Dark Star Safari

by Paul Theroux

  This was incontestable, but I said, ‘The Sudanese military is dropping bombs on Dinkas and the SPLA in the south. Won’t they always hate you?’

  Muslims in the north, Christians in the south, in this the largest country in Africa, Forty years of war in the southern region. A Sudanese lecturing anyone on terror was drawing a very long bow. I think they realized this. They changed the subject.

  Saif-Din said, ‘How can we go to America?’

  ‘Can I work and study?’ Abd-allah said. ‘Get a job to support myself while I am going to university?’

  ‘Where can we work in America?’ Hassan said. ‘What work can we do?’

  I asked them what work they were skilled at. They said, very little. Where had they been? Just here, they said. They had been brought up in Khartoum. They had never left Khartoum – never seen their country, the south which was oil-rich and swampy, the north which was desert and filled with temples and pyramids of Kush, the western mountains of Kordofan and the Nuba people. But these students were not unusual in wishing to travel, or emigrate. American cities were full of people from African cities, who had never seen their own hinterland.

  In Khartoum I would not have known there was a war in the south except for the presence of so many southerners – Shilluks, Dinkas, Nuer, the tall tribal Christians who had come north to escape the fighting. Some lived in refugee camps and survived on food aid distributed by the various foreign agencies who operated in Khartoum. In the mid-1960s, I had been invited by Sudanese guerrillas to write about ‘liberated areas.’ I had then been living in Uganda, which was full of Sudanese refugees, who spoke of burned villages and a blighted countryside. Forty years on, this was still apparently the case.

  ‘Whole sections of the south are uninhabited because of landmines,’ a landmine expert told me in Khartoum. ‘You go there and you don’t see anyone at all.’

  Eighteen years in the British Army had sharpened Rae McGrath’s knowledge of landmine removal. On their retirement, most ex-soldiers moved to an English village and ran the local pub, Rae said. But that usually meant they became drunks, in debt to the brewery which financed them. Rae, who was forty-five and stocky, used the skills he had learned in the military in Landmine Action, an organization committed to the removal of these wicked devices, which are numerous in many parts of Africa. They were simple, lethal and long-lived: a landmine remained dangerous for about fifty years.

  ‘They’re mainly in the countryside, because armies in Africa always fight in agricultural areas,’ he told me.

  Having written a book on the subject of landmine removal, he was quick to reply and sometimes epigrammatic (‘Mine finding is a bit like Zen gardening’). Not much has been written effectively on the subject of landmines and their simple deadly technology. Landmines were usually made of plastic and nearly undetectable. Dogs could smell explosive – so they helped; but Rae’s method was probing the earth, inch by inch, with a metal rod pushed into the soil at thirty degrees. It was pretty safe, he said. You had to stand right on top of the mine to detonate it.

  Areas of the south were full of mines, and donors were urging him to find them and get rid of them, so that they could resettle people. But removal was a slow business and sometimes the locals were not helpful.

  ‘This woman in Malakal says to me, “No one was blown up by a landmine here.” But then one of the neighbors said that the woman’s cow had stepped on a mine and been blown up. The woman said, “Oh, yeah. My cow.” In a war, a cow being killed is no big deal.’

  Rae would be in the Sudan for a year or two, dealing with landmines. At the moment, he was in a top-floor room at the Acropole, surrounded by pictures of his family. He was not alone in his charitable work. Duncan from Save the Children was in the hotel, and so was Issa from Unicef, and Rick (microfinance, small business loans), and the stout Ugandan from UNESCO, and the Dutch team who could usually be seen conferring over maps, and the Bangladeshi (‘But I’m an American now’) who was ‘supervising some UN projects.’

  They were all aid experts, and they ranged from selfless idealists to the laziest boon-dogglers cashing in on a crisis. At an earlier time they would have been businessmen or soldiers or visiting politicians or academics. But this was the era of charity in Africa, where the business of philanthropy was paramount, studied as closely as the coffee harvest or a hydroelectric scheme. Now a complex infrastructure was devoted to what had become ineradicable miseries: famine, displacement, poverty, illiteracy, AIDS, the ravages of war. Name an African problem and there was an agency or a charity to deal with it, but that did not mean a solution was produced. Charities and aid programs seemed to turn African problems into permanent conditions that were bigger and messier.

