Some
background as to what this is. Before leaving for South Sudan, Tunisia and
Egypt in March of 2012, I sent an email to an editor at a well-known New York
literary magazine explaining my travel itinerary and admiration for the
magazine's work, and wondering in kind of a general sense if they'd be
interested in something from me. I received a response a few days after returning to
New York--sure, the editor said, apologizing for the six-week delay. Come to
our offices and we can talk about a possible project.
South Sudan
had been a shattering experience; not transformative or negative, exactly, but
profound in ways that I was still working through in my own mind. So I found myself pitching a travelogue about
cosmopolitanism in war zones and former war zones, something about how conflict
brings together people from all over the world who would otherwise have nothing
to do with one another--aid workers, profiteers, mercenaries, contractors,
politicians, ect--thus creating a kind of a generic, stateless space, something
deceptively open and hopeful, but carved out of the gangrenous flesh of the
societies surrounding them. Or maybe I pitched a travelogue about
normalcy--about what a place like Juba revealed about normalcy as a concept,
and about how places establish and maintain some version of normalcy even under
abnormal circumstances, and whether that normalcy is a coping mechanism and a lie, or whether it reflects a deeper strength that isn't visible from thousands of miles away. The editor said that she'd be unable to pay me, but
gave me a piece of advice that would provide the inspiration
that really brought this essay into being: we like to tell our contributors to write something you can't get
paid for, she said.
(By the way, it may be difficult for people who aren't professional writers to grasp how profound this is. Money and writing are synonymous for members of our tribe; simply giving your writing away wastes your own time and devalues the work of your professional colleagues. Which poses the question: what kind of writing would one do for free if one were in principal opposed to it? In order for it to be worth it write for free, what kind of personal or even spiritual need would the process have to fulfill? And it invites an experiment: What would the results be if one accepted the constraint that the resulting piece was to have no commercial value?)
For my first
couple months at The Atlantic, an email back from the editor felt more
validating than the actual publication of an article. It didn't matter that
those emails were in response to messages that I had sent her first--any word back on
my submission? etc. The fact that someone at a literary magazine was looking at
it meant that I was capable of producing something with potential literary
merit--that seas would rise, servers would melt, humans would die off, and
maybe, just maybe there would still be physical proof lodged in the ruins of some college library
or magazine archive that I had created something worth preserving. It almost didn't
matter when the magazine eventually rejected the piece--it was heartening to
have been strung along for that long,
I told myself.
When a second magazine turned it down, I decided not to console
myself at all and just put the thing down for awhile and move on. I declared the project over. It was a fast
transition, and one that I don't even really understand in retrospect--it's
like it almost didn't register as a failure. Maybe I just didn't want to face the reality that the thing was literally unpublishable. A journalist friend offered to post it on his blog; I
politely declined. I thought of posting it here, and then kept finding excuses
not to. Over time, the essay's existence began to inspire the kind of anxiety
and fear that every past accomplishment inspires for me. Over even more
time, it ceased to inspire any feeling within me at all, other than curiosity
as to whether it was really as good as I remembered it being. I'm far enough away
from it that I'm unsure how much of it is true to Juba as I experienced it, and
how much if it is tainted by sentiment or idealism--I'm not sure how good it is anymore.
One thing is
certain: the South Sudan I perceived in March of 2012 isn't the South Sudan
that actually exists. And while it's true that there was somewhat less
triumphalism and militancy evident on the streets of Juba than I had expected,
I was naive in the sense that I assumed the SPLM to be rational,
western-leaning and even proto-democratic, when of course they are as
ideological, insular and opportunistic as any other guerrilla movement (although they are, it must be said, infinitely better than the pre-treaty, pre-independnece status quo).
This isn't something I necessarily fault them for--I am still convinced that the sense of South
Sudan's "failure" is founded on a position of external privilege. It's a talking point largely spouted by people who have little sense of the
country's actual challenges, which are steeper than those faced by any other country
on earth. But there is, of course, no contradiction between the fact that
conditions within South Sudan are more dire and more complicated than many people realize--and the fact that I was obviously looking at the place through
far too optimistic a lens. This is the perspective of someone who had never been to sub-Saharan Africa before, and it shows.
There are other ridiculous things about this essay, too. It's way too world-weary and self-serious. There are places where I should have eased up. There are some bits that confuse external speech and internal monologue in a way that sorta bogs the whole thing down. There are some worthwhile thoughts that I brush past, and some dumb thoughts that I explore. It definitely doesn't deserve this long of a preamble, but hey, here we are. Anyway. Enjoy.
Special
thanks for Michael Totten, Dov Friedman and Samir Paul, who looked at early
versions of this piece.
