The Boy Who Never Gave Up

A Refugee's Epic Journey to Triumph

Emmanuel Taban

• Verlag: Jonathan Ball
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781776191277
• Thema: Scienze sociali
• Thema: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

In 1994, 16-year-old Emmanuel Taban walked out of war-torn Sudan with nothing and nowhere to go after he had been tortured at the hands of government forces, who falsely accused him of spying for the rebels. When he finally managed to escape, he literally took a wrong turn and, instead of being reunited with his family, ended up in neighbouring Eritrea as a refugee.

Over the months that followed, young Emmanuel went on a harrowing journey, often spending weeks on the streets and facing many dangers. Relying on the generosity of strangers, he made the long journey south to South Africa, via Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, travelling mostly by bus and on foot.

When he reached Johannesburg, 18 months after fleeing Sudan, he was determined to resume his education. He managed to complete his schooling with the help of Catholic missionaries and entered medical school, qualifying as a doctor, and eventually specialising in pulmonology.

Emmanuel's skills and dedication as a physician, and his stubborn refusal to be discouraged by setbacks, led to an important discovery in the treatment of hypoxaemic COVID-19 patients. By never giving up, this son of South Sudan has risen above extreme poverty, racism and xenophobia to become a South African and African legend. This is his story.

THE BOY

WHO NEVER

GAVE UP

A Refugee’s Epic
Journey to Triumph

DR EMMANUEL TABAN

WITH ANDREW CROFTS

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG · CAPE TOWN · LONDON

CONTENTS

Title page

Dedication

List of maps

Prologue

1. Money from the sky

2. A studious boy

3. Life and death in Juba

4. Abduction and torture

5. Stuck in Asmara

6. On the streets of Addis Ababa

7. Fighting off thieves and snakes

8. A home with the Combonis

9. A single-minded student

10. Becoming a doctor

11. A sad reunion

12. Trying to make a difference in South Sudan

13. A wedding and a funeral

14. Farewell to my father

15. On the front line of a pandemic

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the book

About the author

Imprint page

To my mother, Phoebe Kiden Stephen,

and my father, Bishop Giuseppe (Joe) Sandri.

May they rest in peace.

LIST OF MAPS

Map of Sudan and South Sudan

The first leg of my journey: through Eritrea and Ethiopia

The second leg of my journey: through Eritrea, Ethiopia and Kenya

The third leg of my journey: from Kenya to South Africa

PROLOGUE

‘I will kill you like George Floyd!’

A droplet of spit fell on my cheek and I could smell the breath of the Tshwane Metro Police officer. His angry eyes bored into mine.

Seconds earlier, he and his partner had shoved first my wife, Motheo, and then me into their police van. It was a clear act of intimidation. They had pulled us over after I had crossed a solid white line while overtaking another vehicle. I don’t normally disobey traffic rules but I was in a great hurry to get to Midstream Mediclinic in Centurion, where one of my COVID-19 patients was in the intensive care unit (ICU).

‘Where’s your phone?’ he shouted. Another droplet of spit.

‘It’s in my car,’ I lied. I had secretly slid it over to Motheo, whispering to her to send to a friend the photos and videos I’d taken of the vehicle registration number and the cops’ faces. But they were all over us and she was too shaken to do anything. I saw her lip was still bleeding from when the traffic cop had wrestled her to the ground and into their van.

‘Where’s the phone? I saw it on you!’

The officer got into the van and started to search my body, but to no avail. ‘I will kill you!’ The next moment he grabbed me by the throat and started to throttle me.

Motheo is South African and I am South Sudanese. My particular shade of blackness and the fact that I do not speak Sepedi had fuelled the officers’ antagonism. One of them had called Motheo a whore for being married to a makwerekwere, a foreigner.

I tried to resist but my hands were cuffed behind my back and the officer was much bigger and stronger than me. I struggled to breathe. As much as I tried to inhale, no oxygen would come in.

‘Here it is! Here it is!’ Motheo screamed when she saw my eyes rolling back into my head.

She handed the phone to the officer.

‘What’s the PIN?’

I was still gasping for air.

‘What’s the PIN?’ the officer shouted and grabbed me by the throat again.

In that moment I realised that this was the day I might die. My survival instinct kicked in and I tried again to wriggle free. The officer’s colleague grabbed his arm and he let go. I finally managed to focus on what he was saying and gave him the PIN to my phone. He deleted the photos and videos and even accessed my Facebook app, worried that I might share what had happened on social media. Then he got into the van, asking his colleague to follow him in our car as he drove us to Lyttelton police station.

In the early 1990s I fled war-torn Sudan as a 16-year-old boy after I was abducted by government forces and tortured. After my escape, I made my way south through several African countries over many months, surviving hunger, life on the street, thieves, corrupt border officials and many other dangers to finally make it to South Africa. But today not even my medical degree would save me. I had never been so afraid for my life.

