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souslejaune · 6 years ago

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During the food shortage my sister... (Folio 1: Part 4)

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During the food shortage my sister and I spent our hours reading. In the rainbow world of the written word we found holes in which to hide from the reality of our existence.

On the news we saw flickering images of flat bodies steamrollered by hunger. People dotted the city waiting for rations of flour and yellow corn. We had never seen yellow corn before the drought, but it was the colour of the corn the American government finally sent us as aid. Ronald Reagan’s yellow reaction to humanitarian pressure. The Americans didn't owe us anything but because the corn was yellow, our gratitude was measured.

Kenkey, a national staple made from fermented corn: milled, rolled into balls, wrapped in corn husks and punctured in the middle to hold the husks in place and provide better heat transfer; changed its colour from white to yellow like a chameleon. No amount of boiling could make the shade fade. We could no longer identify with our food.

Grandma’s chronic need to consume kenkey before she declared herself sated meant that she was never full during the drought. Yellow kenkey was a hollow statement.

Men wandered around with bloodshot eyes seeking answers. The parched ground offered nothing. Even priests and witchdoctors queued for food. There was an air of persistent mourning. Richer families crossed the border to Togo or La Côte D’Ivoire to buy food that had been shipped in from France. The entire West African sub-region was hit by dry Sahelian winds that came to steal moisture from plants and render them barren. Across the region, breezes played a new kind of music – no longer did we hear the harmonious chorus of green shoots; instead a harsh rattle of brown stalks making sticks of themselves invaded the air, assaulting us, striking a frantic rhythm that left dancers spent. France supported its former colonies with vital food shipments. Although they remained hungry in those countries they thinned slower.

My father drove out into the villages and farming communities where there was still some food, and brought sacks of food home. Plantain, cassava and yam. Tomatoes were scarce. Out of season, they festered like wounds across the nation. There was no infrastructure to process them and our people didn’t like sun-dried tomatoes. Our Uncles and Aunts heard about my father’s haul quickly. Faster than the sweep of bush fires across the farmlands. They came for their “share” of the spoils and later conveniently forgot about us when they managed to get a store of food. My mother told my father that he was too kind-hearted, even though her sister, Stella, was one of the Aunts that came to take our food away.

All through the drama Naana and I read. We fought in the Spanish Civil War alongside Hemingway’s heroes Anselmo, Pablo, Pilar, Maria and the tragic Robert Johnson. We watched them plot and double cross and fall in love and die. We ached with them. We cried with them until the bell for our single meal tolled.

In 1984 a Japanese philanthropist called Ryoichi Sasakawa brought food aid to Ghana and started to consult with West African governments on finding a lasting solution to our sensitivity to drought. I immediately read everything I could about Japan. It wasn't easy reading. While I admired them for Judo and for Walkmans, they had a terrifying history of violence; in Malaysia, in the Philippines, in China – even in Russia. They were just like the British in South Africa and India and Kenya. Still, I decried the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and got mad at the United States for putting over 100,000 Japanese Americans in captivity at the end of World War II. The anger came easily. We were still eating yellow kenkey and Grandma was developing a permanent look of hunger.

That year – 1984 – was an especially difficult year for my sister Naana. She was studying for her A-levels and had to deal with hunger at the same time. Rations at her boarding school reduced dramatically. Her workload increased in an inverse relation to the rations. Predictably, her head appeared to grow ahead of the rest of her body. She looked like a stick drawing by a talented five-year-old. Still, Grandma said she couldn’t afford to weaken or stumble. The exam questions were oblivious to the question of hunger amongst the masses. Universities the world over would still rank us by the same criteria as everyone else, because modern society has no sensitivity to life. I tried to help. Anytime she was home, I read her notes to her when she started doing something that prevented her from reading herself. I read outside the bathroom door. I read in the kitchen and by the ironing table. She began to speak to me like a friend rather than a little brother. We talked about everything and made jokes about our hunger.

“Don’t hold your finger too close to my face,” she’d say. “It looks too much like food and I might bite.”

“If you bite, I might think you’re a big fish. Perfect for kenkey.”

