Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  Sherif quickly drained his drink, pulled from his pocket a tiny atomiser, and sprayed his open mouth so that, on the street, he would seem law-abiding.

  ‘May I leave the bottle here as a deposit against future debriefings?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He rose, pleading some operations he had to attend to in the morning at Omdurman women’s hospital. When she questioned him he mentioned ovarian cysts – a peculiar specialty for someone interested in public health and epidemiology.

  ‘Middle-class women?’ asked Prim.

  ‘Oh yes. But also I repair fistulas which are looked upon as a curse by Sudanese society. That is good and satisfying work, since a simple procedure gives women back their womanhood. I enjoyed our meeting, Miss Bettany. I hope we will meet again soon.’

  Prim knew walking with him to the car, to extend their contact, would not be allowed under the protocols of Sudanese street culture. She saw him to the door, locked up, took a few steps towards the base of the stairs, but leaned back against the filing cabinet full of reports of food dumps established, wells dug, midwives trained, livestock distributed – the largesse of Austfam.

  ‘Sherif Taha,’ she murmured. ‘Oh Jesus.’ She was desperately tempted to believe that whatever Auger had stolen from her had been brought back to her door by Sherif’s angular goodwill.

  Next morning Stoner was predictably pleased to hear from her – ‘You know, delighted!’ Two mornings later she heard from him. ‘It’s on! Congratulations. Not only do we two bozos locate a famine, we chivvy permission to study its extent and initiate the relief effort! You’ll come with us, in the recce phase?’

  Prim found in the days following her excursion with Sherif and his visit to her residence that she began to take more notice of Helene Codderby’s prognostications on the BBC African News and of the Sudan Post, the English language newspaper, as if the country was suddenly more intimately connected to her. And the destiny of President Nimeiri seemed also to engross her in a new way. Nimeiri, who had advanced modern agriculture and brought the peasants in to work as labourers in the cotton plantations, now faced a collapse in commodity prices. To pay his excessive foreign debt and the expense of war, he was earning less and less. Students and other critics went to prison for being vociferous. The president had gathered in the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Islamic Front (the NIF) and various church leaders in the provinces. But even the radicals of the NIF were disgruntled with him. They wanted a more thorough-going and efficient Islamic republic than he could provide. The president had not yet, and was unlikely to confess publicly to the Darfur problem. There was enough bad news for him in the capital, without his drawing on the disaster in Darfur.

  In the meantime, Dr Taha’s curriculum vitae was brought to the office by a hospital messenger. There were references and supporting papers, one of them published in the United States Journal of Public Health and entitled ‘The Aetiological Fraction in the Case of the Water Supply of Shendi, Sudan, 1982–3.’ To it, Sherif had attached a note. ‘This study grew from a contract the Ministry of Health financed. Though I believed that under the terms of the arrangement I was free to publish, the ministry took a dim view.’

  Prim sent these documents to Canberra with an accompanying letter which indicated the distinct services and the prestige she believed a man of his qualifications could offer Austfam. She had not yet had any feedback from Canberra and did not know whether she was considered heroine or villain for her report from Darfur. If the former, they would answer her wishes and authorise her to work with Sherif.

  As she waited, she remembered and weighed the content of his sentences – plain words, but informed by rhythm, by a musical emphasis which made them more significant than they might seem. She held in her head an image of his hands, functionality again masking something more significant. Fistulae, he had said. An act of mercy worked within rubber gloves on a series of birth-induced ruptures connecting bladder to uterus, or in some ill-starred cases bowel to uterus. Womanhood thereby restored to women traditionally thought unclean and accursed.

  Even though Canberra had not spoken, Sherif rang and said he’d like to take her through the questions he believed should be asked in any community health survey. She agreed that he should come to the office– residence the next day about five in the afternoon. Since that was an hour when he could, with more propriety than last time, be invited upstairs into the living room, in early afternoon heat she was overtaken by what she considered nesting instincts. She tidied the small kitchen, the L-shaped living room facing the street, and then the bedroom. She did not expect him to visit there, and in fact she was devoted to the idea he should neither be there or be imagined to be there. But she didn’t want any imperfection from within to penetrate what he would see. Nurse-like, she unnecessarily straightened the thin raucous quilt of red, green, yellow, blue, bought for her bed in the Omdurman souk. It was like the bed of a nun or a patient, iron, knobby, covered in chipped blue paint.

