Passing this squatting group of three young men, two things caught my attention. They were speaking English among each other, and one was carrying the Penguin paperback of Lady Windermere’s Fan. So I said hello and soon we were talking about the rocket attack.
‘The factory made pharmaceuticals, not weapons. But it was empty. There was no night shift on Thursdays. We think the Americans knew that.’
They were university students, in their early twenties. I obliquely asked how they felt about Americans as a result of the bombing.
‘We like Americans. It was your government that did it, not you.’
This distinction between politics and people was to be made quite often by people I met on my trip. Africans in general disliked their governments so intensely, and saw them as so unrepresentative of themselves, that they were happy to give me the benefit of the doubt.
‘We want to be friends,’ one of the others said.
That was Hassan. The others were Abd-allah and Saif-Din.
‘Saif means sword and Din is faith.’
I made a slashing gesture. ‘ “The Sword of Islam” — meaning jihad?’
‘Yes, yes, exactly!’
‘Not much of that stuff in this book,’ I said, tapping the cover of Lady Windermere’s Fan.
‘I am reading for my English. To learn better. Very important.’
Hassan said, ‘Very, very important.’
‘Crucial,’ I said.
They didn’t know the word. We sat down on the Nile bank, across from Tuti Island. I taught them ‘crucial’ and ‘vital.’ It is important to learn English. It is vital that we understand what is happening. It is crucial that we act quickly.
‘But let me interrupt you, sir,’ Abd-allah said. ‘What you think about Afghanistan?’
‘It is vital that we understand what is happening,’ I said. ‘It is tribal warfare.’
‘What do Americans think about Israel and Palestine?’
‘That’s tribal warfare, too.’
Hassan said, ‘You see, sir, if you kill Afghans and Palestinians, they have families and they have children and they will always hate Americans and try to kill them.’
This was incontestable, but I said, ‘The Sudanese military is dropping bombs on Dinkas and the SPLA in the south. Won’t they always hate you?’
Muslims in the north, Christians in the south, in this the largest country in Africa, Forty years of war in the southern region. A Sudanese lecturing anyone on terror was drawing a very long bow. I think they realized this. They changed the subject.
Saif-Din said, ‘How can we go to America?’
‘Can I work and study?’ Abd-allah said. ‘Get a job to support myself while I am going to university?’
‘Where can we work in America?’ Hassan said. ‘What work can we do?’
I asked them what work they were skilled at. They said, very little. Where had they been? Just here, they said. They had been brought up in Khartoum. They had never left Khartoum — never seen their country, the south which was oil-rich and swampy, the north which was desert and filled with temples and pyramids of Kush, the western mountains of Kordofan and the Nuba people. But these students were not unusual in wishing to travel, or emigrate. American cities were full of people from African cities, who had never seen their own hinterland.
In Khartoum I would not have known there was a war in the south except for the presence of so many southerners — Shilluks, Dinkas, Nuer, the tall tribal Christians who had come north to escape the fighting. Some lived in refugee camps and survived on food aid distributed by the various foreign agencies who operated in Khartoum. In the mid-1960s, I had been invited by Sudanese guerrillas to write about ‘liberated areas.’ I had then been living in Uganda, which was full of Sudanese refugees, who spoke of burned villages and a blighted countryside. Forty years on, this was still apparently the case.
‘Whole sections of the south are uninhabited because of landmines,’ a landmine expert told me in Khartoum. ‘You go there and you don’t see anyone at all.’
Eighteen years in the British Army had sharpened Rae McGrath’s knowledge of landmine removal. On their retirement, most ex-soldiers moved to an English village and ran the local pub, Rae said. But that usually meant they became drunks, in debt to the brewery which financed them. Rae, who was forty-five and stocky, used the skills he had learned in the military in Landmine Action, an organization committed to the removal of these wicked devices, which are numerous in many parts of Africa. They were simple, lethal and long-lived: a landmine remained dangerous for about fifty years.
‘They’re mainly in the countryside, because armies in Africa always fight in agricultural areas,’ he told me.
Having written a book on the subject of landmine removal, he was quick to reply and sometimes epigrammatic (‘Mine finding is a bit like Zen gardening’). Not much has been written effectively on the subject of landmines and their simple deadly technology. Landmines were usually made of plastic and nearly undetectable. Dogs could smell explosive — so they helped; but Rae’s method was probing the earth, inch by inch, with a metal rod pushed into the soil at thirty degrees. It was pretty safe, he said. You had to stand right on top of the mine to detonate it.
Areas of the south were full of mines, and donors were urging him to find them and get rid of them, so that they could resettle people. But removal was a slow business and sometimes the locals were not helpful.
‘This woman in Malakal says to me, “No one was blown up by a landmine here.” But then one of the neighbors said that the woman’s cow had stepped on a mine and been blown up. The woman said, “Oh, yeah. My cow.” In a war, a cow being killed is no big deal.’
Rae would be in the Sudan for a year or two, dealing with landmines. At the moment, he was in a top-floor room at the Acropole, surrounded by pictures of his family. He was not alone in his charitable work. Duncan from Save the Children was in the hotel, and so was Issa from Unicef, and Rick (microfinance, small business loans), and the stout Ugandan from UNESCO, and the Dutch team who could usually be seen conferring over maps, and the Bangladeshi (‘But I’m an American now’) who was ‘supervising some UN projects.’
They were all aid experts, and they ranged from selfless idealists to the laziest boon-dogglers cashing in on a crisis. At an earlier time they would have been businessmen or soldiers or visiting politicians or academics. But this was the era of charity in Africa, where the business of philanthropy was paramount, studied as closely as the coffee harvest or a hydroelectric scheme. Now a complex infrastructure was devoted to what had become ineradicable miseries: famine, displacement, poverty, illiteracy, AIDS, the ravages of war. Name an African problem and there was an agency or a charity to deal with it, but that did not mean a solution was produced. Charities and aid programs seemed to turn African problems into permanent conditions that were bigger and messier.
The heat in Khartoum with its sky-specks of rotating hawks left me gasping; and the sun burning in cloudless blue on to the whitewashed buildings and the streets dazzled my eyes, for the streets were all chalky dust — just as fine, just as bright. I walked in slow motion, tramping in heavy shoes. I would have been happy with a turban and a white robe, like everyone else in this begowned population. I settled on a pair of sandals, and went to the souk to buy some, muttering to remember the Arabic for the request, Ana awiz shapath aleila, I need some sandals now.
On the way, glancing at people’s sandals to see what styles were available I saw a man and woman heading to the mosque — it was Friday — he was clutching a Koran, they were both dressed up for the occasion. There was no question they were husband and wife, for she was decorated with henna — a blue-black lacy pattern picked out on her feet and ankles — the privilege of a married woman.