In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  Many of the tribesmen whom I met knew nothing of my own culture. They knew only of those British administrators who had ruled their lands until 1956. Two of the most famous of these in the west were Guy Moore and Wilfred Thesiger. Moore had been inspector in Kutum, a small town in Darfur Province, from 1936 to 1948. Tales of ‘Mr Moore’ were passed down from generation to generation and people delighted in recounting them. Thesiger, who had been Moore’s assistant in Kutum, was remembered as a skilled hunter. Years later he became world-famous as the explorer of Arabia’s notorious Empty Quarter. I admired these men in many ways, and was proud to be associated with them inasmuch as they were remembered as men of good character. Nevertheless, their political power had placed them in quite a different class from me. Often I felt glad that my relationship to those with whom I travelled was one of equality, not of dominance. I knew, though, that these men, particularly Moore, had struggled with some of the same paradoxes involved in living in another culture which I had encountered.

  Like me, Moore delighted in Sudanese culture. He and Thesiger travelled light, without the retinue of servants and cooks which usually accompanied an official party. Moore could speak Arabic fluently and often amazed Muslims with his knowledge of the Koran. He would eat squatting on his haunches from the communal bowl like the local people, a thing unheard of for British officials, and he observed local feast days and customs. He was renowned for his generosity, but equally for his harsh treatment of offenders. He maintained a large prison in Kutum, held public floggings and kept firm control of the movement of people in and out of the district. He respected the simplicity of Sudanese life, and considered that innovation and advance were a dangerous threat to it. Because of this he opposed the advent of motor transport and forbade people to wear European clothes or wristwatches. Unfortunately, in a country which was already struggling with the idea of independence, such conservatism was bound to be taken amiss. A prominent Sudanese journalist was sent by a national periodical to investigate the rumours about Moore’s ‘private kingdom’ in Kutum. Moore refused him permission to enter the town, and the journalist, infuriated by such high-handed treatment, wrote a series of inflammatory articles about what he referred to as ‘rule by inspectors’.

  The articles created a great stir and perturbed the colonial government, which was already preparing for a peaceful handover of autonomy to the Sudanese. Moore was obliged to resign, and left the Sudan under a cloud. From what I had heard of Moore, I felt sure that he had acted with the best of intentions, yet the story remained a salutary example to me of the dangers of toying with another culture, no matter how much value one may see in it.

  Yet the nomads whom I met during my years in the country seemed very resistant to change. During December 1981, for example, when I was spending some time with the Awlad Januub in Wadi Habiila, an incident occurred which has always remained in my memory. The tribe were in their winter camp and their tents were slate-coloured canvas, stretched over wooden frames, almost hidden in the thick bush which had broken out into yellow flower.

  At sunset I sat with my host, Mohammed Belal, in a straw shelter which had been erected in my honour. Above us the sky was candyfloss pink lit by veins of gold which threw the sharp heads of the bushes into silhouette. Mohammed sat across the fire from me with his four small sons, huddled close. He was a raw, big-boned man with a massive head and an aggressive expression. His sons were slim boys with berry-red faces and shaven heads on which small coxcombs of hair had been left, in the Arab custom. Mohammed picked up the smallest child, a baby of less than a year old, and began to dandle him. The baby babbled in delight and the man gibbered back, echoing his baby-talk. Finally he sat the child on one of his knees, and peered across at me with an intense expression. ‘Have you got any sons?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Then you should have some. You could dandle them like this. It does your heart good.’

  ‘But what about the future?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you want to send your boys to school?’

  ‘School?’ he exclaimed. ‘Why? What good is school?’ He lifted his small son up once again. ‘Shall I send this one away from me? To live in a house in a town?’ He lowered his voice, ‘Look around you, khawaja.’ He gestured towards the bush, where his herd of camels shifted and belched in the shadows. ‘Green bushes. Tall grass. Water. Fat camels, which eat well. What more do we need? We don’t have houses like you. We can move our tents where we like, by God! We don’t need lorries. Our camels carry everything. What would my son do in the town, away from the herd and away from his family? No, he doesn’t need school. His school is here in the ranges and the wadis.’

