Some 300,000 people fled the South Sudanese region of Kajo Keji as civil war swept across the country. Ten years later, a delicate peace process has prompted tens of thousands to flood back. Damian Arnold meets the locals and volunteers rebuilding houses, schools and shattered lives.
Julius Gwolo Alfred sits under the same mango tree every Wednesday evening and turns on his radio. Having worked from dawn, he walks half a mile to the only spot where he can get reception and turns the dial at 7.30pm. The aptly named Hope FM spreads a message of self-empowerment.
For years the mangos on the tree ripened in the rains, fell and rotted on the ground because Gwolo was not here to harvest them. He is one of an estimated 300,000 people who fled the South Sudanese region of Kajo Keji because of civil war, living in neighbouring Uganda’s refugee camps.
Even after an interim peace agreement was signed in 2020, most people were too afraid to return and work the land in the vast verdant valley, renowned for its rich soil and plentiful rains, known as the “bread basket of South Sudan”. This year there has been a mass migration back to the villages, where people huddle around radios to receive motivation on how to mend their broken minds and raise their drooping spirits.
“It is very appealing because they are teaching about discovering your own resources to transform your situation,” says the 58-year-old Gwolo, a tall, stoic figure with a saucer-sized indention in his left bicep and a rod-straight back. “For me, that was my land. You can do a lot of things on the land.”
Gwolo has created at least three businesses on his land, where he, his wife and the younger of his nine children have returned. His pride is evident as he talks of how he has made family life on their farm or shamba viable again.
“The people do not want to be dependent on aid as they were in the camps,” says the Rt Rev Lule James Kenyi, bishop of the Anglican diocese of Kajo Keji. “They are hard-working farmers. All they need are seeds and tools. Nature will do the rest. The process is about discovering for yourself. And when you do, you’ll be able to make that idea grow. We are seeing this flourish in Kajo Keji.”
The region is an enormous patchwork of smallholdings crisscrossed by terracotta-coloured dirt roads in the extreme south of the mainly Christian South Sudan. The country was created in 2011 to bring to an end Africa’s longest-running civil war with the mainly Muslim north (Sudan). South Sudan has a population of 12.7 million, is the world’s most recent sovereign state and also one of the poorest and the second most corrupt.
An uneasy peace
Civil war in South Sudan began to rumble in 2013 when Riek Machar challenged the government of the Stetson-wearing Salva Kiir Mayardit. Other rebel groups became involved and the conflict spread to Kajo Keji in 2016, when Machar’s South Sudan People’s Defence Force began forcibly recruiting young men. Fighting stopped in 2020 when Kiir and Machar agreed to form a coalition government. By then, some 400,000 people had been killed and 4 million displaced.
Conflict continues to boil in Sudan to the north, but an uneasy peace has held in South Sudan. And while refugees from war-torn parts of Africa and the Middle East take perilous smuggler routes to Europe, the mass migration home to Kajo Keji of refugees has accelerated this year.
They’ve returned to a country where three quarters of the population depend on humanitarian aid and inflation of the South Sudanese pound has soared recently to Weimar Republic levels. And because of civil war in Sudan, there is little chance of exploiting South Sudan’s rich oil reserves because the pipelines are routed through Sudan and are regularly damaged. “The impact of the civil war effectively means that there’s no revenue from the oil resources,” says Erickson Bisetsa, the South Sudan director of international relief and development agency Tearfund, which is working in partnership with the Anglican diocese.
Anthony Duku James, a local farmer, joined the mass exodus to refugee camps in Uganda in early 2017. “There were kidnaps at night or along the roadside. Opium-addicted rebels raped local women on their way to water points. Many were taken as brides.”
Government troops arrested and tortured people suspected of being opposition collaborators or spies. Grass-roofed dwellings or tukuls were burnt down. An estimated 2,000 people were killed.
“During the night you would hear people crying in deep pain. That was when the community started feeling really scared,” says Duku, who was one of the first to return and has worked for Tearfund. “You would find people beaten, their property looted and animals taken. Some would be imprisoned, some hanged.”
When opposition forces attacked the main police station in February 2017, killing officers and recruiting prisoners, the steady flow on the roads to Uganda became a stampede. “That was the moment everyone ran for their lives, leaving their belongings behind,” Duku says.
In the refugee camps families would be given a tent on a tiny strip of land. In recent times food rations have been cut to 3kg rice, corn, maize and beans. This has to last a month, but would only feed an average family for a week. After a huge influx of refugees from the latest civil war in Sudan and from continued hostilities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, life in the camps has become intolerable. Jane Aba Bure, a former refugee and mother of five, says, “Lack of food and drinking water was very difficult in the camp. That’s what made me return to Kajo Keji.”
