CHildren are Diamonds

One of the University’s visiting writers reports from the most ancient human home.

By Edward Hoagland

In Africa, everything is an emergency. Your radiator blows out and as you solder a repair job, kids emerge from the bush, belonging to a village that you’ll never see, and reachable by a path you hadn’t noticed. Though one of them has a Kalashnikov, they aren’t threatening, only hungry. Eight or ten of them, aged eight or ten, they don’t expect to be fed by you or any other strange adult. Although you know some Swahili, you can’t converse, not knowing Lango, but because there is plenty of water in the streams roundabout, they are fascinated that you choose to drink instead from bottles you have brought. Gradually growing bold enough to peer into the open windows of your truck, they don’t attempt to fiddle with the door or reach inside, seeing no food or curious mechanical delectables. The boxes packed there white-man-style are cryptically uninformative. Meningitis and polio vaccines, malaria meds, deworming pills, folic acid, Vitamin A and similar famine-fighters. However, they will remain as long as you do, and you don’t dare leave because this fabric of politesse would tear if you did, as it would have already if they were five years older. You wish you could ask them if mines have been laid in the road recently by either the rebels or the government forces. Their fathers, the men of the village, haven’t emerged because they’re probably off with the guerrillas, and the women would not show themselves in time of war anyway. It’s a balance you must maintain here: friendliness and mystery.

*

The city splits at the seams with squatter camps, swollen by an enormous flux of displaced refugees from within hungry Kenya itself, not to mention all the illegals from the civil wars afire in the countries that surround it: Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, Rwanda. Look on a map — dire suffering — need I say more?

*

The joke, if you can call it that, among whites here is if you feel a hand grope for your wallet, the second thing to do is try to save the life of the pickpocket. This is a city veering into calamity, where transient whites like me still dribble in because it’s a hub for aid groups, and yet a traditional wash-up spot for Anglo ne’er-do-wells who try to define themselves by where they have been. With the AIDS pandemic, it will soon be too late for a number of things.

*

I help out in a place where we feed street kids and treat them with skin ointments, antibiotics, inoculations, minerals, vitamins, whatever we happen to have. Powdered milk, powdered eggs, surplus soups or porridges that another Non-Governmental Organization may have given us. We have a basketball hoop up, and soccer balls, board games, playing cards, a tent fly hooked to the back wall in the courtyard with cots arranged underneath it, as a shelter where the children can feel some safety in numbers at least. What makes you burn out are the ones dying visibly of AIDS. Yet you don’t want to banish them again to the furnace of the streets, or, on the other hand, specialize merely as a hospice, where salvageable kids aren’t going to want to come. Many of them wish to go to school but have no home to go to school from or money for the fees. So I scrounged a blackboard and taught addition, subtraction, geography, the English alphabet, when I had a break from refereeing a gritty soccer game or supervising the dishwashing or triaging kids with fevers or contusions who ought to go to the hospital (not that that Dickensian trip was often in their best interest). We had artful dodgers eating our fruits and sandwiches, between excursions into robbery, drugs, peddling — but also earnest tykes, plenty of them, who your heart absolutely went out to. Yet triage is frustrating.

*

You don’t have to be a doctor to help people who have no aspirin or disinfectant or malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery or epilepsy pills, no splints or bandaging, and no other near facility to walk to in the bush. Kaopectate, cough suppressants, malnutrition supplements, antibiotics for bilharzia or sleeping sickness or yaws. If you were a nurse, patients would be brought to you with these or hepatitis or broken limbs. The old stone and concrete ruins of a Catholic chapel that had been forgotten since the colonial powers left could be reoccupied, if you chased the leopards and the cobras out, because joy is what is partly needed, especially at first, and joy, I think, is, like photosynthesis for plants, an evidence of God. But joy, like beauty, is a continuum too, and in temperate climates it waxes with the sun somewhat as plants do.

