Three girls follow me around the floor until their ring leader gets over her giggles and greets me. They’d like to take selfies. Their classmates join us, and phones are passed to the security guards and teachers for photos.
The first floor of the museum houses the religious exhibition. The security guard leaves his chair next to the fan to follow us around and make sure we don’t take any photographs. Most of the collection has chips and faded spots, but their colours are still bright. The tenth-century depiction of Daniel and three of his friends being saved from the furnace by the archangel is a reminder that, contrary to idle thoughts, Christianity didn’t come to Africa with our colonisers.
Khartoum is famous for being the location of the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers that flow from Ethiopia and Uganda and onwards to Egypt. It’s on my to-do list after the museum.
My plans change when I get a call from Yusuf. Mr Masjeed has given him my number, and he wants to take me out for lunch. We meet at a food court across the road from the airport for a meal that’s as African as any featuring grilled meat that’s sliced off fatty animal carcasses that hang on hooks at the butchery. Yusuf has an easiness that defines the character of the Sudanese people. Being with him feels like being home. When he drops me off at the hotel later, he tells me to call him the following day to tell him how I’m faring with my cashless situation, and he buys me airtime that doesn’t run out in the two and half weeks I spend in Sudan.
Just as I sensed in 2006 that the trip to Accra would turn my life around, I send Mahlatsi a text message to tell him that Khartoum is under my skin in a way that will never leave me, and that experience tells me it will make me live on the road again. This realisation hits me when I go shopping for a local plug so I can use my laptop. I start my search at the hotel, where the receptionist tells one of the cleaners what I’m looking for and asks him to take me to the hardware store and speak Arabic on my behalf. They don’t have what I’m looking for and even though they know where I need to go, they can’t communicate the information.
My salvation comes when I see a man wearing a beaded wrist band in the colours of the Kenyan flag; I pull his hand without even talking to him first. He overlooks my invasion of his privacy, and uses his perfect Arabic to tell the tuk tuk driver where I’m going. The shop is closed for Maghrib, the sunset prayer. I sit on the stoep to wait for it to open again. Another shopper arrives but unlike me she doesn’t have time to wait. She gives me her mobile number and asks me to call her when shopping resumes. When it does, I send her pictures of frames and their price tags, and the easiness of how we relate seals my destiny with Sudan: I belong here.
It’s an affirmation that I get in every moment of my stay here. I get it from Osama on my second morning. He’s the complete stranger who calls on me from the hotel lobby while I’m out for coffee. He doesn’t speak a lot of English but it’s enough to let me know that being with me is an errand from Yusuf; Osama will take me around the city on public transport so I don’t get lost in translation.
We’re like a painfully awkward blind date for the three days that he shows up at the hotel to take me around Khartoum, but I feel loved and cared for that he puts his life on hold for a few hours a day to make sure that I’m settling in. While I wait for money that I’m making plans to get via Western Union or the Somali network that Mahlatsi is trying to link me with, I visit the confluence of the Nile at sunset, the main shopping districts in Khartoum and the country’s second city, Omdurman, and go on joyrides around the city that end at restaurants on the banks of the river on Nile Street, where I watch the city lights twinkling on the water.
Bashir is the next person to call me over, for tea at his house in Omdurman. Three things stand out about his visit. The first is how his son spends the duration of my trip on the phone with the taxi driver to give him directions so we don’t get lost. The second is that my hosts pay for the trip. Walking into their yard, I find it odd that it has two narrow woven beds next to the door. The are two more beds in the room we walk through to get to the lounge. A section of it has more of these beds, called angareeb, that are a feature of private and public life in Sudan. They are for sitting and sleeping on; in bus stations, outside shops, in people’s yards and their lounge rooms. We sit in the lounge for tea that’s served with dates, chocolates and an assortment of butter cookies.
I meet his family in trickles. First, it’s the new bride and groom who still have henna tattoos from their wedding day. His is black ink at the tips of his fingers. Hers is an elaborate pattern inside and outside her hands, running up to her arms. I also meet Bashir’s wife and daughter, whose feet, like everyone else’s, are always between Khartoum and Pretoria. Our conversation is one that I enjoy more than all others – always a favourite – a world I will only know from the records of history. Bashir works with Dr Mathole Motsekga through Sukara Heritage Society to preserve ancient Sudanese history. At the moment, they’re examining the origins of Sudan as it’s explained in the book of Genesis as the land of the children of Ham, Noah’s son.
On the biblical map Bashir shows me, the land covered Egypt and Ethiopia, while Noah’s other sons lived across North Africa and parts of the Middle East. Any narratives that position and acknowledge Africa as the origin of mankind and civilisation have a ready believer in me. I leave Bashir’s house with an open invitation to visit whenever I want to and a tin filled with enough dates, biscuits and chocolates to last a week, even when I share them with everyone I meet on my journey.
My trip to Port Sudan starts at the bus station in Almin Albenie, where I follow an old man to one of the small offices packed into the alley with even smaller cafés selling bread and fried meat; as always, there are old and young women with tea and coffee stations. Our bus looks like a grandmother’s sitting room with velvet seat covers and silk curtains that are decorated with gold tassels. The overhead compartment is draped with red silk. The aircon is set on freezing and the TV on an Imam’s teachings. They add another word, shabab, to my Arabic vocabulary. It means youth.
