘He said . . . he will kill you, because you are here with the UN.’
For a moment, I remained silent. There would have been no use protesting I was here for my own expedition, that I was not part of the UN in any way. Reason and logic didn’t count for anything in situations like this. Emotions were running too high in Bor; anti-Western sentiment leached out of every pair of eyes. I looked at Siraje: ‘Are you okay?’
He nodded, no longer shaking so visibly. ‘I put myself in the hands of God,’ he answered.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said – and, without another word, we raced for the hotel.
No sooner had I settled into my room than the darkness smothered the hotel. Lying in the comforting blackness, I tried not to think of what tomorrow had in store. My plan was to go back to the local commander and talk again about leaving Bor for the north – but, the more I thought about it, the less real it felt. Bor was only the front line of the ongoing war; whatever the north had in store, it would be much, much worse.
It was only moments after I closed my eyes that the first gunfire sounded. Immediately, I sat up, listening to the fighting erupt. Somewhere, close to the hotel, a running gun battle had broken out. Perhaps the Dinka were storming the UN compound again, or perhaps rebels were making a play for Bor. All of a sudden, the room was illuminated in a wash of bright red. I got to my feet and crept to the window.
When I drew the broken blinds back, I could see tracers lighting up the night sky, illuminating the rooftops of Bor in snatches of brilliant colour. With every passing second, the gunfire seemed to grow closer. I heard the familiar crack of 7.62-calibre AK-47 rounds as they pounded the compound next door. The dull thud of DSHK rounds reverberated through the ground. The question was: who was firing? Was it a rebel incursion? My heart began to pound, keeping syncopated time with the gunfire. Shit, I thought. Were the rebels bent on recapturing Bor? Surely, we would have got wind of this?
I told myself to calm down – it was more likely to do with the attack on the UN base. The battle might have been moving to the streets, flocking this way. I waited for a lull in the gunfire and made a decision: if I was going to survive this night, I had to know what was going on.
Racing out onto the veranda, I found Siraje already emerging from the room beside mine. The way he looked at me, he was desperate for direction. ‘Where to?’ he asked.
Across the courtyard, soldiers and armed civilians were already gathering in the shadows. Who were they? A sudden burst of gunfire sundered the silence and Siraje threw himself back behind the door, trying his best to look calm.
‘Maybe we should go over the fence, get to the Nile,’ he said. ‘We can hide in the reeds until morning . . .’
I hurried to the wall and peered into the west, over the black murkiness of the river. The smells of the Sudd swamp were rich and earthy. Slowly, I backed away. ‘I’d rather risk a stray bullet than get chomped by a croc in that bloody river,’ I said. There was only one other way to go. ‘Up,’ I said, and started to run.
Across the courtyard, close to the river’s edge, a half-finished five-storey building stood as a reminder of better times. We burst through the shattered door and swept away the hanging wires that blocked the stairwell. Running up the concrete stairs, we didn’t stop until reaching the open rooftop, which glistened with spent brass bullet cartridges and shards of glass.
From here, we could see the street fight being played out in snatches of light, machine-gun fire in the thoroughfares, fires erupting in buildings a few streets away. The night was warm, and the sounds and smells put me in mind of my tour in Afghanistan, which seemed such a long time ago.
On the rooftop, Siraje and I settled down. The minutes seemed endless. For three quarters of an hour, the fighting was intense. Flurries of gunfire fought flurries of gunfire, the sounds ebbing and flowing along the streets. More than once, I peered over the edge to see dark shapes charging past the hotel compound. I reached for the cell phone in my pocket, but the signal kept flashing in and out. Below, the gunfire intensified for one enraged minute, and then . . . only the silence.
By midnight the fighting had almost abated. Apart from the occasional shot, whoever it was had had their fun for the evening. Coaxing Siraje out of his hiding, we tramped gingerly back down the concrete stairs, past the trashed rooms, and to our terrace. SPLA soldiers had, by now, filled the open spaces, gathering in the relative safety of the hotel car park. To my relief, they ignored us completely as we made for the veranda.
‘Get some sleep, Siraje.’ He only stared at me, as if nervous to go back to his own room. ‘Don’t worry, Siraje. If you hear another attack, if you hear anything, just come and knock on my door.’
He made as if to leave, hesitating only once. ‘Are we . . . staying?’ he asked.
