One day in Geneina, or Mille, or maybe it was Farchana – excuse the confusion: they are much the same, these places, except for the volume of people, say twenty thousand, or ten, give or take – one day there was another visiting delegation. This was a regular thing. Overseas dignitaries, spokespeople for aid organisations, celebrities such as yourself, or the head of pointy-ended UN humanitarian groups, and there are many so forgive me if I don’t recall exactly whom. I think it was Farchana now, and there’s a reason I remember but I’ll get to that. That day the supermarket consisted of ten trestle tables covered in green palm leaves and featuring tins full of white powder, ones with labels – Nestlé Milk Formula, Protein Enriched – plus piles of sweet potatoes, only slightly withered, branches of green bananas, dried fish, candles, matches (but no cigarettes this time), condoms, cooking oil and many sacks of rice and lentils. Nearby the water jerry cans were stacked high. And the guard had quadrupled. Also developed muscles. And beards. The boy with the G3 was nowhere to be seen and the guards, wearing camos under their jalabiyas, smiled as the visiting dignitaries were escorted out of the jeep. There were a few handshakes. More smiles. One of the plumper babies was brought forward, his mother shy underneath her shawl. The rest of the camp had been warned off the day before and was cowering behind their mud bricks or cardboard.
We had set off early that morning to collect grass and sticks, rather hopefully termed firewood and fuel, but it was the only way people could make a few cents. For the women, it was the only source of income barring their bodies, but those women were pariahs in the camps – there is a respectable hierarchy even among the poorest of the poor – and they lived in a corner none of us ventured near. We were five, and we had walked for hours to find the denser grass that attracted an extra cent a pound, carrying string bags and sticks. One of the women had a baby, another was seven months pregnant. I also took my backpack and even then was scanning the ground for pieces of pottery that I might recognise, since Farchana was said to be within a sultanate that covered many miles in the sixteenth century, a prosperous and civilised trading junction. On the way here I had failed Professor Kass and, despite all that had happened, I was still a budding student of something, if not history. Indeed it was the one thing the ordeal so far, the long journey, the pain, the hunger and the humiliation could not remove from me: my education.
We had travelled farther than usual, rested for some hours in the heat of the afternoon beside a well with a trickle of water, and the others were preparing a small meal, baking flatbread on a fire while I was poking around with my stick along the watercourse, when two trucks appeared on the tracks nearby. Our sticks were of no use at all, and I tried to use my backpack as a shield but the man who advanced on me ripped it off, rummaged through its laughable contents, tossed everything on the ground, then ripped off my toab, revealing my cargo pants, then, even more enraged, ripped them off too. He called his companions over. They left Safiya, whom they’d pushed back into the fire so that her hair singed permanently against her scalp; they left Aisha, the pregnant woman whose baby they ritually punched as they fucked her; they left the woman whose toab they covered in oil from the back of one of the trucks, then lit, then rolled in dirt, all the while laughing; and they left the woman whose baby they had dropped on the road while she sat blinded by tears. They all clustered around me, pawing through my backpack and showing their teeth through their beards. It was the cargo pants, the tattered magazine in my backpack, or both, why they called me, Whore, American whore, even as I moaned, No, no, I am of this country too.
It was totally dark by the time they left. They had burned all the grass and sticks we had spent the day gathering, and stripped our clothes into rags so we huddled together all night for warmth, Safiya and I holding each other close as we had for a long time before. And still huddled we all limped back towards the camp at first light.
We stopped in sight of the southern fence and clustered under a tree. The shame of our nakedness was suddenly more unbearable than the baby we had buried and our dead companion we had had to leave, her stomach split like a watermelon and beaten to a pulp and gathering flies by the second. I volunteered, holding my filthy backpack before me. When the first soldier at the gate saw me he put his G3 on the ground and placed his hands over his eyes. He called me over in a soft voice and with his eyes still shut began to unwind his turban. There are five of us, I said. Excuse me, I mean four. His companions turned their backs and also unwound their turbans. I wrapped his turban around my body and beckoned the other women over and handed them the cloth from the soldiers, who all stood facing the fence until we were covered. The cloth of my soldier’s turban was very soft.
