Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  The passenger beside me, a beefy German reporter named Bart, came even better prepared: he’d packed industrial-strength sunblock and fifteen days’ worth of German K-rations. “Some breakfast?” he asked, offering me a cracker smeared with canned schmaltz. I shook my head. “I have thought the Ruhr Valley was the worst place on earth, but now I know different,” Bart continued, wiping grit from his gold-rimmed half-glasses. “Khartoum, it is like something from Kafka.”

  Across the aisle sat a Canadian mechanic who had spent the previous month in a Khartoum hospital bed, delirious with malaria. He had contracted the disease during his first week in Muglad and wasn’t looking forward to returning south. “Did you know there are sixty-three species of mosquito in Sudan?” he said, quaffing chloroquine. “Down south, those bugs are real Dinkas. Big, black and hungry.”

  While he and Bart compared malaria tablets, I gazed out the window as the plane lifted off over the turgid brown waters of the White Nile. Within minutes the city vanished and we flew across a vast expanse of semidesert, dotted with mud-brick homes. It was a typical Arabian sandscape, arid and dull and conducive to deep, undreaming sleep. I drifted off soon after takeoff and awoke three hours later, over Africa. The plane swooped in low across flat savannah, over stout baobab trees and cone-shaped huts and patches of something I hadn’t seen in months: grass. It was the end of the dry season, still scorched and tan, but after Khartoum, the fields of elephant grass looked verdant and soothing.

  We bounced down a narrow strip of tar and straight up to a terminal the size of a dentist’s waiting room. A dozen people stood crowded inside, hoping to hitch a ride on the flight back to Khartoum. One carried a spear; another a goat. When the pilot said he could take only four passengers, the others turned away without apparent disappointment and sprawled on the floor, a little more comfortable now that there were only eight sharing the tiny space. The next flight was due in forty-eight hours.

  In Khartoum, the UNICEF office had told us it would radio relief workers in Muglad to come to the airport and look after us until we were ready to join the outgoing queue to Khartoum. But the message never got through. So we were ushered instead to a small packed-mud building, which turned out to be the Muglad police station. A scowling officer in green fatigues rifled through our packs, then asked for our wallets. He plucked out my photographic permit, which I’d spent a day and more dollars than I cared to recall prying loose from the Khartoum bureaucracy. He tore the permit in half. Then he took my camera.

  “Mish surra,” he said. No pictures.

  He dove into my wallet again and fished out a letter from the Ministry of Information, which said I had permission to interview refugees in the camp outside Muglad. He stuck this in his pocket.

  “Mamnoor,” he said. Not allowed.

  I assumed he would shortly pluck out all my remaining money and pocket that as well. But he had all he wanted and pointed us in the direction of Beit Khawajja, “White Man’s House,” which housed Western aid workers and served as a sort of hotel for Westerners passing through. As we left the police station, with vague assurances that my photographic gear would be returned on departure, a deputy sat knocking my Nikon against the edge of the desk. Finally, the lens cap popped off and he peered through the viewfinder with wondrous delight.

  Muglad wasn’t accustomed to Caucasian visitors. As we made our way through the village, teenagers crowded behind us screeching like birds—“Khawajja! Khawajja! Khawajja!”—and reaching out to touch our skin. A French aid worker later told me that when he’d first visited southern Sudan, fifteen years before, tribesmen were so confused by his color that they’d asked him, “Were you born underwater?” and “How did you lose your skin?”

  Muglad’s people were as exotic to me as I was to them. Lying just north of the traditional border between Arab and African Sudan, the community was a multi-hued stew, mingling bronze Muslim nomads with black African tribesmen who herded, and worshiped, cows. Tall Dinka men—fantastically tall men—swished past in white Arab robes, speaking pidgin Arabic interspersed with the tongue-clicks of their native language. Greeting each other in the street, they touched their hearts, then placed their right hands on one another’s left shoulder, saying sheebak (Dinka for “hello”) and salaam aleikum (Arabic for “peace be upon you”).

  In Muglad a hole was measured in man-lengths—a well, say, was “six men deep”—and the scale came with an ethnic proviso. Arab or Dinka? If Dinka, each man-length was at least six inches greater. The Dinka were also exceptionally lean, striding through the village with the stick-figure majesty of Giacometti sculptures.

