The Black Nile

Chapter NINE
At six the next morning I waved farewell to Mrs. Kata and opened the gate to find the rickshaw driver waiting. He dropped me at the bus depot, where I bought a cup of tea and tried to make sense of the prior twenty-four hours. Ali Kata Oshi had just been fired from his job as commissioner of Maban, but did that make him a bad guy? I imagined in John Ivo and Ali Kata two poles—those who left home to fight for change during the civil war and those who stayed to make their lives from the world as it existed. John Ivo looked to Juba, and to America, for support. Ali Kata, who had remained in Upper Nile and lived under military administration, naturally looked north to the stability and opportunity of Khartoum. Millions of southerners had done the same during that dark era, some living in the relative safety of squalid refugee camps in the capital, others getting by far from the gunfire and starvation as junior members of Sudanese society. Wouldn’t it be natural for Ali Kata to take a more accommodating stance when dealing with northern influence? That’s how he and so many others had sustained themselves and their families. John Ivo had gone against that grain and lost his wives, his children and his freedom. And, well before I met John Ivo, Ali Kata had been recommended to me by a trusted contact, someone with years of experience probing injustice in Sudan. Didn’t that imply he was on the right side of things? But when John Ivo returned to Maban and tried to organize the local chiefs, it was Ali Kata, backed by gunmen, who had tried to stop him.
People who work with refugees will tell you that the stories of migrants and asylum seekers are often full of holes, that the most straightforward story is usually the one that’s false. Life in extremity is difficult to explain—things happen and people don’t know why they are happening. Some events were fortunate and others were disastrous and that’s how it went. While I was nothing like a refugee, I felt a similar inability to understand the things I had just experienced. I was on a bus; I was on a rickshaw; I came to the home of a friend’s enemy, and there I was treated with kindness. I couldn’t explain it. I hoped to find out more when I reached Khartoum—Ali Kata had invited me for tea and I looked forward to our introduction.
I took a bus north to Kosti, a true city of 174,000 on the Nile’s western bank, and set up house on the fourth floor of a worn-out hotel by the river. I had almost forgotten that buildings could have more than two stories. My room was big, with a chipped red vinyl floor, red-curtained windows that opened onto the hallway, two single beds and a sink. I washed the fear out of the prior day’s clothes, strung a drying line across the room and took a walk down to the water. After crossing a muddy irrigation canal on a bridge of felled palms, I walked for half a mile through fields of arugula and green beans before coming to the flat Nile.
Here by the river the landscape was still green—this was Sudan’s cane belt, the region dominated by the giant Kenana sugar plant, the linchpin of a failed 1970s plan to turn Sudan into the breadbasket of the Arab world. But I had clearly left behind the lushness of equatorial Africa. The air and soil were dry. Nobody’s face was scarred, save a few old women. The Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk had all but melted away on the road from Renk; they’d faded almost from the moment I crossed the disputed north-south border. English had disappeared from the signs and storefronts.
But it was Kosti, not Renk, that was the end of the line for barges from Juba. A low highway bridge was erected over the Nile in the 1970s, turning the city, a steamship way station for more than a century, into a terminus. Now, barges upriver of the bridge ran south to Malakal and Juba, while traffic north between Kosti and Khartoum had all but dried up in favor of the highway. I picked my way through the sand and muck to a pair of barges moored in the shadows just north of the bridge. “Khartoum?” I shouted hopefully to a man standing at the deck rail of the first one. “I want to go to Khartoum.” He laughed and waved me off. The next barge turned out to be a police post, its crew probably keeping an eye out for bridge saboteurs from the mud flats below, a precaution born of the civil war and Sudan’s history of coups and attempted coups. The cops inside were genially unhelpful, so I turned and followed with rising hope the sound of a diesel motor a mile north, but it was only an irrigation pump surrounded by boys playing on the riverbank. I spat and turned back to town.
The city had been founded in the late 1800s by a Greek merchant, Constantini Kosti, who built a trading post at the traditional Nile crossing point for Sudanese pilgrims making their way to Mecca. The settlement caught both the east-west caravan route and the growing river traffic between north and south, and it grew accordingly. As I walked back into the Greek’s namesake on streets of sand and crumbled asphalt it was clear that Kosti needed a new coat of paint. The only brightness to be found was in the snack food wrappers and the Arabic-scripted Coke cans. The place felt shut in. I had a sandwich at a low-ceilinged snack bar and turned in the dusk back to my hotel.
An elderly man sitting on a wooden chair outside a tailor shop waved me over to his perch in the sand. “Bonjour,” he said, and I replied, “Good evening.” “British?” “Not quite.” “Ah, American. Please sit.” He pointed to a low stool at his side, clearing away a small white coffee cup. Hassan had that timeless look, the sense that he would have appeared the same had I been walking past his street in 1960 or 1930 or 1900. He wore a turban coiled around his head in two bands of rolled white cotton, a white ankle-length robe and black leather slippers. He had a neat white mustache and a short white beard that ran in a crescent along the crest of his chin and no farther. Wrinkles cascaded from his eyes in dark rings; more notched his forehead at quarter-inch intervals as if he had spent decades peaking his eyebrows in skepticism or surprise.
“You’ve come from the south?” he said. “How do you find it? Exciting? Are they still angry? You know, we are not so different from them. We have our complaints. Look around, there is no democracy here, no development. The government blames the war but the war never reached here.” He took off his black plastic eyeglasses and wiped the lenses on his sleeve. An old man cleaning his glasses—it created in me an instant sympathy, an uncalledfor familiarity. He said he was a supporter of the Ummah Party of Sudan’s last elected prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi. Sadiq was Sudanese royalty, a direct descendant of the Mahdi, the revolutionary terror who evicted the Egyptian and Turkish colonialists in the late nineteenth century. I’d briefly met Sadiq once after a press conference in Cairo. Speaking of Sudan as a “subcontinent” more than a country, he radiated intelligence and strength in his robe and turban, and looked a decade younger than his then seventy years. By most accounts, however, Sadiq had made a lousy prime minister, both during his first go-round in the 1960s and again two decades later, before the National Islamic Front deposed him in 1989. An Oxford-educated paragon of Arabism, he’d stoked many civil war atrocities but was on the verge of opening peace talks with the SPLA when the generals and the radical Muslim Brotherhood stepped in and ramped up the war, eventually declaring it a jihad. I was planning to visit Aba Island, the spiritual home of the al-Mahdi dynasty, the next morning.
“Oh, we like Imam Sadiq very much,” Hassan said. “If we have a free election, Sadiq will win in the north, especially with Garang dead. But I don’t think they will have a free election. The government would lose, so what would be the point? Do you drink alcohol?”
“I do. Yes. Do you?”
“I am meeting some of my friends later tonight to talk over arak. It would be my pleasure if you joined us.” Nothing would have made me happier than to spend the night drinking homemade date brandy with Hassan and his cronies. Still, this was my first night in the north, where sharia was the law of the land. I pictured myself listing back to the hotel, high on White Nile bathtub hooch, nose bloodied from a fall on the jagged pavements, stumbling into the arms of bored and malevolent police officers. I passed. Hassan didn’t seem to mind.
I walked back sober and didn’t sleep much for the heat and the regret that I wasn’t tipsy. In the morning I took two minibus taxis to Aba Island, a few miles north of Kosti. Today’s Aba wasn’t much more than an eight-mile-long strip connected to the mainland by a causeway over the slow-moving river. But for imperial Egypt, imperial Britain and the ghosts of the Ottoman Empire, it’s where the trouble started. In the late 1800s, Muhammad Ahmad, the pious son of a Nubian boatbuilder, came to Aba for a period of reflection. He saw a Sudan under the control of Egyptian colonizers flying the flag of the Ottoman Turks. The Egyptians viewed the Sudanese with the same superior eye that North American settlers cast on the Sioux and Cherokee, the same eye that drives the Han Chinese in western China or that drove the British in India. (Or the northern Sudanese in the south.) The Sudanese were to be taxed, exploited and civilized, in that order. Egyptian administration was cruel and corrupt and very impious. Fired by anger, Muhammad Ahmad predicted the advent of a Muslim savior, the Mahdi, who would cleanse the land of the foreigners. In time Muhammad Ahmad’s ardent supporters gave him the mantle and he ran with it, routing the occupying forces with a growing army of Arab tribesmen in the first jihad of the machine age.
After winning an escalating series of battles against the occupiers, in 1883 the Mahdi’s forces smote an incompetent British-led force of eight thousand Egyptian soldiers (some of them outfitted in heavy chain mail for the desert engagement). In 1885, they hit the jackpot and took Khartoum after a 317-day siege, killing the famed governor-general Charles Gordon, a British war hero and darling of the antislavery movement. Sudan became a Talibanlike state of summary judgment, famine and perpetual war. The flow of slaves from Sudan to Egypt, Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula resumed from a trickle to a flood. And Britain readied its revenge. The Mahdi died five months after his conquest, possibly of typhus, but his state carried miserably on until 1899 when more than ten thousand Mahdists fell to British machine guns at the Battle of Omdurman. (Winston Churchill was there, taking part in the last cavalry charge of the modern age.) The Mahdi’s descendants dealt shrewdly with London, backing the Allies against the Germans and Ottomans in World War I; his son received a knighthood. Sudan was Britain’s, but Aba Island remained a stronghold of the al-Mahdi dynasty—even as its true center of power shifted to Khartoum where Sadiq’s Ummah Party was the most prominent among the northern political parties. Today the island exudes none of the revolutionary fervor of the past. It is notable mainly as the home of the progressive Imam Mahdi University, located in the former mansion of the al-Mahdi family. It is also home to an attentive cadre of government security officers, as I learned when I stepped off the taxi and went looking for something to eat. The Bradt travel guide had recommended Aba’s fried fish and I was starved. I’d had my feet on the island for fifteen minutes and was peering into a dark restaurant, trying to make out if the three or four inert figures sitting at the back of the unlit room were customers or staff or just the proprietor’s family, when a man approached and said simply, “Come with me.” By now I well recognized Sudan’s version of the flat-topped G-man and I wasn’t at all happy to see him again. I turned with annoyance stoked by hunger. “Come with me please?”
“Yes,” he replied. “You come with me.”
“Can I get a sandwich first?”
“No. Come with me now.”
I hoisted my two bags and trudged after him down the sandy lane, past clusters of shops and small fenced-in bungalows. He opened the old wrought-iron gate of one of these buildings and led me past a tethered goat to a gray wooden door secured by a thin padlock and hasp. This was his station: a shuttered room with a single bed, a few shirts on hangers, an AK-47—minus its clip—leaning against the wall. An old computer monitor dominated the scuffed top of a desk, but I didn’t see an actual computer anywhere. There was a CB radio that might have been connected to a steel tower I’d seen in the backyard. A television and a VCR rested on the floor at his feet. He sat there and looked at my papers, fingering my visas and press card. “What else?” he said.
