A Desert Dies Read online

  I sat down awkwardly near my belongings, not quite knowing what to do next. ‘Give Omar some milk, boy!’ Dagalol told his son. I watched as Hassan drew a bowl of murky liquid from one of the skins. When he handed it to me I saw that it was unlike any milk I had ever drunk. Its surface was a coagulated mass of greyish lumps with a fine smattering of dust. I drank some. It was unexpectedly sour and I winced involuntarily. Dagalol chuckled. ‘This is what the Arabs call gaaris,’ he said. ‘Do not drink too much or you will be running to the wadi!’ Hassan giggled, and Wad Ballal smiled. ‘This is all we have on the migrations,’ Dagalol explained. ‘Milk, and what we can hunt. There is no bread for us here; that is for women. But the Arabs want for nothing when they have milk!’

  I will never forget the sunset on that first day amongst the Kababish. The last shards of sunlight lay red and gold across the western skyline, hung like streamers on the grey outlines of the thorn trees. The whole of the great plain was washed with a sheen of soft gold that lent it an insubstantial, dreamlike quality. As the sun set, two great herds of camels came drifting out of the bush, one after the other. The animals moved in tight groups, shoulder to shoulder, so that the herds seemed to glide silently in a corporate mass. They were being driven by three dark figures: two small boys who swung knotty sticks and an older youth with a camel whip. The coaxing, clicking sounds they made came clearly across the range.

  Men had been driving their camels into the safety of their camps at sunset for generations. Before the camel had come to Africa, for thousands of years, when all the Sahara was as rich and verdant as this savannah, men not unlike these had brought their cattle home at the end of the day. Since those days, most of that vast landscape of three million square miles had been reduced to wasteland by unstoppable environmental changes and the overabundance of the stock itself. Only these Sahelian grasslands were left as a reminder.

  Hassan began to kindle a fire between three stones, blowing into the embers with long whooshing breaths. Wad Ballal and Dagalol took their whips and went out to meet the herds. Soon the camping place was besieged by camels that loomed over my head like giant reptiles. They stamped and snarled, heaved and squeezed, and the Arabs pressed them back, shouting, ‘Deh! Deh! Deh!’ which was the signal to halt. ‘Come here, Omar!’ Dagalol called, and as I approached, he said, ‘Stand here and keep them together while the boys hobble them.’

  I took my whip and stood on guard at the back of the herd. They were unruly animals, heavy with fat, squabbling and snapping at each other in the half-light. Several times, a beast would shuffle backwards towards me, forcing me to leap out of the way to prevent myself being trampled. Dagalol saw me and scoffed, ‘Don’t be afraid. Use your whip, by God!’ Meanwhile, the Arabs moved amongst them, carrying masses of hobbling loops that clinked as they worked. The loops, known as ’uqais, were about a foot long and attached to a wooden peg. To hobble a standing camel, the herdsman would seize one of its front legs by the hock, bending it upwards until it was parallel with the thigh, before fixing the loop around both parts of the leg and securing it with the peg on the outside. This gave the animal only three free legs, and it would soon get tired and settle down comfortably in the grass. Sometimes the camels resisted, letting out a bloodcurdling roar and edging away from the herdsman, who would grab the animal by the shoulder and slap it hard, crying, ‘Khyaa! Khyaaa!’ until it sat down. Then he would scrape out a little tunnel under the heavy foreleg and fasten the ’uqal around it from beneath.

  By the time darkness was thick around us, all the camels had been hobbled and the Arabs sat down amongst their equipment. Dagalol introduced me to his elder son, Abboud, a tall, slender Arab not long past manhood. The two other boys were aged about ten or eleven, and were as alike as two peas. They were called Sayf ad Din and Hamdan. As they greeted me shyly, Dagalol explained in a gruff and mocking tone that they were his ‘little chickens’ from the Mima tribe. In fact, they were hired boys who worked as herdsmen, though ‘chicken’ was a euphemism for ‘slave’.

