LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

she wasn’t afraid to admit she was here because she wanted to be here. She and I exchanged pleasantries, nothing more, and when I turned around to pick up my backpack, the man with the pink flowers in his ears had disappeared. I never saw him again, and I didn’t see Emma again for a long time. Frank didn’t take her picture, and I didn’t write about her in my notebook. But as the plane took off, I began to think about her for another reason that had nothing to do with clothes. I knew that she had been working closely with the SPLA’s ‘education coordinator’, a man called Lul Kuar Duek, to reopen Nasir’s schools. I myself had spent days in Nasir interviewing Lul about his plans for the schools. He had claimed to be a great friend of Emma’s. He was the kind of man the Nuer used to call a black Turuk, a name they took from Ottoman Turks who first introduced the Nuer to modernity when they invaded a century and a half earlier and that now extended to anyone who could read and write and wore clothes. Like most Nuer, Lul was dark as a panther, tall and thin with a narrow head and a loping walk. He was a former schoolmaster and an elder in the local Presbyterian church. He was also a bore and a bully. In the afternoons, he would drink Ethiopian gin out of a bottle and lecture me in his straw shack about the martyred American president John F. Kennedy and why southern Sudan was so backward and anything else that came into his mind. ‘The stage we are at now is the stage of the European in the stone age. We are in the age of stones,’ he would say, pointing his finger at me. ‘And you! You be careful. You should know you are talking to someone who knows everything.’

      Lul’s baby son slept in a hammock next to his father’s automatic rifle during these conversations, and Lul would frequently offer to give him up for the cause of liberating Sudan from the domination of the Islamic government in the north. ‘Even this boy, he shall fight! Even if he should die! Even if it should take a hundred years…’ He recited the SPLA’s slogans with noisy fervour, insisting that the south would never settle for secession but would fight until the whole country had a new, secular government, though he was to be equally enthusiastic less than a year later when his fellow Nuer commander led a mutiny against SPLA leader John Garang on the grounds that the south ought to give up trying to change the north and start fighting for southern independence.

      Like everyone else in Nasir, Lul was obsessed with a prophecy from the Book of Isaiah that he and the others believed foretold the future of southern Sudan. Whenever he had got about halfway through one of his gin bottles, he would wipe his hands on his red polyester trousers, take out the Bible from the crate beside his bed and start banging his hand on it. ‘It is all here - it is written!’ he would announce. Frank and I would exchange weary glances. ‘Isaiah eighteen. God will punish Sudan. People will go to the border with Ethiopia. “The beasts of the earth and the fowls shall summer upon them and all the beasts of the earth shall winter upon them.” I have seen all this come to pass. But it says that in the end we shall have a new Sudan.’

      Lul was talking about the years in which hundreds of people had starved to death or been killed in the fighting around the town before the SPLA captured it from the government in 1989. Even then I wondered how Emma could stand it, handing out pencils to Nasir’s surviving children, while Lul raved on about fighting for another hundred years to make a new Sudan out of that blinding emptiness. I always made sure that Frank was with me before I went to visit Lul in his grass hut. But according to Lul, he and Emma got along famously. In fact, Lul was more interested in telling me about Emma than about the schools he was supposed to be running. ‘You know, Em-Maa’ - he pronounced her name with a satisfied smack - ‘is just like one of us. She walks everywhere without getting tired. She is bringing us so many things we need, like papers and chalks and schoolbooks. You people should know, our commander likes Em-Maa very much. Very much! And she likes him! She has been here, looking for him.’ Underneath the praise, there was something leering in his voice.

      It was hard to imagine why my newspaper would want to know about an SPLA commander’s feelings towards a low-level British aid worker, and so I paid very little attention to Lul’s lewd suggestions. But when I learned, six months later, that in fact Emma McCune had married Lul’s commander, Riek Machar, the one who had ‘liked Em-Maa very much’, I remembered the mingling of lust and envy and contempt in Lul’s voice, and I felt obscurely frightened. Naturally I knew of ‘Dr Riek’, as the southern Sudanese called him. He was another black Turuk, but with a PhD from Bradford Polytechnic in England that made him the best-educated Nuer within the ranks of the SPLA. Westerners found him unusually smooth and affable, but we also knew that he was part of a violent and secretive guerrilla movement that was capable of the most ruthless cruelty. The news of Emma’s marriage provoked a surprising jumble of emotions in me. At twenty-seven she was just two years younger than I. I knew her only slightly, but the world of the khawaja - the Sudanese Arabic term for white people - is a small one, and she and I shared many friends and acquaintances among the aid workers, journalists and diplomats in Sudan. The same interesting British couple who had helped Emma get her job with Street Kids International, Alastair and Patta Scott-Villiers, had given me the tip two years earlier that led to my first big story in Sudan. A few days after I returned to Nairobi from Nasir in 1990, the Scott-Villierses had invited me to join Emma and a bunch of other people who were spending Christmas at Mombasa on the Kenyan coast (an invitation I had to decline, as I spent the holidays working in Khartoum that year). I had been writing about Sudan, off and on, for three years: it was the deepest and furthest part of my experience. Now here was Emma going deeper and further than I had ever dreamed of going, crossing over from the khawaja world into a liberation army led by men like Lul and the scarred gunmen at the airport, men responsible for some of the horrors she had been trying to alleviate as an aid worker. What, I wondered, had driven her to take such an extreme step? Later, after it was all over, I got the idea that her story might shed some light on the entire humanitarian experiment in Africa. Or at least on the experiences of people like me, people who went there dreaming they might help and came back numb with disillusionment, yet forever marked.

       Part One

       My first impressions of Sudan were rather blurred and uncertain; I was so much more interested in myself than I was in my surroundings.

      — Edward Fothergill, Five Years in the Sudan, 1911

       Chapter One

      AID MAKES ITSELF out to be a practical enterprise, but in Africa at least it’s romantics who do most of the work - incongruously, because Africa outside of books and films is hard and unromantic. In Africa the metaphor is always the belly. ‘He is eating from that,’ Africans will say, and what they mean is that is how he gets his living. African politics, says the French scholar Jean-François Bayart, is ‘the politics of the belly’, The power of the proverbial African big man depends on his ability to feed his followers; his girth advertises the wealth he has to share. In Africa the first obligation of kinship is to share food; and yet, as the Nuer say, ‘eating is warring’. They tell this story: Once upon a time Stomach lived by itself in the bush, eating small insects roasted in brush fire, for Man was created apart from Stomach. Then one day Man was walking in the bush and came across Stomach. Man put Stomach in its present place that it might feed there. When it lived by itself, Stomach was satisfied with small morsels of food, but now that Stomach is part of man, it craves more no matter how much it eats. That is why Stomach is the enemy of Man.

      In Europe and North America, we have to look in the mirror to see Stomach. ‘Get in touch with your hunger,’ American diet counsellors urge their clients. Hunger is an option. Like so much else in the West, it has become a question of vanity. That is why some in the West ask: Is it Stomach or Mirror that is the enemy of Man? And Africa - Africa is a mirror in which the West sees its big belly. The story of Western aid to Sudan is the story of the intersection of the politics of the belly and the politics of the mirror.

      It’s a story that began in the nineteenth century much as it seems to be ending in the twenty-first, with a

Скачать книгу