Up on deck it was party time. A group of Sudanese men were clustered round an ’oud player who managed to strum, sing and smoke all at the same time. There was a soft lilting rhythm to the music and his admirers were clapping hands and nodding in time. At the other end of the deck several Sudanese women were holding their own party, dressed in their brilliantly patterned all-encompassing shrouds and painting each other’s hands and feet with henna, delicately applying the black paste in intricate patterns and swirls. When the paste dries it comes off, leaving a temporary brown tattoo effect that lasts several days. Henna is used by both men and women in the Arab world, with some older men – especially in the mountains – using it to dye their beards orange, while women hold henna parties as part of the wedding celebrations for the bride. Here on deck I was surprised at how open and friendly the Sudanese women were, inviting me to sit with them and watch. It had only been three years since I had first set foot on Arab soil but I had long ago learned that mixing between the sexes outside marriage or family is generally taboo. So I was doubly surprised when one of the girls began flirting with me in Arabic.
‘How long will you spend in Sudan?’ she asked, fixing me with her soft brown eyes that sparkled below the veil draped loosely over her hair.
‘About three weeks,’ I replied.
‘And then what?’
‘Well, back to Cairo, I suppose – then eventually back to England,’ I added.
‘Hah! Me too!’ she exclaimed with a mischievous expression.
‘Really? How come?’ I asked naively.
‘Because I will be going back with you!’
Her teasing was innocent and playful, and I admit I was flattered by her attention. But that was the last I saw of her. She rejoined the conversation around the henna and I went off to the bridge to chat to the captain. For a while he let me steer, putting me in charge of his precious cargo of over three hundred passengers, but it was hardly rocket science. The great lake was still as a millpond, broken only by the odd mysterious ripple that I liked to imagine was a crocodile breaking the surface. On either side, the arid, barren hills of the Nubian desert lay all around, so low that when the sun set in a fiery ball the waters of the lake almost kissed the sky.
About a year later, when I was back in Exeter, I read that this same vessel met with disaster. Someone had been using a cooking stove too close to the fuel tanks, and there had been a huge explosion that destroyed the ferry. The survivors tried to swim to the shore but the report said many drowned or were taken by Nile crocodiles. Apparently even the lucky few who reached the shore had to contend with venomous snakes and scorpions. But I was in happy ignorance of this as I returned to my bunk, safe in the knowledge that I would wake up the next morning in a new and different country.
Wadi Halfa was a charmless entrypoint to Sudan, little more than a boat and railway terminal. Incredibly tall, dark and skinny customs men in green fatigues bossed everyone around while money-changers and porters did their best to rip off the few Western backpackers disembarking from Aswan. It was dawn when we arrived and the train to Khartoum did not leave until the evening, so I filled the day by drinking cinnamon tea with the local Nubians and watching scrawny vultures tug at the garbage on a tip. Nowadays I suppose travellers would probably pass the time by sending text messages or tackling a Sudoku puzzle, but there were no such distractions in 1983.
The Khartoum train had three classes of ticket. First was fully booked, second was inexplicably sealed off, so that left me in third. The bare, wooden-slatted compartment was so overcrowded and hot that the only sensible place to be was up on the roof, and this was where the few Western travellers soon congregated. Squatting on the flat, rough surface we had an unobstructed, all-round view as we rattled slowly southwards through the great Nubian desert. The banks of the White Nile alongside us were dotted with thorn bushes where emerald-green birds flitted and swooped. We passed a flock of hundreds of storks on migration, following the river north on their way to Europe. The few houses we saw were not square, stone and whitewashed, but were conical thatched huts. The men we encountered at station halts did not have short black hair, but wild Afros with three-pronged combs stuck in the top. We were seeing the Middle East slowly turn into Africa.