=====================
Juba, March, 2012
For most foreigners, a trip to Juba, which lies amidst
oceanic stretches of apparent nothing, dry plains that from the air resemble
sand left damp from a receding tide--must necessarily begin at the city’s
airport. Let’s start there. Or let’s start in the rough grasses surrounding the
airport’s single runway, where a fatigue-colored fighter jet is slowly being
reclaimed by nature. Wrecked planes are a feature of every airport in South
Sudan. In Wau, a graveyard of rusting fighters sits just inside the airport
perimeter; in Rumbek, a ruined fuselage rots in a busy street. As for the
un-wrecked planes—in Juba, three distinct categories of aircraft are
immediately observable. The largest in number, which sit at the far end of the
runway, furthest from the single-storey passenger terminal, are white UN
aircraft—helicopters, some of them heavy troop transports with rotors folded
over the side; commercial jets with the World Food Service’s logo on the tail
wing, hulking cargo planes. Closer in are neat rows of evenly-spaced Cessnas
belonging to Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, along with other, more
obscure groups. Closest to the terminal are a small collection of planes from
off-brand airlines; Marsland Aviation, Feeder Air, Kush, and Nasair are
represented. All commercial passenger flights to Juba originate somewhere in
the African continent, and half of them seem to originate in Khartoum.
The airport was the last thing the North Sudanese handed
over to the newly-independent South when they left in July of 2011, and one
pilot complained bitterly to me about the sheer incompetence of Southern
air-traffic controllers, who were nervy and poorly-trained, at least compared
to their Kenyan and Ugandan counterparts, and would ask for altitude and distance
like every fucking thirty seconds. They would do it on a single radio
frequency—there were no separate channels for approach and takeoff and landing,
just a hopeless tangle of voices talking on top of one another, in different
accents and at different volumes. Compounding the dangers in this already busy
airspace was the air traffic control tower’s alarming lack of radar. Everything
is done procedurally, based on the location of approaching and departing planes
and the present takeoff and landing queue, which is first-come-first-serve. Not
even the UN gets priority. But the anarchy ends as soon as you land, at which
point the fledgling and cash-strapped South Sudanese government presents you
with a bill for all sorts of services that are virtually free everywhere else.
In Entebbe, Uganda, the government-imposed landing fee is $25. In Juba, it’s
$116. Overnight parking in Juba is $70. It’s $6 in Entebbe.
An aviation connoisseur, or someone who spent a lot of time
at the Air and Space Museum as a young boy, will be immediately intrigued by
the veritable air show that awaits him. There are the Antonovs, glass-nosed
Russian monsters with 32 wheels and red-lipped jet engines that taper
menacingly in front. Less forbidding are the tube-shaped Hawkers built in the
1960s, or the boxy DC-3s that rolled off the assembly line towards the end of
World War II, but are still airworthy, and can take off and land on as little
as 900 feet of dirt runway. They carry medicine and generators and sometimes even
vehicles to place-names of ambiguous linguistic and historical origin—Perriyang
and Aweil and Malakal, dirt strips and dried lakebeds and places that appear on
no map.
A serviceable Hawker jet, with room for a dozen passengers
and several thousand pounds of cargo will only set you back $2 million or so,
one pilot explained to me. But this piece of shit brakes down all the time.
There’s a reason you see planes like this out here, gutted commercial jets,
busted Russian helicopters. They’re obsolete anywhere else.
+++
In Juba itself, you expect to see graves. A friend who
visited Sarajevo once told me that the city offered little evidence that a war
had been fought there less than two decades earlier—only cemeteries that
blanketed the surrounding hills, visible from virtually any sector of the city,
serve as testimony to some horror or another, though they are silent as to
which horror. And while you expect to see the residue of war, ruined buildings
and charred vehicles and craters, you’ll in fact see none of these things in
Sarajevo. But death, or at least the fact of some recent mass death,
nevertheless beams from grey reservations of the newly and prematurely dead, a
ubiquity that makes grim demands on the imagination, inflicting the image of a
hecatomb upon the same physical space as a city that suddenly appears
unnervingly normal.