“What else?”
“Documents.”
“You want more documents?”
“Yes.”
I pulled out my wallet and gave him my New York driver’s license and my Egyptian press ID and my long-expired New York City press card. He stared at each for a moment before setting them aside and again opened my passport. He looked around for a pen, found his to be dry and then borrowed my green Bic. Propping the passport open with the banana clip from his Kalashnikov, the security man copied my information onto the ragged bottom margin of a yellowed Arabic newspaper. “Would you like this?” I asked, proffering a crisp passport Xerox. “I give one to the police wherever I go.” Indeed, I had been called upon to do so at the outdoor bus depot in Renk and again at Kosti.
“I am not police,” he snapped, still copying onto the newsprint. “I am intelligence.”
“So you don’t want this.”
“No.”
“Okay, then.” He finished his scribe’s work, shuffled the various ID cards into my passport and reached out for me to take them without getting out of his chair. I stood up from the bedside, dropped the passport and cards into my front shirt pocket and asked if there was anything else. He shook his head and looked at the door and I used it. This man, I decided, was very unsatisfied in his work.
I stumbled in hunger and heat to a snack shop, drank a Coke for lunch and a bottle of Stim, a Sudanese apple soda, for dessert and washed both down with some Safia bottled water. When I asked the people behind the counter for the garbage they both looked at me blankly. A voice behind me said, “I will take it.” I turned around. “Excuse me?” The speaker was a smiling young man of mahogany complexion. Wedged on a bench next to an attractive girl—they very nearly were touching—he repeated himself. “I will take care of it.” I nodded and left the bottles on the counter, picked up my bags from the floor near my table and shuffled into the noonday sun, toppling an abandoned Sprite on the way out.
Tired and hungry and hot, wishing for a slice of something familiar, anything really, I contemplated leaving Aba Island right then. There was no denying the place had a huge role in Sudanese history. The Mahdi had risen here and, as recently as 1970, Egyptian bombers had killed more than three thousand people when twentieth-century Mahdists threatened open rebellion against the military dictatorship of Jaffar Nimeiri. But I craved ease and saw the prospects here for none at all. I turned toward the main road and a taxi back over the causeway.
“Excuse me!” It was the man from inside the soda joint. He and the young woman had followed me out. “You are a visitor, from England, yes? I will show you around.” Omar and his wife were students at the university. I shook his hand and then reached for hers, converting the attempt at physical contact into a chaste wave over my heart. “Salaam aleikum,” I said. She wore a clingy long-sleeved black gown that reached to her knees, with flare-legged blue jeans underneath, hip elevator-heeled sandals and a diaphanous neon pink headscarf that circled her face and fell to her shoulders. One corner of the scarf was pinned back to ensure her throat remained covered. The outfit, common to young women in the north, struck a neat balance between the opposing forces of modesty and style. The tight blouses and hip-hugging pants and dresses put the figures of these daughters of the Nile on happy womanly display. At the same time, they remained covered, and more than technically—barely a strand of hair or a patch of the young lady’s skin was visible. (Their mothers tended to wear equally fetching wraps called thobes that also pleasantly described the female form.) Omar’s wife returned my greeting, he said a few words to her in Arabic and she turned and walked away. “She has to go somewhere,” he said. “Come with me.”
I said, “You know, you’re the second person to say that to me today,” but he was already off and I followed, the rucksack secure on my back and the raid pack slipped over my right shoulder. We entered the grounds of the university, an old colonial-style mansion flanked by long buildings of classrooms and lecture halls. For the next hour Omar led me from room to room, explaining each one, introducing me to his schoolmates and to strangers. The Mahdi’s heirs had transformed his jihad into a liberal Arabist movement that would have been heresy in the nineteenth century. Imam Mahdi University had six thousand students and a one-to-one ratio of women to men; its female enrollment was second only to Ahfad University in Khartoum, a women’s college. We peeked in on lectures in Islamic law, engineering classes and the chemistry lab. But not once during the long march did Omar let me ask a question or engage another student in conversation. He just talked without stopping, to me, to them, to himself, a geyser of long-suppressed English flowing with deaf enthusiasm. It was with dull joy that I finally crawled onto an outbound minibus a block from the university when his tour was finished. The Mahdists had repelled another invader.
The taxi dropped me at a depot a few miles away, where I boarded a big touring liner of a bus for the ride to Khartoum. I had left the undeveloped south. Northern Sudan was almost entirely untouched by the civil war and, despite the combined effects of mismanagement and international sanctions, its main roads were paved, electricity reached the major towns and there was always a hotel to be found. The seats of the Khartoum-bound bus were mostly filled with old men in white robes, many with wooden walking sticks, a few with polished metal canes. We rolled north over smooth two-lane blacktop, sharing the road with Toyota pickups, minibuses and the occasional Mercedes four-door. After an hour of travel two men came down the aisle with a small cart and handed out boxed lunches—sliced lamb on factory-made white bread with some kind of mayo, a bag of Qatari cheese doodles and a slice of pound cake sweating in plastic wrap, to be washed down with a bottle of orange drink. It made for a surreal sight after my bus ride from Melut to Renk. I ate the sandwich and the pound cake, popped a Mega Man multivitamin and settled back in my seat. Four video monitors hung from the ceiling over the center aisle and these began to play an Egyptian farce that the men on board watched with thin interest. Next up was an American wrestling program. A raven-maned nipple jockey named Diesel was battling several villains for possession of a championship belt. Various sidemen jumped into the ring and joined the fray during the hourlong match. The graybeards on the bus enjoyed every minute of their spandex and shouts and sweat. Some nodded and chuckled when the inevitable metal chair made its appearance in the ring, but it was the steroid aerobatics that brought out the ahhs, relaxed sighs proclaiming, “Now that’s entertainment.”


We shadowed the White Nile, fed with waters from Lake Victoria, the Sobat and dozens of other tributary creeks and rivers. Ahead, rumbling down from the volcanic highlands of Ethiopia, came the river’s other half, its robust fraternal twin, the Blue Nile. White and Blue would collide and merge at Khartoum into the Nile proper.
Khartoum had always struck me as a place of mystery. My first hint of this came while watching The Godfather on VHS when I was in the fourth grade, during the scene where Jack Woltz, the vain movie studio boss, is showing off his fortune to the Godfather’s adopted son, Tom Hagen. Woltz’s wealth is represented by an imposing black Arabian stallion that Woltz has named Khartoum. “Khartoum,” Woltz murmurs, transported, as he strokes the stud’s nose. “Khartoum.”
While things didn’t end well for Khartoum the thorough-bred, its urban namesake was riding an oil boom, with new luxury hotels rising on the Nile and fancy villas multiplying in the suburbs. Sprawling north and east of the Nile confluence, the capital and its sister city, Omdurman, were home to eight million Sudanese, with more arriving every day. It was the country’s center of gravity, the unchallenged seat of political, economic and military power, and it drew comers and survivors from across Sudan’s impoverished peripheries—Equatorians, Dinkas and Nuer from the south, Darfurians from the west, Bejas from the east and Nubians from the north. While I was happy to be back, I now saw the city in a harsher light. The prosperity here had come in part at the expense of the people in Upper Nile. Khartoum, Omdurman and the surrounding states were the turf of the awlad al balad, or sons of the soil, the Arab elites who had controlled Sudan since its independence in 1956. The awlad al balad had ruled in times of military dictatorship and parliamentary democracy and they dominated the political spectrum from left to the farthest right with Khartoum as their privileged seat.
Razed and rebuilt by the British, Khartoum had a dust-caked colonial core surrounded by rings of suburbs and pockets of hydrocarbon prosperity. The new petro-cash largely ignored the historic city center, but that’s where the charm was, and that’s where I headed from the bus depot. Two things drew me downtown—a cheap guesthouse and Waleed Arafat, a member of that rarest of Sudanese brotherhoods, a professional tour guide. I’d met Waleed, a tall and feline man, with an air of determined goodness, more than a year before while passing through Khartoum on the way to a three-week reporting stint in Darfur. He’d struck up a conversation while I was waiting to meet a friend in the lobby of the Meridien Hotel, and we chatted for a long time even though it was clear I didn’t need a tour guide and couldn’t afford one anyway.
Now I was back in Khartoum, in circumstances just as stingy as when we’d first met, and Waleed had offered to assist. A minivan taxi brought me from the bus stand outside the city downtown to the Souk Araby, a dense and dusty crossroads packed with tiny shops, hole-in-the wall restaurants, stands selling music cassettes, pyramids of limes, Chinese flashlight batteries, dusty ranks of leather sandals and baskets of dried fava beans. The people came from every direction, men and boys mostly, running to make their buses or standing in groups chatting. They ignored me and I them. My mood had somehow changed in Upper Nile; the night of gunfire in Malakal and my brush with arrest in Paloich had left me ragged and with a lingering case of nerves. I felt jumpy, in a hurry and at the same time carried a fatigue the heat and dust could not account for. Undergirding it all was nagging lonesomeness that I refused to acknowledge and for which my lousy Arabic would be no help at all. I hoped I could straighten myself out in Khartoum and maybe make better sense of what I’d seen in the south.
I was lumbering with my bags down the street, sidewalks in Khartoum being a sometime thing, when a stranger leaning against an ancient blue-and-white Toyota taxicab turned to me and said in a genial, familiar way, “South Africa? Egypt? Cairo to Cape? Or is it the other way around?” I brushed past him, muttering, “No thanks.”
“Whichever place you are going, you will want a guide.”
I turned and, still walking, said, “I have a guide.”
“I know. Your guide is Waleed Arafat. I am Moez. Waleed is my cousin.”
I stopped in my dusty tracks and, hurling rude overboard, summoned charm to the deck. “That’s right,” I said with a grin. “How did you know that?”
“We are practically the only guides in Khartoum,” he said, ignoring my poor manners. “And we are the best.”
“And it’s my pleasure to meet you.”
We waited for Waleed in the cool little office Moez kept, a pleasing room that brightened further when Waleed arrived smiling. “Ah, Dan,” he said. “I’m happy to see you again. It will be my pleasure to help you in your journey in this country, Sudan, where you will find many interesting things, especially, I hope, the Nubian culture, which is a treasure unknown by many in this country.” One wall of Moez’s office was covered from floor to ceiling with colorful expressionist paintings depicting subjects like Love, Nubia and Love of Nubia, the region that straddled the border of northern Sudan and southern Egypt. Waleed sat opposite these on a metal folding chair. “How can we help you?”