  It was tranquil in the evening, sitting by the fire watching the yellow flames knitting a complex pattern around the dry wood. Across the dark plain many fires blinked and trembled, but their number was insignificant beside the galaxy of stars that stretched to eternity across the sky above.

  That night, the nomads questioned me about my tribe and my land. Dagalol wanted to know if my Ingleez were the same as those who had once ruled the Sudan. ‘Where did they go?’ he asked me. ‘Why did they leave the Sudan?’ I told him that my people had returned to our own country.

  ‘Where is that?’ he inquired.

  ‘It is to the northwest, beyond Libya.’

  ‘Beyond Libya, by God! Then it is surely a long way. How many days by camel?’

  ‘The camel would not arrive there. My country is surrounded by water. Only a boat or an aeroplane can enter it.’

  ‘Do you have camels there?’ Wad Ballal asked.

  ‘No, we have only cattle and sheep and some horses.’

  ‘Are the cattle and sheep as fat as those of the Kababish, or are they of the poor kind?’

  Here I thought I had some aces up my sleeve. I had brought with me photographs of prize Suffolk rams and champion steers from the Royal Show. I presented the cards triumphantly in the light of my torch. But my triumph faded when I noticed the Arabs puzzling over the pictures, turning them over and holding them upside down. I realised with surprise that these men had no concept of pictures and could not make out the shape of an animal in two dimensions. It had never occurred to me that this was a learned concept. There had been superb rock paintings and carvings in the Sahara for millennia, and the men who made them were certainly nomads. But these nomads had lost the art of drawing. Their only artefacts were things that were essential to them on their wanderings, and their arts were poetry, storytelling, and song, which could be transported anywhere.

  Later, when I traced the outlines of the animals with my finger, they soon recognised them, declaring, ‘No God but God, see how fat they are!’ Wad Ballal asked me if we lived on their milk. I explained that we drank a great deal of cow’s milk. Then, just to be devilish, I added, ‘We milk the cows twice a day with a machine that sucks the milk out of their udders and pours it into a bucket!’

  They looked at me in obvious disbelief. ‘How can that be?’ Dagalol asked. ‘Surely it is easier to milk them by hand. That is something that any child can do!’

  ‘Not in my country,’ I told him. ‘Some of my people have never seen a cow. They buy milk in bottles and don’t even know where it comes from!’

  The Arabs were eager to know about women and marriage. I was always a little ashamed to admit to nomads that I was unmarried, for I knew that for them, celibacy was ridiculous. It was the aim of every nomad to marry as soon as possible and become a master of a household. Old men who had not married were figures of fun.

  ‘Do your people marry, or do they just take a woman?’ Wad Ballal asked.

  I told him that we had both systems.

  ‘But if you just take a woman, what happens to the children?’

  ‘There may be no children. We have medicine to get rid of them.’

  ‘God protect us from the devil!’

  Dagalol explained that a man must have children, especially sons, to look after his livestock. ‘You should have at least three,’ he declared. ‘One for the goats, one for the sheep, and one for the camels.’

  ‘What about daughters?’

  ‘They are just incidental.’

  I asked why there were no women here. ‘This is the shogara,’ Dagalol told me, ‘The southern migration. Only the men go on the shogara. The women stay in the north in the damar camps. They look after the goats until the rains come, then they move. That is why we have no tents here. The tents are for women.’

  The fire had burned down to a pool of glowing ashes. The camels were drowsy and had stopped chewing the regurgitated forage of the day. One by one, the Arabs got up from the fire and
unfolded the sheepskins and canvas sheets they slept on. Before he retired, Dagalol told me, ‘There are plenty of robbers in these ranges. The thieving is worse than it has been for years. Now you can hardly rest a single night for fear of bandits, by God! Do you have a weapon?’ I told him that I had a ·22 revolver. ‘Hah, that is no use,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow I shall give you a shotgun. It is necessary in this land. And do not sleep too soundly. We call that the sleep of the donkey. The man who sleeps like a donkey may never wake!’ And with these words of encouragement, the Arab stalked off to bed.

