Baghdad Without a Map

by Tony Horwitz

  “There is nothing to see. And it is dark.”

  There was nothing to see inside, either. The power had blacked out soon after my arrival, and the hotel's only other guest, a Welsh water engineer, sat in the lobby reading a month-old London Times by candlelight. When I persisted, the man behind the desk gave in with an exasperated shrug. “If the power returns, I will give you our kerosene lamp so you will not fall in the holes,” he said.

  The Welshman laughed. “Give 'im a bloody blowtorch. That way he can keep the beggars away, too.”

  An hour later, the power was still down, so I ventured into the dark with the Welshman's cigarette lighter instead. A leper squatted on a scrap of cardboard blocking the hotel's door. As I stepped over him, he reached out and grasped my thigh.

  “Flow,” he said, offering the Arabic word for money. He tilted his head toward the dimly lit door so I could see his face. His eyes were covered by a milky film and his nose was a shrunken button. I clinked a coin in his metal cup and stepped into the street. He rattled the cup, and small boys enveloped me in the dark, shouting “Floas! Flow!” Their black skin was masked by fine white dust, like eerie trick-or-treat-ers.“Floos! Floos! Floos!” I scattered more coins and hurried off into the gloom.

  The night was so black that I paused every few paces to flick on the lighter and peer ahead. The street, which adjoined Khartoum's central square, was edged with heaps of flyblown rubbish, or bundled beggars, it was hard to tell which. A few people still stirred in the night, rearranging meager blankets of newspaper and sackcloth. An old woman crouched to defecate by the curb. Each time I flicked the Bic, a soldier would approach from a doorway or sentry box to ask for a cigarette. Coup attempts were common in Khartoum, and I wondered how the soldiers distinguished enemy from friend in the dark.

  I was retracing my route to the Sahara Hotel when a figure stepped forward, announcing himself with the flicker of a match. He had coal-black skin and a wide, toothless grin.

  “Is you English man?” he asked. I nodded. He held up a large sack tied at one end with black cord. “I am Ali. Everything you want, I have.” He looked suggestively at the bag. “Gin, beer, bongo.”

  “Bongo?”

  “Is Sudanese hashish.” He lit another match and prodded the sack. It twitched. “Also I have python skin,” he said. “Life or dead. Your choose.”

  The match died and I ran ten paces down the street before tripping over something in the road. I flicked the lighter. It was a downed power line, strung a foot or so above the ground. Just beyond it was one of the holes the hotelkeeper had warned about, deep enough to swallow a bicyclist.

  A hand reached out and helped me to my feet. It was Ali again, rattling his bag of gin, weed and reptile skin.“Python, life or dead,” he said. “Your choose.”

  I had come to Khartoum on impulse, with only the sketchiest of story ideas. For the free-lancer, Sudan offered distinct advantages. The local currency had tumbled six hundred percent in the previous year, making Sudan the cheapest country in the Arab world. And it remained relatively unexplored: one of those blighted spots only visited by aid workers, nuns, natural disasters and representatives of the International Monetary Fund.

  “You can't believe Khartoum is a capital,” said John Kifner, a New York Times correspondent and one of the few reporters in Cairo who'd actually visited the place. “I mean, the place is total dreck. Literally. The streets are paved with shit.”

  American diplomats in Khartoum received a twenty-five percent pay boost, as a hardship bonus. Even Egyptians regarded their southern neighbor with distaste. Sudan was filthy and poor, they observed without irony, and the Sudanese were lazy. This from a country where a government survey once concluded that the average Egyptian worked twenty-six minutes a day. A country that made Cairo look industrious and orderly by comparison was something I had to see for myself.

  On the plane from Cairo, I riffled through official literature whose vagueness rivaled the qat-addled prose of Yemen. The name Khartoum was derived from an Arabic word meaning “elephant's tusk” or “sunflower seed,” though the reason for either moniker wasn't explained. According to the Sudan Tourism Guide, “Currency exchange rates are, from rime to time, announced by the Bank of Sudan.” Taxi rates were set “according to an official tariff announced from time to time.” From time to time, a new government also announced itself, usually over the radio waves, at odd hours, with an accompanying score of gunfire. Civil war raged in the south, as it had, from time to time, for twenty-one years. “Yet the people,” the tourism guide assured me, “are peace-loving and friendly.”

