Obituary: Tributes in Loving Memory of Hon. Ayen William Garang Dut, First Female Legislator and a Pioneer of Girl Education in Jonglei State

By Atem Yaak Atem, Sydney, Australia

Sunday, 14 August 2022 (PW) — Ayen Garang, whom we have just lost followed the footsteps of her pioneering father, William Garang Dut, who was among the early generations of boys to go to school at the time when formal education in Southern Sudan was openly rejected by the cattle-owning communities, particularly, the Dinka and Nuer. Garang successfully completed his schooling at Malek Elementary and proceeded to an intermediate level at Nugent School at Loka in Equatoria, one of the two highest centres- Bussere in Bahr el Ghazal was the other- of learning before Rumbek Secondary opened in 1948 at Atar near Malakal, before it was moved Rumbek town.

During colonial rule, all the senior government posts were occupied by the British, Egyptians, and Northern Sudanese. The few Southern Sudanese who were literate in the vernaculars and some rudimentary English could only be employed as interpreters, court for chiefs, clerks or teachers in what were known as bush schools across the region. Because of the quality of their education, Garang and his colleagues were assigned to government departments, where they worked together with British personnel and supervisors. The department of agriculture and forestry employed and posted him to Kagelu in Yei, where teak seedlings had just been planted.

Some years ago, Ayen Garang informed me that her father was the one who introduced mango, lemon, and neem trees into Bor District. A few years later, she added, he planted the same trees, including mahogany, known in Dinka as tïït, in Pawel (Kongor). The neem and mahogany trees were special features of the Kongor “town,” which provided shade to members of the public and even served as courts by some chiefs. Some of them are still there today despite the flooding of the place.

Lemon trees produced fruits, which were in high demand by individuals in the town and outside it. And since they were outside the fence of the government guesthouse, nearly everyone, especially boys from nearby villages and cattle camps, took a special interest in pinching them. “Pinching” or “theft,” would not apply in this situation since the claim that the trees and their fruits belonged to “Ɣön de mapätic”, namely the “district commissioner’s house” in Dinka could be contested.

The guard of the guesthouse, who used to be around the building virtually around the clock, would chase the fruit “thieves”, and woe to the unfortunate boy he caught. Because of his vigilance and brutality, the boys from the nearby cattle camps composed an abusive song against Garang Kuei-Yoom (Gäräŋ Kuëi-Yɔɔm), the perpetual guesthouse guard.

Girl education in Jonglei State

As we have seen earlier, resistance to girl education by the Dinka society meant that all the existing schools from the beginning of the 20th century were for boys. That changed in the early 1950s when an elementary school for girls was opened in Rumbek town. Garang Dut enrolled Ayen and her stepsister Nyankor there. The other fathers who broke with tradition were Rekoboam Akech Kuai, Gordon Apeech Ayom, Chief Ayom Dor, who sent their daughters to Rumbek. Jeroboam Machuor Kulang, one of the first men to receive early education in the area, followed suit by sending his sister, Athor Kulang, later to become the wife of Enoch Mading de Garang Tong.

At Rumbek Elementary School for girls, Rachel Ayen became a classmate of Victoria Yaar Arol Kachuol. The two later proceeded to Maridi Intermediate School for girls in Equatoria. As we will read later, the two would make history in the years to come.

Maridi Intermediate for girls was the first school for girls from all over Southern Sudan. Most of its students were mainly from Equatoria Province, with some from Shilluk in Upper Nile and from the communities of Western Bahr el Ghazal and Wau town.

Ayen as a trendsetter in girl education in the area, was later followed by Aguet Reech Gak, known as Aguet-Thukul, the first girl from Kongor to enrol in school, and years afterwards by the daughter of Paramount Chief Ajang Duot, Aguet Ajang, nicknamed Aguet-Adhuɛ̈ŋ, who was one of the two girls, the other being the daughter an Adhiok school worker, known as Garang-Aruoi-Ruoi, enrolled in the new Kongor Elementary School that opened in 1960 for children from Kongor, Duk Payuel and Duk Padiet, known those days as court centres.