  I lay down on my sheepskin, my head awash with thoughts and ideas. For a long time I stayed awake, staring at the stars and sensing the wall of camels around me, smelling their smell and hearing the occasional sighs and scuffles from their midst.

  I knew little about the Kababish except that they were a confederation of about nineteen tribes and some smaller subsections, who shared a common culture and a common nazir, or paramount chief. They were of different origins. Most of their ancestors, however, came originally from Arabia. In 1048, the Fatimid Caliph Mustansir allowed his vizier to unleash the bedouin of the Bani Hillal, the Bani Sulaym, and kindred tribes against the people of North Africa. Each Arab was given a piece of gold and a camel on the understanding that he would settle in the conquered territory.

  The tribes ravaged and pillaged the new lands, settling along the Libyan and Tunisian coast. Some of them pressed west as far as the Maghreb and south into the Sahara, where they eventually mixed with tribes of Berber origin. Others began to trickle into the deserts west of the Nile.

  In the Nile valley itself the Christian kingdoms of Nubia had long resisted the Arab threat. Eventually though, cut off from their spiritual heartland by the Muslim domination of Egypt, the kingdoms grew weak and succumbed to the invaders. The first Muslim ruled in Dongola in 1315. The Arabs obtained control of Nubia by marriage, as it was the custom in Nubia that inheritance was passed through the female line. By giving the Arabs their daughters as wives, the Nubians acceded control to the Arabs, while ensuring that the character of their land remained essentially Nubian, as it still does today.

  But in the deserts west of the river, the ancestors of the Kababish roamed as they had always done. The fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun commented, ‘There is no vestige of authority in the land, but they remain nomads, following the rainfall like the Arab of Arabia.’

  In 1982, little had happened to change that pattern. The Kababish remained nomads like their fathers and grandfathers, herding camels, goats, sheep, and a few cattle throughout the deserts and desert steppes of the western Sudan.

  In Arabia, the bedouin were camel breeders; the sheep-breeding tribes remained separate. While the Kababish saw themselves as camel men, they managed to rear all types of livestock. This was possible because of the complex system of migrations they had developed, in which different parts of the family moved to different places at certain times of the year. Those who herded the camels could live adequately on milk, but the Arabs who kept goats and sheep required grain to sustain them while the camels were away. The Kababish traded their animals in local markets and as far afield as Egypt in return for grain and the essentials that they could not produce themselves, such as salt, tea, sugar, doth, dates, seasoning, and metal goods.

  The camel was the most important of their animals. It provided milk and occasional meat; its hair was the main component of Kababish tents. The camel gave them the mobility they needed to traverse the vast distances they covered each year. It carried the Arab scouts on their search for grazing. It carried a man’s belongings, his tent and his wives, his children and his supplies; ferrying his small, portable world across the wilderness. Without the camel, life in these desiccated latitudes would not have been possible.

  I spent a restless night. The camels around me shifted continually, lurching up suddenly on their three legs and hopping about with ponderous, pounding steps within a few feet of my head. Dagalol was up constantly, cursing at the camels and swearing at the herdsboys, ‘Down, you son of the uncircumcised! May the Zaghawa take you! Where is that slave! Hamdan! Get up, you lazy black!’

  The morning was full of the acrid smell of camel, and the animals seemed to be everywhere, thick around the hearth and hugging the bases of the thorn trees. They were all shapes and sizes, from enormous stud bulls to fluffy calves a few weeks old. Many of them were she-camels, gigantically pregnant or carrying bulging udders that cried out for milking.

