A new nation, to be born of scars

Victor Ladu drops his crutches in the dirt and sits with his one leg folded beneath him. He looks like a dark bird perched for flight. He brushes dust from the right cuff folded high at the knee.

It’s a hot afternoon. Women balance water buckets on their heads and soldiers, so young, almost like boys, wander through the grass in lazy patrols. They may have to fight one day, but for now they stroll with their guns, lighting trash fires along the road near the new schoolhouse and clinic.

He was them once: raw, unscarred, whole.

The graying warrior with one leg has more stories than bullets. There are many like him in this village and in hundreds more: aging, maimed fighters peeking out from thatched huts, heroes once, but now just men. They wait for Jan. 9, when they’ll vote in a referendum for an independent southern Sudan after more than two decades of a civil war fought over oil, discrimination and religion.

“There’ll be boom times, but not for a while,” Ladu says.

Still, the world doesn’t give rise to a new nation every day. Many predict that the northern-led government won’t let the south go without another round of bloodshed, but, no matter the cost, Ladu is ready for an anthem and a new flag to fly across this troubled patch of northeast Africa. What he’d like most is peace, to lay his head down without bothersome thoughts of what’s moving through the night.

So much has changed since the 1950s, when his father, a doctor, came to Luri Rokwe to heal lepers. Ladu was a boy, fishing in Lake Rotton, running through furrows and goat herds, watching lepers lose fingers and toes. They stayed at the edges, the lepers, whispering, faces covered.

The capital of the south, Juba, was a scratch of dirt roads, not like today with its shops, stores, office buildings and satellite dishes scooping the sky. War and talk of war have hummed for generations between the Muslim north and the mostly Christian and animist south. The north wanted to impose Islamic law and control the south’s oil fields. Other bad things happened too: Ladu’s father was killed in a drunken brawl, stabbed with a spear by his own brother.

“That was in 1966,” he says.

Ladu grew into a man and became a spy. He worked for the state security agency, tipping off the guerrillas in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army about troop and police movements. He volunteered for the Red Cross but later decided it was time to fight. He joined the rebel movement in his village, and one day in 1997, while patrolling the grasslands, he and his men were ambushed by Sudanese government forces.

“Heavy artillery broke the air. Arms fire never stopped. We fought them off and then gathered for a counterattack. Went on for seven days like this and then I stepped on a land mine just inside the bush. My sweeper didn’t detect it. It was shaped like an onion. I was five months in the hospital.”

He pauses. His 9-year-old son, Mekki, has been leaning against the tree, listening. The boy has heard the story before, the tale of a father’s battle in the fight for freedom. There are other stories too, like how starving rebels ate crocodiles from the lake and how humps of orange dirt rose in the strangest places, grave after grave, as if the land was too small to hold the more than 2 million killed between 1983 and 2005.

Graves, fresh and worn, even crowd the village. Two men sit next to one as they fix a bicycle tire. Ladu watches them. His eyes are bloodshot. His words don’t hurry; they drift in the prattle from down the road, the footsteps of children, the clop of goats, the laughter of women, machetes through grass, a radio in the market, planes in the distant sky.

“That market wasn’t here until after the peace treaty,” he says of the agreement five years ago that ended the war. “They built it to sell things to the soldiers at the barracks up the road. This land didn’t have so many huts, either. It was mostly field. There’s only a bit of farming left. Most workers are women cutting grass to sell for thatched roofs. The men fish for food.”

The main dirt road is busy and clouded with dust that sticks to teeth and makes hair gritty. Students from the new school hurry home in their blue shirts with yellow collars. Mekki goes there. Ladu is happy about that, even though the school has no books and SPLA soldiers have to look for chalk to drop off to the director, an old rebel fighter who walks through classes made up mostly of fatherless children.

“We needed that school,” Ladu says. “If you look at history, the Arabs in the north dominated and robbed us because we weren’t educated. The key for us is to teach these children so it doesn’t happen again. The children today are lucky. They’ll have a much better life than me.”

So many people have died on this land, killed by nature, neighbor and inscrutable fate. They’re dying around Ladu these days of malaria and typhoid. The clinic across the road has four beds with stained mattresses and intravenous bags dangling from sticks. It has no electricity or refrigerator and receives three boxes of glucose a month, which last about a week. It runs out of aspirin and needles too. The nurse wears a knit cap and a Virgin Mary bracelet; the doctor is also a preacher.

“The politicians come and promise and then they go away,” Ladu says.

The semiautonomous south, which is expected to vote overwhelmingly for independence, has its own government and army, led by former guerrillas. But rebels and tribesmen don’t always make the best civil servants. They may be the future, though, these former bush fighters wearing tailored suits from other countries. They drive around in entourages past sacks of corn meal and flour, and sometimes guns hidden in sorghum bags, that are shipped in from Uganda and Tanzania.

Women bend in the marsh grass near the lake, filling buckets and heading to the huts with children darting around them. An old leper with a shriveled arm sits under a shade tree near a mud-walled church with a painted blue cross. There are others, but they don’t come out in the daytime. They are, as Ladu says, people “with missing parts.”

They keep telling him there’s oil money to heal sick people or fix all the broken things in this soon-to-be nation. But cash in these outlands is as scarce as crocodiles. Although funds sometimes appear for the oddest endeavors, such as a rusted tanker truck spraying water over the road to keep the dust down in a valiant, futile effort at progress.

Ladu bends over and writes with a finger in the dirt: Luri Rokwe.

“I was born here in 1959,” he says. “I’ve swallowed a lot of bitterness. Soon I’ll be free.”

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com