‘The people have a really difficult decision to make’
The people of Kajo Keji have a choice: stay in the camps where they are half-starving but safe, medical facilities are better and children are given at least a rudimentary education, or return to their farms to rebuild their former lives with the freedom to improve their situation but the jeopardy of conflict flaring up again. “They have a really difficult decision to make. Life in the camp is harder and yet they’re still fearful of returning,” says Yanta Daniel Elisha, a project officer for cross-border initiatives in the Anglican diocese of Kajo Keji.
The return began as a trickle. To start with men would go to and fro, cultivating crops to bring back to the camps and feed their families. Now the dirt roads from the camps some 30km over the border are rutted with the tracks of lorries laden with people and their few possessions, motorbikes and bone-shaking bicycles with packages precariously loaded on the back. The majority walk. In the past six months tens of thousands have returned.
To date, an estimated 150,000 people have come back to the charred shells of their homes and started to rebuild them. Much of the rest are expected to follow in the next few months — if peace holds. Most are tilling the soil again and as the “big dig” gathers pace, markets in the bigger villages and small towns, once ghostly and silent, are bustling with people selling their produce.
Today, villages resound to the laughter of children again, but most of the school buildings have been badly damaged. Of 50 Anglican schools, only 10 have reopened. It is hoped that ten more will reopen in the next year. However, South Sudan’s bankrupt government has not paid teachers’ salaries for nearly a year. Many teachers are working as volunteers and the church is asking parents to make a small contribution to pay the teachers.
Tearfund and Christian Aid have implemented a water, sanitation and hygiene project. The main hospital in Kajo Keji county has reopened with support from the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières. It lacks equipment, but women are going there to give birth.
The bigger problem is trauma, a word you hear more than any other. It is etched on solemn faces. “When people come back and see their homes destroyed, the stress comes and they need to be supported,” James says.
Pere Evans, 53, a former primary school teacher from the village of Andasire, lost his house and 18 cattle; his brother and sister-in-law were shot dead. He was arrested and locked up, expecting the same fate. After three months he was set free and, as one of the first people in his village to return from the Palorinya refugee camp in 2020, decided to create a centre of healing in Andasire, where local people could learn to read and receive counselling.
He persuaded the authorities to give him some land and four years later pupils cram into a teaching building with a rough concrete floor. An open grass-roofed structure serves as a crèche and other classes take place under a tree. Hundreds of people attend the centre from 14 surrounding villages. The oldest pupil is 70 years old.
“When I started the programme, I mobilised the widows and orphans first,” Evans says. “We began by sharing testimonies. Some of the women feared anyone in uniform. They feared even to see men.”
Today the women greet our arrival with a dance and song of their own devising about their need for school uniforms and sanitary towels.
When 16-year-old Gladys Sumure Moi became pregnant, the father ran away to the capital, Juba. While five-month-old Annabel sleeps on her lap, her mother brightens as she talks about the centre. “There is counselling on trauma healing,” she says. “I have begun to forget some of the memories that were tormenting me and concentrate on my studies.” Her ambition is to become a nurse.
Jane Aba Bure recalls sitting down with the other women and sharing their experiences in the conflict. “That reduced the trauma,” she says. She has learnt to read and now counsels new arrivals at the centre. “I advise the young girls to continue with their education before they think of marriage.”
Pita Mary Samuel, 36, has been coming to the centre for three years. Her husband became an invalid during the conflict. They have six children, the eldest 17 and the youngest a 2-month-old girl called Uyako. Mary walks 5km each day to fetch water. “Counselling has helped my relationship with my husband to be more peaceful and it has made me more creative,” she says. She is growing cassava, beans and onions and has been given a female goat to rear on the condition that she gives away its offspring to other women at the centre. “The thing I enjoy most is feeding myself and not having to wait for the ration any more,” she says.
A legacy of trauma
If the women are showing tangible signs of recovery, many of the young men are still deeply troubled, says Evans, who is sitting under an ancient tree that has survived an attempt to hack it down during the conflict. War trauma has led to alcoholism and drug addiction, he adds. A lot of youths are chewing murungu (the stimulant khat) and smoking opium. With no school to go to, idleness has bred antisocial behaviour, including sexual violence.
“There have been a lot of suicides among youths and young men and also older men who have lost their livelihoods and can’t provide for their family,” Evans says. “They commit suicide because they feel disrespected and unworthy.”
Land at the centre is being cultivated to raise money for a larger teaching building and vocational training centre, offering courses in bricklaying, carpentry, mechanics, hairdressing and dressmaking.
Numbers at the centre grew steadily until February 2023, when the flow of returning refugees was staunched by news of a large armed group from the Jonglei area in the north arriving to herd their cattle. They drove their animals onto people’s farms, destroyed their crops, robbed and raped. Twenty-eight people were massacred in Mere Boma. The village’s Anglican priest of 20 years, the Rev Canon Edward Jale, 68, looks sorrowfully at their mass grave — an unmarked slab of concrete — amid the boisterous shouting of girls playing football in the field beyond.
