Faces from Darfur

A single face—sometimes that’s all it takes. Sometimes we get so lost in all the numbers and the statistics that we forget we are actually hearing about real situations, real people and real lives.

We have all heard about the atrocities that have occurred, and are still occurring in Sudan; the innocent lives lost, women and children raped, civilians misplaced from their homes, and even children abducted into slavery.

But how much are we actually concerned with these people suffering half-way around the world? Sure, we can donate $10 here and $20 there. Maybe we could even spare a couple hours to help raise funds for Save Darfur or Amnesty International, or write petitions to our congressmen and women to take action. But until we really see the people who are suffering, until we actually hear their personal stories and the suffering they have individually encountered, the problems in Sudan will remain just that—in Sudan. It takes a face and a person to bring these problems home.

After reading Slave: My True Story by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis, and Escape from Slavery by Francis Bok, I was completely blown away by their experiences. I had always been interested in the Sudan genocide and the slavery that was occurring, but the complete devastation of the whole situation never really clicked in my mind until reading their stories.

Although Nazer and Bok’s enslavement mainly took place during the ’90s, similar situations are still occurring today in the Darfur region. Also, some slaves abducted at the same time as Nazer and Bok still remain in bondage today.

First meet Nazer from the Nuba tribe of south Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. After 12 peaceful years of childhood, her family awoke one night to Arab raiders burning their village and killing their fellow people. Nazer was separated from her family among the panic and terror, and was forced by an Arab to join 30 other Nuba children in the forest. One boy told her how the raiders slit his mother’s throat and then killed his twin baby sisters in front of him, just before they dragged him away.

During the raid, Nazer saw Arabs pin down Nuba women and girls, and rip off their clothes. In her autobiography she said, “Thinking back on this now, if the guards had just raped me that night and left me behind in the forest, that would have been a good thing compared to what really happened to me.”

The men on horseback took Nazer and the other children away and began to sexually molest and assault them. “He [the horseman] started to force my legs apart. Each time I tried to push them together again, he hit me hard around the face…I felt my flesh tearing…” Nazer said.
Many of the other Nuba girls had also been raped and were in more pain than Nazer was. She had learned Arabic in school and could understand the men laughing with one another and saying, “I enjoyed it so much. I wish it could go on for ever and ever!”

Nazer was sold as a domestic servant to a woman in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. She slept very little and was in charge of caring for the woman’s children, cleaning the entire house daily, cooking all the meals, and doing the dishes and the laundry by hand. The woman called her, “Yebit,” an Arabic insult that translates to “girl worthy of no name.” When Nazer accidentally broke a vase while dusting, her master slapped her and exclaimed, “This one vase is worth more than your whole filthy tribe!”

Nazer’s master beat her many more times for other small infractions, and often for no reason at all. One time after making a mistake, her master began screaming at her and punched her so hard that she fell back and deeply cut her leg on the corner of a table. Nazer had to be taken to the hospital, where her master told her to lie and say she was a servant and was being paid for her work.

Nazer was Muslim, like her master, but she was found praying, her master said, “So, now you’re trying to copy us, are you? Do you really think prayers are for people like you?” After that incident, her master would always try to prevent her from praying and would tell her that Islam wasn’t for black people.

“After all those years, [my master] had completely destroyed my sense of my own identity and my own self-worth. I believed that I was no longer valuable as a human being. I believed that I didn’t deserve to be paid for my work. I lived in a state of complete terror of her. And I was still only a child. To rebel against the woman whom I called ‘master’ and who called me ‘slave’ had become unthinkable,” Nazer said.

Eventually though, Nazer was sent to work for her master’s sister in London and was able to escape with the help of another Nuba there. She is one of the fortunate few south Sudanese that has escaped and can tell her story of slavery.

The second author who gives a face to Sudanese slavery is Bok. His story begins similarly. He had a peaceful childhood growing up in a Dinka village about 60 miles from the river separating northern and southern Sudan.

At seven years old, he and some friends were abducted during a raid at a nearby market. The Arab raiders killed every Dinka man and captured the women and children. The children were loaded on a donkey carrier and scared to silence, except for two sisters who were crying incessantly. A militiaman tried to shake one to silence and when she just cried harder, he shot her in the head. After that, the other sister began to cry harder and another militiaman sliced off her leg with a sword. Bok said, “A large fear sat on top of us with so much weight that we were unable to utter even a sound.”

One of the raiders took Bok home, where the raider’s children began dancing around Bok, beating him with sticks and chanting, “abeed, abeed!” (slave). Eventually, Bok herded 200 goats and sheep every day for his master. If he ever complained, his master would threaten to chop off his legs, which had happened to another young local Dinka slave.

Bok’s master forced him to become Muslim, made him say prayers with the family, and gave him a new name. Although most of the time, his master called him, “jedut,” which Bok later learned means maggot.

One day Bok asked his master, “Why does no one love me?” and “Why do you make me sleep with the animals?” His master beat him, yelled at him and replied, “Because you are an animal.”

After 10 years of slavery and two unsuccessful escape attempts, Bok prepared for one last try. In his book he said, “If someone caught me, I vowed to tell them to kill me. I would fight them to make sure they killed me, because I could not be a slave again. And if they didn’t kill me, I would kill myself. I refused to live as a slave any longer.”

Finally, he escaped successfully to Matari, the largest town in the area, where he went to the local police. Instead of receiving help after his 10-year enslavement, the Matari police made Bok their own slave until he escaped again, a few months later.

This time Bok ended up in Jabarona, a refugee camp in Khartoum, where he was arrested 11 days after arrival because the police said, “You have been saying you are an escaped slave; making antigovernment statements.” The Arab raiders who had abducted Bok had been supported by the Sudan government.

After seven months of imprisonment, Bok was released after an official met with him and said, “You will not say bad things about the government again.”

After escaping his first enslavement of 10 years, escaping his enslavement from the local police and suffering through imprisonment and torture for speaking about his enslavement, Bok finally made it to freedom. He now works for the American Anti-Slavery Group in Boston and has literally become a face for the anti-slave movement in Sudan.

Nazer and Bok represent two of the thousands of children and innocent people who have been abducted into slavery in Sudan, and the many who are still being abducted in Darfur. However horrible Nazer and Bok’s stories may be, they are actually the lucky ones—they got out.

Their autobiographies help to shine a light on the slavery problem in Sudan by allowing people like us—sitting comfortably and freely in our own homes or college dorms half-way around the world—to realize and understand the severity of the problem and the lives that are being torn apart.

I have only covered a minimal part of Nazer and Bok’s incredible stories. There are a lot of political circumstances surrounding each of their escapes to freedom that are not mentioned here, but are definitely worth reading about.

With winter break quickly approaching, I urge you to add both of these books to the top of your reading list. They will make you weep of despair, scream of frustration, cry for justice, and most importantly think of the faces beyond the numbers. •