Simon Deng thought he would be able to turn away from memories of torture and abuse he suffered in childhood. But years later, reading in a New York newspaper that a slave could be purchased in Sudan for $10, he was suddenly compelled to speak out.
Deng, 45, a native of the largely Christian Shiluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, was abducted by an Arab northerner while tending his family’s goats when he was 9-years old, he said in an interview in Milwaukee last Friday.
After spending more than three years as a child slave in northern Sudan, he managed to escape and rejoin his “huge family,” which included his parents, his father’s other two wives and Deng’s many siblings.
As a slave, he was treated more cruelly than an animal, given only scraps to eat, and forced to carry water from a river and sleep on the floor.
Still, Deng said, “I promised myself I would put everything behind me and I went on.” He worked as a messenger in the Sudanese parliament and became the Sudanese national swim champion.
That celebrity enabled Deng to come to the United States in 1990, during the first wave of Sudanese immigration, according to student activist Isaac Rowlett, who invited Deng to Milwaukee to speak to local congregations.
His weekend visit was sponsored by the Darfur Action Coalition of Wisconsin, which is administered by the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations.
Rowlett, who was raised in Milwaukee and is now a sophomore at New York University, befriended Deng at the Sudan Freedom Walk, which Deng organized. It began in New York City on March 15 and ended with a rally in Washington, D.C.
“I left [Sudan] with a one-way ticket,” Deng said, adding that he could not live in a country where such terrible things were happening to his people.
“I was living in denial until I came to the U.S.,” Deng said. But, since seeing the newspaper article about slaves in Sudan, Deng, now an American citizen, has devoted himself to the struggle to bring the power of the people of the U.S. to bear on the suffering of Sudan.
He travels and speaks all over the U.S. about Sudan, Africa’s largest country, of which Darfur in western Sudan has received the most attention.
“I’m just trying to turn the bad thing that happened to me to help others. I can’t change what happened to me,” Deng said.
Something in
common with Jews
Deng said that about 1 million people participated in the Save Darfur Coalition’s Rally to Stop Genocide in Washington on April 30, “and many were kids. And about six out of 10 were of Jewish descent.
“If there is a solution to this crisis, the Jews should be proud because they are the ones who are closest to us. The southern Sudanese look at Jews as the closest people who don’t look like us. The southern Sudanese and Jews have something in common,” Deng said.
“History tells us over and over when crimes are being committed and everyone assumes, ‘If it’s not in my backyard, why should I bother?’ ‘If it’s not my cousins, why should I be concerned?’ We forget. In Auschwitz, it didn’t stop there. And millions of innocent people perished because we didn’t get involved.”
In the case of Darfur, “not doing something is telling the perpetrators it’s alright to do what they are doing…. Someday we will ask ourselves why we didn’t get involved. But we can get involved. Now let us be the voice for those who cannot speak,” he said.
We must use our freedom to stand up for the powerless, Deng said. “People who live in freedom have everything in front of us. But people in the desert [in southern and western Sudan] have a choice of death now or death tomorrow.”
Taking a STAND
Rowlett, together with a few friends, founded a chapter of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND) last year, he said.
He was motivated, he said, by a pledge he made to himself during a visit through the March of the Living to Poland’s Majdanek death camp in spring 2005. There he resolved not to “stand idly by the shedding of the blood of your fellow man” (Leviticus 19:16), as Jews are commanded in the Torah.
Rowlett said they started STAND “with just one van, a few signs and some cell phones.” President of STAND’s NYU chapter last year and a co-president this year, Rowlett spent the summer at home in Milwaukee.
But summer wasn’t just playtime for him; Rowlett resolved not to let the summer pass without some effort to help the people of Sudan.
“My goal this summer was to organize one event” and that turned out to be last weekend when Rowlett took Deng to speak and interact in as many venues as could be crammed into the three days he was free from his job as a lifeguard on Coney Island during the week.
Rowlett arranged for Deng to speak on a radio program; two Milwaukee Public Television programs; at Congregations Shalom on Friday night, and Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun on Saturday morning; four churches; a club and a meeting with several pastors.
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