A coup, and a departure

Sudanese dictator Omar el-Bashir has fallen. I was in Sudan when he staged his own coup. Some memories of the days after he seized power, nearly 30 years ago

Sudanese dictator Omar el-Bashir has fallen, deposed by his own army. As I write (April 14 2019), it’s not yet clear how events will play out. What looks like an attempt to hold on to power by the army appears to have failed, or at least to have been strongly opposed.

Bashir (US Navy/Jesse  Awalt)

Sudan has disposed of dictators before. In 1985 Jaafar Nimeiry, who had himself come to power through a coup, was peacefully deposed and the country underwent a transition to democracy. The latter lasted only a few years before crumpling under the stress of the civil war in the south, and a declining economy. On June 30 1989 el-Bashir, then a 45-year-old colonel, seized power.

At the time I was a development volunteer for Sudan’s Refugee Settlement Administration in Showak, a small town about seven hours’ drive from Khartoum near the Eritrean border. I later wrote my own account of what happened in the days that followed. It went into my book on my time in Sudan, Even the Dead Are Coming. Like all ‘on-the-ground’ accounts of an event, it lacks perspective; I saw only what I saw. But here it is, for what it is worth. I have made some edits so that it can stand alone, but otherwise it is much as I wrote it a year or so after the coup.

I

ONE morning halfway through June 1989 my colleague Ali and I went to Gedaref. Ali had some business to do there, and so had I; I wanted to try and persuade the UNHCR office in the city to open their files on refugee protection cases for the third issue of the magazine I was publishing for the Administration.

At nine, we went to the house of the head of our Gedaref office, Ismail Ibrahim, who had kindly invited us for breakfast. (Work in a Sudanese office starts at 7.30am, and breakfast is taken between 9.00 and 10.00.) We walked through the industrial souk, or montega, towards the house. The montega was a riot of unguarded welding machinery, rotting cars waiting to be spliced together, and piles of nuts and bolts all over the ground. Among the montega’s more fun features were large drainage shafts about two feet square, sunk into the middle of the busiest pedestrian thoroughfares. There were no rails or covers of any sort on these, and a pond of black, oily water could be seen about three feet down. That morning I nearly fell down one, much to Ismail’s amusement. In fact he was the culprit as he had distracted my attention by telling me the results of the European elections in Britain, which he had heard on World Service that morning. The Conservatives, he was telling me, had taken an almighty pasting. Had I gone down the drainage-shaft, I should at least have died happy.

Politics was also discussed at breakfast. A friend of Ismail’s, an Army officer, ate with us; he was reading from the front page of one of the daily newspapers. It seemed that 17 senior officers had been arrested and charged after a failed coup plot against the government of Sadiq el-Mahdi had been discovered the day before. There was much speculation as to exactly what was going on.

What was? In the light of what happened not long after, it would be fascinating to know. Perhaps it was a feint, designed by the perpetrators of the later, real, plot, to lull Sadiq into a false sense of security. Or possibly the later coup was sparked off by a wish to rescue the 17, as much as anything else. In any case, after the arrests, no-one really expected further trouble that month. It was not on my mind at all.

About two weeks later, on the night of June 30 several of us gathered over a bowl of punch in the compound. The base for this punch was industrial aragi, the local arak; the taste (which was rough) was disguised by karkadee, an infusion of hibiscus, with lashings of sugar. It was Thursday night; as no-one was working on Friday, that being the Moslem sabbath, this was the night at the pub. It rained heavily. There was much thunder and lightning, and we took shelter in Simon’s hut. The dog Shaggy joined us; an unpopular move, as she stank horribly. At about nine, the electricity went off. This was unusual; it had done so far less that year. At about midnight I decided that I had had enough, and dashed through the heavy rods of rain to my own hut, where I balanced my torch on a shelf and got ready for bed. As often happened during the rains, it was cool. I had a good night’s sleep.

I awoke on the morning of July 1 to find the sun shining cleanly; it was hot, of course, but there was a freshness, as the rain in the night had evaporated and cooled the air a bit. Ian was just outside my hut, working on one of the motorbikes.

“Did you hear, there’s been a coup or something,” he grunted.

“Oh,” I said. Then: “Would you like some tea?”

A neighbour's children (M.Robbins)

II

FRIENDS IN Khartoum were closer to events. As one, an Englishman, explained:

I don’t know how your coup went... It was rather bizarre for me. I had gone to bed, as usual, in the front yard, completely sober, and about three in the morning was woken by a tremendous rumbling sound which at first I thought might represent the effects of a particularly badly-made fish stew concocted earlier. I rapidly realized, however, that the sound...was in fact caused by the passing of a number of tanks in the street...I attempted to get up to have a closer recce but was...restrained by my mosquito-net in which, in my haste, I got tangled up (James Bond never used a mosquito-net and now I know why). I got to the wall in time to see a British-made Ferret scout car bringing up the rear. It did cross my mind that it might be a coup but it seemed a bit of a cliche to be doing it that way so I put it down to some Sudanese tank commander... going to visit his relatives...

He went back to sleep.

Information on World Service the next morning was perfunctory. A Brigadier Omar el-Beshir had broadcast on Radio Omdurman, it was reported; the government of Sadiq, he said, had “beggared the people and made their lives miserable”. I have to say that this was true. There was a suggestion that the new military government intended to end the war in the south, then in truce, as quickly as possible. Several senior politicians, including Dr Hassen Turabi of the National Islamic Front and Osman Mirghani of the Democratic Unionist Party, were known to be under arrest.

The Prime Minister himself was reported by the BBC as having been seen being driven from the palace in the early hours, but over the next few weeks it became clear that he had evaded arrest and was missing. (Like Nimeiry before him, he spent some years in exile but eventually returned.) The BBC’s correspondent in Khartoum, who was Sudanese, was later arrested himself by the new regime.

