LITMIR.BIZ

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Ethiopia’s northern provinces of Tigre and Wollo in 1973. Still others had been in this part of Sudan since the 1960s. The Eritrean camps, which were the oldest, had the best facilities. Over the years, some Eritreans had been able to build flat-roofed mud houses with painted metal doors like those of the Sudanese who lived in the region. It was possible to find an acacia tree or two in the Eritrean camps. More commonly the refugees found shelter from the sun in the round thatched tukuls they made out of mud and sticks and plastic sheeting donated by the aid agencies. The tukuls were set off with little fences made of thorn. They could be surprisingly cosy inside, with Ethiopian needlework hung on the walls and tea-kettles bubbling on the charcoal stoves that the refugees made out of tin cans. Beyond the camps were the graves of the dead, an endless expanse of mounds that rippled out into the desert, seemingly all the way to Ethiopia. The Tigreans and Tigrinya-speaking Eritreans, who were Christian, put crosses on their graves. The Muslim Eritreans covered theirs with thorn bushes. The sand swallowed up both with equal indifference.

      The camps teemed with political intrigues; what the West saw as purely humanitarian acts were never viewed as such in Showak. Anything the aid agencies gave to one camp was assumed to be intended to benefit whatever ethnic or political group was in charge there. Emma soon learned that each liberation group had its foreign backers, even its foreign groupies. There were always rumours of secret deals and deliveries; somebody was always paying somebody else off. One day Saudi Arabia was supposed to be sending the EPLF a lorryload of new AK-47s hidden beneath sacks of grain and milk powder. Another time she heard about a US embassy official who had been seen meeting with members of the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Alliance. Then a group of stubble-chinned Frenchmen who said they were journalists but whom the Sudanese suspected were spies were seen hanging around town for a few days, waiting to cross the border with the TPLF on one of the rebels’ secret runs into Ethiopia.

      The human consequences of this skulduggery were plain for Emma to see. Every third or fourth tukul contained its legless or armless young man; at any tea shop, she could find a table of war veterans smoking and arguing furiously in Tigrinya or Arabic. After big battles inside Ethiopia, the wounded would come flowing back from the event into Sudan by cover of darkness, like a kind of human sonic boom. The next morning she saw them lying in their bloody bandages on the stretchers their comrades had used to carry them down from the mountains. The camps were full of disease - malaria and tuberculosis above all - as well as suffocating idleness. The Ethiopians were forbidden to work in Sudan. Many Ethiopians worked illegally anyway in towns like Kassala and Gedaref and Khartoum, but they were subject to periodic round-ups called kasha in which they might be returned to the camps, if not imprisoned. The local Sudanese envied them their free food and medical care, but the camps were hardly havens of safety. Occasionally one would hear the sound of gunfire. Rival factions would assassinate each other’s members. Murderous rivalries broke out among hungry, bored people crowded into small spaces.

      But to khawajas of a certain temperament, Showak’s appeal was all the more alluring for being less than obvious. (And in this self-enclosed world, Emma was quickly assigned a place: From the moment she set foot outside the administration compound, dancing children followed her wherever she went, pointing and shouting, ‘Khawaja! Khawaja! Khawaja!’ Her nationality and her pro-African sympathies meant little to the refugees, just as their nationality - Ethiopian - and their political sympathies - democratic, Marxist, royalist - meant little next to their more fundamental ethnic and religious loyalties. To them, she was a white woman, plain and simple.) From a Western point of view, the refugees were so pitiful, so poor, so utterly bereft that it seemed as if almost anything one did for them would help. The rush, the thrill, the excitement of living on the edge in itself gave the aid workers an excuse for all sorts of wildness that would never have been tolerated in their own countries. What was tedious for the refugees could be exciting for expatriates. Here as in the rest of Africa, khawajas were forever turning to one another to say, with pleased surprise, ‘Did you know my brother is a stockbroker?’ - and then smiling in mutual satisfaction for having escaped such a fate. And in Emma’s case, there was the haunting sense of kinship she felt with the Sudanese - the sensation that, in Sudan, she had come home.

