Africa Askew

by Peter Boehm

  The town’s inhabitants were all marooned in a huge waiting room known as Metemma. They couldn’t go on, but they couldn’t go back either. None of them were born here. And no-one was here by choice. There wasn’t any reason to be in Metemma. Other than the fact that they hadn’t made it in Aksum, Shire or Gondar, that they hadn’t been able to get by there. That’s why they were washed up here.

  In Metemma, I stayed at the town’s best hotel. A teenager, who helped me change my money, assured me of this. My room was an entirely bare hole, its only piece of furniture a rusty bed, and the floor was bare earth.

  Once I lay down, my whole body started to itch, as though I were preparing to moult. But I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway. I was the only guest. The ugly, drunk prostitutes outside certainly meant well. “Perhaps he’ll change his mind after all”, they must have thought. They played ghastly music from a radio cassette recorder until late into the night, and jiggled their shoulders along to it. That’s how you dance in Ethiopia.

  I just wanted to get away. But then I was also afraid of what would be waiting for me in Sudan. On the other side, a lot of things would be different. The Ethiopian-Sudanese border is more than a border between two countries, as Ethiopia is a Christian oasis in an Islamic desert. But I couldn’t stay in Metemma either. I left early the next morning.

  SUDAN

  The Great Thirst (Border – Khartoum)

  I can’t remember ever having gone to bed thirsty before. Hungry, yes. But thirsty was something new to me.

  Yet, from now on, this was to happen a lot. After the Ethiopian-Sudanese border the map turns white. This is the colour used on my map to show the dry, barren steppe. There’s one large green patch in the bottom left corner of the map. That’s the rainforest in the Congo. In the north, there are a lot of hatched yellow areas. These are the sandy deserts of the Sahara. And Ethiopia is covered in brown checks, as that’s how mountains are represented on my map.

  But as soon as you pass the Ethiopian-Sudanese border town of Gallabat, the map turns white. From here to the blue of the Atlantic Ocean, there’s a plain of over one metre on the map, which is almost 4,000 miles in reality – the Sahel region.

  Well, you can already imagine it must be pretty hot there. Often over 45oC in the shade in March, April and May. And the air is bone dry. I sometimes had nosebleeds, and often had a sore throat for weeks at a time. My freshly washed trousers, which I hadn’t wrung out but just hung up outside in the Khartoum sunset, were dry in half an hour.

  So, yes, it was pretty hot. But no-one had warned me about the great thirst, which simply couldn’t be quenched.

  I tried everything. In Gedaref, in the east of Sudan, I drenched it in aradeep. The ice-cold, almost black juice of the bean-shaped fruits of the tamarind tree tastes refreshingly sour, and at first the waiter at my hotel was pleased when I knocked back a couple of glasses one after the other.

  He must have thought, “wow, he loves my aradeep”. But when I came back a quarter of an hour later, he became uncomfortable. And at my third drink, a few minutes later, he was certainly afraid, and he let a colleague serve me.

  In Khartoum I continued the battle with guava juice and still mineral water. But to no avail.

  And between Khartoum and the Chad capital N’Djamena there was just tepid water from clay pitchers, warm lemonade or a cloudy brew straight from the fountains where the herdsmen took their camels and goats to drink.

  So I placed all my hopes on N’Djamena, where there’d be beer again for the first time after the Islamic dry Sudan, and thus a drink which, at home, never fails in its effect – nicely cooled beer, mixed with ice-cold lemonade.

  But this is how idols are overturned. I had two litres of it in the evening, but I still couldn’t get rid of the great thirst.

  Of course, I also tried other things. Keeping the liquid in my mouth for a long time, for instance, rather than swallowing it immediately. But that made no difference. In an instant the liquid was as warm and insipid as my mouth, and had lost any of its refreshing effect. So it was better to gulp it all down while it was still fresh and cool.

  Then someone advised me to breathe just through my nose. That was really very clever. I tried it. I still drank until my stomach hurt, but I simply couldn’t overcome the great thirst.

