Editor’s note: Persecuted by Islamic radicals in Sudan, Malaika (not her real name) told the following story to Carolina Journal, which offered her and her family anonymity.
RALEIGH — Christian since birth, Malaika knows all about oppression in a nation beset with Muslim-Christian strife. She carries extensive scars on her left side as a painful reminder of her former life in her native Sudan.
Today the mother of seven children and her husband are rebuilding their lives in North Carolina. Both she and her husband are employed as custodians at educational institutions. Her spouse also works part-time at a food store.
Still, wracked with heartache for her homeland and family members left behind, Malaika struggles to complete the transition from Africa to America.
Her face and voice burdened by sorrow, Malaika sat at a rickety, bare-wood table in her small, dilapidated house and told of her family’s exodus. A member of the Dinka tribe by birth, she labored to speak in the language of her new country.
“They killed members of my family,” she said. “Muslims killed my brother and many uncles who were killed. When they come to get my children, and I said my children are not to go, they say they come and kill me.”
Come they did late one night to her home outside Wau, in southern Sudan. About midnight they climbed over the walls surrounding Malaika’s house.
“My children were asleep,” Malaika said. “They knocked on the door and they said, ‘Malaika, Malaika.’ I say, Yeah?’ Three people came into my house and pushed me while I was carrying hot water from the fire. The hot water covered my face. I fell into the fire and burned my side.
“I have some big scars on my side. For two months, I couldn’t sleep on my side.”
Before barging into Malaika’s house, a few days earlier Muslim soldiers had abducted her husband, a clothes salesman. Since the family had no car, he had been walking as usual to the city to do business. The soldiers detained her husband for two weeks for no other purposes than to deny him business and to prevent his Christian customers from benefiting from his goods, she said.
His absence, and the lack of income to buy necessities aggravated the family’s hardship. “For 14 days I don’t have anything,” Malaika said. “My neighbor come and say the Muslims take your husband.
“In the Sudan, you shop for one day, you buy for one day. It’s not like here. Here, you can go and buy food for seven days, and you can put it in the refrigerator. In the Sudan, you don’t have a refrigerator. Today you go buy, you come and cook. Tomorrow you go back again and cook.”
An uncle who worked for an international charitable organization brought food to Malaika and her family while her husband was held captive.
As a Christian, Malaika said, she suffered persecution from the Muslim-controlled government all her life. But she and her family weren’t alone. “They came to all Christians’ homes to kill them and take anything. Now, they’re still killing people in the Sudan. There are people, see, Christians, get out of the city. Christians go into hiding.”
“They kill old people, little children. Those people had guns, but people [Christians] in the Sudan didn’t have guns,” she said. “They would kill little boys, and take the little girls. They use the girls like slaves. They use them like wives when they grow up. They sell some of them to other countries.”
“They kill little boys because when they grow up, they will fight the Muslims,” she said.
Since gaining independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan has been torn by civil war. The northern and more heavily populated part of the country has been predominantly Arab and Muslim. Southern Sudan is predominantly black, with a mixture of Christianity and Animism, according to the Web encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Islamic jihadists, in a campaign to expand Salafist Arabic fundamentalism, supplied the North with money and weapons. A 10-year period of peace came in 1972, with the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement.
In 1983 President Gaafar Nimeiry abrogated the agreement and attempted to create a Federated Sudan, to include southern states, under Muslim, or Sharia Law.
In 1989, Umar al Bashir and the National Islamic Front, headed by Dr. Hassan Turabi, toppled Nimeiry’s government, and instituted their own Sunni fundamentalist government — drawing most of their ideology from the fanatical Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Genocide followed. The Muslims bombed and incinerated villages with napalm, killing 2.2 million Christians and creating 4.5 million refugees and widespread starvation, according to Wikipedia.
“Before the Muslims took over, I have a big church. In 2001, the Muslims came and destroyed the church,” she said. “The pastor ran away.”
Kidnappings and torture were common. Malaika was among the victims.
A few days after her husband had disappeared, a neighbor came to Malaika’s home and said that he had found the place where the captors were keeping her spouse.
Soon a band of Muslims returned and seized Malaika. “They didn’t do anything to my children,” she said. “In the morning, when they [her children] wake up, they don’t see me. They see my shoes, gown, and clothes.”
“They [the Muslim intruders] put me in a car and took me somewhere, I don’t know where…,” she said. “They put a mask over my eyes. They questioned me for three days. They tortured me. They beat me with a whip. They stuck me with something small like a pin.”
“They brought me back after three days. They put something black in my eyes. They pushed me down. So, I don’t know who took me,” Malaika said.
“When they brought me back, my neighbors told me they might be coming back,” Malaika said. “They said I should leave.”
A Muslim interrogator did return to Malaika’s house. “Someone come in the morning and started talking to me a little bit, a little bit: ‘I need you to be Muslim. I need to know the difference between the Bible and the Quran?’
“I say, I don’t know the Quran,” Malaika said. “And he keeps talking, talking, talking. They didn’t kill me because I didn’t say anything bad. I didn’t say anything, I just listened.”
Malaika said she never considered converting to Islam, even though she remained silent during the interrogation.
“I don’t want to change my life to become Muslim, because I’m Christian. I’m Christian! They kill you,” she said. “They kill you when you say, ‘No, I don’t want to change my life. I don’t need to change my life to become Muslim.’ That’s when they take a gun and they kill you.”
After the interrogator left, Malaika’s uncle, who worked for a charity, and members of her church told her she should move her family out of the country.
That’s when the family’s flight to freedom began.
The uncle “came and got me and my children and put us in a big church for seven days,” she said. “They take our pictures for visas and we filled out paperwork. My husband didn’t come with us.”
The family fled to Alexandria, Egypt. Malaika’s husband rejoined the family four months later. They remained in Alexandria for 1 1/2 years until their documents were finally processed and they were interviewed by U.N. authorities in Cairo.
From there, the family flew to North Carolina in 2001. “When immigration people in Raleigh see you come in at the airport, they see your papers, they say, ‘Oh, welcome, welcome to America!’” she said.
The family stayed at the home of a church sponsor for about three weeks before moving into a three-room rental. Later, the family moved into another rental, a small, wood-frame house nearby. Since then they have lived a meager existence in Wake County.
The suffering subsided in time for Christmas this year. Malaika and her family moved into their own new home given to them by a nonprofit organization.
Funded and built by volunteers of a local church over a period of about a year, the home sparkles amid beams of sunlight radiating through the tall trees of a modest neighborhood.
Although grateful and comfortable in her new haven, Malaika vows to persevere on what she considers her Christian mission: easing the suffering of others in her homeland.
“I need to do something to help my family back in the Sudan. Because children grow up with no school and no church,” she said. “People go sit down to pray in the shade — no house, no anything, no book, no school for children. Desert.”
“Now, in Darfur, no food, no food, no anything. People are dying,” she said.
“For me, I bring my children here. I feel good here, but bad for the children there. They have Bibles, but they don’t have the power to build a church or a school” because of Muslim oppression, Malaika said.
She concludes a story whose depth belies translation and offers a warning for her newfound compatriots:
“Now, in Darfur, they tell Christians they can’t go to America, or Canada, or somewhere. I say after many years Americans will see something no good because those people (Muslims) might be talking something good here, but in their hearts they’re not. They lie.”
Richard Wagner is editor of Carolina Journal.