A Desert Dies Page 7

  ‘Peace be on you!’ I said, holding the gun before me.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the man said, ignoring the greeting.

  I saw that he was thin with a fringe of beard. He seemed nervous.

  ‘No one invited me to stay in the village,’ I told him.

  ‘There are plenty of Kababish with goats. Why do you not stay with them?’

  ‘I am comfortable here,’ I answered, ‘as long as I am left alone.’ The man grunted and leapt on his donkey again. Soon, the footfalls faded away into the distance.

  I was both hungry and thirsty when I set off the next morning. It was hot, but I rode on at a trot for five hours through the thorn bush, hoping that I should find someone from whom I could beg water. At noon, I stopped to rest under a kitir tree. I tried to eat some dates, but my mouth was too dry. As I sat there, a shadow fell across me, and I looked up to see an Arab couching his camel. He had approached so silently that I had not heard him. He was fair-skinned, with the swarthy, dark hair of a gypsy, and wore a shirt that was covered in patches. I noticed that a ·303 rifle was slung from his saddle. I stood up to greet him, and invited him to sit in the shade and eat some dates. After a few minutes, he asked me, ‘What is your tribe?’

  ‘lngleez,’ I told him.

  The man grinned. ‘You are the Ingleezi who was with Dagalol, aren’t you? Your name is Omar.’

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘I am Salim Wad Ahmad from the Haworab. My brothers were travelling on the shogara, near Dagalol. The news gets passed along.’

  I smiled in surprise, and explained that I was travelling to Umm Sunta to meet the nazir.

  ‘You will not find him in Umm Sunta,’ Salim told me. ‘He is here in the Bahr, with his cattle. I saw his people yesterday. You will find his camp tomorrow. For tonight, you can stay with us.’

  The Haworab had made camp in some trees about two kilometres away. With them was a herd of about thirty camels scattered across the plain, grazing on green grass. After I unsaddled, I greeted the three other Arabs who were there: Salim’s father and two brothers. They brought me a bowl of fresh milk and made tea, into which they poured unmilled millet. Afterwards, one of them asked me, ‘Are you not afraid to sleep alone in the bush?’

  ‘No, why should I be?’

  The man clicked almost pityingly and then said, ‘The English captured this land once. Perhaps they want to do so again. Perhaps you are their spy!’

  ‘If the English wanted to spy on this land, they would not send a man on a camel!’ I told him, but I could see that he was unimpressed.

  After sunset, the wind roared through the trees, but no rain fell from the darkling sky. The Haworab lit a blazing fire and brought their camels into the taya. The deadwood crackled in the hearth and the camels chewed rhythmically. I asked the Arabs if the rains had been good in this area.

  ‘There has been some rain,’ Salim said, ‘but only in a few places, like this area—the Bahr. We call it by that name because the water collects here in many pools, like a river. But there is not enough grazing for all the Arabs.’

  We were interrupted by two Arabs who couched their camels hastily beside our taya. They belonged to the ’Awajda, slim men with flattened headcloths and well-used rifles. One of them had prominent teeth and wore a silver earring in his right upper ear. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘we have just seen a gom of twelve men from the Zayadiyya. They are coming back from Umm Qozayn with some stolen camels. The camels belong to the Meidob, and there was a battle yesterday. Someone was killed. I advise you to stay alert tonight. Those men mean trouble. They will be passing here very soon.’

  At once, the Haworab doused the fire, and ran around the herd, making sure that all the camels were collected. I brought Wad al ’Atiga close to my sleeping-place. Salim and his brothers cocked their weapons, and two of them moved into the bush several hundred metres away. The ’Awajda stayed with us, sitting together in the midst of the herd. No one spoke, and the minutes passed with no sound but the slow mastication of the beasts around us.

  About an hour later, Salim and his brother came walking back from their position, saying, ‘They passed by, going towards Umm Hejlij. There were twelve of them with five loose camels.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stop them?’ I asked.

  ‘They were Meidob camels, and no concern of ours. Besides, there were too many of them.’

  The ’Awajda bid us goodnight and rode away. After they had gone, I lay down and thought about the next day. I hoped that it would bring the meeting I had looked forward to many times over the past months. I should meet Hassan Wad at Tom, the Sheikh of Sheikhs, whose family had ruled the most renowned nomads of the Sudan for generations.

