In Search of the Forty Days Road

by Michael Asher

  Once he was well strung up, five or six Arabs gave him a tremendous thrashing with whips and sticks. I asked later what the Mesalati had done to deserve such an attack, and one of the Bani Halba told me, ‘Nothing. He was just walking past and the camel grabbed him. Rose on his knees, stretched out his neck, and grabbed him—would not have let him go if we hadn’t beaten him. A mating camel will attack someone without any reason!’

  When I remembered that I had walked past the bull a few moments before the tribesman, I thought myself extremely fortunate.

  It was a hard battle to get myself accepted in the camel-market as a serious camel lover. The Arabs were willing to sell me camels, but at first found it very amusing that a khawaja should want to ride one. It was even harder to get them to teach me about the animals, and I sensed that this was partly to do with the fact that they wanted to preserve their own mastery of the mystique of the camel, just as they saw mystique in the European’s mastery of things mechanical, though I myself had no such skills and hated machines. It took me a long time to break down this cultural barrier, but eventually I managed to learn enough about camels to talk to the Arabs intelligently about them. The greatest hostility came from Arab children, who at the age of nine or ten knew more about camels than I probably ever would. Often, when I rode about on my camels, these kids would shout out, ‘Hey, khawaja! Your camel’s got no balls!’ This was a terrible insult to the Arabs, who identified with the virility of their camels. The first time I heard it, though, I dismounted to see if it were true as soon as I was safely out of sight.

  The Arab sense of superiority came out in their claim that the zurqa were afraid of camels. The Mesalit had many camels, though some of the settled peoples were afraid of them. These people tended to buy the most docile animals, and to use them for carrying. The Arabs loved spirited animals which would jump up and run at the slightest touch, since these were useful in raids or pursuits. For a riding-camel, they preferred a raba’ over short distances, as these immature bulls ran very fast and were extremely light of foot. The fully grown adult males were preferred in the desert itself, or for long distances, since they had more stamina. The best camels came from the Butana in the east of the Sudan, and were reared by tribes such as the Bishariyyin and Shukriyya. These were a special breed, known as bishari, and it was said that one could place a cup of water on their shoulders, and so smooth was their step that even at a gallop it would not spill. They were imported by Arabia and the Gulf States as racing camels and were the most successful in the world. It was always my ambition to own one of these dromedaries, though there were none in the west of the Sudan.

  Apart from the negro farmers, the other important buyers of camels were the samasra or merchants, who built up their own herds and exported them to Libya and Egypt. Originally, Libya had been the best market, as the Libyans paid in hard currency. In I98o, however, the Libyans closed the route to the Sudanese, because of the tension over Chad, and the merchants turned to Egypt, which had been importing Sudanese camels since the 1930s. The Sudan had replaced Arabia as the most successful camel-rearing country in the world. There were officially estimated to be three million head of camels in the country, as opposed to six hundred thousand in Saudi Arabia, though the Sudanese figure, at least, may have been only a third of the actual number.

  At first, years before in Dongola, I had regarded the camel merely with interest: nothing more than an extension of my two feet, which unaided were inadequate for the purpose of desert travel. By now, however, I had begun to see the animal as the Arabs saw it, as a figure of beauty and grace. Most Europeans think of the camel as an ugly or comical beast, because they are not acquainted with its qualities. They tend to judge its shape against that of the horse, with which they are familiar. The Arabs have revered the camel’s beauty for centuries, and much of their early poetry is devoted to this animal: the camel is mentioned in the Holy Koran as an example of God’s wisdom. It is said that only ninety-nine of God’s names have been revealed to man. The camel smiles because he knows the hundredth.

  As my visits to Rashid Omar’s house continued, the shaykh’s presence there and in the market became less frequent. Often his son Omar told me he had gone ‘south’. Once, I saw him in the main market of Gineina, riding his black stallion, with his kinsman Baraka Mubarak and some other Arabs. He looked a magnificent sight as he stopped to greet me, his great turban piled up like an exotic crown and his white robes flying behind him.