But in Juba there aren’t even graves, or at least there weren’t
any that I saw. The war dead are somewhere; disturbingly, that somewhere isn’t
obvious or apparently visible. Neither did I see ruined buildings, nor all that
many charred vehicles (that wrecked fighter notwithstanding), and I certainly
didn’t see any craters. I didn’t see any formal war memorials, no ostentatious
public displays of triumphalism or regret, no murals or statues, no eternal
flames surrounded by wreaths. At
the roundabouts there are already-fading posters from the previous July’s
Martyr’s Day—exhortations to remember “the 2.5 million whose sacrifice formed
our national foundation”—along with very occasional propagandistic reminders
that “the SPLA stands on guard for the nation.” These reminders are weather
worn and admirably discreet, considering that the country’s origins lie in
violent revolutionary struggle, and that its government ministers and even its
president began their careers as guerilla fighters rather than politicians, per
se. A traveler arrives in a city already at odds with an unfathomable and
bloody recent past, a past that commands no subjective, physical presence, at
least not immediately, not in those first confused hours of choking humidity
and flickering cell-phone signals. But already emerging is the sense of a city
half-finished, a place whose atrocities remain guiltily archived in the darker
regions of the visitor’s mind, even as they’re given few tangible reference
points in the external world, where exhortations to proper health and hygiene far
outnumber state-sanctioned reminders of the war. “New country, new beginning,”
read several large billboards. “Have an HIV test today.”
Yet the war endures in subterranean form: figuratively, in
mind and memory; and literally, in the tens of thousands of landmines that ring
the city. Bombs of either variety lie buried under the dominating facts of the
city’s physical existence: the smattering of high rises encased in scaffolding,
white Land Cruisers (NGO and UN, mostly) clogging smooth and newly-paved
streets, pop-up shanty-neighborhoods of freshly-arrived migrants, palm-shaded
riverside hotel bars where Dutch consultants and Ugandan businessmen gather to
waste their evenings—all of it evidence of a place exploding into a novel and
unfamiliar normality.
+++
The oldest building in Juba is
its Mother Church, which was built by Anglican missionaries in the 1920s and
sits at a confluence of shaded dirt roads, behind an expensive hotel that
opened less than a year ago. It’s a red brick, open-air building with a roof
made out of tin siding; the pews are also brick, and the floor is a lustrous
concrete. It is cool and breezy, and on a boiling day—which is most days—the
winds whipping through its partly-open ceiling evoke a sense of spiritual
expansiveness, of being in a place quite a bit larger than mere physicality
would suggest.
When we were here during the war, the pastor told me, all
the South Sudanese that lived here were not allowed to go outside more than 15
kilometers. And if you want to go out you need to get a permit. For you just to
get to your farm, you must get a permit to travel, and you must get no
objection from internal security, public security or military intelligence.
When you get no objections on your documents, you can go out. Sometimes you’re
given a no objection document, but all of a sudden you find yourself kept in.
You were treated as a foreigner in your own home.
And then the war itself—those
years when the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the country’s eventual liberators,
laid siege to the last major city it had been unable to capture, a northern
garrison where the only cars were military vehicles, and the only permanent
structures were government offices and mosques that hardly anyone uses anymore,
even though they’re the largest and really most impressive buildings in the
city—everything is centered on the war, he continued. Everything is actually
portraying the image of war. If you see the kids making toys, they will be
manufacturing military aircraft for war, building tanks for war. Everything is
war. No living being could avoid it. If you bang a drum, everyone will lie down
immediately, even the chickens, even the goats who were living in the city,
everyone will lie down until the sounds is passed. That is the culture of war.
The city now inhabited a
different universe. Life had been organized through the facile authoritarianism
of landmines, soldiers and travel permits. Now there was chaos: language riots
at the University, ethnic violence at the edge of town. But the chaos was
cosmopolitan, at least. Unlike during the war years, there is evidence of a
larger world that Juba is a part of, abundant evidence, even.
The hotel was not there before,
he said. The only vehicles were from the church and then the army and maybe
some few people in the government here or there. But there are actually traffic
jams today. You can see there’s a cultural shock. Even someone who cannot dream
to have a car, finds himself driving.
There is a dignity to this chaos, and the image of a life
without fear—a life that the South Sudanese could own—has smoothed away decades
of frustration and death. Or perhaps it hasn’t. There were times when the
invisibility of the war was evidence of some grand, humanistic triumph in which
every endlessly forgiving citizen of the country could share. At other times,
this seemed like a self-concocted fiction.
During the war, the pastor told me, the Dinka died by the
hundreds of thousands. Some of them are Anglicans. A Dinka once came to me and
said: forgiveness, don’t talk about forgiveness. And I said no. Revenge is His.
Revenge belongs to God.
+++
The city is a bewilderment. There is no coherence to it.