  _____3._____

  Lord of the Drums

  All the divisions acknowledge the ultimate

  authority of the head sheikh, whose

  symbol of supreme authority is the nahas,

  the war drum of the tribe, with which is

  connected considerable ceremonial.

  C. G. Seligman, Races of Africa, 1930

  IN 1898, A YOUNG MAN called Ali Wad at Tom was living in a village west of Omdurman. A British intelligence report described him as ‘a man of modest wealth’. The Kababish legend, however, has it that Ali Wad at Tom was born with no more than two little she-camels to his name, yet he died the richest nazir in the Sudan.

  Ali was a man of uncommon charisma and powers of concentration. He was handsome, charming, and intelligent, with the mind of a strategist. His photograph, taken in middle age, reveals features that are dark, brooding, and aristocratic. His father, At Tom, the hereditary chief of the Kababish, had been put to death for his refusal to join the Mahdi’s revolution. Many more of his family had died in battle against the Mahdi’s forces, and others had been captured and executed in Omdurman. The Mahdi had appointed his uncle, Graysh, as nazir of the tribe, and Ali grew up in Graysh’s household, dreaming of revenge against the Mahdi, and his successor, the Khalifa Abdallahi.

  In that same year, the necessity for revenge was removed when 12,000 of the Khalifa’s followers, the Ansar, were killed on the field of Kerreri near Omdurman; they had recklessly charged a British position defended by Maxim machine-guns and Lee-Metford rifles. With the British once more in control of the Sudan, Graysh was summarily dismissed, and young Ali Wad at Tom appointed in his stead. It was an excellent choice, both for the British and for the Kababish. Ali remained firmly loyal to the Ingleez throughout his life, but also took the pathetic remnants of a tribe decimated by persecution, drought, famine, and disease, and within forty years, re-established them as the most powerful nomadic people in the Sudan.

  Under Ali’s leadership, the Kababish pushed west year by year. They crossed the Wadi al Milik, which was then the border of the independent Sultanate of Darfur, and clashed constantly with Darfur tribes, such as the Zayadiyya, the Zaghawa, and the Bedayatt. They attacked the oasis of El ’Atrun and skirmished in the remote pastures of Chad with warriors of the Gur’an. The Darfur tribes retaliated, raiding Kababish territory, and these raids were immediately reported to the British as evidence of the Darfur sultan’s readiness to attack British land. This reinforced Ali’s position, in British eyes, as the guardian of the Sudan’s western marches.

  When the sultan, Ali Dinar, joined forces with the revolutionary Senussi brotherhood of Libya, he wrote to Ali, inciting him to join the ‘holy war’ against the unbelievers. The nazir refused and referred the matter to the government, which responded by supplying him with shipments of rifles. In 1916, when Darfur was invaded by British forces, Kababish irregulars were part of the occupation group.

  Evidently, profits for the nazir were great. Within sixteen years, his two little she-camels had become a herd of 3,000 head. ‘And that,’ as British Inspector Reginald Davies commented dryly, ‘had not accrued by the slow process of nature.’

  Ali spent the latter part of his life moulding what had been a scattered grouping of tribes into a
unified confederation. He worked to reduce the power of tribal sheikhs and to concentrate authority into his own hands. He was much assisted by the British, who found it more convenient to deal with a single powerful family than a score of smaller chiefs. When he died in 1937, he was Sir Ali Wad at Tom, KCVO—one of only three Sudanese ever to receive the peerage. It was Sir Ali’s grandson, Hassan, who had become nazir in 1945, whom I met in the Bahr in the summer of 1982.

  Not long after dawn, I rode with Salim across the goz to Sheikh Hassan’s camp. The Bahr was a land of gently rolling downs covered with yellow grasses still green at the roots and clothed in thorn bush, kitir, la ’ot, and siyaal, like twisted, delicate carvings. Spits of earth, ochre, and carmine lay between the wedges of grass, and the downs were slashed by shallow washes that grew wider as they fed into the broad depression where muddy pools of rain-water had collected.

  We rode out of the scrubland and into the sea of wind-riffled herbage. My companion pointed out to me a group of figures under a single kitir tree. Near them was a zariba of thorn branches and a place where the grass had been cropped short by cattle. Far beyond the camp, I could see the blue outline of the Qoz al ’Ajura, with its spine of broken granite stretching away north and towering over the acacia scrub.

