EPIC LEAP TO FREEDOM
The amazing life of Dr Emmanuel Taban
The saying “from a log cabin to the White House” means that anybody, no matter their background, can become president of the US (with No 45 at the centre of a criminal investigation, the saying may soon become: from the White House to the big house). In Emmanuel Taban’s case the saying should be “from street child to stethoscope” — and even that doesn’t capture the extraordinary twists and remarkable turns his life has taken from growing up in poverty in a village in war-racked southern Sudan to graduating as a doctor in SA.
Taban is no ordinary doctor — he went on to become a leading pulmonologist who pioneered the use of therapeutic bronchoscopies to treat critically ill Covid patients.
When he was a child, a nurse at the local clinic predicted that one day he would become a doctor. He had never met a doctor and had no idea what being one entailed, but it sounded important.
It was the nurse’s words that set him on the path to becoming a healer. It was the words “made in SA” printed on a Coke can that set him on the road to Johannesburg.
Both journeys were gruelling and treacherous. The odds of him finishing one of them were daunting. The odds of succeeding in both were downright impossible.
In fact, just being born in the then southern Sudan in 1977 meant he was unlikely to even survive to adulthood in the first place.
When Taban arrived on Johannesburg’s mean streets in 1995 at the age of 17, he was a penniless war refugee with just five years of interrupted education to his name. Twenty-five years later New African magazine named him one of the 100 most influential Africans of 2020.
His life has been inspirational. And he’s not done yet. Not even close.
We are sitting at a café in Cape Town, where Taban — taking a break from his day job offering expert pulmonology care at Mediclinic Highveld and at Mediclinic Midstream in Midrand — is on a book tour.
Book tour? Yes, in addition to his life-saving medical work, Taban has published a memoir: The Boy Who Never Gave Up: A Refugee’s Epic Journey to Triumph.
Taban talks about his life as a journey. So let’s join him on his journey, which started with a hard landing onto a mud floor in Juba 44 years ago. That, he explains, is how he entered the world.
When his mother Phoebe was pregnant with him she divorced his father. Soon after Taban was born Phoebe’s brothers decided that she should move to the dusty village of Loka Round because they didn’t want to be burdened with a divorced sister.
Phoebe raised Taban and his four siblings alone.
Taban played with his cousin, hunted for flying termites with his grandmother and snacked on fried grasshoppers.
But his carefree childhood came to an end when the civil war, which had been on pause since 1972, flared again in 1983.
From the age of five, Taban lived in the shadow of violence and there was constant danger that he would be killed and the village destroyed by whichever side — the government army or the rebel fighters — arrived with blazing guns.
The rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army rampaged through the area, taking food and goods, kidnapping girls to be their wives and boys to be trained as soldiers.
As a boy, he found the war impossible to understand. All these years later, he still finds the war impossible to understand.
When he asked his mother what was going on she told him: “There are a lot of cruel people out there who want to hurt us. So when they come, we have to hide.”
When the dogs barked, the family fled into the bush, sometimes for days with nothing but a blanket and whatever food Phoebe could forage.
Taban started school in 1985 but didn’t finish grade 1 because he was constantly having to flee to the bush. The violence robbed him — and generation after generation of children — of an education.
He was almost 13 when he was arrested for joining a protest against the detention of a popular priest whom the government had accused of conspiring with the rebels. Taban spent a few days in jail. He was arrested again less than a year later when his attempt to become an entrepreneur and help his mother feed the family turned into a disaster.
He fell into debt and when he couldn’t repay what he owed two traders, the local chief sentenced him to three months in prison. He wasn’t yet 14. He managed to escape but, because he was a fugitive, he couldn’t return home.
Taban’s memoir sketches the nail-biting drama of his journey through Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zimbabwe until he eventually arrived in SA.
He had encounters with black mambas and hippos but it was humans who posed the greatest danger.
He was treated with cruelty and indifference; he was jailed, accused of spying, tortured, assaulted, robbed and deported.
We get too comfortable too easily in Africa. The lesson I learnt was never to depend on anyone
Relatives turned him away, his “friend” James with whom he lived on the streets scammed him and priests in Asmara, Eritrea, who offered to take him to a safe place instead handed him over to police as an illegal immigrant.
I ask Taban how he was able to trust people after being betrayed so often. He says it was because each act of cruelty he suffered was balanced with the kindness and compassion he was shown by strangers.
“I met so many good people and because of them I started trusting humanity again,” he says.
Taban adds that the incident with James actually turned out to be a good thing.