Buildings become smaller and the landscape sparse when we get out of the city. Most of the trip is through vast stretches of flat desert, with snapshots of towns that turn street corners into second-hand fridge and tyre shops. No matter how desolate the location, there’s always a mosque around.
We stop for lunch and the afternoon prayer, Asr, at a roadhouse with a mosque at the back and coffee stalls at the front. A butcher stands behind a zinc counter at the door. One of the passengers from our bus refuses to let me pay for my lunch, and the workers call me over to chat in broken English and pose for pictures.
In other parts of the journey, the desert is punctuated with bare mountains and villages where herds of camels are left in kraals next to the main road. The women in this part of the country wear large hoop earrings in their septums; all of them drape cotton shawls over their bodies and all the men are in tunics and turbans. Their complexion is jet black and their hair silky. Sudanese people are breathtakingly beautiful. I have to stop myself from staring.
Port Sudan on New Year’s Eve
Being here on the biggest party night of the year seems like a mistake. The bus station is on the outskirts of the city. The streets are dead on the tuk tuk ride to my hotel. The only living things around me are the flocks of sheep left on the railway grazing on piles of dry grass. This side of Port Sudan needs cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
The mood changes when we get to the Bohein Hotel in the area around the corniche. The streets spill over with crowds from cafés, everyone is enjoying fruit juice, tea, coffee, ice cream and sodas. There is alcohol, apparently, but it’s not a feature of social life. I haven’t been drinking since my trip to Cairo, when I forget to resume my daily sundowners at the end of Ramadan. It looks like everyone – young, old, men, women, teen squads, couples – the whole population of Port Sudan is out. Pavements have become picnic spots with people sitting on plastic mats and concrete benches. Buildings and lamps glint wi
th fairy lights. I mill around the streets, following the sound of music until it leads me to a group of musicians surrounded by an impenetrable crowd. I follow folk songs to an outdoor auditorium and spend the final minutes of 2017 at the edge of the stage, where some band members form a circle around me, gazing into my eyes, singing and clapping like they’re putting on a private performance just for me. The sky explodes with fireworks.
I’m only here for three nights. The hotel owner gives me a discount I don’t ask for, and never lets me walk past his office on my floor without inviting me over for coffee, like the people I sit next to at coffee shops and stalls. New Year’s Day is also the country’s Independence Day. I celebrate it at a mushy lagoon with throes of people who arrive on buses, taxis and tuk tuks, and picnic on full meals brought over in pots.
Other than the angareeb, another ubiquitous feature in public spaces are the clay pots that are several feet apart from each other. They’re filled with water and a jug is left next to them so that anyone who wants to quench their thirst in one of the hottest countries in the world doesn’t have to buy it or ask for it. Another common feature is plastic jugs and prayer mats left on the streets so that anyone who wants to pray can cleanse themselves and face Mecca wherever they are.
This innate generosity is the highlight of my travels in Sudan. People just care for each other. They do so patiently, giving their time and hearts to each other. When I look for my bus ticket out of town, Ahmed the tuk tuk driver doesn’t just drop me off at the station. He goes from one company to the next until we find the first ticket out. Some companies write destinations in Arabic and Amharic to accommodate the Eritrean community, and all cashiers put the piles of pounds they collect from us in boxes they leave on the counter, knowing that no one will steal from them. It reminds me of another hotel in Khartoum, which uses a ribbon to keep the gates closed at night.
The trip to Meroe retraces the road I take to Port Sudan from Khartoum, through the now-familiar jarring peaks of granite mountains, the long stretches of desert, the occasional herd of camels and mosques, even when there are only a few houses in the area. This part of the trip ends at Atbara. Like the highways around the country, the station looks like millions of Sudanese pounds have been put into making it look modern. There are designated parking zones for buses, tuk tuks and cabs. The large building is kept cool with air conditioning that’s always set on freezing. There are mini supermarkets and waiting area with benches. The bus companies have demarcated ticket offices and different exits depending on where you are going. I’m the last passenger in the minibus to Meroe.
I’ve been on buses, taxis and tuk tuks decorated with curtains, mirrors, lace trimmings and plastic flowers. This mini bus takes the prize as the most tricked-out public transport in the country, and believe me, they decorate them like it’s a competition. Every surface of the interior is covered with a brown and gold suede cloth. The curtains have frills, the roof has round and triangular mirrors and plastic tear-drop chandeliers that shake all the way to Meroe. The trip is uneventful until the driver stops and tells me to get out in the middle of nowhere. I may not know where I’m going, but I’m not going to be left by the roadside. The day light is fading; I’d rather end up at the last stop with other people. No one speaks English, so the minibus waits until a car that’s going to Meroe finally shows up. I call Bashir, who has become my translator, so he can tell the driver where to take me. He chooses Meroe Tourist Village, which has a mosque on its grounds, a culture museum that’s never open, and a restaurant that looks like a school dining hall and a patio with views of the palm tree forest that stretches endlessly.
