Three teenage girls, their arms around each other’s waists, stand perspiring in the bright Sudanese sun as a gaggle of boys gather round them.
The boys, brawny youths wearing checked shawls knotted over one shoulder, start hollering at the girls, pumping their hands in the air like hip-hop MCs.
”I have a beautiful bull!” one shouts. ”I know how to dance!” another cries, as the girls listen with their eyes demurely downcast.
Then both sexes join dozens of other dancers in the dusty clearing as the place erupts into a melee of wild shimmying to a deafening soundtrack of whistles and insistent drums. Other boys circle around the mass of waving arms and legs, proudly leading their finest bulls. The animals’ long, curling horns are decorated with elaborate tassels.
For the Dinka tribe of southern Sudan, this Sunday evening dance is the equivalent of a school disco, and bringing an impressive bull to the party is a bit like turning up in your dad’s Porsche.
The only discordant note in this display of joie de vivre comes when a line of boys wielding AK-47 rifles dashes into the clearing.
The rifles are not real; they are straw replicas. The boys wave them aloft as part of the dance, along with the more traditional spears.
Cattle and guns: both are central to the lives of the Dinka. It is no accident that boys brag about their bulls — a girl’s father will expect at least 30 cattle as a ”bride price” for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
The guns are a reminder of the civil war that has ravaged this part of Africa for more than 20 years. Many households here are headed by women whose husbands are fighters in the rebel army, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
Akur Yak, a mother of five, is married to one such fighter. He is away from home, and she has to assume his responsibilities too. ”I am responsible for everything,” Yak said, sitting on a wooden bench by her thatch- roofed hut. ”I do the farming. And I cut down trees. If one of the children is sick, I have to take them to the doctor.”
The poorest people in Yirol county, like the Yak family, have few cows, or none at all. Even those with ample herds rely on a good harvest to keep their families’ bellies full.
Milk is fine for fattening children but sorghum, the red-eared cereal that towers above men’s heads, is the staple food.
In the clearing in front of Yak’s mud hut, two of her daughters use long wooden poles to pound sorghum grains into a paste. Her harvest was poorer than she hoped, but at least there is something to eat.
”We eat once a day, before we go to bed,” she said. ”I make ugali [mash] from the sorghum and we have it with okra stew, mixed with a little fish.”
The crop was grown from seeds lent to the family by the village seed bank. Funded by the aid agency Concern, the seed bank is run by local elders who distribute sorghum, groundnut and cowpea seeds to the neediest families.
In Yirol and the neighbouring county of Awerial, Concern is finding ways to help farmers boost their yields. Scarcity of seeds is one problem. Another is the fact that cultivation is traditionally done by hand.
Aid workers have shown locals how to harness those prized bulls to pull ploughs. The ox-drawn plough has vastly extended the acreage which can be brought under cultivation.
There are hopes of a brighter future for south Sudan after a peace deal signed between the government and rebels in May, but the long years of war have left the south desperately underdeveloped.
For the most part, this is a primal landscape of conical, thatched huts flanked by tall stands of grass into which naked children disappear giggling when strangers approach.
There are only two hospitals in Yirol country, scarcely any industry and just a handful of small shops. Aid money is not just being spent on improving farming techniques but on encouraging development by providing loans for small businesses and tools for cottage industry.
In the village of Benyloom, blacksmith John Marier is engaged in turning swords into ploughshares. Squatting before a tiny anvil, he beats a red-hot piece of metal with a hammer. Behind him is a pile of scrap metal shards, some of it from tanks abandoned or wrecked during the war.
His hammer rings down on the hot metal, then the piece of iron is thrust back into a small wood fire to soften up a little more. He makes fishing hooks and kitchen knives as well as blades for ploughing, using tools provided by Concern.
A few metres from where the blacksmith sits, the sound of buzzing betrays another of the aid agency’s projects: modern beehives to replace the traditional hollowed-out tree trunks. The beekeepers, who proclaim that, to them, a bee is ”worth more than a pregnant heifer”, have also been introduced to a modern method of smoking out the bees to get the honey.
Instead of lighting a fire near the hive, as they used to do, a charcoal smoker enables them to drive the bees away and safely retrieve the honey without killing many of the insects.
On Sunday mornings in Yirol county, drumbeats call the faithful to church, to pray for a better future.
Men and women gather under tree branches as an Anglican clergyman in an electric-blue tunic holds aloft a copy of the New Testament in Dinka. Voices raised in sweet harmony, the congregation calls on God to ”heal the devastation of Sudan”.
Sudan by numbers
Population: 2.2 million
GDP per head: $395
Infant mortality/births: 65/1,000
Life expectancy: 65 years
HIV/Aids: 2.6%
Literacy: 58.8%
Access to safe water: 75% — Guardian Unlimited Â