Akuol de Mabior: “everybody has to figure out where their home is”

In one of the final scenes of the film No Simple Way Home, Akuol de Mabior sits inside a vehicle, describing the people along the roadside as the car drives by. There, individuals selling tea strive to make a living. These are the ones who, as she puts it, hold everything together and prevent it all from collapsing. The film by the South Sudanese director was showcased this winter at the Barcelona Contemporary Culture Centre (CCCB) as part of a series organised with support from the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). Both institutions are hosting Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga through a literary residency programme, during which she has curated a showcase of work by two rising African women filmmakers: the South Sudanese Akuol de Mabior and South African Milisuthando Bongela. 

Akuol de Mabior’s film, which premiered at the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival, tells a deeply personal story. Born in Cuba in 1989 and raised in Nairobi, she is the daughter of John Garang and Rebecca Nyandeng de Mabior, a couple pivotal to South Sudan’s independence struggle. Garang died in 2006, five years before the country formally became independent in 2011. Today, South Sudan grapples with rebuilding itself amid a fragile peace agreement and cyclical internal conflicts. Her mother is one of the country’s five vice-presidents, the result of a complex political system not dissimilar to Bosnia, which serves primarily to maintain a fragile peace rather than offer services to South Sudanese citizens.  

In recent weeks, that peace has been looking increasingly fragile, as two of the most powerful figures in government, president Salva Kiir and vice president Reik Machar, appear on the brink of conflict again. The war in Sudan has also impeded the country’s largest source of revenues, oil exports, after it burst due to fighting near Khartoum. The nation’s latest currency devaluation has plunged most citizens—dependent on the informal economy—into deeper hardship. The South Sudanese pound lost an astonishing 64% of its value against the USD in 2024.  

Speaking to Geeska, Akuol de Mabior discusses her filmmaking, the quest for identity and belonging, her mother’s difficult decision to join the South Sudanese government, and the sacrifices of a generation now wondering whether their fight for liberation from Sudan was worth the cost. 

Jaume Portell: How do people manage to survive in an economy where nothing seems to be working? 

Akuol De Mabior: I think of them as experts. They need to know a lot to run their business. I made a film about the informal sector: it’s on Al Jazeera and it’s called Hidden Strength. One character in the film is a Juba native in her 50s, born and raised there. She owns a restaurant that she has kept running through war, peace, and war again, and then peace once more. She always reopens it. For me, the biggest source of hope and change are people like this.

She has created systems so that, “when it’s really bad, this is what I serve.” Whatever happens, she will be sitting at her counter. I wanted to call the film The Shop Counter Revolution. 

JP: You’d make a great journalist with headlines like that. 

ADM: When we interviewed her, she spoke about the systems that helped her deal with all that madness. They really do have deep knowledge that people undervalue. 

They’re organised, but when the value of the currency is dropped in a single day, their savings are decimated. It’s all they had—they were saving in the local currency, so they were optimistic, they were there, they were invested, and… you are losing that person. And this has happened maybe twice or three times (in South Sudan). We were speaking with Tsitsi (Dangarembga) about continuity. So, if you have a currency collapse because some guy decided yesterday, by decree, that we're going to change everything, then you have broken continuity. 

We were talking about how there’s this tendency to make sweeping changes. Because that feels good: “This person is going to save us.” But probably what really changes things is continuity: somebody like Mama Zahra, the woman who owns that restaurant. She’s an institution. There’s even a place called Medan Zahra (Mama Zahra Square), because everybody knows this woman who continues to open her shop. That level of continuity is what creates a big change. 

JP: I had never thought about it this way: a major currency devaluation is like a betrayal. You are telling your own people, “You should have hoarded dollars.” 

ADM: Or invested elsewhere. The most optimistic, the most loyal to the place, are the ones who suffer the most. The person who is the most optimistic, the most invested, and who cares the most about the community— that person is constantly heartbroken. 

JP: What’s the relationship between the South Sudanese people and the state? 

ADM: I can speak from observation, from working and filming in South Sudan. I don’t want this idea that I'm representative of South Sudanese women because my experience is not representative. 

It’s a sensitive question. People are not that free to criticise. If you’re born of a liberation struggle, there’s sort of this idea: this person or this movement will deliver us to the promised land, and that requires leadership. You must be in that mentality to sacrifice so much for freedom as a concept. So, I think there’s still hope around the leadership, even as people keep being heartbroken and things keep falling apart. That mindset from the liberation struggle makes you continue being hopeful. I think people are also angry, but silent. 

JP: A liberation struggle is always about a future expectation. Independence, managing a country, is about reality. Do you think there is a clash between these two concepts? In a way, it looks like South Sudan is living what many countries on the rest of the continent experienced in the 1970s or 1980s. Do you think you will be able to avoid the path other countries followed back then? 

ADM: That was the big hope in 2011. The problem is that a lot of the major catastrophes we’ve experienced in our short history have to do with power struggles within the leadership. Then there’s a sort of mobilisation of communities: “This is my community, so they support me,” and they support what I decided today, which is, “I don’t like this guy anymore.” Civil wars start in leadership. 

JP: How has your relationship with South Sudan evolved since the film was released? 

ADM: I know a lot more about South Sudan since finishing making the film. Of course, I still don’t consider myself to be an authority on the country. I’ve learned just from being there and talking to people. I did another short film that meant we were on an old barge, and we went eight hours up the Nile. 

