I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of gunfire. I jumped out of bed and grabbed my clothes. The militias were outside. I was terrified.

Then I noticed the glow of light coming under the hotel room door. I realised where I was: a luxury hotel room in Milan.

I heard the gunfire again: it was a truck collecting rubbish in the piazza below my window. I was not in the Sudan. There was no threat.

I can never forget what I fled from in my childhood. But I also find that some people simply don’t believe what I have become.

I travel with a UK passport, because Britain took me in as a child refugee. But I’ve got a green card, which allows me to live and work in America. I pay a lot of taxes; I own a house in New York; and I run a handbag business there. There’s no question that I’m legitimate.

Once, I landed at JFK after several modelling jobs in Europe. At immigration the homeland security officer looked me up and down and studied my passport with extra care. Not again, I thought. I’ve been detained so many times. I’ve come to realise that as a successful black woman – and a tall one at that – I represent something that triggers hostility and suspicion in a lot of people.

He sent me off to the little room they have for suspected terrorists, border jumpers and the like. I’d been there before. It’s like a jail in there. You can’t use your phone to call for assistance. They won’t tell you why you’re being detained.

They took my picture. They checked my green card again. They double-checked my fingerprints. They acted really tough, cold and suspicious. They kept me for 2½ hours.

I’d just flown business class from Frankfurt. I was wearing nice clothes, carrying a bag I’d designed, which even had a little brass tag with my name on it. I had all my papers. Yet still they had to detain me for all that time. Was it because I’m a black woman? I can’t prove it, but experience tells me that my skin figured in there somewhere.

A few weeks later the same guy detained me again. This time he grilled me about my travels. Why was I in Africa? Why had I been to Egypt? Why this? Why that?

“I’m a model. I travel for work.” He looked me up and down like he didn’t believe me. I wondered if Cindy Crawford had these kinds of issues. Another hour passed. I went up to him and told him I knew my rights.

“Your rights?” he said with a smirk. Finally, after 2½ hours, he stamped my passport.

“I thought you were Naomi Campbell,” one of the other officials said.

While I was waiting for my luggage a woman came up to me and said: “You know, you look just like this model. She’s from Africa. She’s got really short hair and she looks just like you.”

“Really?” I said.

“Really,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

I got in the car and put all the bad exchanges behind me. It’s the Dinka way.

I WAS born, the seventh of nine children, in a little town called Wau. Alek means “black spotted cow”, a symbol of good luck for my people, the Dinka. I got my long body from my father – I’m 5ft 11in tall – and my mother gave me my smile. My inky skin came from both of them.

My people have lived in the southern Sudan for thousands of years. The main thing to understand about my country is that it has always been split between the Islamic Arab north and the animist and Christian south. The British, who ruled until the 1950s, governed north and south separately; but, just before independence, they gave in to pressure from the Islamic leaders in the north to unite the country.

The northern government proceeded to impose Islamic culture on the southern people, and a brutal civil war broke out. It lasted until 1972 when both sides signed an accord guaranteeing autonomy for the south. I was born five years later.

The Dinka are divided into clans, which are split into smaller groups that each control just enough land to provide water and pasture for their beloved cattle. These animals are so essential to the Dinka that, even though my parents raised us in a town, my mother still kept about 15 head of longhorned cattle.

“Don’t forget to pick up the manure,” she would say to us before we went to school.

Cow dung is really quite clean – after all, it is just grass and water. We’d leave the manure to dry while we went to school and in the evening we would burn it so the smoke would keep the flies and mosquitoes away. Sometimes we would use the ash – which had been purified by being burnt – as toothpaste. We didn’t have plastic brushes in those days; we chewed on sticks until they went soft and then we would rub them along our teeth and gums. Years later, when I was 26, I went to the dentist for the first time. He said I had incredibly healthy teeth, so I’m definitely an advocate of sticks and dung powder for good oral health.

And it’s not just the dung. Sometimes a village boy herding cattle will stick his head under a cow when it’s urinating so that the liquid goes over his hair and body. That’s because cow urine kills lice and keeps mosquitoes away. If you think about it, isn’t that boy clever to take care of his infestation that way, since medicines and insecticides are so scarce in the countryside?

