Khartoum Days: Omdom

Khartoum is a hot, dusty place. Oppressively so, much of the time. Many expatriates headed for The Greek Club at the weekend, crowding into their pool. I must admit, this wasn’t my scene.

What was my scene was jumping into a friend’s 4x4, driving east of the city and crossing the hot sands next to Omdom, a small, sleepy village just outside the capital. Donkeys wandered the streets amid the needle-like minarets poking up from the dirt-streets.

We could usually muster-up a small group to go out there, laden with falafel, watermelon and a healthy disrespect for water quality. For on the other side of the scalding hot sand was the Blue Nile, its waters flowing from their Ethiopian source.

Djellaba dressed men stroll along the sand, youths splash in the water, and a group of khawaaja arrive, submerging themselves in the headwaters of the world’s longest river.

For the females of the group, the experience is somewhat tarnished - parading around in a swimming costume is somewhat culturally insensitive. A moment to relish being born a male.

Many a Sudanese has tales of friends that have been lost at the “wrong” season of the Nile. There is a fish that arrives with the rainy season up-stream, electrocuting swimmers, paralysing them and causing them to drown.

On my first visit there, a few of us remained following sunset, laying on the sand as the day drifted into night. The sun drops rapidly below the horizon as one approaches the equator. The stars filled the black sky and my thoughts turned to my future. I resolved to prolong my stay in Sudan and look for a job here. The moment—and the people—seemed too good.

The Problems Facing a Postman

The address on the envelope was a series of street names—written in Arabic, narrowing down from the main road to smaller lanes. This was not going to be an easy task — we were without a map, and in any case, here in Sudan, street names aren’t a common occurrence. People know roads by the district they are in and by directions, not by name. Often when taking a rickshaw home, saying the name of even a major thoroughfare would draw blank looks from the driver.

So here we stood in Omdurman, bearing a letter of someone who had visited Sudan six years ago and who had entrusted it to a friend working in Sudan to deliver. With embargoes, sanctions and the state of the Sudanese postal service, popping a stamp on the envelope makes post a less viable option than back home.

Asking around, people gave us blank or puzzled looks as we tried to explain the address in broken Arabic. “Where does your friend live?” we would be asked as we showed the envelope. “We were hoping this address would tell us” we thought, silently. At times, this lead to an uncomfortable moment when we realised that the person to whom we were showing this letter could not read the address. Illiteracy rates in Sudan are somewhere around 39%.

Another problem facing those with questions in Sudan is that no-one will ever simply say “sorry, I don’t know”. If looking for something and the person doesn’t know it, there will be a hesitation and then vague pointing in some direction. After some time wandering the streets of Khartoum, I came to realise that the length of the pause dictates the surety of a reply. More than a couple of seconds, and the response can be dismissed completely.

In the baking sun, walking off the main road following directions from a man exuding confidence and without pause, we felt as though we were getting somewhere. A group of men were stood outside a shop, welding together bedsteads on the street side. Another was weaving colourful cord forming the base of the bed, a style popular amongst the lokandas of my journey to Khartoum.

A debate ensued about in which direction our sought-after road lay. I couldn’t follow it all, but at one point three men were all pointing in completely opposite ways. Following the route of the wisest looking man, we asked at the next junction, at which point we were directed back in the way we just came. Flagging down rickshaw drivers drew more blank looks.

When we finally found a tuk-tuk that seemed confident he could render us to our desired location, we jumped in, speeding through the dusty, potholed streets of Omdurman. He knocked on the steel gate to a large house, and a slit opened, the eye of a veiled girl was perceivable as she hid behind the doorway. When her father came out, he knocked on his neighbour’s door and they tried to decipher the address. Perhaps our tuk-tuk driver was confident he knew somebody who would know where the house was located. And “no, we don’t have their phone number…”

We soon found ourself back in the rickshaw, driving back across town. Evidently not pressed for time, we stopped at the driver’s favourite tea-lady, an Ethiopian with whom he flirted outrageously, before once-again entering the labyrinth of Omdurman’s smaller lanes.

Children in the street wondered what these two khawaaja were doing here, and intimated that our addressee had moved to El-Obeid, a city seven hour’s drive from here; or perhaps he was just away on business. More gates were knocked, and a woman came out of a house, saying she knew the guy, and perhaps even our sender. “The French man, yes I remember him.”

Handing over the envelope, we were not sure if we had really accomplished our mission or not. The insha’Allah factor would play a big part in this envelope finding its way from sender to receiver, six years after their acquaintance.

I wouldn’t want to be a postie here.