Savage travel restrictions were slapped in place straight away. It became extremely difficult for a foreign national to go anywhere. The Sudanese themselves found it difficult. The day after the coup Hassen Osman, the head of the Administration – a very senior figure, and a powerful man in the region – attempted to reach Khartoum for an urgent meeting. He spent 11 hours arguing his way through the checkpoints before he reached the capital. There had always been a small number of checkpoints on the road, but now there were many, and some of the new ones between Medani and Khartoum itself were manned by paratroopers. Other measures depended on who found himself in charge in a given place. In Kassala, the Army announced that, henceforth, the number of vehicles run by aid agencies would be strictly limited, and some were appropriated. Most were later returned, often with huge mileages racked up; the Forestry Department in Kassala lost one when the Army crashed it, and left it where they’d wrecked it.

House searches began. Europeans appeared to be exempt from this (although apparently not in Port Sudan). However, the searches were methodical and comprehensive, and anyone holding stocks of liquor panicked. I was approached in the street by an Ethiopian refugee who wanted to sell a consignment of Melotti gin at half-price; I thought it safer to decline. In fact, the Army were probably looking for hoarded commodities rather than contraband; it soon became clear that in the Eastern Region, their priority was to try and make foodstuffs and other goods available at the “official” prices. These were set by the state, but everyone had long ignored them. In Khartoum, a curfew was introduced that ran from sundown to sunrise; later this was pushed back by three hours. Extra police-posts in the city ensured that this was strictly enforced.

In Showak, I was puzzled. Why had the Army staged a coup in a country, and at a time, when power was a poisoned chalice? I did not at the time think it political; the Islamist complexion of the new government was not apparent until later. Indeed, Dr Turabi, the Islamist leader, was then in prison with all the other politicians. And the Army appeared to want to end the war in the south, rather than prosecute it with renewed vigour; the truce remained in place for the moment, and there still seemed a good chance that it would become permanent.

I accepted that the Army simply wanted, as Omer el-Bashir had said in his initial broadcast, to end corruption and the black market and let people eat. For the moment, indeed, his priority seemed to be exactly that. It was soon announced that everything would be sold at the official price, and lists of these prices were posted by order at every shop. The reductions were dramatic; goods were listed at the level fixed by the State under the old regime, figures which had hitherto simply been ignored. Cigarettes were cut by over 50%. Bread sank to about 15 piastres a loaf; only in Khartoum had I ever seen it on sale that cheaply, and that had been nearly two years earlier. Sugar, a sensitive commodity in a sweet-toothed country, was henceforth also to sell at its official price - that was, S (Sudanese pounds) 1.30 a kilo instead of the S9 it had been commanding. Before long the shops shut, having nothing left that people wished to buy; or, if they still had it, not being willing to sell it at such a loss.

Children at Abuda, 1989 (M.Robbins)

I assumed that, this being Sudan, the goods would simply be kept below the counter and sold to known customers for whatever they were willing to pay. But I was wrong. A few days after the coup, I was sitting in my office when two policemen accompanied by an army officer entered the shop opposite. Beyond the purple shutters I saw the three talking to the shopkeeper, checking the shelves as they did so. The four men then left together, and the shutters were drawn shut, although it was early in the day. This happened to all the shopkeepers. Many simply remained closed; our local grocer Beshir, for example. Commodities became scarce. After a few days, a little sugar became available. It had been seized by the Army on the day of the coup. They had checked someone’s warehouse and found some 2,000 bags that had been corruptly diverted from local cooperatives before the coup. Some of this was now sold from the police station at the official price, and everyone waited in line to receive a bag each; it was soon gone. Simon joined the queue with everyone else under the blazing sun, and came back with a kilo in his hand; he waved it around triumphantly. But it was the last we would see for a while. Brewing operations came to a halt. There was barely enough for our tea.

Cigarettes were nowhere to be seen in the shops. The boys who had sold them from blue plywood boxes in the souk were rounded up and chucked off the streets. Ethiopian Nyalas, which were illicit imports and had never really been legal, were now available at extraordinary prices if you knew someone who had hidden his stock; after 10 days those prices spiralled to S40, five or six times the fatuous official price for legal cigarettes, of which there were none. I had a new office-boy; he was excellent at finding cigarettes, and went trotting down to the souk for me to interview shopkeepers known to his family. He nearly always returned with something. He and an elder boy had the market sewn up. We let them keep the change, and I think they did very nicely. But two weeks after the coup, these supplies also dried up. Soon afterwards, the office-boy disappeared as well. He was often ill and Ali had taken him to see Dr Mekki, who advised him to go to hospital in Gedaref. It seemed he had fallen sick because he and his family were now up at three every morning to queue for bread.

Why the chaos? Other parts of the country were not so badly affected. I heard later that the military commander who had taken control of the region had not been tough enough for the Young Turks of his regiment, and had been disposed of in his turn. His usurpers then decided to take tougher action against the black marketeers. They hit other targets as well. One day I hitched a lift over to the UN compound with Barrie Potter, a British colleague who was also a friend. On the way back, we followed the main road into the town centre through the red-light district. The road there was blocked by a large green lorry, surrounded by troops. Women were being herded out of the huts opposite and onto the back of the lorry, carrying what possessions they had; occasionally a cassette-player, or a bundle or two. They seemed to enter the lorry without fuss, but were heavily guarded.

I mentioned this to a colleague in the office when we got back. He said he doubted if the whores would come to any harm. “Perhaps the army at Girba is having a party,” he said with a grin. Then the grin was replaced by a frown.

“You know what all this means for us,” he said quietly. “We will have 20 years of this before we try democracy again. Another 20 bloody years.”

I nodded. It was just over two weeks after the coup.