  As if to compensate for their inferior height, the Arab men—in this region, almost as black as the Dinka—wore absurdly tall turbans. At first glance their costume seemed to consist of matching bedsheets: one for the body and one piled loosely atop the head. Turbans revealed who was Arab and who not, as did the sharp, short daggers that Arabs carried in goatskin sheaths strapped across their upper arms.

  The women were also distinguishable by their head coverings, with the Arabs in loose-fitting scarves and the Dinka bareheaded, except for bundles of firewood or jugs of water balanced deftly atop their cornrows. That the African women wore any clothes at all was a concession to Muslim norms. The Arab women wore nose rings and neck rings and tribal scarifications cut across their cheeks, just like the Dinka. Their gossamer robes, ending at the knee and elbow, would have been judged indecent in stricter regions of the Muslim world.

  So entrancing were the people that at first the landscape barely registered. There was something odd about Muglad, something I couldn’t place. We dropped our bags at Beit Khawajja, an unmarked mud-brick compound, and introduced ourselves to the three young khawajjat who lived there. They worked for an Irish aid group, Concern, which distributed food to refugees in and around Muglad. The year before, when little food had gotten through, 250,000 people had starved in southern Sudan.

  A young man named Kevin invited us to tag along as he made his rounds through the village. “The Arabs resent the refugees getting so much free food,” he said, smiling slightly. “So we try to keep them happy with a wee bit of graft.” There were high-protein biscuits from Australia on sale in the market, alongside beans, oil and other food donated by European countries. There were also sacks of American sorghum, siphoned from supplies arriving at the airstrip. The merchants called it “Reagan sorghum”; news of the Bush presidency hadn’t yet reached Muglad. The low-grade U.S. surplus, used as animal feed in America, didn’t fool the Sudanese. They sold it at half the price of local grain.

  Seated beside the sorghum sellers, women used mortars and pestles to pummel the grain into a dense paste, which they used to make porridge or rolled flat to bake as bread. As we chatted with the women, something behind us suddenly exploded. Bart and I both dove to the ground.

  The women laughed with wide, toothless cackles. “It’s just the grist mill,” Kevin said. “The generator is kicking on.” The mill squatted beneath a strip of sheet metal across the way and consisted of several crude belts that turned two stones that ground the grain. The generator motor clanged loudly and belched black smoke into the cloudless, unpolluted air. A mob of villagers surrounded the mill, openmouthed and wide-eyed, gawking at a mechanism that ground an entire bag of sorghum in the time it took them to mash a single bowl by hand. And I realized then what was so strange about Muglad. Apart from this generator, there was no electricity. There were no power lines, no TV aerials, no cars or trucks. I felt for a moment as though I were standing in some English village at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, on the day a mad and wonderful machine called the cotton gin came to town.

  The few modern goods that had made it to Muglad were carefully recycled as soon as they had served their original purpose. One man fashioned sandals from withered truck tires. Another took apart cans of powdered milk and refashioned them as stout little coffee jugs, with the body of the can forming the pot and t
he leftover strips used for the spout, handle and strainer. The jugs then migrated down the street to the tea and coffee sellers: Arab women seated on straw mats beneath broad-limbed trees, cleaning tiny glasses with the folds of their robes and filling the cups with sweetened tea.

  Kevin’s destination was a mud-brick shopfront where a bent metal verandah provided a slim bit of shade. Beneath the verandah stood a short dark man with a huge turban and flowing white galabiya. He was barking orders at a small troop of listless workers. “This is Faki,” Kevin said, smiling. “The Godfather of Muglad.”

  Faki delivered food for the aid groups, and he was supervising sweaty workmen as they heaved bags of sorghum into battered trucks. When the loading was done, Faki yelled at the lead truck to depart. No one budged. Faki climbed down from the verandah and stalked over, apoplectic with rage. Several tribesmen stood studying a mangy dog dozing in the shade of the lead truck’s front tire. One man tugged the cur’s ear; another nudged its rear. Losing patience, Faki grabbed a tribesman’s spear and sank it in the dust an inch from the animal’s nose. The dog bolted and the trucks rumbled off past mud huts and baobab trees and into the parched savannah.

