Why Southern Sudan’s peace must be passionately guarded

By Kiundu Waweru

Michael Deng rises to his imposing, sinewy height and asks the girls in his communication class at St Paul’s University, Nairobi campus, not to cry when he tells his story.

They laugh him off. He smiles and starts slowly, his words unsteady. As he recollects his early life, Deng doesn’t mention playing with toys or running naked in the rain; instead he talks about his elder brother teaching him to cock, clean and load a gun — the Kalachnikov, he calls it. Later we learn from the brother that the gun was actually an AK47, so named after its designer, Mikhail Kalashnikov.

Deng was born to a large family. His father, Mach Deng, had 26 wives.

His days seemed normal, as he would, in the company of other boys and some men, go out into the field to look after cattle; except that the boys dragged kalachnikovs along.

Deng, 24, says he must have been seven years old when he engaged in a “real battle” against the Northerners (people from north Sudan).

They were out grazing when the cows’ mooing was drowned by the sound of gunshots. Women and children were screaming and running hither and thither.

Never feared death

Deng and the other boys joined the ‘front line’.

“We took the enemy by surprise; because they never saw us coming (beign tiny and sneaky). Sadly, four of us were killed,” says Deng, who had from then on become a child soldier.

But Deng says they never feared death. They were made to believe that they were protecting their parents, and the children who were left behind when they went out grazing.

Sometimes, the boys would go for training, and one group would pretend to be the enemy. During the exchange, there would be fatalities.

The Sudanese second Civil War, 1983 to 2005, in which Deng was born to, claimed some of his family members as he watched. He says his father was a commander in the late powerful leader John Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

Deng’s life turned upside down one day while he was having breakfast at his home with his father, mother, elder brother and two sisters.

“There was long grass outside, and one of my brothers said he thought he saw a head bobbing, as if someone was hiding,” remembers Deng. The brother rushed to fetch his gun but never made it.

Shot in cold blood

The enemy descended on the house and ordered everyone outside. They were shepherded into a circle and Deng’s mother was the first to be shot in cold blood. His father was next, then the brother.

“My two sisters ran away. They were small and the men did not bother to go after them. One man stood guard at the path leading to the gate, and I dashed for his gun. I was trying to wrestle him off it when one of his colleagues shot me on the leg,” says Deng as he pulls his trouser to show us the scar.

Then neighbours arrived, armed to the tooth. Deng’s home turned into a battle zone. “The firing went on and on, as I lay there bleeding.”

Deng has the physical scar just below his knee that reminds him of that fateful day. However, the emotional scars run deep though he rarely talks about it.

“I still ‘see’ the face of the man who killed my father,” he says, reflectively.

Deng and other wounded people were rescued and loaded into a lorry, which headed to Ethiopia. But the lorry broke down along the way and they had to walk across the desert to Kenya, with no food, water. “We had no option but to drink our urine,” says Deng, matter-of-factly.

Home is best

Deng recuperated at a hospital in Lokichogio in Kenya for six months and in 1996, he went to Kakuma Refugee Camp, where he attended school for the first time and stayed there for seven years.

Later his uncle, who lives in Nairobi’s Komarock Estate, took him in. He now has a Diploma in Business Management and is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Communication.

“I would like to go back to my country when I graduate and help build a vibrant media that will educate people against civil strife.”

Right now, he says, his country is full of foreigners. The country is still deep rooted in culture and parents arrange marriages for their children. “They like their daughters to be married by men working in offices, men in suits.”

This has seen the South Sudanese youth shun manual work, and they are all over the world in major colleges and universities to achieve that vision.

It is not easy to live in a foreign country, however, says Deng. It is difficult to get employment and they “hustle daily for school fees and rent.”

At some point, their government paid their school fees “but now, there is an oil crisis in our country. We are on our own.”

But there is nothing as good as independence. So as the Sudanese celebrate their country’s independence, Deng will be among them.