The woman was very attractive anyway, tall and black and slender, in a gold-colored gossamer veil which she parted with a toss of her head, giving me a glimpse of her face. Her figure was apparent in the sinuous movement of her gown, and she wore black high-heeled shoes. Part of her gown became entangled in one stiletto heel and as she stooped to disengage the wisp of silken cloth from the heel point with a gloved hand, lifting her gown a bit higher, I saw the filigree of dark henna all over her foot and her ankle and reaching up her leg, delicately painted, as though she were wearing the sexiest French tights. In addition to the pretty shoe and the naked foot, the principal fascination of this lovely painted leg was that it belonged to a woman who was veiled. The explicit fetishism of her feet, her only exposed flesh, left her hidden charms to the imagination. Nothing to me was more erotic.
That sight made the day seem hotter. I bought my sandals — Souri, the seller said, Syrian ones — and spent the rest of the day breaking them in.
Travel is wonderful for the way it gives access to the past: markets in Africa show us how we once lived and traded. The market in Khartoum was medieval, a meeting place of hawkers and travelers, street performers, hustlers, city slickers in suits, more pious ones in robes, country folk from the southern regions — and if you knew even a little of their customs you could name them; spotting the slash marks on one tribal face, the tattoos and scarification on others, the knocked-out lower teeth or lip plugs of yet others. Many urchins snatched at passersby or sold soap and cigarettes. The Khartoum market was the heart and soul of the city, as markets have been in history. The bus depot was nearby, so was the street of gold and silver merchants, the street of sandal sellers (and illegal leopard skins and snakeskin purses and slippers), the vegetable barrows, the meat stalls, and at the center the country’s largest mosque. Because of this mosque and the Koran’s specific injunction, ‘Repulse not the beggar’ (95:10) every panhandler and cripple in town jostled the faithful as they strode to prayers.
Groups of gowned and veiled women sat in the goldsmiths’ shops choosing dangling earrings, and bracelets as wide as shirt cuffs, and meshlike necklaces and snake bangles. Gold was the only luxury. Some of these shops were no more than small booths but you knew them by their twinkling gold and their mirrors and air-conditioning.
Mahmoud Almansour was selling gold and spoke English reasonably well.
‘Is because I live New York City,’ Mahmoud said.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just visiting family, and this’ — he gestured to the gold objects in a disdainful way.
‘You don’t like the Sudan?’
‘Sudan is nice. Beeble are kind’ — he clawed his shaven head and yanked his beard — ‘but …’
His emigration story was interesting and perhaps typical. In 1985, aged twenty-five, he flew to Mexico City, entered on a tourist visa, and vanished. He surfaced near Tijuana and paid a man $500 to take him across the border. He was sealed into a refrigerator truck that was loaded with fish — Mahmoud was standing behind boxes of fish with three Mexicans. At the border crossing the truck driver gave them mittens and hats and turned the thermostat very low, so that when US Customs opened the doors frozen air billowed out in clouds.
Mahmoud was dumped outside San Diego but did not linger there. In those days no ID was needed to buy an airplane ticket. He flew to Atlanta where — having spent all his money — he picked peaches until the season ended. Then he took a bus to Virginia.
‘More bicking. Bicking, bicking. I bick anything.’
Living in migrant workers’ quarters, eating frugally, he saved enough money to move to New York City, where he knew some Sudanese. And he continued to do menial work. He applied for and was granted a green card, and he continued to save until he gained the confidence of a man who, for a fee, fixed him up with a job driving a yellow cab, which became his livelihood.
‘I am married to an American — black American,’ he specified. ‘But she think, Africa — dangerous! Sudan — not safe! I don’t care. I love New York. America is Baradise.’
He was leaving the Sudan in a few months to return to Brooklyn. He said he felt stifled by the laws in the Sudan — well, he was a hard worker but fundamentally and, like many emigrants to the US, no respecter of laws, so that was easy to understand. Yet it was amazing how even here in the market, Khartoum’s traditional souk, there were upstairs rooms where men and women gathered. Most of the larger coffee shops had a stairway to a hidden room, heavily curtained, fans whirring, a bit stuffy and dark, where young men and women sat at tables, whispering. No kissing, no hand holding, but anyone could see that these whispers were freighted with endearments, and it was all furtive enough to seem rather pleasant.
But groups of men met in such places too. In one of these ateliers I met two men, a doctor and a lawyer, and — this being the Sudan — they invited me to join them for a cup of coffee. Dr Sheikh ad Din was a medical doctor, his friend, Dr Faiz Eisa, was a lawyer.
‘This is not a strict country like some others,’ Dr Faiz said. ‘There are only five aspects of sharia law here. Against adultery. Against alcohol. Against stealing. Against defamation. And traitors — declaring war against your own country. That is forbidden.’
‘But people behave,’ Dr Sheikh said. ‘As you see.’
‘We don’t cut people’s hands off,’ Dr Faiz said. ‘And no stoning to death.’
‘Hey, that’s pretty enlightened,’ I said.
The next day, I walked to the Blue Nile Sailing Club, dating from the early 1920s. This British club by the river had been established for river-related activities — sailing, rowing, sculling — with plaques displayed and the engraved names of winners of the various trophies and competitions. ‘1927 Blue Nile Trophy — S. L. Milligan,’ ‘43–44 Ladies Race — Mrs W. L. Marjoribanks,’ and so forth.
The clubhouse was an old steel gunboat, the Malik, sitting in a ditch high on the riverbank. The last surviving British gunboat from the three involved in the Battle of Omdurman, the Malik, had first come down the Nile in many boxes in 1898 to be assembled in Khartoum and used by the attacking Lord Kitchener (‘We hate him here,’ a Sudanese told me). The Malik was commanded by General Gordon’s nephew, a major known by his nickname, ‘Monkey,’ who had come to the Sudan to avenge his uncle’s murder and to desecrate the Mahdi’s tomb. Seeing these slow hard-to-maneuver gunboats the soldiers’ gibe was to call the fleet ‘Monkey Gordon’s Greyhounds.’ The boats were well armed, though — the Malik had a howitzer, two Maxim guns, two Nordenfeldt guns, and a cannon on board. These guns were used with devastating effect at Omdurman, which was not just a battle to wrest control of the Sudan but also a punitive mission against the Sudanese, as revenge for the death of Gordon and the expulsion of the British thirteen years earlier.
From the wheelhouse of the Malik, toiling upstream, Monkey Gordon saw the Mahdi’s tomb, the army’s first glimpse of Omdurman. Later, in the thick of battle, the Malik was the gunboat that decisively cut off the dervishes who were successfully harrying the Camel Corps. In the end, more than 8000 Sudanese were killed, and wounded men were shot where they lay bleeding. This heartlessness on the part of the British shocked the young Winston Churchill, who was in the Sudan working as a journalist.
At the close of the battle, the Malik was chosen to fire the victorious twenty-one gun salute (with live ammo, no blanks were available). Then, Monkey Gordon, on Kitchener’s orders, took charge of demolishing the Mahdi’s tomb, disinterring the corpse, desecrating it by tossing it in the river but not before hacking off the head. A historian of the battle wrote how Lord Kitchener ‘toyed with the idea of mounting it in silver to serve as an inkwell or a drinking cup.’ Some people believe he followed through, though I was told that the head is buried in a cemetery in Wadi Haifa.