By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 17, 2003
Escape from Slavery: The true story of my ten years in captivity–and my journey to freedom in America,
Francis Bok with Edward Tivnan, St Martins Press 2003, 285 pages, $24.29.
The cruelty that Francis Bok experienced at age seven defies civilized human conception. One day in 1986, his mother Marial sent him to Nyamlell’s market from their Southern Sudan Dinka village of Gourion to sell eggs and peanuts. His father Pial Bol Buk had recently called Francis “Muycharko” — “like twelve men.” He would be successful and achieve something important. Eventually, his father’s hope proved prophetic. But in 1986 Francis could count to no more than ten and still played alweth and Madallah — Dinka hide-and-seek and cricket. His mother sent older friends to supervise his first independent market trip.
That day, the Catholic boy nicknamed Piol, for rain, lost his childhood and world to the murahaliin. After torching the nearby villages and slaying their inhabitants, 20 light-skinned Juur horsemen charged into Nyamlell. They severed the heads of all Dinka men with single sword strokes, left them rolling in the blood-soaked market dust and stole off Piol’s older friends Abuk, Kwol and Nyabol in different directions. A rifleman permanently silenced a crying girl with a bullet to her head. A swordsman more “mercifully” sliced off her sister’s leg at the thigh like the branch of a small tree. Francis tried to flee. Terror squelched his cries. He was halted at gunpoint, grabbed and slung astride a small saddle, crafted specifically to carry abducted children, and ridden far north.
After President George W. Bush signed the tough Sudan Peace Act on October 18, 2002 — improving on earlier measures — many Americans became increasingly aware of ongoing Islamist Sudan’s government support for mass enslavement and genocide of Southern Sudanese Christians and animists. Following the heroic efforts of Boston philanthropist Charles Jacobs to denounce black bondage in sub-Saharan Africa and abolish slavery globally in his lifetime, John Eibner’s Christian Solidarity International began his revolutionary work to purchase and liberate Southern Sudanese slaves from Arab Muslim bondage. Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff also covered the genocide in a series of ongoing exposes.
But few have noted that the experience of Francis Bok–and the ongoing Arab Muslim oppression and genocide against Southern Sudan’s Dinka–is merely the modern manifestation of Islamic Jihad tradition established by the Prophet Mohammed and pursued aggressively ever since by Islamic jurists and rulers–from the Caliphs to the Ottomans, to current-day Islamic tyrants like Sudan’s Hasan at-Turabi and Gen. ‘Umar al-Bashir. “Jihad,” wrote Rashad Ali in Khilafah Magazine in December 2001, “is the removal of obstacles, by force if necessary, that stand between people and Islam. It is the practical method of spreading Islam. The call to Islam is compulsory on Muslims.” Moreover, “Jihad is continuous and will always be so.”
Even victims like Bok are seldom aware of the history. During 10 long years of enslavement by Giemma Abdullah in Kerio, Francis Bok had no idea why he was victimized. He learned soon enough that the Arabic word abeed carried three meanings–“slave,” “black” and “filth.” Half his lifetime among Muslims taught him that they considered themselves better than Southern Sudanese infidels. But this hardly informed him of the history of the jihad institution to which his 20th century captors and masters subjected him. He could not recognize himself as an inferior, non-Muslim dhimmi. Continue reading “Jihad Slavery: An Ugly Living Legacy”
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