Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  Reporting in any ordinary sense of the word was futile. The telephone system was so bad that many phones in Khartoum hadn’t rung for years. Most appointments had to be made in person, and reached on foot. After two days of hiking through the heat and dust, never knowing if the person I sought would even be in, my three-week visa seemed suddenly but a grain of sand in the vast, wretched wasteland of Sudan.

  “Give it a rest, mate,” an English-accented voice called out from the darkened hotel lobby. I was waiting for the telex lines to open so I could let an American editor know that I had nothing to report. The English voice called out again, “No one gives a stuff about this country, anyway.”

  The man’s name was Geoff Bulley and he worked at a refugee camp called Kilometer 26, which denoted the distance from the nearest highway. He’d traveled several days to Khartoum, in hopes of buying medicine, posting a few letters and picking up money wired from England. On the day he arrived, pharmacists went on strike in Khartoum, as did bank workers, bus drivers, postal workers, doctors, engineers and university staff.

  “I’m going back to the bush with the same shopping list I brought here,” Bulley said. His only successful purchase was a pint of bootleg Ethiopian gin. “In most African cities, you can bribe your way through the chaos, even run someone down if you’ve got the money,” he said. “Here, it’s so far gone that you can’t find anyone to pay.”

  Bulley invited me onto the balcony to share the gin, and we sat long into the evening, watching darkness descend twice: first as the sun set, and then, inevitably, as the power collapsed for the night. Slowly, as the darkness and gin took hold, I began to discern the outline of a story in Khartoum’s rubbled skyline. I would write a profile of the world’s most blighted city. Missed appointments, broken phones and blinding haboobs would simply become part of the story.

  Bulley approved of the idea. “Now that we’ve well and truly fucked the Third World,” he said, languorously sipping gin, “it is the white man’s burden to sit back and watch it fall apart.”

  * * *

  It had long been the white man’s burden to keep Sudan’s “fuzzy-wuzzies” in abject submission. The history of Khartoum was nasty and short. Before 1820, the windswept plain at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles was uninhabited, except by passing camels. Then the Ottomans and Egyptians, and later the British, chose this malarial spit of riverbank as the ideal site for a garrison. Samuel Baker, an early English governor in the Sudan, knew better. “A more miserable, filthy and unhealthy place,” he wrote, “can hardly be imagined.”

  Khartoum quickly distinguished itself as the leading slave market in Africa. By some estimates, half the city’s inhabitants in the 1850’s were slaves, destined for Arabia or Turkey. The Sudanese eventually revolted, under a messianic figure known as the Mahdi, and laid siege to a small British force under the command of Charles George Gordon. “It is a useless place and we could not govern it,” Gordon wrote from Khartoum in 1884. “The Sudan could be made to pay its expenses, but it would need a dictator, and I would not take the post if offered to me.”

  It wasn’t. Instead, Gordon’s severed head was offered to the Mahdi, then stuck atop a pole on the banks of the Nile. Thirteen years later, Sudanese dervishes charged out of Khartoum, clad in chain mail, to meet British Gatling guns in the battle of Omdurman. The British lost twenty-eight men; the Sudanese ten thousand. Winston Churchill, who took part in the battle, called it “the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians.” A war correspondent of the day wasn’t so impressed: “It was not a battle but an execution.” The British hurled the Mahdi’s head into the Nile and settled in for sixty more years of dominion.

  Now, after three decades of independence, Khartoum was a sprawling junkyard of British imperialism. The graves of eighteen-year-old Cameron Highlanders and 1st Grenadiers felled by Dervish spears—or more often by malaria—lay in a weed-infested cemetery at the edge of town. George Gordon’s own gunboat rotted on the city’s riverbank, unmarked and unremembered, near where the slate-gray waters of the Blue Nile meet the dull dishwater brown of the White Nile. Five miles upstream, naked boys fished from the half-sunk hulls of rusted British paddle-wheelers. Khartoum’s broad avenues had been laid out at the turn of the century in the shape of a Union Jack, with the streets forming three superimposed crosses. Now the city plan was a tangled, potholed smudge. Trapped in the perpetually stalled traffic, it was impossible to avoid feeling, as George Gordon had, that the only important question in Khartoum was how to “get out of it in honor and in the cheapest way . . . it is simply a question of getting out of it with decency.”

  * * *

  At Sudan’s Natural History Museum, the Living Collection was mostly dead.

  “This pond for rare Nile fish,” the guard said, pointing toward a pool of brackish water where several rare species floated belly-up on the surface. “Pipes rusted,” he continued. “Rust no good for fish.”

  We moved on to the reptile collection.

  “This rare desert snake,” he said. I searched the unmarked pen for signs of snake before picking out a half-decomposed python, well camouflaged by the dead weeds and thorns filling its cage. “No rabbits,” the guard explained again. “No food not good for snake.”

  We moved on past dead turtles, dead birds and a somnambulant crocodile to the one mobile creature in the entire collection: an uncaged baboon, foraging through heaps of jagged metal and discarded jawbones. A small boy stood throwing stones at the creature’s red, swollen buttocks.