One thing that couldn’t be cured was psoriasis, which I had all over my body since I was baby. No one knew what to do about it. My skin turned ashy and white, and I’d scratch until I bled. I felt so ashamed. It’s strange that I grew up to make my living off my looks after so many years of looking like a monster. It cleared up after I moved to Britain’s damper climate, but those years suffering from it taught me not to take beauty too seriously. I was ugly for much of my childhood, and then my skin cleared up and people thought just the opposite; but I remained the same person, with an ugly side and a beautiful side like everyone else. There was nothing substantially different about me; my skin was just better.

I grew up in what was considered a middle-class family. We lived in a two-bed-room cement-block house with a courtyard for the cows. There were eight of us: my mother, father and six children – the oldest three had grown up and left.

Most people in Europe or America would have called us poor, since we didn’t have electricity, running water or an indoor toilet. But we had enough to eat, a solid house and simple clothes. There were plenty of people poorer than us, who worked in the fields and lived in houses with thatched roofs.

My father worked at the local board of education. He left each morning wearing a suit and tie and carrying a black leather briefcase. He was a very stylish man, about 6ft 5in tall, slender and handsome.

In the evenings he would sit in a shaded chair on the veranda and have a cup of tea while he listened to the BBC World Service on his little battery-powered radio.

“What did you learn today?” he asked me every night at dinner. “Did you learn how to rule the world?”

“No,” I would have to say.

“Well then, get in there and do your homework.”

TWO developments signalled the end of this safe childhood world. First, my father accidentally rode his bicycle into a deep pothole one night and broke his left hip. Doctors in Khartoum inserted steel pins into the bone to hold it together. Secondly, in 1983, soon after he came home to recuperate, civil war broke out again.

The government revoked the south’s autonomy and imposed sharia law; the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) was formed to fight back. Wau became a military zone, with rebels on the outskirts, soldiers in town and lawless militias wreaking havoc everywhere.

The militias were groups of gangsters with no political loyalties at all. All they wanted was to rob, molest, rape and destroy. They didn’t care who you were. Many weren’t much more than teenagers with guns.

It was shocking to hear army trucks rumbling through the streets of Wau and to see men in green uniforms leaning against the walls of my friends’ houses. The easy social life we had with our neighbours from different tribes and religions fell apart. Everyone became suspicious of other people. We heard some neighbours saying it was the Dinka who were causing all the trouble. That if it weren’t for the Dinka, who made up a lot of the rebel SPLA, there would still be peace.

I saw my first bodies when I went to get water from the well one day with my sister Adaw. I smelt something awful in the air. A woman’s body was lying in the grass. Then I saw another. We ran straight home.

Government soldiers and militias started shooting at each other all over town. At night there’d be rockets blazing across the sky, and the sound of automatic weapons.

My father had planned to go back to Khartoum to have the pins in his hip removed, but it was impossible to leave Wau. His hip became badly infected and he could only hobble. With such trouble walking, he fell and broke his left arm, too.

One night a firefight broke out outside our house just as he was struggling to get back from the latrine in the courtyard. Bullets flew around him. He had to throw himself to the ground, his face racked with agony, and stay there for 20 minutes.

The following night a group of militia pounded on the metal gate. My mother blew out the kerosene lantern and we huddled together in terrified silence. As they got into the courtyard, my mother suddenly sat up with a jolt and said: “I left the front door unlocked.”

She crept to the door and flicked the latch. It made a clicking, metallic sound. The militia’s guns exploded. They sprayed bullets into our walls and through our windows. We dived under the beds, but my father couldn’t bend well enough. He was almost crying from pain.

The militia left but we lay on the floor all night listening to gunfire and explosions. My parents decided it was time to leave. We would head for the village where my father had grown up. This was south of Wau, far from the main roads, and we would have to walk. How would my father cope? He was only about 40, but he moved like an old man.

When the eight of us set off the road was already packed with other people leaving: Muslim women covered in deep red, or blue or green scarves, Nubian men in long white robes, Christians wearing American cast-offs from the markets. But mostly it was Dinka walking south, towards the borders with Uganda and Zaire, deep into Dinka territory.

I was in my nicest outfit, a flower-print cotton dress with an elastic waist that we had bought in the market. That and flip-flops was all I wore. None of us took even a change of clothes or waterproofs or anything personal.

I was nine years old and I had never been far into the countryside, but I’d heard that things could be really strange. On the few times our cousins had come up to Wau to visit us they’d worn makeshift clothes, and sometimes they had fleas or lice that they would ask us to pick out of their hair. My aunts would sit in bed with their shoes on, getting dirt all over the sheets, which we thought was quite peculiar. But my father said that’s how they did it at home, where they slept on straw mats instead of beds.

