LITMIR.BIZ

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veils. Washing hung out the windows of the sandstone British hospital across the street, and cats yowled from the roof. The main building of the Acropole had originally been part of a commercial arcade. Across the street, a hotel annex was located in an office building built around the time Sudan gained its independence. An abandoned shopping plaza at the end of the same street was littered with empty plastic bags. Clearly someone had once anticipated lots of Western visitors with hard currency in this part of town. But whoever it was had long gone.

      The dirty windows of the little tourist shops in the arcade were piled high with unsold ivory carvings. When a dust storm blew up, the sandy streets seemed to swirl up into the sky, and the buildings merged into one another like the shapes in a brown dream. The whole colonial city seemed half abandoned, faded and crumbling and going back to sand, like the ancient pyramids in the deserts farther north that I had read about. Government offices, the foreign embassies and foreign clubs were still located on the south bank of the Blue Nile along with Gordon’s reconstructed palace. But the crowds, the construction, and the life of the Sudanese metropolis had moved across the river to Omdurman, the mud-walled stronghold of the Mahdi, and to Khartoum North, the new suburb where the aid agencies and wealthy Sudanese were building houses behind walls edged with jagged glass. Khartoum proper was quiet, so quiet that in the afternoon you could stand in the shimmering heat and hear nothing but the rustling of litter in the streets.

      I would go back to the Acropole and sit under the fans in the atrium reading back issues of the Sudan Times, smoking cigarettes and drinking the tangy red hibiscus tea the Sudanese call karkaday. After a while, one of the relief workers might come over and start talking in a hushed voice, and in this way I began to learn a bit more about the war in the south. The SPLA leader John Garang was a Dinka, and the Dinka, the single largest people in the south, formed the mainstay of the rebellion. The Khartoum élite supplied southern and western tribes hostile to the Dinka with machine guns and encouraged them to form militias to raid the Dinka for cattle and, some whispered, even for women and children. The reward for the militias was the booty they captured and, in the case of Muslims, the promise of paradise. There was an Arabic saying that summed up the strategy of the northern élite: ‘Use a slave to catch a slave.’ The south and its borderlands were divided among many tribes, many militias. Baggara, Toposa, Murle, Fertit, Didinga, Ruf’aa, Nuer, Latuka, Acholi - it was hard to keep them straight. The region was also home to smaller, weaker peoples who had no weapons at all, peoples like the Uduk, the Berti, the Bongo and the Moru. They were everyone’s victims. For the Sudan People’s Liberation Army did its share of raiding, too, in the areas it controlled, and those areas were growing.

      There were more modern things to fight about: oil, water and uranium, as well as education and the elusive development often promised and never delivered. The war had started about many grievances, and the longer it went on, the more it collected. It was an ugly business of robbery and revenge, and the army presided over it, disavowing the deeds of the militias in public and working with them in private. Some officers were making a fortune, colluding with merchants in the closed garrison towns of the south to jack up the price of grain and to smuggle out ebony, ivory, rare animals and anything else of value.

      Southern refugees were pouring into the capital by the hundreds every day. No one knew exactly how many there were altogether, but the UN guessed it to be around 700,000. The Nilotes, who made up most of the refugees, were visibly different: aubergine black, taller than most northerners - quite a few Nilotic men as well as some women stand well over six feet five inches tall - and with shorter and crinklier hair, extraordinarily high cheekbones, and facial scars. The Nilotic men wore on their foreheads the distinctive Shilluk raised dots or the parallel marks of the Nuer and some Dinka. Their lower incisors were removed; many decorated other parts of their bodies with cicatrices. They walked with the loping gait of rural people accustomed to travelling by foot. I was told that in the south they might have worn little besides beads and perhaps a pair of shorts, but here in the Arab capital they dressed in ragged Western cast-offs. Their sullen demeanour set them apart as much as their clothing. The Arabic-language newspapers called them ‘traitors’ and accused them of bringing disease, alcohol and prostitution to the city. Since the southerners had not crossed an international boundary, they had no legal right to protection from international agencies such as the UNHCR. Regarding them as a potential fifth column for the SPLA, the government discouraged private relief groups from working in their camps, although some groups did anyway. Once I learned how to recognize the southerners, I saw them everywhere: dusty little boys selling cigarettes outside the Acropole, broad-shouldered women washing clothes in buckets outside Arab houses, statuesque Dinka doormen at the Hilton Hotel.