Jale regularly visits his flock. “Some people are very quiet and some keep talking. Some have started drinking heavily and some just stay indoors. There are many signs of trauma.”
Meanwhile, he is mediating on “land grudges” that start when people return to find others cultivating their land. “We ask people to give back the land when the owner returns. When everyone comes back, I think the situation will be settled because we are only one tribe [Kuku] and people here listen to one another.”
Cattle herders have tried to enter the area several times in the past 18 months but have been turned back by government troops. And as the return to Kajo Keji gathers pace again, the diocese’s radio station, Hope FM, is communicating a programme called Transforming Communities (TC), devised by the Anglican church (about 70 per cent of the population is Anglican) in partnership with Tearfund. The message in the local Bari dialect is simple: make a list of what skills and resources you have and you’ll often find you have more than you thought.
Hope FM presenter Joseph Longa is an exemplar of the message, having rebuilt his family’s life in Kajo Keji. “I grew up in a very poor family and had a lot of difficulties. My father died when I was six and I didn’t have money for my studies. But I managed to get to the level where I am able to do something. I started transporting milk for cattle owners. I used to bring 10 litres, then upgraded to 20 litres. At first, I was using a bicycle and then I bought a motorbike. Now I am transporting 80 litres a day. I am using that money to put my children through school. I have four children and four children from my late brother.”
He is inundated with calls from people eager to share their testimonies. Among them is Pita Rose John, a young woman who is breaking the mould of the traditional mother. “We were trained in how to transform holistically, physically and spiritually and then to develop a personal vision,” she says. She is separated from her husband and is bringing up her four children and two more she has adopted after her brother was killed. Singing as she goes, she has focused on the family’s four acres, where she is growing ground nuts, cassava and maize. She takes the produce to market on her bicycle and has added dried fish and rice to the wares she offers. With more people returning and demand higher, prices she can charge are increasing, she says. She wants to start sending her goods to Juba, where she can trade on a bigger scale.
She is training 30 other young women in the principles of TC, including Emmy Florence, 22, who is selling pens and notepads in Wudu village to pay for her studies. Florence’s ultimate goal is to open an IT training centre.
Those like Duku are showing others what can be achieved and many local people visit his farm. On the journey back in 2020, the father of three was robbed of all his money, about 120,000 Uganda shillings ($56). Eventually, he found his farm in Mere and rebuilt the smallholding. He has started growing tomatoes, onions, green peppers and watermelons, which make more money than the region’s traditional crops. “I didn’t even have to take them to the market. Buyers would come and look for me.” He’s invested the profits in 200 chickens, which he sells. His children have returned and are attending the recently reopened local Baptist school.
A long-promised election in South Sudan, scheduled for December 22, has been postponed for two years while a constitution is written. Many in Kajo Keji greeted the postponement with relief because of the danger that an election might trigger a return to civil war, James says.
He regularly visits the refugee camps to encourage people to come home. “I tell them that the situation is relatively calm and there is no threat at the moment. Many people are coming.”
A permanent peace?
Talks for a permanent settlement — the Tumaini Peace Initiative — between the government and the opposition forces are continuing in Kenya. If an agreement is signed in the next few weeks there is predicted to be another big migration back to Kajo Keji in 2025, when the United Nations is expected to implement a farming support programme, offering training on modern farming techniques, entrepreneurship, market linkages and the forming of farming groups and loan associations. Some say that farmers need to be weaned off their attachment to traditional crops, which take two years to harvest, to focus on higher value produce such as okra, tomatoes, garlic and onions that can be harvested in three months.
“The UN can only do that when it is sure that peace has been signed. Otherwise, it will not risk bringing people in,” says the Rev Dr Michael Paul Kiju, the principal of Kajo Keji Christian College, a teacher training facility for the Anglican diocese.
His dearest wish is for a tarmac road to be built to Juba, 150km away. The bumpy track used at the moment is virtually impassable during the rains. “A better road would be a game-changer. The journey could be less than two hours instead of seven or eight. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s so close but you can’t transport food there because sometimes the vehicle would turn over,” Paul says. With crop production rapidly increasing, such a road he argues would play a vital role in distributing foodstuffs to areas of South Sudan suffering drought and severe food insecurity.
“People here are peace-loving,” Paul adds. “They know how to till our ground and how to produce food because it has been handed down over generations. Given five years of peace this place will be very different. People will thrive.”
Julius Gwolo Alfred feels like he already is. He made bricks from the soil to rebuild his house and has planted 200 teak trees and is making furniture to sell. He is also planning to invest in cattle and is making a ploughing machine that can be pulled by his motorbike. His cassava, maize, ground nuts and bean crops are fruitful. He says that the produce will pay for his children’s education. Perhaps most importantly, he is giving seeds to others.
Written by: Damian Arnold
© The Times of London