I crossed the courtyard and mounted the stairs to Hassen’s office. His secretary smiled and stood to greet me. I asked her politely if he was busy; I knew that he did not appreciate being disturbed when he was. “Yes, he’s there. Go in, Mike,” she said. I did so. I rarely went there, for it was the holy of holies. Although spacious, it was plainly furnished. There were a couple of extra chairs, more ashtrays than usual and, for some reason, imitation flowers in a vase on a desk. Otherwise, it looked much the same as any other office in Showak, complete with flat-topped grey-steel desk. Hassen was sitting behind it, writing. He greeted me politely. “Sit down,” he said; he looked as completely in control as he had ever been.

“I want to know whether I’m going to print another issue of the magazine,” I said. (This was a publicity tool for the Administration; it had been my main work in Showak.) “I didn’t ask earlier because I doubted if you’d know yet. And I thought you might have other things on your mind.”

“Well, yes, I have.” He smiled slightly. “No, you cannot print another magazine. Under the new publications law it would be a capital offence.”

I was not that surprised. I suggested that I travel to Khartoum to see my field director, Ibrahim el-Bagir, who might have other work for me.

Hassen was still smiling. He knew that I was only two or three months from completing my posting, and would probably just leave the country from Khartoum. That was my intention. “Yes, go to Khartoum,” he said. He thought for a moment, and added: “When you get home, write about Sudan, about refugees, about what you have seen here.”

I promised I would. I have.

I stood and we shook hands, and then I left the office. I never saw him again; a few days later I did leave Showak, and Hassen was removed from his post before the end of the year.

Khartoum was full of rumours as usual. The Acropole Hotel seemed to have new staff on duty. I was warned to be careful what I said in the lobby. But there were plenty of cigarettes. I sent 200 back to Showak. And there was food. We had had nothing to eat in Showak since the coup but thin stews made mostly from okra, and even before that our diet had been getting worse. Ibrahim El-Bagir quickly scotched any notions of my remaining in Sudan. We did not discuss it in detail. He did not say so, but I think he felt that the nature of my work before the coup made it more sensible for me to leave the country. So I went to stay with friends in Khartoum Three, as I had on a previous visit a few months earlier; they were congenial company. I set about saying my goodbyes.

My compound neighbour from Showak, Ian, arrived in Khartoum a week or so later, having completed his own posting. He was not leaving Sudan permanently, but would have a holiday in Britain before returning to start a new job. In the early hours of August 8, we went to the airport with one of Imbrahim’s drivers. The curfew was being rigorously enforced; there was a checkpoint every 300 yards, and the night-passes for both the car and its occupants were scrutinised with great care. In the airport we went through the usual scrum, fighting to keep our place in the check-in queue; in the departure lounge we stepped over the recumbent forms of over a hundred young men who were waiting for a SudanAir flight to Tripoli, delayed for 24 hours. Finally we trudged across the apron and underneath the nose of the Tristar, then up the gangway, past the Royal Mail crest emblazoned on the fuselage. When the aircraft lifted off into the dawn, I felt a sense of relief.

But my mood changed as the aircraft wheeled around above the Mogren, the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, to pick up its course for Aswan. For, as I looked down along the wing, I could see the red-roofed villas set in verdant gardens ringed with date-palms, nestling beside the silver-blue expanse of the Nile. For a moment, I fancied I could see oxen and feluccas, but I think we were too high for that.

III

Gedaref, 1989 (M.Robbins)

SUDAN was not Ethiopia. There were no week-old corpses swinging from the lamp-posts of Khartoum, as there were under Mengistu Haile Mariam. But the military government of Omer Beshir continued to prosecute the war; it also adhered to the principles of Shari’a, Islamic law, which had in part perpetuated that war. And it dealt harshly with those who opposed these objectives.

It was not obvious when I left Sudan that any of this would happen. Indeed, the new government had suggested that the question of Shari’a should be subjected to a referendum. On the face of it, this was reasonable. But human-rights groups outside the country argued that, regardless of their feelings, people would not have voted against Shari’a because they would feel instinctively that this would be a vote against Islam. It may be that the government, knowing this, put the idea of a referendum forward in order to secure the continuation of Shari’a law before revealing its own true colours. To the Western mind, a vote against Shari’a is not a vote against religion, simply a vote against imposing it on others. But it would be unreasonable to expect the Sudanese to feel that way. I can confirm this; staff at the Showak workshop told British volunteers that they could not vote against Shari’a, yet added that they actually thought it should be repealed. In any case, the referendum never took place; in the end the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), as it called itself, resorted to more direct methods. Some flavour of these in the months after the coup can be had from the following testimony given to Africa Watch soon afterwards, in 1990:

The atmosphere in Khartoum is extremely tense. Everyone fears arrest and no-one knows who will be next. The most frightening new development is the mysterious new security agency, with its secret houses. …Information is gradually coming out about these ‘safe houses’ but not enough to paint a complete picture… [They include] the Bar Association club. Other known ‘safe houses’ include the Central Bank Employees Club, also located on Baladiya Street, and the Journalists’ Club on Mek Nimir Street. The choice of these clubs is not accidental, but is intended as a humiliation for the groups who have tried to resist the junta. As a sort of extra humiliation, the military have apparently written ‘Human Rights Chamber’ on the door of the room at the Bar Association club where they beat people up.

Political prisoners were not the only victims of the new state. Human-rights violations on a more general scale began early. While I was still in Khartoum in August 1989, Ethiopian refugees were told to report to the security offices, where a number of them were arrested and deported to points outside the capital. These were refugees holding permits to live and work in Khartoum, not illegals. In November 1990, the authorities started to deport displaced southerners (who were Sudanese citizens) as well, dumping them in open country to the south. The combination of the civil disorder that followed, and Sudan’s apparent support for Iraq during the Kuwait crisis, finally persuaded Ibrahim El-Bagir to remove the remaining volunteers from Sudan that month. After many years, the VSO programme in Sudan was closed.

