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Seven

      THIS IS A NILOTIC MYTH. Once there was a rope from heaven to earth. Anyone who became old climbed up the rope to heaven to be made young again, then climbed back down to earth. One day a hyena and a durra bird climbed up the rope. Knowing the nature of these two guests, God gave instructions that they were to be closely watched and not allowed to return to earth, where they would surely make trouble. Nevertheless, they escaped one night and climbed down the rope. When they were near the earth, the hyena cut the rope. The connection between heaven and earth was thereby severed, and forever after those who grew old had to die, for what had happened could not be made not to have happened.

      What has happened cannot be made not to have happened, and often in Sudan I have felt that what has happened cannot be made to stop happening. The British-Sudanese writer Jamal al-Mahjoub once said that to understand the Sudan you need a layered map like one of those cellophane diagrams of the human body that used to be in encyclopedias. As you peeled away the top piece of cellophane labelled ‘Sudan’, you would find a succession of maps lying underneath. A map of languages, for example, and under that a map of ethnic groups, and under that a map of ancient kingdoms, until, as Mahjoub wrote, ‘it becomes clear the country is not really a country at all, but many. A composite of layers, like a genetic fingerprint of memories that were once fluid, but have since crystallized out from the crucible of possibility, encouraged by the catalyst of the European colonial adventure.’ I have often thought that you need a similar kind of layered map to understand Sudan’s civil war. A surface map of political conflict, for example - the northern government versus the southern rebels; and under that a layer of religious conflict - Muslim versus Christian and pagan; and under that a map of all the sectarian divisions within those categories; and under that a layer of ethnic divisions - Arab and Arabized versus Nilotic and Equatorian - all of them containing a multitude of clan and tribal subdivisions; and under that a layer of linguistic conflicts; and under that a layer of economic divisions - the more developed north with fewer natural resources versus the poorer south with its rich mineral and fossil fuel deposits; and under that a layer of colonial divisions; and under that a layer of racial divisions related to slavery. And so on and so on until it would become clear that the war, like the country, was not one but many: a violent ecosystem capable of generating endless new things to fight about without ever shedding any of the old ones.

      Not that I had any idea of all this when I first arrived in Sudan in 1988, clutching a plastic shopping bag full of newspaper articles about the war in Sudan, the war in Ethiopia and the war in northern Somalia - the whole mess that was the Horn of Africa. It was February, the month the Nuer call ‘Fire’. ‘Welcome to the seventh circle of hell,’ a morose and sweaty Iranian at the UN press office told me by way of greeting. I was twenty-six years old. It was my first foreign assignment for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper had embarked on a long-term project looking at famine in the Horn of Africa. I was in the country to write about the mass starvation that the US State Department claimed was about to cause tens of thousands of people in nearby Soviet-backed Ethiopia to seek refuge in Sudan.

      I knew that Sudan itself had suffered a few years earlier from the same famine that struck Ethiopia in 1984-5. My Khartoum hotel, the Acropole, had been the nerve centre of the relief effort. So many aid workers had stayed there in 1985 that journalists dubbed it the ‘Emergency Palace’. On the wall of the hotel office was a letter from Bob Geldof teasing the three Greek brothers who owned the Acropole about their ‘empire’. But I did not think much was happening in the Sudan now. Sudan in early 1988 had fallen out of the news. Two years earlier, in 1986, the United Nations had warned that another famine was developing in the south. The Mahdi’s great-grandson, the democratically elected Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, responded by expelling the UN secretary-general’s special representative to Sudan and closing much of the south to foreigners. Meanwhile the southern rebels threatened to shoot down any aeroplanes, including those carrying relief, that flew into the south. Since then the international press seemed to have forgotten Sudan’s wars and famines.

      So the Sudan Times came as a surprise to me. Written in English by southern Sudanese and printed on cheap brown paper, it came each morning at the Acropole along with fruit, eggs and cereal. Its lurid black headlines reported such apocalyptic goings-on that I used to cast a covert eye around the dining hall to see how my fellow guests were taking their morning news.

      TWO MILLION IN DANGER OF STARVATION IN BAHR EL-GHAZAL

      ARMY ACCUSED OF TORTURING CIVILIANS IN KURMUK AND GISSEN

      FOUR RELIEF AGENCIES EXPELLED FROM THE SOUTH

      125,000 IN DANGER OF STARVATION AS MALAKAL RUNS OUT OF FOOD

      No one ever looked alarmed. Two ancient Sudanese waiters in turbans and long blue robes padded across the black-and-white parquet floor, silently pouring coffee. The ceiling fans creaked, and the dozen or so guests murmured to one another. They were mostly European and American relief workers, although later I met a few more exotic characters, like the ancient Pole who once stepped out of his room into the atrium and fell down face forward, stark naked and reeking of illegal vodka, or the squat coal-black Ugandan with the bloodshot eyes who told me over spaghetti and meatballs that he was in Khartoum shopping for surface-to-air missiles. Shocking reports of torture and starvation, polite requests to please pass the butter: Breakfast at the Acropole gave me my first inkling of the weirdly seductive contrast between Sudan’s hot and sleepy silence and the murderous events rippling underneath it.

      I wanted to go straight to the Ethiopian border, but journalists needed permission from the government to travel outside the capital. Each morning after breakfast, I presented myself at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a shabby reinforced-concrete building with outdoor walkways that looked like a spectacularly dilapidated American motel. I usually made it over to the Ministry of Information at least once a day, too. Sadiq al-Mahdi’s government was threatening to expel all the Ethiopian refugees from Sudan if UNHCR did not pay the Sudanese government more to administer their camps. Before they would approve my trip to the east, the Sudanese insisted that I listen to a long series of background interviews about the alleged stinginess of UNCHR.

      They were a handsome breed, these Sudanese officials sipping their hot, spice-scented tea behind battered metal desks while their gorgeous secretaries sat outside examining the henna designs on their hands and winding and rewinding long white Sudanese veils called taubs. Most of them were northerners, coppery Muslims with high cheekbones and long, elegant fingers who spoke a mellifluous Arabic. Few bore the tribal marks or scarification so common in the south and the west. I spent so much time waiting around in their offices and I became so tired of hearing about their currency-exchange disputes with UNHCR that I started asking them about the stories in the Sudan Times. I noticed they had a way of brushing off questions about the war in the south with a flick of their scarves. ‘Malesh,’ they would say. ‘It is a very sad and complicated problem. It goes on.’

      But then the Sudanese seemed to take everything with the same slightly melancholy, slightly self-mocking good humour. I could see why they were famous for their charm. They punctuated every statement of action with the caveat ‘Inshallah’, or ‘God willing’; when the electricity flickered off, as it did at least once every day, they ignored it. Telephones almost never worked. I rattled around in a taxi, leaving notes for officials, making appointments to make appointments, but mostly I wasted my time. Government offices opened at eight a.m., but not long after that everyone took a break for morning prayers. Then around ten o’clock they went off for a breakfast of ful, or bean stew. At one p.m. it was time for lunch and siesta. In theory employees returned after four p.m. for another three hours of work. In practice I usually found myself back at the Acropole in the early afternoon, the official day over.

      The hotel was located in the centre of the old British town that had been laid out in spacious avenues by Lord Kitchener after the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan in 1898. Sometimes I took a walk after lunch past the old British railway and the great brown mosque, with the men standing out front in tattered jallabiyas and skullcaps, selling melons and tooth-cleaning sticks. At the railway station, a line of empty cattle cars stood on the track, their open doors gaping stupidly at the Sudanese women tripping through the midday heat like so many birds-of-paradise in their

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