by Paul Theroux
Ramadan was laughing with him now. ‘Where did you get that nice wristwatch?’ and he made as if to snatch it.
‘Hinkel,’ the old man said.
‘This place is a mess,’ Ramadan said.
‘Yes!’ the old man said.
‘You should fix it.’
‘It is not my place. It belongs to the government. Let the government fix it.’
We drove north after that, to Atbara, the end of the paved road, where there were no temples, but there was a cement factory and a ferry across the Nile and the last bridge – it was just ferries from here to the Egyptian border. Here we camped again, at the edge of the Nubian Desert. The next town was Dongola and after that Wadi Halfa, the border. And so I spent another night, this one by the Nile, where I had seen so few fishermen. I asked Ramadan why. He said that the Sudanese in the north were not great fish eaters. Fish didn’t keep in the heat, it was not smoked, it was regarded as a snack, not much more. Lamb and camel and goat were tastier.
The next day, seeing torn rubber all over the road, Ramadan spun the steering wheel and headed into the desert, where he spied a car which had skidded there from the effect of a blown tire. No one got a simple puncture in such hot places: the tires just exploded in a mass of shredded rubber.
Three men stood by the old car in the hot bright desert, the only features in the landscape. Ramadan conferred with them and the men explained their dilemma – which was obvious: a blow-out, no spare tire, no traffic on the road; they needed a new tire. They got into our truck and we drove them down the road about fifty miles and dropped them at a repair shop in a small town off the road. This lengthy detour of an hour and a half was considered normal courtesy, like the rule of the sea that necessitates one ship helping another in trouble, no matter the inconvenience. And here the desert much resembled a wide sea.
The men were grateful but not effusive. They saluted us, and off we went.
‘They had a problem. This is what we do. We help,’ Ramadan said.
We picked up more fresh food – tomatoes, onions, limes, herbs, fruit and bread – and drove west to a set of high, dry, brown mountains of rock and rubble. Ramadan found a valley through them, where there was a village surrounded by fertile green fields, irrigated by water from the Nile. They were growing wheat, corn, sorghum and beans. We traveled on something less than a road, a goat track, a path-notion, an idea of a trail. We kept going along it, past screeching children (‘Awaya!’ White man!) to the Sixth Cataract.
The trees were thicker here and the green grass was long. The cataract was a misnomer, though. All I saw was a set of muddy rapids that were easily navigable in a small boat. We made camp in a grove of trees where there was a set of rope beds under an arbor. We ate salad and bread, while swallows and sparrows and yellow-breasted finches flew in and out of the tree boughs. Ramadan took a bath in the river. I was going to do the same, but was too tired and fell asleep on a rope bed, on the bank of the river, to the sound of the thrashing rapids.
I was listening to the radio the next morning in this idyllic spot – Japan is in its most severe recession ever, with high unemployment. The world economy is expected to be in its deepest recession since World War Two – and thinking: None of this will affect a village like this in the slightest, for such a place is both so marginalized and so self-sufficient that nothing will change it.
As though to emphasize this an old man approached and began babbling at me.
Ramadan said, ‘He is telling you he has three wives. He has fifteen babies.’
He was just a grizzled figure hanging around. He had discovered that such an announcement might get a rise out of a stranger, especially a masihi. He explained his conjugal arrangements. Each wife had a separate room. The man alternated. He grinned at me.
‘Tell him I am happy for him.’
Another figure, apparently a small skinny child of about seven or eight, came over.
Ramadan said, ‘How old is he?’
I looked more closely and saw a small pinched face – chinless but dwarflike rather than young.
‘He is twenty-seven,’ Ramadan said. ‘His name is Abd-allah Magid.’
He was tiny, with a small head and skinny arms and a small boy’s body, wearing a little gown about half the size of a flour sack. He was hardly four feet tall and could not have weighed more than fifty pounds. Ramadan questioned him and Abd-allah Magid replied in a strange duck-like voice. He shook my hand and then marched like a soldier up and down, as he had been taught to do, to be cute and to earn baksheesh. But Ramadan was kind to him and gave him half a grapefruit, and when he stopped performing he seemed a sweet and melancholy little fellow, whose life in this harsh climate would be short. He was the smallest man I had ever seen.