But things were much worse in the south, where the army deployed what were called Popular Defence Forces containing numbers of fundamentalist volunteers. Amnesty International reported that in October/November 1989 at least 44 villagers had been killed by pro-government militias in Keiga Alkhel, northwest of Kadugli; this was probably just the tip of the iceberg. However, there were also reports of massacres not connected with the war. Both Amnesty International and Africa Watch stated that the murder of an Arabic-speaking farmer by Shilluk labourers in White Nile province at the end of 1989 provoked, within three hours, a bloodbath in which by the Government’s own admission 191 Shilluk were killed. (Amnesty International quoted reports that 500 people died.) Arrests were made, but by mid-1990 no charges had been brought. All of this happened within a year or so of the coup; the conflict in Darfur was yet to come.

IV

NOT LONG before the coup I went to the great lake at Khashm el-Girba. Ali and I were researching the income-generating potential of the cooperatives movement, which the Government encouraged. The official at Showak whose task it was to promote this was badly overworked, but despite this he took us to see some of the projects in which he was involved. He was justly proud of what had been achieved. For example, there was a successful fish-farm near Girba, and we went to inspect it. The project had worked, and now help was being extended to the fishermen who were working around the lake, in the hope that their catch could be more widely sold. It was a valuable source of protein.

So we went to see them, too. Four of us crossed the dam in a Toyota Twin-Cab, and then peeled right towards the forest that lined the shore of the lake. It was a black rim on the horizon, and to reach it we had to travel over several kilometres of open plain. The rains had just begun, and the plain was not yet covered in grass; but a little moisture had softened the earth’s crust and the soil crumbled a little under the wheels, making them hiss as we sped along.

We entered the wood quite suddenly, and I gasped, for the grass grew thickly beneath the trees, which were themselves richly clothed in leaves. I felt I wasn’t in a desert land any more, but in parkland by an English country house. Yet there was a difference; here, the vegetation, fed by underground water from the reservoir, was so lush and vivid that it almost hurt to look at it. And in the gaps between the trees it was possible to see a sky so blue against the lurid green of the grass that the day has etched itself upon my memory.

The woods were not empty. Rashaida tents, like carpets strung across poles, and camels could be seen; but the human occupants of the tents were hidden. We passed them quietly and continued down to the shore of the lake, finding our fishermen with difficulty. They had no tent or other shelter, but seemed no less happy for that. They made do with an anquarayb (string bed), a few pots and pans, a bright yellow plastic abrique (a spouted can used for ablutions), and their nets. They slung these last into the back of the Twin-Cab; it was high noon and they would catch little, but they were keen to show us what they could do. They waded into the water off a shallow beach. One held the shore end of the net; the other swam out a hundred yards or so, and dragged the other end of the net round in a great arc before returning to the beach. It was, as I have said, noon; even so they caught a Nile carp for us and gave it to us as a gift. Ali took it home and got the cook to prepare it in the mess-building where he lived.

At one o’clock we made our way back out through the wood, climbing up and down the hummocks in the earth with care, anxious not to get stuck on the damp earth. We emerged onto the plain below a sky that brought to mind the great vaulted dome of a cathedral. For some reason I found myself thinking of a far-off time and place where other fishermen had left their nets to follow the son of a carpenter.

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A journey in Sudan

This is an account of a journey I made 25 years ago last month, on November 14 1987. It is from Even the Dead are Coming, first published in 2009 and now available as an eBook. 

 

WHEN I rose at five, it had been black night; when I left the hotel half an hour later it was light, a very delicate pink from the sun beginning to spread across a pale, luminous blue. It wasn’t cold. It was only mid-November, and the mornings wouldn’t chill you until near Christmas; and then for three or four weeks at most. Still, it was mild, and as I lifted my heavy suitcase down the steps of the small hotel in Abdul Rahman Street, I barely broke into a sweat.

I had no problem hailing a taxi at that hour. People start early in many Third World cities, ready to struggle with overcrowded and irregular buses. The Hillman Arrow that stopped for me dropped me at the main bus station at Souk-el-Shaabi at six-fifteen. It was now quite light, although the buildings and buses were still in shadow. But after another quarter of an hour the sun had risen completely, warming my shoulders through the thin, worn cotton of my shirt. I started to feel better.

I had not been happy earlier. I hadn’t slept much. I knew that there was a tarmac road all the way to the small town near the Ethiopian frontier, making me far luckier than most travellers in Africa. But I was worried about what I would find there; moreover, the sound of the zinc doors of the hotel clanging and scraping had reverberated all night, mingling with the relentless hawking of the Saudi in the room next door. He had either a chest complaint, a revolting habit, or both. My other neighbour was doing something active with a number of steel pails and much fluid, a performance that continued until after three. I suspected he was producing bootleg liquor, prohibition being the law of the land. I don’t think I should have enjoyed drinking with him. He was a sinuous man, rubbery, creepy, hairless, somewhat akin to an eel; I had passed him once or twice in the corridor and felt the tang of evil in his presence, as if he were conjuring up djinns rather than gin or concocting nightmares that, released, would roam the streets of the city, poisoning people’s sleep. After an hour or so I had started to feel uncomfortable, and tossed and turned in bed; I told myself not to be absurd. But then the sounds of shots rang out in Abdel Rahman Street, and continued for half an hour. I was aware of the coup rumours, but felt cheated; surely they might have allowed me a little time to acclimatise? Then I guessed that they were shooting stray dogs, a guess confirmed by a squeal of shock and pain as some unloved animal died in the dust of the pavement, such as it was, outside the hotel. All in all, I closed my eyes for less than an hour.

*** *** ***

SOUK-el-Shaabi bus station lay beyond the busy suburb of Souk Saggana, itself four or five miles from the city centre. Taxi was the only practical way at that time of the morning; I remember that the fare for the ride was S.20, about £2.00, but less than S.40 for the journey by coach that would take me for seven hours down the main artery of the country. And that was itself expensive; I could have done the journey for half the sum although, when I saw some of the buses on the road, I realised that that would have been unwise. There was just one sealed road of any length, and it carried most of the country’s imports. In the north, there was little road; just a railway on which the service was highly irregular. There was just one other strip of sealed road, and that did not go far.

