WHY DID YOU COME IF YOU LEAVE AGAIN?
THE NARRATIVE OF AN ETHNOGRAPHER’S FOOTPRINTS AMONG THE ANYUAK IN SOUTH SUDAN
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...... I remember the rainy season like an endless series of malaria and diarrhoea. They enveloped both my body and my mind, leaving no space for thoughts. Malaria seized the entire body: the head would almost explode from heat, the body would shiver with cold and the knees were terribly painful. I would lose consciousness but in a conscious way. I felt as if alive, burning. Boys would pour water on my face, girls would kneel beside me and fan my face, many people would come just to see me and to tell me that everything would be fine. For three days I would lie on the ground, covered by blankets which felt warm like love. For three days I would be lying there on an antelope skin, absent, speechless, soulless - it was a kind of death without fearing the end: fever carried me off and away. Contrary to malaria, attacks of diarrhoea were a real disturbance of self-consciousness. It was a turmoil of emotions, an explosion of intestines: white strings mixing with blood and violet clouds, rivers of excrements flushing out at short intervals, monkeys dashing from one branch of my mind to the other, lightning crossing the air, my bones suddenly collapsing under the weight of motions. Sometimes, I was just too weak to walk, and yet I had to try to reach some empty space between the high grass, emptying myself even when there was no substance. Bugs rolled the excrements away, clearing the place, and while watching them with amazement, I felt like losing balance, like rolling backwards, like falling into the black cracks in the ground. My whole consciousness was reduced to these excrements. Sometimes, the emotions were so heavy that I was almost blind, couldn't distinguish birds from ashes in the air, light from darkness, noise in the ear from silence; but there were also moments when my spirits exploded with sudden lightning and the visions appeared sharp like a knife, opening the smallest features of natural life, odours, colours, tiny birds and burning wounds. One afternoon, I felt that flies were sitting and walking on my lips and then noticed that I didn't make the slightest effort to chase them away. This had always been one of the most disgusting horror visions of absolute poverty: to see flies walking on the lips of children, and the children didn't react to their presence, talking as if nothing was disturbing them. Now I had reached that stage! Was this the moment when I realised that I had become an Anyuak, a stoic witness of my lack of power? For a moment, I felt like an animal enduring my fate. Unconsciously, I had given in to nature. Flies on my lips: their weight was titillating. On one of those days of malaria, the King came to visit me. “What shall we do when you should be dead?” he kindly asked me. He was obviously worried about my loss of weight. “Well,” I answered, “you could burn me and send the ashes to my parents in Switzerland. They would bury the ashes there”. The King was shocked: “Never, never shall we do that!” he exclaimed, as if my idea had offended his mind. Quickly he announced his decision: “No, we shall bury you here under this lemon-tree. This is your home, this is your earth. We shall bury you here. Surely, we shall not burn your body!” I wasn't in a state to argue. If this was the King's way of respecting my last will... I later recalled some documents published in the Sudan Monthly Intelligence Reports stating that the Anyuak used to burn the dead bodies of their enemies and, in an attempt to keep their earth clean from foreign spirits, carried their ashes beyond the border of their territory. If the King wanted to bury me here, it was surely an honour, a way of telling me that I had been accepted in Anyuakland and shared the natives' most fundamental rights. I would survive here for generations!
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About the Book
The book Why Did You Come If You Leave Again? is an ethnographer’s personal account of the five years he spent in one of the remotest parts of Africa. In the author’s comprehensive monograph (eight volumes published by Schwabe) about the Anyuak, a little-known tribe in South Sudan, there was no space left for a portrait of the person who did the fieldwork, his professional and personal itinerary, his experiences and attitudes, his relationship with the local people—let alone for all the adventures he lived when crossing the wilderness and when struggling to stay alive. The travel autobiography sheds light on the long and tedious process of ethnographic fieldwork; it is both personal and profound, varying between moments of actions and reflections and eventually leading to an intimate encounter with an African culture. The many riveting stories told in the book are signposts of a spiritual, psychological, philosophical, and physically exhausting expedition through arid savannah, flooded plains, and compact walls of elephant grass to the spiritual home of a courageous people who have created in the middle of wilderness a center of humanity. Though the narrative is essentially about the discovery of a foreign culture, it also relates the exploration of the ethnographer’s own identity in an environment that didn’t offer any possibility to escape. The book is about thirst, starvation, loneliness and lightening, sickness and death, joy and deliverance, snakes and spirits, shadow, spittle and footprints, and eventually about the author’s quest for meaning, beauty, and understanding of the world. The memoir tells a saga about forlornness, hope, and achievement, and last but not least, growing friendships as the only reward for struggle and pain. The researcher’s autobiography is captivating for the soul and the mind. It is funny, sad, informative, inspiring, and poetic.
About the Author
Dr. Conradin Perner has worked as a professor of French literature; as an ICRC delegate in Asia, India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Africa; and as a commander of peacekeeping forces in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan. After fifteen years of ethnographic research on a little-known people in the east of South Sudan, he worked as a humanitarian agent and adviser for the ICRC, UNICEF, and UNESCO and eventually as a senior peace adviser for the Swiss government in South Sudan. Dr. Perner published books and articles in the field of literature, language, ethnology, human rights, culture, and peace building (as founder of the Gurtong website). In 2011, he was given an honorary citizenship of South Sudan in recognition of his humanitarian and cultural work, namely for the role he played in the epic rescue of the so-called Lost Boys. In 2013, he received an award from the Human Rights Commission in Austin, Minnesota, United States.