“I’m not sure what I need,” I said. “I only know I will need something—mostly expertise, I guess. I’m hoping to follow the Nile from Khartoum, staying as close to the river as I can, to Wadi Halfa. I was thinking that I might find a boat to take me part of the way, but judging from what I saw in Kosti I don’t think anyone is traveling on the river—I think I’m twenty years too late. I want to see the pyramids at Meroe, and then see Atbara, which seems simple enough, and then from there go on to Abu Hamed, at the top of the river’s curve.” I raised my right hand, tracing the Nile’s northerly route past Atbara in the dry air of Moez’s office. “But”—I sliced my hand downward, the river’s southern turn—“I’m not sure how to get from Abu Hamed down to Karima and the Merowe Dam. There don’t appear to be any solid roads there, at least not according to my map. Without a road, I doubt there will be many buses. And I don’t have a clue how I’m going to get near the dam, and I need to get near the dam.” Rising from the Nile about two hundred miles north of Khartoum, the Merowe Dam was arguably the biggest thing happening on the river. The 625-megawatt dam was the bane of environmentalists and human rights activists. At least fifty thousand people would be forced from their homes by the project, and some weren’t going quietly. Sudan’s government was trying to scour anti-dam activists from Khartoum and the dam-affected areas, but I still hoped to somehow pierce the security.
“The route from Abu Hamed seems like it might have fewer police watching than the route from Atbara,” I told Waleed, “but that’s just an ignorant guess. I’ve been trying to contact the people fighting the dam to see if they can sneak me in, but they keep getting arrested, and I can’t afford to be arrested. I think what I need more than anything is a sense of what’s realistic and what isn’t. To make things more complicated, I don’t really have any money for private transport. And I can’t afford a guide.”
Waleed and Moez nodded. “Don’t worry about money,” Waleed said. “We will try to give you our best advices and advices are always free. I am glad for your interest in the Merowe Dam. It is a very important subject for investigation by an American journalist. But there is another dam that is very little known, called Kajbar, that I hope you will examine too, because it will be a very big disaster for the Nubian people. Last month the police were firing on the people there when they tried to make a protest. It is north of Dongola directly on your route. We will make you a plan so you can make a good accomplishment there. Moez’s brother, Midhat, will help.” At that, we left Moez’s cubby and crossed the street, entering a long commercial building fronted by small shops and a corner juice stand. We passed three headscarved schoolgirls drinking from small stainless steel bowls and walked up a couple flights of stairs to Midhat’s office. If, as I suspected, Moez was the dreamer of this group, his older sibling Midhat was the guy who got it done. Burly in his pressed white oxford over a crewneck T-shirt, he watched us enter with a focus bordering on glower, then rose and rasped, “Good meeting you.”
Midhat’s tourist office had in a prior life been a home interior showroom. The sky blue walls were lined with dozens of sample lengths of molding and wainscoting; two impressive plaster medallions, each two feet across, dominated the foyer. A professional road-racing bicycle with skinny tires and clamping pedals leaned against a wall. Waleed and Midhat spoke for a few minutes in Arabic and turned to me. “You’re a cyclist?” I asked. “Yes!” Midhat said. “I have ridden across the country, from Ethiopia to Egypt. I have followed the Blue Nile from the mountains down to Khartoum. When cycle groups ride through Sudan on Africa tours, I organize the routes and ride with them. Some of the riders are very good. Very good.”
“And you?”
“I am average,” he said, confirming his skills with ironclad modesty. “Let me see your passport. You will need a visa extension. We will take care of it. Come here anytime—to talk, to rest. Be careful of the sun. We will help you in any way. Waleed, Moez and me.” We agreed to meet again later in the week.
The next day I took a taxi to the suburb of Khartoum Two for a sorely needed tutorial on Sudan’s oil economy. My instructor, an East African diplomat, specialized in the hard numbers that lay behind the burned villages of Upper Nile and the hostile reaction I’d received in Paloich.
The Ozone café was an affluent enclave of chat and flirting. Sudanese ladies with designer handbags drank coffee and ate ice cream at umbrella-shaded metal tables. Young men and women sat relaxed in their chairs and talked without fear. Sudanese and European children played on the trim green lawn while their parents sipped fresh-squeezed orange juice from wax-paper cups. The air was cooled by a system of water misters—a network of black plastic tubes that periodically released a light spray. Industrial fans on cast iron stands circulated the newly refreshed air, giving the outdoor patisserie a relative humidity much higher than the rest of Khartoum, and a temperature just a bit lower. Short, thick palm trees stood sentry every fifty feet.
My contact was waiting at a table drinking a cappuccino. “It’s good coffee,” she said, “but not as good as the stuff we grow at home.” With that, she dispensed with the personal, looked at her watch and began the lesson. Oil was the name of the game. The northern and southern governments were both hostage to oil revenues, she said, but while the north had agriculture as its traditional, pre-petro mainstay, the south would be completely lost without it. “There is a ninety percent oil dependence in the south,” she said. “It’s problematic. Eighty percent of the southern budget goes to salaries, and already they are over budget. So either the budget is not enough or they don’t have the knowledge and capacity to use it properly.”
“Which is it?” I asked.
“That’s not for me to say,” she replied, “but think of some of these ministers and administrators they have there. Soldiers. Brigadiers. Straight from the bush and now you are responsible for a billion-dollar budget.” She looked again at her watch. “It boggles the mind. The international agencies are just now starting to train state employees in simple basic bookkeeping. Meantime the money flows.
“Now, we know where that money comes from. It comes from oil. And how is that oil sold? The finance ministry says the oil revenue and the distribution of that revenue are completely transparent. Completely. Those numbers are posted on the ministry’s website for anyone to see. All well and good, but the actual production statistics aren’t public, and that means we have to take their word for it—not just the international community but the southern government and the citizens of Sudan as well. Now, an observer would look at this situation and conclude that there’s an awful lot of opportunity for diversion between the extraction and sale of the oil and the posting of these limited figures. A person, a ruling party, an apparatus, could get rich.”
“Do you think they’re skimming?”
“That’s not for me to say either. Now, all the oil contracts made before the CPA—no one knows under what terms those contracts were made. There are a lot of Chinese investments—in irrigation, dams, the chemical industries. How does Sudan pay for these investments when it has twenty billion dollars in foreign external debt? They’re highly indebted. So how do you pay for all these improvements? You pay in kind. The price of oil is approaching seventy dollars a barrel, but they are giving it to the Chinese for as low as forty dollars, so I’m told. Sudan is desperate to invite investment. It will give in to the most ridiculous terms. And it’s not just China. No one’s looked at the Malaysian and Indian companies. They are not doing any better than the Chinese on the human rights issue either. Logically, they could be criticized just as much.
“Now, besides infrastructure, how is this oil money spent? Eighty-two percent of Sudan’s federal budget goes to security—military, the police, intelligence—and that doesn’t count off-budget funding. And it’s not just in the north. Your friends in the SPLA, they take more than half the southern budget. Do you think some of that’s not going into someone’s pockets?”
“Is it?”
She stared. “Not for me to say. Now, when these refugees return home to the south, they ask for three things: a dispensary or clinic, schools and a church. No one is asking for new artillery. They’re not requesting an air force. Meantime, the Government of National Unity has ended subsidies on sugar and petrol. The daily life is growing progressively harder. Inflation has gone from five to eight percent. The American sanctions are hurting the poor. The medicines here are all from China. The prices are high and they are of inconsistent variety and quality. This is the fruits of a closed society. But look around. Money is being made by someone.
“Lastly, because, despite the pleasure of this monologue, I do have to get back to work: The known oil reserves—the wells and fields that are producing oil today—these are projected to start depleting in ten years. So they’ve got to get what they can now, because they don’t know if there’ll be anything to replace it. Most of the untapped oil is deep in the south—not the ambiguous south or the contested south like Abyei—it’s in the true south. The government here won’t be able to control it.” She consulted her watch again. “I have to go. And, of course, I wasn’t here.”
There was no love lost between the leaders of the north and south, and probably even less lost between their constituents. There was hardly a sentient being in the south who didn’t wish to secede once the referendum came in 2011. (A smaller group predicted the south might leave by force—a new civil war—even before the vote.) At the same time, the two sides, and their elites, needed each other. Southern Sudan had the future oil reserves. Northern Sudan had the refineries, the pipelines and the shipping facilities at Port Sudan. Division could mean ruin, but many southerners were prepared for a few more years of ruin if it meant being rid of the Arabs.
Meanwhile, someone was getting rich. Who?
It wasn’t the people on the street. Slums and squatter settlements thought to hold three and a half million people were scattered amid one of the most expensive cities I’d ever encountered. A cheapie lunch of a quarter chicken and a piece of bread, served with a hunk of raw onion, cost me more than a similar meal would at Kentucky Fried Chicken—though it did taste better. Rents in the city had skyrocketed thanks to the influx of foreign oil workers. A two-bedroom apartment that rented for $250 in 1999, before the oil boom, now went for more than $1,500.


It made for jarring contrasts. A newly widened asphalt road runs down the western border of the exclusive Khartoum suburb of Amarat, home to many foreign embassies and the offices of major humanitarian groups. Waiting for a taxi there early one 106-degree day, a medieval vision emerged from the waves of heat rising from the tarmac: An elderly Dinka man, nearly seven feet tall, naked but for a sackcloth shirt that reached above his knees, walked barefoot down the blacktop carrying a long steel beam on his right shoulder. He walked in short unwavering steps, his blued eyes set straight ahead, a slave in all but name. A few feet away Chinese construction workers were chatting with their families via webcam, the women holding the babies up to give papa a better look.
The key to it all were the sons of the soil. These Arab elites, members of three tribes hailing from the states just north of Khartoum, saw themselves as more educated, more Muslim, more Arab and, really, more Sudanese than the others. The country was their patrimony and other Sudanese—those from less sophisticated Arab tribes, non-Arab Muslims like those in Darfur and Nubia and, of course, the blacks in the south—were all lucky to have their affairs run by these bluebloods. It was a fact of life that few were brave enough to discuss openly, until one Friday in May of 2000, eleven years into Sudan’s Islamist dictatorship. As worshippers left afternoon prayers at mosques around Khartoum, stacks of booklets awaited them, each a photocopied indictment of the country’s misrule by a powerful minority. The pamphlets, thousands of copies of them, appeared mysteriously, anonymously. It was rumored that President Omar al-Bashir himself found one on his desk at the Republican Palace.
