Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
frames, was only the beginning - Nyamanzi was vast, and only growing bigger. Boston
and I stopped to take it all in. From the shadows beneath the plastic sheeting, countless
South Sudanese eyes watched us. Boston was shaking his head, half in sadness and half in
barely controlled rage. 'It happens every time,' he uttered, and I could feel his frustration:
he had lived through innumerable moments like this, Africa forever fighting against itself.
The fighting on the other side of the border was now four months old, and many of
the refugees had been here since the beginning. There were now almost twenty thousand
refugees from across the border, mostly ethnic Dinkas from South Sudan's Jonglei state -
and they were still coming. Between the clusters of shacks, Boston and I saw buses and
trucks rolling through the red dirt, hundreds of other refugees disembarking with plastic
chairs, mattresses, cooking pots and cases containing their most precious possessions -
anything they had been able to save. As we wandered, we found no structure to the site.
This was a city that had come into being overnight, without planning or order. There were
no fences, no roads, just arbitrary groupings of families, friends, and work colleagues, each
demarking their little piece of land with sticks or lines etched in the dirt.
At last, after picking our way through the tents for an hour, we came to the centre of
the encampment. Here, bordered by yet more tents, a clear patch of land had become a
designated market. The stalls that lined the square were not run by refugees, but by en-
trepreneurial Ugandans - the kind who had seen, in the sudden influx of desperate South
Sudanese, less a humanitarian catastrophe and more an opportunity for commerce. Still,
they were providing a service vital to the camp. The stalls here sold firewood, nails, soap,
bags of rice - as well as hazardous-looking home-made phone chargers, powered by mo-
torcycle batteries.
We were about to disappear back into the sea of tents when I saw a sign outside one tent
offering the services of a barber, another where people sat at white plastic tables drink-
ing tea, and another where pretty little girls could get beads and hair clips. Boston and I
lingered, watching one girl having her hair put in braids.
'Life goes on, Levison,' Boston announced, and then it was time to go.
Ever since Kampala, I had been catching up on the official news whenever I could. What
had begun as political posturing and backbiting had rapidly spiralled into ethnic violence,
with the Nuer 'rebels' regrouping in the north and attacking key towns along what report-
ers were calling 'ethnic fault lines'. Towns such as Bor, Bentiu and Malakal had ended up
becoming front lines and had changed hands several times over the winter. The rebellion
had, if anything, only grown stronger since then, as the government forces pushed the so-
called rebels out into the bush. Army defections became rife, with entire battalions moving
over to rebel command - and others simply going rogue to become independent militias.
The Jonglei, Unity, and Upper Nile states had been the worst affected - and these were
