Previously, the missionary had been getting to know Moudie — a small, sharp Azande teacher whose very name meant “don’t boast” — and, after Mass, the two found themselves in quiet agreement about carrying the cross rather than dodging it; the man’s story spilled out in stops and starts, from childhood as a refugee over the border to scraping together an education, building a self-help school and a church with his neighbours, then standing his ground when soldiers swept through, refusing the easy glory of a uniform and insisting his weapon was schooling, even when it earned him threats, prison and the cane — and now, as he stayed at the mission pressing for teak poles and materials for a new secondary school, he left the priest wondering whether he’d been too cautious, and thinking, not for the first time, that next Sunday he ought to let Moudie do the preaching.
Anne knew just enough of the art of baking bread to be able to explain it to Clementina, who was looking after the kitchen. Anne is a colleague of mine who, with her husband Frank, recently joined me to work in the Diocese of Tombura-Yambio. The local food is very good, and some people in Africa say, ‘Follow the customs or flee the country’. We are not that radical and we think that it would be nice to have bread now and again. Bread is not a common commodity in South Sudan. The idea is welcomed not only by us Europeans, but by most of the African priests with whom we live in the bishop’s house, and who got used to eating bread during their time in the seminary.
Anne had baked bread before, albeit with a different kind of yeast and a different oven, but she was confident enough to try. She explained it all to Clementina, who stood there looking on benevolently. To make sure, Anne had looked it all up in a cookery book and she hoped Clementina would be able to remember it all: so many cups of flour, so much yeast, so much water; you make a dough, and then you start kneading it. The kneading is important, and Anne was just getting the knack of it. Of course it was a bit messy, the dough sticking to hands and fingers. There Clementina nearly gave the game away, when she showed Anne how to get the stuff off her hands with a bit of dry flour. The first buns were not a great success, but they were edible. Anne explained Clementina that she would try once more with a different amount of yeast and perhaps let the dough rise a bit longer. Maybe they could have another go at it tomorrow. And Clementina nodded, as Africans have nodded at Europeans for generations, and after that they go away and do things the way they know best.
When Anne left the kitchen, Clementina had started over, and she baked some beautiful loaves the way she had learned in Mupoi from the Italian sisters. That must have been in 1960, before Anne was born. Later, when Anne came into the kitchen and found that some flour was missing, she asked Clementina about it. Clementina had said, ‘Leave it to me, I think I know who has taken it, but I have to check it out further.’ It bothered Anne that things kept disappearing from the kitchen. She was glad that she could own people.
We all had a good laugh about it when we sat down to eat that evening. We looked at the bakinde, a sorghum dish, which was left over from the afternoon. It is good food but to eat it three times a day is a bit much. Frank tried to get a rise out of Anne about her bread-baking, and Anne said that she and Clementina would try again tomorrow. At that point, Clementina, standing in the doorway, asked Frank whether he had any margarine. Frank wanted to tease Anne some more about the lack of bread, and went to the cupboard to get some margarine to put on the bread that he didn’t have, only to discover two beautiful loaves. We knew that only Clementina could have baked them. We all had a good laugh, and although we did not know how she had done it, we applauded Clementina. Clementina smiled and went back to the kitchen. Of course Anne felt a bit silly, like the daughter who teaches her mother to bear children. But from that moment on she was willing to see Clementina as teacher. Certainly Clementina could teach us all plenty.
Some weeks earlier, we had needed somebody to look after the kitchen in the bishop’s house and to supervise the cleaning. One of the priests had suggested that we ask Sister Clementina. She was a widow looking for work and the fact that she spoke good English was a great advantage for us who knew hardly anything of the local language. Clementina came to introduce herself, dressed in white, a sign of mourning for her husband who had died a few months before. The life of a widow is not easy in Azande culture, as in many other African cultures. After the funeral of her husband everything is taken away from her, even her clothes. Dressed only in a grass skirt and covered with leaves she is sent back to her family. For Clementina it had not been so clear where her family was. She did not have many relatives, and those she had were far away. Clementina had thought about it, and in the end she had decided to go to the church. After all, in someway that was her home. After listening to her, the parish priest had accepted her and he had given her a hut in the church compound.
For Clementina it was a sort of homecoming. Her father had grown up as an orphan in Mupoi, the first mission station in this area, built by the Comboni missionaries. It was a small town in the middle of the jungle of South Sudan. It could have been a small town in Italy, the brothers who built most of it being Italian. Here they fired their own bricks and tiles; they had their own carpentry shop and sawmill. They even planted vines and made their own wine. Mupoi became a major religious and social centre. It also boasted a primary and secondary school, training for religious brothers and sisters. Here Clementina’s father grew up and here she was born, over fifty years ago. She was still very young when her father died. Her father had been a Christian, but this did not mean that the traditional customs had not to be followed. Clementina’s mother was sent home to her relatives, naked, without even her children. Before the father died he had put on paper that he willed Clementina and her brothers and sisters to the church, because for him, an orphan, the church had become his clan. He was confident that in this way his children would be well looked after as he had been well looked after in Mupoi mission.
Clementina missed her mother a lot, but apart from that she did not have a bad life. She went to school, which at that time was still fairly exceptional for girls. When she was thirteen she became an aspirant to join the sisters. She was among the first of the African candidates. When I asked her why she wanted to be a sister, Clementina answered, ‘I think I wanted to serve God by serving our people. I did not have a special reason, and I think that there are no good reasons why one joins the sisters nor why one becomes a priest’. During her training Clementina learned the things which a sister in training learned in Italy, including baking bread. For part of her education she was sent to Uganda. She was trained to become a teacher, not because she wanted to be one particularly, but because the missionaries needed African teachers for the education of Clementina says with a smile.