The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan laid out in heated prose and cool statistics how Arab Sudanese from just two states—River Nile and Northern—had almost exclusively been running the country since independence. This region supplied just five percent of Sudan’s population, but it dominated government, finance and the military. The effects were clear in Sudan’s vital statistics. While more than eighty-five percent of births in River Nile and Northern states were attended by a doctor, nurse or midwife, more than half the births in Darfur went completely unattended by any kind of health professional. In the lands of the three tribes, infant mortality was lower and life expectancy was higher than in every other state. The Black Book showed how, for all the want in Sudan’s western, eastern and southern provinces, the bulk of government spending and aid went to the same two states from which the elites hailed. There was no official reaction to the Black Book, but the speed and stealth with which it was distributed sent a shudder through the security services—as well it should have. The book’s anonymous authors later revealed themselves as members of the Justice and Equality Movement, an Islamist-themed rebel group that three years later was one of two armed groups to declare war on the Sudanese military in Darfur. The ethnic cleansing, rape and pillage that followed were manifestations of tensions that had thwarted Sudan since the moment of its independence. While the civil war was typically reduced to the shorthand of “Muslims versus Christians” and the conflict in Darfur as one of “Arabs versus blacks,” the deeper issue was that a few haves at the center maintained power by playing Sudan’s myriad tribes of have-nots against each other.
Analyses of the Black Book by Western academics have supported its conclusions. What effect, I wondered, had the new oil riches had on that power dynamic?
Ali Kata Oshi might have had some insight, but the former commissioner of Maban was proving elusive. We played a game of missed calls, and I began to suspect Ali Kata didn’t want to see me after all, that he had thought better of inviting a stranger’s scrutiny, or that he had never meant to see me in the first place. While his disappearance may have been innocuous, it gave greater credence to John Ivo’s description of Ali Kata’s divided loyalties. Having his wife offer hospitality to a journalist was one thing. Meeting him face-to-face was maybe quite another. I gave up on Ali Kata and began marching from government office to government office hoping to speak with different presidential advisers and ministers for an establishment view of how power worked in Sudan.
I even entered into a flirtation with Hassan al-Turabi, the longtime Muslim Brother who was the spiritual and political leader of Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front during its Osama-friendly heyday. Turabi, educated at the Sorbonne (and married to Sadiq al-Mahdi’s sister), had served as speaker of the parliament in the 1990s before he overreached and fell from power. The National Islamic Front split in 1999 after an assassination attempt against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was traced back to Turabi’s wooly associates. Bashir had his former mentor jailed for a time, and Turabi’s new Popular Congress Party lived in the shadows. Meanwhile, pushed by a growing cadre of moderates, Bashir’s National Congress Party negotiated the CPA, raked in the new oil dough and waited for its day in the international sun—until Darfur spoiled the party. Even out of power, Turabi was regarded as the evil genius of Sudanese politics, but he too declined to sit with me.
At last I was able to arrange a meeting with Fathi Khalil, a National Congress stalwart and the influential head of Sudan’s bar association. Khalil’s office was on the fifth floor of the grimy headquarters of the Tadamon Islamic Bank. The neglected exterior, broken elevators and dusty staircases gave way to a clean suite of offices, where Khalil sat at a substantial desk speaking on an Ericsson mobile phone.
As the president of the Sudanese bar, Khalil was one of thousands of members of Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood holding positions of civil and military power across the country. The Brotherhood, which advocated a merger of mosque and state, had been harassed in the republic’s early days, but its influence over Sudan’s institutions had steadily grown, culminating in the 1989 military coup by Islamist army officers led by Bashir. Khalil was a calm, honest face of a movement that legislated lashings for adultery and had tried to “Islamicize” the sciences. His party had never come close to winning a fair election and had banned music at weddings. I liked him instantly.
“There’s a sense among the people I talk to here,” I said, after settling into a cushioned chair and accepting a cup of tea, “that the leaders of the National Congress are amassing secret wealth. How is this seen within the movement?”
“There is more democracy in the NCP now than in 1989, and more than in the other parties,” he said. “I don’t see signs of corruption among the leading figures—the ostentatious houses, the cars. The old Ikhwanis [Brothers] are living much as they have since before the economy started growing.” That may have been true for the party’s rank and file. But after nearly twenty years at the helm of a country without a free press, trade unions or independent political parties, the leaders of the National Congress had done quite well for themselves. An NCP-owned trading company in China was reported to be taking a thirty-five percent commission on all trade between Sudan and China—a colossal skim worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Newspaper editors had in recent years been jailed for reporting corruption allegations involving the vice president and a presidential adviser.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Khalil said when I mentioned this. “It sounds like more of the lies this government has endured from our friends in the West.”
How deep, I asked, were the connections between Sudan’s Ikhwanis and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood? In Egypt, where the movement was born, the Brotherhood was officially banned, its members subject to arbitrary imprisonment and torture. Still, Muslim Brothers, running as independents, made up the biggest opposition bloc in Egypt’s parliament. “Are you cooperating with them?”
“For years, the relationship with the Egyptian Ikhwan was not an easy one,” Khalil said. “The point of contention is the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims. The relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is not the same in Egypt as in Sudan. In Upper Egypt, where the Egyptian Ikhwan is strongest, there is no interaction, no wish to interact. In Sudan you will find families where one is a Muslim, one is not, one is a Christian. In the same house.”
“I’ve seen it,” I said.
“So you agree it’s true,” he replied. “This is alien in Egypt. Tolerance in Sudan is greater than you will find anywhere else in the world.”
“What about the 1962 missionary law?” I said. “It seems like the opposite of tolerance to ban the construction of churches, to nationalize church schools and force Arabic on people who don’t want to speak it.”
“That was repealed,” he said quickly. “Christmas here is a national holiday. I encourage you to expand your view and see the real Sudan. Where are you going from here?”
“I’m following the Nile—Atbara, Karima, Dongola, Halfa. Then the ferry to Aswan.”
He brightened. “Ah, Dongola! That’s my home.”
“You’re Nubian?”
“Yes. I am Nubian.”
Nubians, who make up only three or four percent of Sudan’s population, were active across Sudan’s political parties, but they had especially gravitated toward the Sudanese Communist Party. Fathi Khalil had landed at the other end of the spectrum. While he saw the Brotherhood as a paragon of tolerance, many Nubians viewed it as an instrument of Arabism, one that meant to destroy their millennia-old heritage.
Two days later I walked through the pale yellow heat to the office of Waleed’s cousin Midhat to see if my visa extension had come through. “How is it?” I asked, walking into the cool, darkened room.
“Not very good,” he said, almost in a whisper. He was slouched in his office chair, his head barely visible over the top of the desk. “America just sent seventy thousand army on Iran. Why? Why they did this?”
“Well, if they did, it’s war,” I said. “But really, that’s impossible. They don’t have seventy thousand troops to spare.”
“I got it on my mobile,” he said, “from SUNA”—Sudan’s state news agency. “Why they attack Iran?”
“Look,” I said, “even if our president were deluded enough to think he must invade Iran, the troops just don’t exist. They’re all bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan.” But Midhat wasn’t moved. “Wait here,” I said, and walked down the street to an Internet café, where I searched the web. Eventually I found it—seventeen thousand American personnel in naval maneuvers off the coast of Iran.
“No. Seventy thousand,” Midhat insisted when I reported back.
“You’re going to believe the government’s news service? I’m telling you, it’s seventeen thousand people in boats and planes playing games on the ocean. Nobody’s attacked Iran.”
He scowled. “Why they do this?” he said, low in his chair.
“They’re trying to shake them up.”
“But why?”
“This is what states do. Why does Iran do what it does? Why does Sudan do what it does?”
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “I don’t follow politics. I don’t read newspapers. Only these.” He held up some tourism industry news-letters and a biking magazine.
“I don’t think SUNA is the place to be getting your news,” I said, but he was somewhere else.
“I don’t understand politics,” he said, looking past me, past the doorway and the molding samples on the wall. “Like ten years ago, Egypt closed the border. Completely closed. All because of something in Ethiopia.”
“Dude, I think the something was that your government tried to kill Egypt’s president.”
“I don’t know about these things,” he groaned. “For more than one year you cannot see your family or visit your father’s grave. There is no visitors, no trade. The people suffer. Why? They cut Nubia in half. They cut us in two.” Years after the border was reopened, Midhat still felt that cut and deeper wounds as well. On his computer desktop he kept a photo of the flooding of old Wadi Halfa by the Aswan High Dam. It was a telling image for an ancient antagonism. The ancient Egyptians called the lands to their south “Kush,” though it was usually referred to as “Wretched Kush.” The region was at various times a colony, competitor and conqueror of ancient Egypt. In Midhat’s symbolic screen photo, the last minaret of Halfa’s last mosque is about to go underwater, its crest surrounded by a cloud of panicked birds—an Egyptian victory over the descendants of Kush.
“Last year we did a big tour, with an important group,” Midhat said. “They came on boats—rafts—all the way from Ethiopia. I sent Moez with this group; he showed them all of Nubia, all the way to Halfa. He was supposed to go with them in Egypt also, to the end of the Nile. He had all his papers—his papers were perfect. Moez earned this. But the Egyptian police sent him back from the border. They wouldn’t let him. Why they did that?” He looked at me and we sat in the quiet.
“Sudan is a very tolerant country,” he murmured at last. “Everybody is getting along. In a Christian house they will have a sheet so that during prayer times the Muslim guest can pray. At the church, they let anyone come in. Moez, sometimes he went there . . . We used to be Christians before Islam came.”
That evening, Waleed, Midhat and I took a series of taxis to visit the Nubian singer and opposition figure Mohammed Wardi. Wardi was a true Sudanese hero—as popular in the south as he was in the north, equal parts Frank Sinatra and Woody Guthrie, pushed through a syrupy Sudanese filter. His protest songs had made him one of the country’s most prominent dissidents, and he’d spent two years in prison and fifteen years in exile under three different military regimes. Wardi’s seminal hit “October al Akbar” chronicled the October 1964 uprising that overthrew the regime of General Abboud, and he later was one of the few northerners to align himself with the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. In 1990 he brought his fifty-piece band to play for a quarter million southern refugees in Ethiopia, a Sudanese Woodstock. Wardi was one of Sudan’s few truly national figures, and, I thought, a man worth talking to.
As we walked to the taxi park down the middle of a side street, a trio of curvy young women passed us on the left. One, her lips lined with brown cosmetic pencil, looked over her shoulder, locked her amber eyes on mine and flared her nostrils before rejoining her friends in a cloud of giggles. “They’re teasing me,” I said. “Is it my imagination or were they teasing me?”
“I know,” Waleed said, with bachelor’s regret. “It’s getting worse every year.” I suppressed the urge to look back and we carried on past covered sidewalks where packs of men were gathering for the early evening prayer. They unfurled worn prayer rugs onto the sidewalk and removed their shoes and slippers, washing their hands, faces and feet from plastic pitchers. A few wore woolen business suits, others white cotton robes and others the thin slacks and cracked feet of the laboring class. The pedestrian traffic carried on around them while they prayed.
