A Desert Dies

by Michael Asher

  Each of the nineteen tribes that now constituted the Kababish had its own Sheikh of Sheikhs, depending on its size. These sheikhs were responsible for collecting the annual tulba, or herd tax, of which they were allowed to retain ten percent. The tax was passed on to the nazir, who did not retain a percentage, but whose family was exempt from the tax. The royal family also had the right to requisition livestock from any other tribe in the confederation in the form of tribute. This was often exercised if animals were required for a feast or an expedition.

  The title of ‘nazir’ or paramount chief had existed for generations amongst the Kababish, but it originally belonged to the Awlad ’Ugba, who were the direct descendants of the Bani Hillal. The ’Ugba were now humble sheep breeders living in the eastern part of the dar. The story went that a man called Kirban purchased the nazirate from the ’Ugba, who had grown weak. The price he paid was twenty pure-white she-camels, each with its calf, twenty roan cows, twenty pure-white sheep, and a grey stallion with its handler. Kirban was the founder of the Nurab, and the remote ancestor of Sheikh Hassan. Ironically, the Nurab were probably the least pure of all the Kababish Arabs; they were first heard of in the Dongola region and were almost certainly a mixture of Arab and Beja blood. There still remained a Beja tribe in the Nubian desert called the Nurab.

  All the Kababish tribes acknowledged the leadership of the nazir, and the symbol of his authority was the nahas, a set of copper kettle drums that were sounded in time of war or on auspicious occasions. The Nurab possessed a nuggara, a wooden drum that was sounded for setting up and striking camp during the migrations. Only the royal house was entitled to a nahas, which was the standard of the tribe, though other sections might possess a nuggara. The only other section of the Kababish owning a nuggara, however, was the Barara.

  At the end of August, we left the cattle herd and rode back to the nazir’s dikka at Umm Sunta. It was a large camp of camel hair tents with walls of white cotton, set under thick groves of siyaal trees near the wadi of Umm Sunta. There were fifty or sixty tents of various sizes arranged in widely spaced groups. The nazir’s tent was noticeably larger than the others. On one side, it consisted of the usual roof of thick camel hair, while on the other, it had been extended by timber and straw into a spacious reception area draped luxuriously with carpets and cloth hangings, and containing the sheikh’s divan of palm ribs. Decorated saddlebags of many shapes and sizes hung on the walls, and a number of rifles and shotguns were propped up by the door gap. A pack of ferocious-looking guard dogs bounded up to greet us when we arrived.

  As we dismounted, the nazir’s two eldest sons came out to welcome us. The eldest was At Tom, a man of about my own age with a broad, serious face and a mop of jet-black hair. His brother, Salim, was a handsome, tough-looking lad with a quick and humorous expression. At Tom spoke in a well-modulated voice that contained strength and charm. Salim’s manner was abrasive and mercurial; he displayed a wit that had little patience with the dull. Both brothers were dressed alike in shirts and sirwal of brilliant white, embroidered with silk braid of red and blue. They were the future leaders of the Kababish. Both had been educated at the High Secondary School in El Obeid, but while At Tom had been carefully instructed in the ways of tribal diplomacy, Salim was a herdsman par excellence, who had spent every vacation hardening himself in the ranges and mountain plateaux—scouting, hunting, and tracking raiders.

  The servants dumped my luggage and saddlery in a small guest’s retreat about thirty metres from the main tent. They then turned Wad al ’Atiga out to graze with the household camels.

  During the day, many Arabs came to greet me, curious to see the new foreigner in their midst. One of them was the nazir’s cousin, Salim Wad Musa. He was quite different in appearance from the rest of the family: slim, small, graceful, a shade lighter of skin. He was the son of one of Ali Wad at Tom’s younger offspring and had been trained as a teacher. He knew some English and was far more aware of the outside world than most of the Arabs, yet he retained a deep commitment to his people and his culture. Salim became my closest friend in the royal family and always remained for me the embodiment of all that was noble, courageous, generous, and enduring amongst the Kababish.