I went into making the film without a hypothesis. I was looking to find if there is anything that we can be hopeful about, even as we’ve experienced catastrophic problems. The one conclusion that I kind of came to was this informal sector: we have all these tea shops in Juba and in South Sudan. If you’ve ever been to Juba, if you are paying attention, you will see all these blue chairs everywhere, with a lady serving tea and people drinking tea on the road. I spoke to one young woman who owns one of these tea shops, and she was able to put herself through school and bring an income for her family. 

One recurring element in the film is the relentless flooding, which grows increasingly severe. Even in that apocalyptic setting, when it’s flooded and it looks like the end of the world, you'll still see a woman coming to stack up all her chairs and open her shop. Of course, nobody should have to live like that, but the people who have the heart to still go and open the shop in a situation like this—that’s where I would point my camera. 

JP: Let’s discuss the diaspora, an essential subject of the film No Simple Way Home. How does it feel to say, “I’m from a place I’ve never been to”? 

ADM: In a South Sudanese context, I think part of our identity comes from the liberation struggle: we come from a country (Sudan) where, as southerners, we were not treated well. You are duty-bound to your country because so many people sacrificed: you are told about that, you learn about those stories. So, you need to go home to your country and help because all these people were sacrificed for this. That’s a powerful, strong narrative: people have sacrificed a lot for you to be able to call yourself South Sudanese. 

There’s some goodness in this sense of duty, but it can also make people not ask enough questions: you are supposed to just love your country, to just feel patriotism in your heart.  

JP: Some people think that patriotism equals submission. 

ADM: It’s like a religious experience. You are just supposed to surrender and not ask too many questions. I just want to know if I can get a job, where I am going to live, what the schools are like, what the living standards are, practical things. What’s the price of water?

We have a unifying narrative, and people might feel invested in coming home—even if it’s a home they have never been to. You could be living in a neighbourhood in Australia and really feel connected to South Sudan, even if you’ve never been there. There’s a goodness to it, but then we can sometimes become very romantic, and it can be a disillusioning pool. 

JP: Do you think that some of these people choose South Sudan or their African country of origin because they are not accepted in the host country? 

ADM: I grew up in Kenya, and we did feel that we were not Kenyan; but I’m sure it was not as bad as in Australia, Egypt, or the north of Sudan. After filming, I also realised that building a home and the changing sense of home are universal things: everybody has to figure out where their home is. But if you’re unsettled in your national identity because of your circumstances, the tendency is to think that you're the only one who has no sense of home.

JP: There’s a moment in the film where a woman asks you if you speak Dinka, and you say, “I don’t speak it, but I understand it.” What is the relationship between the South Sudanese who have grown up there and stayed there, and the South Sudanese diaspora? 

ADM: There have always been a lot of internally displaced people, so for those who stayed, it would have been extremely challenging to remain continuously. There might be a tension and a sense of, “You’ve been comfortable out there this whole time, and now you come back, and you want to tell me what it means to be where I’m from, me who has been here the whole time.”

Then, there is a tension between people who stayed closer and engaged somehow, and those who went and lived in the US or Australia, and either didn’t come back or came back rarely. I think it’s unfortunate: there should be more grace for both the people who stayed and the people who left, because it’s rough. I think it’s fraught because both groups of people could make valid points about their choices. 

JP: In a sense, No Simple Way Home is also a film about your mother, Rebecca de Mabior. What struck me most was the profound loneliness the story conveys. Here is a woman—alongside her comrade and husband, John Garang—committing her life to building a nation. They dedicate decades to this immense struggle. Yet, when freedom is finally attained, she is on her own. 

ADM: She always worries that it was all a waste. “Was this all for nothing?” She says it all the time. She’s very vocal about it. She asks herself: did we do all of this and make all these sacrifices? Did all these people make all these sacrifices and die? And has it all been for nothing? She also sees herself as having sacrificed her husband to this cause, the ultimate sacrifice. I don't think she’s answered that question; that’s the weight she carries. 

JP: Why do you think she was offered the vice presidency? 

ADM: Technically, it’s in the peace agreement of 2018. There was a decision to give positions to the disagreeing parties, and she was lumped with what they call the former detainees—a group of people who were arrested. She spoke against anything being done to them. These are people she sees as comrades, who were close to my father and a big part of the movement. 

So, she’s one of five vice presidents. When I interviewed her, she said that it was not an easy yes, because things are messy and dangerous. But she had a sense that she could help keep the peace between people who don’t always see eye to eye. 

JP: So, her role is essentially that of a peacemaker. 

ADM: That’s what pushed her to say, “OK, fine,” because we can’t afford another war. In a screening I did in San Francisco, one woman asked, “Why would your mother join such a corrupt government?” 

It was a good question. I said that it was not an easy yes, but she felt that saying no might have a worse outcome. Do you make decisions because the optics are good? Yes, if she were on the outside, she could be in the opposition and say, “Look how bad they are,” and look good. But there was much more to that decision. It was not an easy yes; she doesn’t covet political power. 

JP: What kind of films do you hope to make in the future?

ADM: I would love to do an Africa-wide series on the informal sector—the people who find ways to make things function. I’m also working on an adaptation of a Sudanese novel with some producers based in Paris. Additionally, I’ve been preparing another film about a politician for a few years now. 

That’s been an ongoing and difficult project that I really hope to deliver. I don’t want to be making an exposé, and I hope to avoid propaganda. I always have to add this caveat: I want to humanise African leadership, but that’s not to say we should forgive mistakes. 

We tend to sanctify or demonise. Mandela is basically a saint, right? And then we have our demons—monsters who are outside of humanity. I see it as the job of a documentarian to bring all those experiences into our shared humanity.