  ‘That is Sheikh Hassan,’ Salim told me. ‘The dark man sitting in the shade. The other men with him are his scribe, his holy man, and his servants.’ The Arab wished me the safekeeping of God, and rode back in the direction of his herd. I approached the camp slowly, couched my camel nearby, then walked over and greeted the company.

  Sheikh Hassan received me with gracious dignity, and showed no surprise when he saw that I was a European. He was a thickset man with dark skin and the same heavy, rather brooding features I had seen in a photograph of his grandfather. He was dressed very simply, in a shirt of white cotton and sirwal like any ordinary tribesman. A Martini carbine lay propped against the rope bed on which he sat, and scattered around him was a clutter of chipped saddles and saddlebags worn shiny by use. A brace of waterskins hung in a nearby bush.

  I had been looking forward eagerly to my meeting with Hassan since I first decided to live amongst the Kababish. He was paramount chief of the entire confederation of tribes, and his authority extended not only to the borders of the Kababish dar, or homeland, but far beyond into the open reaches of the desert itself. It was a vast area. The dar alone was 48,000 square miles, and the desert was perhaps four times that size. The nazir’s power was acknowledged as far as the oases of El ’Atrun and Nukheila, near the Libyan border, and even along the palm groves of the Nile as far as Dongola.

  When I met Sheikh Hassan, the power of the nazirate was already on the decline. Only a month before I arrived in the dar, Hassan’s uncle, Mohammid al Murr, had died. AI Murr was the eldest son of Sir Ali, though due to his mother’s status, he never inherited the title of nazir. Nevertheless, he had been the real power amongst the Kababish for decades and when he died, something of the old spirit of Sir Ali Wad at Tom died with him. I greatly regretted not meeting this famous Arab.

  Sheikh Hassan introduced me to his clerk, Mohammid Dudayn. He was an olive-skinned Arab dressed in a spotless jallabiyya, like a townsman. I later came to admire Dudayn: he was the son of a holy man, the Faki Hassan, who had been a client of the nazir’s and had originally come from the Jawa’ama tribe. Dudayn was one of the most perceptive and intelligent men I met amongst the Kababish. The other man was the Sharif Mohammid, a lean and austere figure with close-cropped hair. He was an Arab of the Kunta tribe from Mali and had practised as a holy man amongst the Kababish for many years.

  The nazir called for a negro servant to unsaddle my camel and set it out to graze. Another servant brought a canvas sheet for me to sit on and, a little later, gave me tea and a handful of dates. As I ate and drank, Sheikh Hassan asked me questions about my journey. He was interested in everything: the state of Dagalol’s camels, the grazing in the south, the latest stories of camel raids and the condition of the country between there and El Fasher. He was particularly interested in news about the Zayadiyya, and seemed very impressed that I had ridden from El Fasher alone. ‘You were lucky to get through alive!’ he exclaimed.

  Later, when I tried to explain why I had come to live with the Kababish, he waived my explanations aside as if he already knew them. He told me that two outsiders had lived with his family before. One was the anthropologist Talal Asad, and the other a German traveller called Farid. ‘You are welcome here,’ he told me. ‘You are British, and the British have always been friends of my family. This land is your land.’

  It was not until much later that I realised how much l owed this reception to my colonial predecessors, men like Reginald Davies, Harold MacMichael, Douglas Newbold, Bill Henderson, Guy Moore, and many others. They were remembered with affection, and their age was thought of as a golden one. They had been admired for their toughness, honour, and sense of justice; they were men who had devoted their lives to this country and knew its language and customs well. The Kababish were a hard, wild people much in sympathy with the uncompromising yet incorruptible attitude of the colonial administrators. The scores of outsiders—teachers, medics, nutritionists, and aid workers—who poured into the Sudan after the drought never replaced the colonialists in the affections of the Kababish despite their liberal pretensions, which were as alien to the nomads as if they had been written on the moon. ‘The British were honest and just, and their word was one word,’ the nazir told me later. ‘They ran this district with one inspector, two clerks, and five police troopers. Now there are two hundred doing the same job and doing it less efficiently!’