  The heat in Khartoum with its sky-specks of rotating hawks left me gasping; and the sun burning in cloudless blue on to the whitewashed buildings and the streets dazzled my eyes, for the streets were all chalky dust – just as fine, just as bright. I walked in slow motion, tramping in heavy shoes. I would have been happy with a turban and a white robe, like everyone else in this begowned population. I settled on a pair of sandals, and went to the souk to buy some, muttering to remember the Arabic for the request, Ana awiz shapath aleila, I need some sandals now.

  On the way, glancing at people’s sandals to see what styles were available I saw a man and woman heading to the mosque – it was Friday – he was clutching a Koran, they were both dressed up for the occasion. There was no question they were husband and wife, for she was decorated with henna – a blue-black lacy pattern picked out on her feet and ankles – the privilege of a married woman.

  The woman was very attractive anyway, tall and black and slender, in a gold-colored gossamer veil which she parted with a toss of her head, giving me a glimpse of her face. Her figure was apparent in the sinuous movement of her gown, and she wore black high-heeled shoes. Part of her gown became entangled in one stiletto heel and as she stooped to disengage the wisp of silken cloth from the heel point with a gloved hand, lifting her gown a bit higher, I saw the filigree of dark henna all over her foot and her ankle and reaching up her leg, delicately painted, as though she were wearing the sexiest French tights. In addition to the pretty shoe and the naked foot, the principal fascination of this lovely painted leg was that it belonged to a woman who was veiled. The explicit fetishism of her feet, her only exposed flesh, left her hidden charms to the imagination. Nothing to me was more erotic.

  That sight made the day seem hotter. I bought my sandals – Souri, the seller said, Syrian ones – and spent the rest of the day breaking them in.

  Travel is wonderful for the way it gives access to the past: markets in Africa show us how we once lived and traded. The market in Khartoum was medieval, a meeting place of hawkers and travelers, street performers, hustlers, city slickers in suits, more pious ones in robes, country folk from the southern regions – and if you knew even a little of their customs you could name them; spotting the slash marks on one tribal face, the tattoos and scarification on others, the knocked-out lower teeth or lip plugs of yet others. Many urchins snatched at passersby or sold soap and cigarettes. The Khartoum market was the heart and soul of the city, as markets have been in history. The bus depot was nearby, so was the street of gold and silver merchants, the street of sandal sellers (and illegal leopard skins and snakeskin purses and slippers), the vegetable barrows, the meat stalls, and at the center the country’s largest mosque. Because of this mosque and the Koran’s specific injunction, ‘Repulse not the beggar’ (95:10) every panhandler and cripple in town jostled the faithful as they strode to prayers.

  Groups of gowned and veiled women sat in the goldsmiths’ shops choosing dangling earrings, and bracelets as wide as shirt cuffs, and meshlike necklaces and snake bangles. Gold was the only luxury. Some of these shops were no more than small booths but you knew them by their twinkling gold and their mirrors and air-conditioning.

  Mahmoud Almansour was selling gold and spoke English reasonably well.

  �
��Is because I live New York City,’ Mahmoud said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just visiting family, and this’ – he gestured to the gold objects in a disdainful way.

  ‘You don’t like the Sudan?’

  ‘Sudan is nice. Beeble are kind’ – he clawed his shaven head and yanked his beard – ‘but …’

  His emigration story was interesting and perhaps typical. In 1985, aged twenty-five, he flew to Mexico City, entered on a tourist visa, and vanished. He surfaced near Tijuana and paid a man $500 to take him across the border. He was sealed into a refrigerator truck that was loaded with fish – Mahmoud was standing behind boxes of fish with three Mexicans. At the border crossing the truck driver gave them mittens and hats and turned the thermostat very low, so that when US Customs opened the doors frozen air billowed out in clouds.

  Mahmoud was dumped outside San Diego but did not linger there. In those days no ID was needed to buy an airplane ticket. He flew to Atlanta where – having spent all his money – he picked peaches until the season ended. Then he took a bus to Virginia.

  ‘More bicking. Bicking, bicking. I bick anything.’

  Living in migrant workers’ quarters, eating frugally, he saved enough money to move to New York City, where he knew some Sudanese. And he continued to do menial work. He applied for and was granted a green card, and he continued to save until he gained the confidence of a man who, for a fee, fixed him up with a job driving a yellow cab, which became his livelihood.