Where is the downtown? Is the downtown the dusty central souk, where pacing
young men furtively shuffle rolls of pink and blue South Sudanese pounds, and
Kenyans sell stacks of dress clothes and light bulbs? Maybe the downtown is
near the Juba Bridge, the city’s sole means of reaching the lightly-inhabited
eastern bank of the White Nile, and within walking distance of the
recently-incinerated Konya-Konya Marketplace—there are dark whispers that the
owner of the land the market occupied found the place inconvenient to his
long-term real estate development plans—as well as some of the finer riverside
hotels. Is the downtown in fact near the ministries complex, the walled-off,
1970s-era seat of the new country’s government, a place of crumbling brutalist
architecture and spit-shined black SUVs? I don’t know. Juba certainly has a
center, radial streets that are home to the Norwegian Veterinarians
International and the Eight-Government Joint Donation Committee and the
Nonviolent Conflict Responders and a thousand other organizations of ambiguous
but seemingly well-meaning purpose. All the time I was there I never saw a map
of Juba, so I’m not sure where this center is. On how to drive from the souk to
the Nile, or from the airport to the bridge, my directions would be worse than
ignorance. There is no promenade along the White Nile, few landmarks, natural
or otherwise, to suggest your location.
In Juba, muddled geography is a tyranny in the sense that
any basic, seemingly insurmountable fact is a tyranny. One morning at a
nearly-empty hotel bar I met a South Sudanese man who had fled to Kenya during
the civil war and then moved on to Australia, where he became a successful
computer engineer. When the war ended he had no desire and no conceivable reason
to return to a homeland that was still in a state of violent transition, but
when independence came, he felt pinched by obligation, and his conscience could
not allow him to simply enjoy a comfortable life in a borrowed corner of the
earth. So for the last few months he had been on a consultancy with the
Ministry of Tourism. In the deep south, down near the Kenyan border, are
grasslands that rival the Serengeti in diversity—there are elephant herds and
even lions, and each spring, antelopes migrate there, thousands of them, fur
and hunched spines stretched to the horizon. It was the largest land migration
in the world before the war scared them away—nature, it seems, has an instinct
for human troubles. But it’s been seven years, and they’re beginning to come
back. Had there been many tourists in South Sudan since independence? No, he
said, chuckling and shaking his head.
Another thing about the deep south, he added: pineapples
grow in the wild there. You don’t even have to try to cultivate them. Just dig them
out of the ground. The land in our country is the most fertile in Africa.
Later in the day I found myself at yet another hotel bar
(for a western visitor, Juba is a city of hotel bars). Remembering what the man
had told me, I ordered a pineapple juice. I was given a can of Rani brand
pineapple juice, from Yemen.
In all likelihood, the can had been taken by container ship
from Yemen—thirsty, suffering Yemen—through the piratical waters of the Gulf of
Aden, then to Kenya, then trucked through Uganda along miles of maraudering
clay roads. It was a paragon of wasted effort and wasted local capacity, and in
this respect, the humble can of pineapple juice was not alone: There is a
national airline, but its planes are supposedly registered in Kenya. There is a
national beer (White Bull—a Toast to a New Nation), but there are whispers that
it’s owned by a Kenyan company as well. There’s an excellent weekly newspaper
called The New Nation—but it’s a project of a European NGO, and its editor in
chief is Belgian (even though most of its writers and columnists are locals).
The woman who sold me phone cards at a roadside stall was Kenyan. The bartender
at the Bedouin is Ugandan. What about the man scanning a fully-uniformed
Bangladeshi UN peacekeeper’s groceries at the JIT Mart? It’s well known that
the JIT Mart—the only “western” style grocery store in town, and as fine a
place as any to spend $9 on a box of Frosted Flakes—is owned by Kenyans (or
possibly South Africans), and the man looks as if he could be from India or
Pakistan, which in this part of the world means he’s probably from Kenya, which
means that he, like virtually every other laborer and businessman and piece of
commercial produce in Juba, is not from anywhere that’s even particularly near
Juba.
There are hotels called the Shalom and the Beijing and the
Da Vinci, and one optimistically named the New Sudan. Everywhere is somewhere
else. Peer into one of the prefab, shipping container houses on the grounds of
the Afex Village—the sort of place where consultants and World Bank bureaucrats
might live for months at a time—and you might see a heavyset older gentleman in
khaki shorts hunched over a desktop computer, surrounded by African kitsch and
plywood attempts at designer furniture, as unbothered here as he would be in
Geneva or Soho.
Everywhere is somewhere else and indeed, everyone is from
somewhere else. If you walked 300 yards from the waterfront pre-fabs, past a
gravel parking lot crowded with white Land Cruisers, you’d find a neat
encampment with outdoor shower stalls and its own little family of goats, flush
against the Afex’s perimeter, which abuts slums where I’m told that homebrewing
and prostitution are the only means of income and where Dinka and Nuer
occasionally shoot at each other over cows. At night, stereos blast Congolese
rumba and propulsive Ugandan pop—schizoid sounds, the music of other places and
other lives.