  I stayed in the dikka for more than a month, sleeping in the guest tent, either alone or with visitors who happened to arrive. These were often tribesmen who had come to petition the nazir or had been summoned to appear in his court, and I learned much from conversations with these men. My strangest companion was a travelling dervish of the Awlad Rashid. He stayed with me for two nights and, in that time, hardly spoke at all. He owned nothing but a water bottle, a staff, a rosary, and a prayer mat; he spent much of the night repeating prayers and making prostrations. When I finally asked him why he had come here, he merely answered that he was travelling ‘in the path of God’.

  Every morning, after we had tea with goat’s milk, one of the servants would call the visitors over to the nazir’s tent. I would usually accompany them, and we would find Sheikh Hassan in the shade outside with two or three of his guards and several of his sons. Often, he was called upon in his capacity as judge to deliberate in some dispute.

  In one typical case, a tribesman complained that a neighbour had slaughtered one of his cows. The neighbour was brought, and he told Sheikh Hassan, ‘The animal was dying. It had got stuck in a bog and there was no chance for it. I passed it by once and the next morning, it was still alive. I slaughtered it so as not to waste the meat.’ Several of the onlookers applauded his action. There was no attempt to keep them quiet, and it seemed that anyone could express an opinion, even the servants who had sat down to listen. Finally, however, the nazir said, ‘The case is clear. By the law of ’urf, no man is entitled to slaughter an animal belonging to his neighbour, no matter what its condition.’ He nodded to the defendant. ‘The mistake is yours. You must repay your neighbour the cow you took from him.’

  The nazir’s authority as judge was maintained by a corps of court bailiffs, or ghaffirs, who drew a small salary and were officially entitled to carry arms. There were twelve or fifteen of them, mostly belonging to the Nurab. The majority were of the slave caste. A few were ‘clients’ of the royal family who had originally come from other tribes and settled with the Nurab, such as Adam Wad ash Shaham and Mahmoud Wad Affandi, who had originally belonged to the desert Awlad Huwal. Adam was an old man, unusually tall for an Arab, with a muscular frame and a cavernous face, scarred by years in the sun on the trail of bandits and lost camels. His relative, Mahmoud, was a small man who always looked as if he were about to burst out laughing. He had been badly kicked by a camel in the previous year and walked with a limp.

  Many of Sheikh Hassan’s guards were renowned for their toughness and tenacity. Some, like the notorious Abdallah Wad Fadul, had been desperate bandits in their younger days, lifting scores of camels from the tribes. Wad Fadul was a man of about fifty with a crop of silver stubble, a wide moustache, and foxy eyes. He was as neat as a professional soldier and always kept his equipment in immaculate condition. He had once lived in Darfur, where he had become involved in so many blood feuds with the Zayadiyya that he had fled back to Umm Sunta, where Sheikh Hassan had made him a ghaffir in recognition of his great potential.

  Umm Sunta was the summer quarters or ‘dammering’ centre of the nazir’s family, and the dikka was pitched near to the well fields in the wadi so that the herds could be watered frequently there. Some of the wells were hand-dug pits; others were permanent deep wells called sawani. There was a borewell several kilometres from the camp run by a powerful engine, though the scarcity of fuel meant that it was often idle.

  In the first days of my stay I rode to the market near the borewell with At Tom Wad Hassan. It was a bleak day and the settlement looked incredibly desolate. The wind blew silver lashes across the square, beating at the frail doors of the shops. There were a few Arab women about, dressed in wrap-around loincloths or flowery dresses, wearing nose rings of gold or thick chunks of amber a
round their necks. Most of the six or seven stores were built of timber and straw, though a few were of mud-brick; they were owned by merchants of the Jallaba tribes from the Nile valley, who had lived with the Kababish for years and were under their protection. They sold tea, sugar, salt, cloth, grain, and perfume and were paid either in cash or in livestock, which they sent to Omdurman. The other inhabitants of the village were retired slaves who cultivated tiny plots in the wadi, kept a few goats and chickens, or worked as labourers for the merchants. I asked At Tom why none of the Kababish lived in the village. ‘That would mean settlement,’ he told me, ‘and for the Arabs, settlement is like death.’

