The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (5 page)

I paid a driver and pulled myself up into the back of the next truck heading deep into Darfur.

We crossed the river against a current of people escaping. All along the muddy roads and along the flats where every vehicle makes its own road, we passed refugees walking toward Chad. We encouraged them as we passed, telling them that safety was only a mile farther, then only two miles farther, only a half day farther, and soon we would only say that they were walking the right way. We gave much of our water to mothers and children.

The white Antonov bombers were visible from time to time, and smoke was often seen rising behind the hills. Village defenders and other resistance fighters sometimes stopped us on the road. Our trucks were white, as are any civilian Land Cruisers or other trucks that might otherwise
be mistaken for military vehicles. Even so, the resistance fighters reminded us that the helicopters and bombers would not care about such things. So every turn of our journey was carefully traveled, our eyes watching the sky and the distant hills and wadis. We would lean out and look at the tire tracks beside the road to know who had come this way and that. Fresh tracks from big tires would mean government trucks and death. Fresh horse tracks in great numbers would mean Janjaweed and death. This constant observation was a good travel activity to help pass the hours, as our situation was truly in God’s hands, not our own.

When, in the trance and bounce of the long journey, I would think of the whole situation, it did seem like a bad dream. This part of the world, our world, was changing so quickly every day, falling deeper into the fires of cruelty. I wanted to wake up from it. Imagine if all the systems and rules that held your country together fell apart suddenly and your family members were all—every one of them—in a dangerous situation. It was like that. You cannot be thinking of yourself at such a time; you are making calculations of where your friends and family members might be, and where they might go. You are recalculating this constantly, deciding what you might do to help them.

I had decided even before leaving Egypt that I would go first to my older sister’s village, so I would then have some news about her to give my mother and father in our own village.

After some rough mountains, the approach into her village was along a dry river. Wells and small pools—the water points of the village—were pocked with bomb craters. The normal rush of village children toward a visiting vehicle was absent. The outlying clusters of huts were burned, though some had mud rooms and enclosures that were still standing.

I had been to this village many times, including for several weddings, which are a big part of life for us. A wedding goes on for four evenings, with wonderful dancing and singing. I saw an area of large trees and remembered all the dancing that used to happen under them. The women form a long line and sing traditional songs about village life,
and then dance in this long line—so beautiful in their brightly colored gowns floating about them in the firelight. The men watch and jump in a ceremonial way. In ancient days they would have their spears with them, since this was the symbol of the male. At the last wedding I went to, some men had guns and they fired them in the air, to show their appreciation for the great dancing and singing by the women.

That now seemed so long ago, and forever lost. As we arrived, we could see that many huts were still standing. My sister’s hut was among them.

After my sister Halima recovered from seeing the man her baby brother had grown to be, she made a small joke that I was always doing things backward, that a Hari should not come home to roost in the middle of a war. She was joking that our family name,
Hari
, means “eagle.” Birds are famous for leaving a village before a battle, not for arriving during one.

Her husband was away somewhere with a group of men. They were perhaps moving the animals to safety or preparing to defend the village. Women are often not told about the troubles of war, though they suffer them greatly.

But whether they are told or not, the women know everything. The children see it all and, as they do their chores, the women ask them to tell what they have seen. I did not ask Halima where my brother-in-law might be. He was somewhere doing what needed doing, just as the women were busy hiding caches of food out in the wadis to the west of the village, should a hasty escape be necessary.

Halima told me of the prior bombings in the village,
which killed seven people. I knew these families, though some of the victims had come into the world in the years I was away. Thus I had missed their whole lives, which was very sad to me.

In the evening, when the children of the village finished their chores with the animals and gardens, I talked to them under a tree in a slight rain.

“Tell me what happened,” I asked the eldest boy, who was perhaps fourteen and would surely be among the resistance troops in a few days or weeks. He was wearing torn jeans and a shredded UCLA sweatshirt that probably had come through marketplaces from Algeria to El Fasher, having first been donated years ago in the United States.

“All the birds flew up and away. This is the first thing we noticed,” he said.

Then he mimicked the noise of the Antonov bomber as it cruised high over the village.

“We could not see it,” he said. The others nodded.

“But our mothers knew it was the Antonov as soon as they saw the birds leave, and they yelled at us to go hide in the wadi, and take some animals quickly. So we took the donkeys and some chickens and goats as fast as we could. As we ran, we could hear people in the village yelling to get this person or that person out of a hut and help them get away. We could not hear the Antonov at this time. We thought it had gone away and we were safe, and that our mothers were crazy. Our fathers were far away with the animals.

“Then we heard the Antonov coming back,” the boy continued under the tree. “It was coming lower, and we
could see it coming up the wadi. It dropped a big bomb on each of the water points along the wadi to destroy the wells and maybe to poison them with this…”

The boy then pulled up his sleeve to show me red blisters on his arm. Other boys did the same, revealing backs, necks, legs, and stomachs burned by some chemical.

“The bombs sent balls of fire and sharp metal everywhere, even to where we were hiding, where the metal came down like rain—
ting, ting, ting, ting
—for a long time. Some trees and huts were on fire when we came running back to find our mothers and grandparents.”

I noticed how loud the boys were talking, and then I realized they were not hearing well. I remembered how the RPGs had damaged my own hearing for a long time when I was a little boy caught in an attack.

Seven people were dead, but the toll could have been much worse if not for the vigilance of the women. It could have been much worse if helicopter gunships had chased down the children and women, as happened so many other places. It could have been worse if the attack had been followed by the armed horsemen of the Janjaweed and the government’s own troops, who would have raped every girl and woman and then shot everyone they could find. This had not happened yet to this village, but they understood it was yet to come.

Many dead animals still needed to be buried or taken away. I tended to some of this, helping wherever I could.

