My father returned, and he showed off the two strong goats that he had with him. I finished my tea and we set off on the walk home. But the larger of the goats didn’t appear to be very happy. It was digging its hooves in and shaking its head from side to side, as my father pulled the string. A tug of war ensued, which neither side won. Finally, my father grabbed the stubborn goat by its horn and handed me the string of the more cooperative one.
“Rathebe, you still remember how to hold a goat?” he asked, his eyes twinkling.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I retorted, in mock anger. “Why on earth wouldn’t I?
My father shrugged. “Well, big city girl soon to be a doctor and all that . . . I was just checking.”
We laughed. My father wrestled the troublesome goat into a submissive stance and started dragging it along by its horn. For a few minutes it tried to struggle, before realizing that resistance was hopeless. As we wandered along I started to feel somber again: My father’s joking had raised a laugh, but it had also hit on a sore point.
“Abba, d’you really think I will be?” I asked, quietly. “D’you really think I will be a doctor?”
He stopped, and gazed at me with his gentle eyes. “What d’you mean, Rathebe? Of course you will.”
“But they’ve shut down the university. It’s closed until further notice . . .”
My father reached out and took my hand. “Don’t worry, Rathebe, they can’t keep it closed forever. They need doctors and lawyers and engineers in this country and they know it. So don’t worry. By the end of the summer they’ll be forced to reopen, you’ll see.”
I nodded. My father’s words had cheered me up a little.
“Now look what you’ve done,” my father declared. “You’ve dropped your string and the goat’s wandered off. . . . Lucky it’s the well-behaved one. Think you can manage this devil-goat, while I go fetch it?”
When we reached home Grandma was overjoyed to be presented with the two strong goats. She immediately declared that we should slaughter one of them and prepare a feast to welcome home our “doctor daughter.” I tried to object that I was a long way from being a doctor, but Grandma was having none of it. Mo and Omer were called, and Grandma passed them the devil-goat to be taken away for slaughter. Mo would hold the goat down, while Omer administered the cut to the throat with his sharp dagger.
As they led the goat away, I reflected on the way Grandma had changed since Grandpa’s death. For most of her life the very idea of slaughtering one of her precious goats for a spontaneous feast would have been unthinkable. She would have seen such behavior as unforgivably profligate and wasteful. Now all that had changed. I remembered when she had made us eat the goats that had died from an unknown disease. That was about the height of generosity with the old Grandma. It would take me awhile to get used to this softer, kinder version.
Grandma, my mother, and I jointed up the meat with a big machete and a couple of sharp daggers. There was never much blood, as the goat had been bled to death after having its throat slit. This was the way that an animal had to be killed, to be halal—acceptable—for a Muslim. It may sound horribly cruel, but I knew that Omer would have talked to the goat and said prayers over it, calming it down before he dispatched it to the afterlife. He had a gentle, natural way with animals that belied his warlike nature.
“You never used to slaughter your goats like this,” I ventured, taking a peek at Grandma. “What’s got into you?”
Grandma shrugged. “This life doesn’t last forever.” She was slicing up the goat’s liver into bite-size pieces. “I know when I was your age I thought it did, but it doesn’t. So, best make the most of it while we’re here, for you’re a long time dead afterward. Now, take this goat’s liver, fry it in some spices, and go serve it to your father . . .”
With the summer holiday drawing to a close my father’s predictions came to pass. The national emergency was declared over and the universities reopened. I said my goodbyes to my family and traveled back to Khartoum, my hopes riding high that all would be as it was before. Upon arrival, I was overjoyed to see Rania, Dahlia, and my other friends. We had an excited, gossipy reunion. But there were a handful of bunks that remained empty. We soon learned that these were the girls who had gone to join the jihad. In the boys dorm there were yet more bunks that were empty.
Much as we tried to, it was hard to recapture the joy and the spirit that had possessed us during our first term. There was a shadow hanging over us: in part it was the memory of the forced shutdown of the university; in part it was the ongoing absence of those students who had gone to fight the plastic jihad. We knew that there was nothing to stop the authorities from doing the same again, and this time the methods used to “recruit” for this war of deception and lies might be far more forceful.
The campus had become a heated rumor mill, and every week there were reports that yet another student had died fighting. Some of the Arab students became angry at the blacks and the southerners for bringing death into their lives. I tried to keep out of it, to keep my head down and to study.
After the baking summer came the rainy season, and the cool downpours were very welcome. They took the heat out of the campus, both physically and in terms of our anger and confusion over the plastic jihad. Gradually, we tried to forget all that had happened. But the rains brought other, unexpected problems. One afternoon in October a huge swarm of insects blocked out the sun. Within minutes a thick carpet of giant locusts had settled upon every inch of the ground. This was a plague of biblical proportions.
Dahlia and the other Arab city girls were totally horrified. As for Rania and I, we had to resist the temptation to collect up handfuls of the insects and fry them for dinner. We could just imagine how the other girls would react if we did. The swarm stripped the leaves from the trees and the grass from the ground, and when all the green matter was gone they turned their attention on the university buildings themselves.