Meroe is not as famous as Giza but it’s possibly one of the most important sites in Africa for the two hundred-plus pyramids left behind by Nubian kings and queens. The earliest date back to the sixth century and while they are small compared to the famous ones in Cairo, they have the cachet of being the first to go up. They’re scattered around the former heartland of the Nubian kingdom, and much like other experiences and relics from Sudan’s glorious past, there is barely any information about them at the site. The information black out is frustrating but the lack of tourists turns being here into an experience that’s not marred by throngs of people; it makes exploring them a private tour of sorts.
I waddle through the sand while my cab driver stays behind and catch a lucky break when I meet Ibrahim and Mohammed and the two Chinese friends they’re taking around northern Sudan. They give me company, someone to take pictures of my bucket-list moment and a crew to trek to the pyramids in Nuri with.
Meroe has two sides; the near-desolate sites of the desert, and the vibrant town that sits on the banks of the Nile. In this part of town, houses and buildings look like a box of Smarties with colourful walls. The muezzin for Isha, the last call to prayer in the evening, finds me at the viewpoint at the hotel. I walk back to my room to repeat a ritual I’ve seen countless times in the past nine years, when believers rinse their right hands three times, followed by the left, then the face and feet. After my improvised wudu, I go to the mosque, where I kneel and make my head touch the ground, declaring: ‘Laa ilaaha illalaah, Mohammed ar-Rasool Allah’; there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger. I first say these words in August 2009, when one of the passengers in my taxi from Conakry to Bamako writes them in my journal. This time around, I say them to mark my conversion to Islam. The other people in the mosque are the manager, Mubarak, and the two staff members he’s leading in prayer. When he’s done, he shows up at my door to tell me that seeing me pray is the final sign he needed to tell me that he wants me to be his second wife.
I find him camping outside my door the following morning. ‘I have spoken to an Imam who has agreed to marry us before you leave for Dongola,’ he says hopefully. He backs off when I promise to think about his proposal. I block his number a few minutes after I check out to travel to Dongola.
At the bus station in Dongola, I show a driver the picture of a jellabiya-clad man walking into a mud hut shaped like a beehive. I want this scene to be my last experience in the north before I trek back to Khartoum. Within seconds, a group of other people, all men, has gathered around us, passing my phone from hand to hand to figure out where I need to go. I’m excluded from a conversation that’s become spirited, and sounding like it has stopped being about getting me on a taxi to the place in the picture.
Whenever someone joins the chatter, the conversation goes back to arguing about where I’m going. Someone calls a friend that speaks English. In what’s turning out to be the story of my travel here, he doesn’t just tell me where to go. He drives to the rank to meet me in person and offers to help me look for a hotel when I come back from my trip. In the meantime, he, along with the group, agrees that Mohammed is the best person to take me there. He speaks English and he is a police officer. The guard will open for us if they’re already closed for the day. Another plus with Mohammed – he’s the only person who will drive me there and back for three hundred pounds.
Mohammed speaks good English on the hour-long drive through desert towns that add pops of colour to the earthy tones with pastel purple and lime walls with white borders, dots and pin stripes. I may not know where I’m going but forests of palm trees don’t match the barren landscape in the picture Mohammed keeps assuring me we are on the way to. My picture doesn’t have other buildings around. The trip ends in a sprawling compound housing a peach-coloured building. We’ve walked into a family day with families picnicking on the sunburned grass. Children take a break from chasing each other to get ice cream, which they always do with a smile, and to join their families for food, which they sulk over. The guards know Mohammed. They laugh and catch up with each other, and let me through without charging me. I show him the picture again. He says starting at the Kerma Museum is part of the experience.
Kerma Museum has the largest collection of Nubian relics. It’s an ancient site with ruins of what used to be the royal burial grounds and temples. The collectio
n of relics here is even smaller than the one at the national museum in Khartoum. It still gives a rounded impression of life at the height of the Nubian kingdom. The collection includes granite statues of kings from the Nubian dynasty, ceramic vases and jars, figures and models of village life then and a burial site with a grave and skeleton. Through a gate at the back of the museum are grounds with some of the tombs from Kerma’s golden age between 2500 and 1500 BC. Without context, they are just solid lines of sand in blocks and spherical shapes.
Mohammed stays on the ground while I climb heavily up the steps to the top of one of the three deffufas left over from the Kingdom of Kerma. Deffufa is derived from the Arabic translation of pile. It’s an apt name for the mud building. Its previous use is unknown. It’s now a viewing point for sunsets that sink into the forest of palm trees. After the ritual rounds of taking selfies, I show the beehive huts to a boy I find hanging out on the steps. I ask a boy who speaks fluent English if he knows where I need to go, and if he can tell Mohammed how to get there. We’re not just at the wrong place. We are at the opposite end of town. Worse, with the sun starting to set, it’s too late for me to trek there. I have been keeping myself in check from the beginning of my trip as people send me on wild rides around town because ‘no’ seems to be a forbidden word in Sudan. I tell myself to chin up, and enjoy the moment for what it is. But this is enough. I’m leaving the country in three days. I can’t afford to lose any more time.
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