Mohammed Wardi awaited us in a private fenced-in garden in a suburban district of Khartoum. This oasis wasn’t quite as technologically advanced as Ozone—a gardener was hand-watering the plants and trees backlit by small floodlights in shades of blue—but it was cooler and more inviting. Two fawns rested on the wet grass inside a steel cage. Wardi, in white robes and a turban, greeted us from a lawn chair where he was holding court with four others. He was a big man, slightly roly-poly. He liked to drink, it was said, and drink had taken a toll. Waleed and Midhat were starstruck, and gave their full names when introducing themselves so Wardi would know exactly where they were from and who their people were. A bottle of Chivas Regal appeared, and I joined Wardi and a couple of his cronies in drinking it, discreetly scooping the ice cubes from my glass and dropping them onto the grass.
I told Wardi that my friends in the south had insisted I meet him. Why was that?
“I am an observer of Sudan, of the entire Sudan,” he said. “I’ve seen our entire political history. I’ve heard the first speech of every coup. Imagine how many first speeches I’ve heard—each one the death of democracy.” One of Wardi’s own nephews was executed in 1999, during his most recent exile, for allegedly planning a coup. But just a few years later, the crooner was welcomed back home. Wardi had been living in Los Angeles when, in 2002, his right kidney failed. When he couldn’t find a donor in the United States, Osama Daoud Abdelatif, Sudan’s leading industrialist, arranged for his safe return. By then the regime had mellowed. Peace talks were under way with the south, and some radical elements had been purged from the ruling clique.
Wardi arrived in Khartoum later that year to find hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, the biggest public gathering since independence. There was no shortage of would-be kidney donors. “The welcome I received was a clear message to the authorities,” he said. “What I saw was a large crowd, unafraid to gather in such numbers.” Later that year, he performed a series of concerts on the banks of the Blue Nile, breaking the capital’s 11 p.m. curfew to lull and spark the audience with songs that hadn’t been performed in Sudan for more than a decade. When the thirty-piece band played the last note of the final show, a fireworks display lit up the night and echoed across Khartoum. A shiver of fear was said to have run through the Republican Palace. Had the revolution begun?
After the CPA was signed, Wardi chaired Khartoum’s welcome committee for John Garang. Garang’s return to the capital attracted more than a million jubilant Sudanese. It seemed victory was finally complete, that a single Sudan—plural and intact—would emerge from the dismal era. Then came Garang’s death and the war in Darfur, with its promises of continued misery. “You haven’t asked me about Darfur,” Wardi said, after an hour of scotch and reminiscence.
“What about it?” I asked.
“Rape,” he said, holding out his glass for a refill. “There is no rape in Darfur. The Sudanese people don’t rape. Muslims don’t rape. Maybe the African Union are doing it. But not the Sudanese people.
“Darfur is something domestic. I know,” he continued. “The United States and Europe are exaggerating it. The only way to solve it is through the Sudanese people and the Sudanese way. If the American people leave it, it will be solved easily.” On this subject, he was a mainstream Sudanese: If the world was accusing Muslims of atrocities, then the world was wrong. Wardi had suffered personally at the hands of the Islamist regime; he was one of the few northerners to acknowledge the horrors the north had visited upon the south. But his response to Darfur was the defensive position that held across the Muslim world. Wardi’s denials reminded me of something a Tunisian acquaintance of mine—a woman who worked with victims of sexual violence—once told me of visiting an Egyptian-funded field hospital for refugees in West Darfur state. She’d inquired about three preteen girls who had been violated in a nearby camp. “Cunt!” the Egyptian doctor there said to her. “This is a Muslim country. There is no rape.”
Wardi’s group, including a son-in-law who had only recently been permitted to return from political exile, looked at me politely, waiting for a fight, but I wasn’t in the mood. I made a few boiler-plate references to United Nations investigations, noted my own experience in Darfur and switched to a less contentious topic, the Kajbar Dam, which threatened to submerge twenty-six Nubian villages in Sudan’s far north. What would it mean for Nubia? “We exist from antiquity,” Wardi said. “We had our own identity, civilization and kings. We have our own ancient language, which we still use today. We once ruled over Egypt and all the way to Syria. Those Arabs are just nomads. They came here—that’s okay. They brought Islam—that’s okay. But they can’t Arabize us. The people who live along the Nile know this history, they know the crime of the Aswan Dam. It pushes us to take up the gun, like the people in the south—or in Darfur.”
Wardi’s visions of Nubian empire weren’t an exaggeration, but that empire was long gone. In the fourth century AD the rulers of a kingdom called Meroe merged with two neighboring kingdoms to become Nubia, a Christian realm that stretched from present-day Aswan as far south as Khartoum. Nubia withstood a series of Arab invasions following the dawn of Islam in the seventh century, but was in time slowly converted through intermarriage and the efforts of wandering preachers. Over the centuries, many Nubian tribes took on an Arab identity, so that present-day Nubia extends only five hundred miles, from Aswan to Dongola. Today, the most renowned Nubian antiquities, like the pyramids of Meroe, north of Khartoum, lie well outside its current domain. In a week I would see Nubia for myself, and learn if Wardi’s predictions of armed conflict were prophetic or the bluster of a pampered luminary.


On my last evening in Khartoum I paid a visit to the famous confluence of the White Nile and the Blue. In an upper-class amusement park on the water’s edge, I was trying to photograph the marriage of the two rivers in the dying western light when a group of college girls stepped in front of me and demanded to know what I was doing and what I thought of Sudan. They weren’t flirting; they were defending the republic. “It’s beautiful,” I said, hoping they would let me get a shot framed, but they weren’t satisfied. What, they wanted to know, did I think of race relations in Sudan? Straightening my posture, I said with an almost true smile, “It seems like a family.” They nodded with satisfaction. Was it similar in America? “You might say that.”
“No,” a young woman said hotly. “I don’t think so. America is not tolerant like Sudan. There are many problems there. Many problems.” Her friends nodded. By now two older men, dressed like bureaucrats, had joined us, and they berated me for shooting pictures and demanded to know who had authorized it, as if the river itself were a secret strategic asset. I was running out of light—the sun was down, and the golden hour was just about over. The air went from dim to dark while they bickered at me. I stalked away, cursing them all, and walked a mile upriver, until, just past a riverside tea shack, I came to a crumbling stone stairway leading down to the water’s edge. There, in the twilight, a blue-uniformed inspector from the river police was tying his launch to a tree branch hanging low over the water. He agreed to take me to the black and shining confluence, motioning for me to duck beneath the gunwales when another police boat passed. We reached the confluence and he cut the engine and let us drift awhile in the coolness. We made a slow quiet circle, and I craned my neck to take in the yellow haze of Omdurman, the motionless Ferris wheel at the amusement park and the faded aluminum Pepsi-Cola billboard on Tuti Island. “Quais?” the inspector said, and I nodded. He rip-started the Yamaha and raced us back to shore with the stern lancing up out of the water, showing off for his guest. Then he tied the boat to the low-hanging branch and, asking nothing for his trouble, wished me good night. It was a fine last evening in Khartoum.
The next morning, after a breakfast of fried eggs, puffy Sudanese bread and salty cheese and olives, I loaded my bags into a waiting pickup truck, shook hands with Midhat, who had arranged the ride, and left for the pyramids of Meroe. In a low-budget plan to get from Khartoum to the Egyptian border, this was my one indulgence—a hired car to take me directly to the Lion Temple of Naqa, which lay in the desert off the main road, and then to the pyramids, where I would be left to fend for myself. There was a luxury tourist camp about a mile from the pyramid site. I doubted they would be open at this, the opening blast of summer, but I felt sure I could find some kind of coop there. American sanctions meant Sudan was without a single foreigner-friendly ATM, and credit cards were not accepted anywhere. With a daily budget of 4,200 dinars, about $18, I wouldn’t qualify as a paying guest anyway.
The driver and I used my GPS to find the exquisite Lion Temple, with its wide-hipped queen etched in red stone relief—a first-century AD throwback to the days, hailed by Wardi, when the Nubian empire of Kush was a force to be reckoned with. We returned to the road to find the tourist resort. I pointed the driver to what appeared to be a trail heading east into the desert but we bottomed out in the sand after five hundred yards. As we stood outside the truck staring at the sunken tires, sweat blotting our shirts, a barefoot boy of eight or nine came running. He must have risen directly from the hot dunes—I couldn’t see any nearby settlement. The boy was carrying the thoroughly rusted head of a shovel, its thin blade chipped and uneven. He immediately dropped to his knees when he reached us and began digging under the truck. Soon other boys appeared, one with an intact shovel, some holding sticks, still others with nothing to scoop the sand but their bare hands. They surrounded the truck and dug with abandon, pausing from time to time to look up at me and shout, “Foolus!” Money. After a short time the operation was hijacked by two older boys, maybe seventeen years old, who intimidated the younger diggers into following their direction. It worked.
They dug; the driver abused the gas petal; I pushed. Tires spun, blasting filthy sand into my nose, mouth and ears and down my chest. The truck was freed. A dozen barefoot boys in dirty white tunics clamored at me for payment, each pushing the other to get closer to me with his outstretched hands and Gatling-gun arguments. I looked at the driver. “Just pay the older two and be done with it,” he said in Arabic, and somehow I understood him. I gave five hundred dinars, about two dollars, to the two biggest, broadcast a handful of change onto the sand for the youngsters to fight over and leapt into the pickup, locking my door. We made our getaway back to the road under a hail of desert stones and pre-adolescent oaths and quickly found a correct trail to the camp. I tipped the driver, said goodbye and surveyed my new home. It was a complex of three buildings, including a locked main hall that looked downright cozy. As I’d expected, the place was empty, battened down for the season. A Land Cruiser sat on blocks under the eaves of the main house, its windows covered with sections of sheet metal to protect against sandstorms. I found a string bed half buried in a dune in the shade of an outbuilding, slipped off my boots and took a nap there in the wavy heat. An hour later I opened my eyes to see a tall camel approaching from the horizon at a slow metronomic gait, two riders clinging to its back, rocking up and down with each step. They meandered ever closer, the camel knelt and a young man jumped off, lean and wrapped in white cotton. I stood up to greet him. He said he worked at the camp during the tourist season and acted as caretaker in the off; he offered me the use of his room for the night. “I’m probably better off sleeping outside,” I said, and he agreed. I followed the caretaker around the building as he attached a hose to the bathroom faucet and, dragging it around back, refilled a zir, a ceramic water urn, for any strangers that might pass this way. He then poured more water into a truck tire lying in the sand. It had been sawed in half lengthwise for use as a crude birdbath. “The birds are lucky to have you,” I said.
