Dreams Are Not Made of Concrete

1.

The sun is slowly coming up on one of the main thoroughfares in Juba. Most of the streets do not yet have names; the city is too young, and we navigate using landmarks. At night, I am lost in the endlessness of the dusty tracks, the absence of electric lighting, the silence of the stars, and the uncertain edges of urban settlements.

The night is receding, and the sun is throwing the market stalls of Konyo-Konyo into flat relief. It is an auburn light, still so faint that it seems as if objects (a corrugated iron roof, a blue UNHCR tarpaulin, dried fish) are clinging to it, holding its chaste offerings to themselves like gifts of flowers. There are only a few cars on the street, and the dirt has not yet absorbed the sky in its swirling dominion. I sit next to a roadside stall (a cardboard box with a cloth on top, charcoal in a brazier, a heavy pot on the fire) drinking the burning-hot sugar syrup that passes for tea here.

The road lies ahead of me, unmoving. Soon, cars will be careening over potholes, cutting cartographies through the dusty furrows of the road as they make their way into town.

In 2005, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) signed a peace treaty with the northern government, ending 22 years of civil war. In 2011, just two months before I wrote these words, Southern Sudan voted to decide on whether it wants to secede from the North. Juba is soon to become Africa’s newest capital. Throughout the conflict, the city was in a state of suspended animation: the government controlled the urban center, but the SPLM, seasoned guerrillas, had encircled it. Supplies came at a premium. Residents who remember that time speak darkly of searching for food in the rubbish. The core of the city dates from this period: a series of stone houses, owned by northern merchants fearing for their future, that today form an embattled stockade in the midst of a rapidly growing urban sprawl. Since 2005, a new type of urbanism has sprung up.

Tent cities shelter along the banks of the Nile. Then there are the concrete bungalows built by soldiers and politicians, and the endless squatter camps that are going up overnight, as thousands of internally displaced people return south after years of exile.

It is not just those displaced by war that have flooded into Juba. There are East Africans looking for work, journalists looking for fame, and endless aid workers, whose extravagant salaries have turned Juba into an unlikely boomtown. Their uncertain coexistence makes for an uneasy peace. We all live next to each other, in this city that is not quite urban, not quite a city, and not yet a capital.

We wait for the results of the referendum.

2.

In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker’s elegiac investigation into the nature of memory, the narrator tells us that she received a letter from Krasner:

He told me that in the 19th century, mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time.

There is some truth to this, I think, drinking my third tea of the day as the sun climbs higher in the sky, and the market stalls, ad hoc constructions of tarpaulin and corrugated iron, start to shine. I wave at a lumbering UN Land Cruiser careening over reluctant potholes. The driver, Haider, is a Pakistani soldier spending a year with the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS). I met him a few nights ago, at the sprawling UN compound next to the airport, and we bonded by dreaming of Sajji, that wonderful dish of roast lamb stuffed with rice, beloved in Balochistan. Lamb of any kind felt very far away that night, surrounded by UN pizza joints, and something like a shared bodily memory (grease, rare meat that gives easily in the mouth, the smell of charcoal) brought us together.

The UN compound is a world of its own, replete with...