In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  However, Hassan continued to plan his escape, and this had brought him into contact with the mysterious John Bosso. No doubt acting on the maxim, ‘A stranger is the friend of every other stranger’, Hassan had introduced him to the house of Rashid Omar. Bosso was a medium-sized, chunky negro, dressed neatly in jeans, tee shirt, and sports shoes, and at first I took him and his slimmer, less talkative friend Alex for modishly dressed Mesalit tribesmen. It soon transpired that the two men were Ugandans from the Buganda tribe.

  They had left Uganda, he said, as a result of the recent invasion by Tanzanian troops. Bosso spoke English with a commanding, persuasive style, and with a perfect accent. He was a lively and interesting conversationalist, and he told me that he was a lecturer at the Institute of Fine Art in Khartoum, specialising in ceramics. Alex, who spoke no English, was Bosso’s assistant. They were preparing a thesis on local art, and they had decided to tour the area by camel. Rashid Omar agreed to find two good camels for them, and an Arab guide.

  One day, Bosso told me that he was unable to continue his research because his cameras had been stolen, and his project could not go on without photographs. I offered to lend him my own camera, since I knew that he would be returning to Gineina in a few weeks. I also gave him a letter of introduction to a colleague of mine, Donald Friend, a teacher in Kutum.

  Bosso left alone one night, riding a camel. Alex had decided not to go with him, and so had the guide which Rashid Omar had provided. The weeks passed. Alex sold his camel and returned to Khartoum. Still Bosso did not return.

  The next time I saw Donald Friend, almost the first words with which he greeted me were: ‘You’ve got a lot to answer for, bringing John Bosso here!’ Bosso had arrived in Kutum, on his camel. He had stayed with Don, who was the only European then living in Kutum, on the strength of my recommendation. He presented himself as a research student studying local pottery, and he duly began to ride off on his camel to visit nearby sites of archaeological importance. However, before long Bosso managed to involve Don in a complicated web of secrecy about an archaeological ‘find’, the upshot of which was that Don was accused of a conspiracy to defraud the local people and forced to leave the town where he had been well respected.

  At the same time, Bosso quietly disappeared. He sold his camel to a friend of Don’s, ’Ali Atim, for a bargain price. ’Ali had paid a large proportion of the amount, when Bosso asked if he could borrow the camel once more to visit his site. Needless to say, no trace of Bosso, the camel, my camera, or any of the other things which people had lent him were ever seen again.

  I eventually got Hassan to confide in me. Bosso and Alex had approached him with the idea of escaping from the Sudan into Libya, a highly forbidden action for refugees, who were closely watched by National Security.

  ‘You cannot do anything when you are a refugee,’ he said.

  ‘They watch you like hawks. I myself first came to Gineina with the idea of escaping into Chad or Libya, but they watch you so closely, and this was the first chance I found. We went to see Rashid Omar to get camels to cross the Libyan Desert, and a guide. “How will we make the guide take us to Libya?” I asked Bosso. “When we get out into the desert, we’ll kidnap him, and force him to take us!” he said. Well, I couldn’t go along with that: the guide was an Arab, who knew the desert, he could have left us to die at any time! Alex thought so too, that’s why he pulled out.’

  ‘But the guide didn’t go in the end?’ I said.

  ‘No! That Rashid Omar is a wily bird! He must have known that something was wrong. He told the guide not to accept the job in the end, and Bosso went off alone. I’d like to know where he is now, wouldn’t you?’

  I would have been fascinated to know. Had Bosso reached his destination, or had he expired somewhere in the wastes of the Libyan Desert? A discussion about politics that we had once had flashed through my mind. Bosso had spoken in defence of Idi Amin, the bloodthirsty ex-president of Uganda, who had been expelled after the Tanzanian invasion of the country. If Bosso had been one of Amin’s men, he would have fled to the Sudan to escape retribution at the hands of the Tanzanians, and would be heading for Libya, which was at that time sympathetic to Amin.

  ‘Bosso was a lecturer in Khartoum, wasn’t he?’ I asked Omar, my pupil, one day.

  Omar raised his eyebrows. ‘No!’ he said. ‘He was the manager of a cigarette factory.’