*

I can do the basic mechanics if we break down on the road, and know when to speed up or — equally important — slow down, when figures with guns appear to block our passage. (If it’s soldiers, you never speed up, but the decision is not that easy because every male can look like a soldier in a war zone, and the soldiers like civilians.) The big groups such as Doctors Without Borders, CARE, Oxfam, Save the Children, have salaried international staff they can fly in from Honduras, Bangkok, or New Delhi to plug a momentary defection or a flip-out — dedicated career people, like the U.N.’s ladies and gentlemen, with New York, Geneva, London, Paris, Rome, behind them, who’ve been vetted: not much fooling around. But there are various smaller outfits, whose flyers you don’t receive in the mail back home, that will hire “the spiritual drifter,” as my friend Al put it to me, to haul pallets of plywood, bags of cement, first-aid kits in bulk, and bags of potatoes, bayou rice, cases of your basic tins, like corned beef, tuna, salmon, peas, what-have-you, and trunks of medicine to provision the solo picayune apostle out doing Christ’s appalling work in the hinterlands.

You draw up lists of refugees, so no one gets double their ration by coming through the corn queue twice. Use ink stamped on the wrists if you have to — if their names are always Mohammed or Josephine. And you census the children, as well, and weigh a sampling of them in a sling scale, plus measure their upper-arm fat, if they have any, with calipers to compile the ratio of malnutrition in the populace, severe versus moderate, and so on. I’ve helped inject against measles, tetanus, typhoid, when not enough licensed people were there, having been a vet’s assistant at one point in my teens. I’ve powwowed with the traditional clan chiefs and tribal healers, the leopard-skin priests and village shamans and elders, or young militia commanders, and delivered babies when nobody competent was around. I’ve squeezed the rehydration salts into babies’ mouths when they’re at death’s door, or mixed the fortified formula which you spoon into them, and chalked the rows of little white squares in the dirt where you have them all sit individually at their feeding hours so that every individual gets the same amount of protein, the same units of Vitamins A, C, E, B, calcium, iron, phosphorous, out of the fifty-five-gallon steel drum you’re stewing the emergency preparation in. Hundreds of passive, dying children sitting cross-legged in the little squares, waiting for you to reach each of them. You don’t think that breaks your heart? Chalk is never gonna look the same.

*

You meet many travelers — businessmen with attaché cases full of banknotes to persuade the bureaucrats in Government House to sign onto a certain project scheme; ecologists on a mission to save the chimpanzees; trust-fund hippies doing this route overland, now that you couldn’t go from Istanbul into Afghanistan; specialists from one of the U.N.’s many agencies studying a developmental proposal, or transiting to the more difficult terrain of Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Somalia, then resting for a spell on the way back. The taxi stand was busy from sunrise to pitch dark, and the pool on the roof was patronized by African middle-class parents, some of whom were teaching their kids how to swim, as well as the KLM airline pilots and Swissair stewardesses, the Danish or USAID water-project administrators waiting for permanent housing, or bustling missionaries passing through.

*

Food is so central that you can’t exaggerate the issue. My waitress, for example, was hungry for protein even though she worked in an expatriates’ hotel. There was a pot of gruel in the kitchen for the help, but it wasn’t nourishing enough for a lactating mother, and the chicken parts and fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables the guests ate were exactly inventoried each night to compare what remained in the refrigerator with the restaurant’s orders. Nor did she eat leftovers off of people’s plates, because she’d heard that AIDS can spread by saliva. And, although she wouldn’t be robbed at night once she reached her bus station, she said to get to it she needed to use her tips to take a taxi because men with clubs waited next to a corner between here and there.

*

The fabled “Cape to Cairo” artery from South Africa toward Khartoum and Egypt is no more — a jaunt that had been throttled first by Idi Amin and now choked off again by the war in the southern Sudan. Beyond the city’s suburbs, indeed, signs of human occupancy almost disappeared in the elephant grass and regrown jungle, because for the next eighty or a hundred miles all of this had been a triangle of death, incinerated in Uganda’s own civil wars: Amin’s eight years of butcheries, and then when he was overthrown, Obote in an ostensibly saner manner had killed just as many, till Museveni upended him. So many clanking tanks, half-tracks, and fearsome assault platoons had crawled up this road, mowing down anything that moved, that even in the peace Museveni had established, nobody wanted to take the chance of living anywhere which might be visible in the forest. Bower birds, sunbirds, bee-eaters, secretary birds, reedbuck, dik-diks, spitting cobras and black mambas were about, but the people who had somehow survived on-site or returned afterwards were not going to trust the neighborhood of the road, except for bicycling quickly along the asphalt. And then the trick was to vanish imperceptibly when you reached your destination: with no path to a hidden village showing that soldiers rumbling by in a grisly truck would notice. Settlements had been scorched, torched, eviscerated horribly, the skulls piled up from the massacres. And women still sometimes flinched — broke into a run for the woods — at the sound of my motor.

