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cut jeans and short-cropped hair, his barrel chest and biceps threatened to tear open his
shirt. As if to complement the look of a human monolith, his neck and shoulders bulged.
A shovel-like hand extended and grabbed mine in such a crushing hold that I couldn't
have torn away, even if I had wanted. 'Alright mate!' he said, with a perfect English ac-
cent. 'How's it going? Welcome to the republic of South Sudan! Tamam?'
'Tamam?'
'It means cool, good, awesome . . . Well, something like that. It's Arabic.'
Ignoring Boston's suspicious looks, I said, 'Well, in that case, Tamam to you too.'
'It's me,' he said, lifting his glasses for an instant. 'Andrew Ray Allam.'
Now this smiling behemoth made sense. I'd been expecting to meet up with a man
named Ray Allam somewhere this side of the border, but hadn't anticipated his being at
the checkpoint. All I knew of the man was what I'd heard from a friend back home, who'd
helped arrange the logistics while I'd been dealing with Matt's death. Allam was a milit-
ary man, somebody who could advise me as we tried to make a way north. He was newly
promoted as a colonel in the SPLA, on a part-time basis - a sort of Sudanese reservist,
whose day job was to arrange logistics for television crews and journalists. The SPLA was
the Sudan People's Liberation Army, South Sudan's newly official military force, which
had begun as a guerrilla organisation in 1983 and finally won the country's independence
in 2011. It was now engaged in suppressing the 'rebels' of the current crisis. If anybody
could help me continue the expedition by navigating between the shifting sides of the con-
flict, it would be Allam. Or so I hoped.
We agreed that he would meet us at several junctures on the journey north - first, here,
at Nimule, and later on the outskirts of Juba, the capital city, which was now held safely
by government forces. Further north, things became more problematic, with several key
towns along the Nile being fiercely contested, but that was a bridge to be crossed another
day. For the moment, Allam led us around Nimule as we resupplied our food and provi-
sions. The town was incongruously calm - the only signs of conflict were the refugees
passing south, back into Uganda. Breeze-block mansions and restaurants lined the main
Juba road, and among them, Allam had found us a compound-style hotel. In the morning,
he told us, he would introduce us to the rangers who would escort us north, through the
Nimule National Park - but, for the moment, it was time to hear his story.
'I was twenty-one when I arrived in England,' he told me, in the hotel bar. 'Before that,
I'd escaped the civil war by heading to the north - to the side of the enemy. I'd been told
that was the place to receive a good education, but when I got there I met an Englishman
who arranged for me to get refugee status in the UK. When I arrived, I couldn't speak a
word of English - but they sent me to college in Winchester and I studied hard. I ended up
with a diploma in media studies and was on track to get a good job in England . . . but I
couldn't stop thinking about my homeland, about Africa. In the end, I came back. I wanted
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