      The government and the SPLA were engaged in a dance of negotiation at the time over Sadiq al-Mahdi’s campaign promise to repeal sharia law. At the same time, the Arabic-language newspapers were full of gossip about al-Mahdi’s desire to form a coalition government with his brother-in-law Hassan al-Turabi’s hard-line party, the National Islamic Front (NIF). Al-Mahdi’s flirtation with the NIF, whose entire programme centred on creating an Islamic state, cast doubt on the sincerity of his promises to rescind sharia. But the first southern refugees I ever asked about the war said little about Islam or Christianity. Instead they told me they had been driven off their land because the northerners wanted the oil underneath it. An American named Bob who worked for Save the Children had invited me to come with him on a visit to one of the southern squatter camps outside Khartoum. Right after breakfast we climbed into his Land Cruiser and drove over the bridge across the White Nile to a big camp on the other side of Omdurman called Hillat Shook. From the bridge, I could see Omdurman’s minarets and the shining gold dome of the Mahdi’s tomb. We passed residential districts surrounded by high walls studded with broken glass, industrial areas, a camel market, desert strewn with rubbish. On the outskirts of the city, the road petered out, and we bumped onto a dirty expanse of sand. Finally we reached a vast refuse dump over which hung a whitish, chemical-smelling fog of smoke. In the midst of the rubbish, people milled around hundreds of low, round igloo-like huts made from scraps of cardboard and plastic sheeting and burlap. This was Hillat Shook.

      Bob and I got out and started picking our way through broken glass and twisted metal towards the huts. Some tall, bony men came out, waving their arms and shouting at us. Bob said they were speaking Dinka. ‘I hope they aren’t drunk,’ he said under his breath. The men pulled us by the arms towards one of the huts. They did smell of merissa, the local beer, and I wondered about that, because alcohol was illegal in Sudan under Islamic law. But they seemed sober enough. Outside the hut a woman appeared to be cooking something over a burning tyre. Despite the awful smell and industrial debris, the scene was recognizably African. To my citified mind, it looked as if an avant-garde artist had been given the task of creating an African village out of toxic waste materials. I crouched down and crawled inside the hut behind one of the men. It stank of shit and sweat and burning rubber. A naked old man lay on the dirt floor. His eyes were open but covered with a thick whitish film. A woman squatting next to him in a faded floral cotton dress spoke imploringly to me, wringing her wrinkled hands. I couldn’t understand a word she said.

      Outside I could hear Bob talking to a man who knew some English. Bob seemed to be explaining that we were not doctors.

      A gurgling sound came from the old man’s throat. His foot jerked, then lay still.

      The woman, who had been looking at me expectantly, began to wail. People crowded into the hut. They jabbered angrily. I backed out, making apologetic signs.

      I’ve told them you are a journalist, Bob said when I emerged. This man is ready to talk to you.

      I took out my notebook with relief. Taking notes I knew how to do. A gaunt old fellow dressed in what appeared to be a dirty white nightshirt came forward. He carried a large stick. The men who had dragged me and Bob over to the hut set down some wooden crates for the three of us to sit on. Surrounded by a noisy and ever-growing crowd of Dinka, the old man began to tell us his story. Another man attempted to translate. The old man spoke with passion and vigour, often thumping the ground with his stick for emphasis. The listening crowd shouted added details at key points in his story. All the while the woman inside the hut kept up her monotonous wailing. The smoke from the tyre burned my nostrils and made my head ache. All I could make out through the translation was that the man

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