In the Sixties, after independence from the British, it had been mainly these local forest tribes, such as the Baris and Acholis, who logically should have been part of Uganda to begin with anyway, fighting the Muslim government. Then in the Seventies a new president of Sudan had made peace with them, with regional freedom of religion and cultural autonomy, until the Eighties, when a new fundamentalist Sharia swing reignited the war, led now by the big plains tribes, Nuer and Dinka, pastoralists living between these mountains and forests and the vast Sahel of the Arabs. It was a more serious insurrection, with the southern black army officers defecting to command the rebels, and on the government side, the Baggara Arab tribes armed for lethal, devastating cattle raids against the neighbors, the Dinkas. The U.S.A. was allied with Khartoum for strategic reasons at the time — to harass Gaddafi on Libya’s flank — and discouraged even food aid reaching the southerners. So a quarter-million people starved.

*

One morning in Sudan I woke to a lovely morning sun and boundless rolling perspectives after I climbed a viewpoint behind the church that overlooked the modest gorge of the Bahr el Jebel, the “Mountain Nile,” flowing under the Imatong Range, Sudan’s highest, behind ridges behind me, all downstream from the Victoria and Albert sections of the Nile, in Uganda’s lake country, but not yet joined by the Bahr el Ghazal, the “Gazelle River,” from the west, and the Sobat, from the east, near Malakal, to form the White Nile. Then, at Khartoum, the Blue Nile, from Ethiopia, joins the White to constitute the famous Nile that flows to Shendi, Atbara, Wadi Halfa, Aswan, Luxor, Cairo, and the delta close to Alexandria: nowhere, though, more beautiful than around here. Beyond the gorge sat endless savannah grasslands, woodlands, parkland, in tropical, light-filled yellows and greens, where, although the hartebeest, kob, buffalo, and reedbuck may already have been eaten and the rhinos and elephants shot to buy guns with their horns or tusks, the vistas remained primeval because for decades civil war had prevented any other kind of development, like logging, tourism, mining. I had a spear-length stick in hand, to defend myself afoot or keep the wildlife at bay, and more appropriately remind myself of how the Dinkas, as a cattle people from time immemorial, had been able to protect their herds and pasturage from the Baggara Arab tribes whose homelands adjoined theirs, even though the Baggara domesticated horses as well as cattle and rode into battle, instead of merely running.

A Dinka, who could run for twenty miles with six spears in his free hand, attacking from the reeds and rushes of every river crossing, every hyacinth swamp, was not a foe whose cattle could be rustled and women stolen with impunity. What had skewed the equilibrium of spear versus spear was when Khartoum had given the Baggara guns and sent its army in motor vehicles and helicopter gunships to mow down the lumbering cattle who escaped the horses, driving the surviving herdsmen off of their beloved prairies, steppes, and swamps and plains.

*

We were inoculating babies against measles, before the dry ice that kept the vaccine fresh was gone. But an elephantiasis sufferer was in the line. How could she have survived this long? We gave her Cephalexin, for whatever that might be worth. The queue was checkered with people with rag-fashioned bandaging on, and blue robes for one particular clan, or red for another, or body paint, headcloths, loincloths, tribal scarifications on the person’s forehead, and possibly a giraffe’s scrotum as a carryall on a rawhide strap from his shoulder. Yet he was wearing a garage-sale apron from Peoria.

