As one, we all took a bus to flee Khartoum, a journey away from death, hopefully to life, but perhaps to another death in wait. Ngok and Twic, once peas in a pod, now different as fire and fat, but in this bus driven by an Arab whose soul Allah keeps, they travel as one.

If you draw your cues from observing the driver’s mood to understand the level of danger we are in, you cannot help but conclude that the journey we are about to undertake may be one of no return. “Bismillah,” the driver mumbles. His mind is crisscrossed with fear he no longer fears; his soul he has given to Allah to keep. It is a long story.

We, his passengers, fled South Sudan a few years ago when our own waged a tribal war that spared neither the green nor the innocent smiles of child and old. The situation was dire, so we voted for Sudan, the abode of peace, thinking that where calls to prayer are loud, frequent, and ostentatious, devils would not dare the wrath of Allah and must have packed and retreated to South Sudan to join kindred spirits.

With confidence, we thought a land shepherded by Allah would always be in peace. In millions, we flocked to Sudan, the land of Allah-fearing people. We have frequently looked back to see if South Sudan were still in the thickest of woods. Alas, it still is. For ten years, devils there, perhaps in cahoots with exiled Sudanese ones, have been working hand in hand to hotly pursue peace, now ever on the run.

Since we abandoned Juba, we have never failed to utter a refrain of relief: “Thank God, we are not in South Sudan.” Our assumptions about Sudan, it has turned out, could not have been more mistaken. A few days ago, like lightning without clouds or thunder, prayerful devils chanting the name of Allah in vain struck at the heart of Khartoum. “Allahu Akbar,” God is Great!

This left us bewildered, wondering if calls to prayer were enough to banish devils hiding in the deepest recesses of Sudanese hearts. In a few hours, the city was reduced to rubble. The edge on which we, Sudanese, live is consumed by flames. Two armies, both of Allah, locked in a deadly strife, both invoking His name. Why, when they both agree all glory is Allah’s? Only Allah knows.

Of the two, which party is the devil’s? We cannot tell, but we see they are one another’s definition, both hypocrites, both tired of waiting on Allah to cast the die in favor of one or the other, so they take matters into their own hands. Civilians are sandwiched in between fire raining from the skies and boiling earth with bullets popping here and there. Shameless.

Each army expects Allah to be their partisan, to intervene on their side. And they fervently pray, expecting mercy to land on one and damnation on the other. Oh, what a test, but it is Allah they put to the test, One who cannot fall prey to evil designs of confused earthlings.

We sit in the bus recalling how ten years ago, we had to abandon South Sudan to seek calm in Sudan. Here we are again, on the road back to South Sudan, fleeing death. Now we are in a bus bound for safety, but perhaps to the jaws of old death waiting.

Nuer and Dinka, Murle, Bor, and Toposa. I see semi-vertical, slanted marks on the face of a Twic man sitting by my right-hand side; he sees mine running across my forehead. We know one another. Petrified but aware we are traveling as one people, South Sudanese, we allow quiet to reign.

Sudanese have one inclusive name for us: Junubieen. Today, as Junubieen, we escape the grinding blades of racism and acute Islamism, the two faces of the Sudanese coin on whose rims we have lived till shaken off today. It is dead silent in the bus.

Danger lurks inside and outside the bus, but we sit butt to butt, face to face, ears on the next man’s mouth, attentive to his heart rhythms – just in case. Suspicious of one another and tantrum-prone, thank goodness, there’s no space to act out our deep fears. So, quiet dominates but for intermittent baby cries whose noise annoys no one but the childish.

We are close to the territories of South Sudan. Shall we be safe on arrival, or should we gear up for yet another litany of suffering now that we belong to our respective tribes with nothing to unite us, not even the term Junubieen?

By Raphael Abiem