‘Where are you going?’ asked Osman.
I explained that my immediate destination was En Nahud. Osman smiled for the first time.
‘That’s where we’re going,’ he said. ‘We shall go together?’
He seemed to take this for granted, but somehow I felt reluctant.
There was something mildly sinister about the brooding youths, and the stories I had heard about bandits had put me on my guard. On the other hand these boys had rescued me from a very awkward situation, and anyhow, to travel with company would be far more interesting than going alone.
‘What’s your tribe?’ I asked.
‘We’re Arab–Hamar.’
I hoped that the flush I felt spreading over my face was not too visible. Here were the very people I had been warned about repeatedly. I could have fallen into a trap, like a fly into a web. Yet it was too late to refuse their offer, for I had already told them that I was going to EnNahud, and to change my mind now would be to insult their hospitality.
I had no choice but to go along with them and hope the stories were fallacious.
We drank water from ’Ali’s waterskin, sucking the tarry liquid from the mouth of the vessel. Then the Hamar stood on my camel’s legs as I mounted. We rode together towards the melting sun which was already fading into the pale soup-mixture of the evening sky. My camel seemed to perk up, padding faster with the two larger bulls ridden by Osman and ’Ali. As we rode the camels formed and broke in endless patterns, sometimes in file, sometimes abreast. The Hamar lads rode lightly and easily, though I noticed that they both used the hard-framed packsaddle, known as the hawiyya, piled with blankets, sheepskins, and canvas sheets. They rode at a steady pace rather than the skipping trot which I had found comfortable, and allowed the camels to munch grasses as they went, mouthing strange clicking and sucking noises and swinging their whips from side to side harmlessly.
At intervals they chatted, asking me about my country and my work in the Sudan. They digested the answers slowly, as if they could not believe that a khawaja would ride a camel. But their talk and manner was so courteous and friendly that my suspicions began to evaporate.
‘We’ll stay at Umm Gauda tonight,’ said Osman.
‘We’ll arrive there after sunset. It’s a village of the Bederiyya–a people not to be trusted—but it’s better to sleep in the village than outside. No one would steal our things while we were under their protection.’
The light had faded almost completely when we reached Umm Gauda, but I was still able to make out the shape of a broken grass compound within which there were a few grass huts with pointed roofs. I followed Osman and ’Ali up to the gate and couched my camel by theirs.
‘Peace be on you!’ Osman called.
‘O people of the house, peace be on you!’
Suddenly a gaggle of curly-headed children appeared at the doorway, laughing and pointing. Then a man came forward, a small, trim figure in a plain cotton robe, his face in the darkness like wrinkled rubber, and his hair chopped down to the bone.
‘Welcome, welcome!’ he said and shook hands with each of us in turn. ‘By the will of God you are well?’
‘Thanks to God we are well.’
He called to the children, and some older boys, who immediately began to unload the camels and carry the equipment into the compound. Then the camels were led away into a dark corner of the yard, while the Bederiyya brought sheaves of hay or qeshsh and laid it before them. We were ushered to an almost moribund fire outside one of the grass huts, where we squatted on straw mats, and our host began to warm a pot of coffee in the hearth. As he poured us each a cup in turn, he said that he was Juma’ Salih of the Bederiyya, shaykh of this village, which consisted of few but his own family.
Juma’ was curious to know about me and my origins, and when I explained that I was English, he said, ‘Ah yes, I remember the Ingleez. But that was twenty-five years ago. You’re the first one I’ve seen since then. Are the Ingleez coming back?’
I could not help chuckling a little at his obvious sincerity, and I assured him that the Ingleez were not coming back. He seemed disappointed.
As we talked, other men—sons, cousins, and brothers of Juma’, I imagined, came over to listen to the conversation, greeting us and taking their positions by the fire. Small boys would sidle up and sit quietly in the shadows, staring with wide eyes at the adults. As I fell more into the background of the talk, I began to perceive that, far from being imposed upon by our visit, Juma’ seemed honoured and stimulated, as if our coming had for tonight shone the lamp of favour on his doorstep.