*

Driving north the people walking were sparse, and mostly from the local Madi or Bari tribes, a foot shorter than the Dinkas and thicker-set, scrambling along like forest-and-mountain folk, not striding like cattle-herders, plainsmen. As food got shorter again next week, they would disappear into the woods and gaunt Dinkas take over the roads, stalking famishedly for something to eat. Instead, we saw a burly man with a bushbuck slung over his shoulder that he had snared, who started to run when he heard the motor, till he realized we were aid workers and not about to steal his meat, as guys in an SPLA vehicle would have. Another man, two miles on, was squatting on his heels, quietly collecting wood doves one by one every few minutes, when they fluttered down to drink at a roadside puddle he had poisoned with the juice of a certain plant that grew nearby. He too was frightened that this clutch of birds he had already caught might be snatched away, until white faces in the window proved we weren’t hungry. He showed us the deadly root, and how pretty his half-dozen unplucked pigeons were, as well as a pumpkin he wanted to sell.

*

Close to the rope ferry from Kerripi to Kajo Kaja, we passed several Dinkas with fishing nets, and spears tall enough to fend off a crocodile or disable a hippo — which was what they were good at, when not embedded in the intimacies of their cattle culture, with five hundred lowing beasts, and perhaps a lion outside the kraal to reason with, the rituals of manhood to observe, the myriad color configurations and hieroglyphic markings of each man or boy’s special display-ox or bull, for him to honor, celebrate and sing to, and the sinuous, cultivated, choreographic eloquences of its individual horns that he tied bells and tassels to. The colors were named after the fish-eagle, the ibis, the bustard, or leopard, brindled crocodile, mongoose, monitor lizard, goshawk, baboon, elephant-ivory, and so on. Like the Nuer, who were so similar, they had been famous among anthropologists but were now shattered by the war. Adventure, marriage, contentment, art and beauty had been marked and sculpted by the visual or intuitive impact of cattle, singly, and in their wise and milling, rhythmic herds — as bridewealth and the principle currency, but also the coloring registering like impressionistic altar pieces, the scaffolding of clan relations and religion. A scorched-earth policy by the Arab army and militias needed only to wipe out their cattle to disorient and dishearten them. We stopped and people emerged from the bush. One man was burdened by a goiter the size of a bagpipe’s bladder; another with a hernia bulging like an overnight bag. They were Madis, Baris, the so-called Juba Peoples, displaced by the war and siege. We had palliatives like vitamins, acetaminophen, valium, cotrimoxazole, even some iodine pills for the goiter man, although, like the hernia character, he needed surgery.

There were patients with cataracts, VD, bronchitis, scabies, nosebleeds, chest pains, Parkinson’s, thrush cellulites, breast tumors, colon troubles, a dislocated elbow, plus the usual heartbreaking woman whose urinary tract, injured in childbirth, dripped continuously, turning her into a pariah, although it would have been as easy as the hernia for a surgeon to fix. My friend could do the elbow, with my help, and knock back an infection temporarily, but not immunize the babies or anybody because our vaccines had had no refrigeration for so long. She bestowed her smile. The line that formed, the fact that she was going to finger and eyeball everybody, was reassuring.

*

One night in the sunset’s afterglow a man with broken eyeglasses led us to the straw church he had built, quoting Isaiah, chapter 18, and Matthew, chapter 24. “For nation will go to war against nation, kingdom against kingdom; there will be famines.” Ladoku was his name; and it’s no exaggeration to say that his church was constructed mainly of straw, or that any big drugstore would have had ten-dollar glasses that would have helped him a lot.

*

On the river herons, egrets, ibises, buzzards, guinea fowl, whale-headed storks, flapped every which way over the dugouts of lanky men wielding fishing tridents. They stopped at hamlets of huts only a yard above the water to let people off, or leave freight, with cattle browsing in the shallows, their left horns sometimes trained a certain way by the gradual application of weights, and a herder proudly dusted with ceremonial dung-ash, and poised upon one leg, the toes of the other hooking that knee so as to jut out quite jauntily as he leaned on the point of his fighting-spear, with his fishing-spear dandled in his free hand. Whether Nuer or Dinka, these were people of sufficient numbers that they hadn’t needed to bother learning a common language like Arabic or English to speak with other tribes, and stared with more interest at the cargo of goodies on the deck than at the foreign or inferior strangers. The captain, although he was ethnically an Arab, had been born to shopkeepers in Malakal — had gone onto the river as a boy with his uncle, who was a pilot during the British era, and then married a daughter of the King of the Shilluks. The Shilluks were a river tribe located just northward of the Nuer and Dinkas, sharing Malakal with the others as a hub, and, though less numerous, they were knit rather tighter as warriors, if only because they had a king, so that their tough neighbors seldom messed with them.

