A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  As we talked, Wad Ballal made a fire between three stones and set on it a blackened kettle. Abboud brought the guests dates and a bowl of sour milk. The tea was black and stiff with sugar; the Arabs drank it with loud, appreciative sips. The kettle went back on the fire time and again in the course of the afternoon.

  Dagalol asked, ‘What of the grazing? What kinds of grass have you seen?’ One by one, the men gave accounts of the grasses and trees they had seen that morning. They had an encyclopedic knowledge of the plants and animals in their environment and excellent memories for locations. They had sharpened the art of description into an exact science, and had a large vocabulary of words with fine gradations of meaning for geographical features. When the talk of grazing faded, Ali Wad Hassan said, ‘I saw a gam of Zaghawa riding northwest this morning. There were twelve of them on fast camels. They were all carrying rifles. Their camels had the brand of the Artaj, and one of the men was Awdi Mohammid, who took three camels from the ’Awajda last year. They might have been going to the market, but you do not need rifles in the market.’

  They were bandits and no doubt!’ Haj Hassan commented. ‘Curse their fathers!’ Dagalol declared. ‘They are a pestilence since they came south!’

  The Zaghawa were one of the semi-nomadic tribes speaking a central-Saharan language who inhabited the semideserts of North Darfur. They had been the rivals of the Kababish for generations. Since the late 1970s, however, their lands had been severely affected by drought and desertification. Many had abandoned their villages and fled to the cities. Others had moved south with the remnants of their herds, where they had come into conflict with other tribes intent on using the southern grasslands.

  The next day, we moved off soon after sunrise, coursing through the forests of acacia and moving steadily north towards the granite ridge I had seen on the previous day. The camels strode on, lowering their crane-like necks as they went and consuming the luscious herbage by the ton. The grasses became sparser as we moved north, and Dagalol sent Abboud off on his fast little camel to find the best pasture. Throughout the morning, we twisted northwest and northeast, turning and circling in search of better grazing. At noon, we made camp on a plain of tribulus beneath a shining wall of grey rock, which was the edge of a range of hills to the west. Nearby, we saw the conical roofs of a village called Ereja, inhabited by cultivators of the Berti tribe.

  After we had made the taya, I rode off with Dagalol and Mohammid Wad Habjur in search of a she-camel that had been lost during the morning. We found her several kilometres away, lying near a siyaal tree. She was still alive, but when the Arabs examined her, they found that one of her rear legs was broken. Mohammid said that she had probably been kicked by a bull-camel trying to mate with her. ‘We shall have to slaughter her,’ Dagalol said, ‘and we can sell some of the meat to the Berti.’

  Leaving the animal, we mounted up and rode to the nearby village. It was similar in appearance to Ghubaysh, but slightly larger, with the usual beehive huts and tottering compounds of cane. We couched our camels outside one of the houses and were greeted by a tribesman of the Berti, a thin little black man wearing a cotton singlet and a skullcap. As they dismounted, slinging their rifles across their shoulders, I noticed an almost imperceptible change come over the Arabs. Suddenly, their manner was reserved and distant, as if they were in the presence of an inferior; as they walked into the compound, they seemed to summon a condescending dignity that was not far short of swagger.

  We sat inside one of the grass huts, and a woman brought us a bowl of hot polenta. It was greenish-grey in colour with the consistency of dumplings, and was covered in a gravy made of onions, dried tomatoes, and okra. The hut contained little except two rope beds and some tin boxes piled against the wall. As we ate, Dagalol explained that he had some meat to sell. The Bertawi nodded and said that he would fetch all the men of the village, who would ride out and butcher the animal. After he had gone, his wife came to collect the empty bowl. She was a small woman with a very dark complexion and short, spiral hair. She was probably not long out of her twenties, though she looked worn and thin from childbirth and hard work. To my amazement, Dagalol called the woman over and said, ‘Your people are coming with us to slaughter a she-camel. While they are out of the village, I will come back to see you. You understand?’ At first, I thought I must have misheard, but the woman nodded, her face expressionless, and said, ‘Very well.’

