Tradition evolves in southern Sudan camps

By Raymond Thibodeaux, Globe Correspondent

Aug 28, 2005 (AKUONG CAMP) — At 12 years old, Machuei Marial Makuei is too young to sing praise to his favorite bulls, as is the local custom for teenage boys whom elders have entrusted with the herds.

So just before dawn each morning, on this cleared stretch of grassland about 10 miles east of Rumbek, Sudan’s southern capital, he quietly hums the songs to himself as he grooms his father’s cattle, a herd more than a hundred strong.

”I want to stay with the cattle because they need me, but my father wants me to go to school,” Machuei said with a seriousness that sets him apart from the other children.

Machuei (pronounced Ma-chewy) and his family are among the thousands of southern Sudanese living in seasonal cattle camps, which for generations have served as the engine of culture and identity for the Dinka, the largest tribe in Africa’s largest country. The nomadic camps are where boys and girls are initiated into cattle life, south Sudan’s highest form of wealth, where the bonds with their families’ herds are deepened by learning to milk the cows, birth calves, cure hides, sing praise, dance for the best bulls, and neuter and decorate the lesser ones.

They are also where boys and girls first fall in love and form relationships often measured in cattle, with bridal dowries bringing at least a dozen bulls and scores of cows.

For decades, the tradition had been under threat by war between Sudan’s government in the mostly Islamic north and rebel militias in the Christian and animist south. Many Dinka and their close cousins, the Nuer, lost their herds in countless raids by government-backed Arab militias.

But with a January peace deal ending Sudan’s 21-year civil war, the tradition is facing a new challenge: peace. The end of the fighting has brought a push to develop and modernize southern Sudan, a region largely ignored by the Khartoum government.

The promise of high-paying jobs is luring thousands of people from cattle camps and village farms to larger towns like Rumbek. Businesses are starting to flourish, kindled by the belief that southern Sudan, under the peace deal, stands to pocket about half the country’s oil wealth, about $1.5 billion a year, according to UN estimates.

Expectations are high. People here want paved roads, phone lines, electricity, running water, schools, libraries, and access to healthcare. Southern Sudan is in the midst of a great leap forward, fueled by the euphoria of sudden wealth.

”Our cattle camps might not survive the next two generations,” said Ambrose Riny Thiik, southern Sudan’s chief justice. ”I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. We need to catch up with the rest of the world while managing the social upheaval that’s bound to cause.”

Catching up includes mandatory schooling for children, especially in southern Sudan, where the United Nations estimates that less than a third of the population is literate.

Children are the backbone of the region’s agricultural economy, filling a labor gap left after many young men and women ran off to join militias during the war, mostly within the ranks of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/ Army, the south’s largest rebel group.

Thiik and other high-ranking SPLM/A officials are collaborating with the UN mission in Sudan and dozens of nongovernmental agencies to lift southern Sudan from the chaos of war and catapult it into the 21st century.

”We are beginning to see changes. We are working on an interim national constitution that recognizes gender equality and child rights, which are often ignored by customary law,” said Akur Ajuoi, a Dinka working in Rumbek as a legal attorney for UNICEF, the United Nations fund for children.

”These are changes influenced by the south Sudan diaspora and those returning from places like the US and Europe,” Ajuoi said, herself returning from London, where she was partly raised.

Several SPLM/A leaders, touting education as the key to turning southern Sudan from a militarized society into a civilian one, have vowed to provide free primary education, pressuring parents to send their children to school by levying steep fines if they don’t.

But it is likely that some parents will keep their children at home anyway — so great is the parents’ need for their children’s labor, aid workers say. In Rumbek, children as young as 10 earn income for their parents by working at the cattle market, grooming and feeding cattle being put up for auction.

It’s usually the teenage boys, with AK-47 assault rifles slung across their shoulders — to fend off cattle rustlers and bandits — who lead their family herds in the dry season from the relative safety of towns and villages to the grassy marshes between the Bahr El Jebel and Bahr El Ghazal rivers, which converge into the White Nile.

The open range where they set up camp invites danger, mainly from scavenging hyenas, cattle rustlers, and mosquitoes that carry malaria, the leading cause of death in south Sudan.

At the Akuong camp, dozens of huts made from tree branches and dried grass sit like tiny islands amid a sea of cattle. Teenagers spread mounds of cow dung to dry in the afternoon for burning to drive away mosquitoes at night. Children play amid the din of steady mooing.

Before the last stars of the morning dim, the wiry, shirtless Machuei has finished applying a coat of a gray paste — made from cattle urine and dung ash — to the cattle horns as a protection against scratches. By 11 a.m., the sun is scorching and bright enough to burn the landscape white.

Machuei dodges the sharp points of horns as he loosens the neck ropes holding each bull and cow to a wooden stake in the ground.

Freed of their bonds, the cattle remain sleepily where they are until Machuei’s older brother, Malual, 17, gathers them for the day’s long walk to the fresh grass.

”I love my sons, but they will grow up different,” said Machuei’s smiling father, Marial, 51. ”It’s too late for my older one to go to school, but Machuei still has a chance.”

The two boys’ diverging paths are literally etched on their faces. Following Dinka custom, Machuei’s brother has had his bottom front teeth removed and parallel lines cut across his forehead. Machuei’s teeth are intact, his forehead unscarred.

”I don’t want that for him,” said Marial, his large, calloused hand around Machuei’s shoulder. ”I need him to learn more than just cattle. School is better than cattle.”