May 2004–March 2005
By Bradford Brooks
My first trip into Rumbek, in the southern Sudan, I had a meeting with the county commissioner and then the mayor. The latter took several hours, a freeflowing and wholly enjoyable afternoon of shooting the African shit: peace negotiations progress and dirt on the characters involved, Iraq and President Bush, the weather and God, women and their problems and how downright bewildering they can be for us Men of the World, landmine types, provenance, and locations around town (surprisingly few), New Mexico and its history, who dug the trenches around Rumbek's Freedom Square, the state of education in Sudan, what I studied at university and why, and an incisive recap of the Sudanese war and Mayor Mabor's role in it (fanatical, goofy, mur derous).
I left the office a little before four in the afternoon. It was blind ingly sunny, around 115 degrees, still but with an occasional breeze. The Sudan People's Liberation Movement flag hung obdurately from a lodgepole in front of the town administration buildings. Next to the flag is a mango tree. They crown out at around fifty feet, majestic and beautiful, inviting and protective. The entire perimeter of Freedom Square—which sprawls, green and vast, directly in front of the town buildings and across from which local militia trained throughout my meeting—is graced by mature mango trees. Crosses were carved into them maybe fifty years ago, elegant Greek Orthodox crosses adzed in by Protestants, and they have caused the bark to grow bulbously and expressively around their scarred shapes. Small herds of zebu cattle are pushed along all day, diagonally, across the square.
The town building and its plaza are a major meeting point in town. Women lounge, wildly scarified, hair coiffed in mindboggling, impossibly tight geometric intricacies, listless, in the shade under the portals, staring out at the lone mango tree hard by the sunbleached flag. Under this mango men park their bicycles (Phoenix and Gazelle brands, Indian knockoffs of Chinese goods, if you can imagine, capa ble of hauling hundreds of kilos of cargo). The bicycles are festooned with plastic daisies and neonpink streamers that resemble Halloween boas, maybe a Camry rearview mirror if somebody is terribly flash. In a county seat of 55,000 inhabitants, with no private vehicles, and perhaps only a dozen Land Cruisers all told, belonging to the Army or the U.N., a bike represents vast wealth. The shade under the tree with all the bikes reminds me of an upscale corral (“Home, James, and don't spare the Gazelles!”). Men gather chairs—made from mahogany and reeds, mortised & tenoned with a machete, à la the Flintstones, hor rifically uncomfortable—around the bicycles and sit in the shade and talk smack. The tree is the epicenter of male social and political life in Rumbek, guys slapping hands and laughing and jiving and scoot ing over chairs, grinning crazily. It's a very transient group, a magnet everyone pulls to for just the right amount of time in their day, coming in, hallooing, moving on. The place to be seen or wait for an important personage to emerge from the dank offices of power, to plead, cajole, pay homage, bid or curry favors.