I awaited the bus, surrounded by ragged boys who looked fourteen but, I later realised, were probably four or five years older. They wished to guard my case, see me onto the bus, load my luggage; all of which, I felt, I had best do myself. When at a quarter to seven the bus had not turned up, they became desperate in their search for services they might render me. Exasperated, I gave them cigarettes, which I knew they could trade; raw Cleopatras from Egypt. They fell silent then but stayed close to me, like tick-birds.

Now, the sun was really warm. In two more hours the temperature would pass 100 deg. F in the shade, and there were no clouds in the sky. There would be none until June, seven months hence. I fidgeted. Along with other passengers, I was standing on one of eight or nine pavement-bays near the booking-office; these were where the Western-style coaches stopped to load. But the bus-station was enormous, and already it was crammed with vehicles of every kind. Some, like the blue MAN that would take me, and stood some yards away with no sign of life, were of a type familiar in Europe—albeit a little old. Most of the others were converted pick-up trucks, with rough wooden benches nailed to the back, and covered over with a souk-built framework that reminded me of wrought-iron gates in English suburbia. And then there was the closed, coachbuilt bus on an Austin chassis. Long, high in the back, with multiple rear wheels, it rather resembled the American school buses that were also common here. However, the Austins were immensely powerful, and hunted in packs. I think they must have been powered for the haulage of grain in the desert, then geared up at the differential to allow for their lighter load. Unlike the European coaches, they would cross hundreds of miles of desert in the North, drivers taking their direction from tangled tyre-tracks and occasional, stunted trees.

A few minutes before seven, Souk-el-Shaabi became busier. There were families; middle-aged men in white djellabiyas reaching to the ankles, and sirwals, baggy trousers cut very low in the crotch, beneath. The women, sometimes with tribal scars—horizontal or vertical slashes on their cheeks, looked almost to me as if someone had been at them with cattle-brands; but they wore no chadors. Rather, the city-dwellers wore Fifties-style dresses in bright colours, hidden usually below flowing, transparent toabs—white wraps of finely-spun cotton that reached to the calves, and had hoods that could be lowered onto the shoulders. Their faces were never covered. Older women, and countrywomen, wore similar robes, but of many colours—tie-dyed?—light and thin, but drawn many times around the body. Sometimes, the women seemed very bulky, and moved with excruciating slowness. Later, I realised that the practice of female circumcision sometimes made movement very painful for them.

They made much noise and drank much tea, bought from men who crouched on the ground beside frames of iron that carried charcoal. Always, it seemed, these travellers were laden with possessions. When one goes somewhere, one acquires what cannot be bought at home. So it was here; people have reported passengers staggering aboard the ferry home from Aswan laden with everything from kettles to sofas. Certainly, at Souk-el-Shaabi, they had mattresses, clothes, pots and pans; and I even saw a stereo or two, bound perhaps for some rich merchant’s home in a place where there was power, in more ways than one. Quickly the rooves of the Austins were piled high with booty, from trips to Egypt perhaps? or just to the Libyan Souk across the city.

"Kassala-Kassala-Kassala-KASSALA!”

At first the shouting shook me, piercing the canopy of chatter that arose from the passengers.

“Sennar! Sennar!”

“Rabak! Rabak!"

“Kosti-Kosti-KOSTI!”

The name Kosti I knew, given the town in memory of a Greek merchant, who had arrived to trade in goods and chattels in the days of slavery. Richard Dimbleby says that there was a Greek grocer in Khartoum with General Gordon, but I believe they were there before that.

I listened hard for my own destination, but it seemed that we were forgotten. Then, at five to seven, the blue MAN bus decided it was time to go. It yawned; stretched; scratched itself, and ambled over with a whiff of morning diesel. It was time to join the flow down the artery into the belly of the Sudanese beast.

*** *** ***

KHARTOUM’S suburbs were unlovely. The bus passed down Africa Road between lines of concrete blocks of flats, crudely built and often unfinished. It was the custom, as it was elsewhere, to leave steel wands protruding from the top storey, in case one should later wish to build above. Between buildings and potholed tarmac were wide dusty margins of nothing much, dotted here and there with tea-stands; or the odd boy selling cigarettes from behind a blue plywood box, on top of which there was always a jam-jar holding ‘singles’ for those who preferred to buy that way. Often they did; a packet of 10 costs half a day’s wages for most urban Sudanese.

Abuda refugee settlement, February 1989 (pic: M.Robbins)

There were planning laws in Sudan but everyone ignored them, and many a multi-storey block had been thrown up wherever, maybe on land owned by someone who is quite unaware of the building’s existence. To connect water and telephones, such as they were, without the correct warriga (any bit of bureaucratic bumph in Sudan is called a warriga) was illegal, but of course it happened. The city authorities were aware of the problem and it irked them. Nonetheless Khartoum grew and grew, and straggled deep into the Gezira, the cotton-growing belt to its south-east; so that leaving the city could take an hour or more on empty roads.

After Souk-el-Shaabi, this unattractive mess was strewn with petrol-stations. There are hundreds on the outskirts of Khartoum. But there was rarely much petrol. Even taxis were restricted to four gallons a day, and to get this, they queued. The queues outside a petrol-station could certainly be a mile long on a weekday morning and ran into and beside each other, mile after mile of bright yellow taxis, drivers resigned to spending the first two or three hours of their working day (which may begin at five) waiting for their lifeblood.