“We are lucky to have them,” he replied. He showed me the key to the bathroom and its vast supply of sun-boiled water, prepared me a cup of tea from the resort’s kitchen and wished me luck. Then he changed from his desert robes into a clean shirt and pants, splashed on some cologne and set off on foot for a nearby village to see his fiancée and his kinfolk. Late that afternoon I walked over a long stretch of hard rippled sand to a field of nearly a hundred decapitated black-and-tan pyramids. They were built here over the course of twelve hundred years, into the fourth century AD, to mark the graves of the Nubian Kushite royalty, who saw themselves as heirs to the great dynasties of Egypt. If Egypt’s pyramids were solitary greats, these made a dense community of local heroes. They were much smaller than their Egyptian counterparts—the tallest topped out at around ninety feet—and were built at sharper angles. They would have cut a fine silhouette with the sun at their back if not for one inescapable fact: The top of each stately isosceles had been dynamited off in the 1830s, many by a dogged Italian tomb robber named Giuseppe Ferlini. Ferlini had heard there was gold inside the pyramids. He and his fellow vandals found almost none.
After a clear night under the stars I carried my bags to the road and tried to flag down passing buses, but none stopped. Two hours later on the steadily warming roadside, I found mercy in a man driving a truck for the government’s Dams Implementation Unit, which was responsible for raising the dam at Merowe and for the work at Kajbar that Waleed and other Nubians were concerned about. The driver spoke fair English—he was of the last generation to learn it in the public schools, before the 1989 coup. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” he said, laughing at the memory. “John Wayne.” Still, I didn’t want to spook him by asking about the dams, and I didn’t think his English and my Arabic were sufficient to have a coherent conversation about it. So we drove north, testing the limits of our language skills, when he stopped at an intersection to chat with a colleague in a white government sedan. The conversation seemed to turn to me, and the colleague’s voice turned hard.
We drove on for another hour before coming to a big depot on the right side of the road. It was ringed by fencing and guardhouses and flew the flag of the Dams Implementation Unit. “I have to go inside for lunch but you are not allowed,” the truck driver said. “Just five minutes, Daniel, and I will come back.” An hour later I was still broiling on the roadside. The driver had been told to lose me and so he had; my eyeglasses burned my fingers when I took them off to wipe the sweat from my face; my hair—why was my hat off?—had become a radiant heat source. At last a northbound bus glided to a stop just a few feet from me and three men got out—two to carry my bags and the third to personally guide me up the stairs into their Daewoo luxury liner. The bus was half empty, the passengers all smiling. I took a seat, someone handed me a bottle of cold water and when I woke at Atbara the driver refused payment. Did I really look that bad?
Atbara was a sleepy stopover of a town. It was the headquarters of the all but ruined national railway, a junction where the line from Port Sudan on the Red Sea met the north-south traffic between Khartoum and Wadi Halfa. Situated just north of the confluence of the Nile and the Atbara River, it was divided into two districts. West of the railway, leading to the Nile, was the British town, laid out in 1889 by General Kitchener as he made his way south to defeat the Mahdi’s forces at Omdurman. There were no British remaining, but the streets were broad and lined with trees, and every colonial bungalow was fronted by a generous yard. East of the tracks lay Sudan: a dozen miles of low-rise buildings the color of old grime, hordes of Toyota minibus taxis and, strangely, a fleet of Ford Falcon vans from the 1960s, the only American cars I’d seen in Sudan. How they got here, and why they existed only in Atbara, was a mystery. Despite its near-total absence of trees, this was the Atbara I preferred, and it was here, over kebabs and a plate of tameyya, a deep-fried falafel made from fava beans, that I met a Nubian archaeologist who I hoped might help me find my way along the Nile’s S-shaped curve, from Atbara to Abu Hamed, a hundred miles to the north, and from Abu Hamed south again to the controversial Merowe Dam outside Karima.
The archaeologist said he might be able to arrange a jeep and driver for a budget-busting two hundred dollars a day. “But please—don’t try,” he said.
“You think I’ll be arrested? I know they’re serious about keeping reporters away from the dam.”
“It’s not the police, it’s the people, the Manasir tribe. They’re crazy. Their lands will be flooded by the dam’s reservoir and they refuse to budge. People have been jailed. People have been killed. The authorities have delayed filling the reservoir, but everyone knows they will lose in the end. If the Manasir see a Westerner in their lands they’ll think you work for the dam. They’ll kill you. They’ve banned archaeologists as well—no one knows the ancient treasures that will disappear because of this—Kushite, Christian, Kerma culture. The Manasir say we’re only there to make the government look good. The government has offered to resettle them on good agricultural land, a place near Khartoum with good access to markets. When you live in a poor country you want to be near the government center—your problems are taken care of. But the Manasir are a river tribe. They want to be on the water where they can catch fish. Fifty thousand people will be displaced, some willingly, but not the Manasir.”
“Why doesn’t the government just settle them on banks of the reservoir?” I said.
“Because that will be very valuable land, a lake two hundred kilometers long,” he said. “They won’t waste it on tribesmen. They will give it to their own people, the Shaygiya Arabs. That’s the vice president’s tribe. They take care of their own. You know, when you deliver a paper on ancient Nubia in Europe, you have to be perfect. They are very sharp there. They hear every word. When you give the same paper to a conference of Arab archaeologists, you can say whatever you want. No one is listening.”
I had, years before, hiked for several days to reach a village in the Indian interior that was threatened by a massive dam project. Back then I was escorted to the spot by a pair of young activists and two boys from the local tribal community. They were my protectors, translators and informants. I could find no such pipeline to the Manasir lands. Activists working in Khartoum on behalf of the Manasir had been driven underground by arrests and torture, and the Manasir themselves would be anything but welcoming to a foreign stranger. Added to that was a state of near martial law that existed around the dam itself. To make the trip up to Abu Hamed and then down along the river would be to risk violence from the Manasir or detention and deportation by the security forces. I couldn’t figure how to make it work.
Dejected, I dropped Abu Hamed from my plans. From Atbara I crossed the Nile by ferry and took a minibus taxi 150 miles west through the volcanic Bayuda desert to Karima. The Bayuda and the Nubian Desert just north of it make up the eastern flank of the great Sahara. In satellite photographs the Bayuda suggests a flat, veiny slab of amber, something you might see in an ignored corner of a provincial museum, but up close this beauty was lost. The desert threw off a broiler-like heat that befitted a former volcano field. As I stared out the window at the mesmerizing plain of sand, stones and small stands of acacia bushes, my sweat-burned eyes deceived me. Lakes and ponds would appear in the far distance, and animals too—gazelles and fine-boned storks—but they dissipated before we got near them. We traveled on a rugged track running alongside a four-lane highway that was under construction. The new highway sat high on the landscape, looming over the taxi, and was marked by giant steel power lines that would one day carry electricity from the Merowe Dam to Khartoum, doubling the country’s electricity supply. In a region that saw but a small fraction of the precipitation that the south received, this new highway had giant culverts, some more than twenty feet wide, to ensure that the seasonal rains were allowed to flow across the landscape unimpeded, preserving ancient watering holes and seasonal creeks and the migrating Arab tribes who depended on them. It was just the sort of consideration the residents of Upper Nile in the south had been denied when the oil roads were built.
I found a small and pleasant room at the Hotel Nasser in Karima and spent the evening wondering if a more nervy reporter wouldn’t have rolled the dice on a jeep from Abu Hamed into the Manasir lands. Now sneaking in the back way was no longer an option. What about the front? The next morning I hopped a ferry across the Nile to Merowe town and asked a rickshaw driver to take me to the local dam implementation headquarters. We puttered to a destination well outside town, in an area desolate of everything but low-rise concrete compounds. These were new buildings built off new roads, all related to the planning, construction or protection of the dam and its power plant. The driver stopped at an anonymous gated complex, where a custodian wordlessly walked me down a long air-conditioned hall to the local manager’s office. I knocked and walked in, suddenly aware of my exceedingly informal attire: a wrinkled formerly black short-sleeved shirt, dirty green work pants, a dusty blue walking hat and boots that now bore no evidence of maintenance. Two men greeted me with expressions of mild professional curiosity.
I explained that I wanted to visit and take photographs of the dam and handed over my Sudanese press card, shifting eye contact from the manager to his assistant, who spoke better English. To my surprise, they didn’t throw me out. While the boss checked the fax machine and took some calls on his mobile, the assistant, Idriss, phoned a security office somewhere to ask permission. He placed the receiver back in its cradle and poured some tea from a red thermos pitcher on the table at our feet. “They will make some calls to check on you, and in one or two hours we will know. How many are in your group?”
“It’s just me.”
“And how many others?”
“It’s just me.”
Idriss and his boss looked at one another for a moment. They asked about transport. I said I would rent a car once I received permission to visit the dam. How much would a taxi cost? The three of us stumbled over the numbers, and they smiled when my eyes widened at 10,000 dinars, about $50. We sat quietly for another ten minutes when an idea came. “Would you like to see my passport?” I asked. “Maybe that will help whoever is doing the checking.” They liked the idea very much and Idriss made another call and gave them my passport number and mentioned my Nile itinerary—Malakal, Kosti, Khartoum, Atbara. Idriss put the phone down and smiled. “In half an hour our car and driver will take you to the dam, you will make photos and then he will drop you at the ferry to Karima. But first, please join us for breakfast.”
We took turns washing our hands in the manager’s pink-tiled bathroom and then walked into a conference room to a big white bowl of ful, a plate of fried eggs, cans of tuna, a plate of halvah, some jibneh and bread. I ate enough to give honest protest when they encouraged me to have more. Five other men hung back while Idriss, the boss and I ate. When we finished they took our places at the table and finished off the communal tray, as befitted their junior rank. I washed my hands again and sipped more tea on the couch in the manager’s office, and then it was time to go. A driver, clean-shaven and impassive, escorted me to a double-cab Toyota Hiace, where my first act as esteemed guest was to turn the air-conditioning down by half, and we were off, passing armed checkpoints with a wave, the radio playing lyric-free Arabic Muzak, past the time-ruined Nubian pyramids of Nuri (much bigger, and more Egyptian, than the spiky crowd at Meroe), past mud dovecotes and old mud-slab tombs, and after twenty minutes we were fast upon the dam. On a rise to the right of the road was what appeared to be a model village of white two-story condos with AC units outside each room and a new mosque raised in a modernist style—no cupolas or onion domes. The road curved quickly to the left and just like that we were crossing the base of the dam itself, its upper reaches bristling with row after row of bare steel rebar. Welders linked them in showers of acrid sparks while other workmen moved across acres of scaffolding. I saw Chinese managers in khaki and shirtsleeves hiding from the sun behind dark glasses and wide-brimmed straw sombreros; Chinese workers in hard hats, each carrying a bulky plastic canteen; and the heavy labor, Sudanese workers, black and brown, some of whom appeared to be as young as fourteen or fifteen, in coveralls and hard hats. A billboard on the east bank showed a Sudanese, a Chinese and a European looking with satisfaction over a set of blueprints toward the dam itself. In addition to the China National Water Resources & Hydropower Engineering Corp., French and German companies had a major role in its construction. Cement trucks churned on the tarmac, men walked with hard-work swaggers, and—whatever the serious human rights issues, the forced displacement, the lack of environmental review, the destruction of farmland, the arrest and torture of opponents—I had to admit the thing was a sight, big and impressive and cool. We pulled left again, onto the Nile’s west bank, and drove past a long low barracks for the Chinese workers, and then, on the left, another barracks, of coarser construction, for the Sudanese, and across the road from there, a line of shops that sold cool drinks and candy. We passed a last checkpoint and came to the headquarters, which resembled a small Silicon Valley office park. I followed the driver inside, and as he walked almost too fast down along the central hallway, it occurred to me that I had neglected to get a contact name from Idriss. The driver turned sharp and sudden into the office of the resident engineer and his face, both blank and direct, made clear he hadn’t been warned of my arrival.