It took about a day for me to realize that almost none of
the city’s drivers, waiters, construction workers, bartenders, hotel clerks or
dishwashers are actually South Sudanese. For reasons that I still don’t
understand, the locals are all but totally locked out of the labor market. I
heard polite (if loaded) socio-historical explanations for this, something
along the lines that imperialism in the Sudan was based around Ottoman-style
feudalism, while Uganda and Kenya reaped the benefits of western European
Protestantism, which elevates work and self-betterment and individual dignity
to the level of religious obligation. The most common answer to the labor
question, however, was cultural. There’s just no culture of work, I was told.
People wanted jobs, but they weren’t used to having jobs.
I assumed this was some sort of coded racism bandied about
by condescending westerners (as well as by condescending Ugandans and Kenyans),
this idea that South Sudanese would rather starve than work. But I heard a
similar story from a group of South Sudanese economics professors at Juba
University during a public lecture that touched on the country’s labor crisis—a
panel discussion held in a sweltering, badly decaying lecture hall with
malfunctioning lights and microphones.
This country is a goldmine for painters and electricians,
one economist said. What are our people doing? We cannot say that there are no
jobs, because the Kenyans and Ugandans are mining gold in South Sudan.
To develop entrepreneurship, you need a system that develops
skill, another speaker said. In a militarized and traumatized society, this is
hard. But what do we do? We could not de-traumatize our youth. They are still
militant in their thinking.
What did he mean militant thinking had endured? And what did
he even mean by “militant thinking?” He did not necessarily mean a predilection
towards violence. Take, for example this bottle of Rwenzori brand water from
Uganda, one speaker explained. Now here is a bottle of the local brand—of a
locally-owned brand, even. In fact, this bottle of water represents one of the
few truly domestic products you can buy here. The locally-produced bottle
contains 0.65 liters of water for the same price as half a liter of Rwenzori.
But the difference isn’t obvious to the naked eye, and most of our population
is illiterate. The local brand now produces half-liter bottles. Their product’s
advantage is gone. Our people can’t understand the competitive edge.
Consumerism, work, a rational economic environment—these cannot function here.
If you spend money in the Juba market, one speaker said, the
money goes to Kampala. It goes out.
The boda-boda is the only industry in Juba that South
Sudanese dominate. The barriers to entry are minimal: simply obtain a
motorcycle or the right to drive one for a few hours a day, and you can begin
ferrying people from place to place, five pounds for short distances, 10 or 15,
perhaps, for a ride to the airport or the Jebel Market or one of the nicer
riverside hotels. The boda drivers are sharply-dressed young men—they wear
aviators and striped collared shirts, and they evince an unflinching stoicism
that, by my 10th or so boda ride, amounted to a collective
philosophical statement.
The roads in Juba are dangerous—there is only an emerging
sense of how to behave in a traffic jam, where imperious Land Cruisers and
clouds of buzzing two-wheelers jostle each other for position, sometimes losing
their footing amidst the dust and noise. In this environment, simply to ride a
boda as a passenger is exhausting. The sun, the blacktop, the clutter of
wheezing exhaust pipes and the hot motor underneath wring the human body like a
wet rag, and by the time even a short journey ends, you feel the dizziness of
an oncoming stupor, of a body sucked of whatever moisture and whatever vital energy
it had held.
But the boda drivers are unfazed. They began to represent
some ideal beauty, fearless and young. They will dart between 18-wheel trucks
on a busy street, even when you tell them not to. They will pretend to slow
down if their passenger is concerned with the current speed, only to quickly
speed up again. In the dark early morning, when wild dogs own the empty and
unilluminated streets, they will gun their bikes down lonesome straight-aways,
screeching to a halt only when a limping and quite possibly rabid animal
crosses their path.
Much to my regret, I didn’t
interview any boda drivers, although I did take a picture of one. He’s bald,
maybe in his early 20s, with a grid-patterned button-up shirt and a black pair
of sunglasses. His shoulders are hunched, and his arms dangle at his side—there
is nothing bothered or anxious about him, no grease marks or sweat stains. I’m
not sure that his job even existed during the war years, when Juba was a much
smaller and far more isolated place—he is newly enabled to drive on paved
streets that actually lead somewhere, that are clogged with people on important
and purposeful journeys, even though this sudden eruption of importance and
purposefulness means that the ever-vulnerable boda driver might be side-swiped
or spun out or killed at any given moment.
There is something I’ve read into
his cool and vaguely sneering gaze that speaks of the mundane audacity of surviving
here, but also of the crushing burdens attached to even the most minimal form
of unthinking physical continuity. He strikes an effortlessly badass pose, a
cowboy pose; there is a happy and novel independence inherent in this vocation
of his, though it’s possible, looking at the picture, that this confidence
inhabits a dead or decaying spirit. Is there some secret desiccation hidden in
his careless hunch of the shoulders? He doesn’t have a helmet. His might be an
attitude of superiority towards the thickening chaos that surrounds him, or an
attitude of total acceptance.