  Upon landing in Khartoum, it seemed miraculous that anything got done from time to time, or at all. The city was paralyzed; first by temperatures that crossed 100 degrees a few hours after sunrise, and then by choking dust storms, called haboobs, which gusted in from the desert, mingling sand with what was already an airborne compost heap of grit, shit, rotted fruit, rotted flesh, sweat and bongo breath. Traffic jams began at dawn as cars queued for scarce gas rations. They continued through the morning as commuters crawled toward the city center along three- and four-lane avenues reduced to one-lane ducts by craters, broken stoplights and drooping power lines. By the time most travelers reached downtown, the brief workday was almost done. Then the traffic fanned out of the city again, until three in the afternoon, at which point the city went completely dead, stricken by heat that was now beyond the endurance of even the ever-patient Sudanese. Then night fell, the power failed, and another day in Khartoum ended, exactly like the one before.

  Reporting in any ordinary sense of the word was futile. The telephone system was so bad that many phones in Khartoum hadn't rung for years. Most appointments had to be made in person, and reached on foot. After two days of hiking through the heat and dust, never knowing if the person I sought would even be in, my three-week visa seemed suddenly but a grain of sand in the vast, wretched wasteland of Sudan.

  “Give it a rest, mate,” an English-accented voice called out from the darkened hotel lobby. I was waiting for the telex lines to open so I could let an American editor know that I had nothing to report. The English voice called out again, “No one gives a stuff about this country, anyway.”

  The man's name was Geoff Bulley and he worked at a refugee camp called Kilometer 26, which denoted the distance from the nearest highway. He'd traveled several days to Khartoum, in hopes of buying medicine, posting a few letters and picking up money wired from England. On the day he arrived, pharmacists went on strike in Khartoum, as did bank workers, bus drivers, postal workers, doctors, engineers and university staff.

  “I'm going back to the bush with the same shopping list I brought here,” Bulley said. His only successful purchase was a pint of bootleg Ethiopian gin. “In most African cities, you can bribe your way through the chaos, even run someone down if you've got the money,” he said. “Here, it's so far gone that you can't find anyone to pay.”

  Bulley invited me onto the balcony to share the gin, and we sat long into the evening, watching darkness descend twice: first as the sun set, and then, inevitably, as the power collapsed for the night. Slowly, as the darkness and gin took hold, I began to discern the outline of a story in Khartoum's rubbled skyline. I would write a profile of the world's most blighted city. Missed appointments, broken phones and blinding haboobs would simply become part of the story.

  Bulley approved of the idea. “Now that we've well and truly fucked the Third World,” he said, languorously sipping gin, “it is the white man's burden to sit back and watch it fall apart.”

  It had long been the white man's burden to keep Sudan's “fuzzy-wuzzies” in abject submission. The history of Khartoum was nasty and short. Before 1820, the windswept plain at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles was uninhabited, except by passing camels. Then the Ottomans and Egyptians, and later the British, chose this malarial spit of riverbank as the ideal site for a garrison. Samuel Baker, an early English governor in the Sudan, knew better. “A more
miserable, filthy and unhealthy place,” he wrote, “can hardly be imagined.”

  Khartoum quickly distinguished itself as the leading slave market in Africa. By some estimates, half the city's inhabitants in the 1850's were slaves, destined for Arabia or Turkey. The Sudanese eventually revolted, under a messianic figure known as the Mahdi, and laid siege to a small British force under the command of Charles George Gordon. “It is a useless place and we could not govern it,” Gordon wrote from Khartoum in 1884. “The Sudan could be made to pay its expenses, but it would need a dictator, and I would not take the post if offered to me.”

  It wasn't. Instead, Gordon's severed head was offered to the Mahdi, then stuck atop a pole on the banks of the Nile. Thirteen years later, Sudanese dervishes charged out of Khartoum, clad in chain mail, to meet British Catling guns in the battle of Omdurman. The British lost twenty-eight men; the Sudanese ten thousand. Winston Churchill, who took part in the battle, called it “the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians.” A war correspondent of the day wasn't so impressed: “It was not a battle but an execution.” The British hurled the Mahdi's head into the Nile and settled in for sixty more years of dominion.