  From Nigeria onwards it got better. After that, you could buy ice-cold drinking water in plastic bags at every street corner.

  And so I realised what I had to do to combat the great thirst. In the mornings, ideally as soon as I’d woken up, I had to drink one or two bags, each half a litre, and keep tanking up throughout the day. If I only began drinking in the afternoon or evening, when I had more time, I couldn’t get as much in as I wanted. Then I could never get rid of the great thirst.

  And so I filled myself up every morning. This morning ritual soon seemed like drug-taking. As soon as I’d administered it to myself, I felt unwell. My stomach had cramps from the cold, I felt a bit sick, and a cold shiver ran down my spine. But it had to be. I could no longer survive without the bags. I was addicted.

  The heat was worst in Niger and Mali. The certainty and regularity with which I had to drink there soon reminded me of filling up a car. When I was empty, I simply couldn’t go any further. And just as you know your car’s average consumption, I could say more or less now much I’d have to tank up with after 500 yards in the blazing sun – about one bagful.

  But I never noticed where the fuel disappeared to. The air was so hot and dry, that it immediately dried the sweat off my skin. It was only when I entered a cooler room – but even then, a long time later – that the sweat began to run down me in streams.

  The whole time, I never looked up at the sky. Today, I wonder why not. But there was simply nothing to see. There was never a cloud in the sky. The entire time, the blazing sun was relentlessly roasting everything and everyone.

  Only the sand storms granted us a brief respite from this plague. The heat would build itself up for days, becoming more and more oppressive, until you felt you couldn’t bear it anymore. Then, usually after at least a week, one morning the sun would be veiled in sand. The sky would sometimes get really dark, the daylight hazy for the first time for ages. And then it wasn’t so hot anymore. I was happy to accept the dust in my hair in return.

  In N’Djamena, in Timbuktu and on the journey between the cities, I usually slept outdoors. The walls had become so hot during the day that you couldn’t stay inside.

  But then you were roasted through and through outside in the sand. It had soaked up so much sun during the day that, despite a raffia mat and the cool night air, it felt like a huge hot pan.

  It was a tough time. The great thirst only subsided after four months – in Dakar, where the breeze of the Atlantic Ocean brought me some relief.

  In between times, when it was at its worst and I was struggling to sleep at night, only an age-old piece of advice, which I’d been given as a child for situations like this, could help me – imagine something nice, then you’ll be able to sleep.

  During my great thirst, my favourite fantasy was of a big – really huge – bottle of mineral water, just above freezing point, with a drop of fruit juice in it and very fizzy, so the drink would really smart on my tongue.

  But it had to be a bottle. I was categorical about that. It was too quick and easy to drink it from a glass. I, on the other hand, needed a column of water, spurting from far above me and threatening to overwhelm me with its great power. You see, that was the worst aspect of the great thirst – seeing the bottom of the glass yet again.

  The closed woman (Khartoum)

  Ahmed and Hassan (I’ve changed both names) live in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. The country is subject to Sharia law. That means that drinking alcohol is punished by flogging, and adultery by stoning.

  They’re both in their mid-twenties, and went to school in Eastern Europe. But they now lived in Khartoum, and they were angry that I’d got the impression of Sudan as a strongly I
slamic country.

  “You can do everything here that you can do in Europe. Just not in public”, they told me over dinner, and they also told me that a lot of young couples in Khartoum sleep together before they’re married. And Hassan, who’s a doctor, said with as little emotion as though he were talking about a fridge door, “Just last week I closed another woman because she was going to get married.”

  After almost four weeks in Khartoum I, too, noticed that Islamic Sudan is nowhere near as strict as it makes out to be. It’s true that it still has Sharia law, and there’s no sign of any political majorities which would be likely to do away with it. But the time when it was strictly implemented has now passed.

  A year ago, the police caught Ahmed drunk. He was sentenced to forty lashes, but at court he bribed the man doing the flogging to just beat him “gently”.