It is a funny thing, George, that whenever I think of all the atrocities that have been performed, I can feel almost nothing except for a brick-like hardness, but when I recall this small act of decency I soften in my chest and cry for the kindness.
Your name, the soldier enquired? Aisha, I told him. And your companions? Aisha, I pointed at Safiya. And Aisha. And here too was Aisha, all four of us. If we were Aisha there was a small chance our shame would not be hurled at us some time later, though we would never escape completely the jeers and hisses, and the taint would return to us like the smell of decaying flesh that once captured in the nostrils never seems to fade. He gave us each a ticket from within his hut and with it we entered the camp and passed the two other checkpoints and eventually found our places in the rows upon rows of cardboard and mud huts. Past the supermarket, where the dignitaries’ jeep was just leaving. That is how I remember it was Farchana. Where if your name was that of the Prophet’s favourite wife there was a chance you might be protected, to a point.
You would not think there’d be much use for archaeology in Darfur but Nyala University held a chair in Sudanese history and prehistory and due to the efforts of one professor, a large collection of artefacts had been amassed, dating back past the fifteenth century. And academics have this endearing, almost childlike capacity for resistance to political or other pressure. They almost wilfully carry on delivering lectures while bullets might be whizzing past the windows of their classrooms. They still expect their students to arrive for their tutorial sessions even as they are being dragged through the streets with their wrists tied with wire and their shirts off, the gravel scraping their backs red raw as they scream for mercy and beg for their mothers.
Professor Kass was one of these innocents. He was still poring over his boxes and papers the day the first of many bombs were dropped from the Antonov-26 planes that began circling the region. Painted a bright UN white these planes indeed looked benign for a while. But they came and went with no real logic and so it was easy to see how someone like Professor Kass could over the years bunker down when necessary but basically spend his time methodically brushing dirt from a fragment of clay pot or burnishing a gold anklet, circa 1530. He had a sense of honour and the Arab Cultural Foundation had given him a grant to study artefacts from the Keira dynasty of the Sahel region and the grant would be spent accordingly, war or no war. Indeed Professor Kass was one of those who clung firmer to the habits of scholarship as the civilised world as we knew it crumbled. It was as if he were a moral shield in the face of so much barbarity. Plus, there was no great reason at that time to think we were in danger. None of us had the slightest idea of what was in store. The war was confined. It was complex and bloody but the conflict was between the herders and the farmers, far off in the northwest, or so we thought.
Professor Kass had known my parents, and it was mainly on their account that I had returned to Nyala to pay him a visit. Indeed he knew them far longer and better than I, the accidental, late and only child of their marriage. They were, he and others had told me, devoted to each other, though I was first too young and then too far away to see. Professor Kass had organised the funeral, and I suppose he had paid out of his own pocket, though I felt the Church Missionary Society should have taken care of all that. So I had a sense of obligation, that l
ast visit in Nyala. I was planning to apply for a postgraduate position in London – journalism, I was considering – but then he persuaded me to accompany him on a final field trip. And I did have the time, and I was interested enough. In Khartoum I’d taken an undergraduate class in archaeology and even thought it might be fun. He had the departmental jeep and engaged a driver, so we set off for Geneina while the weather still held. In the rainy season it would be impossible, though the drought had taken care of that for many years.
I remember the afternoon we left, later than intended, for the professor was a ditherer and had already kept me waiting in the courtyard outside his office while he shuffled through papers and answered emails. I can see his face tilted upwards at the screen, his moon-sized glasses slipping, as he laboriously poked at the keys with one finger. I wandered away to the student co-op shop and bought us a bottle of water each. At the counter there was a stack of cheap notebooks, plus a stand of magazines. I bought a new notebook and the latest Time, though it was already months old, which I would read when I got the chance. By the time I got back to the jeep the professor was at the window talking to the driver. There you are, he said. Let’s be off.