Years later, when I went to England, I got a first-hand lesson in how wrong it is to judge people by their backgrounds, because I was misjudged myself. In Wau I belonged to a well-educated, sophisticated family but in London I was the one everyone teased for being a primitive country girl. In their eyes I was no different from my village cousins. I was an unsophisticated African whose skin was darker than night. They were second or third-generation immigrants, with lighter skin, and they knew the ways of London.

On the first night of our walk my mother cooked a stew from wild fruit and vegetables. Then we lay our mat on the dirt outside an abandoned hut while she beat the ground with a stick to let any wild animals know that we were here and that we were human and that they’d better stay the heck away.

“But what about the snakes?” I said.

“The snakes don’t want to eat little Alek,” my father said.

“And the lions?” I asked.

“Lions want a fat girl, not a skinny little girl like you.”

Next day we reached the jungle, which was like walking through a slick green cave, thick with mosquitoes. On the second night I woke in the darkness with raindrops falling on my forehead. In the morning it was still raining. I smoothed out my flower-print dress and put on my flip-flops, brushed my teeth with a stick and started walking, feeling hungry and hoping we’d find food.

I was starving. Eating only a small stew of leaves and roots at night doesn’t satisfy or nourish, especially if you’ve walked for eight or nine hours. Sometimes I’d just rub my hand on my belly to soothe its aching. Nearly two decades later, the thought makes me want to cry.

Ever the optimist, my mother found the bright side. She sang silly songs, made jokes, set up games and told us stories about how life was when she was young. We walked like that for two weeks, laughing all day and sleeping outside in the rain with our rumbling bellies at night, until one day we saw cattle grazing and an old man walking towards us. My father said: “We’re here.”

I could see huts made of mud and straw. Our house in Wau was huge in comparison. I felt sad and frightened. All of a sudden there were 20 or so kids surrounding us, saying: “Welcome! Welcome! Where are you from?”

I thought perhaps it could be nice after all. But that didn’t last.

“City kids, city kids,” they said. “We’re going to eat you alive!”

AS THE weeks passed in the village, my father’s hip got worse. One morning I found him curled in the foetal position on his blanket, a strange look in his eyes. He seemed like another man, distant, frightened and desperate. Soon it became nearly impossible for him to bend or sit without falling. Walking was painful and slow.

There was an old man who lived in a hut on the edge of the village. He was very tall and often appeared out of nowhere, covered in white dust. We children called him the “ghost giant”. He was said to be a healer. One morning, he put his nose to my father’s hip. The smell of the infection sent his head back sharply. He told my mother: “Doctor. He must see a doctor.”

My father needed the kind of medical attention that nobody in the village had ever even imagined, let alone seen. Without it, he would die. But we couldn’t return home until the fighting stopped.

For months the news from Wau was bad. It was also the height of the rainy season, and mosquitoes bred in little puddles all over the village. It was horrible at times, with great swarms of mosquitoes that were starving at the end of the day, just like us. We’d eat. Then they’d eat. In the morning I’d wake up with welts and bloody smears on my body.

At last a travelling trader told my mother that the battles around Wau were largely over. No one in the village made a fuss when we left. We just walked away into the bush.

Within an hour my father was barely able to move so my brothers helped him along. Then I fell ill. My head ached and my muscles felt like they were filled with pins. I shuffled along, hanging back with my father.

“Baba,” I said, using the name I’d called him when I was a toddler, “I’m so tired.”

“I think you’ve got malaria,” he replied.

Malaria is endemic in the southern Sudan; each year it kills and sickens thousands. My mother had a single ampoule of medicine in a syringe to use if the malaria got really bad, but my father didn’t think my case warranted it. So I walked on, feeling like I was dying.

Late one night I heard my older sister Adaw crying out. In the morning she didn’t get up. She just stayed under her blanket, shivering.

“Malaria,” my mother said. She had it about twice as bad as I did. My mother decided to use the medicine. It worked. My sister’s fever subsided. But her leg hurt where the needle had entered and the wound became grey with infection. It leaked pus at night. Adaw joined my father hobbling at the back of the line. Nearly four weeks passed this way. My sister could still keep walking all day, albeit slowly, but my father had to stop to rest, sometimes for a whole day.

Finally, we reached the grassy area that bordered the Jur River, near Wau. I was so excited that I ran ahead with my sister Athieng through a tunnel of 6ft-high grass, laughing and calling out.

