They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky

Most people know the second part of the war in Africa and assume it started when Joseph Kony “became possessed”. However, that is not when it began. It actually began way before that and the LRA wasn’t even established. There was however a rebel group called the SPLA, Sudan’s People Liberation Army. Actually the people that really started attacking the villages were the government and at first the rebel groups were the ones protecting the villages and the survivors. When Islam became a prominent religion in Africa the government wanted it to be spread throughout Sudan. The main reason for this was to gain land. However, the government had the northern Islamic tribes believe they should own cattle like the Dinka and Nuer, the two major tribes in the central area that lived on the land the government wanted because the land was the most fertile in all of Sudan. This made problems because the northern tribes started to attack the central tribes for their cattle. But, wealth in those tribes depended on how many cattle you owned. The government made laws to try and make the central tribes convert. In the book They poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan by Judy A. Bernstein, The elders in the tribes said, “..there is no time to pray five times a day… the cannot force us to do this thing to our women. We love our women. We will not cut them like the castrated calf.” (Bernstein 37) and this is when the government got mad and started attacking villages. Villages were destroyed, families torn apart, and villagers thrown into slavery. “… During one of the attacks by the Murahiliin, people were killed and cattle stolen; Deng was taken away…. Murahiliin had thrown him on the back of a horse and took him to a faraway place where he was sold as a slave”. (Bernstein 37) Murahiliin are the northerners that were attacking the central tribes for the land since they weren’t converting and they wanted the land. Being a slave wasn’t easy. But, either was being back home. It got to the point that the attacks were just massacres. They killed everyone in sight and burned down the whole village. To escape people would run into the bush and hide in the tall grass infested with snakes, scorpions, hyenas, and lions. They would lose everyone they knew and had to trust the people they met to help them get from one village to the next. The soldiers that because apart of the rebel group found these groups of stranded people and helped lead them from one village to the next. However, no village was safe. The government would bomb the villages daily and there were little resources for everyone and some villages even attacked the groups of people so they would stay away from their villages because they didn’t want to give away the few resources they had. Many people died in the deserts going from one village to the next and the ones that didn’t became sick and weak. Some days the adults would have to drink their own urine due to lack of water. Their feet would get cut up, there were cannibals in the brush right by them along with many other dangerous animals, and they had nothing for warmth during the night. Even when they reached villages they rarely got something to eat and/or drink. When they reached their final destinations there wasn’t anything special about them, one area had chiggers, bugs that crawl into the cracks on your skin, bury in them and suck your blood. The more someone scratches at them the bigger the wound gets. The other area was poor and run down with very little resources. No matter what happened to you, being enslaved, killed, or living and trying to find safety it wasn't easy. There was no safe place and very few people actually found family. But the war most definitley didn't start because of Joseph Kony. The whole war is terrible. However, if people are going to learn about it they should really know the whole story.