A little later, a boy brought a huge dish of ’asida, a kind of stodgy pudding made from sorghum flour. This was my first experience of the staple diet of the western Sudan. It resembled half a football lying in a pool of sticky gravy, and after the boy had poured water over my hands I crouched around the bowl with the others and copied them, dipping my right hand into the soggy mass. To my dismay, I found that it was piping hot: it stuck to the fingertips and burned them unmercifully. I hid my discomfort as well as I could, however, and covertly watched my companions, trying to emulate their trick of covering the morsel with gravy before inserting it quickly in the mouth.
After the meal, the boy poured more water over our hands, and we settled down around the fire to drink tea. I will always remember this first night in a village in Kordofan: the camels shifting and chomping in the shadows, the pointed roofs of the huts looming up in the darkness, the flicker of the fire in the open grate, the smell of woodsmoke and the tidal rise and fall of the talk around the fire. The Hamar boys and the Bederiyya were deep in conversation, which seemed to revolve around prices: the price of a camel in El Obeid, a cow or a goat in EnNahud, the current price of sugar, millet, sorghum, and groundnuts.
The men seemed to be juggling constantly with the figures, repeating them and reciting others from previous times. Later they broke up for their evening prayer, each man facing east and praying separately, making his own individual submission to God. It seemed to me that these individuals, not only in this tiny place, but in millions of such places all over the Islamic world were united to the core by this moment, this submission to a single idea. I felt humbled and envied them.
As the talk continued afterwards, I found it increasingly difficult to understand or take part. I found my attention wandering above the soft murmur of voices, drifting into the deep mystery of the night. It had been a day of strange reversals, but now I felt content, and above me the stars were out, in celebration of my euphoria, in their most royal gold. It was a privilege to be here.
4. THE BUSH ARABS
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN EL OBEID and the wells of Abu Ku’ in North Darfur is about four hundred miles. The way cuts through thousands of acres of rolling rangeland, referred to in the geography books as marginal steppe or acacia scrub. The Arabs simply call this area qoz, meaning sand dunes, a word reflecting the true essence of the country, which is in fact a sea of undulating red sand, the deep shades of which are given relief by the golden yellow of the coarse grasses which cover it like a carpet. These grasses are valuable beyond calculation, for the wealth of the Arabs, their cows, sheep, and camels, depends on their abundance.
The ranges are also enhanced by rich veins of green bush, many species of acacia, mukhayyit, ushur and others. The ushur or Sodom’s Apple grows like a fungus on the land, producing a tempting green fruit filled with a poisonous white pus. The acacia thornbush, however, is a vital source of food for camels, and one variety produces gum arabic, the soft amber resin which is an important export of this region.
The scrub is dwarfed in places by the grotesquely magnificent figures of the giant baobab trees which occasionally raise their stark fingers over the landscape.
The qoz is dotted with villages: compounds of grass with straw-roofed huts which blend in with the colour and texture of their surroundings. These works of man are pinpricks a
gainst the background of the enormous dimensions of the rangelands, for this is a place where humankind has wrought little of permanence on the landscape, where nature, by sheer size and power, has resisted any encroachment on its autonomy.
As I travelled, I felt myself becoming totally immersed in my environment. This was not the desert I had seen from my house in Dongola, yet these desert marches still represented part of the world I had sought. It was a world existing within its own time span, and all but oblivious to the outside. I never regretted my decision to cross it by camel.
I travelled with the Hamar boys for four days, as far as the town of En Nahud, and very quickly I perceived that the tales I had been told of the Hamar were groundless. The boys were courteous and considerate, and treated me like an honoured guest. They would hold my camel as I mounted, help me adjust my saddle, and perform all the small tasks of caring for the animals without my help. After a while, in fact, I found this rather irritating, for I saw it as a barrier between us. I desperately wanted the Arabs to accept me as one of themselves, and in a sense resented this special attention, as a result of which I learned less about the handling of camels than I should otherwise have done.