  Later that morning, Sheikh Hassan’s son Mohammid arrived with two more negro servants and a squad of five white donkeys that he had watered nearby. He was a tall, quiet lad, with a tangled mass of long hair—this, I learned, was a sign of mourning for the death of Sheikh Mohammid al Murr. We were joined by a slim, pleasant-faced Arab of about twenty who carried a ·22 rifle. He was Dudayn’s younger brother, Ibrahim, who was chief herdsman of the nazir’s cattle, which were grazing out beyond the skyline. At midmorning, one of the servants brought us a dish of polenta. It was a hemispherical cake of millet, known as kisri, over which cow’s milk had been poured. We ate in the shade of the kitir tree, crouching around the bowl and eating with our right hands.

  I stayed in the Bahr with Sheikh Hassan for ten days.

  Each morning, I would awake as the first red streak of dawn fired in the sky, and the dark shapes of the cattle and baggage camels around me came into silhouette. The cattle herd would be massed in a semicircular laager, rank upon rank of humped bodies with passive, peacefully chewing heads. A score of calves would be lowing a few yards away in the zariba, where they had been enclosed for the night. Cattle could not be hobbled as the camels were, but by enclosing their offspring, the Arabs ensured that the cows would not wander off in the darkness and that the calves would not drink their mothers’ milk.

  The Arabs would get up one by one from their rope beds, upon which all but the servants slept. They were light structures known as ’angarebs, sprung with ropes of palm fibre, which were easily carried by camel. As they arose, the servants would bring round jugs of water with narrow spouts for the ritual ablution. Each man would retire some distance and wash his private parts, then return and complete the ritual. He would wash his hands, mouth and face each three times, splashing the water over the forearms up to the elbows, dragging wet palms through the hair and forcing wet fingers into the ears. Finally, he would pour water over his feet, washing them as high as the ankles. This sequence was performed only when water was plentiful. In the desert, those who prayed used a shorter form of ritual in which sand was substituted for water.

  Each man prayed in his own space, facing Mecca. He would compose himself, whispering the call to prayers, then raise his hands with a final: ‘God is great!’ He would clasp both hands before him, staring at the ground and repeating the first verse of the Qur’a
n, ‘AI Fatih’. This would be followed by another prayer, brief or long according to his choosing. Then the Arab would make his prostration, first bowing, then kneeling and crouching so that his forehead and the bridge of his nose touched the ground before him. For the morning prayer, only two sets of prostrations were required. The Arabs also prayed at midday, afternoon, sunset, and evening. For each of these prayers, four sets of prostrations were performed, except for the sunset prayer, which required three.

  Generally, the Kababish were not religious and knew little about Islam. Some families, like Nas Wad Haydar, never bothered to pray; others prayed when they felt like it. The nomads were not fanatic Muslims. Though they had some superstitions, they were not fanatically superstitious, for they were essentially a pragmatic people.

  After the prayer the Arabs sat in private meditation until the servants brought tea and fresh milk. In the nazir’s camp, everyone was served tea individually, with his own teapot. This and the presence of rope beds distinguished Sheikh Hassan’s camp from any other encampment.

  The servants were mostly negroes from the nazir’s household slaves. They were referred to as the ’Ol. Almost all of them were second or third generation descendants of men and women who had been captured during raids in the time of Sir Ali Wad at Tom. One of the servants with us was Sa’ad Wad Siniin, whose father had been part of the spoils of Sir Ali’s raid into the country of the Gur’an. He was a huge, powerful man with enormous hands and feet and an unkempt mop of spiky hair. Another was a thin, wiry fellow called Khamis; his father was a famous Dinka slave known as Bambidu, who had taken part in many raids against the Kawahla tribe.

  After tea, Ibrahim and the herdsmen would release the calves from the zariba and drive the cattle out into the pastures. The Kababish were famous as camel-herders, and I wondered why the nazir was travelling with his cattle. Sheikh Hassan told me, ‘The Kababish are camel-men, but we have all types of animals. It was my grandfather, Sir Ali, who first introduced cattle to our family. One day he asked his people, “Which is the richest tribe of the Kababish?” They thought for a bit then said, “It is the ’Awajda, for they have many camels.” He said, “It is not the ’Awajda.” They thought a little more and said, ‘Then it is us, the Nurab. We are the richest.” “It is not the Nurab,” he told them. “It is the Shilaywab.” “But the Shilaywab have far fewer camels than us,” they said. “Yes, but the Shilaywab have all kinds of animals, not only camels. That is why they are the richest. We should be like them.” So from that time, we started getting cattle.’