There was not a great call for amateur historians of north African culture of the sixteenth century anyway, either there or here in rural Victoria. However, speaking three languages landed me a position in the community centre, though translation is not quite the word for what I do. The other day a Mr el-Shataya (six children, wife or wives killed or dead) wanted me to explain the intricacies of the Australian taxation system prior to his lodging a request for an ABN. Mr el-Shataya, I confided, I doubt even the ATO itself understands its own workings. He did not offer so much as the flicker of a smile. As far as he is concerned I was never married to the father of my child and I have no right to make jokes or understand anything more complex than stewing goat or cultivating tomatoes and chillies. But I give him all credit. He is enterprising. He wants to run his own business. He has already purchased a new lawnmower and has commenced driving lessons. Negotiating through me, I should add. For which he is doubly, triply, resentful. Mr el-Shataya will learn English, he will figure out the ATO, and Centrelink, and Medicare, and the local parents’ committee of his children’s school, and then have nothing more to do with me.
Anyway, he is right. Most definitely did I remain unmarried to the man who fathered Essa. Mr el-Shataya and his friends suspect me of everything and they would be right. In the camps it is only whores and abeed who bear fatherless children. Anything else would be an admission no one can afford to make. After I sorted out his papers, downloaded and printed the correct forms from the ATO website, filled them in for him, pointed to the three places where he needed to sign, scanned them, emailed them back to the ATO, and handed him the originals in a fresh buff cardboard folder, and after he left again without thanking me, only pulling his orange jalabiya a little tighter and holding his head a little higher, I felt rather diminished. I locked the office and went out, over the road to the IGA. It would soon be time to fetch Essa and I would get something special for our dinner. I chose some chicken pieces and a jar of Mother Patel’s Butter Chicken sauce, something I had never tried before, and went to select tomatoes and cucumbers for a salad. At the end of Fruit and Veg the manager was heaping onto a table a pile of corn cobs, all wrapped in their bright green skins. Special today, Miri, he told me. Market fresh, three for a dollar. I looked closely at them. They did indeed look very fresh. I picked one up. The cornsilk was soft and moist, the colour of a baby mouse. The kernels inside would be sweet and plump. No thank you, Brett, I said. Not today.
The jeep had veered sharply to the left and the driver overcorrected, taking us to the other side of the road, where we came to a stop in a shallow ditch. Blowout, sir, he informed Professor Kass after he got out and inspected the tyres. He estimated we had less than ten minutes before we would reach the next town. The map revealed numerous villages all around and I knew the map was unreliable – or rather, the map was innocent enough, it was the landscape that had changed – but the camel herders had scoured through and burned this village, that village, leaving others in between apparently at random and yet not: they had their reasons. But that had been a while back and the place was quiet. No reports of fighting for many months and not even the professor would have taken us there had there been a risk, grant or no grant. We decided to walk rather than wait, since the driver showed no signs of being willing or able to change the tyre. And even to my unmechanical eye, the wheel looked damaged. The driver sat leaning against the jeep and I wound a toab over my khaki shirt and pants, hoisted my backpack and we set off. There was nothing to show for the trip already and Professor Kass was chewing over the frustration of that when a band of people appeared on the road ahead, walking towards us quickly. Women, children, babies. A few donkeys. Old men. Only old men. We saluted them and some acknowledged the professor but mostly they avoided our gaze. Eyes down. And we kept walking.
What might have been ten minutes in the jeep might have been two hours by foot. But what might have been was never to eventuate as another knot of people appeared, then another, and I began to notice that they were all scared. Even the donkeys were abject, but then donkeys generally are. It was only beginning to dawn on me how clear the signs were of trouble ahead when I also noticed the light was fading. Professor, I said, I think we should turn back. He looked at his watch, looked at the sky. We drank some water, then he agreed. I was not sure at what stage panic set in or even what it was that cemented the brick of fear into place in my chest, but by the time we had trotted back some kilometres towards the jeep and the driver we had left behind, I felt a dread like nothing I had ever felt before.