  My thoughts were interrupted by shouts of ‘Peace be upon you, people of the house!’ We stood up to greet two nomads of the Zayadiyya tribe, both carrying rifles, who sat down with us in the hut.

  The men were very excited and told us that they had just returned from chasing some Zaghawa, who had stolen six of their camels in the night. ‘The slaves made camp in a wadi not far from here,’ one of the men told us. ‘So we dismounted and made a circle round them. Then we opened fire. I shot one of them dead and my brothers shot two more. The rest of them ran away, leaving the dead ones. We let them go, and just collected our camels. They will not come looking for our stock again. No, they will not forget that lesson, by God!’

  ‘What was their tribe?’ Dagalol asked.

  ‘They had the brand of the Artaj.’

  ‘Were there twelve of them?’

  ‘Yes, but there are only nine now.’

  ‘We spotted them moving northwest yesterday. May the curse be upon them, the sons of dogs!’

  As Dagalol talked to the Zayadiyya, some of the arrogance dropped from his manner and he assumed a cordiality that seemed exaggerated after his distant manner with the Berti. I had heard in El Fasher that there had been clashes between the Kababish and the Zayadiyya recently, and I expected my host to treat these men more as enemies than friends.

  Not long afterwards, the Berti assembled with their camels and donkeys, and we rode out to butcher the she-camel. She was still lying where we had left her, and at once Mohammid Wad Habjur slaughtered her, stabbing her in the neck with his dagger, then slitting her throat. Before the Berti set to work to cut up the meat, Dagalol agreed on a price with them for the carcass. Then he told them that he would ride back to his herd and rejoin them before the work was finished. No one paid him much attention as he mounted his fine camel and slipped off across the ranges. I sat with Mohammid and watched the men carving red slivers of meat and hanging them on the thorn trees. One man severed the head with an axe. The camel still looked very peaceful, lying coiled in the sand. It seemed an ignominious end for such a noble beast, yet I realised that this was the law of the nomads. Those which could not keep up with the herd had to die.

  Dagalol returned as the men were dividing the meat and stowing it in leather bags. His face wore an inscrutable expression as he dismounted and watched the final stage of the work.

  Later, as the three of us rode back to camp, he bragged, ‘I made sixty pounds for the camel and only paid two for the woman! These Berti women never refuse, by God!’ ‘What would have happened if they had caught you?’ I asked him. ‘Death!’ he smirked, though he did not make clear whose death it would have been.

  For a week we moved northwest, circling around the hills of Karkur and Bat-Ha, searching for rich pasture. The days faded into one another, indistinguishable except for small events. As my body became accustomed to the new pattern of life, this unchanging rhythm became a soothing heartbeat, which at times brought me a deep sense of peace and tranquility.

  The mornings were grey and heavy, the sky overcast with billows of cloud, grey and Prussian blue. Occasionally, the air was moistened with a scatter of raindrops, but there was no cloudburst of the kind the Arabs hoped for. The plains were crowded with nomads. There were tribesmen from other sections of the Kababish: the Nurab, the Haworab, and the Barara, as well as unrelated tribes such as the Zayadiyya, the Zaghawa, and the Meidob. Mostly, however, these nomads moved with their camels and fat-tailed sheep like unseen clippers below the horizon. It was only at night, when scores of campfires twinkled out of the darkness, that the scale of
the great migrations made itself felt.

  In the evening, after the meeting with the Zayadiyya, Dagalol became even more circumspect. He would post one of the Mirna boys as a sentry and expect him to stay awake all night. In the morning there would often be acrimonious arguments about one of them having fallen asleep. My sympathy was with the boys, for I noticed that they always got the lion’s share of the work and I did not blame them for being exhausted at night. They were little more than children, yet they did the work of adults. They seemed perfectly at ease amongst the camels and I often watched them riding, sometimes bareback, perched like crows on the rumps of huge bulls, handling them with the confidence of masters. Though the Mirna were villagers like the Berti and owned few camels of their own, many of them were apprenticed to Kababish herd owners from a very early age. They were paid in livestock, and each boy received a young camel at the end of a year. Sayf ad Din and Hamdan had been working for Dagalol for almost two years. I once asked Sayf ad Din what he would do when he had finished working here. ‘I will have a herd of my own,’ he told me, ‘and I will grow millet and sorghum and ride a white donkey. I will be a rich man like Dagalol!’