(As far as I can remember, the woman who could have been among the first literate women in the whole district at the time I went to school, was Mary Nyadier, the mother of Thomas Madit Aleth, who was my contemporary at Kongor Bush School and throughout our formal education. Madit, whose father, Timotheo Aleth Gueny, was originally from Atuot of Yirol, is now a professor of Medicine at the University of Bahr el Ghazal.)

Indigenous businessmen

After the independence of Sudan in 1956, William Garang left his job in civil service and joined politics. In 1958 he contested the parliamentary seat allocated to the northern part of the district. Garang, the rural voters called “Wil Yom”- corruption of “William”- lost to Parmena Bul Koch. It was after that William Garang established a shop in Kongor, making him the third indigenous person to own a shop in the area. The first was Doka Fadl Mulla, a Bor town-based businessman of Aliap heritage.

Monychol Deng Ayii, a former policeman and a very wealthy man in cattle, ran Doka’s shop. The second shop owner was Dhebedayo Anyieth Akuei, a man from Pathuyith, who owned a modest shop. The first person to keep Garang’s shop was an Ayual man called Duot Gak, who appears to have been lacking in numeracy and literacy. It might have been that factor that made Garang employ his relative, Isaac Kot Goch, who had completed Loka Intermediate School, as a replacement for Duot Gak.

Sitt Rachel Ayen Garang

After completing her intermediate education, Ayen became a school teacher in Malakal. She later married Ezra Majok Chol Biar, who was a postman in the same town. In those days, female school teachers were referred to as “Sitt”, an Arabic honorific for lady. Sitt Ayen was an active member of the Christian community affiliated with the American Church of Christ in the Upper Nile, whose large congregation included nearly all the ethnic communities in the province as well as members of the American Presbyterian Church, who were of European extraction.

Ezra Majok later joined politics and in 1968 became an elected member of Sudan’s Constituent Assembly in Khartoum, where he represented Bor Centre Constituency on the ticket of Sudan African National Union (Sanu) under the leadership of William Deng Nhial. Both Ezra Majok and his Sanu colleague, Jonathan Malual Leek, Abel Alier of the Southern Front, who represented Southern Bor, defeated their opponents mainly on a partisan basis, not sectional. Following the military coup led by Colonel Jaafar Nimeiri in 1969, the parliamentary regime was dissolved along with the Constituent Assembly, and political parties were banned.

First women legislators

The Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972 granting autonomy to the South was an opportunity for the citizens of the region to demonstrate their capacity to manage their local affairs within a united Sudan. In the election of 1973 to the legislature, the People’s Regional Assembly, syndicated organisations such as workers, university graduates and women, among others, were allotted seats to contest. The legislature had three seats for women in Bahr el Ghazal, Equatoria and Upper Nile, respectively. The successful candidates were Victoria Yaar Arol, Mary Nura Bassiouni and Rachel Ayen William Garang. Victoria Yaar made history in 1967 when she became the first girl from Southern Sudan ever to enter university.

She completed her studies at the University of Khartoum with a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Political Science. Mary Bassiouni broke the record as the first women minister from the South when she was appointed as state minister for Women’s Affairs in the government in Khartoum. Coincidentally, when Mary was a minister in Khartoum, her husband, David Bassiouni, was occupying in Juba the portfolio of Agriculture in Abel Alier’s government of 1980.

Democratic experiment in a continent wallowing in a dictatorship

In the decades following the decolonisation of the African continent, especially from the mid-1960s, Africa was being ruled by either military or one-party states or by individual despots, such as the unhinged Marcia Nguema of Equatorial Guinea. The argument some apologists of totalitarianism advanced against the multi-party system was that liberal democracy was not suitable for Africa as it would open up the way for ethnically based parties. Those were lies to justify the tyrannical rule. The exceptions, however, were Botswana in Southern Africa, and Nigeria for a very brief time.