      But a haze of suspicion hung over Westerners in Showak. In the nearby Tawawa camp not far from Showak, Emma met some of the Ethiopian Jews left behind a few years earlier when Israel managed to spirit away some 16,000 falashas, as the Ethiopians called them. It had been against the stated policy of Sudan to assist the Jewish state in any way, but with American help the Israelis spread around enough cash that they were able to land a plane more than once outside Showak and load the Ethiopian Jews onto it. Ahmed Karadawi had often pointed to the Ethiopian Jews as another case of Western hypocrisy, noting that US and Jewish charities raised $300 million to finance Operation Moses, the most dramatic of the Israeli airlifts, and care for its 8,000 beneficiaries - ten times the amount raised in the United States at the height of the famine to care for 600,000 refugees remaining in Sudan. When news of the falasha affair broke, the Sudanese media portrayed it as an outrageous violation of Sudanese sovereignty by a conspiracy of Zionists, CIA agents and humanitarian agencies. The outcry helped lead to Nimeiri’s downfall. In the trials and investigations that followed, several refugee administrators lost their jobs. Those who remained tended to view the khawaja commotion over the famine in Ethiopia as a smokescreen for the West to pursue its own interests, such as aiding Israel and making the Soviet Union look bad.

      Emma’s Sudanese friends assumed she would have no trouble finding a job with one of the Western aid agencies. Zaroug and the others were forever complaining about the arrogant young foreigners who ran so many of the refugee programmes. Just as the Victorians in the nineteenth century trusted Gordon and Baker more than the Egyptians to carry out their anti-slavery agenda in Sudan, so twentieth-century North Americans and Europeans trusted their own nationals more than Africans to carry out their schemes for African improvement. Frustrated by what they perceived as the inefficiency and corruption of African governments, they channelled an increasing amount of their aid through private, non-governmental organizations such as World Vision and Oxfam. The overseas aid workers were often hired not for their knowledge of Africa but for their familiarity with Western ideas about what should be done for Africa. In the 1980s, that meant concepts such as women’s rights and ‘grassroots development’.

      In the eyes of the Sudanese, the Western aid agencies’ preference for hiring khawaja over Sudanese managers looked at best like a case of tribal favouritism, at worst like a neocolonial plot. To them, these university-educated Europeans and Americans seemed painfully incompetent. Few spoke any of the languages of Sudan or Ethiopia. They seldom knew anything about the way the refugees had lived back at home. They were hardly capable of penetrating the internecine politics of the camps. They outraged local mores with their clothes and their music.

      Volunteers hired in their home countries to work for organizations like Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) for about $100 a month, lived closest to the people. Their stipend was still almost four times the average annual Sudanese income of $360. After gaining some experience, however, expatriates who liked the life could graduate to better-paying jobs with an established charity such as Oxfam or Concern or CARE. At the top of the aid caste system were the high-ranking UN officials and Western diplomats in charge of dispensing the government money that kept the whole system operating. They did not visit the camps often, being busy in Khartoum with logistics and paperwork, but they sailed back and forth in air-conditioned vehicles between their offices and walled villas with cooks and gardeners. The United Nations and its specialized agencies such as UNHCR and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) regarded Sudan as a hardship post. In addition to an annual salary of $50,000 to $100,000, such expatriate officials in the country received a per diem of $100 a day. To obtain one of these jobs, certification from a Western university in development studies or refugee affairs was usually the ticket. The aid workers in Showak welcomed Emma to their Friday-night rooftop parties. But with a degree in art history and no aid experience, she didn’t have the credentials for them to hire her.

      After a month in the east, she gave up looking for work in Showak and went to Khartoum. In the capital, she found a short-term position funded by the VSO, teaching English and art to children at an Italian convent school. Initially she hoped to extend her contract. But the sprawling Sudanese

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