*

The lions here have lost their sense of propriety. They are rattled, eating human carrion like hyenas, and hauling down live individual human beings, as if there hadn’t been a truce in force between the local people and the local lions for eons. Before the war, lions always knew and taught their young where they would be trespassing — what domestic beasts they shouldn’t kill unless they anticipated retaliation — and people, as well, knew where it was asking for trouble for them to go. Deliberately hunting a big black-maned male might be a manhood ritual, but never casually undertaken with a Kalashnikov, or meaningless. Neither species was a stranger to the other, or its customary habitat — whereas many of these poor refugees had been on their last legs, eating lizards, drinking from muddy puddles, wandering displaced hundreds of miles from their home ground, where they belonged. And so, on the one hand, young lionesses grew up stalking staggering people, and, on the other, soldiers in jeeps were shooting lions that they ran across with tommyguns, for fun. No rite of passage, no conversation or negotiation was involved: No spear in the teeth — which then became a cherished necklace worn at dances.

*

Back in Uganda I was back in the world of AIDS. The Sudan’s war had kept most infected people out of the zone we’d been in, but within a few minutes I noticed that several youngsters clustered around were not healthy. They weren’t wasted from starvation, or fascinated by a motor vehicle, like the crowds of kids where we’d come from. I couldn’t tell whether they were orphans or belonged to someone, but their stumbling, discolored emaciation meant they were dying of AIDS.

*

Flying over Juba we saw muzzle flashes, burning huts, and a blackish tank askew on a roadway, as we banked. Inside that broken circle of machinegun sniping and mortar explosions nobody was moving as in a normal provincial city, just scurrying for bare essentials. From the air, you could spot the positions that were crumbling and who, hunkered there, was doomed.

*

I ran into a couple of gaunt, drained Maryknoll nuns recuperating on a two-week Christmas holiday from their current post at Chukudum, in the Didinga Hills of borderline Sudan, where a pretty waterfall burbles down the rock bluff behind the garden of the priory, and Khartoum’s Antonov bomber plane wheels over every morning looking for a target of opportunity. These nursing Sisters are seasoned heroes. They’re deep-dyed. You meet them on the hairiest road, coming or going from a posting, and they don’t wilt. They don’t believe that God is dead. They are wary but unflappable.

*

I load a truck with the standard fortified nutritional preparations, and spare stethoscopes, blood-pressure cuffs, tourniquets, penlights, tongue depressors, tendon hammers, antimalarial amodiaquine, paracetamol, antibiotics such as amoxicillin, cotrimoxazole, ciprofloxacin, and doxycycline, mebendazole for worms, water purifiers, tetracycline eye ointment, paracetamol and Ibuprofen, bandages in quantity and tape and nylon strapping, syringes and needles, scalpels, antiseptic for sterilizing, insecticide-treated mosquito netting for many people besides ourselves, I.V. cannulas, stitching needles and thread, umbrellas and tenting for the sun and rain, white coats for each of us to wear to give us an air of authority, and as much plastic sheeting as I had room for to shelter families in the coming rainy season. My friend Al says that children are diamonds, and knew so from the front lines, having witnessed the successive Ethiopian and Somali famines and the Sahel droughts of the Kababish country in northern Sudan: knew that you can be nearer my God to thee without sectarianism. One Christ, many proxies.

Edward Hoagland, the University’s Schoenfeldt Series Visiting Writer in 1994, is the author of twenty books, among them the classic Notes from the Century Before (about British Columbia). He has written of work, independence, and Americanness in these pages.