  ‘I am married to an American – black American,’ he specified. ‘But she think, Africa – dangerous! Sudan – not safe! I don’t care. I love New York. America is Baradise.’

  He was leaving the Sudan in a few months to return to Brooklyn. He said he felt stifled by the laws in the Sudan – well, he was a hard worker but fundamentally and, like many emigrants to the US, no respecter of laws, so that was easy to understand. Yet it was amazing how even here in the market, Khartoum’s traditional souk, there were upstairs rooms where men and women gathered. Most of the larger coffee shops had a stairway to a hidden room, heavily curtained, fans whirring, a bit stuffy and dark, where young men and women sat at tables, whispering. No kissing, no hand holding, but anyone could see that these whispers were freighted with endearments, and it was all furtive enough to seem rather pleasant.

  But groups of men met in such places too. In one of these ateliers I met two men, a doctor and a lawyer, and – this being the Sudan – they invited me to join them for a cup of coffee. Dr Sheikh ad Din was a medical doctor, his friend, Dr Faiz Eisa, was a lawyer.

  ‘This is not a strict country like some others,’ Dr Faiz said. ‘There are only five aspects of sharia law here. Against adultery. Against alcohol. Against stealing. Against defamation. And traitors – declaring war against your own country. That is forbidden.’

  ‘But people behave,’ Dr Sheikh said. ‘As you see.’

  ‘We don’t cut people’s hands off,’ Dr Faiz said. ‘And no stoning to death.’

  ‘Hey, that’s pretty enlightened,’ I said.

  The next day, I walked to the Blue Nile Sailing Club, dating from the early 1920s. This British club by the river had been established for river-related activities – sailing, rowing, sculling – with plaques displayed and the engraved names of winners of the various trophies and competitions. ‘1927 Blue Nile Trophy – S. L. Milligan,’ ‘43–44 Ladies Race – Mrs W. L. Marjoribanks,’ and so forth.

  The clubhouse was an old steel gunboat, the Malik, sitting in a ditch high on the riverbank. The last surviving British gunboat from the three involved in the Battle of Omdurman, the Malik, had first come down the Nile in many boxes in 1898 to be assembled in Khartoum and used by the attacking Lord Kitchener (‘We hate him here,’ a Sudanese told me). The Malik was commanded by General Gordon’s nephew, a major known by his nickname, ‘Monkey,’ who had come to the Sudan to avenge his uncle’s murder and to desecrate the Mahdi’s tomb. Seeing these slow hard-to-maneuver gunboats the soldiers’ gibe was to call the fleet ‘Monkey Gordon’s Greyhounds.’ The boats were well armed, though – the Malik had a howitzer, two Maxim guns, two Nordenfeldt guns, and a cannon on board. These guns were used with devastating effect at Omdurman, which was not just a battle to wrest control of the Sudan but also a punitive mission against the Sudanese, as revenge for the death of Gordon and the expulsion of the British thirteen years earlier.

  From the wheelhouse of the Malik, toiling upstream, Monkey Gordon saw the Mahdi’s tomb, the army’s first glimpse of Omdurman. Later, in the thick of battle, the Malik was the gunboat that decisively cut off the dervishes who were successfully harrying the Camel Corps. In the end, more than 8000 Sudanese were killed, and wounded men were shot where they lay bleeding. This heartlessness on the part of the British shocked the young Winston Churchill, who was in the Sudan working as a journalist.

  At the close of the battle, the Malik was chosen to fire the victorious twenty-one gun salute (with live ammo, no blanks were available). Then, Monkey Gordon, on Kitchener’s orders, took charge of demolishing the Mahdi’s tomb, disinterring the corpse, desecrating it by tossing it in the river but not before hacking off the head. A historian of the battle wrote how Lord Kitchener ‘toyed with the idea of mounting it in silver to serve as an inkwell or a drinking cup.’ Some people believe he followed through, though I was told that the head is buried in a cemetery in Wadi Haifa.