  Now, after three decades of independence, Khartoum was a sprawling junkyard of British imperialism. The graves of eighteen-year-old Cameron Highlanders and 1st Grenadiers felled by Dervish spears—or more often by malaria—lay in a weed-infested cemetery at the edge of town. George Gordon's own gunboat rotted on the city's riverbank, unmarked and unremembered, near where the slate-gray waters of the Blue Nile meet the dull dishwater brown of the White Nile. Five miles upstream, naked boys fished from the half-sunk hulls of rusted British paddle-wheelers. Khartoum's broad avenues had been laid out at the turn of the century in the shape of a Union Jack, with the streets forming three superimposed crosses. Now the city plan was a tangled, potholed smudge. Trapped in the perpetually stalled traffic, it was impossible to avoid feeling, as George Gordon had, that the only important question in Khartoum was how to “get out of it in honor and in the cheapest way. . . it is simply a question of getting out of it with decency.”

  At Sudan's Natural History Museum, the Living Collection was mostly dead.

  “This pond for rare Nile fish,” the guard said, pointing toward a pool of brackish water where several rare species floated belly-up on the surface. “Pipes rusted,” he continued. “Rust no good for fish.”

  We moved on to the reptile collection.

  “This rare desert snake,” he said. I searched the unmarked pen for signs of snake before picking out a half-decomposed python, well camouflaged by the dead weeds and thorns filling its cage. “No rabbits,” the guard explained again. “No food not good for snake.”

  We moved on past dead turtles, dead birds and a som-nambulant crocodile to the one mobile creature in the entire collection: an uncaged baboon, foraging through heaps of jagged metal and discarded jawbones. A small boy stood throwing stones at the creature's red, swollen buttocks.

  “This called dog-faced monkey,” the guard said, shaking his head. “He be dead soon also.”

  I tipped the guard a few pounds and went inside to look at the collection of stuffed animals. There were dioramas of cheetahs and gazelles, most of them mislabeled. A stuffed aardvark had fallen over, taking a mock acacia tree with it. I found Fathi al-Rabaa, the museum's curator, in a dusty office beside a bank of seven phones. They, too, were dead. “This one rang last year,” he said, pointing at the nearest phone. “It was a wrong number.”

  I asked him about the museum's collection and if there were plans for improvement. He shook his head.

  “It is better now than it was,” he said. “The floods last year washed away many of the animals. It is better to drown than to starve.”

  The museum suffered from the same problem as every other institution in Sudan. Its budget had remained stable for the past five years. Unfortunately, the Sudanese pound hadn't, nor had inflation; the museum's meager allotment was now worth five percent of what it had been five years before. Al-Rabaa had tried to raise money abroad to buy new animals and feed the surviving ones. But with the phones, telexes and mail routinely out of service, it was hard to know if any of his missives had made it, or if they'd been answered.

  “I am still hopeful,” he said, sitting there, waiting for one of the phones to ring again. “In Khartoum one must learn to be patient.”

  Later that day, I wandered across town to the office of Sudanese Business. I'd picked up a copy of the “economic and business weekly” at a newsstand. The motto proclaimed on its pages—“to promote individual initiative, drive and excellence and entrepreneurship”—struck me as insanely quixotic.

  The editor, Ali Abdalla Ali, agreed.

  “It was a stupid idea, really,” he said, wiping a brow stained with ink and sweat. “We posed ourselves the question 'Is there a meaningful private sector in Sudan, and what are its prospects?' ” After six months, he thought he'd found the answer. “Sudan has no stability, no private initiative, no hard currency and not a single clear policy. The prospects for business are nil.”

  I asked him what he would advise foreign investors. Ali laughed, the deep hearty laugh of the Sudanese. “I'd have to tell them, 'Please, go away.' ”

  He borrowed my pen and began listing, with grim relish, a few of Sudan's key economic indicators. By the time he was done, he'd filled an entire page with what read like a bankruptcy filing.