  Hassan was undeterred by the failure of the escape plan with Bosso, and he had made many contacts in the town. One day he came to my house to inform me that he had finally decided to make his move.

  ‘I’ve met some men in the market,’ he told me excitedly. ‘Mahamid Arabs they are, barashoot who go across to Chad. I will go with them, disguised as an Arab. No one will find me!’ When the appointed day came, Hassan left Gineina after dark with a smuggler’s caravan.

  It was Yagub who related the end of the story to me. Hassan reached the capital of Chad, N’Jimeina, and looked for work. He found this difficult, however, as the country was in such turmoil, and he began to travel back to the Sudan. He had bought with his savings a Kalashnikov rifle, hoping to sell it across the border at a considerable profit. At the town of Abeche he was searched, and the rifle was found. The Chadians immediately shot him dead.

  Yagub said, ‘But we will all die, in Sudan, in Chad, in England, it’s all the same.’

  9. LOST ROADS IN dar ZAGHAWA

  NORTH OF GINEINA, THE LANDSCAPE rolls and folds through valleys where watercourses meander like golden snakes, lush with subtropical vegetation. Huge heraz trees, their canopies like green parachutes, rise above brakes of lesser shrubs: lalob, kitir, nim, umn sayal, gamez, ushur, and mukhayyit. These valleys are rich agricultural land, where the farmers of the Erenga, Tama, and Jabal tribes grow fields of millet, sorghum, and groundnuts. The grass-hut villages of these tribes nestle amongst the trees and the tall grasses as they have done for generations.

  Beyond these rich lands, however, the terrain becomes more arid: wastes of red sand and multicoloured rock carpet the floors beneath the crags of the mountains. This, the most remote region of Darfur, is the land of the Zaghawa, an ancient tribe of the Sahara.

  The Zaghawa are the largest Sudanese section of a family of tribes whose homeland is probably the central Saharan massif of Tibesti, on the borders of Chad and Libya. The family includes the Tubu, Gor’an, Bedayatt, and Berti tribes, who speak related Central Saharan dialects, and whose origins are shrouded in mystery. Some scientists believe that these races represent a fusion of Mediterranean and Negro peoples which may have taken place while the Sahara was still fertile, around 5000 BC. If so, they may be the oldest surviving inhabitants of the Great Desert.

  The Zaghawa are seminomadic, keeping cows as well as camels, and growing some crops. Though they claim descent from an Arab ancestor, their forefathers probably lived along the eastern edges of the Sahara before the coming of the bedouin.

  In December 1980, dar Zaghawa was in a potentially dangerous state of turmoil. Across the border, in Chad, the Bedayatt and Gor’an tribes were heavily involved in the civil war. They had been armed, but instead of putting all their efforts into the war, in which many of their kinsmen, the Tubu, fought on the opposing side, they occupied themselves in raiding across the Sudanese border. They attacked not their cousins, the Zaghawa, but the nomadic Arabs, whose lines of migration passed through this territory, and who were the traditional enemies of the Saharan tribes.

  My ambition was still to travel along the ancient Forty Days Road, though in the four weeks which I had at my disposal in that winter of 1980, I knew that I should never get farther than the watering-place of El Atrun, which was ‘first base’ on the old route. Nevertheless, I was determined to reach this oasis, even though I might have to travel alone for some of the way. I made the mistake of forgetting the companions, and thinking only of the way. My direct route to the oasis lay through dar Zaghawa, and though I rec
eived many warnings of the delicate situation there, I was driven on by lack of time, and secretly by a desire to see this inaccessible region in which few Europeans had travelled.

  It was to the shaykh, Rashid Omar, that I turned for advice in this matter, for I knew that anything he said would not be affected by the attitude of the official authorities. I decided not to consult the police, since I was certain that they would refuse me permission to travel at this hazardous time. I knew that between Gineina and the Zaghawa ‘capital’, Tina, about a hundred miles north, there was little but remote sparsely inhabited country, where old tracks and pathways lay hidden under gorse and thornbush, overgrown and obscured through disuse. I asked Rashid to find me a guide with whom I could travel at least as far as the borders of Zaghawa country. The shaykh introduced me to Adem Ahmed, a tribesman of the Zaghawa community, who had walked to Gineina from his camp near the village of Kulbus, to seek advice from Rashid about his eight camels which had been stolen by a raiding party. I agreed to meet Adem in a few days’ time near Jebel Kundebi, a lone knoll which stood outside the town.