  Spotting us, Faki wandered over and smiled broadly. “Faki is the only man in Muglad who can make the food move,” Faki said. Straightening his foot-high turban and brushing dirt from his starched white robe, Faki resumed barking orders at a crowd of workers who, like the dog, were searching for shade from the blinding afternoon sun.

  Faki Naway was a trader, truck owner and teamster boss, rolled into one. When aid workers first arrived in Muglad, they had needed someplace to store grain. By the following day, Faki had bought every warehouse in town and doubled the going rate. When relief workers went looking for trucks and truckers to carry the grain south, they ran into Faki again. The local militia, an irregular army of spear- and carbine-toting tribesmen, was the only force capable of securing safe passage through the war zone. Faki had the militia in his pocket. Anyone else who tried to move grain would find his truck convoy under attack by the same militia they’d failed to pay off.

  “It’s not a pretty business,” Kevin said, “but you either do the job their way or you don’t get it done at all.”

  Kevin had come to negotiate a new delivery contract. Faki waved us inside for tea, and three loafers were unceremoniously dumped from their chairs so we could sit. By Muglad standards, the office was high-tech. Faki had a dented filing cabinet, a UNICEF calendar from the previous year and an ancient wind-up phone with five Eveready batteries strapped to the back, to power the pulse through the static. It had a range of fifty miles. Faki also had the only personal car in town, a shiny Toyota pickup, minus the hood. It was parked beside the office and three young men took turns wiping it clean of dust each time the wind swept through town.

  Kevin and Faki made chat in Arabic, then got down to business. There were endless obstacles to the contract Kevin had offered. The rainy season was about to begin, turning the roads into goat tracks. The guerrillas grew stronger every day and had recently blown up one of Faki’s trucks with a land mine. Faki could do what Kevin asked, but only for a sum double the one Kevin had offered.

  Kevin balked, sipping at his tea and talking with Bart and me instead, as though he’d lost interest in the contract. Somehow, I hadn’t imagined Western aid workers haggling like tourists in a rug shop to get food delivered. Like any good Arab merchant, Faki had a few theatrics of his own. As we chatted, two sinister-looking men appeared on the verandah. One, whom Kevin identified as the commander of the local militia, wore a safari suit and sunglasses, and he carried a sharp-pointed stick. The other, his lieutenant, had a Kalashnikov slung over one shoulder of his jungle fatigues. Nodding silently at Faki, the two men sat on the edge of the verandah and stared off into space.

  Kevin groaned, opened a small canvas sack and spilled several thousand Sudanese pounds onto the floor. It was the first installment of Faki’s contract. “Good, very good,” Faki said, trying out his two words of English. Flashing a gold-toothed grin, he stuffed the pounds into the breast pocket of his robe, beside a Bic pen. “The white man was brought here by Allah,” he said.

  * * *

  That night, on Faki’s invitation, I went to dinner at his home at the edge of Muglad. Since I was barred from visiting the refugee camp, I’d latched onto Faki as the next-best subject for a story about Southern Sudan. I was writing, at the time, for The Wall Street Journal, and Faki struck me as the sort of ruthless entrepreneur with whom bond sharks and arbitragers might identify. Muglad’s Mover and Shaker. Donald Trump in turban and galabiya.

  That evening I saw another side: Faki the village sheik and chieftain. His home lay at the end of a long dirt road, behind a high fence of sorghum stalks. I arrived to find a dozen other guests sitting in the open yard, sipping water. Faki’s house was invisible, hidden behind trees in the twilight. One of the men explained that we were the first shift to dine at Faki’s table, with two other groups to follow. Faki entertained every night, feeding family, neighbors, clients and militiamen.

  After half an hour our host appeared with a freshly pressed galabiya, new plastic thongs and a small white skullcap in place of his turban. The skimpy headgear revealed something I hadn’t seen before: a “prayer bump” on Faki’s brow, a sign of Muslim piety earned by years of kneeling and pressing his forehead to the ground.

  I told Faki that I was a journalist and that I wanted to profile him for the businessmen who read my paper. The notion flattered him. But as an interviewee he was rather elusive.

  “How old are you?” I asked through his nephew, who served as translator.

