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In 1974, both governments in Cairo and Khartoum sat in a room and signed a paper. “The Sudd is wasting water. Let us dig a 360km canal from Jonglei to the Sobat. We will split the extra water 50/50. The people of Twi East, Duk and Bor. The people whose cows drink from the toic. Whose fish breed in the Sudd. Whose history is written on water were never considered. So, in 1974, mostly students of defunct Bor District in Juba protested over the project of canal were many of them were shot and killed by Khartoum government. In 1978, the French company CCI shipped this behemoth from Pakistan. Guided by a laser beam, it dug 130 feet wide, 20 feet deep. It consumed 10,400 gallons of fuel a day. However, history had already prepared a man, when a man decides to fight, he fights for something bigger than his village.. Dr. John Garang de Mabior was in Iowa State University at that time doing his PhD with thesis “Identifying, Analyzing and Evaluating Development options for The Jonglei area”. The very canal that wanted to kill his people. the government's plan for the locals was nothing but "misery management." A few boreholes and schools to make people keep quiet while they steal Nile river to Egypt. Dr. Garang decided to used Sudd as a yardstick. In Nairobi, at UNEP headquarters, there was a group called the ELC. One Professor Richard Odingo of Nairobi University who in 1977 stood at a UN Conference and shouted, "Here is a canal being built that will make Africa's next desert!" On October 1982, at the Royal Geographical Society in London, they held a meeting. Topic: "The impact of the Jonglei Canal." The white man who once wanted the canal now said, "Stop it” When SPLA was formed on 16th May 1983 after the Bor Mutiny, the first military order was not to attack Juba. It was, Go and stop the Bucket Wheel. In 1984, they chased the workers. CCI ran away. “makarawin” was left there, alone, rusting in the bush of Nyaken, birds nesting in its buckets. 260km of unfinished canal, disappearing under grass. The Bucket Wheel did not cause the war alone. But it gave the war a story that the world could understand. It turned SPLA from "rebels" to "saviors of the world's largest wetland." May the soul of a man who could have lived the life many of us only dream of, but chose instead a fight that forced him to leave his family behind. Credit:Desmond D. Mabior.