the cue and stated her business. What was the extent of the slavery problem in the mountains? Any estimates of how many people had been seized?
“I don’t know much more than what I told you earlier,” Michael said with a weary shrug. “How many have been taken?” Another shrug. “A few, like that young woman who spoke to you, escape and give us some names. We get some informations from people whose families have paid Arab traders to return them.”
“We work a lot with a trader named Bashir. Is he one of them?”
“I have no idea.”
“I know of this Bashir,” Major Kasli interjected. “He’s gotten rich selling slaves back to freedom.”
Michael glanced at him sidelong, then said, “The taking of captives isn’t our problem, it’s the symptom of a problem.” Looking away, he waved his stick at the red wafer of the sun, suspended on the rim of the far ranges.”There’s the problem.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Quinette said.
“Those hills, and those over there, and those behind us. These mountains are so isolating. You have in one valley a village and you have in another valley another village and the people don’t even speak the same language. This makes it easy for the Arabs to give rewards to one tribe if they will join with the government. Yes, I’m sorry to report that many Nubans have been bribed to fight against their own people. The old tactic, divide and conquer, and we do half the work for them by dividing ourselves. Tribalism is the problem here, in all Sudan, in all of Africa. Who brought the first African slaves to the slave ships? Other Africans.”
He fell into a silence, looking at her as if he expected a response. She couldn’t think of any. Her only thought was that he was a strikingly handsome man.
He turned from her to glance over his shoulder, toward the mission and its surrounding village. “I would like to show you something, Miss Hardin. If you care to see it.”
“What?”
“What I hope will be a solution to the problem.”
In the dusk that had dropped like a stage curtain, they walked a rutted lane, past tightly clustered huts, Michael presenting verbal snapshots of the town when it had been home to more than two thousand souls. The thriving marketplace, the harvest festivals, the church filled with congregants, the school with pupils, their voices and laughter ringing in the air when classes were over.
“And then Khartoum’s bombers came, and then the raiders, and it became a village of ghosts,” he said. “Only a few people escaped death or captivity. Those drifted back and discovered that the Arabs had failed to destroy the wells. Why, no one knows. News of this traveled, and in time refugees from elsewhere began to arrive. Because there was water. Water is hope. These new settlers began to rebuild the houses, to plant gardens and tobacco and sorghum fields.” He stopped and motioned at a cooking fire, its glow illuminating the face of an old woman squatting before it. “She and her family are Moro tribesmen. And over there”—he walked further, toward the wink of a paraffin lamp—“are Nubans from the Tira hills. And there in those houses are Masakin Nuba.”
Quinette nodded to be polite. None of the tribal names meant anything to her. Off in the distance, men and women were dancing, drums and chants providing a kind of background music to Michael’s soliloquy.
“After I was given command of the SPLA forces in the Nuba and I saw what was happening here, I made my headquarters nearby. This is my main task—to unite the Nuba in a common cause. Very difficult, maybe impossible, but it begins here”—he stomped a foot—“because here the people have been uniting themselves. Without intending to, out of necessity, they’ve planted a seed. When you plant a garden, you build a fence around it. We fighters are the fence. Since we came, more people from all over the mountains have been settling in this refuge, and there have been no attacks. We now have almost half the original population, but from different tribes, learning one another’s dialects and customs, discovering what they have in common. New Tourom belongs to no one tribe, it belongs to all. Out of destruction, the seed of a new society, with the old divisions and suspicions set aside. Now we must nurture it, help it grow into a fine big tree.”
Darkness had fallen, a full moon had risen, and he stood in its