The other guesthouse consisted of three mud huts. We were given two huts in which to sort ourselves out. Two kids, aged approximately two and four, were woken up and told to go to another hut. At this juncture the Ethiopians, who really seemed to like their injera, asked our host to make them some. He was still trying to light the fire when I decided I had had enough. It was time to go to sleep – on a bed that I was going to have to share with another guy. The bed boasted a mosquito net. I was not too worried about suffocating from the smoke from the fire because our hut had a permanently open door (read ‘no door’).
I had a good night’s sleep. It must have been the smoke from the fire. I never even noticed when the others retired and my bed companion joined me on the worn-out mattress. On waking, however, I realised that not only had I shared the hut with five humans but that the floor was crawling with earthworms as well. Thank God, I saw them only in the morning or I would not have slept a wink.
That morning was my fourth early morning in a row, but I didn’t mind because I was well on my way to Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. Another boksie picked all of us up at our guesthouse and took us to the bus rank, to continue the journey. Now that it was daylight, I could see that Gedaref was not such a small town after all. At the bus rank we got into a luxurious bus that was going all the way to Khartoum. Maybe my judgement was clouded; I suppose that after six hours on a boksie anything would look and feel luxurious.
At sunrise, just when I thought we were leaving, we were all asked to go and register at an office near the bus station. Given the large number of people who had to register, the process took two hours and, after leaving the town, we were stopped and checked several times again along the way. Something you should probably expect in a country that has been embroiled in prolonged civil war and ruled by military regimes for half a century.
Each time, the passports of all foreigners, who constituted about 80 per cent of the total number of passengers, had to be collected by the driver’s assistant. The assistant would take our passports to a particular office and within a few minutes we would be on our way again.
Two hours after leaving Gedaref we stopped for breakfast – in Ethiopia, injera; in Sudan, a bean burger, which was just a big bun stuffed with beans. Since I had been told that Khartoum was only three hours from Gedaref, I thought I would wait to eat until we arrived there.
The road from Gedaref to Khartoum was the exact opposite of what we had experienced the previous day. It was tarred and we were now travelling in what appeared to be a desert: nothing but sand. Everything looked different, including the Arabic-speaking pitch-black men wearing long, white dresses, some of them passengers on the bus and some walking along the road. It was very hot, but at least our bus was air-conditioned.
Five hours after leaving Gedaref we did indeed arrive at the hot, dry and dusty city of Khartoum, located at the point where the White Nile, flowing north from Uganda, meets the Blue Nile, flowing west from Ethiopia. I couldn’t see the resemblance, but in Arabic al-Khartoum means ‘elephant trunk’. It was here that the Confederation of African Football (CAF) was founded in 1957, the year after Sudan’s independence. Ironically, Sudan’s national football team has always been, and still remains, one of the weakest teams in Africa.
Because of the chaos at the bus station as people tried to locate their luggage, I could not get a group photo taken with my Ethiopian friends, as we had agreed the previous night in Gedaref. Under a scorching sun, with taxi touts screaming, people welcoming their friends and relatives and at the same time making sure that their bags were not taken by someone else, the Ethiopian guys disappeared before I knew it.
The heat was excruciating, normally 40 degrees in the shade (of which there was not much) at that time of year. Just sitting in a cab on my way to a hotel was making me sweat.
Finding accommodation in Khartoum can be quite difficult because most signs are in Arabic. I was relieved when I eventually found a budget hotel, but when I stepped into my room I was so disappointed that I immediately went back to reception and asked for a refund. No questions were asked, so I did not have to explain that the bed was too small, with a hollow mattress and no bedding to talk of, and that both lights and air-conditioner were not working and, to crown it all, the walls and floors looked as if at least one pig spent at least one day per week in that room. I moved to the hotel next door.
The second hotel was only slightly better but much more expensive. The accommodation was definitely not worth the price, but I thought it would be easier to sleep there for one night and then try to find a better place the following day.
I had not checked emails for a number of days, so I decided to use the facility down the road from the hotel to find out how everyone was doing. In my disappointment with Khartoum I was thinking things could not get much worse, but then I opened an email from my fiancée informing me that she had resigned from her job because ‘it was a job from hell’. That meant that, at the end of that month, both of us would be unemployed. Good news for people with a 20-month-old baby. Talk about family planning.
It got worse. There was another email from my fiancée. She was questioning me about a certain SMS she had found on my cellphone. I had given her my cellphone when I left but had taken out the sim card. What I did not know was that cellphones sometimes store sent messages on their hard drive. I had to do some quick damage control over the internet.
When I am drunk I have this really bad habit of flirting with women. You know, typical man with an ego that has to be stroked all the time? There are some women that you SMS or phone only when you are motherlessly drunk. This was one of those SMS’s.
Between a depressing hotel and a disappointed fiancée, there was no way I could enjoy my dinner that night, although I was ravenously hungry. Back at the hotel I flushed the toilet and seepage appeared between the toilet bowl and the floor. Luckily, I had only pissed. I knew I had no choice but to find better accommodation, fast.