  I spent those days preparing my camels and equipment. I had recently acquired two fresh camels. One was an immensely strong bull, which was inclined to be bad tempered, as all adult males are, and the other a small four-year-old of the type known as hiq. As I might be travelling alone in the desert, I intended to use the calf for carrying extra water. I laid in a good supply of flour, tea, spices, and dried meat, as I expected the journey to El Atrun to take fifteen to twenty days, and I took with me a light hiker’s tent, two blankets, which were more useful in the desert than my old sleeping bag, and two full-sized waterskins which I had obtained from Rashid Omar.

  Shortly before I left, Rashid’s son, Omar, visited my house, bringing with him a .22 revolver which he insisted on my taking. I objected at first, remembering the heavy responsibility which firearms imposed.

  ‘Everyone in that country is armed,’ he told me. ‘And they will be after your camels. You must have protection.’ Eventually he persuaded me that he was right, and I accepted the weapon.

  I left Gineina on December 4, leading my small caravan. I wore Arab dress, a thick headcloth wound around my face so as to prevent too much attention being drawn towards me. I hoped to be able to slip away from the town quietly, with as little fuss as possible, for I had already learned that it took very little to excite the townsfolk, and that a crowd of onlookers would gather at the least excuse.

  Soon I was clear of the town, climbing out of the depression in which it lay. I couched and mounted the large bull, and as he vaulted up, a current of elation swept through me. I was back in the wilderness I craved. Now it seemed that I had never been away. That night I camped with some Mahamid Arabs in the dry watercourse under Jebel Kundebi, in which I had arranged to meet my rafiq. The Arabs had with them seven camels, which were suffering badly from the mange. They had been to Gineina to visit my old acquaintance, Awad Al Kariim, the vet, who had recently been transferred there. Awad had prescribed some antibiotics, and the Arabs asked me to translate the instructions on the packet, which were written in English.

  Not long after dawn the next morning, Adem Ahmed arrived at the camp. He was a slim, knobbly man with polished black skin, dressed in a short Arab shirt and a white headcloth. He carried over his shoulder three spears: a long stabbing weapon, six or seven feet in length, and a couple of light javelins. After drinking tea we saddled the camels and set out into the qoz with the Mahamid. The Arabs and the Zaghawi chatted amiably, for generally the Arabs do not hate the Zaghawa as they do the Bedayatt, and anyway it was the custom to be courteous to a travelling companion, no matter to which tribe he belonged. We ascended the wind-worn slopes of the mountain, from which the magnificent panorama of dar Mesalit could be seen: a land of sweeping downs and corries, decked in russet, green, and saffron. There was no single thing in the landscape that belonged to the twentieth century.

  Soon the Mahamid turned off to their camp, and Adem led me through cultivated fields to Wadi Sirba, which coiled through a cleft in the hills. For three days we followed the line of the wadi, passing through the territory of the Erenga and Tama tribes. Our path led us into deep ravines filled with tropical lushness, along yellow hedgerows blazing with grasses, punctuated by the twisted trunks of giant acacia trees. We rode through fields of grass, like prairies of wheat, where columbines grew amongst the stalks, mixing with the maroon red of kirkadea and the brilliant yellows and pinks of flowers whose names I never knew, like jewels amongst the ranks of green and buff. Negro girls of the farming tribes worked in the fields, or drew water at the boreholes in the wadi. They were black as ravens, with smooth, shiny skin and firm, rounded bodies. Their hair was cut short in braided locks, glittering with silver coins and pendants, and their bodies, covered only by loincloths, were decorated with nose- and earrings, and metal bracelets which rattled on their wrists and ankles. Around them played scores of naked, potbellied children, chattering happily.

  It was harvest time here, and often we would come across areas of hard-packed sand where men and women were threshing the millet with wooden flails. Sometimes Adem would stop and help the local villagers in the threshing, while I continued with the camels. Once he came back clutching five freshly cut ears of corn which, he said, were lucky. I guessed, though, that his real reward had been a bowl of merissa, the local beer, which the farmers drank as they threshed.

