Juba
In the run-up to this week’s referendum on Southern Sudan’s future, I flew to Juba with a bottle of Bushmills. The whiskey was for Dan Eiffe. When Sudan’s southern Christian rebels were on the brink of defeat, it was Dan who turned the war around. He has saved countless thousands from hunger. And he has played more of a role than any other Westerner in the creation of Africa’s newest nation, after centuries of bloodshed and slavery.
I have encountered odd Western characters in Africa’s wars, such as the Belgian dwarf with a Napoleon complex who in 1994 helped Rwanda’s Hutus kill their taller Tutsi cousins. Dan is an entirely separate kind of oddity. Few of us have faced the dilemmas, or seen the evil, or risked death and damnation the way he has. In Dan’s ravaged, smiling face, I see the effects of the struggles he’s endured. ‘Go easy on the mother’s milk,’ says Dan, passing me the Bushmills on an evening by the Juba Nile.
Born one of 16 children on a County Meath farm, Dan was inflamed by Irish nationalism and liberation theology at his strict school, Cork Carrignavar (the Rock of the Man).
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