  “This called dog-faced monkey,” the guard said, shaking his head. “He be dead soon also.”

  I tipped the guard a few pounds and went inside to look at the collection of stuffed animals. There were dioramas of cheetahs and gazelles, most of them mislabeled. A stuffed aardvark had fallen over, taking a mock acacia tree with it. I found Fathi al-Rabaa, the museum’s curator, in a dusty office beside a bank of seven phones. They, too, were dead. “This one rang last year,” he said, pointing at the nearest phone. “It was a wrong number.”

  I asked him about the museum’s collection and if there were plans for improvement. He shook his head.

  “It is better now than it was,” he said. “The floods last year washed away many of the animals. It is better to drown than to starve.”

  The museum suffered from the same problem as every other institution in Sudan. Its budget had remained stable for the past five years. Unfortunately, the Sudanese pound hadn’t, nor had inflation; the museum’s meager allotment was now worth five percent of what it had been five years before. Al-Rabaa had tried to raise money abroad to buy new animals and feed the surviving ones. But with the phones, telexes and mail routinely out of service, it was hard to know if any of his missives had made it, or if they’d been answered.

  “I am still hopeful,” he said, sitting there, waiting for one of the phones to ring again. “In Khartoum one must learn to be patient.”

  * * *

  Later that day, I wandered across town to the office of Sudanese Business. I’d picked up a copy of the “economic and business weekly” at a newsstand. The motto proclaimed on its pages—“to promote individual initiative, drive and excellence and entrepreneurship”—struck me as insanely quixotic.

  The editor, Ali Abdalla Ali, agreed.

  “It was a stupid idea, really,” he said, wiping a brow stained with ink and sweat. “We posed ourselves the question ‘Is there a meaningful private sector in Sudan, and what are its prospects?’” After six months, he thought he’d found the answer. “Sudan has no stability, no private initiative, no hard currency and not a single clear policy. The prospects for business are nil.”

  I asked him what he would advise foreign investors. Ali laughed, the deep hearty laugh of the Sudanese. “I’d have to tell them, ‘Please, go away.’”

  He borrowed my pen and began listing, with grim relish, a few of Sudan’s key economic indicators.
By the time he was done, he’d filled an entire page with what read like a bankruptcy filing.

  A foreign debt of $14 billion, on which Sudan paid nothing and which now accounted for a third of all overdue payments to the International Monetary Fund.

  Inflation rate of 100 percent a year.

  Factories running at 5 percent of capacity.

  Imports running at three times exports.

  A per capita income of $279, lowest in the Arab world.

  Chronic shortages of bread, fuel and water—and a black market in everything, even stamps.

  A brain drain so severe that most Sudanese with education and skills quickly fled overseas.

  “Those without skills stay to run the government,” Ali said, adding without shame that Sudan was “the worst basket case” in Africa, perhaps in the world. “I do not know. I have heard Burma and Bangladesh are maybe this bad.”

  I asked him about the prospects for his publication.

  “Advertising is very poor, sales are worse,” he said. “So I think we will expand to twice a week.”

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “All of Sudan is in debt. I have some catching up to do.” He gave me an inscrutable smile, and an inky handshake, and returned to work on the previous week’s issue, which hadn’t yet made it to the streets.

  * * *

  The out-migration of skilled Sudanese was matched by an inward flood of liberal-minded Westerners. Sudan, after all, was a vast laboratory of human misery, offering everything a researcher or philanthropist might need: war, famine, flood, plague and pestilence. “It’s like living in the Bible,” said a wide-eyed American aid worker, who was recovering from malaria when I met her in the lobby of the Acropole Hotel.

  The Acropole was the strangest and most entertaining hotel in the Middle East. Run by a Sudanese family of Greek extraction, it was a way station for all the aid workers, missionaries and free-lance Good Samaritans who passed through Khartoum between visits to the black hole of Calcutta or the famine-stricken fields of Ethiopia. During a single afternoon in the hotel’s lobby, I met a Canadian tree surgeon just in from Malawi; a one-armed Eritrean working for the rebel movement that had been fighting the government of Ethiopia, next door, for twenty-five years; an English missionary in a woolen cardigan who was navigating through the 100-degree heat in search of a street urchin to adopt (“The Lord told me to”); a Swiss intern who was sleeping off some fever he’d contracted in the south of the country (“There are diseases here I have never seen, except in medical textbooks”); and a Dutch “meat consultant” who asked me to hold up putrefying slabs of beef so he could photograph them to shock his colleagues back home (“In Holland we would not feed such meat to pigs”).

  I also met journalists drawn like me to the Acropole’s cheap rooms, its colorful clientele, and most of all its owners, who spoke a dozen or so languages and could fix everything from a photography permit (without which your camera would be seized) to a bogus record of inoculations (without which it was impossible to land in any country after visiting the disease-ridden Sudan). The Acropole even offered an occasional video, flashed against a screen on the hotel’s rooftop, with the blacked-out skyline of Khartoum providing a more than adequate backdrop.