  ‘Where are you going, Shaykh?’ I asked him.

  ‘South,’ he replied.

  I watched the group of horsemen as they disappeared into the market crowds. That was the last time I saw Shaykh Rashid Omar alive.

  Throughout the first part of 1981, the incursions of the Gor’an and Bedayatt into the Sudan continued. The Awlad Janub sub-clan of the Mahamid lost three hundred camels in a single day to fifty Gor’an who came armed with machine guns and automatic rifles. The Gor’an were Habri’s guerrillas who needed the camels for food. It was rumoured that the Libyan Polisario fighting in Chad were not Libyans but Sudanese who had been working in Libya. Habri himself could be seen in Gineina from time to time, organising offensives into Chad, while his men were organising offensives in the opposite direction: into the Sudan.

  By July 1981, the situation had become even worse. The Libyan airforce was bombing Kulbus and Tina, and there were forays over Gineina itself. Two Libyan Jaguars were shot down by the guerrillas right over the school, and of the crews which baled out, one was found to be a Sudanese pilot, recruited in Libya. There were rumours that Sudanese jebha working for Libya were infiltrating the Sudan, and there were many arrests. An Arab of the Mahamid was arrested in Khartoum, trying to blow up Habri’s HQ there with a device given him in Tripoli.

  One day in November I noticed that Omar, son of Shaykh Rashid, was missing from my evening classes, in which he was a student. No one knew where he was, but later in the day I happened to walk past the town police post. The station had an external lockup, like something out of the Wild West: it had a barred door through which the felons could be seen peering at any hour of the day. On this day, I realised with a shock that it was Omar’s face which was peering out at me. I went over to ask what was wrong and he told me sheepishly that he and his father had both been arrested in connection with the war in Chad. I asked the police captain if I could bail him out, but the officer told me politely that it was a security problem, for which the secret police were responsible.

  A week later he was released without punishment, and he told me that he had been arrested at the border, trying to get into Chad to join the Libyan forces. His father had been arrested at the same time. I had long suspected that the shaykh was a recruiting agent for Asiil, but the full story did not become apparent until that December, when I heard that Rashid Omar had died. He had gone ‘south’ once too often. His business trips, as I had suspected, were illegal journeys into Chad, where as an Arab who had once moved in and out of the country constantly, he knew all the secret routes and safe areas. On several occasions he had brought home to his Arabs news of the Libyan Polisario, the troops fighting in Chad against Habri’s Gor’an and Bedayatt. Many of these soldiers were Arabs of the Rizayqat. After one trip, he returned saying that the Arabs in Libyan service had been pressed into the army against their own will when they had gone to Libya to find jobs. However, Asiil was prepared to release the sons and husbands of the Rizayqat families, if a certain amount of money was paid. Rashid was charged to collect that amount.

  He duly collected the money from the tribes and transported it secretly across the border. Some months later, he returned. None of the sons of the Rizayqat were with him. He said that Asiil had taken the money, then refused to release the fighters. Then Rashid really had gone south: down to the Mahamid damr in Wadi Habila. It was here that he had met his death, stabbed and beaten by the angry Arabs whom he had either cheated or failed.

  It seemed almo
st a fitting end for one who had lived by cunning as he had, yet I could not help regretting the death of the most colourful character I had met in the Sudan. As I watched his son Omar, who at the age of nineteen took responsibility for the entire family, women, goats, camels, and cows, and accepted the responsibility of his father’s signet ring, the symbol of his new position amongst the Arabs, I could not help feeling intensely curious about the nature of the future damin of the Mahamid.

  13. SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE SOUTH

  FROM GINEINA I DECIDED TO set out into the ranges of dar Mesalit. Although I had travelled in the desert, I had never seen anything of the family life of Sudan’s nomadic tribes, and now my plan was to find the nomads who were at that time on their annual migrations to the south through the dar Mesalit. Luckily, I had made a friend in Gineina: a fellow teacher named Mohammed Hissein Mukhtar, himself an Arab of the Zayadiyya tribe, who agreed to travel with me as a rafiq. We left Gineina riding my two camels, an old bull, strong but slow, and an excitable five-year-old.