The smell of the chemical was still heavy on the village. It made everyone, especially the children, suffer diarrhea and vomiting for several days. Many had difficulty breathing,
particularly the very young and old. The birds who drank from the water points began to die. Fifty or more camels and other animals who had trusted the water too soon lay dead at the wells.

Junked appliances and other scrap metal had been packed around the huge bombs dropped by the Sudanese government, creating a million flying daggers with each explosion. I had heard that this was happening, but did not believe it until I saw the pieces of junk stuck in the trunks of trees. Most of those killed by the bombs were buried in several pieces.

The women, normally dressed in bright colors or in the white robes of mourning, were now all in dark browns to make themselves less visible in the desert. They had poured sand in their hair, which is a custom of grieving for the dead, and they began to look like the earth itself. The children were in the darkest colors their mothers could find for them. All the bright color of the village, except a sad sprinkling of dead songbirds, was now gone.

After the second day I told Halima that it was time for me to go find our parents and the others of our family in the home village. We said goodbye very warmly, because we well knew the trouble coming.

There is a small town within a few hours’ walk of my home village. Like most towns in the middle of an area of villages, it has a marketplace and a boys’ school and a girls’ school, all with mud-brick buildings.

As we approached the town in the Land Cruiser, we moved from the flat desert into a wadi between small mountains. We drove along the sand of the dry riverbed. Up ahead would be, in normal times, green trees, the sound of birds, and the smell of cooking. Boys and girls would be tending animals at the water points along the sandy bottom. All that was different now. Many of the trees were now burned and the water points were blackened and cratered. There were very few birds.

The children of the village looked at us seriously instead of running along beside us. Their animals were nowhere to be seen. Some burned huts were still smoking.

Each family compound has a kitchen hut that usually includes three or four red clay vessels inside, called
nunus
, full of millet. These are sometimes much bigger than you can reach around, and can be fairly squat or as tall as a man. These silos can keep millet for ten or fifteen years and provide some insurance for hard times. From the burned huts, the smoke from these vessels layered the village with a smell of burned cooking, plus the burnt-hair smell of smoldering blankets and mattresses. There was also the smell of the dead, since not every animal had been buried yet.

I went first to the sheikh’s huts: I knew him well and so could get the best information there. His huts were partially burned; no doubt everyone had rushed to help put out the fire here, since the sheikh’s house is everyone’s house. There was a busy coming and going of people now. Burials were being arranged and some of the wounded were being tended to. I was told who was dying over in that family and who over in this family, so that I could visit them before they died. There are no doctors or medicines in these villages, so you will die if you are seriously wounded. You bear your pain as bravely as possible and pray for death to come. Your people come to be with you. I knew everyone except the children in this village, so I visited the seventeen badly wounded people who were dying. Some had lost arms or legs in the explosions or had great wounds loosely held together with stitches of wool thread or animal hair. The only medicine or pain relief was a cup of tea.

These were people I had grown up with and played games with under the moon—we played games at night because
we were busy with chores in the day, and the daytime heat was too much.

I visited a young woman whom I had always admired when we played together. She had been so strong and joyful. It was not proper for me to hold her hand, though I longed to do so now. Maybe you can think of who this would be if this happened in your hometown, and you may know how I was feeling.

Two days before my arrival the seven water points of the village had been hit with large bombs, and this had set some of the huts afire. It had not been the first attack. Each day now, the children were sent away from the village. The animals were brought to the few usable water points late at night for watering. In the daytime, anything moving in the village would invite bombs or helicopter attacks. Still, no ground attack had come.

Every cousin I met told me often or more deaths in his part of the family. All the villages to the east were under attack, and the men in this village were preparing for what might come next. The women were tending the wounded and were preparing food and supplies to hide in the wadis and pack on the donkeys.

While some men were organized to wait in place and defend the villages, others joined resistance groups that roamed in vehicles to be wherever they could be of most use. The government was attacking so many villages at once that these men were stretched thin and exhausted. The five kingdoms of North Darfur—Dar Kobe, Dar Gala, Dar Artaj, Dar Sueni, and our own Dar Tuar—were all under attack at the same time. Kingdoms in West and
South Darfur were also being hit. The resistance fighters— some barely fourteen years old—would come into the villages in pieced-together Land Rovers for water and food, then would speed away to the next emergency, leaving their wounded with the women of the village. While the kingdom’s system of sultans, omdas, and sheikhs was until recently a superbly efficient form of military organization, no one was giving orders now; the facts of each new day overwhelmed all plans.

I was told by the sheikh that my own smaller village had been bombed once but was not badly damaged, and that my immediate family was not harmed. Knowing this, I stayed in the larger village a few days to help where I could. There was a great movement of refugees through this town and people needed every kind of assistance.

Many men were joining resistance groups; you would see very young teenage boys jumping into the backs of trucks with a family weapon and that was it for them. No one in the boys’ families would try to stop them. It was as if everybody had accepted that we were all going to die, and it was for each to decide how they wanted to go. It was like that. The end of the world was upon us.

“We are leaving now to try to get to Chad,” was the anthem of many families as they moved through the sheikh’s compound to say their goodbyes. They received advice as to the best ways through the mountains and wide deserts. Chad was far away. Even if they were not attacked by troops or Janjaweed or helicopters, many would not survive the hundred-mile trip through the scorching desert. The rain time would be over in a few days, after which the
desert would dry very quickly. But there were not many other choices. Some said they would hide in local wadis and wait for peace. And there are caves in the mountains, as I well knew. But most people were intent on finding safety in Chad, where Zaghawa relatives would take care of them until they could return. Below all these adult conversations gazed the worried eyes of silent children. And in every adult eye was the dullness of a fatal understanding: whatever we do, our world is now ending and we commend ourselves into God’s rough or gentle Hands.