I could not answer. I told him it would be alright and retreated to the gutted shell that was my own room.
In the darkness, I reached for my phone again. As the reception flickered in and out, I saw that I had several missed calls. I was scrolling through them when the phone began to vibrate again. The name ANDY BELCHER was illuminated on the screen.
‘Belcher,’ I said, picking up the phone.
‘Lev?’ buzzed a voice in my ear.
‘It’s me.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ came the sardonic reply. ‘Are you okay up there?’
‘What’s happening here, Belcher? Are the rebels storming Bor?’
Belcher had been keeping close tabs on the progress of events from the relative safety of Bedouin Lodge back in Juba. ‘It’s not rebels, Lev. It’s Dinka Youth – armed civilians. They’re so pissed off with the UN, they’re ready to attack anyone associated with the organisation.’ He paused. ‘Do you hear me, Lev?’
‘I hear you,’ I said, wearily.
‘Get out of there,’ said Belcher. ‘Look, there’s a Cessna. I can have it with you in three hours. Don’t take any risks.’
I had opened my mouth to reply when fists hammered at the door. Siraje, I thought, come to get me. ‘Belcher,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to go . . .’
When the door was drawn back, it was not Siraje staring at me from the veranda, but the manager of the hotel instead. ‘There you are,’ he breathed. ‘I thought, for a second . . .’
‘We went to the roof,’ I said. ‘Just in case.’
‘They’ll kill you if they find you in here. These Dinka Youth, they’ll think you’re UN and then . . . you have to go.’
‘Go? Now?’
‘First thing in the morning, as soon as you can. However you can. Do you hear me?’
There was not only desperation in this man’s eyes; he was begging me for my sake, not for his. ‘Thank you,’ I said, and watched him hurry back along the veranda.
Sleep wouldn’t come to me that night. For long hours, I prowled up and down the circumference of the tiny room, listening out for voices, half waiting for another knock at the door. When it did not come, I tried to close my eyes. I wanted to think about the north, about the four hundred miles of wilderness I had been hoping to traverse – but all I saw, in vivid splashes across the backs of my eyelids, were memories of the day in Bor: the burial mounds listing in the earth beside the river; the black blood stains where the clergy had been massacred inside the cathedral; the burnt-out tanks and the smell of death.
Before dawn, I returned to the veranda, to watch the soldiers still gathered in the car park. I still couldn’t shake those images from my mind. Compared to what was happening in South Sudan, my own expedition was as insignificant as a single raindrop in the storms that were soon to come. Even if there was a way to go downriver, I knew, now, that it wasn’t worth it. How could I justify putting other people in danger by walking through a warzone where people – real people – were starving and being killed every day? I wasn’t one of the Nile’s first explorers, and this wasn’t the 19th century, when it was acceptable to pay for your own militia and battle your way through spear-wielding tribes and impress your superiority upon them with a Gatling gun. I’d set out on a mission to discover more about the River Nile and its people, not simply to prove a point.
For the first time, I understood: I had no place being here. I thought back to the other conflict areas I’d been in: Afghanistan, Iraq, Kurdistan, Burma, the Caucasus and others. Of them all, this was undoubtedly the worst. Bor was a place without hope – so devastated, so lost and so violent that it sent a shiver of horror down my spine. I thought back to Baker, who had been thwarted by tribal wars in Uganda and took revenge by shooting dozens of ‘natives’ as he cruised upriver on his barge; I thought of the Romans, who had been driven back by the impenetrable Sudd; I thought of how Stanley had sacrificed two hundred men following the flow of the River Congo. In the final moment, I thought of Matt Power, dead on a Ugandan hillside, never to go back home. Africa seems to take lives without regard and with impunity. Somewhere in Bor, it was happening even now. I’d seen enough death in my time to understand that there is just too much to live for, and if there was one place I didn’t want to see my own end, it was South Sudan. The Nile, as far as I was concerned, could wait. She wasn’t going anywhere, and maybe one day I would come back and complete this journey in more peaceful times.
Without fully realising it at first, I had made my decision. A world record simply wasn’t worth getting shot in the back of the head for. In the morning, we would beat the road back south, following the edge of the Sudd, through the empty carcasses of villages decimated by war to the relative safety of Juba. No world record, no expedition, was worth the risk of walking blindly onward.
I lay back in bed, staring at the ceiling, and waited for the dawn’s first light.