But then, in the early sixties, the civil war began. The government accused the missionaries of supporting the rebels. This has never been demonstrated, but it would be worse if it could be shown that they were not on the side of the people of South Sudan, among whom they were working. Then all the missionaries were told to leave the country in 1964. Clementina was in Mboki, near Tombura, at that time. She remembers how upset the missionaries had been. The Italian Apostolic Vicar of Mupoi had called all the African sisters together. He had told them, more or less, that the Italian sisters and he had come to the conclusion that the African sisters could hardly remain sisters without them, and that they were released from their vows and could go home. This had upset the African sisters. Some of the sisters took the Apostolic Vicar at his word and had gone back to their villages, but to Clementina and a few others it did not make sense. They had not become sisters to serve the missionaries, but the church and its people. They knew that the church was not leaving with the missionaries. They decided to remain sisters and see where it would lead them. Soon enough they realized that they could not keep up all the big buildings, could for and with the people.
But the war in the south broadened, and it was no longer safe to stay in Mupoi or in Mboki. The African priests and sisters fled with their people to the Central African Republic and Zaïre, leaving the mission buildings to be invaded by the army and the forest, and to turn to ruins. But in spite of everything, the church grew among the people in exile. Some of the sisters remained together and lived the religious life, and though they adhered to many Italian rituals, gradually African ways entered their lives: they cultivated their own gardens, and became more open to relatives and their needs than they had been under the missionaries.
In 1973 the African sisters returned to Sudan. The new bishop, Joseph Gasi Abangite, welcomed them back to Mupoi. Rome had suggested that the few African sisters of different congregations who had survived the exile, form one new congregation. This was not easy, but an effort was made. However, plans which are made in Rome do not always work in Africa. Clementina went back to Uganda to be trained as a midwife; that is what she had originally wanted to be. When she returned to Mupoi there was considerable tension in the convent. Some sisters had secondary education; others had hardly finished primary school; there were financial problems; there was tension between sisters who had previously belonged to different congregations. For Clementina it was not any longer a peaceful life in the convent. She does not go into details, but says the new congregation was no longer serving the church by serving the people. She left the convent without very well-defined reasons. But then she did not have good reasons for entering in the first place.
It was no problem for Clementina to find work. There were not many women around with a good education. She could have started teaching again, but the nursing profession appealed more. For many years Clementina was a midwife. She assisted women in bringing children into the world, knowing that she herself would never have children. It had taken some courage to tell the man who wanted to marry her that she would not be able to have children. But this policeman, who had a few children already with another woman, had proposed to her all the same. The fact that Clementina could not have children of her own did not mean that she was ever without children in her home. She adopted the child of a niece of hers who had sleeping sickness, and relatives regularly sent children to Aunt Clementina, knowing that she would look after them.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but with a great sigh Clementina admits that she did not have a wonderful marriage. No, her husband was not a bad man, but he drank a lot and his drinking brought problems. Perhaps it was the other way round and his problems drove him to drink. Clementina does not know, but she knows that her husband had a very difficult job. To be a policeman for a government which suppresses your own people is not easy. But Clementina looked after him. In the end she accepted him as another difficult child.
Clementina worked in the hospital in Yambio during the time that I was a regular visitor there. She knew me long before I knew her. When I fled in 1990 after the SPLA announced they were on their way, Clementina remained in Yambio. When the government troops were routed, many people fled to Zaïre and the Central African Republic. Clementina had seen it all before, and decided not to run this time. She withdrew with her husband and the children into the forest where they built a hut, not far from Gangura, a small village on the road to Zaïre. After the arrival of the SPLA, Clementina’s husband did not go back to work. He did not know how acceptable a government policeman would be to these liberators. Soon he heard that they were recruiting soldiers, but he did not want to fight. He withdrew further into the forest and drank himself to death. With her children helping, Clementina started to clear the land. She planted fields with cassava, groundnuts and sorghum, the traditional crops. Then when the people of World Vision arrived with vegetable seeds, she put in onions, tomatoes and cabbages too. The people of World Vision discovered her in the forest when they started a small clinic in Gangura.
They asked her to work in their clinic and Clementina accepted the offer. From the nurses of World Vision I hear that Clementina was probably the most dedicated nurse they had seen for a long time. As a nurse she was addressed as ‘Sister’ again and she was content serving her community once more as a sister. She was at work in the clinic on the day she heard that her husband had fallen sick. She ran home at once, and with the help of neighbours brought him to the hospital in Yambio. The services there are not very good, or perhaps she had got her husband there too late. Clementina does not blame anybody, but a few days later he died.
After the funeral Clementina was sent ‘home’ with nothing. She had to leave her hut, was not even allowed to harvest the groundnuts in her own field. According to her tradition she had to leave it all behind. African tradition can be very cruel. Where could she go? As a child, when her father died she had been given to the church. She sought out the nearest Catholic church and that is how she arrived at the church in Yambio.
When the people of World Vision discovered where she had gone, they came to ask her to return and work in the clinic. But Clementina declined. She just wanted the simple life of service, which she had known as a young sister. She accepted work in the bishop’s house, to see to it that everything is kept clean, to supervise the kitchen, and to train the few missionaries who live there, even if it meant teaching them how to bake bread.
Next time, the handshakes won’t be enough: the numbers keep climbing, the mud keeps winning, and the questions from the journalists won’t let up. He’ll have to decide what the churches can really do when there’s no food to give, only presence—and whether anyone beyond this border will choose to be their Simon of Cyrene.