“Please wait here a moment,” he said in perfect English.
“Sure. You mind if I gawk at these blueprints?” They were beautiful and they covered the wall, showing in precise graceful lines the turbines, penstocks and control gates that had slowed the Nile and destroyed the fields and date palms of the Manasir and other tribes.
“That’s fine,” the chief engineer replied. On the desk was a pile of papers, apparently an unbound report, by the “Reclamation” section discussing the delays and the “resettlement crisis.” As a hydroelectric project, the Merowe Dam wasn’t really taking water from Egypt, but this didn’t stop the generals in Cairo from threatening to bomb the site when the topic was first bruited in the 1980s. They’ve since come to terms with the dam, and it isn’t considered a threat to Egypt’s age-old domination of the river—an ancient hegemony cemented in the modern era by the British-brokered Nile Waters Agreement of 1959. The treaty allocates 55.5 billion cubic meters of water each year to Egypt, 18.5 billion to Sudan and not a drop to anyone else—a source of increasing ire in Britain’s former colonies in East Africa, where the rains have become unpredictable and irrigation is now seen as a necessity.
A young man sat at the desk busily mousing his way through something. “What is your diploma?” he asked without looking up from the screen.
“Political science,” I lied.
“Science?”
“Political science and creative writing. I’m not an engineer.”
“Technical qualification?”
“I have no technical qualification,” I said, and he went back to ignoring me.
A minute or two later an agitated man in a Sudanese safari suit—small, balding, with a black mustache—came galloping down the hall and slid to a stop in the doorway of the resident engineer’s office. “If-you-just-go-with-this-man-to-the-village-for-just-one-minute-there-are-some-forms-for-you-to-fill,” he said in one panting breath, and for a full second I actually believed him. I would be taken back to the modern-looking management village we’d passed on the way in. I would sign the liability forms. And then I would walk freely among the workers and shoot the $2 billion hydroelectric dam in beautiful Kodak black and white.
We walked back down the long hallway, the driver ducked into a kitchenette for a couple bottles of Coke and moments later the Toyota double-cab surged back over the dam, past the workers, across the Nile, past the new village, past the checkpoints and dustmote villages and the mud-brick saints’ tombs and the ruined pyramids of Nuri, all the way back to the administrative office in Merowe. And another cup of tea with Idriss and his boss.
“So, Daniel,” Idriss said. “You have seen the dam.”
“Briefly—and I couldn’t take pictures.”
“You have seen the dam,” he said with gentle finality. “For today, let that be enough.”
With that, Idriss’s driver took me past farmers’ fields and canals full of splashing naked boys to a ferry point, where I crossed the Nile back to Karima. My transport this time was a wide-beamed rowboat propelled by a skinny oarsman with two old women and a cow for company. It was an abrupt contrast—one minute I was zooming through the 112-degree sepia desert, and the next I was rolling down to the water, surrounded by wide irrigated patches of beans and arugula. An hour later I was inside the Karima post office—a charming colonial bungalow set under broad shade trees, beneath which most of the staff were lounging. I needed stamps, and among the wax-papered inventory I found a set commemorating the dam. One 400-dinar rectangle showed a township of modern white houses set in the desert. “Merowe Dam Project: Rehabilitation Projects,” it said in English, celebrating the resettlement that the Manasir had so far thwarted. Another showed an ancient clay urn, boasting, “Merowe Dam Project, Safe of Archaeology.”
I asked around town and on the waterfront about a boat to Dongola, but no one remembered the last time a passenger boat had made the trip. That night I walked to the riverbank a half mile from my hotel to gaze at a half dozen Nile steamers rusting in the sand. The steel-hulled triple-deckers were piled one against another, wasting away within arm’s reach of the water. As recently as the 1980s these floating hostels plied the route between Karima and Dongola, carrying passengers and cargo. They had dining halls, private staterooms, even post offices, promising a slow, steady and civilized journey along this river in the desert. The steamers fell out of use as civil war and mismanagement turned Sudan’s economy to dust and the state got out of the business of floating hostels. Now travelers willing to suffer through four hours of furnace and grit could pay 2,500 dinars to cut across the Nubian desert in the open bed of a pickup-truck taxi called a boksi. Roads kill river travel. One day an all-weather road will connect Juba to Malakal, and those barges too will fade away.
I opted for a different route, one that reduced the personal ingestion of sand by half and kept me close to the river as it completed its southern bend near Abu Dom and turned north toward Egypt. I rode through a sandstorm, huddled with ten other passengers, to a way station called Ad Dabbah, a low-rise settlement of string-bed flophouses, kebab joints and dry goods stores. There, under a lashingly hot wind, I hunted on foot for a ride north to Dongola, and struck gold forty minutes later in the form of a small bus idling by the road. Inside, ten men in white robes and turbans looked at me without emotion. Another slept. And a man at the back beckoned me over. They were a group of legislators from Northern state, and I’d caught them at the end of a prayer break. The bus was a government charter—they’d just come from an official tour of the dam, part of a public relations offensive to win support for Merowe and, implicitly, for Kajbar. In fact, they’d been to the dam just a day before my aborted visit.
“What do you think?” I asked my new friend, the sole local representative of the SPLM. “It doesn’t matter what I think about this,” he said. “It’s already built. The dam in Kajbar isn’t built, but I guarantee you it will be.”
“What do your colleagues think?”
“They are from the National Congress,” he said. “They are told what to think.”
Three hours later we were in Dongola, the capital of Northern state and the southernmost city of present-day Nubia. After registering with the local security office, as foreigners are required to do, I checked into the cheapest hotel I could find and waited to hear from Haroun, a friend of a friend who said he would take me for a clandestine look at the villages near the Kajbar dam site. A bucket bath managed to remove the first couple layers of desert grime from my flesh, and I set off for a look at the town. I walked well past dark through Dongola’s fields and date groves, the furies of mosquitoes made bearable by the cool air on the Nile banks and the company of a group of farm boys who stopped their donkey cart to chat and observe me with soft curiosity. Dongola’s date palms had made the town of nineteen thousand prosperous by Sudanese standards. The brightly lit shops were stocked with expensive canned vegetables and packaged cookies and cakes from Egypt, Turkey and, curiously, Bosnia. The electricity ran all night.
Haroun called two days later and we arranged to meet at a village on the east side of the Nile a few miles north of Dongola. I obtained an exit permit, as foreigners are also required to do, took a passenger ferry across the river and caught a taxi to the meeting spot.
Haroun was reassuringly nondescript. He had been an English teacher before the Islamists had stricken it from the curriculum. Now he farmed his father’s dates. We continued farther north in his Toyota pickup, following a thin road along the Nile’s eastern bank to the hamlet of Sebo, just upriver of the Kajbar dam site.
“It is tense now, but okay, not as bad as right after the murders,” he said of the April 24 protests and police shootings that Waleed had first told me about. “Since the recent trouble, now we have a stand-down. A standoff. On the surface, nothing is happening. Underneath, the problem is building.”
Despite the tension between the local people and their government, the view from Haroun’s pickup was as pleasant as any I’d seen in months. The Nubian landscape was a refreshing tonic to the cinderblock and cement houses of northern Sudan. We passed orchards of date palms, fields of onions, garlic and fava beans, and broad, smooth-walled mud-brick compounds, most marked by an oversize front gate decorated in bright colors and simple paintings. The villages were clean; there were no piles of refuse on the streets, and gone were the rashes of desiccating plastic shopping bags that marred so much of the landscape elsewhere.
We drove to the home of a village chief, who’d agreed to tell me about the struggle over the Kajbar Dam. Two boys dragged a string bed from the main house to the courtyard. The chief’s greeting was cordial, but he asked that I not write down his name or take his photograph, adding, “There are special police here now.” He sat on a walnut-stained high-backed armchair, almost a throne, in the spare surroundings of the earthen courtyard.
“It started about eight in the morning,” he said of the April 24 incident. “The youth went to the dam to show their opposition. The police came and they shot the gas, but the youth from all the villages, the twenty-six villages, refused to leave. The police fired and two people were shot, not fatally. This brought more people, at least three thousand, and when more police were sent up from Dongola, they stopped them on the road between Jeddi and Sebo.” Police reinforcements sent from Dongola were trapped by a roadblock of boulders and palm trunks several miles south of the site, where the route is pinched by the Nile on one side and a steep stone embankment on the other. Residents surrounded the dozens of police in a polite standoff, offering tea and water but keeping them away from the work site.
A local SPLM representative secured a promise from the governor that police would leave the area and that work on the dam would stop. Instead, once the cops were freed, the work site was reinforced with sixty-five soldiers and the region was locked down. It was a predictable betrayal.
“In 1995 some Russian engineers came and made a study,” the elder said, pausing to take a bubbly pull from a rose glass nargileh at his feet. He released a cloud of sweet tobacco smoke. “The government said it would be a small dam, with minor flooding. Later they said there would be more flooding, that it would take all the banks of the Nile and the date palms and the islands in the Nile. They said they would discuss compensation and then for years we heard nothing. Then, just this year, in January, we looked up one day and a helicopter was landing near the village. They were Chinese people and Sudanese. They said they were building a hotel—Chinese people, here to build a hotel. Then, out of nothing, fifty Chinese workers, geotechnicians, were taking samples of the rock, ten-centimeter cores, and no one was telling us anything. They say the new dam will provide electricity for the district, but there is enough electricity at Merowe. The real reason is to scatter the Nubian area, to finish the work of the Aswan Dam.”
Haroun cut in: “Lake Nubia is filling with silt,” he said, speaking of the Aswan High Dam’s 350-mile-long reservoir. “It has hundreds of meters of dirt at the bottom and soon it will be full and the High Dam will be useless. These dams in Sudan are made for Egypt, so they will take the dirt before it reaches Aswan. They are planning another dam near here, at Dal, and this too is for Egypt.”
“It’s just miserable,” the village elder said. “After Halfa, we are all facing a dim future. The same thing will happen to us. We expect nothing better. We are river people. How can we stay in the desert without trees? We are free in our village. We fear only God.”