  I soon got tired of living in the guest tent and told the nazir that I should like to build a tent of my own. He frowned and was reluctant to agree. Later, I went with At Tom on a tour of his family’s tents. They were all of the same basic design, with the tilted roof of thick, woven wool stretched over a central frame of two uprights and a cross-piece. There were two poles, one at each end, which supported the corners of the tent. The roof was held in place by tightly bound guy ropes, and its edge stood about two metres from the ground.

  The tents of the nazir’s family were far more lavish than those of the other Kababish tribes. They had been extended with local materials such as cane, grass, and wood. The extension was often draped in white cotton or in matting of black goat hair, which the Arabs called khesh. Outside the tent stood a wooden cabin made by piling up lengths of deadwood. This was known as a tukul and was used as a kitchen. The tukul was abandoned when the nomads moved camp, but often stood for years as a forlorn monument to a past campsite.

  The roofs were made of four pieces of woven wool that were stitched together. The strips were grey, off-white, cream, and brown in colour and were made of camel hair with some goat hair mixed in. The camels were shorn at the end of winter, when their long coats had grown. The Kababish made a great festival of the event, inviting their neighbours and slaughtering sheep or goats for a feast. When the wool had been sheared, it was carded and spun into thread. The lengths of tent material, known as shuggas, were woven on a handloom with a frame about five metres long. It was identical to the loom used by the Arabian bedouin, though it was curious that the bedouin used goat hair instead of camel hair. One Kababish woman told me, ‘Camel hair keeps out the heat in summer and the rain in the rainy season. Goat hair keeps out neither, that is why we only use it for walls and not for roofs.’

  Many of the tents were beautifully decorated inside with ornaments of leather and wool. The basic item of furniture was a double bed made of palm ribs bound with strips of leather. The bed rested on pegs about a foot from the ground, though it could easily be rolled up and carried by camel. Along the sides of the bed, forming a small antechamber around it, were two sheets of plaited gazelle hide decorated with cowrie shells. These were works of great skill and subtlety in which the leather was woven like thread. They were practical as well as ornate, and when folded, could be used as voluminous shelves. Behind the bed were usually two enormous wedge-shaped saddlebags made of cowskin. They were often decorated with elaborate patterns and were used for carrying grain during the migrations. Most of the ornaments of the tent had a practical value as well as a decorative one.

  Though the nazir finally agreed to allow me to have my own tent, it was with some reluctance, and I wondered why this should be. One night, Salim Wad Musa took me aside and told me, ‘Omar, you cannot really have your own tent. Tents are for married men and you are not married. The tent is the property of the women. If you have a tent, it means that you must receive guests, and to receive guests, you must have a woman to cook. To fail in hospitality would be a disgrace.’ At once, I saw my error, and thanked him for his frankness. ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘if you want a woman, a wife can always be found. You should marry at your age. Why not marry an Arab?’ I told him that I should consider it, and went back to the guest tent a wiser man.

  It was the first week in September and still no rain had fallen in the dikka. The rains were two months late in this area, and the summer was turning into a test of patience for the nomads. The days in the camel hair tents were unendurably hot; at night, the lightning danced temptingly in the sky but no rain fell. There was a palpable sense of frustration amongst the Arabs that darkened into depression as the dry days passed. The afternoons were seething hot. The sky sparkled like polished marble and the thorn trees bristled in the sun. The white cotton walls of the nazir’s tent shimmered brilliantly under the trees, and hour after hour, the heat spilled down like molten brass. There was not a leaf of green here to ease the harsh colours, the stark ochre, and glaring pink of the earth. The tents were the only hiding place from the strafing sun. Often hot winds would rake over the camps, tearing at the cotton walls and dragging a fine mist of dust over the woollen roofs.

