Deborah Scroggins - Emma’s War - Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

‘What’s he saying?’ I asked.

‘He thinks he is a prophet,’ the first soldier said. ‘He says he has had enough now. You have been coming and going, but you don’t bring anything.’

‘He is a madman,’ the other soldier declared.

Frank took the man’s picture. I had been keeping a sort of diary of our trip in a small pink notebook I’d picked up in Nairobi. I took it out and wrote on the cheap brown paper:

Madman

flowers in his ears

feather in hair

shells on right arm

piece of notebook tied to left

like a mime

ring in nose

Those are the last words in that Nasir notebook, for just then we heard a high-pitched whine. For a moment I wondered what it was, still transfixed by the prophet. Then we saw the shadow of the plane’s wings. It was coming down in the tight corkscrew the pilots always performed in case someone started shooting at them. It landed, the engine sputtered into stillness, the rebels ran to open the door, and out jumped Emma. Frank and I stared. She was almost six feet tall, pale, dark-haired and slender as a model. She was wearing a red mini-skirt. An SPLA officer climbed out behind her; she and the officer were laughing about something. Emma threw her head back. She had large white healthy teeth. It was hard to believe she was flying in on an emergency relief mission. She looked as if she ought to be stepping out of a limousine to go to a party.

In a way, I was not surprised. I had heard about Emma. Young, glamorous and idealistic, she had sent a ripple of excitement through the social circles of the aid business when she went to work for a Canadian aid group called Street Kids International. In Nairobi, headquarters for East Africa’s burgeoning humanitarian industry, she had gained a reputation for wildness: adventures in the bush, all-night revels in the city. She was an Englishwoman with entrée to the city’s most exclusive expatriate circles, yet she was said to feel most at home with Africans. Some admired her nerve; others considered her dangerously naïve. I’d caught sight of her myself a few weeks earlier at the mess tent in Lokichoggio, or Loki, as we called it, the staging ground inside Kenya for the UN relief operations into southern Sudan. She had been drinking beer with a table full of African men, and she was talking with great animation. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could tell that the men did not want her to stop.

Now in Nasir I thought I understood the current of disapproval that followed the stories about Emma. That gorgeous splash of a mini-skirt seemed almost indecent in a place filled with sick, hungry people catching their breath between bouts of vicious killing and mass starvation. To look happy seemed tactless - a flaunting of one’s good fortune. It occurred to me that the modest T-shirts and khaki shorts or blue jeans that were a kind of unofficial uniform for most of us expats were in some way an attempt to make ourselves sexless, at least in our own minds. We imagined that it announced, ‘We are not here to have a good time.’ It was like a surgeon’s scrub suit or perhaps a modern version of sackcloth and ashes: an unspoken signal that we thought we were wiser and more virtuous than the Sudanese and were in a kind of mourning for them. Not that the Sudanese were fooled. In truth the average aid worker or journalist lived for the buzz, the intensity of life in the war zone, the heightened sensations brought on by the nearness of death and the determination to do good. We wanted to be here, we were being paid good money to be here, and the Sudanese knew it.

On second thoughts, Emma’s mini-skirt seemed to me a refreshing departure from the usual pieties. It suggested that she was more honest than the rest of us, that she wasn’t afraid to admit she was here because she wanted to be here. She and I exchanged pleasantries, nothing more, and when I turned around to pick up my backpack, the man with the pink flowers in his ears had disappeared. I never saw him again, and I didn’t see Emma again for a long time. Frank didn’t take her picture, and I didn’t write about her in my notebook. But as the plane took off, I began to think about her for another reason that had nothing to do with clothes. I knew that she had been working closely with the SPLA’s ‘education coordinator’, a man called Lul Kuar Duek, to reopen Nasir’s schools. I myself had spent days in Nasir interviewing Lul about his plans for the schools. He had claimed to be a great friend of Emma’s. He was the kind of man the Nuer used to call a black Turuk, a name they took from Ottoman Turks who first introduced the Nuer to modernity when they invaded a century and a half earlier and that now extended to anyone who could read and write and wore clothes. Like most Nuer, Lul was dark as a panther, tall and thin with a narrow head and a loping walk. He was a former schoolmaster and an elder in the local Presbyterian church. He was also a bore and a bully. In the afternoons, he would drink Ethiopian gin out of a bottle and lecture me in his straw shack about the martyred American president John F. Kennedy and why southern Sudan was so backward and anything else that came into his mind. ‘The stage we are at now is the stage of the European in the stone age. We are in the age of stones,’ he would say, pointing his finger at me. ‘And you! You be careful. You should know you are talking to someone who knows everything.’

Lul’s baby son slept in a hammock next to his father’s automatic rifle during these conversations, and Lul would frequently offer to give him up for the cause of liberating Sudan from the domination of the Islamic government in the north. ‘Even this boy, he shall fight! Even if he should die! Even if it should take a hundred years…’ He recited the SPLA’s slogans with noisy fervour, insisting that the south would never settle for secession but would fight until the whole country had a new, secular government, though he was to be equally enthusiastic less than a year later when his fellow Nuer commander led a mutiny against SPLA leader John Garang on the grounds that the south ought to give up trying to change the north and start fighting for southern independence.

Like everyone else in Nasir, Lul was obsessed with a prophecy from the Book of Isaiah that he and the others believed foretold the future of southern Sudan. Whenever he had got about halfway through one of his gin bottles, he would wipe his hands on his red polyester trousers, take out the Bible from the crate beside his bed and start banging his hand on it. ‘It is all here - it is written!’ he would announce. Frank and I would exchange weary glances. ‘Isaiah eighteen. God will punish Sudan. People will go to the border with Ethiopia. “The beasts of the earth and the fowls shall summer upon them and all the beasts of the earth shall winter upon them.” I have seen all this come to pass. But it says that in the end we shall have a new Sudan.’

Lul was talking about the years in which hundreds of people had starved to death or been killed in the fighting around the town before the SPLA captured it from the government in 1989. Even then I wondered how Emma could stand it, handing out pencils to Nasir’s surviving children, while Lul raved on about fighting for another hundred years to make a new Sudan out of that blinding emptiness. I always made sure that Frank was with me before I went to visit Lul in his grass hut. But according to Lul, he and Emma got along famously. In fact, Lul was more interested in telling me about Emma than about the schools he was supposed to be running. ‘You know, Em-Maa’ - he pronounced her name with a satisfied smack - ‘is just like one of us. She walks everywhere without getting tired. She is bringing us so many things we need, like papers and chalks and schoolbooks. You people should know, our commander likes Em-Maa very much. Very much! And she likes him! She has been here, looking for him.’ Underneath the praise, there was something leering in his voice.