08/11/2023
A Dutch Journalist Paul Schipper unveils biography of Late Bishop Paride Taban
The life of
Paride Taban
©Paul de Schipper,Netherlands
(Taken from International Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award Nomination 2018 by Paul de Schipper)
Data on Paride Taban Abraham Kenyi. Emeritus bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Torit. Founder
of Holy Trinity Peace Village Kuron.
Born: Opari, South Sudan, 1936. Madi tribe, Logopi clan. Traditional name: Odega. Meaning: ‘somebody born too late, ‘somebody who overstayed in the womb’.
Father a non-practising Muslim, mother an adherent of traditional religion.
1940
The family, with five children, moves to the regional town of Torit, on foot. His father obtains a job there with a colonial cotton company. An uncle carries the little boy on his shoulders for eighty three kilometres. They travel in a group because roaming warriors make travel dangerous.
Taban grows up in a factory community with many workers from different tribes. “That cured me early on of any form of tribalism.”
1950
Taban is baptised a Christian. He is given the name Paride, derived from Paris, the legendary
son of the King of Troy in Greek mythology.
1951
Taban attends the seminary in Okaru “because the missionaries wear such lovely clothes”. He
also learns how to make furniture and repair cars there. When Torit’s garrison mutinies, the
young Paride discovers what the violence of war involves. Hundreds die and the leader is cut into pieces.
1956
Sudan gains independence from Britain.The seminary is caught between two adversaries:
government troops, and insurgents rebelling against the Arab north. The government soldiers kill southern intellectuals. Taban escapes ex*****on and attempted assassinations.
1964
Juba, ordination as a priest. Receives a driving licence as a gift.
1966
There is a threat of Father Agostino being executed in Juba. His lawyer is able to secure his freedom. Taban: “Then we made the decision — Father Agostino, Mgr Laharanya and I — to stay with our people. Not to flee. Until 1972, we were the only priests in Equatoria in the east of South Sudan.”
1966-1972
Taban operates within the church in a completely hostile environment. One day, a soldier in the Muslim- and Arab-leaning government army saves the lives of Taban and the sisters in a seminary. “Because I offered him a crate of beer and a bull for his soldiers and promised to sell him a second-hand Land Rover if he rescued us.” Taban helps civilians and soldiers in the continuing state of war.
1972
South Sudanese rebels and the government in the north conclude the Addis Ababa Peace
Agreement, after mediation by the World Council of Churches among others.
1974
Taban exchanges two elephant tusks for two pairs of oxen and an ox plough in Uganda and
successfully introduces them in South Sudan.
1976
Parish priest in Loa. Foundation of a cooperative: “Whereby we made it clear that the cooperative belonged to the people and not to a particular tribe or clan.”
1977
Taban meets Ed Resor of Catholic Relief Services. Taban, who is exhausted at that point, is invited to go to the US. He works on Ed’s father’s ranch in Wyoming, where he helps repair fencing and clean stables.
1978
Foundation of the Sudanese Bishops’ Conference.
1979
Pressure on Taban to go into politics. Taban refuses: “I didn’t want to become a minister or have a position of power. I wanted to continue my blessed work as a priest.”
1980
Taban is in Malakal when he hears someone call: “The radio says that that man has been appointed assistant bishop of Juba by the Vatican.” Youth warriors committed to peaceful transformation of their communities during a cross-border peace & sports workshop
1980, 4 May
Ordination as bishop in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, by Pope John Paul II.
In the plane going there, his mother, who is flying for the first time, teaches him a lesson that Taban will always follow from that point on: “She taught me how you can avoid your own fear and neutralise your instinct for self-preservation by concentrating on the suffering of others who need help and comfort more than you yourself. That lesson has always helped me to overcome my fear in risky situations.”
1981
Taban becomes closely involved in SudanAid/Caritas and the work in refugee camps.
1983
Taban is appointed bishop of the new diocese of Torit. A new guerrilla war breaks out in South Sudan.
1985
The war comes closer. Toposa elders read in the entrails of a goat that “a great power is
approaching”.
1986
The rebel army of the SPLA is nearing Torit. Taban remains there with three other priests. His only contact with the capital Juba now is via a short-wave radio.
1988
Taban travels with the other Sudanese bishops to Rome for a meeting with the pope. Back in
Juba, he hears about the situation in Torit, now besieged by the rebels. There are many dead and wounded. The people are going hungry. Taban organises an aid convoy with one hundred lorries. Civilians travel in the lorries’ cargo area. The journey is a hellish ordeal that takes weeks. The convoy, led by Taban, is bombarded and shot at. There are fatalities every day. An ambush results in sixty dead. Of the one hundred lorries, sixty eventually arrive in Torit.
1989
After a medieval siege of the town of Torit, it is captured by SPLA rebels. Taban disappears off the face of the earth. For months he is held in inhuman conditions in an SPLA bush prison.
1989/1990
After he has been freed, Taban initiates the foundation of the New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC) with the aim of coordinating aid and relief in the south. He becomes its chairman and Father Mathieu Haumann of Mill Hill Missionaries acts as his secretary and gives him day-to-day support. Where the civilian structure (infrastructure, transport, healthcare, education etc.) has been
destroyed by the war, the NSCC starts to build its own structure through the church.