‘He lives here. His mother died the day he was born. I am asking him why he doesn’t get married.’
Abd-allah Magid said in Arabic, ‘The girls don’t like me. I can’t get married. What can I give them?’
Ramadan said, ‘He has nothing.’
The dwarf Abd-allah Magid, looked after by his grandparents, was friendly and kind. He sat on the edge of a rope bed and kicked his feet. He was too small to work, to weak to do much of anything. But he was not bullied or mocked as vulnerable physical types are in some parts of Africa. It was obvious in the kindly behavior of the villagers that he was regarded as special, unique, perhaps even blessed.
‘The criterion is how you treat the weak,’ a man told me back in Khartoum. ‘The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.’
The speaker was Sadig el Mahdi, great-grandson of El Mahdi (‘The Rightly Guided One’), who had dispatched Gordon. I had not wanted to go back to the city. I would have been happy to spend another week camping – the wind, the sandstorms, the cloudbursts at night only made the experience more vivid and memorable. But I had been granted an interview with Sadig el Mahdi, at his Omdurman mansion.
This opportunity arose because a man on the Secretariat for Peace in the Sudan, another guest at the Acropole, had mentioned my name to the former prime minister. The man claimed that it had rung a bell – a small bell, I suspected, just a tinkle, but that was enough motivation in the hospitable Sudan for someone to make a pot of jebana coffee and strew the cushions and put out the welcome mat.
‘He is a good man, a very smart man,’ a trader in the Khartoum market told me. ‘He is head of the Umma Party.’
The trader’s friend said, ‘His father was Siddig. His grandfather was Abdelrahman. His great-grandfather – well, you know.’
The meeting was fixed for 9:30 at night, an odd time, it seemed to me. I was usually in bed by nine or ten: in Africa, daytime was for roaming, nighttime for hunkering down – predators came out at dark. But a Sudanese explained that this late hour was a sign of respect, the last meeting of the day, a conversation without interruption. I was still weary from my camping trip, but I was pleased to be able to meet this eminent man. A battered taxi came for me at 8:30, Abd-allah the driver cursing when he could not restart it, and cursing much more after he started it and we were stuck in heavy unmoving traffic on the Nile bridge: ‘It is old. It was built by the British. The British! No one ever fixes anything here.’
Glare-lighted dust in the headlights, the loud impatient car horns, the night heat, the smell of diesel fumes. Abd-allah complained the whole way about the inefficiency and dereliction.
Abd-allah said he knew the house. He took side roads to the riverbank and after a few turns there were men in old clothes squatting in the middle of the road – the security detail; and farther on a crude roadblock. Abd-allah shouted to them. We were waved on and soon came to a high wall with a lighted archway. Abd-allah parked, and crawled into the back seat to sleep, and I was escorted through the narrow door.
The garden beyond it was thick with palms and night-blooming jasmine. I was led past the lighted villa and down a gravel path to a sort of summer house woven entirely of wicker but as big as a bungalow, with walls open to the night air. Som
e men and women rose to greet me – Sadig’s daughter Rabah and another, Hamida, both of them very pretty and married. But modesty was encouraged and staring was rude in this culture, and so I wrung my hands and told them how grateful I was to be there.
Coughing, I explained that I had caught a cold in the desert.
‘Kafara,’ the novelist Issa said, a Sudanese expression of commiseration, the equivalent of ‘God bless you.’
‘To delete your sin and make a better relation with Allah,’ Issa said.
Then with a flourish of his full creamy robes, like a conjurer at a fancy dress party, Sadig el Mahdi appeared – tall, dark, hawk-nosed, with a Van Dyke beard and wearing a pale turban. Waving his wide sleeves he urged us to be seated again. He was both imposing and at once charismatic, because he was so responsive, an attentive listener and a great talker. His manner of holding court was to solicit opinions, and to listen, and at last to say his piece. He gave the impression of huge strength, of humor as well as a sort of ferocity that I took to be passion.
‘You have been in the Sudan a little while,’ he said to me, ‘but there are some things you must know. Just some points I would like to mention.’