  I had intended to try to explain the advantages of education, the need for engineering and technology in the advancement of the country. But I knew that I could never argue with the honest logic of this simple man. It may be, though, that the nomadic tribes of the Sudan may not stay as they are for much longer. Already the government has plans to settle them, and those amongst them who are educated or ‘enlightened’ are beginning to claim the right of education and other services.

  The government has refused to provide these unless the nomads agree to settle. Alternatively, the oil which is already beginning to trickle from Sudanese fields may provide the nomads with technology which will transform their culture. For the three years in which I made my convoluted arabesque of journeys across and around the Libyan Desert, these peoples were my friends, companions, and sometimes my enemies. Although I started out with the illusion that the Libyan Desert was somehow to be ‘conquered’, as a man may climb a mountain, I soon came to realise that it was in being able to call these men companions that I was truly privileged.

  2. SOJOURN IN NUBIA

  In these deserts the river was life itself.

  A. Moorehead, The White Nile

  I FIRST SAW THE LIBYAN Desert from the porthole of a Fokker Friendship, cruising down through serene and cloudless skies over the small town of Dongola in the Northern Sudan, the place to which I had been posted as a teacher for the next nine months.

  Framed by the small window, I saw in microscopic display the elements which were to play such a large role in my life. I saw the thin green ribbon of the Nile, meandering like a serpent on its way north, between thick yellow wedges of desert. The entire area seemed devoid of vegetation, though as the plane dropped nearer I noticed some islands in the stream which were verdant and leaf-shaped. A little closer the nail-parings of green along the riverbanks, Dongola’s famous palm groves, became visible, but from this height any greenery was swallowed up by the enormity of the desert and rendered as insignificant as scum along the edges of its vast emptiness.

  My view of the scene was both obscured and distracted by the face of a pretty English girl, who was rapt in contemplation of the same landscape. Her name was Katie, and we were to be colleagues together in Dongola. I did not guess at that time that I would come to love all that I saw before me at that moment: the river Nile and its palette of colours, its inestimable poetry, the desert with its power and its unfathomable mystery, and Katie, who had a poetry and a mystery which were all her own.

  When I was a child my father spoke to me of the lure of the desert. His words had no meaning to me, however, until the moment I stepped onto the tiny airstrip outside Dongola. When the pilot cut the aircraft’s engines, and the dust had settled, I immediately became aware of the appalling aridity of my new environment. It was ‘The Desert’: a vast roll of paper, dried and corrugated, laid out to a dazzling horizon. It seemed a virgin stage, and almost at once I sensed that I should take some role upon it. Its only props were rocks and lonely bushes, its backdrop distant mountains hanging like grey ghosts beyond the skyline, its lighting the stinging sun which seemed all enemy and without mercy.

  I felt drawn to this wasteland, in no way that I could yet articulate, but through a growing sense of excitement within. For the moment I stood there, g
reen from England, a neatly pressed shirt on my back, my hair combed and in place. I had never eaten with my fingers from a communal bowl, or sat in a Sudanese squat, and I knew no Arabic.

  It was pure chance that brought me to Dongola. Only a few weeks before I arrived in the Sudan, in August 1979, I was kicking my heels around Belfast city centre with a Walther PP pistol snugly lodged under the waistband of my jeans. By chance I bought a copy of the Guardian(London), a paper which appeared rarely on the newsstands there.

  Scanning the Situations Vacant columns, I came across the following advertisement:

  Teachers wanted for the Sudan. The Sudan is a developing country and cannot afford to pay expatriate salaries. Enthusiasm more important than experience. Climate harsh but people friendly.

  For some time I had been looking for a way out of the prison that life had become, the bars imposed by the permanently cocked pistol in its waistband holster, and by the dangers of speaking in my English accent which had caused me to become silent and unresponsive.

