SOUTH SUDAN · NUBA MOUNTAINS · WAR ZONE, DATE WITHHELD
I arrived in Nairobi not knowing I was about to enter a war zone. A week later I was flying an Aero Commander at 300 miles per hour over South Sudan, with the controls in my hands and nobody checking the rules — because in a war zone, there are none.
The meeting in Nairobi was supposed to be routine. I had flown in from Washington for a Sudan team session — the kind of thing that fills a week in a conference room and sends you home exhausted but intact. Then someone told me I had been selected for a field mission. I had not been asked. I had been nominated.
The backstory was this: the Country Director had convened a meeting of all the Governors of the South Sudanese provinces, and the Governors had said something that nobody in the World Bank wanted to hear. They said that Bank staff only visited the safe cities — the ones close to the Kenyan and Ugandan borders — and had never seen the real places. The real places being, in this context, the ones where fighting was still happening. The Nuba Mountains, in the border region between North and South Sudan, was one of the most contested territories in the country. It had seen some of the bloodiest clashes of the entire civil war.
A minister would accompany me, I was told. Along with three other people. That sounded fine. Then they told me about the pilot.
He was a tall, lanky New Zealander who did this kind of route because nobody else would.
His name I will not give here. What I will say is that he was known — among the aid workers and UN staff who used the Lokichoggio airstrip as their jumping-off point into South Sudan — as someone who operated at the outer edge of what a pilot was supposed to do. He flew routes that other pilots declined. He flew them in aircraft that other pilots would have grounded. And if he liked you, I was told, he would let you fly his plane.
I already held a glider pilot’s licence. I had never flown a fixed-wing powered aircraft.
We met him at Loki, as the airstrip was known. He was exactly as described: tall, lean, the unhurried manner of someone who has been in dangerous places long enough that danger no longer requires a reaction. I looked at the co-pilot seat beside him. It was empty.
“Can I sit there?” I said.
He looked at me for a moment. “No,” he said. “You’re too fat. Go to the back.”
I went to the back.
He flew us across South Sudan — low, direct, the kind of flying that stays below the radar because there are people on the ground who would prefer you not arrive. Below us, the country unfolded: the swamps of the Sudd, then the drier scrub of the south, then the rocky broken landscape that announced the Nuba Mountains. We landed on a strip of compacted earth. There was a Land Cruiser waiting. And behind it, rising almost vertically from the plain, a sheer rock cliff.
That is the way we are going. And we did.
The Land Cruiser climbed what should not have been climbable — a rock face that passed for a road only because someone had once driven it and survived. At the top was the South Sudanese safe area, dominated by a large army base, and the huts where we would sleep, and eat bread and soup, and do the work we had come to do.
For the first few days I did what I had come to do — meetings with government officials and community leaders, working through how the funding was reaching local people, the patient unglamorous business of field verification in a war zone. Then I had two days free.
The morning of the first free day I picked up my camera and walked out of the hut. The landscape around the camp was extraordinary — open scrubland, rocky outcrops, and scattered among them, enormous baobab trees. The baobab is the great landmark tree of the Sudanese savanna, ancient and solitary, its trunk swollen with stored water, its branches reaching in every direction like roots exposed to the sky. The biggest one was in the army camp. I had been photographing them for perhaps an hour when I realised I had drifted too close to the army perimeter.
I was surrounded before I understood what was happening. Soldiers, weapons raised, faces not friendly. This area was bombed regularly by aircraft from the north — Antonovs coming in low, dropping munitions on anything that looked like a military target. A man with a camera and an unfamiliar face, moving around the edge of an army base, was not a difficult thing to mistake for a forward scout sending coordinates to Khartoum.
It was tense. The kind of tense where you choose your words carefully and move nothing you haven’t been told to move. They brought me to their commander. I explained, slowly and clearly, who I was and what I was doing. The minister was sent for. He confirmed everything. The commander’s expression shifted from suspicion to something approaching amusement.
The last thing he said to me, through the minister, was direct: get out of this area and don’t come back near the camp with that camera. I did exactly as instructed.
A week later our New Zealander came back for us. He had the same aircraft, the same unhurried manner. I climbed in. This time he looked at me differently. I thought he seemed pleased at how I looked after a week in the Nuba mountains.
“You can sit here,” he said, nodding at the co-pilot seat.
I sat there.
We took off and climbed out over the mountains. The landscape below was extraordinary — the rock formations, the light, the scale of it. We had been flying for perhaps twenty minutes when he turned to me.
“Would you like to fly the plane?”
I said absolutely.
“I should tell you,” he said, “that we are not breaking any civil aviation rules here. This is a war zone. No rules exist.”
He handed me the controls.
The Aero Commander had once been the personal aircraft of the President of Tanzania. The controls were extraordinarily sensitive.
What I did not fully appreciate, in the moment of taking over, was quite how sensitive. I applied back pressure — harder than I should have. The nose came up sharply. The aircraft lurched upward. Everyone in the back was pushed into their seats. There was a moment of silence, and then laughter — the minister, the others, all of them finding it funnier than I did. I apologised. Then I flew the plane for the next two hours closely following the directions from the GPS that was right in front of my nose.
There is a particular quality to controlling an aircraft for the first time — the directness of it, the way the machine responds to the slightest input, the sense that you are balanced on something that requires constant attention. An Aero Commander at cruise altitude, over the plains of South Sudan, in a war zone where no rules exist, with a New Zealander beside you who is watching with mild amusement: this is not a bad way to learn.
As we approached Lokichoggio, we saw it: a large transport aircraft below us, a C-130 or similar, clearly in some difficulty. We followed it for a while from high up. It felt like an eagle looking at a hippo going to the same place we both call home. Then we saw it slowly descending ahead of us, slower than it should have been, the kind of controlled urgency that tells you something is wrong but not yet catastrophic. We watched it go in. It landed. We came in behind it.
On the ground, the pilot took the controls back without ceremony. We taxied in. The minister said something gracious. The others gathered their bags. The New Zealander checked something on his instrument panel, already thinking about the next flight.
I have thought about that journey many times since. The Governors had been right — you cannot understand a place from the safe cities near the border. You have to go to the real places, which are sometimes the places where nobody else will take you, on aircraft that other pilots won’t fly, with a pilot who tells you you’re too fat for the co-pilot seat and then, a week later, hands you the controls over a war zone.
The minister. The pilot. The rock face. The bread and soup. The soldiers with raised weapons and a commander who found it funny in the end. The lurch of the plane when I pulled back too hard and everyone laughed. All of us travellers that fate had put together, never to meet again.
— Parminder Brar