Tribute To An Icon – the Fallen Servant Teacher, Peter Yak Jany Ruea

To be interred today Saturday at his final resting place in Omaha, Nebraska, USA

ByDeng Nyang Vanang, Juba, South Sudan

Late Peter Yak Jany Ruea is a darling of his people with deserving national hero status.  An easy going gentleman so kind to a fault, living joyfully and at ease with like minded fellows not necessarily of  his ancestry, while giving no place for grudges in his heart.

Traditional marks scattered all over his forehead, face and hands conspicuously told of a once Nuer youthful ladies’ man who underwent all rites of passage demanded of him by custmory rites of passage.

All that came to pass when he left his village of birth, Lony for Khartoum in 1974 in search of education and never to see most of his beloved family members.

There he enrolled to learn Thoknath, an ethnic Nuer language of South Sudan and Western Ethiopia in Omdurman Evangelical church in 1978. He later joined Comboni College to learn English as a second Language and world’s lingua franca.

From Khartoum he returned to Lony in 1981 in South Sudan where he hung around till he made up his mind to  proceed for a new venture in Ethiopia where he did both Junior and high school studies.

Brothers Bil Jany, Chuol Jany, Tongyik Jany and his sisters Nyakui Jany, Nyatut Jany and Nyapieth Jany were his siblings from his mother Nyapuot Gai Duot Nyaang he never lived with in his both younger and older age. He also had more step brothers and sisters from his father’s second wife.

To kill loneliness, he adopted himself to a larger family of the Nuer people he loved dearly from the original citizenship of Galiah in Lou Nuer he was born in 1958 to Chiediem Gool subsection.

An icon so much adored in life as is in his death, being a pioneer educationist endowed with little knowledge he generously shared with everyone, making him hailed widely as an impeccable champion of the Nuer pursuit of education.

In his formative years Nuer was in the back water of education in which the few finalists of secondary school became more of village celebrities.

Against which he rolled up his long sleeves and fought the celebrated mediocrity in not just encouraging everyone to declare war on his ignorance.

He was further involved in chalking up his knowledge on locally tanned animal skins called blackboards fixed onto the mudwalls of grass sashed tukuls that passed for school.

Glued to his direction in racks on butt-hurting stick benches in dusty classrooms were determined lads armed with pens and pencils as they took notes of what he noted on pale looking black boards.

We as pupils were in actual sense of the word peering through and drenching in our sweat to grasp the invisible words chalked on the so called blackboards.

It was an all-boys school as girls faced early lockdown waiting to be married off for what {cows} were more important than an alien education with far remote, unguaranteed benefits.

Outside the class session in Nuer congregation’s Presbyterian Church he could gather us around him heartily discussing while looking over our shoulders like a hungry falcon SPLA’s agents would swoop on us at no time.

Unconcerned, he would throw up his hands with a revealing artificial golden tooth to emphasize a point on a brighter future. The rebel movement laid siege through conscription of the unlucky ones in our midst.

To be forcefully carried away screaming, legs up in the air dangling to pursue what Dr. John Garang considered an higher calling – liberation of the motherland, Sudan.

Yak was uncomfortable with accusing Garang of tribal tendencies in the Koryom division parade. Subsequently sentenced to firing squad by William Nyuon Bany for his disrespect for Garang. But Garang hailed and set him free into civil life in the Itang refugee camp as too honest nationalist to be killed in 1984.

Seeing everyone going to school in the camp was a passion he grabbed whole heartedly and forsook all the goodies any man would crave for in a lifetime.

Yak defied the odds and out of herd boys moulded state of the art Professors, Doctors, bureaucrats and politicians now shaping the future of Western Ethiopia and South Sudan’s in second liberation after the first one Garang fought for. 

And in so doing, he stepped on countless powerful toes he risked his life fighting for the sake of others as the courageous man diametrically an antithesis to his name Yak – the Nuer traditionally associated with cowardice. He was instead a proven roaring tiger in hyena skin. 

An obvious stamina with which he confronted the perceived oppressive systems rather than joining them in pursuit of getting every child to school.

It was not battles fought and won by him all alone. David Guek Bidit, James Deng Kek, Andrew Tut Deng and Moses Thor started what he finally put into fruition under James Koang Tuor as both student and director of the makeshift Presbyterian school.

Late James Deng Keka was his main foreman in the anti-illiteracy campaign with whom he ran summer courses in Itang Junior school headed by an Ethiopian Hagos Berai as the principal.

The bridging course run by two of them, all Khartoumers and full of positive energy, prepared refugee students in academic high jumps for an enrolment in grade 7 through an entrance examination every year.

He acknowledged his academic shortfall when he attended grade 7 up to grade 9 with his students, me included, he taught in primary.

After grade 8 he was one of many who missed Inter-church aid’s fewer and competitive scholarships in much coveted cold Ethiopian highlands.

He finished his secondary education  in Gambella in 1992 and afterwards moved to the East African country of Kenya where he resettled in the US after a couple of years in the searing heat of Kakuma refugee camp. 

It is there the big support machine gun he suddenly fell silent in the fierce battlefront the United States has become unexpectedly.

With many years of inquiry seeking what his telling silence was all about through James Gatchang Chol becoming less promising with each passing day.

Diminishing hope to which I clang that God would pull up a miracle to change his fast dwindling fortunes for much sought after American dream turned a mirage.

A dream he stubbornly forewent on the fringes than benting against the eroding tide of capitalism and its unsurpassing greed, terminally breaking his spirit on May 25^th, 2021.

And never lived to beat the savages of capitalism like he did to village life that wanted to keep him hostage in illiteracy.

The Khartoum-based government that robbed the better part of his school going age down South.

SPLA’s craze of throwing every child to the firing line.

And abrasive Hagos Barei’s futile attempts to block his passion of making everyone count education wise. 

The author, Deng Nyang Vanang, is Reachable at: dvanang@gmail.com

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