We’d laugh a pained laughter that involved as little motion as possible, although Naana’s head still shook involuntarily anytime she laughed. Every time I made a comparison with something from Great Expectations, which had become my habit after reading the full version that year, her head would shake silently.

We were as close as twins until our parents decided that GeeMaa – my father’s mother – should come and live with us, since living alone in hard times is doubly hard. Naana automatically lost her bedroom and had to share mine. I did my best to make it easy for her but I was very untidy, and I refused to move my mounted spider, which gave her the creeps. Sixteen is a terrible age to lose your privacy. Particularly if you are female. Hormones kick in. Unfamiliar cycles become bedmates. Changes occur almost daily. You need time and space to adapt. Apart from the obvious sexual differences, I was a curious boy with a penchant for reading. Her diaries, letters, notes and schoolbooks became targets. She had no inclination to share the soaked blood of her growing pains and concerns with me. I was too wide-eyed. My questions too detailed. We grew apart.

Nevertheless I think I was good for her. I asked her endless questions about her schoolwork; asked until she could reel off answers without thinking. I also pestered her with information from my favourite information trove – the encyclopaedia – and what I had gleaned from old magazines.

“Naana, did you know that Somoza Garcia’s dictatorship in Nicaragua was supported by the US?”

Impatiently, “No.”

“Twenty years. Then his brother took over, then his son…”

“Ebo, I’m trying to study.”

“Oh, OK. What is it today? I didn’t understand the differentiation thing you explained yesterday.”

“Ebo!”

“OK. Just give me the book.”

She threw it at me.

When I wasn’t with her, I spoke to GeeMaa.

GeeMaa liked to go for walks. We left our house in Tesano and strolled. Sometimes to the Industrial Area. Sometimes to North Kaneshie. She bought me groundnuts on the way when we could find some. The dusty roads had become dustier still. With fewer traders lining the banks of the open gutters along the roads, the city had become a faded monochrome of its former self. GeeMaa seemed impervious to the despair that clung to the city like grey blight on trees. She told me fantastic stories. Water maidens, sorcerers and the living dead. Being the student I was, turned on by basic science and its neat explanations, questioned her stories. She always smiled when I doubted her. “Mi bi, there are two sides to every story,” she would say. “More than two sometimes.”

It was the same thing she said when I asked her about my grandfather, FatherGrandpa, whom I had only met twice. She said it with a tender smile. With the quiet assurance that Mr. Wemmick from Great Expectations had when saying “portable property.” The clear air of those who have tested the truth of their statements. On the way home she often recited her favourite poem

Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Alone at home with her one afternoon, I told her about my Dee Dee dreams. It was a Friday and I was helping her slice onions in the kitchen. I chopped onions so regularly that I no longer cried when I did. GeeMaa had taken over in the kitchen since she moved in with us. She insisted she had nothing else to do and she didn’t want to be waited on. Her intervention was well-timed. The drought had pushed prices up and, although the food situation was improving, prices showed no inclination of easing down. With GeeMaa living with us my mother didn’t need to be home as much so she went back to work as an accountant. Business was slow in my father’s hardware store; sales of farming implements had reduced to a trickle. He continued to sell cooking utensils and specialist items like laboratory equipment, but his income was not enough to support the family. Undeterred, he contemplated importing irrigation devices from China. He revealed this while we were cleaning his well-kept Datsun.

“It will be the next big thing,” he announced with a smile. “The drought has taught everyone that rain is not a reliable servant.”

My father’s optimism always made me smile.

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continued >> here <<… | start from beginning? | current projects: The City Will Love You and a collection of poems, The Geez

#novel #series #fiction #niiayikweiparkes

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newstfionline · 8 years ago

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War Consumes South Sudan, a Young Nation Cracking Apart

By Jeffrey Gettleman, NY Times, March 4, 2017

YAMBIO, South Sudan--Simon Burete was weeding his peanut field a few weeks ago when he saw smoke coming from his house. He ran as fast as he could.

He and his wife, Angelina, had enjoyed years of peace, he farming the fields, she selling the produce in the market. They were poor but welded to each other. Just that morning, they had talked about walking into town to buy their first mobile phones.

But as Mr. Burete made it back to the house, out of breath, red dirt still stuck to his knees, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Angela was lying on the floor, burned to death in a rampage by government forces.