  There was not much to do. All she had to do to the living room was close and fold a rice-paper Guardian Weekly, which crackled like rubbed lizard-skin in the dry air, and remove a coffee cup. She dreaded the arrival of the promised senior colleague from Austfam, which would mean turning this space into a bedroom, hers.

  In Canberra it was the next calendar day and morning faxes from Austfam headquarters were arriving as Sherif pressed the bell at the gate and announced himself. She met him at the open office door. He was in shirt sleeves and carried a raffia bag, not by the handles but scrunched at its neck. He frowned, hearing the fax machine. ‘But you have incoming mail.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Prim, ‘I don’t need to look at that till tomorrow. Most of it’s projects in Asia, anyhow.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sherif. ‘They used to say, trade follows the flag. Now it’s aid that follows the flag.’

  The raffia bag proved to contain gin. Dr Taha seemed to have a mission to provide her with a cocktail cabinet, in a republic which forbade such things. ‘Not that I encourage you, Miss Bettany, to be lawless.’

  In her living room, over tea, and later at an Eritrean restaurant on the Blue Nile where they ate dinner with Erwit, Sherif – who already knew what questions should be posed and data should be sought in random sample surveys of what he called ‘displaced communities’ – asked for suggestions from Prim.

  Agreed on the significance of Infant Mortality Rate and its relationship to the Crude Birth Rate, they made notes on the corners of the paper tablecloth left free by the large metal dishes of injera bread, by the bowls of lamb and chickpea paste, as they decided what other baseline data should be gathered.

  ‘Those people most in need within the camp? Those who have no animals?’ asked Prim.

  ‘Sure,’ said Sherif and tilted his head.

  ‘Listen, you know what questions to ask. You don’t need me to dream them up.’

  ‘You are, after all, the boss. I’m the volunteer.’

  So the discussion continued. Who had skills which might generate income? Mat-making? Curio-making? Tailoring, embroidery? Refugees could take these goods for sale to souks in villages. Not to be forgotten: those with earning power as shamans. The women who wrote love amulets. Yes, charcoal-burning, as she had seen at Mawashei. Teaching. Could likely women be financed to become teachers? So the hardest up were those without animals and without any source of income or any skills to trade. But say there was some income, couldn’t it be used to create a co-operative store? Couldn’t it be used to buy a motor-driven mill so that women who were able to grow or buy a little grain didn’t become weakened by the hours-long daily task of grinding it so it could be cooked?

  Further questions. Total number of persons in households, ages and sex of family members, tribe, place of origin, former occupations – pastoralist, farmer, both? Reasons for coming to somewhere like Adi Hamit? Slaughter, burning, confiscation of cattle? Terror, hunger, both?

  Sherif kept returning not only to the benefits of
such inquiries, but to their moral force. ‘I published the Shendi article, which concerned water-borne parasites, from professional vanity, to which I am perhaps too susceptible. But also – if this is not too grand a term – to bear witness.’

  The dishes were taken away by a waiter. Erwit had gone off to talk with the restaurant owner, a man from Asmara who, like Erwit, had been a rebel soldier in Eritrea’s war against Ethiopia, another of the sad, vast wars of the region. Prim and Sherif began tearing off the notes they had made on the butcher’s paper table-cover. Sherif would need them to devise a questionnaire for the planned surveys.

  ‘You realise,’ said Prim, ‘that within a week or two I could be involved in the relief effort in Darfur.’

  He said of course. That was a chief priority.

  ‘And there’s one other thing,’ she told him.

  ‘Oh?’ he said, and frowned.

  This is work he wants to do with me, Prim thought.

  ‘Nothing directly to do with this. Let’s put in a question about slavery.