At the time Africa was in the grip of absolutism, personal or collective, the system in Sudan was a combination of military and one party, embodied by the Sudan Socialist Union (SSU). The rest of the political parties and their activities were proscribed. The SSU had its secretariat in Juba and several outstanding Southern political figures were members of its political bureau.

In the South, the reality was different. The separation of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary was strictly observed in Juba. The legislature kept the government on its toes, and for its part, the executive branch accepted the way it was.

One case will be cited here. When members of the legislature tried to investigate a minister for alleged corrupt practice, the speaker tried to shield him by attempting at every turn to frustrate the process. The assembly responded by accusing him of being partisan, which its members said the behaviour amounted to the loss of his role as an honest referee and concluded that he was no longer fit for the job and must. After days of intense arguments, to and fro, the speaker had to resign, and a replacement acceptable to the legislature was installed.

Three years later after that, the assembly voted out a sitting head of the executive after a transparent and free election. Ayen and her colleagues had proved to the Sudanese and the rest of the world that not only was Southern Sudanese competent in managing their affairs but also that they were operating according to the letter and spirit of democratic pluralism. It was a feat that many among the younger generation may not be aware of the potential of their people to govern themselves to the best of their ability and the potential inherent in them.

Late Ayen William Garang and her fellow legislature and members of the executive of the day belong to that generation that proved the hallow lie made in the North by the likes of Hassan al Turabi, Ismail el Azhari, Sadiq el Mahdi and other racial fanatics that Southern Sudanese could not govern themselves competently and responsibly. Ayen and her colleagues will remain the pride of the South Sudanese today and for those to be born.

Shadowed by personal tragedies

In the early 1980s, Ayen had a serious motor accident when the vehicle she was travelling in between Bor town and Kongor overturned. She survived with a broken hip. She went to Khartoum for treatment that included a permanent use of crutches. As if that was not bad enough, she lost her daughter, who was married to Ajang Achuoth Ajang from Awulian. She left behind two toddlers. (It is worth mentioning that one of those kids was Malang Ajang, now an adult. She was named after her great grandmother, grandmother, Malang Achuoth Yaak, who was a paternal aunt of this writer’s father.)

In 1992, Ayen’s husband, Ezra Majok, was among the many victims who were fallen down by local pro-government militias’ bullets during the hasty withdrawal by the SPLA from Kapoeta as the garrison town was falling to the government forces and their allied militias.

Life in Nairobi

After the change of government in Ethiopia in 1991, the entire SPLM/A leadership along with the refugees relocated to Kenya, with the former moving to Nairobi, the capital, while the former settling in Kakuma under the care of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR.) Life for the twice-displaced Southern Sudanese in this East African country proved very difficult. Police harassment of those stateless persons for identity papers, whose lack or even when available, was used for extorting money from them. An endemic shortage of money made life very difficult.

It was at that time, that Ayen left Khartoum for Nairobi. She was then the full carer for her orphaned grandchildren, who needed education as well as shelter, food and health care. Fortunately, their father, Ajang Achuoth, was working as an operator with the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA’s) long-range communication radio and was receiving a small stipend, but not enough to meet most of the basic requirements. Ayen herself was working for an NGO operated by members of the movement. Again, what she received was insufficient.

Despite her own personal problems, Ayen was one of the elders and leaders of the Dinka community, who were always at the forefront to advise members to take heart and bear with dignity the hardships they were going through. Things would one day return to normal and any form of personal weakness during the bad days would be still remembered long afterwards- for wrong reasons- and that scenario should be avoided, they would warn.

I recall a community meeting in Nairobi one afternoon when Ayen heaped praises on Deng Ayuen Kur, an SPLM/A member and chairman of the Southern Sudanese Law Society, a body that was at the time receiving generous financial support from an international law body. According to Ayen, Deng was in the habit of sending his wife to visit neighbouring homes in Nairobi’s sprawling suburb of Zimmermann, where many of Southern Sudanese lived as its rents were more affordable.