1991
Mengistu’s regime in Ethiopia, which has been the mainstay of the SPLA rebels, collapses. The new regime chases all the Sudanese out of the country. A mass of refugees start crossing the Ethiopian-Sudanese border. Taban travels there with Haumann. They have nothing to offer them. When Haumann asks whether there is any point to this, Taban says: “It is easier to shake hands when your hands are empty.” Taban stands at the border and personally greets the refugees on 20 PAX !
Four Freedoms Award Nomination Bishop Paride Taban Roosevelt Academy PAX ! Four Freedoms Award Nomination Bishop Paride Taban Roosevelt Academy 21
the bank of the river that runs along the border. He sees a woman give birth to a baby in the water. The image of the tens of thousands of refugees, especially the children, would remain with him for ever. It is one more in a long series of tragedies in South Sudan.
1993
Taban opens a church centre and relief base in Narus, a settlement on the border between Kenya and Sudan. The bishop is increasingly focusing on an international campaign for peace in South Sudan.
When Pope John Paul II visits the regime in Khartoum, a BBC reporter asks Taban what he wants to say about that visit to the pope. His answer: “Your Holiness, you are going to Khartoum to see your flock there. A large red carpet is being rolled out for you, but be aware that the hand that greets you is dripping with the blood of your Christians."
1994
Advent letter from NSCC, 1994: “The Africans in Sudan have been exploited for centuries. The slave trade is still continuing. The politics of the regime in Khartoum is worse than Apartheid.
Apartheid still allowed development. The politics of successive regimes in Khartoum are of conquest, exploitation, slavery, islamisation and war. There is no other nation in Africa that has known so much oppression as Sudan.”
1995
Taban travels through his diocese and also visits communities in Western Equatoria. Sometimes he travels straight across the firing lines. One evening, the rebel leader Garang promises to organise gunfire so that the government soldiers stay under cover and Taban is able to drive through. Taban does not tell his travelling companion Haumann all the details. Taban: “It was raining grenades on both sides, soldiers were using dead bodies for protection. We drove and we reached our destination.”
1997
The war has destroyed all the roads in Taban’s diocese. Taban thinks that the communities
needed connections to one another so that they can communicate with one another. The
‘contractor’ Taban therefore decides to build a road from the Kenyan border to the eastern most part of his diocese, the district of Kuron. The 300-kilometre-long ‘Taban Highway’ is excavated and paved using a bulldozer that the rebels have captured from the government. The project manager is the Dutchman Ydo Jacobs.
1999
The war between the SPLA rebels and the Arab north degenerates into an internal tribal conflict that costs countless human lives. The SPLA splits into factions. Taban continually tries to intercede between them.
2000
Air-raid shelters are built in the school that Taban had established in Narus.
2000
Construction of a bridge over Kuron River, start of Taban’s Peace Village project. Haumann on
Taban: “He prefers to drive an old Land Rover than run a diocese.”
2004
Taban asks the pope to relieve him of his duties as the administrative bishop of Torit. The pope gives him dispensation.
2005
After twenty-two years of civil war, peace is signed in Kenya between North and South Sudan.
2005
The new South Sudanese government gives Taban ten square kilometres of land on which to build a Peace Village, a place of peace and meeting point for tribes that are often on hostile terms. “A place among the poor and the most abandoned,” as Taban put it.
2005
Together with Pax Christi, Taban initiates a cross-border Peace & Sports programme in South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya. The aim is to give young soldiers from different, conflicting tribes the opportunity to meet one another in peacetime and deconstruct their conflicts, and to help them find a better way of living without violence.
2006
The Peace Village started to take shape with the construction of a school, a clinic, an agricultural information centre and a community house.
2008
Together with peace actors from Eastern Equatoria, Jonglei, Karamoja (Uganda) and Turkana (Kenya), the Peace Village organises a cross-border v and peace conference peacefully bringing together 400 youth warriors from tribes on hostile terms in Toposa, Murle, Didinga, Buya, Jie, Turkana and Karamajong, along with local leaders from the three countries, to promote peace and break the cycle of intercommunal violence and cattle raiding.
2009
The Peace Village develops into an oasis of peace in South Sudan, still plagued by the
resurgence of conflicts. Taban’s Christmas message, 2009: “When His disciples asked Jesus where He lived, the answer was ‘Come and see.’ If anyone asks me where I live, I say ‘Come and see’. Thank you to everyone who has given us support. Love is the key to Heaven.”
2011
South Sudan gains independence.
2013
Militants from the two most populous tribes, the Dinka and Nuer, commit large-scale slaughter. Start of a new civil war.
2014
Taban intercedes, with the support of NCA and Pax Christi, to obtain a peace agreement between the rebel faction of David Yau Yau and the South Sudanese government.
2015
In the presence of five European ambassadors, the governor of Eastern Equatoria and David Yau.
Yau, Taban launches the Kuron Peace Academy. Now all the elements of the Peace Village will be covered by the Academy: living by setting an example, development, mediation and dialogue in the community, and an exchange programme to bring people from South Sudan and international people together in the Peace Village to generate reconciliation and change in South Sudan.
2015
The clinic in the Peace Village obtains its own doctor.
2016
With the support of the EU, Taban and the staff at the Peace Village get a road built between Narus and Kuron.
2016
Resurgence of violence, thousands flee. The UN warns of genocide.
2016
The Peace Village peace team successfully mediates in a regional tribal conflict about cattle raiding.
2017
Famine in South Sudan. !
2018 Awarded with International Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award Nomination
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