+++
In a building abutting the Da Vinci’s parking lot, a few
hundred yards from the bulrushes and mango trees lining the White Nile, is the
recording studio for Iconic Productions. I didn’t expect to be invited in—I was
simply examining the posters lining the studio’s windows when a tall young man
with long, braided hair all but insisted I come inside.
I’m an artist of dance hall, the man said. Sudanese-style.
He played me an excerpt from the song he was working on, and it had a
simultaneously heavier and more melodic character than Jamaican dance hall. The
track had obviously been made with nothing more than a synthesizer, a computer
program and a single human voice.
That song you just heard, he explained, is about the
uprising in our country because of the economic crisis. This is a growing
society, so any song we do must be about directly educating people.
The Konya-Konya market had burned down just days earlier,
and already a song had been written about it: the market is destroyed, the
artist repeated during the track’s pulsating chorus, now everything is
expensive: sugar, salt, transportation.
The studio’s manager was also there, a 19-year old from the
nearby city of Yei. He spoke Swahili, English, Arabic and Dinka, which was
advantageous, since not all of the artists who used the studio were South
Sudanese: there were also Congolese and Ugandans who paid 300 pounds for an
hour of studio time, enough time to record a song that could be played on local
radio (without any royalty to the artist, of course), and then maybe catch the
attention of a concert promoter, or, more lucratively, a politician.
Politicians in South Sudan never traveled—and certainly never campaigned—without
a musician or two in tow. Even so, the manager explained that music was not
exactly political here, or at least it wasn’t political in a divisive or
partisan sense: in the studio, and in music in general, people meet as South
Sudanese—as friends. They do not ask each other where they are from, or what
ethnic group they belong to.
They had songs about AIDS prevention, hip-hop tracks in
Dinka, story-songs meant to revive tales that were already being forgotten,
past tales, the producer called them. There are South Sudanese spread all over
the world, he told me, and most of our people forget their culture easily.
The war had killed up to 2.5 million people and displaced
several million more. It depopulated vast tracts of the country, and any
ambitious person either fought for the SPLA or fled to Kenya or Ethiopia or
Khartoum or Egypt in search of a high school education or simply a life with a
more manageable baseline of existential danger. Music could form an identity, a
common language for a broken land.
Or perhaps not: the South Sudanese music market is just not
making money right now, the artist told me. You can be very famous and still
make nothing, and even if you are paid, they don’t pay you the way they’re
supposed to pay you.
+++
On the recommendation of a colleague, I met a Canadian
fellow who had lived in Central Africa for the past 15 years, and was now a
consultant or NGO hack of some sort of another. We met at an Ethiopian restaurant
by the airport road. Ethiopian restaurants in Juba occupy a diner’s middle
ground. They aren’t posh by any means, although the overwhelming probability is
that a foreigner won’t get sick eating at one. Yet foreigners tend not to eat
at them—not out of any latent racism, mind you, but because most of them have
NGO or government expense accounts that obviate any need for budget dining
options, almost all of which happen to be Ethiopian here. Why struggle with
overcooked goat meat at the Paradiso, which sits across the street from the Red
Cross compound’s decidedly un-scenic war-era concrete barrier, when spare ribs
and ostrich steaks await you at the Da Vinci’s stunning waterfront? Luckily, the Ethiopian places offer a comforting lack of pretention. There’s an
Ethiopian restaurant in downtown Juba called Lula’s, and if you walk up to a
seemingly-purposeless wooden table in the establishment’s deepest, most
fly-ridden reaches and display a flawless $100 bill from 2009 or later, you
will get a mind-boggling exchange rate of 3.6 South Sudanese pounds to the
dollar, which is nearly a half-pounder higher than the allegedly official rate
of 3.2 pounds, which is basically like getting $10 for free (one of the city’s
more ominous idiosyncrasies—at least from the perspective of South Sudanese
economic planners—was that no one knew quite how much the money was worth).
Lunch, accompanied by meandering 70s Ethio-jazz gasping from a beat-up cassette
player behind the bar, is practically on them. And despite the flies and the
heat, the place is such an upgrade over being outdoors that you want to sit
there for hours, drinking Kenyan-imported coke, or perhaps Ethiopian-imported
coffee, which takes ten minutes to make and is served in a kind of gourd-shaped
jug, and tastes a bit like Turkish coffee would if the sediment were evenly
distributed throughout the body of the liquid, rather than clustered in a
single muddy glob.