The Sudan, largest country in Africa, was a microcosm of Africa, he said. All the African races were represented in the Sudan, all the religions, too; and three of the four major African languages were spoken here. The Sudan was the meeting point of all the countries in the Nile basin, and shared a border with eight countries.
‘Sudanese civilization preceded Egyptian civilization,’ Sadig said. Our history is not a branch of Egyptology, but something else entirely – Sudanology, one could say.’
He asked what I had seen in the north. I explained my camping trip and specifically how I had been impressed by the manner in which Ramadan my driver had helped the stranded men on the road, much to our inconvenience but the rescue of the men.
‘A stranger is not a stranger here. He is someone you know. And this, coming to the aid of a weak person, is chivalry,’ he said.
‘That holds the society together, I suppose.’
‘Yes, Sudan society is stronger than the state,’ he said. ‘Sudanese people have toppled two regimes by popular uprising. Even this present regime is being chipped away.’
‘How is this happening?’ I asked.
‘Through the strong social ties. Social ties are deeper than politics,’ he said. ‘This can be a burden but it helps us. If we had not had such social ties we would have disintegrated.’
A violent overthrow was not the Sudanese way, he said. ‘This country has had no political assassinations. We have a high degree of tolerance, a high degree of idealism – more than the rest of Africa. In the Sudan, enemies socialize!’
Coffee was poured, glasses of juice passed around, cakes and cookies were distributed. A fan whirred in a corner but the heat was oppressive and the aroma of the river overcame the jasmine in the garden.
‘We have had the bloodiest encounters with foreigners,’ Sadig said. ‘But, as a foreigner, you will be helped. We have no anti-foreign feelings.’
True, he said, the present government of the Sudan had tried to cultivate anti-foreign sentiment – ‘a very Islamized view of the world’ – but they had failed.
‘That ideological agenda has faded,’ he said. ‘Slogans have had a field day here. We’ve tried all the systems in the book – socialism, democracy, Islamic rule, military rule.’
I asked, ‘What do you think of the present government?’
‘The present regime has been very intolerant and repressive. This unrepresentative nature is now very conspicuous. But we have had thugs in government for eighty percent of our independent existence.’ Laughing, he said, ‘Before 1996, I was arrested myself!’ Then he grew serious again and added, ‘This government declared a jihad and abused human rights in the south.’
‘What will happen to the war in the south?’
‘We have the greatest potential for change through peaceful means,’ he said. ‘We Sudanese are war-fatigued and dictator-fatigued. Southerners don’t want to fight. They are running away from the war. Even the Comboni Fathers denounced the war,’ he said, referring to the Italian priests whose missions were in the south and west. ‘The Sudanese are fed up with war.’
I mentioned that I had seen the ruins left by the American bombing. I wondered aloud how he felt about relations with the United States. After all, although we had an embassy residence and a big embassy building we had no ambassador, no American staff here, and only the most tenuous diplomatic relations carried out in whispers by officers who came for the day, some from Cairo and others from Nairobi.
‘Clinton had something like ideological blinkers about the Sudan,’ Sadig said. ‘He thought it should be part of the Horn of Africa, so that America could be in charge, using the Horn as a springboard.’
‘Somalia is not much of a springboard,’ I said.
Somalia was famously a fragmented clan-ridden country we had tried to pacify and control, but one we had fled after our first casualties were inflicted by a howling populace, who hated foreigners much more than they hated each other. It was a country without a government, without a head of state, without any of the institutions of society, no courts, no police, no schools; a country of embattled warlords and clan chiefs, and in the hinterland little more than opportunistic banditry.
‘We prefer Bush’s ignorance to Clinton’s wrong thinking and know-it-all attitude,’ Sadig said.
The talk went on until after midnight – the writers talking about their favorite Sudanese novels – one, Dongola, by Idris Ali, had been translated by my brother Peter. They told me about memorable trips they had taken in the country – to the south, to the west, and by train north to Wadi Halfa and Egypt. How people had been kind, taken pity on them, and how the women in the countryside had protected them and preserved their modesty.
