In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  In Search of the Forty Days Road

  Michael Asher

  To Katie Mitchell,

  Wherever Time May Find You,

  Allah Yabaarik Fiiki

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FROM THE ONSET, WE WERE very pleased to acquire the digital rights to this travel writing classic by Michael Asher. At a time when Chad, Libya, and Sudan have been grabbing international headlines for the wrong reasons, we find their panorama drawn on Asher’s canvas ruggedly romantic, almost idyllic as a world far removed (literally and metaphorically) from any other place on earth, a place to visit for self-discovery and adventure. But these are just our gut reaction to the book and beside the point.

  What is clear about In Search of the Forty Days Road is that it stands as an authoritative, firsthand account of Asher’s experiences, part of his body of writing, which have made him an established and respected expert of the life, culture, and peoples of northern Africa and the Sahara. It is now our great privilege to publish the e-book version.

  For the digital edition, we have retained the original language, although certain elements of it may not apply to today’s politically correct landscape. We believe, however, that they are important to keep as part of that particular historical milieu. We did not include the print version’s photo section due to technical issues. Other than this exclusion and minimal editing (to conform to our in-house style), we have remained true to the original published by Penguin Books in 1987.

  We hope you will enjoy the book as we have because Asher is a brilliant storyteller, a keen observer of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of his subject.

  Agatha Verdadero

  Publisher, Master Publishing

  July 2012

  PREFACE

  THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT of a love affair. Like many Englishmen, I was captivated by the desert from the moment I first saw it, and even now my image of its grandeur and beauty is undiminished. But perfect as it is, the desert is no more than sun, sand, and stars, and perhaps man should not bestow his affections so easily on something inert. My romance, therefore, was not with the Libyan desert, but with its peoples: the Arabs and other tribes which inhabit the desert and its fringes, without whom my journeys would have been meaningless. This work is a tribute to them.

  During my years in the Sudan, I received help and interest from many quarters. Amongst my colleagues, fellow volunteer teachers, I owe a great debt to Kathleen Mitchell, who both inspired and encouraged my interest in the desert and its peoples, and to my other friends in Dongola, Maria Laudenbach and Marc Weedon-Newstead.

  My thanks are also due to Donald Friend, who showed me how well an Englishman could adopt the customs and language of a foreign people. I am also indebted to John Armstrong, who acted as ‘midwife’ for many of my ideas. Nothing could surpass my indebtedness to my parents whose support has been unshakeable.

  David Granville, English Teaching recruitment officer at the Sudanese Cultural Centre in Knightsbridge, also deserves my thanks for allowing me to pursue my research in the library there. The Sudanese teachers, administrators, and others who gave me assistance and hospitality during this time are too numerous to mention, but I am especially obliged to Awad Abu Zayd and his family who were true friends in Dongola, to Mohammed Hissein Mukhtar of the Zayadiyya, who acted as guide on my journey amongst the Mahamid Arabs in dar Mesalit, and to Awad Abdal Kariim of the North Darfur Veterinary Department, who was instrumental in organising my expedition across the Libyan Desert with the Rizayqat. I must also thank Farah Yusif Suleiman of the Forestry Commission for his patience in teaching me about the problems of desert encroachment. I am indebted to my friends in Gineina, especially Mohammed Zakariyya who was always ready to help in the organisation of my schemes, and to the neighbour who came before the house, Ahmad Abdal Faraaj Ahmad, now a member of the People’s National Council of the Sudan.

  My greatest debt, however, I owe to the nomadic peoples of the Sudan, to the Rizayqat, Kababish, Hamar, Bedayatt, Zaghawa, Zayadiyya, Awlad Rashid and others with whom and amongst whom I travelled. These men will never see their names in print nor appreciate the concept of this book, yet they taught me some of the most profound lessons of my life. I salute, therefore, the tribesmen who for three years were my companions along the way.