  We don’t have to publish it. But let’s test if the phenomenon is widespread.’

  ‘Slavery,’ said Sherif flatly.

  ‘Yes. Another issue that arose from my journey out to Darfur. Mind you, Stoner says the term is very loosely used.’

  ‘Maybe you should find someone who is in a condition of slavery, and ask them what they think of the term?’

  ‘I intend to,’ said Prim. ‘I believe I’ve already met one who has been. But how would I find another such person? Well, through these surveys.’

  He did not seem as hostile to the proposition of slavery’s possible existence as Stoner had been. ‘You should speak to my friend, Mrs Khalda el Shol. Everyone calls her Mrs el Rahzi, since she’s married to the famous Professor el Rahzi. He’s professor of politics at the University of Khartoum. I have been frequently invited to their house and I am sure they would be delighted to see you. Khalda was one of our first feminists. Our Germaine Greer.’ He laughed. ‘She’s made some inquiries in this matter, and she knows slavery activists. Would you like to visit her?’

  ‘I’d love to meet your friend.’

  ‘There’s also a German or Austrian woman named Baroness von Trotke. Then there’s a woman bush pilot, Connie Everdale, from Lokichokio in Kenya. She used to fly whisky to Khartoum and khat, the narcotic, to Somalia, but she saw the light of revelation in middle life. Those two visit Khartoum sometimes, and Mrs el Rahzi greets them and confers with them. A very good woman, Mrs el Rahzi. Sometimes she takes one of the slaves – if that’s what the people the baroness rescued really are – as a servant.’

  ‘It sounds very much like abolitionists in the nineteenth century,’ said Prim.

  ‘Except that slavery is illegal in the Sudan,’ Sherif told her – a warning against exaggeration.

  The reconnaissance party to investigate Darfur gathered in Khartoum the same day Peter Whitloaf, the chief executive of Austfam, wrote enthusiastically about involving Dr Taha, initially for two health surveys. Any chance of doing a community somewhere in the South? asked Peter. A sort of pre-refugee study? Whitloaf said that her report to Austfam from Darfur had been admirable, careful – she had not been betrayed into hyperbole. He asked her if she thought she could carry the office for a while longer on her own. ‘You certainly seem to have made extraordinary contacts there. Theoretically, of course, you should get yearly leave and I know you have a sister back here, in Sydney. It’s just that Cambodia and the Pakistan monsoon between them seem to be absorbing all our spare personnel.’

  He said that he would write a request to the Minister for Health asking that Dr Sherif Taha be granted permission to work under contract for Austfam and given all facilities, including travel permits, to make his work possible.

  Prim showed the letter to Sherif, whose vast eyes coruscated. Prim rejoiced that they now had a licence for unlimited future meetings and travels.

  The party was made up of Saudi representatives of the Red Crescent, three European Community officers, Americans from US Aid, Norwegians and British from Save the Children, and three bureaucrats from the Sudanese Ministry of Health. The party was to be divided into three teams, with Prim and Stoner in separate teams. Darfur was divided into three sectors, the smallest in the more densely populated south of Darfur, and two others named Central North and North-East. Each team was allotted towns or villages to visit. If to cover the ground one team needed help from another, they could call them in by radio.

  Prim travelled with Erwit in her own vehicle in convoy with the personnel of the North-East team. They found the villages of north-east Darfur more depopulated – there had been a scatter of rain a few weeks past, and then a determined dry spell. In some cases, women and old men, left behind to tend and protect the house while the rest of the family made off to find work or food in the big towns, told them the millet crop had already been baked to death in the earth.

  The leader of the North-East team, a Dutchman named Martin, told Prim after their visit to el Fasher and Mawashei, which had if anything swelled as a camp in the few weeks since Stoner and she had been there, that his estimate was that this crisis would kill 200 000 people.

  Prim was sceptical. ‘As many as that?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course. Why would you argue with such a figure?’

  ‘These people are clever, that’s all. Adaptive. They’re so determined. They’re not very willing to lie down.’