Map of Sudan and South Sudan

1 MONEY FROM THE SKY

As a barefoot boy in the dusty South Sudanese village of Loka Round, I was always running. Nothing could slow me down as I hurtled enthusiastically through childhood, but the pile of money that lay before me in the road brought me to a screeching halt. I had never seen anything like it, so I assumed it must be the sort of miracle, the kind of gift from God, that the grown-ups in my life had always been promising. I snatched it up.

The magical appearance of that money in the dust seemed, at that moment, to suggest that my prayers had been answered, just as the grown-ups always told me they would be.

I was about eight years old and unexpected visitors had arrived at our one-room hut, a simple structure made of mud and grass, like all the others around it. My mother had sent me out to buy a loaf of bread so that we would have something to offer our guests. As always, I set out with all the speed I could muster, running as fast as my legs could carry me so that I could get back as quickly as possible with the loaf and show them what a good and reliable son my mother had raised.

The money, however, caused me to stop and investigate. Counting each worn and grubby note, I carefully shielded my find from any predatory eyes that might be watching from the bushes on either side of the track. I realised it was about $20 worth of local currency, enough to buy any number of loaves, and more money than I had ever seen – or would see again for a long time.

I was so happy that my heart soared in my chest. I pushed the notes into the pocket of my shorts and set off once more on my mission at even greater speed, fearful that someone might have witnessed my good luck and would try to rob me. I couldn’t wait to get home and show my mother how the God she told me so much about had decided to bless me.

‘God has given you money, Bobeya!’ she exclaimed when she saw it. My nickname in the family was Bobeya, which means ‘baby’ in my mother tongue, Pojulu, a Bari language. The name stuck, even as the years passed and many other babies were born after me, each one increasing the burden on my mother, who struggled to keep them alive long enough for them to become self-sufficient.

For the next few days I doubled and trebled my prayers in the hope that even more free money would drop out of the sky and land at my feet, allowing me to help my mother feed the many empty stomachs that depended on her. It confirmed everything I had heard in church about the goodness of the Lord.

I was still too young to understand that hoping for an unearned windfall in this way was part of accepting that I was unable to earn money for myself. It was telling me that, in order to prosper, I simply had to pray and then wait for those prayers to be answered. It did not occur to me that there might be another way. Every grown-up I knew was praying for the same thing, and with the same lack of success.

To my disappointment, no more money arrived from the sky. When I thought back a few days later to the night before my windfall, I remembered lying in the dark and hearing drunk people fighting on the road outside our fence. It was not unusual to be woken by such threatening sounds, but it occurred to me that it was probably one of the drunks who had dropped the money in the dark rather than a benevolent heavenly Father.

But still, I reasoned, He had guided me to the spot before anyone else, so maybe He was just moving in ‘mysterious ways’ like they talked about in church. The incident gave me much food for thought, which my young mind was not yet ready to put into any coherent order, leaving me feeling confused and unsettled. I longed to understand things better.

Typical mud huts in Rajab East village on the outskirts of Juba

Now, after many years of travelling, reading and learning, I understand that the sort of long-term poverty I was born into is not inevitable for anyone, and it has nothing to do with God’s will. It wasn’t Him that made us poor. In fact, the Republic of South Sudan, as my country is now known, could be one of the richest countries in the world. We have a God-given abundance of oil, gold and other minerals lying under the ground, and our soil is so fertile that it is almost impossible to stop things from growing in it. Yet it is home to some of the poorest people on Earth, people who still live in mud huts like the one I was raised in, with no electricity or running water, and who seldom have enough nutritious food to prevent their stomachs from aching. My people have eyes, but they cannot see the riches of the country. They have accepted their status as victims of their own mentality.

Sudan’s development as a country was severely hampered by long periods of civil war, first from 1955 to 1972 and then from 1983 to 2005. South Sudan gained its independence in July 2011, becoming the world’s newest sovereign state. The struggle to reach that point, which filled my childhood years, was long and bloody.

Even today, life expectancy in South Sudan is still about half what it should be, partly because of the lack of clean water, basic hygiene, education and effective medical care, and partly because of the country’s murderous political history. A country that should be close to paradise more often looks like hell to those who visit or watch from the outside.

I was born on a mud floor in Juba, now the capital of South Sudan, to a single mother in 1977. My statistical chances of surviving into adulthood were never good. But, like all children, I never realised that there was anything I could do to improve the odds beyond offering up prayers to God when instructed to do so, and hoping for at least one miracle to come to my rescue.

I accepted my own helplessness to influence my fate just as everyone around me accepted theirs, and just as the majority of people in South Sudan still do. Because of that acceptance, and because of the strength and goodness of my mother, my early years were happy despite the poverty and adversity that to me seemed normal.

I was the youngest of the four children that my mother had with my father, Lemi Sindani. My mother, Phoebe, was a hardworking woman whose entrepreneurial skills had to compensate for her lack of education and family support. She made a mistake when she married my father, who proved to be an incorrigible philanderer, and they eventually divorced while she was pregnant with me.

Shortly after my birth Phoebe’s brothers, my uncles, ...