‘He lives here. His mother died the day he was born. I am asking him why he doesn’t get married.’
Abd-allah Magid said in Arabic, ‘The girls don’t like me. I can’t get married. What can I give them?’
Ramadan said, ‘He has nothing.’
The dwarf Abd-allah Magid, looked after by his grandparents, was friendly and kind. He sat on the edge of a rope bed and kicked his feet. He was too small to work, to weak to do much of anything. But he was not bullied or mocked as vulnerable physical types are in some parts of Africa. It was obvious in the kindly behavior of the villagers that he was regarded as special, unique, perhaps even blessed.
‘The criterion is how you treat the weak,’ a man told me back in Khartoum. ‘The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.’
The speaker was Sadig el Mahdi, great-grandson of El Mahdi (‘The Rightly Guided One’), who had dispatched Gordon. I had not wanted to go back to the city. I would have been happy to spend another week camping — the wind, the sandstorms, the cloudbursts at night only made the experience more vivid and memorable. But I had been granted an interview with Sadig el Mahdi, at his Omdurman mansion.
This opportunity arose because a man on the Secretariat for Peace in the Sudan, another guest at the Acropole, had mentioned my name to the former prime minister. The man claimed that it had rung a bell — a small bell, I suspected, just a tinkle, but that was enough motivation in the hospitable Sudan for someone to make a pot of jebana coffee and strew the cushions and put out the welcome mat.
‘He is a good man, a very smart man,’ a trader in the Khartoum market told me. ‘He is head of the Umma Party.’
The trader’s friend said, ‘His father was Siddig. His grandfather was Abdelrahman. His great-grandfather — well, you know.’
The meeting was fixed for 9:30 at night, an odd time, it seemed to me. I was usually in bed by nine or ten: in Africa, daytime was for roaming, nighttime for hunkering down — predators came out at dark. But a Sudanese explained that this late hour was a sign of respect, the last meeting of the day, a conversation without interruption. I was still weary from my camping trip, but I was pleased to be able to meet this eminent man. A battered taxi came for me at 8:30, Abd-allah the driver cursing when he could not restart it, and cursing much more after he started it and we were stuck in heavy unmoving traffic on the Nile bridge: ‘It is old. It was built by the British. The British! No one ever fixes anything here.’
Glare-lighted dust in the headlights, the loud impatient car horns, the night heat, the smell of diesel fumes. Abd-allah complained the whole way about the inefficiency and dereliction.
Abd-allah said he knew the house. He took side roads to the riverbank and after a few turns there were men in old clothes squatting in the middle of the road — the security detail; and farther on a crude roadblock. Abd-allah shouted to them. We were waved on and soon came to a high wall with a lighted archway. Abd-allah parked, and crawled into the back seat to sleep, and I was escorted through the narrow door.
The garden beyond it was thick with palms and night-blooming jasmine. I was led past the lighted villa and down a gravel path to a sort of summer house woven entirely of wicker but as big as a bungalow, with walls open to the night air. Some men and women rose to greet me — Sadig’s daughter Rabah and another, Hamida, both of them very pretty and married. But modesty was encouraged and staring was rude in this culture, and so I wrung my hands and told them how grateful I was to be there.
Coughing, I explained that I had caught a cold in the desert.
‘Kafara,’ the novelist Issa said, a Sudanese expression of commiseration, the equivalent of ‘God bless you.’
‘To delete your sin and make a better relation with Allah,’ Issa said.
Then with a flourish of his full creamy robes, like a conjurer at a fancy dress party, Sadig el Mahdi appeared — tall, dark, hawk-nosed, with a Van Dyke beard and wearing a pale turban. Waving his wide sleeves he urged us to be seated again. He was both imposing and at once charismatic, because he was so responsive, an attentive listener and a great talker. His manner of holding court was to solicit opinions, and to listen, and at last to say his piece. He gave the impression of huge strength, of humor as well as a sort of ferocity that I took to be passion.
‘You have been in the Sudan a little while,’ he said to me, ‘but there are some things you must know. Just some points I would like to mention.’
The Sudan, largest country in Africa, was a microcosm of Africa, he said. All the African races were represented in the Sudan, all the religions, too; and three of the four major African languages were spoken here. The Sudan was the meeting point of all the countries in the Nile basin, and shared a border with eight countries.
‘Sudanese civilization preceded Egyptian civilization,’ Sadig said. Our history is not a branch of Egyptology, but something else entirely — Sudanology, one could say.’
He asked what I had seen in the north. I explained my camping trip and specifically how I had been impressed by the manner in which Ramadan my driver had helped the stranded men on the road, much to our inconvenience but the rescue of the men.
‘A stranger is not a stranger here. He is someone you know. And this, coming to the aid of a weak person, is chivalry,’ he said.
‘That holds the society together, I suppose.’
‘Yes, Sudan society is stronger than the state,’ he said. ‘Sudanese people have toppled two regimes by popular uprising. Even this present regime is being chipped away.’
‘How is this happening?’ I asked.
‘Through the strong social ties. Social ties are deeper than politics,’ he said. ‘This can be a burden but it helps us. If we had not had such social ties we would have disintegrated.’
A violent overthrow was not the Sudanese way, he said. ‘This country has had no political assassinations. We have a high degree of tolerance, a high degree of idealism — more than the rest of Africa. In the Sudan, enemies socialize!’
Coffee was poured, glasses of juice passed around, cakes and cookies were distributed. A fan whirred in a corner but the heat was oppressive and the aroma of the river overcame the jasmine in the garden.
‘We have had the bloodiest encounters with foreigners,’ Sadig said. ‘But, as a foreigner, you will be helped. We have no anti-foreign feelings.’
True, he said, the present government of the Sudan had tried to cultivate anti-foreign sentiment — ‘a very Islamized view of the world’ — but they had failed.
‘That ideological agenda has faded,’ he said. ‘Slogans have had a field day here. We’ve tried all the systems in the book — socialism, democracy, Islamic rule, military rule.’
I asked, ‘What do you think of the present government?’
‘The present regime has been very intolerant and repressive. This unrepresentative nature is now very conspicuous. But we have had thugs in government for eighty percent of our independent existence.’ Laughing, he said, ‘Before 1996, I was arrested myself!’ Then he grew serious again and added, ‘This government declared a jihad and abused human rights in the south.’
‘What will happen to the war in the south?’
‘We have the greatest potential for change through peaceful means,’ he said. ‘We Sudanese are war-fatigued and dictator-fatigued. Southerners don’t want to fight. They are running away from the war. Even the Comboni Fathers denounced the war,’ he said, referring to the Italian priests whose missions were in the south and west. ‘The Sudanese are fed up with war.’