  And when the law dictates how women are to dress, their clothing becomes a political statement. In Khartoum, many women protest silently against the stipulation that they have to cover everything except their face and hands when they’re in public. For them, the Hijab functions as a fashionable accessory, and it has shrunk to a small, brightly-coloured and translucent scarf. Many women wear it in such a way that it shows more of their head and hair than it covers.

  In addition, throughout my whole trip, Khartoum was definitely the city where the American influence was the most noticeable. In Khartoum II, the part of the city which is closest to a European entertainment district, there was the “Lucky Meal” snack bar, and its logo sported the curved “M” of the American hamburger chain. As a nod to the USA pizza chain, one restaurant called itself “Pizza Hot”, and the walls of the ice-cream parlour, where young people enjoyed meeting, were decorated with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

  The following evening I asked Hassan what he had meant when he’d said that he’d “closed” a woman up again. He was doing a year’s internship as a doctor in a military hospital. Hassan explained that one of his friends was a captain in the Sudanese army. He had a 23-year-old girlfriend. They were in love. But it was obvious that they couldn’t marry, because the girl’s parents had already arranged for her to marry her cousin.

  The date for the wedding was drawing closer, and the 23-year-old had to cover all traces of her relationship with the captain. Many men in Sudan file for divorce the same night, if they discover that their bride is no longer a virgin. This would be a disgrace which neither the bride nor her family would ever live down.

  “The women you sleep with,” Ahmed had already explained to me the previous evening, “aren’t the ones you marry. And the ones you marry, you don’t sleep with.”

  Hassan said that the girl had therefore suggested that she would sleep with him if he then sealed her up again. Ahmed added, “Hassan knows the woman. He couldn’t take any money from her.”

  No-one in Africa is able to keep business and money out of private matters. Relationships with one another here are based on precisely negotiated giving and taking. Even on the most intimate of topics, you peddle and haggle.

  And so Hassan let the girl come to his house, slept with her – “Once. She was very nice and very tender. But she said she had far too much on her mind at the moment” – and he operated on her the following morning. “A very simple thing” – in his words. “Two small incisions, two, three stitches, just like a small cut. And five days later I took the stitches out.”

  You also need to know that North Sudan practises the most rigid form of female circumcision. After the operation and healing, during childhood, only a very small opening for the vagina remains. This means that, initially, sex is extremely painful for both the woman and the man. The “closing up” operation re-creates this state.

  Hassan said that this operation is very common in Khartoum. Many women get a nurse, who wants to earn a bit of money on the side, to carry it out – or they do it themselves with superglue. The most important thing, in order to re-create a semblance of virginity, is to again increase the resistance to penetration.

  As we were sitting in a café one evening, Hassan passed me his mobile phone. He wanted to introduce me to his future wife. “We make love just with words”, he said, after I’d exchanged some pleasantries with her.

  He’d already long forgotten the closed woman. Since then, he’d eaten, drunk and danced at her wedding, and sent the couple on their way with his best wishes. “No-one guessed anything”, he’d later told Ahmed, good-humouredly. “As I said, it was a very simple thing.”

  Strange Expatriates II: Karl May

  Karl May was never the same after that. The tales of his travels, which had sold in such huge numbers, had come to an end. Henceforth he just wrote nebulous and vague parables, full of metaphysical symbolism, which no-one wanted to buy or could even understand.

  What had happened? What threw the poor man off-track like this? It’s quite simple – he went travelling.

  Karl May is probably the most widely read German writer. He has some 200m copies in print, more than half of them in German (according to Wikipedia) and Karl May’s story is well-known in Germany. He wrote his famous “Traveller’s Tales” at home, at his desk in a small town in eastern Germany. He only went travelling in his head, on the map or through a Baedeker guide. He’d never been to Old Shatterhand’s Wild West, or to Kara Ben Nemsi’s Wild Orient. But at the age of 57, when he was already famous and could finally afford it, he actually went on a trip to the Orient – and promptly suffered a severe nervous breakdown, or perhaps even two.