  The Malik was made of riveted steel plates, and so it was almost indestructible. But it was beat up, with broken portholes and twisted rails, and scruffy, littered decks and cabins full of smashed planks. Some working sailboats and motorboats were moored at the pier nearby, but even so this club – this broken boat – had seen its better days. The Mahdi’s mud forts still stood on the Nile banks at Omdurman, much eroded and smoothed by high water but still showing the musket holes in the battlements.

  The Sudanese are so proud of their military prowess that they can quote lines from the Kipling poem ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy,’ written in praise of the Sudanese warriors – ‘the Fuzzy was the finest o’ the lot’ and ‘We sloshed you with Martinis, an’ it wasn’t ’ardly fair.’ When it came to left-handed compliments, Kipling was a born southpaw. Still, the Sudanese are proud of,

  An’ ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ’ayrick ’ead of ’air –

  You big black boundin’ beggar – for you broke a British square!

  In the house of the Mahdi’s successor in Omdurman, there is a room amounting to a shrine to General Osman Abu Baker Nigna. This turbaned saintly looking old man was the soldier who had impressed Kipling, for he had fought nineteen battles against the British and distinguished himself by leading charges that successfully broke the troop formation known as the ‘square.’ No one, neither the Indians nor the Zulus nor Napoleon’s troops, had ever managed that military feat.

  Later that day, with a man named Khalifa, who was a history buff, I went to the Khartoum Museum, which was full of pharaonic statuary – and it is obvious that the border of Egypt is arbitrary, and that what we take to be Egyptian gods and temples reached deep into Africa, deeper than Nubia, more southerly than Dongola, almost to Khartoum.

  Khalifa said, ‘The kings of Kush were forced out of Egypt by the Assyrian invasions and they ruled at Meroe and the various towns of the Dongola Reach.’

  ‘How far is Meroe?’

  ‘You could go there in a day.’

  He went on to say that as late as the sixth century the statue of Isis from Philae was carried up the Nile to bless the crops.

  There were Christians nosing around the Nile Valley at that time too, Khalifa said, sent from the Eastern Roman Empire to convert the Nubians, who were still (to the horror of the Christians) worshiping Isis and Osiris. Thus it can be said that Christian missionaries have been peregrinating and proselytizing in Africa for upwards of 1400 years – and fighting a rearguard action in places like the Sudan which was Islamized in the sixteenth century.

  ‘Islam spread
in the Sudan through the Sufis,’ Khalifa said.

  I had a nodding acquaintance with Sufism, the mystical form of Islam. Khalifa said there were many Sufis in the Sudan. The authority on Sufism in the Sudan, Yusef Fadal Hasan, lived in Khartoum. He told me that there were all sorts of Sufi devotees, according to the mosque – some danced and drummed, others didn’t drum at all, while at certain mosques the Sufis performed unique musical compositions.

  And there are dervishes,’ Khalifa said.

  Towards the end of a very hot afternoon, the sun lowering into the dust cloud raised by the day, the orb growing larger and redder as it descended, we were hurrying through the low stone-piled graves in the vast necropolis of the Hamad el Nil Mosque in Omdurman, to see the dervishes.

  I could hear the chanting as we approached, and coming upon the spectacle I knew that I had never seen anything like it. A crowd of several thousand stood in a great dense circle in the courtyard of a mosque that was at the edge of the cemetery – somehow the dereliction of this mute nearby field of corpses added to the frenzy of what I was witnessing. At the center of the circle were stamping men, some in green robes, some in white, some in green sashes and green skullcaps; about six or seven were dressed in motley – multicolored patched robes and red capes and red dunce caps and carried sticks, some spinning on one leg others dancing or slowly whirling.

  The musicians stood in a group of twenty or so, with drums and cymbals, nearer the mosque, and played loudly, in a syncopated way, while everyone chanted – dervishes, green and white robed priests, and the crowd, too.

  ‘No God but Allah! No God but Allah!’

  The robed men in the center began a deliberate promenade in a great circle, led by a huge black man in green – green turban, green robe – and surrounded by the dervishes, some spinning, some hopping or dancing. Nearly everyone had a stick of some sort and some of their gestures seemed to mimic swordplay.

  The robed women had been shoved into one corner, where they chanted less demonstratively. The watching crowd of thousands danced in place, and chanted and made a continuous motion of pulling an invisible rope. This slow motion tug-of-war was both graceful and weird and the tuggers’ faces shone with sweat as they mimicked this yanking.