Before setting out to look for a hotel the next morning, I thought I would register – in keeping with the law, which required that, as a foreigner, you register within three days of arriving in Khartoum. On my way to the Aliens Registration Office I noticed the Dubai Hotel and thought I would enquire about their rates. At reception, a black gentleman told me that the hotel catered for the Chinese community only. As he told me that, I looked around and saw a Chinese family having what looked like a gourmet breakfast. I could not believe that in Africa I was unable to get a room because of my nationality and/or race.
Another bright idea was born in my mind – Business Idea Four: I should open the Bunjumbura Hotel in New York, or the Lubumbashi Hotel in London, for Africans only. How possible was that? I began to think that people were correct in saying that the Chinese are Africa’s new colonisers.
I proceeded to the Aliens Registration Office because I was sure the process would not take long. The officer at the door to the office, which was on the second floor of an old but recently painted white building, had to fill in the form on my behalf because everything was written in Arabic. Once inside, I was told by a tall man in a blue uniform that the form needed to be signed and stamped at my hotel. I could not believe that I had to limp (my Achilles tendon was starting to act up again) all the way back to my scruffy hotel. To make things worse, the heat must have been above 40 degrees.
After checking in at another hotel, which was even more expensive but at least had an effective air-conditioner, TV and a clean bathroom, I got my form signed and stamped. It looked as if hotels were under clear instructions to check the passports and visas of their guests. Happy that all formalities were done, I walked briskly back to the Aliens Registration Office. Where the real bureaucracy started:
1. My completed form, photo and passport were taken to the back office.
2. After ten minutes I was called to the counter to collect the form from another counter.
3. More forms were filled in by other officials in blue uniforms.
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sp; 4. The completed forms were transferred to an officer who put them in a folder.
5. Another officer stapled everything neatly into the folder.
6. Another officer then gave the folder a reference number.
7. I was then asked to pay at the cashier’s desk.
8. Still more forms were filled in by an official at another counter.
9. I was instructed to take a seat while the entire folder was taken to the back office.
It was while waiting for my passport to be returned that I noticed that some registrations were handled by agents. I got talking to one of them, Ahmed Elsadig Ahmed – a strange name for a pitch-black man. He explained to me that the big chain hotels took care of their guests’ registration. Since I was not staying at a top-end hotel, I did not enjoy that service.
Sitting on a hard bench, mesmerised by this merry-go-round, I noticed that the registration office doubled as police headquarters. The officials handling alien registrations were, in fact, policemen in blue uniforms. The thought of not registering had crossed my mind earlier. When I asked Ahmed whether the authorities would have found out, he told me that after registration my passport would carry a sticker and stamp that officials would look for when I left the country. Without that sticker and stamp, irrespective where you were, you would be asked to go back and register. By then there would be a fine because, in all probability, you would have stayed for more than three days without registering.
In just under four hours I had finished registering and I was officially in Khartoum. I had one more registration to do though: to register my camera at the Ministry of the Interior. That, I thought, could wait for the following day.
I was dreading checking my emails again. As expected, there was a long email from my fiancée about disappointment, trust, love, the future – you know, the same old story. A few days earlier, before I lost it, I had read in Richard Carlson’s book that couples spend a lot of time fighting over trivial issues until tragedy strikes – the death of a child, for example, or if one partner is diagnosed with a terminal disease. That kind of tragedy makes people see things in perspective.
It was while staring at the computer screen that I decided to tell my fiancée about a terrible thing that had happened to me the previous night: I was knocked down by a bus. In Sudan, unlike us in South Africa, they drive on the wrong side of the road: the right side. As a result, I had looked on the wrong side before crossing. I had been to the local clinic, where they bandaged my left hand and knee.
I knew that fabricating this story was a risk because my fiancée might become suspicious about the sequence of events – a domestic squabble and, all of a sudden, I have an accident. But it was a risk worth taking.
Back in my hotel room, I had to monitor developments in Egypt, which was holding its first contested presidential elections. With the price I was paying for the hotel came channel television and I could tune in to CNN. Hosni Mubarak, who had been president for 24 years, was definitely going to win. These were the first multi-candidate presidential elections since he was elected in 1981. Hitherto, he had secured his position by having himself nominated by Parliament and then holding a referendum to confirm his nomination. I was interested to see how the Egyptians were going to react to Mubarak’s fifth term in office.
As expected, Mubarak won by an overwhelming majority. There were isolated cases of protests by daredevils who dared to challenge him, but within a day or two the Egyptian police had squashed all the riots.
Naturally, I was nervous but eager to check my emails the next morning. When I opened my inbox I found that my fiancée had sent me five messages in 12 hours. My plan had worked like a bomb! As I had hoped, the focus had changed completely: she reminded me how much she loved me and even suggested that, maybe, I should fly back to Johannesburg as soon as possible. That was good news, for me at least. I could concentrate on the trip again.