  I’d stumbled upon Karl May when I was telling a friend that I’d be travelling through Sudan. He advised me to read Karl May’s trilogy about the Mahdi and I thought, yes, the Mahdist period is a very interesting time in Sudanese history, and I began to read.

  Just like many German boys before the advent of Harry Potter, I was a devoted Karl May reader. My May phase was short, but his books must have fascinated me. I devoured the first six volumes of Kara Ben Nemsi – I wasn’t interested in Winnetou and co. – but before I could get to the next volumes in the series, and thus to the next continent – South America – my May phase had already come to an end.

  In those days, I’d borrowed the well-thumbed books from our town library. They seemed to me to be thick and meaty. I must have been in my first year of secondary school – eleven or twelve years old. But now I couldn’t remember anything about the contents of the books, far less their impact on me.

  As a young reader, I’d had no idea about the Mahdi, and it’s not surprising that adults don’t read books in the same way that children do. But now reading Karl May’s trilogy “In the Land of the Mahdi”, in which the main character is again Kara Ben Nemsi, I was shocked.

  Far too many people were flogged in it for my current taste. The subplot couldn’t justify this punishment for me. Neither could I remember there having been so many poorly veiled fantasies of violence in the first six volumes I’d read as a child, and so I wondered whether Karl May gained a sense of – for me unsettling – satisfaction in describing them.

  The Mahdi in Karl May’s trilogy is based on a real model. If such comparisons are possible, Mohammed Ahmed was the Osama Bin Laden of the late 19th century. But he certainly was the British Empire’s nemesis. After all, the Mahdi had brought about the most serious defeat suffered by the western world’s greatest power of the time.

  In those days, Britain was the de facto mandate power in Egypt. And it was this country, in turn, which had annexed and ruled – and so colonised – Sudan in the early 19th century. In 1881, Mohammed Ahmed declared himself to be the Mahdi, the prophet’s successor whom the region had, according to Sufi tradition, long been awaiting. He collected masses of followers around him, and began to subject the Egyptian troops to one defeat after the other.

  In February 1884, the British government sent the former Governor of Sudan, General Charles Gordon, to Khartoum to organise the evacuation of the city. Soon after, however, Khartoum was surrounded by the Mahdi’s troops, and Gor
don telegraphed for military reinforcements. Gladstone’s Liberal government, however, didn’t want to get involved in the war against the Mahdi, and didn’t take Gordon’s cry for help seriously. After seven months of occupation, Khartoum fell. Gordon was killed, and his severed head was presented to the Mahdi on a tray.

  It wasn’t until ten years later that the British Empire began to re-conquer Sudan, and it took no chances. It first built a railway leading south from the Egyptian border, and finally sent in an expeditionary force of 23,000 men. Khartoum once again fell to the Anglo-Egyptian troops in September 1898. The tomb of the Mahdi, who had died in the meantime, was blown up, and the remains of the self-declared prophet were thrown into the Nile.

  This perhaps enabled the British Empire to get revenge for its humiliation by the Madhi, but it didn’t overcome the consequences of the Mahdist period. In the German zoologist Alfred Brehm’s 1850 travelogue – an important source, incidentally, for Karl May’s trilogy – millet beer was still an important part of the culture of Sudan and of many other African countries. After the Mahdists and the Caliphates under the Mahdi’s successor, North Sudan became an Islamic country.

  Karl May wrote his Sudan trilogy after the spectacular fall of Khartoum to the Mahdi’s troops – at the time when Europe’s newspapers were full of the Dervishes’ atrocities. But he pre-dated his plot to a time prior to Egyptian rule.

  In the book, his alter ego, Kara Ben Nemsi, helps an officer, commissioned by the Egyptian viceroy, to oust a ring of slave traders.

  Here, too, May’s storyline is based on reality. Britain actually had put pressure on Egypt to take action against the slave trade in Sudan, and the Governor General, Charles Gordon (1877-79), captured 700 slave traders.