  Everything was difficult here. The wells were far away, and water had to be brought from them by donkey. Often, there was none for washing or even drinking. The water was always stored in the nazir’s tent. To get a drink, one either had to call a servant or brave a pack of viciously snarling dogs. In the deep wells, the water table had sunk progressively lower. Now camels had to be used to draw up heavy buckets. Water was never available to wash clothes, and I was reluctant to ask the servants to work for me, since I had no money to give them. It was difficult for me to visit the wells or the market, for my camel was far away, grazing with the other camels in the wadi, and these places were too far to reach easily on foot. The Arabs had donkeys that they used for local transport while their camels were grazing, and though the nazir always assured me that I could help myself to any of the donkeys, there never seemed to be one available when I needed it. I once spent ninety minutes walking to the market and a further ninety minutes walking back, only to be called into the presence of Sheikh Hassan, who told me, ‘Do not walk to the market. Do not go there without transport, for the Arabs will say that I am a bad host, and that will be a disgrace for me.’ I appreciated his point, but at times, the dikka seemed like an island in space, cut off from everywhere without the magic carpet of camels to provide connection. I often wondered why on earth the nazir had chosen this benighted, desolate place for his headquarters. The answer always came back: ‘For the animals!’ To the nomads, livestock was everything, and a campsite was always chosen for the availability of food for the animals, no matter how inconvenient for the men. The siyaal trees in which the camp was pitched were almost the only source of food for the goats, which were the animals kept in the dikka during the summer months.

  There was no news from the nazir’s camel herds, the so-called nuggara-herds that were still in the south. The Arabs could do no more than watch and wait. I realised then how hard the lives of these men were. It was not the thirst, or the heat, or the lack of food, or the desolation of the desert that crippled one, but this constant inactivity of the summer months. It seemed an existence of monochrome dreariness that dragged on and on without respite. I had expected hardship and challenge here, but this soul-destroying idleness was something I had not bargained for.

  The gloom was deepened by the sense of mourning in the camp after the death of Sheikh al Murr. The period of mourning was set at an entire year, and this meant that for that time, there could be no weddings, no singing, no dancing, and no celebrations of any kind. The men of the family allowed their hair to grow long and unkempt until the mourning period was over. They also reversed the sheepskins on their saddles so that the side without fur was uppermost. Female relatives wore simple dresses of white cotton instead of colourful robes for the whole period.

  When Sir Ali Wad at Tom died in 1937, Al Murr had been passed over for the nazirate in favour of his younger brother At Tom, Sheikh Hassan’s father. The new nazir had depended much on his elder brother’s advice. When he in turn died in 1945, Hassan was a lad of only seventeen years. Al Murr had been regent of the tribe until 1952, and thereafter, had been deputy nazir. Al Murr was much feared for his merciless attitud
e to enemies, though I learned that he had been charming to those he liked. The power of his personality had undoubtedly shaped the Kababish in the years since Sir Ali’s death, and his death in 1982 was in many ways a symbol of the end of the old Kababish and a portent of the years of disaster that were to follow.

  During September, the nazir fell ill and was confined to his tent. I learned that he was suffering from diabetes and from a mysterious allergy. Occasionally, I would sit with him as he lay outside in the shade. He related how he had been to Britain as a young man and had visited Buckingham Palace, where he had met the Queen and the ‘Dook’, as the Sheikh called him. He described with amusement how the sun had once come out from behind a cloud during his stay, and how he had been amazed when everyone had begun to remove their clothing. He commented that Britain was ‘a place without sun nor empty talk!’ I asked the nazir whether Kababish migrations had changed in recent times. ‘There were certain set routes once,’ he told me. ‘Everyone went on the same day. We would sound the nuggara as a signal to start. Each family moved parallel so as not to use up the other’s grazing. The Nurab took precedence over the other tribes, but there was plenty of grazing and no one worried. Now there is just not enough grazing for our animals. We can dig new wells, but they will not bring more grass. It gets worse every year. Now everyone goes his own way and looks after himself.’

  The tedious days were only lightened by the visits of other outsiders. Three tribesmen of the Berti from Darfur shared my tent for almost a week. They were simple, good-natured men with round, black faces, who spoke Arabic with a strange accent, reversing masculine and feminine cases. They had come to claim compensation from the nazir for some camels that had been stolen from them by the ’Atawiyya. I asked one of them what had happened. He told me, ‘One of my brothers was herding his camels with his son, when four ’Atawiyya came into his camp. They ate and drank with him, then left. Then they came on him at night and beat him with their rifles until he was senseless. The boy ran off, even though they shot at him, and fetched help. The Arabs went off with thirty camels.’ He related how the Berti had shot one of them dead. Two of the ’Atawiyya had run away and the other had been captured. ‘But they killed seven of the camels on the way, that is why we are claiming compensation,’ he added.