LITMIR.BIZ

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of Africa’s traditional religions have virtually none at all. Nevertheless Nimeiri continued his drift to the right. Naming Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of the Muslim brotherhood, as his attorney general, he embarked on a programme of making Sudan’s laws more Islamic. He set aside his safari suit and began appearing at Friday prayers in the mosque in the skullcap and jallabiya of a Muslim scholar.

      Then in 1978 Chevron struck oil just north of the town of Bentiu, in a mixed Nuer-Dinka area a little south of the north-south border. The oil well was located on a spot known as Pan Thou, or ‘thorn tree’, in the Nuer language. In a move suspicious southerners saw as a clue to Arab plans to seize the southern oil, Chevron and the government insisted on changing the Dinka name of the spot to Heglig, the Arabic name for the same tree. Extracting Heglig’s oil was to prove thornier than the company ever realized. Chevron had confined most of its dealings to the central government. But under the terms of the Addis Ababa agreement, the southern regional government was to receive the revenues from any minerals or other deposits found on southern land. Rather than see that happen, Nimeiri and his Islamist attorney general in 1980 tried to change the boundaries between north and south so that the land under which the oil and uranium lay would belong to a new northern province that the government named Unity. The south erupted in riots, and the president backed down. But the tension and mutual distrust kept mounting.

      In the Bentiu area near the oil fields, angry Nuer men formed themselves into a militia they called Anyanya II; small clashes broke out in various parts of the south. In 1983 a battalion of southern soldiers stationed in the town of Bor mutinied over a pay dispute with their commanders. Colonel John Garang, a taciturn Dinka army officer with a PhD from Iowa State University, was sent to mediate. Instead, Garang fled with the men of the 105th Battalion across the border into Ethiopia. From there he urged the Sudanese to rise up against Nimeiri’s government as part of his newly formed Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). This time, Garang said, the south and its allies would fight not for independence but for a secular, socialist Sudan. A few months later Nimeiri imposed an unusually harsh version of sharia law on all of Sudan. The civil war was on again.

      Ethiopia welcomed Garang and his mutineers, just as it had embraced the southern Sudanese rebels of the 1960s. Ethiopia’s wars and famines were a mirror image of those in Sudan; the same whirring cycle of disaster had rekindled that country’s civil war. For a short while after the signing of the Addis Ababa agreement, the Ethiopian government had gained the upper hand in its battles with the Eritrean rebels. Then famine struck northern Ethiopia in 1973. A widely publicized BBC broadcast accused Emperor Haile Selassie of having ignored the famine. The United States and Europe withdrew the aid that had propped up his regime. A Marxist military regime seized power, and Sudan resumed its support for Eritrea. With Sudanese support, a variety of new Eritrean and Tigrean groups opposed to Ethiopia’s government sprang up in the refugee camps on the border.

      Like most Africans, Emma’s friend Karadawi took it as obvious that to feed and house people on one side of a conflict was to help that side. He considered the UN agencies’ pretensions to neutrality a laughable bit of Western hypocrisy. In Sudan he had been one of the first to suggest that the government recognize the humanitarian wings of the rebel armies fighting in Eritrea and neighbouring Tigre province, allowing them to raise funds and import materials just like every other foreign relief organization. In Oxford, Karadawi had gained a certain fame for his willingness to criticize all sides involved with aiding Sudan. When he and Emma met in 1985, President Nimeiri was refusing to ask for international assistance even though thousands of people in western Sudan were starving. A BBC journalist asked Karadawi where the fault lay, and he did not hesitate. ‘With the government,’ he replied. At the same time, he was engaged in writing a doctoral dissertation arguing that the West had turned refugee aid into a self-perpetuating industry that often did more harm than good in Sudan. His colleague Barbara Harrell-Bond ultimately incorporated many of his insights in her book, Imposing Aid. Alex de Waal, a fellow student at Oxford with Karadawi, is today Britain’s best-known critic of humanitarian aid. De Waal credits Karadawi with inspiring him. He dedicated his 1997 book Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa to Karadawi.