“I used to call her akara-ngba,” he said, which means in the Zande language “the last word on beauty.”

He could barely choke out the words.

South Sudan’s war and its full ugliness are engulfing new, previously peaceful areas of the nation, spelling horror for the victims and signifying something deeper: This country is cracking apart.

Yambio, a midsize town of wide dirt roads and lofty kapok trees that seem to breathe tranquillity, used to be part of what was called a green state. This place was considered safe. It was not a red zone.

But now charred buildings and crushed huts line the roads leaving town. Bountiful fields--here in a part of the country known as South Sudan’s breadbasket--lie untended during a desperate national food crisis. The names of dead loved ones circulate through hastily built displaced-persons camps all around Yambio, just as they do in cities and towns hundreds of miles away.

South Sudan’s conflict started as a power struggle between the country’s political leaders before slipping into a broader feud between the two biggest ethnic groups, the Nuer and the Dinka.

But as it enters its fourth year, this war, Africa’s worst, is rapidly sucking in many of the nation’s other ethnic groups, including the Azande, the Shilluk, the Moru, the Kakwa and the Kuku. The widening conflict is imperiling nearly every pillar that this young country’s future rested on: oil production, agriculture, education, transport and most especially unity, which seemed so proudly on display six years ago when South Sudan was born in a halo of jubilation that now seems Pollyannish.

Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, and every major cease-fire that has been painstakingly negotiated by African and Western officials has been violated.

Dangerous fissures are opening up within the South Sudanese military, and the burst of bloodshed here in the Equatoria region is both cause and effect. An Equatorian general and a colonel recently quit, blasting the government on their way out. One said the justice system was “too deformed to be reformed.” Another accused the government of orchestrating a “tribally engineered war.”

On top of all this now comes another calamity: famine.

Last month, the United Nations declared that parts of South Sudan, which receives billions of dollars of Western aid, were suffering a famine.

A formal famine declaration is rare--in the past 25 years, only a handful have been made worldwide. They are a cry for help (and for donors to give more money) and an admission that aid efforts have catastrophically failed. Blaming the South Sudanese government and rebels for intentionally blocking lifesaving supplies, United Nation officials said more than one million people could die.

The hunger-stricken areas include some of the same ones afflicted during South Sudan’s last famine in 1993, immortalized by a Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a vulture squatting behind a starving toddler too exhausted to crawl.

The United States helped birth this nation, building ministries, training soldiers, pumping in more than $11 billion since 2005. Americans, especially powerful Christian groups, cheered on the South Sudanese rebels during their decades-long liberation battle to split off from the Arab-dominated government of Sudan, which southerners simply called “The North.”

But South Sudan is going down the North’s same bloody road.

By all accounts, the South Sudanese forces, in a facsimile of the widely vilified northern Sudanese forces that they rebelled against, are waging war ruthlessly against their own people.

Analysts say South Sudan has become shockingly similar to Darfur, the vast, western region of Sudan that plunged into conflict in the mid-2000s and became a global byword for atrocities against civilians.

What happened there is happening here: government-backed militias, and sometimes uniformed soldiers, sweeping into towns, burning down huts, massacring civilians, gang-raping women and driving millions from their homes, leaving many to crowd into disease-ridden camps protected by United Nations peacekeepers.

Human rights groups say the evidence of war crimes grows by the day. And just as in Darfur, United Nations officials in South Sudan are worried about genocide.

The South Sudanese government says it is putting down a rebellion--the same rationale used in Darfur. And it is true that armed groups rose up in 2013, led by ambitious Nuer politicians challenging Dinka hegemony just two years after South Sudan won its independence from Sudan.

But the broader narrative of the two countries is beginning to blur. A commonly uttered line on Sudan is that it has been at war with itself since independence. Most analysts and even some South Sudanese government officials fear that could be South Sudan’s destiny as well.

“We are doing exactly what the North was doing--that is the irony,” said John Gai Yoh, an adviser to South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir.

“I feel my life is meaningless,” Mr. Yoh said, sitting in a large office in Juba, the capital. “Why is it that we had to fight all these years and end up here?”