  1. A foreign debt of $14 billion, on which Sudan paid nothing and which now accounted for a third of all overdue payments to the International Monetary Fund.

  2. Inflation rate of 100 percent a year.

  3. Factories running at 5 percent of capacity.

  4. Imports running at three times exports.

  5. A per capita income of $279, lowest in the Arab world.

  6. Chronic shortages of bread, fuel and water—and a black market in everything, even stamps.

  7. A brain drain so severe that most Sudanese with education and skills quickly fled overseas.

  “Those without skills stay to run the government,” Ali said, adding without shame that Sudan was “the worst basket case” in Africa, perhaps in the world. “I do not know. I have heard Burma and Bangladesh are maybe this bad.”

  I asked him about the prospects for his publication.

  “Advertising is very poor, sales are worse,” he said. “So I think we will expand to twice a week.”

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “All of Sudan is in debt. I have some catching up to do.” He gave me an inscrutable smile, and an inky handshake, and returned to work on the previous week's issue, which hadn't yet made it to the streets.

  The out-migration of skilled Sudanese was matched by an inward flood of liberal-minded Westerners. Sudan, after all, was a vast laboratory of human misery, offering everything a researcher or philanthropist might need: war, famine, flood, plague and pestilence. “It's like living in the Bible,” said a wide-eyed American aid worker, who was recovering from malaria when I met her in the lobby of the Acropole Hotel. The Acropole was the strangest and most entertaining hotel in the Middle East. Run by a Sudanese family of Greek extraction, it was a way station for all the aid workers, missionaries and free-lance Good Samaritans who passed through Khartoum between visits to the black hole of Calcutta or the famine-stricken fields of Ethiopia. During a single afternoon in the hotel's lobby, I met a Canadian tree surgeon just in from Malawi; a one-armed Eritrean working for the rebel movement that had been fighting the government of Ethiopia, next door, for twenty-five years; an English missionary in a woolen cardigan who was navigating through the 100-degree heat in search of a street urchin to adopt (“The Lord told me to”); a Swiss intern who was sleeping off some fever he'd contracted in the south of the country (“There are diseases here I have never seen, except in medical textbooks”); and a Dutch “meat consultant” who asked me to hold up putrefying slabs of beef so he could photograph them to shock his co
lleagues back home (“In Holland we would not feed such meat to pigs”).

  I also met journalists drawn like me to the Acropole's cheap rooms, its colorful clientele, and most of all its owners, who spoke a dozen or so languages and could fix everything from a photography permit (without which your camera would be seized) to a bogus record of inoculations (without which it was impossible to land in any country after visiting the disease-ridden Sudan). The Acropole even offered an occasional video, flashed against a screen on the hotel's rooftop, with the blacked-out skyline of Khartoum providing a more than adequate backdrop.

  Through the Acropole it was also possible, from time to time, to make appointments. The hotel was one of the few addresses in Khartoum where overseas mail actually arrived. Savvy Sudanese used it as a substitute postal address, and also as an alternative to the futile phone system, leaving notes for each other as to the time of business meetings or dinner parties. One day I left a message in the box of a prominent social scientist and two days later he left a message in mine, suggesting I visit him at his office at the University of Omdurman the following morning. There was a pleasing subterfuge to the system, as though we were all part of some clever underground, passing notes to each other despite Sudan's best efforts to foil communication.

  Unfortunately, scheduling a rendezvous was much simpler than keeping one. Omdurman lay just across the river from Khartoum, within plain view of the traffic gridlocked on the Nile bridge from dawn to dusk. Abandoning my cab, I covered the last two miles on foot, arriving at the university bathed in dust and sweat.

  “I'm so sorry I'm late,” I blathered to the secretary. My appointment had been scheduled for nine o'clock and it was now eleven-thirty.

  “Late? For what?” she asked. The professor hadn't yet arrived. She suggested I stroll around the campus and return in an hour or so. “If he is not here by then, it means he gave up on the traffic and went home for the day.”

  The campus was a shabby collection of unpainted buildings circling a dusty courtyard. Notices were plastered to the walls announcing that classes had been suspended for the day because of the bus strike, the postal strike and the strike by university staff. But because there was no way to circulate the news, many students had shown up anyway.