We followed the rise and fall of the land, and I became accustomed to the deliberate yet unforced way in which the Arabs made the pace. Their camels moved easily, with sweeping strides, and often I found myself admiring the superb patience, grace, and power of these animals. My own bull was shorter and had a jerky stride, yet I tried to emulate the light and easy manner of the Hamar, encouraging the camel with clucking and sucking noises, tapping his shoulders with my heels and his rear flank with my stick. Slowly, I overcame the difficulties I had experienced in my first days of riding. I learned to fit the saddle correctly and to master that most difficult of operations: mounting.
The trick, I discovered, was to stand at the animal’s left shoulder holding the headrope and the stick or whip in the left hand. One then grasped the rear saddle horn with the right hand and cocked the right knee carefully over the front horn, like a hook. The movement had to be extremely careful, for most camels would rise as soon as they felt pressure, and the hooking of the knee gave one a secure position as the camel jumped up, whereupon the rider crossed his legs over the animal’s neck. This position, slightly forward of the hump, was quite comfortable, despite the fact that the motion of the camel put a strain on one’s back and legs. Once up, the camel was controlled by the headrope, held in the left hand, and by the stick or whip held in the right.
As we rode, the Arabs filled the hours with endless talk, and I was able to question them about their lives. I soon discovered that they were not from a nomadic background, but villagers from near En Nahud, the centre of the Hamar dar, or homeland. Their father, they said, lived near En Nahud, and owned a few camels. They were on their way back from El Obeid, where they had sold some camels in the market. Since the Hamar were largely a sedentary tribe, practising cultivation as well as pastoralism, I was interested to know how they reared their camels, for I understood that these animals required an annual cycle of movement.
‘Once the Hamar were all nomads,’ Osman told me.
‘That was in the time of our great-grandfather, the time of the Khalifa Abdallahi. Now most of our people live in villages. Still, when the rains come, the young men take the camels and cattle north, as far as the dar of the Kababish. Then they move south again, after the rains, back to the villages. But, in truth, we have few camels now, not like the old times.’
‘Once the Hamar were the most powerful tribe in Kordofan,’ cut in ’Ali. ‘By the life of my eyes, we had more than the Kababish—they only had goats! Then the watering-places dried up, and the Kababish stole many Hamar camels.’
‘Is there still trouble between the Kababish and the Hamar?’ I asked.
‘The Kababish are savage men, and they have many weapons. They respect no one,’ Osman said. ‘And sometimes they take Hamar animals.’
‘The Kawahla are the same,’ continued his brother.
‘They come into our country to steal cows and camels, then they take them off into their own country. Only a month ago, one of our kinsmen lost five cows.’
‘What about the police? Don’t they help?’
Osman laughed. ‘What can they do? These tribes are more numerous and better armed than the police. They know the country better, and know where to hide.’
I was still a little sceptical about this talk, though I could not help being fascinated by such stories. I had heard many tales of this kind, not least about the Hamar themselves, but I often suspected that they were engendered by spite against other tribes.
Occasionally, I felt disinclined to talk, and as I rode, gazed around enjoying the overpowering beauty of the landscape. Here there was life in plenty. The scrub was full of birds: orange-beaked hornbills, bee-catchers of bright yellow, indigo Abyssinian rollers, woodpeckers with scarlet plumage, dun-coloured plovers, and crows of black and white. Often we disturbed colonies of giant vultures, which regarded us with distaste but did not fly off at our approach. Sometimes I would catch sight of one of these birds perched high in the branches of a tall tree looking like the feathered monarch of some mythical domain. The grasses were alive with lizards, snakes, and salamanders, and insect life was in great abundance. There were butterflies: swallowtails, admirals, and whites, and sometimes the air hummed with the sound of locusts the size of young nestlings. ’Ali told me that the Hamar caught and ate these, considering them a great delicacy.
