The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (20 page)

Is the black color of skin such a thing
That the government should draw its guns?

—
DINKA SONG
¹

If Sudan splits along the tenth parallel, it will become two countries, one
black and Christian, the other more Arab and northern. When I traveled to the north-south border, and to the frontline village of Todaj, in 2008, I was startled by how aware people were of the tenth parallel’s significance as both a geographic and ethnic divide. Partly this was a result of the failed 2005 peace deal, which was supposed to give both sides rights to the land along the tenth parallel:
leaders from both sides knew the lines on the map, since they determined whether or not the whole town would survive. But it wasn’t the town that mattered this time; it was the oil beneath, and I wanted to see it. I’d flown above the fields—thousand-mile grids sliced into the
sudd—
from above. Swamp water shone through the slots. I’d thought of the determined Karl Kumm nearly swimming across what
he’d called “one vast lake that culminates between the seventh and the tenth parallel.” From the ground, oil was a more mysterious affair, and that was no accident. Occasionally, I would get a whiff of its acrid tang, but the signs of oil extraction are not so easy to see. Sometimes a red knob in a sandy clearing led to a few yards of exposed white pipe, or a telltale hummock that looked like a
woodchuck’s tunnel. These, I was told, were signs of the 2003 oil pipeline buried under six inches of barren soil. I decided to try to visit the largest oil fields around.

For thousands of square miles, the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company was extracting the light, sweet crude oil that makes petroleum prospecting in Africa so lucrative. GNPOC had its headquarters at Heglig, which lies
within fifty miles of the tenth parallel in the state of South
Kordofan. It was a four-hour drive from Todaj (which lay in Zone Four) to headquarters, beneath an incandescent sun. Along the way I saw no sign of life except a few fishermen, who stood ankle-deep in puddles scooping Nile perch and mudfish into nets. The fish, at first glance, looked like snakes. So late in the dry season, the puddles
were too shallow to cover the fishes’ whole bodies, leaving their muddy fins to writhe above the water. These would-be fishermen depended on a battery of international aid agencies, although their fishing hole was at the edge of a vast oil field. Aid dollars were pumped in to feed them while their country’s wealth was pumped out from beneath their feet.

GNPOC did not welcome visitors, but thanks
to a favor from a well-placed friend, I was granted an appointment with the chief of security at headquarters. My reporting was supposed to be restricted to the company’s community development programs, but what I saw were communities being destroyed.

The territory within GNPOC’s barbed-wire perimeter, which lay about an hour north of the town of Bentiu, seemed like another country, or several
countries. In the trailer that served as a lobby, oil workers in red, green, and beige jumpsuits—from China, Malaysia, India, and Sudan—scurried through a waiting room, where a sign in Arabic read, “Use the Waiting Time to Ask for Forgiveness.”

I was taken to a GNPOC-built hospital on a company road not far away. Since the headquarters sat on the de facto border between northern and southern
Sudan, the hospital saw patients from both sides—northern Arab nomads, and Dinka from the south. Medical treatment was free, as long as those seeking it could pay the three-dollar bus fee from the nearby town. And most people could not. “The culture is our biggest problem,” said the hospital’s doctor, who had come south from Khartoum. “There’s no civilization here. Africans and Arabs both, all they
do is fight.”

That spring, the Arabs and the Ngok Dinka were doing all they could
not
to fight. Most nights in the nearby oil town of Abyei, well-armed teenage bullies played a lethal game of chicken, as soldiers from both sides cruised the oil company roads in land-borne gunboats—open Jeeps mounted with antiaircraft guns called technicals.

But no one who actually lived there wanted more war.
The nomads
were in a terrible position. As in Nigeria and across much of Africa, the desert and seasonal droughts were squeezing them off their land. In Sudan, the Khartoum regime intensified this crisis by leasing land along the nomads’ migration routes to commercial farmers. (For years, Osama bin Laden was one of the largest.) No longer able to go north, the nomads had no choice but to push
farther south, into Dinka land. Both nomads and Dinka recognized these patterns, and neither wanted trouble. The elders also understood that their people were not simply competing for grazing land, or even oil; they were pawns in a larger conflict.