We met in an Ethiopian restaurant. He had the beaten look of
the frontiersman—sturdy, well-worn clothes clinging to leather flesh, a face
made wise by decades of accumulated weariness. His countenance was consistent
with the news he brought, which he conveyed with a hint of boredom, as if the
country’s problems were so intractable as to be banal: Khartoum was mobilizing
thousands of militants for service in Southern Kordofan; villagers in Nuba were
getting pounded by long-range artillery and rockets; the price of basic
foodstuffs had exploded on the southern side of the border. Yes, people were
optimistic now. Juba was once a small place surrounded by SPLA, with only
military pickup cars and so on. Now they were seeing things they had never seen
in their lives. They had never seen a Prado. They had never seen a car that
wasn’t a cattle car. They had never seen buildings sprout up beyond the
mountains, or buildings more than a couple of stories tall. But the needs here
are the same as needs everywhere, and the people were smarter than the French
in the sense that they wouldn’t wait 1000 years to start their revolution.
For lunch, the Canadian recommended I go to a place called
the Logali House, which he described as the fanciest restaurant in town. But I
do not like it, he said. I did not move to Africa to be around westerners.
The South African-owned Logali House is indeed the most
expensive hotel in Juba. With its barred windows and pale concrete exterior,
the building it most resembles is the Bin Laden compound, even down to its
inconvenient (and therefore discreet) location at the end of a dirt side street.
One night there will set you back $400, which buys you access to a place that’s
aesthetically calibrated to evoke a comfortable and familiar western existence.
There is an epic breakfast buffet. The interior spaces are spotless and
mercilessly air-conditioned, and the restaurant’s bathrooms have framed art
photos of African cattle. On a large flat-screen TV in the restaurant’s outdoor
patio, the blinding green of a distant cricket oval, manicured, so orderly and
logical as to seem fictitious, an occidental fantasia—reassures you that you
are actually someplace other than where you are.
At brunch on a Sunday, the Logali House is a fascinating
place to dine alone. There’s lunchroom chatter about the torture of UN flights
and difficulties getting up north. At the table next to mine, a woman from an
NGO I’d never heard of clutched a motorcycle helmet. I’ve decided I don’t want
to die on a boda-boda, she told her brunch mates, who were French, Dutch and
American—young and attractive in a generically urbane, vaguely collegiate
sense. A few days ago, she said, there was a fuckup at the airport, and my
driver claimed he could get me to Bentiu in 12 hours. I was tempted let me tell
you.
The conversation abruptly turned to vomit. When did you
vomit? Did the retrofitted Russian military helicopters that UN uses (maybe not
retrofitted—they look like they’re 30 years old as soon as they get off the
assembly line, a pilot told me)—make you vomit? What about those long Land
Rover journeys along potholed clay roads? What about you, had you ever vomited?
No, replied a sunglassed Frenchman. I have never vomited. Not even when you
were a kid? No. Never.
At brunch I had a bacon cheese burger—an actual, not fucking
around burger, thick and topped with fresh avocado and an English-style bacon
sheet, rather than the thin, anemic strips we Americans are used to.
+++
I grew bored one afternoon, and a short walk from my
hotel—the cheap and Ugandan-owned and sometimes-electrified (and, therefore, ephemerally
air-conditioned!) Bros—brought me to the Konya-Konya market, which was quite
busy despite having burned down just a few days before. I could see the
burned-out husk of the former marketplace, blackened plywood beams and piles of
ash, crumbling walls and debris whose removal in either the short or long-term
felt somehow unlikely. The rumors had already escalated: why had it taken the
fire department (encouragingly, Juba seems to have one of these) such a long
time to show up? Could it be that the government also wanted to clear the
Konya-Konya of its troublesome tenants? If this had been the plan, it obviously
hadn’t worked. Already there was fresh plywood going up, merchants staking
their claims to an area that—out of inertia or stubbornness on the part of a
population that had been through an awful lot worse than this—would likely function as a marketplace again someday soon.
And on the other side of the road was a glimpse of what the
Konya-Konya had looked like just a few days before: live chickens stuffed in
wooden cages and clothing racks offering nothing but Boy Scout outfits and Texan
police uniforms. The Konya-Konya is a place of constant movement: of bicycles
and motorcycles crammed between narrow rows of ramshackle stalls, of belching
minibuses and voices—pleading, laughing, the hushed tones of negotiation, loud
inviting voices, squawking and whinnying animal voices. Anything seems possible
here. You can pay to have your cell phone charged or your business cards made
using a computer and printer resourcefully hooked up to a small external
generator; you can also catch a bus to Kenya or Uganda, or sit in the back of a
coffee stall and watch Eritrean satellite TV. This is where the city lives, not
in the hotel bars, not behind a dragnet of caltrops and concrete walls.
