So it wasn’t all bad with Adrian. It was good, there in that moment. And I took his hand and smiled up at him.
There was an awkward pause.
“Better have a quick coffee and something to eat and get going. If we look broken down, it won’t be long before we attract attention.”
“Ade,” I said suddenly and he turned back. “Thank you for coming.”
He smiled and shook his head, looked at the ground and kicked a stone.
“I don’t think we were offered a choice,” he said, his voice dropping at the end to indicate conclusion.
“So let’s go now,” I said. “We’re on a mission. We’ll eat and drink later when we have some miles on the clock,” and I ran to the driver’s side.
“Are you insured?” he called.
It was one of the funniest things he ever said, because he was sending himself up, whether he meant to or not.
We’d done about eighty kilometres before I pulled over and then it wasn’t because we wanted to brew coffee and get some sort of carb and sugar hit from dry biscuits. A small skull-and-cross-bones sign nailed to a teak tree by the side of the way indicated that the road had been mined at some stage in the ebb and flow of battle between the Sudanese government and the southern rebels.
Young sappers of the SPLA were swinging their detectors like suburban lawn strimmers in the road ahead. I pulled on to the gentle banking on one side and hissed the air-brakes to a standstill. The SPLA boys in their desert fatigues would be no trouble, so Adrian and I made some coffee. They approached us and, in response to one mildly curious question, Adrian said we’d had engine trouble, fallen behind our convoy and were now catching up. I said we had a radio in the cab and were in constant contact every fifteen minutes, just in case any of the half-dozen soldiers had ideas for our transport.
The commander nodded distractedly and winced into the distance. Nobody here cared about paperwork. While we waited for the all-clear, we ambled about separately, sipping sparingly at water bottles from the small refrigerated box in the cab that we couldn’t get to work properly, so the water was mostly tepid.
Leaning against one of the great tyres, hot to the touch like a burning skin, I saw Adrian crouching about a hundred metres down the road, watching something low and a little in front of him, a lizard perhaps. But he stayed there and was staring. I walked in his direction and saw that he was kneeling now, his backside on his heels, his hands resting palm-upwards on his thighs. As I walked softly up behind him, I saw he was fixed on a pile of maybe a dozen or fifteen skulls, human, in the drainage ditch by the road.
They were sun-bleached white and scavenged clean. Most had no jawbone. They were probably all that was left of a government garrison in retreat, jumped by rebels along this remote road, and I expect the skulls had been kicked into the ditch by the sappers to keep the road tidy for purposes of their sweep.
But someone had stacked them respectfully, so that they were piled upright, a sightless audience to the passing. Adrian had been looking into the little caves of their eyes. I realised he was praying.
We drove. We stopped. We drove again. The journey continued like this for a couple of days. No more sappers and skulls, just great tracts of driving, Adrian and I taking turns at the wheel and otherwise dozing in the back, the odd navigation conference and calculations of the rations left aboard the lorry. And our odyssey punctuated by little vignettes of the horror that the civil war had visited on inhabitants luckless enough to live in this ruined Eden: a burnt-out farm, its fenced and empty animal pens still standing; a pile of cattle carcasses; abandoned machinery, its bright yellow paint echoing a hopeful time, now evaporated in the heat haze.
We drove for hours through forests of teak, which along with the stratum of oil somewhere way below, in some benign fantasy of another economic world, could not only have fed the people now fled, but sent their children to brand-new schools to become doctors and engineers and teachers and aid workers to other desperate regions. They could have gathered in the sun on their school runs, like parents from the Home Counties to the Emirates, to complain that they’d had to wait half an hour to see a doctor in the flagship new hospital or to sneer at how hideous was the new superstore.
No, in truth the tribes of southern Sudan are too noble for that Western model of existence. Maybe that’s what made them so vulnerable to the ravages of civil war. The population of a country spoilt by prosperity is harder to oppress.
The Dinka herd oxen and watch the sun rise. They were always going to get walked over by those with American guns who would fight Western wars, even if they didn’t care about the rich seams of black gold under their plains.
We stopped at a tight little settlement beyond Amadi. It was still standing but was strangely vacated. “Ghost town” didn’t do it justice, for that implies abandonment. The ghosts were very present here and some were still walking about, in a semblance of remaining alive. There had been a hospital. That’s why government forces targeted it in a deliberate act of apparently wild vengeance.