  Indeed, Dagalol was rich by Arab standards. Apart from his large camel herd, he owned goats, sheep, and cattle that were still in Kordofan. Like most Kababish, he did not display his wealth in his manner of living. He ate the same meagre food, wore the same tattered clothes and lived the same hard life as his fellow men. Amongst the nomads, a man’s position in society depended not only on the number of livestock he owned, but also on his generosity. The Kababish disliked selling their animals and always maintained herds and flocks that were as large as possible. They never culled the weak animals to improve the strain. I once asked Wad Ballal if this maintenance of large herds was purely to improve a man’s position. ‘It is good to have many animals,’ he told me, ‘but that is not the only reason the Kababish have large herds. In times of hardship, when the rains do not come, the weak animals will die anyway. The man with a hundred camels may be left with twenty, but the man with twenty will be left with nothing. But no matter how many animals a man has, if he is not open-handed, he is nothing. The man who does not slaughter animals for his guests is not a man. It is better to have a few camels and be renowned for generosity than to have many and be known as a miser.’

  ‘And which is Dagalol?’

  ‘He is mean, by God! I would not work for such a mean one if I had the choice. I am a freeman from the ’Atawiyya, the Arabs of the desert. My family lost their herds years ago and I have to work as a herdsman. I get paid one adult camel every year, and usually I have to sell it. Still, God is generous. There are many who have less than me.’

  I learned much from such conversations, and it soon became clear that the Kababish was by no means a society of equals. The bedouin tribes of Arabia were groups of independent freemen in which the sheikh held power by consent of the others. Amongst the Kababish, though, there were at least five distinct levels in the hierarchy. First, there were the livestock owners, like Dagalol and old Habjur, who formed a kind of upper crust. These were the Arabs who had the leisure to visit each other in the afternoons: the warrior class who carried automatic weapons and rode on ashab camels. After them came the herdsmen, who were divided into Arab freemen like Wad Ballal, and ’Awwala herders like the Mirna boys. They were paid for their work, though the next level—the slaves—were not. They were bound to their masters by a reciprocal arrangement in which the freeman was obliged to feed and clothe them. Legally, of course, slavery did not exist in the Sudan, for it had been outlawed by the British in 1924. Kababish slaves could not be prevented from leaving their former masters, and many of them had done so. Others, however, had opted to remain in their position, valuing the sense of security that they were not assured of finding in the town or the city. Another class consisted of ‘clients’. These were freemen who belonged to another tribe or family, and who might attach themselves to a powerful individual. There were no clients amongst the Nas Wad Haydar, though I met several later during my stay with the nazir.

  Despite the sense of tranquility that engulfed me, there were inevitable times when the strangeness of the new culture weighed down on me like a heavy load. In the mornings, I hardly noticed the time passing, but the afternoons were vacant spaces in which the day stretched out like a desert to the far-off horizon of the night. I was not accustomed to idleness, and my body was still geared to the constant stimulus of the town. I found that I had to make an effort to slow my body down to the ticking-over rate of the Arabs. They were never bored, and the words ‘interesting’ and ‘boring’ had no place in their vocabulary. If there was nothing to do, they merely retired into themselves, preserving their valuable energy for the next burst of activity. I had not yet learned to do this, and for a long time it remained my most difficult problem.

  Language posed another problem. I spoke Arabic more or less fluently, but the Kababish spoke a dialect that I found difficult to understand. Not only was their pronunciation different, but they also used many words that were specific to their way of life and that only a nomad would have known. I set about learning as many of these words as I could, noting them down in my pocket-book in phonetic script, but the task was an unending one and the dialect seemed to get more difficult as I tried to pin it down.