Most evenings the elders gathered at the sprawling whitewashed mud compound of the Ngok Dinka’s paramount chief, Kwol Deng Kwol. Lesser chiefs such
as Nyol Paduot looked to the paramount chief for guidance. But so did the Arab Misseriya, thanks to ties between the two groups.

Kwol Deng Kwol is a gentle giant in his forties. Seven feet tall and wearing a pink tattersall shirt and khaki trousers, he made his way around the banquet hall greeting his guests, a mobile phone in each hand. He inherited this role by blood; his father was the legendary
Ngok Dinka chieftain Deng Majok, who married nearly two hundred wives and fathered a thousand children. Deng Majok also forged a peace with the Misseriya chieftain Babo Nimr. When Deng Majok died after a long illness in 1969, Khartoum had his most powerful son and rightful heir assassinated. Both men were buried outside the hall in what looked like a small parking lot, the sarcophagi slathered
over with cement so that no one could defile the bodies.

Fear lent the evening a festive air. The chief was laying out hot platters of roasted goat, cups of wild honey, and china bowls of sour cheese called
kisra.
Sometimes the signs of imminent conflict—crowded roads, a sudden excess of food—are easy to mistake for prosperity. Yet at the chief’s banquet, everyone knew they were waiting for war.

At the edge of the hall, one black man towered over the tall crowd. He was wearing the white cap and robes of a northerner—a Muslim—but his height and skin color clearly marked him as belonging to the Ngok Dinka. His name, it turned out, was Maulana Alor Deng and he was one of the paramount chief’s hundreds of brothers. He was also an imam in the local mosque—had been, at any rate, until the northern
government kicked him out several years earlier because, as he said, they did not want a black man leading prayers.

Maulana Deng converted to Islam in order to get an education, and
upon doing so, he was compelled to forswear his parents’ spiritual beliefs and take on a Muslim name. Over time Deng’s practical assimilation had become a genuine experience of religious conversion.

With a bowl of
amber honey in his lap, he laid out the conflict between north and south in terms an outsider like me could understand. “In the north people think that they are better,” he said, because they are Muslims and ethnic Arabs. “The south is more blessed with resources. That’s why the north wants to control it.” That meant oil for the government, water and viable pastureland for the nomads. As a Muslim,
Maulana Deng was ordered by the northern government to fight against his non-Muslim Ngok Dinka brothers during the most recent jihad. He prayed for God’s guidance, and, he says, God told him not to go. So he refused to fight. “I didn’t give in because I know what jihad means, and this was not real,” he said. As a result, he was tortured. “If my faith wasn’t strong, I would have left Islam,” he
said.

A blind woman, eyes blued with cataracts, one earlobe ripped in two and a safety pin pushed through the other, entered the mud hall, which was redolent with the aromas of honey and hay. Dragging a gnarled wooden staff and wearing a white shawl so frayed her clavicles showed through its weft, she looked like an oracle, and was singing low in her throat about Abyei, this town, which was named
for an acacia tree. She was a praise singer, Maulana Deng explained, a cultural relic of another time. The song she sang—of war, attrition, and stubborn return—was a song of the past, but she could have been singing about the future.