  Occasionally Adem and I would walk with the camels, descending into the deep creek beds, enjoying the golden prelude to the sunset, as the coolness poured down upon us from the north. After dark, we would camp in the wadi, lighting a fire in the cool, soft sand, eating ’asida and drinking tea, while Adem talked away in his strangely accented Arabic.

  It seemed a lost world, young, innocent, and beautiful. Travelling here, on a road which no one in a car or truck could ever find, was valuable for its own sake, not merely for exploration, or to meet the local people, but also to get away for a time from those hated engines and live in the peace of an unspoiled land.

  Adem spent much of his time in the evening involved in his prayers. This was because he had been too tired to perform them in the heat of the day and believed he could make good by doing them all together at night. The Zaghawa are generally fairly religious, like the Arabs, though the Bedayatt and the Gor’an have a reputation for neither praying nor fasting.

  Throughout these first days I continually had trouble with the large bull. His behaviour got worse as we moved north, almost as if he were reluctant to leave his homeland. Several times he turned his head and tried to bite me as I rode him, a rather daunting experience, as a fully grown camel has sharp canine teeth and could easily crush an arm or leg with a single bite. Eventually, I allowed the Zaghawi to ride him, though even Adem found him impossible to control.

  ‘By God, but he’s bad, that camel!’ he said. ‘You’d better change him in Tina, or he’ll kill you!’

  After eating in the evenings, we would talk for a short time. I asked him if the Bedayatt were as treacherous and godless as the Arabs said. Adem considered the question, then said, ‘Indeed, some of them do not know God. Some do not fast, some do not pray, some even don’t believe in the Prophet. It’s said that they will kill for no reason, and that they steal camels: that is also true. But some of them are very good people, and there are bad men in all tribes, even the Ingleez!’

  On the third day we met a great caravan on its way back from the village of Kulbus. There were fifteen bull camels tied head to tail, and each animal carried two fat saddlebags filled with grain. Kulbus was a centre of the millet trade, and caravans travelled to the village from all over North Darfur. This one was being led by three men of the Gimmar, a small tribe of whose territory Kulbus was the capital. We stopped to greet the cameleers, and after the usual formalities, Adem asked about the news from the north.

  ‘Last week four men of the Gimmar were travelling to Kulbus
from the north, by camel. Some Bedayatt came across the border and attacked them. They hit them with bullets and all were killed. Then the raiders took the camels and went back into Chad.’

  ‘Upon you be the Prophet!’

  ‘By God, it’s true! I advise you not to go into the land of the Zaghawa at the moment. The road to Tina lies along the border, and it’s very dangerous!’

  ‘By God, you’re right!’ said Adem.

  We thanked the Gimmar and carried on, but their words haunted my mind. Indeed, it seemed that what had been said about this route was true. North of Kulbus, I should be alone in what sounded like very dangerous country. I began suddenly to feel very glad of my small pistol.

  Early the next morning we passed through a rocky gorge, from the exit of which we could see a wide valley. Here, Adem pointed out to me the green wedge of Kulbus. It looked peaceful that day, slumbering in the cool of the morning. Within a year that village was attacked by repeated bombings from the Libyan airforce, and had become the home of thousands of Chadian refugees.

  Adem invited me to stay at his camp, but explained that he would be delayed in the village for some time on business. I thanked him, but said that I would rather press on as my time was limited. I preferred not to tell him of my apprehensions about the small police post in Kulbus, and the three Camel Corps troopers who he had informed me were permanently on duty. I had no wish to be stopped at this stage in the journey, especially as I had no permission to travel.

  As we descended into the settlement, I cursed the bravado which had induced me to enter the place, rather than avoiding it, despite the complicated explanations this behaviour would have warranted to my rafiq. I was not keen to expose the clandestine nature of my journey to the Zaghawi, since I was not sure that he could be trusted inside his own territory. I knew the ethics of the Arabs, but the Zaghawa were not Arabs, and I was not certain that they would behave in the same way. We parted on the outskirts of the town. ‘Watch out for the Bedayatt,’ he told me. ‘Once you get to Tina you will be safe, but don’t sleep alone on the border road. Go in peace!’