  “Something over thirty. It is not important.” He looked more like forty-something, and I told him so. He laughed. “It is because my work makes me old.” He pulled up his robe to reveal a deep, ugly scar on his thigh. “A spear wound, from fighting the guerrillas,” he said. “The man who did it went away looking much worse.” He offered no further details.

  I asked him about his career, and on this subject he was more forthcoming. The son of a Muglad shopkeeper, he’d begun as a humble trader and trucker, doing small jobs for the army and local merchants. Then the aid groups came, and they’d naturally turned to him. “Faki is the only honest man in Muglad,” he said, speaking, as usual, in the third person. Other truckers skimmed grain from the bags of sorghum, delivering their cargo half empty, or stuffed with dirt. “Faki’s bags always arrive full,” he said. I knew from Kevin that this was so.

  I asked him about his ties to the militia, and whether this helped his business.

  “It is true, I have friends.” He smiled. The gold incisors flashed again. Then he swept his arm across the courtyard and said, for the benefit of everyone, “What is a man without friends?” The others nodded obligingly and responded, almost in chorus, “Nothing, Faki, nothing.”

  Faki also wasn’t reticent about the growth in his estate. The food deliveries had transformed him from a small-time trucker to a provincial tycoon who now possessed seven trucks, sixteen Dinka house servants, five hundred head of cattle, and three homes—one for each of his wives. “I change houses each night, for six nights, then sleep alone on the seventh,” he said.

  I asked him if he felt at all strange about becoming so rich from feeding starving refugees.

  “Without Faki, many in the south would have nothing to eat.” Then he spoke forte voce again, turning to the others. “Without Faki, many in Muglad would have nothing to eat!” When the laughter died down, he waved us to a large table at the center of the courtyard, adding, “My friends, it is time.”

  Tall Dinka servants emerged bearing large platters with multicolored woven lids. Somewhere in the dark a generator rumbled, and a dim light glowed in the courtyard. The second shift of dinner guests had already gathered, sitting silently in the shadows at the edge of the courtyard.

  Faki stood at the head of the table, with six guests on either side, an
d took the top off each of the platters. One was filled with steaming chicken, another with goat, another with beef. There were also bowls of mashed, spiced peanuts and baskets of steaming bread for scooping up the food. Bart, who sat across from me, whispered through the steam: “My editors, they want I should write about a starving child, and here we eat so well!” After a few seconds the guilt passed, and as soon as Faki had thanked Allah for the food, we greedily dug in.

  Faki himself sipped water, waiting for the night’s final shift before taking food. Continuing our interview, he said he planned to turn his business over to his sons and go into export-import, based in Khartoum. He also hoped to acquire a fourth wife, a young nurse in Muglad who was not only beautiful but fluent in English and French as well. “This will help Faki to go international,” he explained. The price tag for the takeover was steep. A fine wife in Muglad could cost up to thirty thousand Sudanese pounds or thirty head of cattle, whichever the bride’s family preferred. The two sides were still negotiating.

  “In the future, someday, Faki would like to go to New York,” Faki said. “Look for another house, maybe some cattle.”

  Faki clapped his hands and the Dinka servants reappeared, clearing away the ravaged platters and setting down cakes and tea in their place. When this too had been consumed, Faki glanced meaningfully into the dark, where the next shift of diners waited. The guests at our table thanked him with handshakes and bows and slipped quietly into the night.

  Faki held my hand for a moment and gestured at my notebook. He had one more thought for Wall Street. “Even if I never see New York,” he said, “I can count my cattle and say, ‘There is no man in Muglad like Faki.’”

  Bart and I stumbled through the pitch-black night to Beit Khawajja, burping all the way. The aid workers were already asleep on cots in the open air, with a half-dozen Sudanese rolled up in sheets on the ground. Two cots remained empty, for us. I thought for a moment about the malaria-stricken Canadian I’d met on the flight from Khartoum, and tried to cover myself with my mosquito net. It was hot and uncomfortable, like lying inside a giant cobweb. So I threw it away and lay there in my underwear, on a narrow cot, feeling oddly content. My belly was full—indecently full—and I gazed up at a bright tapestry of stars, undisturbed by clouds or smog or urban glare.