The Journey of the First Palotaka Boys (Part One)
6 min readBy Kur Wel Kur
“In Eastern Equatoria, lies Palotaka of Pajok payam in Magwi County, where 2,500 boys lived. Back in 1980s, we admired and aspired in the Dinka’s wrestling, styles of composing folk songs, storytelling and in growing as Dinka’s men. We were small boys! Dreaming and contemplating those good things, passing in rites of passage, especially initiation and becoming men, men of our forefathers’ tradition, jetted us to do things as elders told us. However, little did we know, we would end up living for years, thousand miles away from our birthplaces.” (Our generation: The lost generation).
For 2 years, from 1983 to 1984, we witnessed the mass exodus of youth; the mobilisers told them of guns at Bilpam in Ethiopia for their security, Murle had continued to steal our cows and kidnapped our children in the broad daylight but because they__Murle__ owned guns, they always inflicted heavy casualties on our people, the mobilisers narrated.
Over 10 thousands young men marched to Bilpam; they spent a year in Ethiopia undergoing military training; however, when they returned, their enemy had changed, Murle represented no threats but Arabs in the northern Sudan! The new and full trained soldiers would shout, SPLM/A Oyeeeeee!
UNHCR / W. Stone / 1991
Dr. John Garang launched a revolution! The war, no longer in the air, but with us; we ate in war; we slept in it; cultivated, reared and herded cattle in war; our brothers and sisters married in it; we lived in war.
With war, we became parts and parcels of the same thing; Dr. John Garang echoed this as such, “we were born, went to school and even grew grey hair in war” when he sold the CPA to Sudanese in Washington DC. So for 4 years, South Sudan became volatile.
Thousands of Sudan’s soldiers would exit Juba in attempts of reaching Bortown but the mighty SPLA crushed them. The crushing of 10 thousands soldiers (Sudan’s army), sent a chilling fear in the heart of hearts of Arabs especially Gaafar Nimeiry; he vacated the presidential seat in 1985. Abdel Rahman Swar al-Dahab and Ahmed al-Mirghani managed the interim government until Saddiq Al-Mahdi won an election and became a prime minister in 1986.
Before Omar Hassan al-Bashir with the help of Hassan Abd Allah al-Turabi, carried out a coup and ousted Saddiq Al-Mahdi, the first round of lost boys swarmed in thousands towards the East, Ethiopia in 1987. Bashir trembled the Sudan’s politics and the six years old liberation (SPLM/A) in 1989; in the same year, Bortown fell to the SPLM/A because the town became isolated with no supplies and reinforcement from Juba. Bashir sent waves of intense fear to the movement so the leaders in the SPLM/A prepared for the long and daunting struggle (war).
The second round of lost boys blanketed the roads to Jonglei’s capital in October, 1990. With the same narrative in minds, schools in the distant lands; this time, in the border of South Sudan and Uganda! We possessed nothing, some wore pairs of shorts but shirtless or shirts without pairs of shorts/trousers and majority were naked. Some had blankets cut in halves and some had no blankets. At night, we would snuggled or cuddled (no evil just for warm) under those halves blankets but still the October cold winds swirled and whipped through us with no tolerant.
We (those of Anyidi, Kolnyang and Makwach payams) spent two days waiting for boys from Baaidit and Jalle payams. We hit the road after they came and rested for a day; we arrived at Gemeza in Mundari around noon and spent a night. A lorry from Bortown appeared, we squeezed, scrambled for spaces and filled it to the brim but handful of other boys remained to trek to Mongala. On the lorry, thorns of overgrown trees whose canopies roofed the road, flogged us. We reached Melang (golden), a cattle camp 10 minutes on foot to Mongala.
We camped in that cattle camp to wait for the rests from Gemeza. For the first time, We encountered the first cruelty; we boiled our food but had no plates for serving so we raced into the cattle camp to request the cattle keepers for hides, keepers dried hides and censored them into desirable sizes for multipurpose, for example, they use them for sleeping, sheltering when it rains and shovelling dried cow dungs when smoking the cows.
Remember, we came begging for hides, the keepers gave them to us; we served our food on the underside of the hides. Before we could finish eating, the cattle poured into cattle camp from pastures around 4 pm! This time, cattle comes with tsetse flies and only smoke from burning cow dungs drive away tsetse flies. The keepers rushed to where we camped for their hides. Some keepers held by their patience, waited for five minutes for some of us to finish their food; however, a particular guy with no humanity came towards us, we were using his hide, in circle we sat.
This guy squeezed himself into the circle and grabbed the hide with the food and swung it, the hide flew and landed upside down on the nearby grasses; he scrubbed the hide with grass and strutted away. We slept with empty tummies. This, when we started adapting the art of surviving without parents.
The rests whom the lorry left, came trekking to Melang; they arrived at 5am. The guardians told us to move to Mongala at 9 pm; we waited for a convoy of 10 tucks, which delivered aid to Bor town. In the following morning, we boarded the trucks after the SPLA threatened the drivers to whip them bare buttocks.
The drivers (Kenyans) hired by UN, pleaded with the SPLA authority not to use the trucks to transport the children because the UN prohibits the drivers from carrying persons with cargoes vehicles. However, the authority refused to listen and we hopped on the trucks, each truck carrying over 100 children!
As the government neglected roads because of war in South Sudan, all roads remained unsealed so a road from Mongala to Torit (SPLM/A headquarter then) had potholes of a volcano crater size; our journey through Ngalngala to Torit, took us 7 hours. In those trucks, we hanged to one another because no rails or anything to hold and the metallic bars on the top of trucks were too high for our heights.
So as the trucks navigated and dodged all those potholes, we would swing side to side; 7 and 9 years old children bawled, urinated and defecated in the trucks. Drivers as annoyed as you can imagine, never allowed us to stretch or relieve ourselves; they could stop for a few minutes for their desires. Arrived at Torit in Eastern Equatoria, we headed to Mission, a suburb in Torit, where missionaries resided back then…
To be continued….
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