Waiting for News

The polls in Sudan officially closed last Thursday following a two-day extension to voting. The counting of the ballots began the following day, with results initially scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday 20 April. Everybody here believed that to be rather optimistic. The National Election Commission announced today that results would be delayed, unable to set a definite date.

“We cannot set a definite date to announce the results because (the counting) is a very complicated process”

— Hadi Mohammed Ahmed, head the NEC’s technical committee

Preliminary results based on counts from several polling stations (of the tens of thousands around the country) all favour the incumbent president, Omar al-Bashir. This has come as little surprise.

During the election period I have been reading several of the national papers on a daily basis, and the impression one gets is largely of confusion. The quality of these publications leaves much to be desired.

In the run-up to the elections, conflicting stories often appeared in the same publication regarding boycotts of the process. The messages reporting the extension of the voting period, and the subsequent announcement of the results, have also been tainted by uncertainty.

This is without mentioning the often poor level of English, sometimes atrocious type-setting, and at times evangelical tone of certain pieces.

Former US President Jimmy Carter has made the headlines several times, leading a team of election observers from the Carter Centre. Over the weekend a Sudan rights group urged the group to leave the country “before the expected declaration of victory for the National Congress Party (NCP) and its indicted President”, calling on Carter to salvage his reputation.

Both the Carter Centre and the European Union election monitors say that the elections failed to meet full international standards, but concluded that they were a significant step towards democracy.

It’ll be interesting to see how the results will be accepted by the Sudanese here. One gets the impression that many in the West, who are often keen to criticise poor practices (ex. Zimbabwe two years ago), are somewhat holding their tongues during the Sudanese process, presumably not wanting to rock the boat ahead of the referendum next January. All eyes are looking south, and the prospect of the creation of the world’s newest state. If the Southerners want independence — and vote for it — then they will soon be rid of Mr. Bashir. But this leaves the Northerners who don’t want the NCP somewhat in the lurch for the next five years, as the President consolidates his power, the winning of the election giving him some sort of mandate for his policies.

» More photos: Sudanese Elections.

From Colonial Times

Much of the architecture of the University of Khartoum resembles a Sudanese take on an Oxford college, having been built by the British under their colonial rule in 1902.

It seemed slightly ironic that I, as a subject of Her Majesty, should be here in the University of Khartoum now speaking the Gallic language to a group of its students.

Hidden in a wing of one of the smaller libraries are some books that date from the British rule; I couldn’t help but wonder if people knew exactly what was amongst the stacks here. Would titles such as Romance in India be now banned? And surely, some of these historical pieces would fetch several guineas now, such as old illustrations from the Bonaparte era.

Skimming through some titles pertaining to the Middle East, the world has changed quite a bit since Wilber’s Iran, Past and Present, and the Earl of Cromer’s Modern Egypt makes no mention of Mubarak.

Upstairs in the main library, I had a more modern cultural lesson. The library is split into two wings, males segregated from females, presumably to prevent any improper thoughts or temptations. As I sat working amongst the studious menfolk, a wrap at the barred window made me look up. A veiled girl stood outside, beckoning me over. She slipped me a note, told me to read it, to call her, and promptly disappeared.

Esfahani memories of Iranian dating initiation flooded my mind, whereby a girl discretely slips her number to a guy she likes the look of whilst leaving a café. The onus is then on the aforementioned subject of this wooing to phone her and arrange a sequestered rendezvous.

Was this note, which ostensibly showed an interest in my mother tongue^* from a purely linguistic point of view, hiding such covert connotations? Only a phone-call would tell…

^* And how did she know I was English?

Hanging with the Kids

With time to kill waiting for election results, I hung-out in Khartoum, meeting people here. A friend who works at the University of Khartoum as French teacher invited me over to the campus, and through her I met some of the students, all of whom spoke French incredibly well. They were from all over the country and were a fascinating bunch, all showing the paradoxical wish to leave Sudan to seek life elsewhere, but while loving their country, expounding its qualities.

The student-teacher relationship that exists here is rather different to that of Europe. Gibes about their work, and the attention a certain student pays to his poulettes, help her reach a near perfect attendance rate, she says, and is part of the reason why she loves teaching in Sudan, as opposed to back in France.

Later, sat on a woven string stool drinking coffee outside the French Cultural Centre, Mohammed & Mohayed were rapping in French & English—as fluidly as they would in Arabic—to the beat they had written themselves, playing through the tinny speaker of a mobile phone. Whilst they are keen to criticise love, claiming it “doesn’t exist”, the attention they pay it in their rhymes, rings of that Sudanese paradox again.