I once asked Osman why he preferred to stay in villages overnight rather than sleeping in the qoz.
He looked at me blankly, then replied, ‘Why sleep in the qoz, when everyone here will shelter us? It is the way of the Arabs: if we come to a village, they must give us hospitality. If not, how could they expect to receive it in our lands? Anyway, it would be shameful.’
‘Who does not welcome guests in his house?’ said ’Ali.
Indeed, in the Bederiyya villages at which we rested for the first three nights, we were always welcomed as readily as we had been at Umm Gauda. We were shown respect and treated with great politeness, almost as if we were ambassadors of our different tribes.
Each day we travelled until about noon, when the sun was a burnished hammer raining forty-degree blows upon our heads. We would halt for a rest at a hamlet or village, where the Bederiyya would help us to unsaddle our camels and carry the equipment into the shade.
The Hamar would set the camels to graze in the bush, or feed them on sorghum grain bought from the villagers. Then we would be entertained under a shelter or in a hut where the shafts of sunlight penetrated the gloom like currents of warm water. We would eat ’asida with the tribesmen, squatting in the sand or on straw mats, and afterwards drink tea and chat, or just rest until about three o’clock, when we would saddle up and set off again, travelling until after sunset.
Always our hosts were anxious to hear news from the outside world. Most of the villagers rarely ventured further than the nearest market and were fascinated to hear anything new. I was questioned in detail about my ‘tribe’. The most common questions were personal ones: was I married? How many children had I? How many brothers?
They were amazed to discover that I was not married, for amongst these people marriage came early, an arranged affair, often between first cousins. A man had to pay an agreed sum for a wife, or a number of cows or camels to the equivalent value. They took my bachelor status as a sign of poverty, and found it difficult to reconcile this with a belief that all khawajas were rich. When I explained that in my country it was the tradition for the woman’s father to pay for the wedding, they were at first mystified, then assumed that men in Britain were subservient to women, an assumption which, to their satisfaction, was borne out when I admitted that we were ruled by a queen and a woman prime minister.
Similarly, they were surprised at the small size of my family. The Arab
s generally had large families, often with more than ten children, whom the parents relied on for support in their old age. A man who had many sons was respected and honoured. They wondered, too, at the fact that my family owned no livestock, for even amongst these largely settled Arabs, a man’s status depended partly upon the number of camels or cows he owned. Other favourite questions concerned my people’s agriculture: what crops did we grow? When did we harvest them? What type of soil did we grow them in? These were things which interested the tribesmen and with which they could identify. Most of them seemed to imagine the world as a great plain of sand and grass, populated by tribes of varying speech, colour, and custom, but with basically the same lifestyle as their own. They rarely asked about the ‘wonders’ of modern technology, which they did not understand, and which had little bearing on their lives.
Osman and ’Ali, however, occasionally referred to relations who had gone off to work in the cities such as Khartoum or Wad Medani. They spoke of their imagined lives there almost with wistful yearning, which contrasted with the deep pride they had in their Arab traditions. They told me of their ancestor Abdalla Al Juhani, progenitor of the Juhayna families, one of the two great divisions of the Arabs of the Sudan, and the one to which many of the nomadic tribes belong. Their forefathers had left South Arabia in the seventh century, and had entered the Sudan in the fourteenth century by way of Egypt. It was strange to hear these youths referring to such events as if they had occurred only yesterday.
When they spoke of their tribe, I could see that they had a fierce sense of identity with it. It was a large family of which they felt themselves to be an integral and important part. The disadvantage of this strong sense of unity was that it led to mistrust of other tribes. The Hamar regarded the Bederiyya with something like disdain, because they were not Juhayna Arabs, and even their nearer kinsmen, such as the Kababish, a nomadic tribe from the desert fringes, were treated with suspicion.
In Search of the Forty Days Road Page 5