That was when Sadig said, ‘The criterion is how you treat the weak. The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.’
A Sudanese basket and a clay coffee pot were brought out and presented to me.
‘When you drink, you remember us,’ Sadig said.
Abd-allah the taxi driver complained most of the way back through Omdurman and over the bridge. But I was smiling, vitalized by the talk and bewitched by the Nile, which was coursing from the heart of Africa, and the sight of the moon shining on it, filling its surface with shattered oblongs of light in brilliant puddles.
6 The Djibouti Line to Harar
Only two trains a week ran on the Ethiopian line to Djibouti, across the low hills east of Addis Ababa and the rubbly plain to the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there I could go by road into the mountains to the old walled city of Harar. Harar was a place I had always wanted to see, for its associations with Sir Richard Burton, the first European to visit. And the boy genius Arthur Rimbaud: after he forsook poetry and civilization Rimbaud had been a trader there off and on for ten years. In spite of his whining in letters home, he had liked Harar for its remoteness and its wildness. Rimbaud took a quiet pleasure in Africa’s motley and unexpected satisfactions, its dusty congeniality. He was seeking relief from metropolitan phonies, literary trend-spotters, hangers-on, time-wasters, and ambitious importuning twits. ‘I’m through with those birds,’ he said in Africa. His mood I shared, his quest I celebrated.
Haile Selassie had an intimate connection with Harar, too, having been born there and served as governor of Harar province before becoming Ras Tafari Makonnen, Lion of Judah, Elect of God, Power of the Trinity and Negusa Negast, King of Kings – in a word, emperor. His career had been patchy. King to Ethiopians, descendant of the Queen of Sheba, mocked as ‘Highly Salacious’ by Evelyn Waugh, he was divine to Rastafarians. Exiled in England during the Italian occupation, he returned to rule as an absolute monarch to whom his subjects bowed low for thirty years. At last he was overthrown by the Derg (the Committee). When I was in Harar the government revealed that the 83-year-old emperor had died
in 1975 having been choked to death personally by the Derg’s leader, Mengistu Haile Maryam, who flaunted the emperor’s ring on one of his own strangling fingers.
Famous for its fierce jut-jawed hyenas and its handsome conceited people, Harar I regarded as one of the great destinations in Africa. For its exoticism, its special brand of fanaticism and its remoteness, Captain Burton had compared Harar to Timbuktu, saying that, ‘bigoted and barbarous’ – but also unique in its languages and customs – it was the east African ‘counterpart of ill-famed Timbuctoo.’ At last I was near enough to go there by train.
‘Maybe I should go to the station for a ticket,’ I said, when I arrived in Addis from the Sudan – by plane, because the border was closed.
The Ethiopian manager was a skinny fine-featured man with popping eyes and a shabby suit and the welcoming even courtly manner of his fellow countrymen, who proved to be very polite if a bit melancholy. But then the unsmiling Ethiopians looked brokenhearted even when they weren’t.
But the hotel manager was laughing to reassure me. ‘No worry. The train is not popular.’
My first impression of Addis Ababa was: handsome people in rags, possessed of both haughtiness and destitution, a race of aristocrats who had pawned the family silver. Ethiopia was unique in black Africa for having its own script, and therefore its own written history and a powerful sense of the past. Ethiopians are aware of their ancient cultural links with India and Egypt and the religious fountainhead of the Middle East, often claiming to be among the earliest Christians. When your barbarian ancestors were running around Europe bare-assed with bellies painted with blue woad, elaborately clothed Ethiopians were breeding livestock and using the wheel and defending their civilization against the onslaught of Islam, while piously observing the Ten Commandments.
Relatively new as a city, a brainstorm of Menelik who craved his own capital, Addis Ababa was a sprawling high-altitude settlement with the look of a vast rusty-roofed village, scattered over many hills. It was 100 years old but had a look of timeless decrepitude. Unprepossessing from a distance, up close it was dirty and falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed people and sick animals; every wall reeking with urine, every alley blocked with garbage. Loud music, car horns, diesel fumes and pestering urchins with hard luck tales and insinuating fingers and dire warnings, such as ‘There are bad people here.’