  The twenty-six years of my life in Britain seemed to have been a maze of blind alleys, of doorways leading nowhere, always in pursuit of that elusive quality–adventure.

  I had searched for it in the ranks of the Parachute Regiment and later in the reserve of the Special Air Service Regiment. Finally the quest had led me to the bleak streets of Ulster as an officer engaged in anti-terrorist activities.

  As a security officer in Northern Ireland, I had become disillusioned and cynical, and my alienation was beginning to show. When in 1979 I heard a rumour that the Special Branch were about to put a trace on me, I decided it was time to go.

  I applied for the job, and was successful, and on one Saturday in July, I found myself handing back my weapon to a superior, laying out my thirty bronze-nosed slugs in a neat row on his desk, and watching as he placed the Walther carefully away in a drawer. It seemed to me at that moment that I had cast away with the weapon the chains of a life of controlled aggression which had begun when, as a youth of eighteen, I had first worn the maroon-red beret of the Parachute Regiment. I had seen action in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles, when gun-battles and bombings had been commonplace. I had worked in a small airborne intelligence section in the jungles of Malaysia, responsible for mapping out routes in the almost impenetrable rain forest. I had operated in small boats in the Baltic and dropped by parachute into the forests of Germany. Later, while an undergraduate at the University of Leeds, I had continued my military connection, serving with a reserve ‘Sabre’ squadron of the Special Air Service Regiment, in which I received specialist training in clandestine warfare, and learned to carry my world in a rucksack over vast distances in adverse conditions. Later still, I had turned this military necessity into a pleasurable pastime, training as a teacher of physical education at Carnegie College in Leeds, where my main interests were in outdoor pursuits.

  Eventually, however, I rejected the dull routine which teaching in Britain seemed to offer, and was lured once again to Northern Ireland, this time as a civilian, by that same obscure desire for adventure. I learned many things during my protracted training, however, which would prove useful later. I learned to live and work alone and in tiny groups for extended periods and in harsh and sometimes dangerous conditions. I learned to navigate accurately in all weathers, to hunt and trap food, to cross rivers and climb mountains. Above all I had had an opportunity to assess my strengths and weaknesses, to observe my physical and mental abilities in situations of stress and challenge.

  However, on that Saturday in 1979, when I put away my pistol for the last time, I was determined that I should never again seek such challenge in a situation likely to be detrimental to anyone but myself.

  Now I was beginning a new chapter in the quest for adventure. Standing there, neat and British, on the Dongola airstrip, I felt the powerful thrill of Africa.

  Dongola is the heart of the ancient African land of Nubia. It was old when the Arabs came here in the fifteenth century, and its people had lived for millennia along its gravel river terraces. At least once during its history a Nubian king had extended his power into the very core of Egypt, and the fortitude of Nubian soldiers delayed the Arab invasion of the Sudan for many centuries.

  I soon grew attached to Dongola, this town of strange curves and angles, with its matrix of mud walls, every shade of brown. It is a stark town, with little shelter from the hunting sun. Its walls are cracked and scarred by years of resisting the sandblazing wind from the north, the savage haboob which blows almost constantly in Dongola. Because of this, the Dongolese look to the Nile for comfort—the cool shade of its palm groves, the cooler embrace of its waters. The Nile is mother to the Nubians, and like a woman her beauty changes its subtle tones with her times. The river seems to have moulded these people from her very clay, for they reflect her nobility, her beauty, and her grace.

  It was from Katie that I first learned to shed some of the prejudices of my European upbringing, and to see in a new perspective a society which had little in common with my own. I found the hospitality and generosity of the Sudanese astonishing. It was by no means uncommon to be invited to supper by a stranger whom one had met in the street, or to find on leaving a coffeehouse that some unknown person had paid one’s bill and left.