  M. J. A.

  Gineina, North Darfur

  The Democratic Republic of the Sudan

  January 1982

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN TRANSLITERATING ARABIC SOUNDS, I have followed convention in renderingqaaf as ‘q’, though the reader should note that this is pronounced ‘g’ in the Sudan. Thus the name of one of the principal tribes, the Rizayqat, is pronounced Rizaygat. The Arabic sound ’ayn is represented by the apostrophe ’. The sound is difficult for most English speakers, and is pronounced by a slight retching effect in the back of the throat; it is a consonant not a vowel. The diphthong ei is represented generally by ‘ay’, although where it occurs in proper names of an accepted English spelling, it has been left.

  I have taken the liberty of giving some Arabic words anglicised plurals, as the plural system is complicated in Arabic. Thus the plural of “qayd”, a hobbling rope for a camel, is written qayds although it is actually qiyuud. The exception to this is in tribal names of communities, where I have preserved the singular and plural forms. The singular of Rizayqat is Rizayqi, of Kababish, Kabbashi, of Bedayatt, Bedayi, and so on.

  The reader should note that some of the dialogue has been translated literally, not idiomatically, in an attempt to preserve the texture of the original. All translations are my own.

  Finally, the names of a few of the prominent characters have been changed in the interests of their privacy and security.

  M. J. A.

  1. SURVIVORS OF A LOST WORLD

  Ask of the neighbour before the house

  And of the companion before the way.

  Arab saying

  THE TENTS OF THE MAHAMID lay on the banks of a wadi. The rainy season had been over for a month, and the nomads were making their way back south to where the old and weak members of their families lay in the damra, their semipermanent camp. The watercourse, only weeks ago flooded with fast-moving water, was dry: a bed of flat, yellow sand, decorated with blue boulders, worn smooth by the annual passage of the rainwater over centuries.

  It was night and the weather, sharp. In the camp, amongst the acacia trees, the fires were no more than glowing spills, their lingering smoke draping the thorn trees like gossamer. Most of the men slept in the square tents, which were gathered in family groups, but the unmarried and the hardy lay in the hearth area, the dara, on rugs and mats. Not far away from them, the camels were drawn up in a great crescent, drowsing in the depths of the moonless night. A couple of stallions were tethered to posts which had been driven into the ground, and a clutch of sleek hunting dogs were curled up under the eaves of the tents. All was silent and peaceful on the wadi-banks. The tribesmen, exhausted after a day’s watering, slept deep in the knowledge that the next day they must move to richer pastures further south.

  Unknown to the sleeping men, other figures lay beyond the perimeter of the camp, cowled against the night but far from sleep. They had come amongst the trees like assassins, moving downwind of the dogs, leaving a nest of riding-camels not a stone’s throw away. The camels under guard could not cry out, for their jaws were bound tightly with cloth.

  Now the figures began to move towards the Arab encampment, leopard-crawling like trained saboteurs, camouflaged by the shadows, until they were amongst the herd. A dagger was thrust forward in the darkness, and the hobbling rope of one of t
he female camels was severed, then another and another. Finally, the stealthy figures moved back into the bushes whence they had come.

  Some moments passed; one of the camels stood up quietly. She remembered some tasty thorn leaves just a few yards away and began to move towards them. One of her sisters, finding herself free, followed out of curiosity, then another. When the five females whose ropes had been cut were feeding busily in the shrubbery, out of sight of the camp, one of the cowled figures appeared and began to hustle them towards the couched pack of camels. So skilfully did he coax them on that there was not a hint of a cry or groan. Only when the raiders were mounted and beginning to move away did one of the females let out a roar of objection. A dog barked in response, and the Arabs in the camp were awake and leaping to their feet; rifles were seized as the Arabs raced through the bushes in pursuit of the raiders. But they were too late; the Bedayatt had come and gone with the expert precision born of years of practice, and even the most experienced of the Arabs’ trackers could not follow them quickly in this darkness. The Arabs could do nothing but wait till the first embers of dawn lit up the desert, to pick out the trail of the raiders. They would follow them on their little stallions, and perhaps, they thought, they would recapture their camels. Perhaps there would be fighting, and tribesmen would be killed. Most likely, they would not see the camels again: they would be dispersed, their brands changed, to be sold in the small markets all over the region.