Souk-trucks, Khartoum (pic: M. Robbins)

The souk-trucks, too, were preparing for the day. In the hinterland, we passed an enormous dust field with maybe 30 such vehicles, parked with their bonnets up so that the riding-boys could polish the engines. They are beautifully-kept, these souk-trucks, and may rumble on for several decades. They are built mostly on the Bedford TJ chassis; their round, postwar-style cabs are usually a bright royal blue and their bodywork has been painstakingly constructed in the souk, great slabs of steel painted matt-black, studded with a thousand rivets. Sometimes steel hoops protect the cargo, which may be loaded to twice the vehicle’s height. The bodies are extremely heavy, and the lorries are said to be net consumers in the economy, so profligate are they with precious diesoline. But they are impressive, polished to perfection, interiors tastefully upholstered in crushed velvet and hung with tassels; doors cut away and replaced with wooden balustrades as armrests; slogans painted, with care and symmetry, in a million designs that include expressions of religious faith, national flags, eyes; — all overshadowing the drabness of the buses, which offered nothing more than posters of Bob Marley and, more frequently, Michael Jackson in their rear windows. (But whenever we played a tape of Michael Jackson to the Sudanese, they couldn’t stand him.)

Khartoum came to an end eventually. We passed a police checkpoint, where the duty officer glanced inside the coach and saw me; he must have asked the driver where the white face was going and, satisfied, did not ask to see my permit to leave the capital. Later, things would be less relaxed.

We entered the Gezira. The original cotton plantations were irrigated around the time of the first world war, by the British; by the time they left the country in 1955, a million acres were under cultivation. It sounds impressive, but the Sudanese later doubled it. It was indeed impressive now. The price of cotton, however, was not. Still, the earth was rich and brown and amazingly fertile; palms spring, as do acacias; and there was a village every few miles.

It was as we passed these that I regained my sense of place. It was a small thing that did it; it usually is. Every village had its school, and they were not far apart. At eight there was morning assembly, and for some minutes I kept seeing long, neat parallel lines of pupils in bright cotton uniforms, robes and pajama suits of bright blue or orange topped, in the case of the girls, by a white hijab, a cotton headscarf. I regressed 20 years and was with them, my mouth thick with bacon and eggs and the cold breath clouding from me as I stood waiting to do calisthenics in the schoolyard; or my stomach playing up from breakfast as we opened our hymn-books in the oak-beamed hall. Here, they stood in dusty yards under a pale blue sky, but I knew I could have been one of them. But this is how a strange country clicks into place. A mass of curious sounds, beating sun and dust and broken pavements, becomes a man stirring tea with a spoon; or a squad of soldiers running, to barked orders, by the side of a road or a man resignedly reading his paper as he queues for petrol, or simply scratching his arse, like I do.

*** *** ***

AFTER nine, we passed through Hasaheisa. On the night of August 4, 1988, Hasaheisa would be the last dry place I would see on earth. On a bright November morning the previous year, it was the best view I had had so far of the Blue Nile, here nearing the end of its journey from Lake Tana in Ethiopia to the Mogren in Khartoum, where it joins the White Nile from Uganda. Long before that junction it is majestic. A mile wide at Hasaheisa, it was there lined with trees, and a shady wood had grown up above the beach in the town; just opposite was the coach-stop with its restaurants where lumps of lean meat hissed on hot stones heated with charcoal. From Rufa’a, on the opposite bank, came a ferry; its ramp slapped down on the sand, and Toyota pick-ups struggled for the beach, hampered by hordes of white-clad men travelling to the market. Glimpsed; then gone, as was a felucca seen like a snapshot, gliding through the trees. We did not stop at Hasaheisa.

I once read a short story that referred to ‘the stupefying plains of Sudan’. Stupefaction sets in after Hasaheisa. After Wad Medani has slipped past to the right and the bus has climbed the Blue Nile bridge outside that town, there is scarcely a feature in the landscape. It takes about an hour for stupefaction to become complete.

The endless baked-earth plain that accounts for most of Eastern Sudan is not what it appears, but in November the dry season had begun, and it was like a sheet of grey marble broken only by a skein of very fine cracks. Moreover it stretched, uninterrupted, as far as the eye could see, so that one had the impression that the earth had been turned inside-out, and you were crossing what had been the inside and was now the skin. Both earth and sky were infinite, leaving the eye to search for some point of reference—and find none.

Except the mirages. These began at about ten, and seemed always to be on the horizon; at first, I thought that they were lines of trees. They were not simple shimmers such as one sees on an English summer’s day, but great expanses of water floating across the landscape. So realistic were they that reflections of real objects, when there were any, could be seen as they passed. All this somehow added to the heat; by now all the curtains on my side of the bus were closed, so that I could only look out through a small crack by my seat-upright. In fact, the sun did not shine too fiercely into my side of the coach, for Ibrahim had thoughtfully booked me fi’il dol—in the shade; you can save a little money by sitting on the other side of the coach, but you will fry.

I didn’t fry, but the heat touched me and I welcomed the iced water brought round by the driver’s mate. There wasn’t much of it on board, however. Or perhaps it became tepid. I found out later that if something—water, Pepsi—is supposed to be served cold, then the Sudanese will only serve it cold; pride will not permit it to be given any other way, even if you are dying of thirst. So I dried out slowly and watched the empty world slip by outside, only the odd discarded tyre or fanbelt by the side of the road betraying the motion of the coach.

“The world is flat,” I wrote to a friend a week or two later. “I know, because I’ve just fallen off the edge of it.” I might have added that I had discovered a secret of the Creation; that God had baked the earth in a kiln. I knew too that he had forgotten to attend to parts of it afterwards, for I had crossed one such place, and discovered His omission.

*** *** *** 

JEBEL is the Arabic word for either a hill or a mountain; to a European, a jebel is a low hill and that was what these were, barely a hundred and fifty feet. There were a number of them, clustered around that part of the road that twisted through Fau.

This was once the site of one of the biggest refugee camps of them all. A camp, Fau V, still existed, but Fau I and II had vanished in the dust, just three years on from the year of hunger in the Horn of Africa which saw the Tigrayans lead 400,000 of their people across the mountains to Sudan. Later, when they could, they led them back. I did not know this then. But I certainly noticed Fau, for the jebels were hauntingly weird; some round, and some jagged like snaggle-teeth of witches; small ravines full of stones ran down their flanks. One of them, two or three miles from the road, was so distinctive in shape that I dubbed it Cathedral Rock, and in months to come it was a landmark on many journeys that I made along this road.