Back at the hotel, there were flyers around the bar
notifying customers that an “Afrobeat” band performed at the hotel every
Saturday night. This seemed plausible: the Bros’ waterfront, which is ringed by
a rusty barbed-wire fence that obliterates an otherwise pleasant view of the
Nile, accommodated scores of outdoor tables, far more tables than were needed
for everyone staying at the hotel, as well as a large concrete stage with a new-looking
drum kit. I got back to the hotel that night to learn that the band really
didn’t play there anymore, if it had ever played there at all. I decided to
begin a movie I’d brought with me, Bela Tarr’s Satantango, a seven-hour film
about the last days of a Hungarian collective farm.
The movie begins with an eleven-minute fixed shot of cows
pouring out of a dilapidated agricultural warehouse, just an endless torrent of
cows, moaning and mooing and attempting to mount one another, and it seemed to
me that the cows had triumphed over something—that they’d overwhelmed their human
masters and earned their freedom, or a sort of conditional freedom, simply by
virtue of a long, slow decay, the inertia and eventual self-destruction of the
systems that held them in bondage. The land was theirs now, and the land would
eventually reclaim and destroy everything that was external to it, first of all
the warehouse, an island in a bovine mob, already swallowed by copulating dumb
beasts; next the drunken, backstabbing townsfolk, who lived repetitious and
spiritually desiccated lives whose meaning and value they weren’t even wholly
convinced of. To me the scene conveyed a kind of eternality to the cow,
something that mocked the constant dissatisfaction and changeability that every
human community and every individual human being is subject to.
South Sudan is a land of cows. Cows appear on both the 5 and
10-pound bills. Wars are still fought over them. During the civil war, the
northern military and their proxies would steal or even massacre cows. There
are parts of South Sudan where cows represent wealth, status, food, milk and
marriage; one NGO worker told me somewhat crassly that in Jonglei, where
various tribes were busy massacring each other over cattle, local leaders only
cared about three things: their tribe, their women and their cows. In the
southern part of the north Sudan, the socio-historical rift between cow-herders
and camel-herders is an ancient and bitter one.
In those blurred moments before the final onset of a hot,
uncomfortable sleep, the film was a mirror of places I’d already been, and I
was looking at the flatlands of Northern Bar El-Gazal, where the cows stood
sturdy and fresh, and the humans were wasted and traumatized by decades of
vicious genocidal war—and at the skeleton trees and dead grass of Yida, where
refugees chased from their homes by the Sudanese military lived in crooked
wooden hovels, and the cows’ horns grow up to two feet in length.
+++
SPLA founder Dr. John Garang is the county’s hero, even
though his vision of a “New Sudan” once stood in opposition to South
Sudan’s current independence. He believed in a single Sudan for all of its
citizens, a worthy dream that died when the Khartoum regime rigged nation-wide
elections, and when Garang—who became Vice President of Sudan in 2005—was
killed in a highly-suspicious helicopter crash just days after taking office.
On the posters for Martyrs’ Day, which is observed on the anniversary of
Garang’s death, he appears in western dress, with a rainbow arching halo-like
overhead. His face is on every South Sudanese pound, wearing the calm yet
resigned expression of a man whose tragedy is finally over. In the reception
area of the Bros, there is a photo of the great leader, with the caption: Dr.
John Garang. He was an icon, a fighter and a hero. You are a burning spear
within us forever.
Garang’s SPLA didn’t capture Juba during the war, but he is
nevertheless buried there. His tomb lies just down the road from the ministries
complex, and he is buried along a stretch of roadway marked by a long row of
international flags, including the flag of the north Sudan. On the other side
of the road is a presidential reviewing stand for celebrations or parades, and
the complex—the flags, the tomb, and the grandstand—is guarded by surly army
officers who might arrest you if they catch you taking pictures.
Garang is buried beneath a slightly larger than life-sized
statue of himself, built of a plastered-over bronze that is already peeling. He
holds a book under one arm, and a walking cane in the other; with the cane, he
motions towards the road and the row of flags, perhaps towards a future of
promise and responsibility, towards freedom, and equal membership in the same
community of nations as their former enemies. Garang is wearing a suit, and
there is no suggestion that he had been a man of war, no sign that you were
standing next to the body of one of the most successful, sophisticated and
brilliant guerilla leaders in modern history. You were standing before Garang
the agriculture PhD—Garang the statesman.
The statue sits in the middle of a vast, walled-off tract
cluttered with piles of asphalt and dirt. Maybe it will become a park one day.
Something is being built there, but it is not clear what.