  I heard this story one night in an Arab camp. Sitting by a flickering fire, with the stars out like tiny jewels laid on the black velvet screen of the night sky, my host Hassan Abdal Kariim, a young man in his early twenties, told me the tale with all the oratory and rhetoric of a master storyteller. It could have been a heroic story from the legends of the tribe: an epic from the deep past, of Hassan’s ancestors in Arabia. But it was not. Hassan had been one of the victims of the raid, which had occurred in the winter of 1980. The place was the Province of Darfur, an area in the west of the Republic of the Sudan.

  When I first went to the Sudan, I never dreamed that I should find there the survivors of a lost world. I thought I knew the Arabs: that word lay in the sump of my memory, where it had been since as a child I had read the simplified Arabian Nights, as a youth I had seen Lawrence of Arabia, and as a young man I had read the poetry of James Elroy Flecker. I did not know, however, that the images which these romantic works conveyed were composites, created through the rose-tinted glasses of my own culture. They had little connection with the real figures which loomed behind the celluloid strip and the romantic phrases.

  The Arabs had once been the nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, and that name was given to them by the townsmen with whom they interacted. They called themselves Bedu, the people of the desert, and indeed their environment was amongst the worst of all imaginable worlds. It was a vast shelf of rock and sand, where monotony and sterility were broken by the occasional clump of trees or patch of grass around a well.

  Many different Arab tribes came to the Sudan between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, and eventually established dominance over the area. Many tribes settled along the river, but bedouin such as these, who were ancestors of the Mahamid, never gave up their wandering lives, and even now, generations later, they continued in the same pattern of nomadic existence.

  The Bedu lived a life which was strictly regulated by rules of honour and chivalry. The various tribes were constantly in competition for grazing and water, and this led to raids on enemy tribes, battles, and bloodfeuds. But this competition was also a factor which preserved the vigour and vitality of bedouin life, provided an opportunity for the equalisation of wealth, and promoted many of the Arabs’ qualities of chivalry, courage, and tribal solidarity.

  The Prophet Mohammed, born in Mecca in the seventh century AD, was the first man to impose an uneasy unity on the tribes. They rallied under the banner of Allah, the One God, and instead of fighting each other, poured their considerable energies into conquering half their known world, a venture which they achieved within a few generations. The faith of Islam perhaps came from the city, but it was the character of the Bedu which stamped it most powerfully.

  In due course, the tide of empire ebbed, and the nomads returned to the life they loved. Some were by now far from the Arabian Peninsula, but always they gravitated to the desolate places they knew and understood.

  After thousands of years of eking out a precarious living in their harsh environment all over the Arab world, it was discovered that for all that time the Bedu had been sitting on a material which was beyond price: oil. Discovery of oil in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and North Africa brought to an end the way of life which the bedouin had preserved for so long. They became the labourers in the first oilfields, and for the first time in their history, affluence came to the desert people. As their stock of western material goods increased, so their mobility decreased. In the past, material goods had been an embarrassment to the nomads, who had to carry everything on a few camels. Jobs and the new possessions meant settlement, and led to the death of their animals. All over the Middle East and North Africa, the bedouin drifted into towns in search of the new comforts to be found there, but their values were not those of the townsmen, and the new wealth slipped through their fingers and often left them stranded at society’s lowest levels, bereft of the dignity which even as poor desert dwellers they had known. The spirit which spawned their greatness was diminished, leaving in places a flotsam on the desert’s edges, a hollow imitation neither of the east nor of the west, but combining some of the worst facets of both.