In the shadow of the jebels, man and beast took shelter from the furnace of the day. This was where I saw my first camels; first just two or three, hobbled, one leg tied in an angle at the knee so that it wouldn’t wander far. Then there were more and more, and there were goats too, and stupid brown sheep with their long, silly tails and ears. Always these animals seemed to be in the care of a single boy, who looked about 10 to me but was probably 14; he was armed with nothing more than a stick, and dressed in a simple white djellabiya. He would squat below a solitary, windswept acacia, if he could find one, and would be alone but for the herd, which might be a hundred strong. I have no idea how he controlled them. Probably he did not know himself, and would have been surprised that anyone should remark upon the matter. Sometimes, he would be at a hafir, an artificial lake or pond 50 or 60 feet across, constructed of banked earth on the surface of the plain. They collected water in the rains, and held them a few weeks—no more; already, after three weeks of drought, they were reduced to a few murky puddles in a bowl of churned earth.

Near Fau we stopped for Pepsi. We had been on the road for four hours and I should have liked to relieve myself, but felt shy about doing so when there was no shelter; and in any case the passengers were fanning out from the tea-shack to pray. I watched them prostrate themselves for a moment before I realised that they were actually squatting to urinate. I decided that the sight of a man standing to do so would provoke curiosity, and decided to wait.

Pepsi was less of a problem. I was befriended by a tall Sudanese, dressed not in djellabiya but in slacks and sandals and Western-style shirt, which is what Sudanese office-workers wear during the day. (The shirts always have collars. No Arabic-speaking Sudanese wears a tee-shirt. Only Southerners of African origin do that.) The man fetched me a Pepsi, and we smoked cigarettes together. As always in that country, I was not allowed to pay.

There were many tumbledown shacks lining the road just south of Fau, and we would see more further east, near Gedaref. They are teahouses and restaurants, with a few shops selling cigarettes and groceries; others sell petrol or jazz (diesel) from 44-gallon drums from which the fuel is pumped by hand. Other shacks were brothels. The Sudanese attitude to prostitution is curious; this is a Moslem society in which premarital sex is unimaginable for a woman (although the rules are broken more frequently than Westerners think). Thus a man obtains sex elsewhere, and does so until he is 30, as marriage is expensive and therefore late. So prostitution is not rare, and is a service industry in which Ethiopian refugees play a serious role.

The truck-stop was, in fact, a good place for a brothel. A lorry-driver’s life in Sudan is a lonely one, and never more so than on the long tarmac road which stretches 1,000 kilometres from Khartoum to Port Sudan. The journey can be completed by coach in 19 hours, often with a single driver, who will go hard to make time. The truckers do likewise. There is an incentive; in 1988 a good truck-driver could earn S.250 for a haul from capital to coast and back. That was then about £75.00 at the official exchange rate. In real terms, given the cost of living, it is worth £250-£300. I heard of one man who regularly did three trips back and forth in a week, so that he must have spent about 120 hours at the wheel. He would, if he kept it up, have netted about S.3,000 a month. The average wage for a teacher or a junior civil servant, both of whom might have had a much-prized degree, was about S.400. There was only one way for many of the drivers to survive such a punishing schedule—dope, or bango; a rolled leaf full of the stuff (which was strong) could be had for about S.35. I was told that many of the lorry-drivers were more or less constantly stoned out of their brains.

Even if this were untrue, fatigue and heat together would have wrought havoc on this road. Every mile or two there seemed to be a burnt-out coach, overturned souk-truck or flattened car. Months later, I travelled to the capital with a colleague from the finance department of our office; he told me of his education—he had been trained as a glass technologist in Bulgaria but for some reason was now a wages clerk. Later we amused ourselves by counting off the wrecks at the side of the road, each crushed pick-up or bleached and mangled mechanical skeleton being greeted with ironic cheers. By the time we passed Wad Medani we had reached 17; at that point, we gave up and discussed Bulgarian glass-blowing techniques instead.

The evidence of carnage did not discourage people from travelling at 150kph and more. At night, you were lucky if a lorry had more than one headlight. That would be pointing in the wrong direction, anyway. Tail-lights were often neglected; a problem, as the big Fiat trailer-trucks often rumbled through the night at 35-40kph or less. Any faster, and the one dim headlight would have been inadequate. But the truckers’ most disconcerting habit was seen when they were standing still. In the event of a breakdown, a cairn would be erected some way behind the disabled vehicle, to warn oncoming drivers. The matter resolved, the truck would pull away, the cairn being left where it was—normally under your sump.

*** *** ***

THE JEBELS passed and there was again nothing to either side of us. There wasn’t even much traffic; it was one, and many drivers had chosen to break their journeys. We had ourselves been travelling for six hours. With the noon came an uncomfortable dryness and a caking of dust upon the face, so that the eyelids felt as stiff as card. The passengers were quiet. Earlier, there had been a cheerful group at the back of the bus. One had cried out: “Sudan niish—aragi!” Sudan finished—aragi! The latter was the local firewater, distilled from dates and, like all alcohol, illegal. Perhaps the cry was for my benefit. But now those passengers, too, were dozing. The sky was pale blue and empty, although I believe that once on that journey I did see a tiny white cloud; I can’t be sure. An empty pan beneath a dome. Such emptiness can panic some people; to others it brings peace.

Occasionally, however, the featurelessness was broken. Every half an hour, we would drift past a small corral of rush fencing, often broken or sagging. Within would be a group of perhaps four or five round straw huts, with conical thatch rooves tied at their peak. The walls of the huts, too, were often thin or damaged. These were called tukls, or goateas, depending on the region. Nothing stirred within the compounds; and there was just nothing there, save for an occasional abrique, a yellow moulded plastic jug with a handle and a long spout. This was used to keep water handy for washing, and was found in every house.

