bang. The Nuer, most anyway, decided to follow Machar, and the Dinka lined up with Garang, and the next thing you know, there is no longer one SPLA but two. Machar’s men attacked Bor—that’s Garang’s hometown—and slaughtered two thousand people. Tied children up and executed them. Hung old people from trees. They disemboweled women, whether after they’d shot them or before, I don’t know. After, one hopes. The rest, thousands of them, fled into the swamps, and a lot of them died of starvation and malaria. I evacuated some of the victims, by the way. I saw it, Douglas. Garang’s troops retaliated in kind, and it goes on to this day.”
“Okay, proving what exactly?”
Tara looked surprised by the question, its answer was so plain. “Well, Machar and Garang both hold doctoral degrees, so to get philosophical about it, I suppose it proves that education is no vaccine against savagery, even though many people persist in thinking otherwise. More to the point, it proves that one cannot take sides. You’re on the side of the southern Sudanese? But which southern Sudanese? The Nuer or the Dinka? And what of all the smaller tribes, some allied with the Nuer, some with the Dinka, some with their own armies? The southerners are their own worst enemy, and—”
“The fanatics in Khartoum are their worst enemy,” Douglas interrupted.
“Oh, have it your way, then. I must say all this chatter makes me glad I fly planes instead of make policy.”
“Fly planes instead of make policy? Hey, what are we? Bus drivers? It’s our responsibility, yours, mine, Fitz’s, everybody here”—he made a wide sweep of his arm—“to think about what we’re doing, and if it’s the wrong thing, make it right. Otherwise, we might as well pack our trash and go home. There’s things we can do, big things, and Fitz and I are going to start doing one of them tomorrow, and you’re going to be part of it, even if you think all you’re doing is driving the bus. Sorry if I sound like I’m lecturing.”
“Oh, I suppose it’s good for the middle-aged soul to be lectured by the young now and then. My children, and there are four of them, do it all the time.”
“I haven’t spent the last couple years out here just playing Herc jockey,” Douglas carried on, as if he hadn’t heard her. “I’ve read a lot about Sudan’s history. How the Brits divided the country, just about built a great wall of China between the north and south, and when they left, way back before I was born, told the Arabs and blacks that now it was up to them to figure out how to get along.”
“Oh God, don’t remind me that nineteen fifty-six was way before you were born,” Tara said, with another restrained, backward toss of her head. “I remember when we—when the British left. I was one of the ones doing the leaving.”
They each gave her a questioning look.
“I was raised in Sudan, you know. My father was an engineer, in charge of a postwar development project. A sort of social experiment. Provide land and income to tribesmen without either.”
“Then you know better than anybody what I’m talking about.”
“Actually, no.” Tara smiled, but the stern look, returning to her eyes, nullified it. “I’m not defending colonialism, but I rather think the argument that it’s to blame for Africa’s problems has worn a bit thin. Something else is going on. As far as Sudan goes, I think it’s up to the southerners to sort themselves out.”
“And up to us to pitch in and help them do the sorting.”
“You don’t make a good carpenter by building his house for him,” she said.
“Right. You give him a hammer, show him how to use it. But then you don’t stand back and feel real good about yourself and say tsk-tsk when he bends a nail or whacks his thumb. Sometimes your arm has to get sore with his. Sometimes your sweat has to drip on the ground with his. Sometimes you have to swing the hammer with him, and yeah, sometimes you have to swing it for him, not sit in the air-conditioning like Timmerman with maps and pins and fax machines.”
“And you don’t eat Danish ham and drink French wine while the other guy gets by on his porridge and bad water,” Fitzhugh added, his own fervor rising with the fervor in Douglas’s voice. “And when the job’s done, you leave with the shirt on your back, not a hundred