The screams tore the late afternoon sky. Alongside the road, just where we had broken down in the jeep, were men with their throats cut. The long beard of one had been neatly sliced off too. It was lying on his chest as he lay there, flies already clustering. Beside the jeep I could see the driver still sitting, his head to one side, his chest flooded, red. Babies were crying, donkeys shrilled and honked in that way they have. Women were running or huddled, weeping, moaning. Men with flashing teeth amid their beards. Knives. Dust. Lots of dust, making the afternoon darker. There must have been wind.
They were camel herders, these men, but they had no camels with them now, only trucks the colour of the desert from where they’d come, and on the back were belt-fed machine guns, enough to mow down an army. But the machine guns were silent. Instead the men were slicing with machete-like knives and at the very second I registered it was only men and children lying dead the professor was whisked from beside me and tossed in the same ditch where our jeep had failed us, blood pouring like a stream from his throat into the thirsty ground.
They took all the women and we left. I don’t know what happened to the children, the babies, the ones who had not been killed. I was tied to two others and we were dragged into the back of a truck which belted along the road towards the township the professor and I had been headed for. The trucks slammed to a stop in the main street, where already there was chaos. Fires, men running, waving burning torches and rifles. Shooting, screaming. Crying. A few buildings were still standing. A small church. The remains of a post office. A general store, with posters out the front still flapping in the wind advertising publications. Africa Today and OK! magazine. The air was putrid. Later, the next day, I would know why.
George, you don’t want to hear the next bit, but you need to know. And I need to tell you. They tied many of us together, the two women I was already with and several more, our wrists banded like we were paper dolls. I don’t know how many men there were either, as I stopped counting after the seventh or eighth. They came at us and pushed us close to the largest fire in the town square, raping systematically from each end of the line as if we were in a factory and they were on a productivity drive. I was somewhere in the middle. The breasts of the woman next to me were weeping milk onto her bare chest. Her baby wou
ld have been back on the road in the dusty wind, wailing. Or perhaps not.
It is amazing how quickly some men can fuck. Even more amazing how they can move into a woman regardless of the previous man’s semen. Such brotherhood. And since I mention semen there are all the other fluids and excretions, and you may as well know about them. Blood, of course, lots of that. And it seemed even the menstruating women were not avoided as being unclean. Urine, for they pissed over us, many times. One of them pissed onto the woman on the other side of me just as his friend ejaculated, and they both laughed like hyenas. There was shit. People do that when they are terrified. And the tears, they go without saying.
I was waiting my turn, there were men either side of me, and the woman whose breasts were leaking was heaving in grief as the next man fucked her, crying through mouthfuls of ash and dirt that eddied around carried by the dry wind, the wind that tore unrestrained in that place, uncontained by any tree or building. Unfortunately for me it was still light.
There is more, George. And you perhaps should not read the next bit, but I have to write it. Skip to the end if you like, there is something nice there, I promise you.
I was the child of missionaries, sent to school in England. My father was born in Khartoum, of British parents, military people. My mother was a local. They both believed themselves to be British, always. That is the legacy of colonialism, isn’t it? My mother was also raised a Christian. And in Abbotsford Anglican Girls’ School no one had ever heard of female circumcision, or if we had we would have laughed at the very idea.
George, I was not laughing when the camel herding men got to me, stripped my pants off me, spread my legs and jeered abuse. I was crying, very much so. The first one screamed, This one is unclean! Unclean! They kicked me in the vagina, precisely, many times. I could not move away as three of them held me, one at my head, two at each side. Finally I called out in English, For the love of God, leave me alone! And this stopped them momentarily.
Letter to George Clooney Page 20