Two things puzzled me about these compounds. The first was the absence of movement or objects; the second, the distance of the compounds from any form of life. The mysteries would be solved. No-one stirs in the midday heat unless they really must, for it is dangerous to expose yourself to it (although labourers do, perforce, during the harvest). As to how anyone could live on a slab of baked earth 80 kilometres from the nearest means of making a living, I would find this out during the rains. Yet the strangeness of such a life never ceased to impress me.

The city of Gedaref came towards us at two. It is a place of 300,000 people, but there are few high buildings; only a massive grain-store that can be seen half an hour away. Gedaref is the granary of Sudan.

We entered the city. My memory is of mile after mile of straggling suburbs consisting of compounds of tukls, the perimeter walls becoming steadily more elaborate as we neared the centre. Simple holes for people to pass through were replaced with slabs of corrugated iron set in crude frames of wood, protruding above hedges of mesquite. These gave way to walls of biriish, matting woven from dura stalks. There were still few people to be seen. Work had finished for the day at half-past one or two, and it was time for lunch, followed by sleep until after four. Then the shops would reopen for several hours. For now, the city of Gedaref was ghostly, but one other thing struck me at once. The taxis: almost without exception, they were royal blue Mark Three Consuls and Zephyrs with sweeping, finned rear wings. Why? I never found out.

We paused for Pepsi and passengers in the shadow of the huge television aerial, surrounded by compounds that had not, essentially, changed in appearance since the time of Elizabeth I. My companion and I drank Pepsi together and chatted as best we could with the 10 or 20 words of Arabic and English we had in common. The language difficulty did not bother us. Together we watched the passengers leaving the coach, hauling luggage slowly through the narrow door, the older, fatter women clumsy as before in their movements. My friend explained that the coach would go to Kassala, but would pass the town of Showak en route, in about 30 or 40 minutes. There I would leave it, if the driver remembered to stop.

The word Showak, a colleague was to tell me, meant yearning. But others said that it meant fork, and indeed it was on a bend in the river Atbara. Showak, yearning or a fork.

The road wound out of Gedaref up a shallow slope, but after five minutes the unrelieved flatness of the land returned. It was not so empty, though. Within 10 minutes a village appeared, and then another; large and prosperous, with squat one-storey brick houses, many large compounds, tractors, and the tall square water tanks with their chequerboard pattern that were a common sight all over the region.

And then there was a wood. This puzzled me. It looked large, but in fact spread only a quarter of a mile on either side of the road, a remnant of the forests and savannahs that had characterised the area until the 1960s. In the woods, herdsmen, for some reason older now, had hobbled their camels for the midday heat, and let their flocks graze in the shade. Often these were goats, whose constant nibbling was destroying what was left of the trees. Some of the men looked villainous, and I was later to learn that this stretch of road was not advised at night—although by then I had already made several journeys down it in the hours of darkness. There was a haze within the woods, and a hint of green; for a moment I couldn’t place it, although I noticed the mixture of red and silver tree-barks, both of which gave gum arabic, and the vegetation on the forest floor. I was curious; it was November 14 and we were 1,000 miles north of the equator. Only later did I realise that the khareej, or rainy season, had just ended, and that the trees were not in bud; rather, the leaves had died and were shrivelling, parched, on the branches. Nothing is ever quite what it appears in Sudan.

*** *** ***

I RECOGNISED the town from the cylindrical water-tanks that towered above the United Nations compound like Wellsian tripods. There was nothing else; I could see few buildings apart from the odd shack. By the time I had realised where we were, the bus was three kilometres up the road, passing the bus-station—itself a series of broken-down shacks in the plain.

“Showak!” I gurgled.

“Showak!” yelled my friend.

“Showak!” cried my neighbour, a clerkly figure in razor-crease slacks and shirt, waking suddenly from the deep sleep in which he had been for the previous four hours.

“Showak! Showak!” yelled everybody, snapping their fingers and stamping their feet to attract the attention of the driver, who, they realised, had forgotten to stop for me. Now he did so, with reluctance, a kilometre or so beyond the bus-station. The riding boy helped me to take my suitcase from the locker in the vehicle’s side. I did not tip him—you do not, in Sudan—but thanked him; he grunted and climbed aboard again, and the blue MAN pulled away, and out of my life forever.

I looked around me. There was no traffic whatsoever. Nothing stirred. The landscape was not so flat as it had been before Gedaref, but it was still plain, and for the most part featureless. I could see the bus-station in the distance, and wondered if I could walk to it with my luggage in the sun that beat down on the parched earth. There was no sound. It was peaceful, as it must be for a chicken when it is finally in the oven.

Far away, a white shape detached itself from the bus-station. It came slowly towards me as I watched, standing in the dust beside the empty road. It did not speed up but approached in third gear, the whining of the transmission coming clearly to me through the emptiness. It was a pick-up truck. I wondered if I had arrived, by mistake, in a small Texan town; and whether the driver wore a stetson.

He wore no stetson, but looked thoroughly evil. He was a driver for the Commissioner for Refugees workshop in the town. He was also, it was said, a part-time secret policeman and was rumoured to carry a gun in his glovebox. I never confirmed this, but he was certainly strangely wealthy, with a penchant for European three-piece suits which he wore on cold winter mornings—the only time when they did not boil him to death. But he was always kind to me.

I digress. I knew nothing, then, of this; nothing indeed about anything much. It was three in the afternoon of Saturday, November 14, 1987. It was 110 deg F in the shade. There was no shade. There was nothing much of anything. I could see no town.

“Oh, my God,” I muttered. “Am I spending two years here?”

Even the Dead are Coming is is now also available as an eBook for Kindle ($2.99 US, £1.84 UK), and in all other eBook formats. There's also an extract from the book in
The Nine Horizons, a collection of Mike Robbins' travel pieces, published in April 2014.

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Fetching water, Karkora refugee settlement, December 1987 (pic: M. Robbins)