      Karadawi could go on for hours brilliantly analysing the Islamic concept of barakat, or ‘blessings’ - the wealth and power that naturally flow to the pious - always with cigarette in hand. In 1985 a group of army officers overthrew Nimeiri but refused to dismantle the sharia law he had enacted. It was going to be much harder to get rid of Islamic law than it had been to get rid of Nimeiri, Karadawi predicted. Islam, he said, was a genie that would not go back into the lamp. He explained that Islamist politicians would accuse any Muslim who tried to revoke Islamic law of being an apostate, a crime punishable by death under sharia. Meanwhile the abolition of Islamic law remained the key demand of the southern rebels. The officers who had seized power wanted to hold elections, but Garang and his SPLA refused to participate unless a constitutional conference was held to decide the place of religion and ‘nationalities’ in Sudan. The officers, mostly conservative Muslims, refused. When a vote was held in 1986, the Islamic parties were the winners. Karadawi told Emma that this probably spelled the end of any peace talks for a while. ‘Malesh,’ he would exclaim, using the half-amused, half-bitter Arabic expression that means something like ‘What a pity!’ but can also mean ‘So sorry’ and ‘Too bad’.

      Karadawi introduced Emma to many of the young Africans studying at Oxford University. Heirs to the university’s tradition of training colonial elites, the Africans tended to come from the most privileged families in their own countries. Some were hereditary chiefs. Most had held or were on their way to holding top positions in their governments or armed forces-perhaps with the next coup. In their papers and in their seminars, they spoke of economic development and the need for democracy and institution building. But in private they talked of power as a family affair, a game of intrigue, honour and greed into which they had been born and in which they might well die.

      Emma had never shown any interest in ideology, though as an art student she had disavowed her father’s Conservatism. The left-leaning political opinions she voiced could have come straight out of the pages of The Guardian. She felt a little insecure in the highly intellectual environment of the refugee programme. But Karadawi assured her that as an artist she had at least as much to offer refugees as the so-called experts who were always blathering on about ‘early warning systems’ or ‘coordination planning’. ‘Most of the refugees in Sudan can’t read. You can use your pictures to teach them,’ he told her, one friend remembers. In any event, it was not a political programme that attracted her to the world of Karadawi and his friends. It was more like the high drama of it all, the almost Shakespearean sense that, behind the sham parties and borrowed ideologies, character is all. A few people, some of them her friends, might decide the fate of whole countries. She could speak as glibly as anyone else about the need for refugee participation and grassroots involvement, but her friends believe that, inside, she thrilled to the stories of kings and queens, prophets and warriors, heroes and villains.

      Karadawi never discussed his relationship with Emma, but everyone at the refugee programme knew they were having an affair. When Emma staged an exhibition at Oxford’s Poster Gallery of the aerial photographs she had taken on her trip with Bill Hall, Karadawi invited all his friends to come. The relationship distressed Karadawi’s wife, Selma, but she kept her feelings to herself. Sudan, like most of Africa, is polygamous. While northern Sudanese men expect strict fidelity from their wives, few Sudanese women are in a position to demand the same from their husbands. ‘Let us just say Ahmed’s wife was very tolerant,’ a Sudanese colleague of Karadawi’s laughed indulgently when asked about Selma’s response to the affair. And Karadawi was not the only Sudanese man to fall for Emma. Hamid el-Tayeb Zaroug, another northern Sudanese refugee official, met her while on sabbatical at Oxford. Zaroug was a Sudanese government administrator of the Ethiopian refugee camps that Emma had heard much about from Karadawi. He continued writing to her after he returned to Sudan.

      Emma finished her degree in early 1986. For a short time, she went to work for the art department of Harper’s & Queen. The job didn’t work out. The magazine’s arbiters of fashion expected the young girls they hired to model the smart clothing featured in its pages. Emma insisted on wearing her trademark Indian caftans

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