“James and I had been going from organisation to organisation, seeking financial support. What I was doing was treading water, which was not the right thing to do. When I met James, I lost my sense of direction. I stopped progressing. I became too comfortable,” he says.
According to Taban, there are lots of parallels between his journey and Africa’s problems, and becoming “too comfortable” is one of them.
“We get too comfortable too easily in Africa. That is related to aid. When you get relief, you forget you must grow your own food. The lesson I learnt was never to depend on anyone. That lesson was taught to me over and over again, I need to be able to stand up by myself. And I continued my journey.”
Propelling each step he took was a desperate desire for education because he knew that education was his ticket out of poverty.
Taban says when the nurse predicted he would one day become a doctor she had seen something in him that was beyond his poverty.
“She saw what I could become. She saw potential. I knew I had a bit of intelligence in me and that if I was given a chance to go to school, I would do very well. I also knew that just going to school was not good enough, I had to put much more effort in than everyone else and be the best in whatever I do and never give up in whatever I’m doing.”
Taban says the question that people most often ask is how he made the decision to start the trek of about 5,000km to SA. Well, he explains, it was because of who was with him at that time. Or to put it another way, who wasn’t with him at the time.
“You see, if I had told you that I’ve decided to walk to SA, the first thing you will say is: ‘Are you bloody stupid? Do you know how far it is? You can’t walk.’ And I would have been discouraged from taking the journey. I didn’t want people to discourage me so I didn’t talk to anyone. I just put one step after another and kept on moving.”
Taban believes the universe was looking after him.
“I don’t know if you could call it a guardian angel or if it was just my instincts that kept me safe from danger, but something was protecting me.”
Obstacle after obstacle was hurled at Taban, yet he was determined to succeed. What compelled him to keep going when life became so impossibly difficult?
“I was running away from something but I was also running towards something,” he tells me.
was something bigger — something that required me to be determined, something that required me not to give up.” He thinks for a while before he continues: “To be honest, if I could tell you what pushed me that would be great. But I just knew that I was going towards something, and something was pushing me, and that something was within me.”
He says his difficult childhood — sleeping in the bush, going hungry — prepared him for his journey. When he arrived in SA he found his way to the Comboni Missionaries who gave him a place to stay and helped him get into school.
He matriculated (twice) and spent six years studying medicine; he then specialised as a physician, and after that qualified as a pulmonologist. Taban holds three medical degrees.
He wants South Sudanese children to hear his story so they know that a child who once was forced to beg for food on the streets has achieved something significant.
South Sudan gained statehood in July 2011 after splitting from the rest of the country. The new government invited Taban to be its director of health, but he declined.
“I didn’t think that I was ready,” he says. “I was 29 and I thought, no, I won’t be able to do that. That position needed somebody with experience.”
According to Taban, South Sudan — with its oil, gold and other minerals — could be a very rich country. But it is home to some of the poorest people in the world, who still live in mud huts like the one he grew up in, with no electricity or running water.
“The people have accepted their status as victims,” he laments.
“We need to start thinking differently — not only in South Sudan, but in Africa. Why are people still living in mud houses, why do people still not have toilets, why is there no
I work hard to make sure that my children all have a soft landing when they arrive in this world
education? It’s time that we stop blaming other people for our failures. I want to help to correct this narrative that we are victims. We are free now and we are capable of doing anything that anybody can do in this world.”
A message he hopes readers take from his book is that life’s a journey and every journey must have a purpose.
“On every journey we encounter problems, hardship, happiness, difficulties, robberies, everything, but the most important thing is that they should not give up on that journey because there’s no journey out there that is smooth. It’s important to work hard because the harder you work, the more life falls into place.”
He says when people ask him why he works so hard, he explains that when he was born, there was no mattress to land on, and he was born on the hard floor of a mud hut.
“I work hard to make sure that my children all have a soft landing when they arrive in this world. The poverty my family experienced over the last few generations must end with me,” he says.
And it has. When Taban’s medical practice was up and running smoothly, he built a house in Trichardt, Mpumalanga, for his wife Motheo, a physiotherapist, and their daughters — Naledi, Yeno and Awate — and his niece Emba, who he and Motheo have adopted. He also paid for 14 of his nieces and nephews in South Sudan to attend school and university.
Taban’s memoir leaves the reader despairing at the devastation of war and the desperation of people born into poverty on a continent of riches. The people who were cruel to him will enrage you.
However, reading about the strangers who lent him a helping hand raises the spirits. And more than that, Taban’s success against all odds will give you a much-needed injection of hope. Taban is the author not only of The Boy
Who Never Gave Up but of his own destiny.