  The Arabs were already gathering around the fire, on which a pan of camel’s milk bubbled. No one seemed to speak much at that hour of the day. Even the camels seemed unwilling to move from the cosy configurations in which they had arranged themselves. There was a pristine stillness that seemed to hold everything in its power. The Arabs, wrapped in their ragged woollen tobes, possessed a strange dignity as they rested silently by the hearth as if in meditation on the approaching day. Only the Mirna boys moved, carrying heavy bowls of milk fresh from the udder and filling up the goatskins that hung from the central pole. I watched one of them, Sayf ad Din, as he went through the ritual of milking. He chose a big she-camel and released her from the hobble so that she stood up, lazily shaking herself until her fat hump wobbled. Then the boy spoke to her softly, massaging her udder. His fingers worked lightly on the teats while he held the bowl in his left hand, balancing on one leg as the milk splashed into the vessel. The fresh milk was covered in froth and slightly salty. The Arabs called it halib. It was stored in long goatskins that hung vertically by the upper end. The larger skins, made of either goat or sheep hide, were used for carrying water.

  We drank tea mixed with milk for breakfast. The mixture was bitter, for the Kababish thought it a waste to use milk and sugar together. They drank out of miniature enamel mugs, which they laid in the sand before the pourer after they finished each one. They drank five or six cups of this tea every morning, for there was no shortage of milk.

  After we had tea, I went with Dagalol to visit the camp of Mohammid Wad Habjur, which was pitched about a hundred metres away, across a carpet of diffir grass. We were welcomed by Mohammid and his father, a stumpy man with a wedge-shaped face and a head of grey hair. ‘Welcome!’ said the old man, Habjur. ‘You are the Ingleezi who wants to travel with the Kababish? Don’t you know that the life of the Arabs is difficult? The people of the town cannot stand it! The Arabs carry hunger and thirst. Their way is the way of men, by God! There is no comfort here!’ He said this in a chaffing, jocular tone, but I realised that underneath it lay the traditional distrust that the nomads felt towards townsmen like myself. They regarded themselves as superior to all settled people, white or black. Anyone who was not a European or a free Arab was referred to as being one of the ‘Awwala—the slaves. The Kababish called themselves Al ’Arab and would scarcely concede that there were any Arabs more noble than themselves.

  The lives of these men were austere simply because they were nomads, and because they could not afford to own goods other than those they could carry. It was this very austerity, however, that gave them their sense of aloofness. From the beginning I was regarded as inferior, partly because I was a townsman and partly because I simply could not do what they could. I had not come amongst these Arabs to be an observer. I wanted no less than to become one of them. I knew that it was an almost impossible task, yet I was rigidly determined to follow their customs and faith and to do as they did, no matter how hard it proved. Only in this way could I show myself to be worthy of them, and open up the way for acceptance.

  After we left Habjur’s camp, Dagalol took me on a tour of his camel herd in order to find one that would suit me. He owned more than two hundred animals. Only a small number of them were trained riding camels. These were all males, and could be distinguished from the others by their low humps and the patchwork marks on their backs where a saddle had rubbed against their hide. Riding and baggage camels were known asjumaal to differentiate them from the herd camels, or ilbil.

>   The Kababish had three types of camel: the ashab, the’anafi, and the ’arabi, The ashab was a racing dromedary, imported from the Beja tribes in the east of the Sudan. It was distinguished by its off-white colour, small head, and curved neck. It was lightly built, full-muscled, and extremely fast and smooth, much prized as a riding animal for raiding and hunting. The ‘arabi was a massive beast, ponderous and powerful. This was the animal that carried the Arabs’ belongings and the colourful litters in which their women rode. It was generally beige, red, white, or light brown in colour, and could be recognised by its large forefeet. The ‘arabi was the breed developed by the Kababish themselves and was well adapted to the desert. It was enduring and patient and often used as a riding camel for long-distance treks such as those to Egypt. The ’anafi was a hybrid, produced by the interbreeding of the other two types, combining the characteristics of both. Some of the fastest and most enduring camels the Kababish owned were those of the ’anafi type.

  It was an ’arabi that I selected from the camels Dagalol offered me, since I knew that over the next months I might be covering a great distance. The animal was a huge, fawn-coloured male and Dagalol told me that his name was Wad al ’Atiga. ‘A good choice, by God!’ he commented. ‘This camel will take you anywhere. But he will cost you a great deal.’