In no time at all they were munching away at curtains, seating, and even our bedding. It was impossible to sleep without a mosquito net, and it was impossible to wash without first clearing dead and dying locusts out of the water tank. Finally, the city girls decided they could take no more. The locusts were making them ill, they complained. Scores of them went home. In no time Rania and I were pretty much alone in our dorm.
We had a khawaja from Germany teaching us chemistry, and he became obsessed by the swarm. On the one hand, he hated walking among the clouds of insects that rose at every footfall; on the other, he was fixated by the locusts’ ability to chomp their way through the entire campus, stripping it bare. Ten days after the arrival of the swarm an aircraft flew over dropping a fine mist of chemical spray. We stayed inside the dorm to avoid the nasty, choking ammonia smell. The German professor was equally amazed at the piles of dead locusts that now littered the ground, and he started to photograph them.
Eventually the swarm moved on, and at the end of our first year we had to take our foundation exams. Those that passed would go on to study their chosen degree subject. Those who failed would either have to retake the year, or leave. I was nervous as to how I would fare. Before now, I had always been up against girls from the provinces, but here I was being tested against students from Khartoum, and some of the other major cities.
The morning that the exam results were posted Rania and I rushed down to discover how we had done. I elbowed my way through the crowd of students and nervously ran my eye down the list of names. I found my own, only to discover that I had placed somewhere in the middle of the year. It was a pass, but hardly a good one. I was relieved to have got through, but disappointed. Rania’s mark was a little lower than mine, but still a pass.
As we studied the results I suddenly realized that the names of those who were away fighting the plastic jihad had been included on the board. I simply couldn’t believe it, especially when I realized that they had each been given a mark far higher than my own. I stared at the board with mounting anger, th
e words of the security officer who had addressed us upon the day of the university shut down ringing in my head.
Jihad is considered superior to academic study, he’d said, and so it is only right that those who fight should be rewarded.
So this was their reward! Without being present for most of the year, and without even turning up to take the exams, they had been given top marks. I was furious. I felt as if the university had betrayed me. I felt as if the grand ideals that it supposedly stood for were all just a pack of lies. What was the point of studying, if this was to be the reward for honest endeavor? I turned to Rania, jabbing my finger down the list of names.
“High pass marks,” I snorted. “For them. For the plastic jihadists! I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it!”
Before Rania could respond, a male voice cut in. “Why can’t you believe it? If you spend all your time buried in your books, it’s no wonder you don’t know what’s going on!”
I turned to find Ahmed, one of my fellow Zaghawa students, standing behind me. He was in his third year, and his family were traders in Khartoum. I didn’t know him that well, but I was aware that he was involved in political activities at the university. A few times he’d tried to engage me in political discussions, but I’d always shrugged him off, telling him that I was here to study. Rania and I wandered away disconsolately. Ahmed fell into step alongside us.
“Well done on passing,” he remarked. “But it’s time you opened your eyes, don’t you think? There’s no point in trying to pretend this is simply a place for academic study. It isn’t. It is a recruiting ground—both for those dumb idiots who support this regime, and those of us who oppose it.”
“And what about those of us who don’t want to get involved?” I countered. Ahmed shrugged. “Then don’t get involved. Bury your head in the sand. But you’d better prepare yourself for more favors for the jihadists, like those fraudulent exam results, and more trouble for those of us who refuse to join their jihad. Better get used to it.”
“D’you think they’ll be back again?” I asked. “Those men who closed the campus . . .”
Ahmed snorted. “You really think they ever left? Look around you. Open your eyes. They’re here. They have their people everywhere, talking to the gullible, showing their videos, recruiting, recruiting, urging students to go to war and be martyrs. No need to take any exams, they say—come and fight. No need to read any books, they say—learn to shoot a gun. Write your name on the exam papers and leave the rest to us.”
In Ahmed’s smoldering anger I reckoned I could see some of my cousin Sharif’s reasons for becoming the rebel spirit that he had. But still I refused to get involved. Instead, I returned to the village for the end-of-term break and tried my best to put such troubles to the back of my mind. I was about to start my studies in medicine proper. The dream was that close to being realized. I didn’t want anything to jeopardize that.
The medical degree breaks down into four subjects: general medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology. I had already decided that I wanted to specialize in the last one—the care of women during pregnancy and childbirth. This was where the need was greatest in our village: I had seen so many cases where babies had died during childbirth and mothers had become terribly ill.
During my second year I had to study all four subjects, and I knew I would face exams at the year’s end. In each subject I would be awarded either an excellent, a pass, or a fail. I would need to pass all four subjects, achieving excellence in obstetrics and gynecology, to be able to specialize in that area of medicine. I spent large amounts of time secreted in the library, poring over medical books and cramming. I did my best to avoid Ahmed, and others involved in the political struggle, keeping my head firmly on my studies.