Not quite. I read in another email that my niece Nontetho (it was she who had given me Richard Carlson’s book) had suffered a mild stroke. We darkies, generally speaking, do not believe in a stroke as a medical condition. More often than not we see it as part of being bewitched. Hence, when someone suffers from a stroke we often say ‘izinto zabantu’ – she has been bewitched. I was not surprised, therefore, when in the same email I learned that she would be taken that weekend to ukhokhovu – a traditional healer with really strong, effective, guaranteed, come-back-for-more-at-no-extra-charge-ifyou-are-not-healed muti.
I fully endorsed that decision because it was baffling to me how an energetic 24-year-old party-animal who was always full of life could suffer a stroke. After I got back to South Africa, however, I learned that Nontetho was addicted to drugs, mainly cocaine and crack, which had caused a nervous collapse that seemed like a stroke. She was subsequently admitted into rehabilitation for a whole month and within six months of her release, she resigned from her job, and then fell pregnant too. It does not stop, hey.
With my domestic squabbles sorted out, at least in the short term, it was time to register my camera at the Ministry of the Interior. I had a rough idea where it was, but the armed guard outside the building that I thought housed the ministry didn’t have a clue what I was talking about when I enquired.
A few metres down the road I asked another armed guard, even showing him my camera. His response was simple: ‘I am just a policeman.’
That was it. I was not going to trouble myself further by looking for a camera registration office. Instead, I decided to take a scenic walk to the White Nile bridge and started out along the Nile road, which for three and a half kilometres runs parallel to the river.
Being such a bargain hunter, I decided that I would, when passing a grand hotel, pop in to find out its rates. The first of a string of fancy hotels was called the Sudan Hotel. I was surprised when the guard prohibited me from entering the hotel’s main entrance, telling me firmly, ‘This hotel caters for the Chinese community only.’
I burst out laughing in disbelief. This was the second hotel in the same city that catered for Chinese only. It is often said that women have men by their balls. It seemed to me that the Chinese had the Sudanese government by the balls for it to allow such a practice.
I walked past other beautiful hotels, but by then I was not interested in being turned away by more For-Chinese-Only hotels. I carried on walking past the National Museum and the al-Mogran Family Park, an amusement park on the pie slice of land where the White Nile and Blue Nile meet. It was too hot to bother visiting either of the two attractions. It was so hot, in fact, it made me wonder how many Sudanese annually die of heat stroke/heat exhaustion – which could also be described as bewitchment or izinto zabantu.
Owing to what looked like road upgrading, traffic on the White Nile bridge was being redirected to the new bridge just south of it. There was a strong military presence in the area. As I walked towards the centre of the new bridge some men who were working on it came to me and said, ‘You same as Okocha’, referring to JJ Okocha, the former Nigerian captain and then Bolton Wanderers player, who also used to have his hair plaited. Being a mediocre soccer player I felt happy to be compared to one of the players who was holding high the African flag in Europe.
A few moments later, I stood facing the view I had always wanted to see: the merging of the Blue Nile, whose source lies in Lake Tana in Ethiopia (which I had visited) and the White Nile, which starts in Lake Victoria in Uganda and which John Hanning Speke claimed to have discovered in 1863. On the very day he was to defend his case against Sir Richard Burton, leader of the two expeditions to find the source of the Nile of which Speke was a member, Speke accidentally shot himself while shooting partridges.
The confluence of the two Niles was a breathtaking sight. I could see water of two colours, side by side, before the actual merging downstream into the Nile proper. Actually, you do not have blue water on the right and white water on the left. What you see is very muddy water on the right and not very clear water on the left. But it
still looked magnificent, especially from the bridge, which is high above the water and offers an uninterrupted view of the confluence. Standing before such a phenomenon you cannot help but feel that there is a God above or a supernatural power at work somewhere.
From their source, the Blue Nile and White Nile flow for about 1 600 and 3 700 kilometres, respectively, before meeting in Khartoum. From there the Nile flows almost another 3 000 kilometres northwards – the longest river on earth. From Khartoum it follows a winding course across the desert and, after Cairo and just before reaching the Mediterranean Sea, it separates into three branches to form the Nile Delta.
It’s a pity I could not take pictures of this exceptional natural phenomenon, but I didn’t dare. I had read stories of people getting arrested in Sudan, even though they had photo permits, for taking photos of bridges, slums, or anything that was considered a security risk or might paint a bad image of the country in the outside world. I did not even have a photo permit and the last thing I wanted to do was to visit, even for an hour, one of Khartoum’s prisons.
After spending a while on the bridge, I walked to Omdurman, which looked more modern than Khartoum itself. It was only then that I understood why Khartoum is called a three-in-one city – a ‘Tripartite Capital’. On the southern bank of the Blue Nile and to the east of the White Nile lies Khartoum proper; north of the Blue Nile is Khartoum North, which was originally established as a railway terminus and river port (one of Sudan’s largest oil refineries is located there, along with other industries); and on the west bank of the merged Nile lies Omdurman, the most popular of the three and throbbing with traditional markets and informal social life. It also happens to be the largest city in Sudan and the country’s commercial centre.
I didn’t walk as far as Omdurman, but I heard that the handicrafts souq (market) was enormous. I couldn’t face getting lost in that heat, which would inevitably have happened.
Dark Continent my Black Arse Page 19