She once hailed from the vibrant city of Bor from where some of southern Sudan’s leaders, elites and diplomats have emerged. She was a young and innocent Dinka girl then. Now she is a woman, a mother with children with Nuer blood running in their veins and can no longer say with authority that she’s the typical young Dinka girl from Bor.
Martha Nyankuek Maggot was abducted by the Nuer tribesmen, many years ago when she was hardly nine years of age; it was during the long civil war in southern Sudan that her parents cannot remember which year exactly it was that their first born was ruthlessly taken from them. The only way to estimate the time this took place is by going back memory lane to find out from which front the war was being fought at the time. So we estimate that she must have been hardly nine when she was abducted. On that dreadful day, the Nuer who are one of the major communities (tribes) of southern Sudan struck Magot’s village with the sole aim of abducting young female children who would stay home to do the house work and maintain the home as the men went to fight. Magot’s father, also a soldier, tried in vain to fight back to win his daughter from the hands of the abductors who stripped his wife naked and threatened to end the lives of both his wife and daughter if he didn’t cooperate. To spare their lives, he obliged. He was never to see his daughter for good, or so he thought.
Save the Children Sweden, has been working in southern Sudan for almost two decades now. Its programmes cut across all aspects of children’s lives. Since the signing of the comprehensive peace agreement in 2005, Family Tracing and Reintegration (FTR) have been at the centre of its child protection programme. Together with the government and other partners, SCS has been trying to trace children who were abducted, captured or ran for safety to other lands during the war and re-unite them with their families and give them all the support they need to be successfully reintegrated into their communities.
It is through these efforts that Magot was earlier this year identified by an uncle of hers in the far village of Pulchuor in Wuror County a Nuer dominated zone. With tireless efforts from the government and organisations such as SCS, her family was traced to South Bor and her parents identified.
Ululations rocked the clear blue sky of Bor, tears and screams of joy filled the air. As a mothers pain of labour and joy of seeing her long lost child converged at one point of the body – the heart and let loose in another - the eyes, through which a stream of tears flowed endlessly. In a miraculous moment of utter disbelief and sheer amazement, Nyankuek Magot was reunited with her family. Up and till then she had never felt the joy and warmth of family, joy she had been shuttered from when she was abducted years ago, and still she afforded to smile. Even with the reality that she hardly knew her own people, she hardly recognized her own parents and neither did she understand the tongue they spoke. She smiled, her smile accompanied by tears, not only of joy but of contentment of finally being back to her mother land, her land, her people, her roots, her smile with her white teeth tapering out of her mouth, only a reflection of the brightness she felt inside. The entire village was perturbed and thrown into a frenzy of celebration with everyone appearing from all corners of the town, to witness and celebrate the return of one of their own – Magot.
The joy still in the air, the euphoria slowly wears away as the family is brought to the reality that Magot is not the little girl they used to know, she’s no longer their little first born child, she is a woman now, a woman, grown to the full. A woman endowed with all that biology had to offer, a woman now turned to a mother. Their little girl is now a mother of two!
In the years that she was away, Magot got married to a Nuer man, with whom she had two children, both of whom are girls, as if to remind her parents of their pretty young daughter who was once abducted and now has returned. She comes not alone, but with a package of two, her daughters. Later on in the month, her husband ironically appears and lets known his plan to take back with him, his wife and children to “their home”. Magot’s parents are again thrown into limbo. They are even hard hit by the reality that their daughter now belongs to another community, another people, her husband’s people but they are not ready to let go of her again just yet. They insist that Magot’s ‘husband’ pays dowry to them according to their culture in order for him to have their daughter, a daughter that up to now, they didn’t know existed, a daughter that they don’t really know, a daughter they have not really nurtured. Failure to meet their dowry demand, he, Nhial Bol Gal, father of Magot’s children, will not have her. This now brings in a new controversy especially because Magot as a woman in the Dinka community has no say in matters such as this. Her mother compares a girl in this community as a commodity sold in the market to any willing buyer who pays the best price. On the other hand, Bol is not ready to let go just yet without his wife and children, his family.
When probed further in private, Magot says that she will be willing to go back to Nuer land because that is where her children belong and that if she was alone, she would prefer to stay with her parents. She emotionally, confides in me saying “it is the blood of another that will make me go back; it was the blood of my father that brought me back and the blood of my children that will take me back to Nuer and not my will”.
Then I’m left to wonder really, where is the place of the girl child when it comes to making decisions on vital matters affect her? How does the community perceive her? How can she ever be happy with decisions she hasn’t made or at least participated in making? Maybe this is a different issue altogether, and such is culture and such is life, I say, only hoping that wisdom will prevail and Magot and her children get what will be good for them even as the ironical ghost of the joy and anguish of abduction continues to shadow their lives.