After thirty hours on the train roof and 550 miles of desert we drew into Khartoum at midnight. There was a delicious, overpowering scent coming from the blossom of the neem trees that grew around the station, but I had a pressing issue to worry about: where to sleep. The streets were deserted; the capital had gone to sleep. All the cheap hostels were closed up for the night and I could not afford anything bigger, so desperate measures were called for. On impulse, I knocked on the gates of a grand colonial building bearing the sign ‘Khartoum General Hospital’. After a few seconds a sleepy night-watchman appeared with a lantern.
‘Are you a doctor?’ he asked in Arabic.
‘Of course,’ I bluffed.
‘Then please come in.’
Exhausted from the train ride, I slept like a log on a concrete slab. In the morning I woke up next to a motionless body in a blood-soaked shroud; I had been sleeping next to a corpse. Outside in the courtyard a boy was spraying insecticide against the mosquitoes, the sky was full of wheeling vultures and the hospital was stirring to life. It was time to go before I was asked to perform an autopsy.
Sudan was the wildest, most exotic country I had ever been to. In the market stalls of Omdurman animal hides, horns and skulls hung out in the sun for sale, probably illegally. Here I met Dinka and Nuer, tribesmen from the equatorial south, incredibly tall and with their faces ritually scarred with pinprick patterns. In a dusty square not far from the tomb of the so-called ‘Mad Mahdi’ who fought Lord Kitchener’s troops in 1898 there were whirling dervishes who danced themselves into a hypnotic trance, flinging their shoulder-length hair from side to side. But I had little time to explore the country, as I had promised Cairo’s Sadat Academy where I was teaching that I would be back in time for the start of their summer term. Frustratingly, I had to decline an invitation to join a jeep safari into big-game country in the south, travelling east instead by bus to Kassala, nine hours away on the Ethiopian border. Here, the baking landscape trembled in the heat haze and as I scanned the horizon a line of camels materialized, blurred at first and then clearly defined, the tribesmen riding them with one leg cocked up on the saddle, cantering across the flat valley floor then vanishing once more into the mirage.
This region was home to some of Sudan’s most war-like tribes, with wild-haired tribesmen from the Hoddendowa and Baggara strolling through Kassala market with metre-long swords draped across their backs. (I managed to get one of these magnificent specimens out of Sudan and back to Britain, carrying it on to the plane in a less paranoid, pre-9/11 age, and it eventually saw service cutting the first slice of our wedding cake.) Kassala market was like a microcosm of the tribes of the Horn of Africa, the very people whom Wilfred Thesiger had travelled amongst when he led a Royal Geographical Society expedition into Danakil country in Abyssinia in 1933, aged just twenty-three. Here too were the Rashaida, an Arab race that had migrated across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula, their sharp-featured faces visible beneath their head veils, the hair at the sides of their heads shaved off in traditional fashion. Eritrean women were also here, wearing vertical nose rings through the thickest, fleshiest part at the tip of the nose that must have been incredibly painful to put in. I noticed they wore their hair plaited at the front into three strands, all emanating from a gold ring above the forehead. They were refugees from the low-level guerrilla war going on just across the border, where Eritrean independence fighters were battling it out with the Ethiopian army. One afternoon I visited a Sudanese army border post where their dinner consisted of a gazelle, shot with an AK-47 and now strung upside-down from a Russian tank barrel with its guts hanging out.
I stayed in a border village on the outskirts of Kassala with a kind Sudanese family. The father, Sayyid Ahmed, was the sh
eikh of the village and the moment I stepped off the bus he insisted I be his guest. Ahmed had ten children and they lived in a round, mud-walled thatched hut surrounded by a defensive hedge of interwoven thorn bushes to keep out the wild animals. Once again I thought of Thesiger: when he was working for the Sudan colonial service in Kordofan province in the 1930s he had lived exactly like this, and the villagers had often begged him to ride out on horseback and hunt down the lions that were marauding their livestock. When he wrote about this in his memoirs half a century later he was criticized by some people in Britain, who accused him of depleting Africa’s big game. But Thesiger always maintained that back in the Sudan of the thirties lions were so plentiful they had become a public menace and he would never have hunted them nowadays.