I acquired the reputation of being a goody-goody, with my head always stuck in my books. Most students believed that I had not the faintest interest in politics, or even the vaguest sense of the trouble that was brewing across the country. The only context in which I showed a spark of dissention was human dissection. As part of our studies in surgery we each had to complete a course in the cutting and identification of the parts of the human body. We broke up into teams of four, the university providing each team with a human corpse on which to work.
Each cadaver was kept on a rack in a giant freezer. It was immediately plain for all to see that the corpses were exclusively black Africans. Our corpse had the most amazing face, with a mass of dot-scarring in a swirling pattern over cheeks, nose, and forehead. Rania remarked that this was the scarring of the Nuer tribe, one of the main rebel groups fighting in the south. With black gallows humor we named our corpse “James,” as we reckoned that would be a suitable name for a man from the Nuer tribe.
I asked the laboratory technicians from where James had come. All the corpses came from the Capital Cadaver Collect. I asked how exactly a corpse ended up there. Various explanations were offered. Some were houseboys to Arab families. They had died, and upon their death no relatives could be traced, and so they were donated for dissection. Some were refugees who had fled the fighting in the south. Others had died in road traffic accidents, and as no family came forward they were sent for dissection.
Finally, I asked the question that was foremost in my mind: Why were there only black Africans? The lab technicians confessed that they didn’t know why, and this troubled them. On one occasion some Nuer people had turned up demanding to know why their son had been sold for dissection without their knowledge. The lab technicians felt terrible about this, but what could they do? Their job was simply to fetch corpses for dissection from the Collect, not to check on the provenance of the bodies.
The more I dwelled upon this the angrier I became. If some were victims of road traffic accidents, then surely Arabs also died in such accidents—so why didn’t we get their bodies? Why only ever black Africans? I discussed this with Rania, Dahlia, and the others, and it became a big issue among the students. At one point we were even considering boycotting the dissection course, but we realized this might jeopardize our studies.
“If it wasn’t for us black Africans the Arabs couldn’t feel so superior,” I fumed. “They need us—they need someone to keep down, to keep under them.”
Rania agreed. “They’re just playing games with the blacks in this country. They don’t give a damn about us when we’re alive, and even less when we’re dead!”
How horribly full of foresight those words were to prove.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rumors of War
I knew how valuable my qualifying as a doctor would be for the people of our village. That gave me the strength and fortitude to persevere with my studies, and I did well. There were several further shutdowns of the university, but luckily they largely left the medical faculty alone. Perhaps they realized that they needed doctors in the country, and to send medical students to fight in this futile, murderous war wasn’t very wise.
I became increasingly fascinated by the traditional medicines used by Halima the Fakir, and by Grandma. I had good laboratory facilities at my disposal, and I decided to determine what medicinal value such cures might have. I was particularly interested in the ointment made out of burned pigeon feces, which was used to treat cuts and burns. Then there were the scores of plants, shrubs, bark, and roots that Halima and Grandma took from the forest. Each time I went home I gathered a few more samples.
Some of these village cures had no medicinal value whatsoever. When someone had jaundice the medicine woman would burn their skin with a knife heated over the fire. Six or seven times she would apply the red-hot knife, the smoke and steam sizzling up from the skin. If you had a bad migraine, the medicine woman would use the hot knife on the side of your head, or on your neck if that’s where the pain was. There was every chance that this would make things worse, especially as the burns so often became infected.
There were other ailments that were treated by traditional “cutting”—but invariably the so-called
treatment proved more dangerous than the illness itself. If a child had whooping cough their throat would swell into a big goiter. The medicine woman might decide to cut it in an effort to try to “drain” the goiter. But the goiter was in reality a swollen gland, and more often than not the child would die from the bleeding, infections, and trauma.
One lady in our village had given birth to seven daughters in a row. Her husband had decided to take a second wife, as he desperately wanted a son. Then, to the joy of both parents, their eighth child born was a boy. But he soon developed whooping cough, and so the medicine woman had cut the goiter. The bleeding refused to stop and eventually the boy had died. The distraught father had accused the medicine woman of murdering his son, and the mother had never really recovered her peace of mind.
But several of the herbal cures did seem to have merit. Grandma would make a paste out of the taro shrub to heal wounds. When I tested the taro plant I found it to contain cutins—natural chemicals that promote healing. The drying and burning of the plant simply rendered it into a fine powder, so that it could be more easily applied and absorbed into the wound.
I reached my final year at university proud that I had come so close to achieving my father’s dream. But early one morning I awoke to the stomping of heavy boots just outside the dormitory window. Word rapidly spread that the security men had locked down the boarding house. No one was being allowed to leave. For several minutes I crouched in the darkness, worried sick that this was it—that they were going to forcibly carry us off to the jihad. I vowed to myself that I would resist.
One or two of the city girls had mobile telephones, and they managed to contact their parents. They found out the gist of what was going on. Word was passed around the darkened dorm, whispered from student to student. Fighting had broken out in my area, Darfur. A group of rebels had attacked the airport at El Fasher. Dozens of soldiers had been killed and several aircraft destroyed. After the attack, the rebels had melted into the desert. It was seen as being a major victory for the Darfuri rebels, whoever they might be.
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