  The disappearance of the Bedu from the deserts was speeded by the new central governments which were growing up in the first half of the twentieth century in the Arab world. It was not in the interest of such governments to have powerful forces, whose allegiance was not to them, wandering within their borders. Bedu raiding of peasants and of each other was a threat to the stability of the state, and had to be prevented.

  Libya, until recently a country largely populated by bedouin tribes, tried to settle her nomads overnight into luxurious flat complexes with all modern conveniences, but without any instruction as to how they should be used. The bedouin ripped out washbasins to use as watering-troughs for their goats, unravelled electric cable for tethering-rope and carried their livestock up and down in the electric lifts. They grazed their flocks on the ornamental lawns and often slept outside below the stars with their animals, disdaining the tight confines of their new homes.

  The new technology transformed the lives of many bedouin even if they refused to settle or be settled. Motor transport meant that for the first time water could be taken in large quantities to the herds, creating a situation where the herds no longer had to be moved, and making the traditional lines of migration unnecessary. This in turn led to overgrazing, and as a result the production of camels, the traditional occupation of the bedouin, declined. The skills of the desert were lost, and eventually, in some places, the culture which had stamped the Arab coin in its own image became all but unrecognisable.

  In Arabian Sands, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger wrote:

  Life in the desert ceased to be possible when the few but entirely essential commodities that the Bedu had hitherto been able to buy in exchange for the products of the desert became too expensive for them to afford, and when no one any longer required the things which they produced.

  In the Sudan, however, there has been no breakdown in the economy of the nomads. The bedouin culture has survived in countries where the oil boom has yet to take place, where perhaps the state lacks the resources or the inclination to settle its nomads, or where the wages and material goods are simply not available. The Sudan is such a country. The nomadic Arabs there are the survivors of a heroic age which was once the property of the entire Arab world. These are the principal characters of this book.

  These people do not know the word Bedu, though they are proud to call themselves Al
Arab, and despite some admixture of African blood, it is they who preserve so nearly the culture and values of their ancestors. They are as proud of their lineage as any of the so-called noble tribes. The latter are no longer able to produce camels in the same numbers, but the Arabs of the Sudan are producing more than any people has ever produced, and even exporting them to other countries. Whereas other bedouin tribes may have become Syrians, Libyans, Saudis, Algerians, Jordanians, and Yemenites, the Arabs of the Sudan have remained Arabs, with allegiance only to their tribe and its interests.

  Although technology may have transformed their lives and culture, their culture remains almost unchanged, and their economy intact. Camels are still required by cultivating tribes such as the Fur and Mesalit for use as beasts of burden, for ploughing and carrying. Similarly, the townsfolk are still keen to obtain the animal products which the Arabs provide: buttermilk, skins, leatherwork, goats, sheep, and horses. From the sale of these items, the nomads are able to buy the commodities which they themselves cannot produce, such as grain, sugar, tea, vegetable oil, salt, cloth, swords, daggers, and rifles. Some of the Arabs have settled near towns and become charcoal-burners and woodcutters, but the majority still prefer the tribal society of the desert and semidesert, which has been their home for centuries.

  Not all my companions in the Sudan were Arabs, neither were they all nomads. The Zaghawa and Bedayatt, for example, are black Saharan nomads and seminomads, whose relationship with the Arabs has traditionally been one of mistrust. These people, who claim Arab ancestry but do not speak Arabic as their mother tongue, nor resemble the Arabs, have no less a claim than the bedouin to be the ancient stock of a great desert. I also travelled with tribes such as the Hamar, whose transition from nomadism to sedentarism was brought about by impoverishment rather than policy. Their views provided an important counterpoint for me against the attitudes of the pure nomad. I myself made no distinctions of quality between the various tribes and cultures, and the opinions I recorded were those of others. Nevertheless, because I speak their language, it was to the Arabs that I felt most strongly attracted.