In the afternoon, as the temperature hovered around 45 degrees (113°F) in the shade, we ate lunch of flappy unleavened bread dipped in the communal bowl of spicy meat casserole, washed down with cool water from the family well, poured from a stone jug with a horsehair stopper, followed by cups of scalding cinnamon tea. Sayyid Ahmed bounced one of his many small children on his knee, but when I asked him her name he had trouble remembering it and had to call out to his wife to be reminded. He was a fan of the BBC World Service, he told me, and he proudly produced an old radio that hissed and crackled like wet firewood. This meant nothing to me at the time – it was to be another twelve years before I worked for the BBC – but I now realize it is exactly remote communities like these that depend so heavily on the World Service for impartial news. At night I found it too hot inside the hut so I slept beneath the stars, lulled by the warm breeze that brushed my face and the melodic chirring of the cicadas that sounded in the darkness from beyond the thicket of thorns. I felt deeply content.
By day I went walking in the Toteel hills on the Sudanese side of the border, trekking up a steep track marked with the spore of wild baboons. A few hundred yards above the valley floor I watched as a haboob, a travelling squall of a dust storm, marched inexorably towards a cluster of thatched huts, enveloping them and flinging their flimsy roofs high into the sky. Up in the treeless hills, I reached a plateau where something large suddenly rushed towards me from above, narrowly missing my head. It was a vulture, one of a flock of hundreds that had risen on the thermals and was now scouring the rocks for anything to eat. I thought vultures were supposed to eat only carrion, but up here, exposed and outnumbered, I was not about to put this to the test and I scrambled back down the hill extremely quickly.
That night I was given a rare privilege: I was invited to attend a zarr, a secret exorcism in a private house. I stumbled across it by chance, drawn by the sound of drumming, chanting and clapping coming from a backstreet courtyard. When I peeked through a half-open gate I was ushered quickly inside and the gate was slammed behind me as I was guided over to a corner, where veiled girls with flashing eyes hand-fed me a local dish called lugma. I was the only male present. This was the zarr reehat ahmar, they explained, ‘the exorcism of the red wind’, for the benefit of a woman supposedly possessed of an evil jinni. I looked over to see a woman groaning and rocking backwards and forwards, clutching her sides. All around her, seated on rush mats, were about a hundred young women, watching while four older women, their faces lined and tribally scarred, performed a bizarre ritual in the middle of the courtyard. They rolled around on the ground like seals, beating the earth with their fists in time to the drumming. Things then took a strange and alarming turn as the elders began whipping themselves and flinging small battleaxes into wooden posts. The aim, said the girls, was to draw out the evil jinni and banish it from the afflicted woman’s body, but when one of the axes landed with a thunk in a post close to my head I decided it was time to make my excuses and leave.
I returned to Cairo vowing to come back and explore Sudan further but I never did. Two years after my trip there the country’s leader, President Numeiri, was overthrown by Islamists. Government officials made a great show of pouring bottles of alcohol away into the Nile and it was announced that Islamic shari’ah law would now be strictly enforced. Relations with the West and with moderate Arab countries plummeted, Western travellers were viewed with suspicion and by the early 1990s Sudan had become home to Osama Bin Laden, his bodyguards and his contracting business. Although he personally invested millions in the country, Sudan grew steadily poorer, and nowadays when I tell Sudanese I went there in ’83 they sometimes smile wistfully and say, ‘Ah, those were the golden days.’