Ayen added that Awel, Deng’s wife, would give the list of those families in desperate need of food. Deng in turn, Ayen added, would secretly send money to the head of such a family. From her voice, it was obvious that if Ayen had the means, she would do what she then saw as an act deserving appreciation and replication by those with the means to help those in dire straits. She cared for those who happened to have fallen in hard times either because of war or for factors beyond an individual’s ability.

Workshops and peace talks

As an elder and a former legislator, Ayen continued to attend forums in which a peaceful and lasting solution could be found to end the armed conflict in Sudan. She and I once attended a discussion forum on the prospects for peace in the country. The All Africa Conference of Churches was the organiser. The gathering was attended by representatives of the Government of Sudan, the SPLM, and members of civil society from Kenya and Southern Sudan.

Sudan’s ambassador to Kenya was to lead the government’s delegation, but at the last minute, the government had a change of mind: its representative was going to be someone called Prof De Chand, a Southern Sudanese and a government supporter. We had to wait for him for more than 24 hours as he was still in Khartoum to replace the ambassador who had been withdrawn for reasons we did not know.

On arrival, De Chan began to read from what he said was the new constitution for the country, which he lauded as “the best and most democratic constitution in the whole world.” An Orthodox bishop from Eritrean rose to register his disagreement “I am ashamed to hear this from you as a Christian if I can believe your words. What could be democratic in a constitution which makes non-Muslim citizens the second class in his own country?”

Ayen followed with a warning, telling the government apologist that it would be better for people who did not understand Arabic not to make such claims since the constitution he was promoting was in that language, which he did not know. To support her, John Luk Jok, an outstanding lawyer and politician representing the SPLM, added that in a society governed by Sharia, non-Muslims are subject to dhimma, meaning they have to pay protection tax. Was it what De Chand was advocating? Luk wondered aloud.

During the lunch break, Ayen was still in shock about the words from the government’s representative, who happened to be a fellow Southern Sudanese. “It is the politics of the stomach. It is disgraceful!”, she told me in Dinka.

Even at the end, she performed another first act

During her life in Australia, Ayen Garang was an active member of the South Sudanese community to which she contributed by attending functions, happy or otherwise. In the latter, her counsel was always motherly and comforting. Now she has gone, what is left is a gaping hole that is not easy to fill. She didn’t live in vain and that is why her demise is a blow to her family and the whole society of South Sudanese in the diaspora and at the home of her birth, South Sudan, the country she loved and served in her soul.

There is no denying that during her lifetime, Rachel Ayen Garang Dut made history twice, one in education and the other in politics. It came as no surprise when it was revealed that before her passing, she had prepared a comprehensive will and that she had insured had life. In Western cultures, those acts would make no news, but in our own society, where many would consider will-making or pay for life insurance and even for a funeral, acts bordering on one bewitching oneself and shouldn’t be done at all.

Ayen must rank as one of the very few among us for defying an outdated mindset. One hopes that Rachel Ayen William Garang Dut has set an example for her age cohorts, especially for South Sudanese, and that it is the time now for them to embrace rational modern ways both in life and matters related to death, considering that no one is immortal.

Rachel Ayen William Garang Dut Gosh will be remembered for the positive contributions she made during her active public life. That knowledge should be a consolation for her large family, friends and all those who knew and worked with her. Adieu Ayen.

The author, Atem Yaak Atem, is a South Sudanese journalist and writer. From 1975-1981, he covered (including reporting from the press gallery during parliamentary debates) affairs of the defunct Regional Government of Southern Sudan, first for the English language weekly newspaper, The Nile Mirror and later as founding editor of The Southern Sudan monthly magazine. He will publish his memoirs of the time under “Into the World of Journalism: From the Nile Mirror to Radio SPLA.”

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