  She had seen thin women, encouraged by a light scatter of rain to return from the city to plant millet, beating at termite nests to expose the grains that ants had stolen in better years. Would 200 000 of them and their children perish? She remembered the day she and Stoner first encountered the columns and observed a death, a limb protruding from a grave of stones. Could that happen 200 000 times?

  As the first relief convoy for Darfur gathered on 21 May, the government of President Nimeiri, subjected to even fiercer wounds than those inflicted by the letter of the provincial governor of Darfur, was overthrown by the army. It seemed a remarkably easy transition – the chief parties to the relief operations in Darfur did not need to let themselves be distracted. Large resources of international emergency food had been gathered in warehouses in North Khartoum, Omdurman, and at the edge of the New Extension, and the new regime seemed happy to see the Darfur crisis attended to.

  The effort was by consent of all participants named Project West. Stoner and his staff, with the officials of the Office of African Emergency, were principally responsible for the creation of an office in Khartoum named the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. They controlled a fleet of nearly four hundred trucks, and the movement of food.

  Prim and Erwit were at a truck marshalling point on the western edge of Omdurman when the radio announced that the Military Council had appointed an interim civilian prime minister, who was soon pleased to cite the Darfur crisis as an indication of Dr Nimeiri’s maladministration.

  The co-ordination office had assigned to Austfam an emergency feeding station in the town of Abu Grada, situated on a wadi below nubbly hills in north-east Darfur, reached by convoluted and obscure tracks in the clay. The town was a settlement of stone, mud and brush habitations occupied by people of the Fur tribe.

  When the first relief truck arrived it was mobbed by people of all ages, and as Prim and Erwit joined the person in immediate charge of the proposed feeding station, a young Indian man named Pradesh from Save the Children, the cries of hungry women and youths were so intense that bags of sorghum needed to be opened on the truck itself, and people’s pannikins filled directly. Prim handed high-protein biscuits and powdered milk over the sideboards of the truck into reaching hands, some of which held pots. She saw that victimhood – although she still had doubts that these people would wish to be described as victims – did not improve human habits.

  As this first, frenzied, panicky issue was in progress, an old man, who turned out to be the uncle of the town’s sheik, appeared on
a wooden crutch and chastised his fellow citizens for forgetting their pride, for being raucous, for pushing the weak out of the way. His intervention permitted a conference between Prim, Pradesh and the sheik himself to take place in the shade of a brush shelter outside a mud-walled cluster of huts which belonged to the sheik’s clan. The old uncle sat by reminiscing on how the wadis, in his youth, had been full of trees, and the rainfall reliable. El Fasher, where half the town had gone in desperation to find work, had been a green city.

  Under the sheik’s patronage, lists of townspeople were drawn up. Tents and tarpaulins were erected in a thicket of acacias, and supplies unloaded there. An instant feeding station was thus created. It worked by a simple equation – 5 tonnes of high-protein biscuit, and 10 US tons of sorghum were sufficient for two weeks short ration to the 2457 people whose names were on the rolls. In the next seven weeks, 157 US tons of sorghum, 43 US tons of powdered milk, and 85 tonnes of high-protein biscuit were distributed in Austfam’s name. By then the Darfur famine had been written about in The Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and The Times had declared, like the Dutchman, that 200 000 lives were about to be lost. As famished as the citizens of the town, and their brethren now returning to Abu Grada from the cities, as regularly as babies perished of gastroenteritis or measles and were carried away by fathers to a cemetery area in a ravine and buried in the earth beneath heaped stones, Prim found it hard to believe so many would become victims. Such was the fame of the Darfur emergency that a Canadian NGO took over Abu Grada after some weeks.

  In this time Prim discovered some of the subtleties of such emergencies. Food saved, but could also corrupt. She and Pradesh needed to complain to the sheik about families who managed to pass themselves off as greater in number than they were, or who tried to hoard and sell on to town merchants. The sheik himself was a problem: he was something of a town bank, and had loans out everywhere. He had declared no moratorium in this hard time for his borrowers, though he was genially open to adjusting repayment.