Now back in Cairo I had to concentrate on the business of learning colloquial Arabic, the whole raison d’être for this year in Egypt. By chance I met up with an Egyptian family that completely changed my time there. I had student friends out from Exeter and I was showing them round the bazaars of Khan El-Khalili, part of the historic quarter known as medieval or Islamic Cairo. It is a misnomer, really – rather like saying ‘British London’ – since nine out of ten Cairenes are Muslim anyway, but it alludes to the concentration of surviving Islamic architecture here. Suddenly bored by the endless displays of tourist tat in the bazaar, the plastic sphinxes and the bogus papyrus, I took a turn down a tiny backstreet alleyway and walked up a flight of dimly lit steps in a district called Gamaliya. Although this was effectively a slum quarter, it was a place still dominated by eight-hundred-year-old mosques and other buildings from the greatest era of Islamic architecture. On impulse, I knocked on a door and it opened immediately. A large-chested woman in traditional dress, the all-encompassing black milaaya laff, stood in the doorway, a hint of curiosity playing across her face. Mustering my best colloquial Egyptian Arabic, I explained that we had never seen the inside of a house here. Immediately she beckoned us in. Stooping to get through the doorway, we entered a dirt-poor living room where a family of about a dozen was squatted on mats, eating the communal supper. There were crumpled piles of blankets and bedclothes and I was pretty sure this was where they slept as well as spent most of the day. ‘Itfaddal!’ she commanded, ‘please join us’. I felt guilty at interrupting their meal, but they were so welcoming it was hard to leave. Within minutes we were cracking jokes, with Umm Layla, the big-chested mother, pretending to be an expert in karate and her children pretending to cower in fear. ‘Baytna baytak,’ said Ahmed the father, a taxi-driver, ‘our house is your house’. It was a happy place, despite the squalor, and I was invited to return whenever I wanted, so I did.
On a cold afternoon in January I told Peregrine and the rest of the students that I was transplanting myself to Gamaliya to stay with my Egyptian family for a few days. Ahmed’s family had no telephone so I had no means of warning them; I just turned up and they seemed to accept this as the most natural thing in the world. Egyptians can be famously kind and hospitable, so this open invitation did not strike me as unusual, but if I had not spoken Arabic it would have been unworkable. I was given a space on a narrow shelf just under the roof and next to the dovecote on which to lay out my sleeping bag and we all shared the communal footprint loo. Umm Layla lit a fire in the battered, portable grate and we snuggled round it, watching Egyptian soap operas on their fuzzy black-and-white TV and eating lib, cracknuts, which to my mind do not repay the considerable effort needed to split them open without spilling the contents all over your lap. As the rain pelted the corrugated roof we shared a meal of black olives, hard cheese, flaps of unleavened bread, tomatoes, spring onions, peppers, honey and tangerines. Layla, the eldest daughter, bombarded me with questions about England. Was London like Cairo? Did my parents live like this? Had I met the Queen? Her younger sister Seneyya found it endlessly fascinating to comb my hair, while Hamdi, one of the sons, who was studying engineering, sat silently watching TV. From the glowing embers of the fire Ahmed ignited his shisha, his waterpipe or hubble-bubble, smoking it contentedly while surveying his family then handing me the pipe for a puff. I have never been a smoker so I was not keen. Perhaps luckily for me, a couple of illicit drags on a cigarette at the age of twelve were enough to put me off for life and even persuade
me to make both my parents give up. But the whole idea of a waterpipe is that the smoke actually passes through the water, cooling and filtering it so that what you inhale is so light that cigarette smokers say they cannot even taste tobacco. I was converted, and have since brought back shishas from as far away as Basra to smoke in our back garden in London.
That night I drew up my sleeping bag tightly around my neck, partly from the cold, partly to keep out any vermin. I awoke with a start when something ran across my sleeping bag, assuming it to be a mouse or even a rat. But in the morning, over breakfast of hot, deep-fried falafel, the family laughed when I told them. It was a stoat, they said, there were many of them here, attracted by the pigeons, and I was not to worry. Outside, the sounds of the bazaar coming to life drifted up like woodsmoke and a peek through a crack in the wall revealed Egyptians muffled in grey tasselled scarves and big crumpled overcoats. I turned my attention back to the family. Umm Layla was wearing a bright-blue gown that could barely contain her bulging arms. Now she was asking me about England: did we live like this over there? Like the Norwegian author of The Bookseller of Kabul I was accepted by this family with no preconditions. I chipped in a few well-worn banknotes towards the groceries and taught the children as much English as I could, and in turn I was free to come and go as I liked. On the morning after my arrival I wrote in my diary:
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