Abandoned Villages

By: John Jefferson

Abandoned Villages

Anyone that has taken a family vacation in the West can recount memories of visiting old abandoned Indian villages.  Vestiges of the past, perhaps with a person there to show you what the people that lived there did to make clothing, prepare food, and even bury their dead.  With a little imagination, one could picture what it was like when these indigenous people roamed the plains freely and called these places home, despite how desolate and forsaken they look today.  Similarly, the Nuba Mountains holds villages emptied of their inhabitants, as if they were roadside attractions awaiting the queue from the tour operator to come alive in a demonstration of what had been.  The sad reality is that the villages being emptied symbolize the success of the eradication program taking place throughout the region.  In places like Bit Akel and El Feid, we saw well preserved homes, some missing their grass roofs, but otherwise intact.  Sometimes contents of the tukuls were strewn about as if the occupants left in great haste.  We saw bed frames, jerry cans, and shattered pots in one of them.  Looking at the empty villages one might assume they have been that way for years, but that is not the case.  They are artifacts of the war; bombings, raids, and military attacks on civilians caused them to leave and leave in a hurry.   When I first saw the “evidence” of what was happening in Darfur in the early 2000s my mind immediately told me that the scorched earth and smoldering mounds where a village was purported to have been was some fabrication.  I couldn’t immediately grasp that those scenes ever could have been of a place where generations of simple farmers and herders built compounds, grew crops, raised their children, worshipped their God, and died at a good old age.  I tried to convince myself the reason there was nothing there is because there never was anything there.  In 10 years of seeing how the Sudanese can transform a naked patch of earth into a place of vitality, tradition, and hospitality, I now know coming across the remains of what was a village is only a result of some tragic, horrible event, no less impactful than seeing devastation wrought by fire, flood or earthquake in the States.  In fact, it is more tragic and horrible in places like Nuba and Darfur because these are manmade, programmed and intentional acts of violence done on defenseless civilians eking out a living for generations.  Our hope, and theirs, is that they will be able to return to their homes soon, and not have them go the way of those Indian villages.