  In the afternoons, the talk was always about raids and bandits. Old Habjur was the most aggressive and outspoken of the family. ‘I have been through good times and bad,’ he would say, ‘and I am not going to let these slaves eat my livestock now! You see this rifle? It is an excellent weapon. It cost me the price of a camel, by God! I may have grey hair, but I still know how to shoot!’

  Once he told me, ‘I do not like this country. These slaves stop us watering our herds. They hold us back at the watering place and say, “The wells are dry!” or they tell us, “Pay us money and we will let you water!” Curse their fathers! In the old days, the Kababish would not come near this land of blacks! The grazing was good in the north then. You could stay in the desert and find everything you needed. If you wanted meat, there were oryx and ostrich to hunt. Where are they now? I have not seen an ostrich in two years, by God! The best ranges have gone and we come further south every year.’

  It was true that the settled tribes that controlled the borewells in the south resented the nomads’ increasing activity in their land and charged them high prices for water and sometimes even for grazing. If a camel strayed into cultivated land, the farmers would seize it and refuse to return it until the Arab paid a hefty fine. Often, the owner had little cash and might have to sell the animal in order to pay.

  Each day, we seemed to pass deeper into the timeless zone of the ranges. We rode through prairies, where the sand was obscured by the valuable baghayl grass with its tiny wheat-like ears and stalks of spun gold. We drove the massed herds under the sweeping backdrop of the Darfur mountains on the edge of the Marra range, through bristling acacia woods, and out into the flat lagoons between volcanic atolls that rose from the valley floor like broken teeth. At other times, there were few features by which to measure distance and time, and often little relief for the eye from the ocean of green stretching to every skyline. Sometimes, I would forget where I had come from and where I was going. My life became free of past or future, just an ever-present now focused here in the tranquil, changeless undulation of the great herds across the land.

  Often in the mornings, the boys would sing. In clear voices, they sang the four-line rhyming verse that the Kababish called dobbayt. The songs spoke of tall grasses and rich hunting, of races to the watering place, of men who had fallen in camel raids, and of maidens with eyes like gazelles. They sang of the things that lay close to the heart of their culture, and always the theme returned to the rain and the camel, the camel and the rain. Over and over the melody repeated itself, and the song went on and on as the camels paced and grazed. The song, the singer, and the animals seemed to merge into a single euphonic harmony, regulat
ed only by the slowly changing intensity of the sun’s heat.

  Occasionally, we moved so slowly that Wad Ballal and I would dismount and let our camels graze with the herd. We would wander along behind them, stripping bark from a baobab tree or watching for game. There were some bustards here; once, Dagalol brought one down with his Kalashnikov, and we ate meat. Another time, he shot a massive shoebill, but after he had turned the great carcass over with his foot, he said, ‘Its meat is no good,’ and he left it lying there for the ants and vultures. Once, Wad Ballal bagged a wildcat by simply hurling his axe at it as it popped out of its hole at sunset. Its meat was tough but not unlike rabbit.

  The days passed, and the nomads made no attempt to move further north. The rains had not yet fallen in Kordofan except in scattered places, and the Kababish were reluctant to drive the herds back without more encouraging news. I was still thinking about the desert and my meeting with Hassan Wad at Tom, and was afraid of being stuck in Darfur all winter. I told Dagalol about this and he said, ‘Wait a few days, then we shall decide whether to go or stay. There will be a meeting if no news comes in a few days.’ I agreed, and it was during those few days that the most memorable incident of my stay occurred.

  We were camping on a gently rising bank covered with tribulus. About a hundred metres away to the west lay a wadi, veiled with acacia trees. It was late and the boys were already curled up on their sheepskins. I lay in my space nearby, writing up my journal in the light of my torch. I could see the dark figures of Dagalol and Wad Ballal hunched up near the remains of the fire, a pool of faintly glowing embers. There was a gentle murmur of talk from the Arabs. Beyond them were the shadowy outlines of the camels. The night was full of the sound of their chewing and the sweet-savoury smell of their bodies.