Three weeks later the northern army laid siege to Abyei and destroyed the town. By satellite phone, the paramount chief told me that the whitewashed mud house where
we had eaten supper had been looted and burned to the ground. He had taken shelter with twenty other men in a single hut too small for them all to lie down in at once. Aid workers did not have enough tents or tarps to go around. At night, the men took turns standing out in the rain. “My people are living under trees,” Kwol Deng Kwol said. Here at least there were trees.
²

Now brother will deliver up brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death. And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.
—
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW
10:21–22

We sent to you [Muhammad] the Scripture with the truth, confirming the Scriptures that came before it, and with
final authority over them: so judge between them according to what God has sent down.
—
THE QURAN, THE FEAST
5:48

“Take off your veil!” a soldier shouted, grabbing a woman’s black face veil with his left hand and
steadying the butt of an AK-47 against his shoulder with his right. “Why are you coming so close to us? You have explosives?” The soldier, working for a government
of warlords, stepped forward until his gun’s muzzle grazed her nose. She was a suicide bomber, he was certain; he fixed her with a glassy, pink-eyed glare. Fearing he would shoot her, or that she would explode, I closed my eyes. The afternoon’s bedlam didn’t recede; it flooded my eyelids with green.

Here at this crossroads in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in June 2007—deserted except for this
woman, a passel of soldiers, and a man selling fresh mango juice from a wooden table (his stall had been blown up several days earlier)—everyone and everything held its breath. A piece of trash, a pile of rubble, a woman waiting for a cup of mango juice—any of these could be a bomb rigged by the Islamic insurgents called al-Shabab, “the Youth.” The insurgents ruled this neighborhood, Tawfiq. Their
bunkers—hidey-holes littered with cracker wrappers and old tissues—rutted the sandy streets.

“I just want a juice,” the woman pleaded, trying to back away. Suddenly exposed and embarrassed, she broke into a jester’s forced grin. The juice man watched from behind his table, trying to wipe the distress off his face, keep his features neutral,
careful, careful.
He probably knew her, since she lived
nearby, and he had sold juice on this corner for the past twenty years. For all I knew, she could be his daughter. Maybe her family was watching from the curtained window of a house down the street. Maybe tomorrow, to avenge their daughter’s shame, they would send their son to join the insurgents.

Nearby, grazing cows and a group of children sniffing glue competed for something to eat in the
same pile of garbage. A sign on a daub wall read, “New Fallujah Café,” linking Somalia to Iraq and the legendary city there where Muslim resistance defied American might. This arid strip of badland clinging to the continent’s northeastern edge was fast becoming the most violent nation of Africa’s fifty-three. Six months before I arrived, on December 26, 2006, neighboring Ethiopia, which has been governed
by Orthodox Christians since the fourth century, officially invaded Somalia, whose nine million people are Muslims. In the name of defending their Somali nation and their Islamic religion against Ethiopian “crusaders,” al-Shabab, an Islamist militia, had launched a rebellion against the Ethiopians. This local battle had global repercussions: it was bleeding into
a proxy war between Al Qaeda and
America, who saw in this fight between Somalia and neighboring Ethiopia a struggle for an ideological and logistical foothold in Africa.

The battle-by-proxy for Somalia was not new; during the cold war, the United States and the Soviets vied for control of the tiny country to gain access to the oil routes on its long coastline. Since the fall of Somalia’s Soviet-backed military dictator, Siad
Barre, in 1991, the country has endured seventeen failed attempts at government. Somalia is the longest-running failed state on the planet; for much of its history, it has been ruled by warlords. In 2004, a nascent Islamist government, the Islamic Courts Union, rose to challenge the warlords’ power. The Islamic Courts Union began as a network of neighborhood courts that meted out justice according
to Islamic law. It consisted of a coalition of businessmen, religious leaders, and militants, including, according to U.S. intelligence, at least three members of Al Qaeda. From the start, the coalition was riddled with divisions: Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a forty-six-year-old soft-spoken former Somali schoolteacher, headed the more moderate political wing, and was frequently at odds with the
sixty-two-year-old hard-line military commander Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who was on both the U.S. and UN terrorist watch lists. Sheikh Aweys led the Islamists’ military wing and their militia, al-Shabab, and by 2005, under Aweys’s leadership, the Islamic Courts Union was showing the usual signs of a conservative Islamist regime staking a claim on its people and their habits.