  As we drew out of the rows of grass huts which made up the town, I felt the old familiar excitement welling up inside me: the freedom and exhilaration of the desert. For two days we travelled in Mesalit country, crossing occasional cultivated fields of millet, descending into watercourses and passing below the peaks of mountains. The witches’ caps of Mesalit villages peered at us over the tall grasses, and we passed bare-breasted women toiling in the fields while their menfolk sat in the shade and drank the local beer, known as merissa. Though alcohol is forbidden in Islam, merissa drinking was a Mesalit tradition going back to the times when the tribe were renowned as warriors. It seemed to me, though, that the women, who worked in the fields, cooked, reared the children, and built the houses, had an extremely hard life. Mohammed thought so, too.

  ‘For the Mesalit men, buying a wife is like buying a tractor,’ he said.

  ‘If you have four wives, you have four tractors! You are a wealthy man!’

  Everywhere we asked for news of the nomads and then, by chance, in the third day, we almost rode into a family of Arabs of the Mahamid section of the Rizayqat. I will never forget the sight which met my eyes as the Arabs came towards us. There was a small herd of camels being marshalled by some oldish men on horses, but the herd was led by a gigantic male camel, carrying on its back a black litter. This was almost like a small house or shelter, built on a special frame, which fitted over the saddle. The frame was draped with skins and cloth and around it were attached all kinds of baskets, leather and wooden vessels, which represented all the nomads’ worldly possessions. The camel was decorated with a headdress of jet-black ostrich feathers, and a variety of plaited leather necklaces, from which streams of hide cascaded, decorating its head and neck.

  More ornate streamers tumbled from special saddlebags at the animal’s flanks. Within the depths of the litter, known in Arabic as the howdaj, I could make out the thin pale face of a woman. The whole pageant was a magnificent and spectacular sight, and Mohammed and I halted our camels to watch it as it drifted towards us across an open plain of desert.

  The Arabs stopped to greet us as the procession passed by, and told us that they had been far north, into the country of the Zaghawa, and were now returning to their winter grazing grounds around Gineina. This southern movement they called mowta, and it was the custom amongst the Rizayqat tribes that the women and children moved with the men, leaving only the very old and the very weak in the semi-permanent summer camps. These Arabs were grumbling about the Mesalit, whose territory they were now crossing. As often happened, the harvest had come late this year, which meant that on their way south, the camels had to pass through unharvested Mesalit cultivation. For every camel which entered a Mesalit field, the Rizayqat were obliged to pay one pound, though often they would refuse and this sometimes led to clashes. Only a few years ago there had been a full-scale war between the Mesalit and the Mahamid, resulting in a number of killings. The Arabs maintained that these were their traditional lines of migration, dating back centuries. The Mesalit, of course, had an equally strong claim to the land on which their livelihood depended. The Mahamid told us that the whole of their clan was travelling on this route, though the main body of them had already passed south. If we continued north, they told us, we would find the tail end of the migration.

  Sure enough, that evening just at sunset, right on cue it seemed, we came across a Mahamid family camped I the bed of a watercourse. As soon as they saw us, the men came running out, and as we couched our camels they clasped each of us by the hand saying, ‘Welcome! Welcome!’ over and over. Though by now I was accustomed to Sudanese hospitality, I was bowled over by the openness with which these men received us.

  They had built an overnight camp in the shade of two trees, where the women had erected a tent. The men sat on rugs in the bed of the wadi, and produced glasses of strong, black tea on a metal tray.

  ‘Why do you stay here, brothers?’ Mohammed Hissein asked.

  ‘One of our calves is ill, by God! Don’t you hear the naqa?’ said an old, old man, whose face seemed to have been wrought with hammer and chisel rather than formed from flesh and bone. It was only then that I became aware of a piteous wailing sound, and the old man directed my gaze to the base of one of the trees, where a large cow camel stood fidgeting nervously around a light bundle of fur stretched out on the ground.

