Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Adjumani was smaller than Masindi, but it was clear that the local population - nineteen
thousand at the last official census - had been swollen dramatically by the influx from over
the border. It had the feel of a frontier town, its main strip flanked by crumbling colonial
buildings and a small roundabout where a policeman waved through traffic and goats. It
was in the swarmed roads that we saw evidence of the fleeing South Sudanese. New Land
Cruisers with RSS plates and tall, smartly dressed men with facial scars had set up camp
here; these were refugees with money - and lots of it.
'Some of them have fled as far as Kampala,' said Boston as we picked our way into the
centre of town. 'The house prices have rocketed because of these Sudanese. They're buy-
ing all the biggest houses in the city.'
'Where do they get their money from?'
Boston only laughed. 'They steal it, Lev. Even you can see that! South Sudan is one of
the most corrupt places in the world. All that aid money and charity donations going in -
where do you think it goes? Not on aid . . .'
Now that Boston said it, I remembered reading about how the president of South Sudan,
the cowboy-hat-wearing Salva Kiir Mayardit, had admitted that over four billion dollars of
public money had 'gone missing' - the implication was that it had been stolen by members
of his own government.
'This is why African aid will never work,' Boston muttered, and we stopped for the
goats to pass.
Adjumani was welcoming the rich South Sudanese fleeing the violence on the other
side of the border, but it was the next day that we discovered what was becoming of the
less well-off. After a night in the relative civilisation of the town, where good hard cash
could still buy a decent bed for the night, we followed a winding path north, keeping our
eyes firmly locked on the mountains that marked the border of the world's newest coun-
try. From our vantage point, on a rocky plateau overlooking the Nile, we could see small
villages on the plain below. It all looked so wild and untamed, and as the mountains grew
bigger so did their air of menace. Beyond them, only thirty miles to the north, lay a war-
zone.
Nestled in the mountains' black foothills I could just make out the telecommunications
masts of the border post of Nimule, and the columns of faint smoke rising from a village
fire somewhere between us and the hills. As we progressed across the plain, through ele-
phant grass twelve feet high, and waded waist deep across a tributary from the river, the
smoke grew thicker, and at last we emerged to find what I knew instantly was a refugee
camp on the cusp of great crisis.
Nyamanzi had once been a tiny village, like any of the other ramshackle ones we had
stopped at on our way north. Now, it was a refugee camp threatening to outsize Adju-
mani itself. The line of UN-issued shacks, made from plastic sheeting over simple wooden