Suddenly, I saw three men in raggedy clothes, carrying Kalashnikovs, staring at us 10 yards away. The leader wore sandals and a pair of amber aviator sunglasses.

“Who are you, little girl?” he said. I didn’t answer. I was terrified. I guessed that they were rebels, but even the rebels would kill Dinka if they needed something. I knew that soldiers raped girls. I knew they stole children.

I hoped they would hate me because of my ugly psoriasis and would not want to get anywhere near me. But they started coming towards us and I felt the life drain out of me. I would have peed in my knickers, except I’d hardly had any water to drink all day.

Out of the long grass my mother appeared. They looked at her like she was an apparition. Then she spoke: “Aren’t you Anok Deng? I know your mother.”

The leader nodded. He suddenly seemed sheepish.

“Oh my goodness. If your mother only knew. How is she?”

“My mother is good, madam. She’s in Congo.”

“She’s safe?”

“I think so, madam.”

“Are you going to rob us?”

“I don’t think so, madam.”

We ended up giving them all of our goods – our salt, a little bit of soap, a cooking pot and our food – but as a present, not because they demanded it. I felt sorry for them. They even carried my father and sister across the river. They could have killed us, which is what happened to so many other people when they met soldiers – the army, the rebels, the militias – yet these guys treated us as fellow human beings.

Wau, when we reached it, was scary. Houses had been burnt. The police station had been wrecked. The road was pitted with tank treads. Our gate was broken. And a family was living in our home.

They left after my father spoke to them. There was still something powerful in the way he dealt with people. But he now desperately needed to get to Khartoum, as did my sister Adaw, whose infected leg was turning black. There was no one in Wau who could treat them.

My mother wanted to get all the family out. But there were no buses or trains. The only way out was by air. All the airlines had long since stopped landing in Wau’s little airport, but there were military planes. Every time we heard a giant C-51 transport plane flying in with supplies for the army, my mother would gather all of us together, and we’d set off, hoping to escape.

At the airport, we’d wait with hundreds of other people. Soldiers stood around, their berets cocked on their heads, their eyes bloodshot and nervous. Since they shot up the town every night we were respectful. They liked to see people beg.

It was a shock when they finally showed a little grace on our third trip to the airport. My mother begged them to put my father on a flight. She pointed to his hip. She showed them Adaw’s poisoned leg. Finally, the guards said: “Fine, they can go. The rest of you will stay.”

We went home and wept. It was one of the few times I’d seen my mother cry. There was nothing left for us. We had no father. We had no money. We had no idea what the future held.

We returned to the airport again and again, but each time we were turned away. Finally, while we were walking to the airport yet again I turned to my mother and said: “I’m leaving today, no matter what. Even if we have to split up.”

For a moment my mother looked at me as if I was mad, but something told her to trust me.

At the airport it was the same old scene. Nasty soldiers. Hundreds of people wanting to get out. A line of people who, for whatever reasons - bribes? connections? – were being allowed to board the plane.

I spotted one of our neighbours among them. I didn’t know him at all well. He could have been a child molester for all I knew. Without saying a word I left my mother’s side and walked over to him. I told the guards he was my father. Amazingly, he nodded in agreement.

My mother looked at me with great pain in her eyes. As the line began to move she whispered to my new “father” in Dinka. “Take her to my family in Khartoum,” she said, giving him my aunt’s address.

The man nodded. But who knew? What if he sold me? What if he took me as one of his wives? What if I never saw my mother again?

I glanced over at her and smiled. I suppose my face gave it away, because a soldier suddenly stepped in front of me.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “What are you doing here?”

I acted offended. “That’s my dad,” I said, pointing at my “father”, who kept his cool and just nodded his head.

“Come along, girl,” he said. “Keep with me.”

As we headed to the plane I turned to see my mother again. Her eyes were puddles of sadness. I wanted to cry, too, but I didn’t.

We climbed the metal steps into the cargo hold. I took a seat next to my “father” on a wooden plank, and figured out how to strap myself in.

As soon as the plane started taxiing down the runway the pilot turned all the lights off so we wouldn’t be shot down by surface-to-air missiles. We flew in total darkness for three hours. The other passengers were completely silent; I felt like we were on a death watch.

I was alone in the world, fleeing a war with nothing more than the clothes on my back. My journey to the woman I am today had begun.

© Alek Wek 2007

Extracted from Alek by Alek Wek to be published by Virago on November 8 at £11.99.

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