‘Because when the government wants them to move they will ask for money.’
The Sudanese government in an expansion mode had become well-known for compensating people whom they were compelled to resettle.
Farther up the road, the boulder piles were even higher and some could have passed for mountains, or stone skeletons of mountains, while others were perfectly pyramidal. Here and there a mirage-like strip of green, low in the west, indicated the north-flowing Nile. I assumed that all the settlements would be near the Nile, but I was wrong. Some villages were a whole day’s donkey ride from the Nile, so that it was two days there and back; and the same distances from some villages to the nearest town — longer on foot than by donkey. It was true that there were Sudanese here who enjoyed the congeniality of living on a grid of streets in a good-sized town with a market by the river, but there seemed to me even more people who chose to live in the middle of nowhere, huddled in huts by a few boulders, a longish walk from a water source.
A little way off the road we stopped at Wadi ben Naggar, just a tiny village of goat herds and farmers but also the birthplace of Omer al Bashir, the current president of the Sudan, who had come to power in a coup.
A toothless man in a ragged turban howled at me and to neutralize his hostility I gave him the conventional greeting, ‘Salaam aleikum’ — Peace be upon you.
‘You are American?’
I caught the word, Ameriki, though Ramadan was translating, and Ramadan answered for me. The man had a grubby gown and a falling-apart turban and five days’ growth of beard.
I even understood this man’s next howl.
‘Bush ma kwais!’ Bush is no good.
‘How do I say, “I don’t know”?’
‘Ana ma’arif.’
I smiled at the man and said, ‘Ana ma’ arif.’
The man laughed and clutched at his turban, disentangling it some more.
‘Clinton Shaytaan.’
That was pretty clear: Clinton is Satan.
‘A lot of Americans would agree with you,’ I said.
He shook his head and smiled goofily, and gabbled a little: What was I saying? Then he said, ‘Bush blah-di-blah.’
‘He is saying you look like Bush.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said to Ramadan and to the man, still practicing my new phrase, ‘Ana ma’ arif.’
‘Not big Bush but small Bush,’ Ramadan translated.
‘Ask him if he wants a Stim.’ It was the local version of 7-Up.
The man said, Yes, indeed, he wanted one.
Giving it to him, I said, ‘Please stop talking about Bush.’
He smiled at me — still no clue — and toasted, clinking Stim bottles, ‘Clinton is Satan.’
We left his boisterous abuse and his unfriendly smile, looked around the village, and then drove a little way up the road and off it, straight across the soft sand and deep ditches for about forty miles. There was no road to speak of, only hard-packed desert gravel and now and then powder-soft dunes. Up ahead I would see greenery and think there was a wooded glade but this would be ridiculous misapprehension as the glade turned out to be a hot patch of desert with a few stands of thornbushes and the wriggly marks of snakes.
‘There was a school here once,’ Ramadan said.
‘I want to see it.’
The place was ruined and deserted, just a cluster of empty buildings in the desert — perhaps an aid donor’s idea in the first place, one of those good-hearted misguided efforts to elevate Africans in a western way.
‘What happened?’
‘No water, no food, no teachers — nothing.’
Sand blew through the roofless classroom and the place looked as useless and broken as a Kushitic ruin, but without any of the art or grace. Some hobbled tortured-looking camels tottered near the school, their forelegs tied together so that they would not stray.
Then I saw the forgotten scholars and potential school kiddies: they were at the well, helping their elders, watering their goats, and the smallest of the children — no more than eight or nine — was running next to a roped donkey, hitting his hindquarters with a sharp stick and running beside him. The donkey was pulling a rope, and watching him I was surprised to see how far he pulled it, more than half the length of a football field down a well-worn path, zipping an immense length of frayed rope out of the well.
The well was ancient, the place was ancient: a Meroitic temple complex dating from the first century AD still stood near here, and such temples, so far from the Nile, could be sustained only by deep and reliable wells. This one was 175 feet deep. The opening at the top was about four feet in diameter. I was spooked contemplating its deepness. Men threw the goatskin hide pails into the depths of the well and then jerked the rope, bobbing it and filling it; and then they hoisted it a few feet and satisfied that it was full, they knotted the rope to a donkey and a little boy would chase the donkey into the desert, belaboring it with a stick. There was not a shred of clothing or any item of apparatus here that was any more modern than the first-century temple of Al Naggar (‘Carpenter’) on the other side of the dune. The school must have seemed a nice idea, but nothing here could have seemed more superfluous than those classrooms.
‘So you’re American?’ one of the men said to me in Arabic, because Ramadan had tipped him off.
‘Peace be upon you.’
‘And peace be upon you,’ he replied.
‘Bush is no good,’ another man said: the Arabic was simple enough.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why is he saying he doesn’t know?’ one of the men at the well said.
Ramadan said, ‘Does everyone in the Sudan love President Omer?’
Yes, yes, they understood this, and laughed angrily and stamped on their little hillock for emphasis. And I thought of the lovely lines of Joyce, The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not exploitable ground but the living mother. They loved their well. They explained the well to me, how deep it was. It had been dug many years ago. Sometimes they had to rope up and descend into its darkness to retrieve a lost pail, not a happy task.
‘There are snakes in the well,’ one man explained. To my next obvious questions they said, ‘Yes, the snakes are a meter long and they bite with poison.’
I walked around, looked at the goats, the camels, the toiling men and women, the children who were standing in the sun, performing this necessary and never-ending task. Then I said goodbye.
‘Tell Bush we want a pump!’ one man screamed in Arabic, Ramadan helpfully translating.
No, I don’t think so: a pump would need gasoline, spare parts, regular maintenance. Ultimately the contraption would fail them. They were better off hauling water the ancient way, with donkeys, goatskin pails, and goatskin water containers which when filled looked like little fat goat corpses.
But I said, ‘The next time I see President Bush I will mention it,’ which when translated brought forth a howl of derision.
Two thousand years ago, Al Naggar, this dune-haunted ruin in the desert, was a city, with cisterns and tanks, roads and houses, sophisticated agriculture and a high degree of prosperity, artisans everywhere, and priests and devotees. It was the center of a cult of the lion god Apademak, chief god of the Meroites, probably with good reason. There must have been many lions roaming in the central Sudan then — there were plenty in the south even now — and it is human nature to worship what we fear.