He said he stayed on as a presidential adviser because if people like him left, “the whole system disintegrates.”

South Sudanese officials admit that their government, led by Mr. Kiir, has been a huge disappointment.

Take the economy. When South Sudan gained independence, it was churning out 300,000 barrels of crude oil per day, generating billions of dollars that were supposed to be spent on schools, roads, playgrounds, health clinics, water treatment facilities, police stations, all the gear of a functioning state.

But look around most of South Sudan and you won’t see any of that. The reason? The oil revenue was stolen. Top officials have been accused of amassing fortunes, and they and their families were often spotted in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya next door, driving the snazziest cars--$100,000 Land Rovers and gleaming Humvees that hogged up the road.

Back in South Sudan, teachers are paid less than $3 a month, and many said they hadn’t seen even that. Even ambassadors often don’t get paid.

A few years ago, the government struck a questionable revenue-sharing plan with Sudan. Instead of insulating themselves from oil shocks, as outside consultants urged, the South Sudanese cut a deal to make as much money as possible when oil prices were high.

But once oil prices collapsed, the costs of production were nearly as much as the market price, leading to almost no government revenue or foreign exchange and causing enormous inflation, which in turn has fueled the famine. For many South Sudanese, food prices have spiraled out of reach. And now that the war has disabled many pumps, oil production is a trickle.

One of the few shards of hope, analysts say, is that Riek Machar, the former vice president and powerful Nuer politician who led the rebellion against the president, has been sidelined, relegated to exile in South Africa. Mr. Machar has been widely blamed for stoking violence, and few of South Sudan’s neighbors, which have been trying to broker a peace, want him to return.

But the issue of Dinka domination remains. The president, Mr. Kiir, is a Dinka, as are the chief of staff of the army and many top military and security officers.

Most people in Yambio are from other ethnic groups, like the Azande, and say they have been brutalized by the Dinka. They also say some of their youths have joined the fight against the government.

They call the rebels “the boys in the bush.”

It’s often hard to tell which came first, the oppression or the rebellion.

In the past few months, small bands of Zande rebels have attacked government convoys and the houses of government officials. In response, the government has gone on a tear.

United Nations officials said that in December, government soldiers, commanded by Dinka officers, had burned more than a dozen villages outside Yambio and massacred scores of civilians.

The villages around Yambio have turned into ghost towns, empty huts staring lonesomely out at the wide dirt roads. Fields of peanuts, cassava, beans and corn have been abandoned. Some of the skinny papaya trees are so full of fruit at the top that they look like they’re about to tip over. Nobody’s around to pick them.

Yambio was considered one of the best educated, peaceful and agriculturally productive parts of the country, but farmers have fled to camps for the internally displaced. The people here are now totally dependent on donations from aid groups, adding to the strain in dealing with the famine.

Few want to return home, fearing their own government.

“Six Dinka commandos raped me,” said one woman in Yambio, who asked that her name not be used for fear of reprisals.

Not far away, David Angelo, 22, looked over his shoulders before slowly taking off his shirt. Standing in the sunlight, in front of a tiny hut in a displaced persons camp, he said he was not a rebel but had been captured by Dinka soldiers bent on revenge.

His back, his neck and his shoulders bore fresh machete scars. “The government soldiers left me for dead,” he said.

Some analysts, both African and Western, feel the situation is so hopeless that they have proposed a radical solution: an international takeover. The argument says that South Sudan’s government is not an effective or legitimate state, and that it should be nudged aside to let the United Nations and the African Union run a transitional administration for 10 to 15 years.

South Sudanese officials say they would violently resist this.

“We went wrong,” said Taban Deng Gai, the first vice president. But, he added, “South Sudan is not a banana state.”

Many South Sudanese are now asking questions they thought they would never ask: Should they have voted for independence? Would their lives be better if South Sudan were still part of Sudan?

These questions are academic for Mr. Burete, whose eyes shine with tears when he remembers his wife.

He recalled how, at the end of each day, she would show him the money made from selling vegetables. If it was a good day, they would treat themselves to something special.

“She loved to eat meat,” he kept saying. “She loved to eat meat.”

#South Sudan #South Sudan war #south sudan famine

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