  Through the Acropole it was also possible, from time to time, to make appointments. The hotel was one of the few addresses in Khartoum where overseas mail actually arrived. Savvy Sudanese used it as a substitute postal address, and also as an alternative to the futile phone system, leaving notes for each other as to the time of business meetings or dinner parties. One day I left a message in the box of a prominent social scientist and two days later he left a message in mine, suggesting I visit him at his office at the University of Omdurman the following morning. There was a pleasing subterfuge to the system, as though we were all part of some clever underground, passing notes to each other despite Sudan’s best efforts to foil communication.

  Unfortunately, scheduling a rendezvous was much simpler than keeping one. Omdurman lay just across the river from Khartoum, within plain view of the traffic gridlocked on the Nile bridge from dawn to dusk. Abandoning my cab, I covered the last two miles on foot, arriving at the university bathed in dust and sweat.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late,” I blathered to the secretary. My appointment had been scheduled for nine o’clock and it was now eleven-thirty.

  “Late? For what?” she asked. The professor hadn’t yet arrived. She suggested I stroll around the campus and return in an hour or so. “If he is not here by then, it means he gave up on the traffic and went home for the day.”

  The campus was a shabby collection of unpainted buildings circling a dusty courtyard. Notices were plastered to the walls announcing that classes had been suspended for the day because of the bus strike, the postal strike and the strike by university staff. But because there was no way to circulate the news, many students had shown up anyway.

  “It is no matter,” explained a young woman named Sowsa. “Even when the university is open many professors do not make it.” The students had learned to educate themselves, and Sowsa invited me to join a small group pulling up chairs in a circle at the edge of the courtyard.

  Typically in Muslim countries, students are segregated by sex and universities have become bastions of fundamentalism. But here, the sexes sat comfortably together. The women wore loose scarves that covered just enough hair to qualify as Islamic. While the men wore long white robes and absurdly tall turbans wound from four yards of white Sudanese cotton, the women wrapped themselves in brightly colored sarongs that clung to their tall, slim figures. Swathed in purple and orange and striding through the dust with the loose-limbed grace of newborn fawns, the women lent an ethereal splendor to what was, in every other detail, a hideously blighted landscape.

  The students in the courtyard had gathered for an impromptu poetry seminar, and they took turns reciting Arabic verse. Sowsa whispered their meaning to me in English, though many of the poems seemed to lose something in translation. “This one is about monkey magic,” she said. “This one is about a camel party.”

  The themes of other poems were obvious enough, and rather surprising. One student recited a ditty mocking the government’s incompetence, and his audience responded with peals of laughter. Sowsa recited a poem about the brutality of the civil war, causing several students to weep. Then she turned to me and asked if I could offer a verse in English. My tiny repertoire of limericks didn’t seem appropriate. So I recited the only other poem I knew by heart: Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

  For most of the students, the high-blown language was incomprehensible, even if images of “decay” and “colossal wreck” were all too familiar. But they clapped politely and insisted that I recite the sonnet a second and third time. When I finished, Sowsa laid her long fingers on my arm and gazed at me with wet, mocha-colored eyes.

  “Tony, this is a sad and beautiful poem,” she said softly. “Is it the first one you have written?”

  * * *

  I found Professor Abdul Rahman Abu Zayd massaging his worry beads behind a dune of dusty papers. Unaware of the bus strike, he’d waited for an hour that morning at the stop by his house, then hitched a ride to the center of Khartoum. From there he’d caught a taxi which was stuck in traffic for so long that the ride cost him sixty Sudanese pounds, almost equal to his weekly salary.

  “This country is a total mess and the government is a total failure,” he said, before I’d asked a single question. “It is just every man for himself, living by his own wits.”

  Like every other person I’d met in the Sudan, the professor was strikingly candid; there was none of the studied indirection or straight-out lying to which I’d become accustomed in the Arab world. I was beginning to like the Sudanese very much.

  “Isn’t anyone afraid of speaking out?” I asked.

  “Afraid? Of what?” He chuckled. “The government is on st
rike like everyone else. Who will come to arrest me?”

  The openness, in fact, went deeper than that. Sudan, almost alone among Arab countries, was committed to a degree of democracy and free speech. In between coups, there were polls that resembled popular elections and the newspapers were free to lambast the government, which they usually did.

  “The problem,” Abu Zayd said, “is that democracy doesn’t work so well in a country such as this. You must agree on a few things to have civilized debate. Here, we agree on nothing.”

  Sudan’s population was divided among 500 tribes, 115 languages, and 60 political parties. Like other Arab and African nations, its borders had been drawn for the convenience of European colonialists; the country didn’t make much sense as a modern state. “You can’t decree national identity,” Abu Zayd said.

  Our chat was interrupted by a power failure, which plunged the windowless office into darkness. Abu Zayd shrugged. Even with power, he said, his appliances were useless. He had a photocopy machine but no paper. The typewriters were missing keys. And the university hadn’t been able to purchase new textbooks in five years, for lack of funds.

  “It is hard to call this a developing country,” he said, searching his desk for candles, “because most of the movement is the other way.”

  I asked Abu Zayd how much longer people could manage in these conditions before rebelling—or before losing what little freedom they had left.