  ‘She has just given birth,’ continued the old man. ‘But the calf is ill. Perhaps it will live. God knows!’

  After drinking tea, we turned the camels loose on the wadi banks to graze with the Arabs’ small herd. I stood on a high point and watched the last embers of the sun burning out, taking in the camels’ lumpy shapes moving in the grass, the goats bleating, the moan of the distressed naqa, the women—grey ghosts amongst their piled-up saddlery, pounding spices in huge mortars carved from wood. It seemed to me a scene of perfect beauty and peace, an age away from the town, with these people whose entire worldly possessions were now laid out under two trees in the gathering darkness. And what I felt for the lives of these men was envy. I knew that somehow I wanted to be like them, to embrace their way of life; yet at the same time I knew that no matter what, I could never be completely accepted by them. I was still as far removed from them as a visitor from another planet.

  We met again in the wadi to eat ’asida and drink more tea.

  Mohammed explained to me that in a camp such as this, the men would always sleep and sit apart from the women. As we ate, we talked of the migrations. The Mahamid said that they had begun to move north in June, at the beginning of the rainy season, and like the Mahamid we had met earlier they had been north into dar Zaghawa.

  I asked if the whole tribe always moved at the same time, and one of the Arabs said, ‘Yes, we all travel on the same day, unless something prevents us. That’s because of raiders. This route is a very dangerous one, by God the Great! And it’s getting worse!’

  ‘You mean raiders from the Mesalit?’ I asked.

  ‘Never!’ the man scoffed. ‘It’s the Bedayatt and the Gor’an we have to be careful of. They have many weapons because of the war in Chad, and they know how to use them! A small family on its own in that area would be eaten, by God!’

  I asked how long they would stay in one place during their migrations.

  ‘Not more than five days or a week usually,’ the old man said.

  ‘Then we move on for a few hours or a day, until we find another good place.’

  The Mahamid explained that some of their number were fighting on both sides in the Chadian war, though most of them were supporters of Gikoni Wadai, the President of Chad, merely because their enemies, the Gor’an and Bedayatt, supported his rival, Hissein Habri. They told us that they were neither Sudanese nor Chadians. ‘We are Arab,’ said one of the men. ‘And our enemies are the zurqa, especially the Gor’an and Bedayatt.’

  They were curious about me, and though they
were familiar with the word Ingleez, they said that undoubtedly my people were Arabs. ‘In fact,’ said the old man, ‘you Ingleez are the nobility. It is said that the father of the afranj was Abu Jahil, one of the noble Quraysh, who was born in the days before the birth of the Prophet, may prayer and peace be upon him. He travelled to the land of the afranj and married one of their women. He forgot the noble tongue of the Arabs and began to talk in a strange tongue, as you do.’

  I was both surprised and a little embarrassed by the story, although I did not wish to insult my host by contradicting him in what was evidently considered a compliment. But I was tempted to smile when Mohammed whispered to me in English, ‘Rubbish!’

  Later, the men brought us a bowl of camels’ milk. It was steaming hot and the Arabs had added a little flour to the liquid, giving it the consistency of thick cream.

  The next day we left the Arabs in their camp and went off in search of the main body of the tribe. We followed the meandering course of the wadi until it narrowed into shallow creeks which were overshadowed by the canopies of nabak and heraz trees, hung with bunches of catkins and wreathed in white butterflies. We passed occasional Mesalit settlements, and once saw a camp of the Bani Halba cattle nomads, whose houses were hemispherical huts of matting, like straw igloos, quite distinct from both the tents of the Mahamid and the beehive cabins of the Mesalit. Around the village was gathered a large herd of cattle, black, white, red, and brown. I was surprised to find the Bani Halba so far north, for I knew that their homeland was south Darfur. Mohammed told me that recently they had begun to move further into dar Mesalit, and to acquire camels instead of cows.