  More difficult to assimilate was the communal nature of everything the Sudanese did. Here the family was still of the utmost importance, and each individual, weak or strong, was assured of a place within its structure. It was a society without alienation, where even outcasts belonged. The family was a powerful entity, both supporting and depending on its members. We had been reared to believe that, as individuals, our desires and ambitions were of paramount importance.

  Now we found ourselves in a society whose separate parts were of less significance than the sum of those parts.

  Memories of those nine months in Dongola come flooding back in vivid intensity; they are among the happiest of my life. Memories of the flux of colours in the river at sunset; of feasts in the narrow streets of Nubian villages; of riding amongst a cavalcade of white donkeys with youths of the Mahas tribe as they sang an ancient melody in their native tongue; of the beat of drums, bounding across the sandhills from the straw huts of a Bishari village; of a line of Mahas women wading through the river shallows with lengths of cloth, trawling for fish.

  I can see again the spectacle of scores of Nubian women dancing at a wedding, dressed in splendid rainbow colours, swaying erotically to the hypnotic beat, flinging their braided, butter-smeared hair from side to side and rattling their gold bracelets, while groups of men danced up to them hand in hand, each one vying for the honour of being touched by the swinging hair of the women.

  I remember the excitement of the date harvest in September, the brown limbs of the young boys as they scaled the knotted trunks of the date palms, holding curved blades in their teeth, the flash of gold as the cut bunches of dates slithered through the fronds, the singing of the teams of women below, their hands stained with henna and faces tattooed with kohl, as they shredded the fallen branches.

  I remember too the great fishing barges putting out into midstream while the sunlight made patterns through the butterfly wings of their sails, of the Danaqla fishermen hauling in the majestic vessels before sunset, laying out their baskets of still squirming bream and perch along the muddy quay.

  For the Nubian river tribesmen of Dongola, the great river forms the hub of their existence. They turn their backs on that very different world which lies to the west.

  This shadowless wasteland is the Libyan Desert: a misleading term, perhaps, for much of it lies within the borders of the Sudan. From the Nile it reaches away west till it merges with the great Sahara, rising to the baked chimney stacks of Tibesti, in Chad, and the sunburnt peaks of the Hoggar, in Algeria. It finally comes to rest on the shores of the rolling Atlantic, over three thousand miles away in Mauretania.

 
This is a scavenging, dust-choked place, a place of old bones and spiked bushes, where the scarecrows of cairns mark a man’s unlooked for grave. It is a land like a parched throat, a land like dried cardboard, and this tiny bastion, Dongola, lies under its eaves, part of it, yet no part.

  As I settled down in Dongola, I saw this world from my door everyday. It seemed a place of mystery, fearsome, infinite, as alien to men as the surface of the moon. Yet I knew that men lived there, for I had seen camel herds, great mobs of loose-limbed beasts, crawling over the flat sands like giant insects. In their wake came fierce-looking men who rode masterfully on enormous bull camels, cracking rawhide whips and chanting odd songs: the breath of an alien domain. The lives of these camel-men were quite different from those of the river tribesmen amongst whom I lived. They did not shun the desert, for their lives were centred on the well and the camel, lives of constant movement over the vast plains of their homelands.

  When I learnt that these camel-men were ‘Arabs’, the word immediately triggered off a complex series of associations in my mind. There were memories, recently formed, of hordes of white-robed figures sweeping, not over the desert, but along the streets of London in summer, wearing spotless white headcloths, and followed by trains of women in vampire-like masks. These images were coupled with vague pictures of oil derricks, concrete palaces and squadrons of gauche American cars. But these memories had submerged a far older stratum of associations—the vivid childhood characters of the Arabian Nights, mysterious, hawkish men in furled turbans with viciously curved daggers, camel-riders, their faces swathed in white cloth, carrying ancient and ungainly flintlocks, black tents in the desert, dim figures moving beneath the palms at an oasis–ghosts which still lurked in the darker recesses of my memory. These ghosts, I thought, belonged to a world created by childish fantasy, a world which, if it had ever existed at all, had long since faded.