“Is anyone coming to your side?” I asked. “Have any of the political parties tried to help you?”
“This area voted for the communists in the last election, in ’86,” the elder said. “They have no influence these days and because of that vote the government suspects we are all atheists. Look at my home,” he said, waving his hand over the courtyard. “This is my area, for me only. My wife and children stay over there.” He pointed to a wall and a smaller yard behind it. The two realms were connected by the main house. “There is no way to re-create this once it is destroyed. This house, those palms, this river: This is our life.”
On one level, the forces threatening Nubia were the same ones that threaten minority communities across the industrializing world. The perceived needs of the nation—in this case, electricity and irrigation—would have to be met at the expense of an unlucky few. While a large body of evidence suggests that the benefits of big dams are outweighed by the social and environmental costs they incur, it seemed to me that projects like those at Merowe and Kajbar were undertaken, however brutally, by people who truly believed they were working in the national interest. It wasn’t a multibillion-dollar plot to destroy Nubia, it was an ambitious grasp at economic self-sufficiency.
But my family members had not been forced from their lands, and my native language wasn’t banned from the public schools. Nor, like many Nubians, was I looked at with theological suspicion by the dominant culture because my distant ancestors had been Christians. And really, no one in the ruling party was shedding a tear for the destruction of Nubia. It wasn’t hard to see why Nubians saw the Kajbar Dam as another piece in an Arab scheme to blot them out forever.
We drove to Haroun’s home, a less expansive version of the village chief’s house, also with a broad courtyard, though without a traditional haram, or formally segregated women’s area. Haroun’s wife simply stayed away while we talked. Then, to my surprise, she joined us for dinner, a tasty spread of stewed spicy meat, fish and beans that we ate from small bowls with round chewy flatbread. Haroun and I walked through the empty village paths, each family safe behind its painted walls, past clusters of compounds, a mud-brick community privy (For visitors like me? For unmarried men?) and down through a band of date palms to the Nile’s edge. From there we walked north on the reed bank, pausing at a point where the satin water became agitated, the beginning of the Nile’s third cataract. A thousand yards ahead I saw a small group of buildings and pieces of earthmoving machinery, tiny modules backlit by the receding sun. “We should stop here,” Haroun said. I kept walking. The buildings were specks in the Nikon’s viewfinder. “I can’t get a shot,” I said and pressed forward.
“We should stop here,” he said again. It was the same diffident tone, but now ever so sharp. I stopped.
“Sorry.”
We walked the trail back to town. “The problem is that the families get bigger, but the land doesn’t,” he said, changing the subject. “As a family grows, there isn’t enough land for all the sons. Some go to Khartoum to work, or to the Gulf, and they lose their connection to the village. So when the government is offering compensation, even if it is too little money, they might sign. Some won’t ask the brother who is actually on the land. Some will sign even if the father is alive. That is happening here now—a government officer is paying out the money. They split the families and take the land. And the court sides with the government, even if the seller had no right. Our palms can produce dates for more than a hundred years, but they are offering just two or three years’ compensation for each tree. How is that fair?” We stopped at the roadside and waited for a flatbed semi to pass, a load of cement strapped to its back, a man in uniform riding shotgun next to the driver.
I slept under the stars at Haroun’s house and wondered if I wasn’t romanticizing the lives of these Nubian farmers. In recent centuries Nubia had been an impoverished smudge on the map. Nubian men had been fleeing north to Cairo for work as servants, footmen and soldiers since the 1700s. The Nubian empires that people spoke of today were long gone. And yet: The Nile and the date palms that drank from it had allowed these people to maintain their culture and native language in the face of a larger culture that preferred they either assimilate or disappear.
Some days after leaving Sebo, while watching HBO in the comfort of a five-star hotel in Aswan, I received a text message from Waleed Arafat: “I am so sorry to tell you that the Kajbar case has entered a bloody stage,” he wrote. Dam authorities had started plowing under fields and cutting down palms. A group of protesters had marched out from the village of Jeddi to close the dam site and were met with tear gas and gunfire at the same pinch in the Dongola road where the police had been trapped two months before. Seven villagers were killed, nineteen injured and some, including women and children, were missing after they leaped into the Nile to escape the onslaught. Waleed and Moez were beaten by police in Khartoum while leaving a demonstration against the massacre. And five hundred soldiers from the Dams Implementation Unit’s special security force had taken up permanent residence in Sebo.


In the morning I caught a bus to Wadi Halfa, squeezed between the driver and the left-hand door. Four women in full face-covering niqab, two wearing elbow-length gloves, were crowded to his right. This bus was a first cousin of the schooner that had brought me from Melut to Renk—no reclining seats or video amusements, just angry gears and hot wind. It took two days to make the three hundred miles to Halfa. We spent the night at a way station not far from the Nubian village of Dal at the Nile’s second cataract, where yet another dam was planned. From there to Wadi Halfa the Nile became an eighty-mile stretch of rapids, boulders and islands of granite holding fast against the coursing water. Unlike the nearly flat river of southern Sudan, here the Nile dropped more than a foot a mile. It seemed just a matter of time before that energy would be tapped and a last piece of Nubia submerged. The Nubians had seen this before, when Old Halfa was destroyed by the High Dam at Aswan.
Wadi Halfa was a ghost, a dusty broken valise of a town. It clung to the edge of Lake Nubia, unreal and untethered, a permanent refugee camp. But it wasn’t always that way. The real Halfa, now under water, had been a bustling if dusty frontier town of eleven thousand, the hub for transport and trade between Egypt and the Sudan. The locals lived off this trade, supplementing it with small farms and remittances from Nubians working abroad.
Despite initial resentment of the overbearing Egyptians, Sudan’s government in 1959 consented to the construction of the Aswan High Dam, Nasser’s grand monument to Egyptian progress. As many as 120,000 Nubians were displaced, and while Egypt’s resettlement of the Nubians was carried out in an indifferent but generally humane manner—new villages were created on the Nile north of Aswan, where communities could remain intact—Sudan’s response was disastrous. A model city, New Halfa, was erected near the Ethiopian border, and Old Halfa was evacuated. Most residents complied, but a group of families defied the government of General Abboud and refused to leave their city. They moved as the waters rose and in the mid-1960s reestablished Halfa at the edge of the new reservoir.
“We are one family from the first cataract to Dongola,” said Sawi Bitek, a Nubian elder statesman, when I met him outside a small dry goods shop in Wadi Halfa. “When the High Dam came, some of the people were transferred by force. We, the five hundred families, insisted to die here. Four times we moved to escape the water. We were exposed to heat and cold. Fortunately there came the revolution of October ’64 against the regime of Abboud and we were recognized. Before that we were outlaws.”
“It’s been more than forty years since the High Dam,” I said. “And, I’m just a visitor here, but things don’t look very good. What are you looking for? What do you want?”
“Our main point is how to keep our culture,” he said. “We are a minority. We have no lands. The Nubian feels a man without land is not a citizen. He is just a wanderer.” As the Nubians were being pushed off the land, newer, more politically reliable groups were talking their place.
“They are encouraging Islamists into the area,” Bitek said. “Five or six months ago the Al Waan newspaper reported that Jews were fomenting revolt in Halfa! We oppose the dam, so we are Jews. The normal people don’t like us. You can see it, from antiquity to today. They imagine a Nubian problem will rise one day. We are real Muslims, not Muslims for show. We are not hypocrites. During the Nimeiri years they wanted to start a Comboni school here—the rich and the powerful all send their children to the Comboni school in Khartoum. But the authorities said, ‘No, they are weak Muslims. They will change.’ They said that when the Comboni Brothers come we will all be making the sign of the cross. I was here before God. When did you come here? I was here six thousand years. Before religion. Before God.”
I mentioned that Mohammed Wardi, the Nubian singer, had talked about armed resistance in Nubia. Bitek shook his head.
“I respect Mahatma Gandhi. Mr. Nehru, he sees a cow, he bows down. That’s his belief. Those who speak of armed resistance should come and see. Come and see the situation here. Where are the people? This area is not suitable for guerrilla warfare.” Halfa was a Nubian city, he said, but its institutions—the banks, the police and the major businesses—were all in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. “They control the economy.”
“Has the peace treaty had any affect on the north?” I asked.
“The CPA is a gift from the south to the north,” he said. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement contained provisions for political pluralism that affected the entire country. “Before, we would both be arrested for speaking out in the open like this,” he said, “though there might still be a report. Everyone wept here when Garang died.”
I spent three days in Halfa, sleeping at an open-air flophouse with dozens of others waiting for the ferry to Aswan, and breakfasted each morning at an outdoor restaurant in the back, eating ful, bread and tea with customs officers and local businessmen. Behind us two big orange diesel trucks, ten-wheeled passenger rovers with rows of aircraft-style seats, awaited a shipment of European tourists from Egypt to be borne through Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya south to Cape Town. The trucks and their crewmen—a mix of white and black South Africans, an Australian and three Kenyans—had been waiting in Halfa for two weeks. They had planned to take the vehicles into Egypt and bring their wards south from Cairo, but something had gone wrong with their paperwork; the trucks would stay in Halfa while the tourists were transported south on Egyptian charter buses. The Kenyans were especially disappointed; they’d hoped to see the pyramids.
One evening, as I sat smoking with them, a solitary figure appeared at the edge of their encampment, a broad black man who stood on thick bare feet in a soiled robe. The cook at the restaurant brought him a metal cup of water and a piece of bread. Standing, he ate the bread and drank the water and carried the cup back to the cook without speaking. He walked slowly to our table and sat down but didn’t utter a word. “He’s an absolute mystery,” one of the South Africans said. “No one knows where he came from. Been here for months. He’s twice—twice—walked to Egypt across the desert, been caught and sent back here over the border. No passport, no documents, nothing. He doesn’t speak.”
The locals had given up trying to reach him in Arabic and Rotana, the Nubian language. The Kenyans and the South Africans had tried English, French, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Swahili, Baganda and Luo, with no success either. He lacked the height, the leanness and the ritual scars of the Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk. And he appeared bigger, thicker, than the Equatorians I had met. A response to French might have traced him to the Central African Republic, the Congo, Rwanda or Burundi, but he didn’t respond to French. And he clearly wasn’t Ethiopian or Somali. His features were softer than those I associated with the people of the Horn. Handed a pen, he drew birds, not words. What was he seeking in Egypt? I imagined him on a quest to Mount Sinai or Jerusalem itself, maybe fulfilling a vow to a wasting relation back in Brazzaville, Bangui or N’Djamena. “Where you from, man?” I asked. “Where’s your family?” Bare forearms on the table, he leaned forward and looked at me with his mouth just a little bit open, dark eyes speaking patience and humor, the way an adult might receive an infant’s babble.