A Desert Dies Read online

  Sheikh Hassan explained that cows were an important source of milk for the families that could not travel with the camel herds on the distant migrations. The cattle had to be kept near the nomads’ semi-permanent camps, as they needed water every two days.

  The nazir’s emphasis on cattle meant that his family were already in transition from the free life of the desert to that of semi-settlement. The descendants of Sir Ali Wad at Tom had become the ruling elite of the Kababish, and all the magistrates and government representatives were taken from this family. Distracted from their livestock by their other duties, these men could no longer spare the time for long-range camel migrations, and though they still owned thousands of camels, these were in the hands of slaves and hired men. Denied the benefit of camel’s milk, they had turned instead to cows. But cattle were not resilient enough to resist even mild drought: by 1985, the nazir’s magnificent herd of over a hundred cows had been reduced to only fourteen head.

  When the cattle had moved out, Sheikh Hassan and Dudayn would prepare for the work of the day. A canopy of canvas would be slung up in the thorns of the tree and the beds moved into the oblong of shade beneath it. The nazir received visitors constantly. They were mostly Kababish tribesmen with weathered bedouin faces, belonging to any of the nineteen tribes that composed the confederation. They wore jibbas of soiled cotton and patched sirwal with yellowish strips of headcloth and cowskin sandals. The majority were small men with stringy beards and brown eyes. They wore wooden rosary beads around their necks and carried rifles and daggers. They would couch their camels in small nests about twenty metres from the camp and stack their weapons at a respectful distance before approaching the nazir, stepping gracefully out of their sandals and squatting down in the dust before his couch.

  Many of these Arabs came with complaints about livestock thefts. One old man told the nazir, ‘The Zayadiyya took twelve of my camels last night, by God! I knew nothing until I awoke this morning. They are sons of dogs, curse their fathers!’ Another Arab of the Nurab came to report that two of his she-camels had been driven off from the watering place by Zayadiyya in broad daylight. ‘I shall take the first two Zayadiyya camels I find, by God!’ he declared. Always, the nazir listened carefully to the complaints and Dudayn recorded the details in a thick ledger. Within a few days, the list of such incidents had become considerable, and always the Zayadiyya were blamed. ‘The Zayadiyya will soon have a proper war on their hands,’ Dudayn commented. ‘Once, they were nothing, but now, they have grown rich in herds and weapons. When the Kababish first came to the area of Umm Qozayn, there were few Zayadiyya here. Now they claim it is their territory, and that the grazing belongs to them. They have no official dar as we do, and they cannot stop us grazing in their territory.’ Both Dudayn and Sheikh Hassan were delighted when I produced my map of the region. It was a copy of the 1940 survey made by the British, though it showed clearly the border between Kordofan and Darfur. ‘See,’ said Dudayn, pointing to the map. ‘Kordofan is marked as Kababish country, but the Zayadiyya are not marked at all!’

  The grazing land in the west of the Sudan was owned communally and, officially, no tribes could prevent others from grazing their animals on any part of it. However, the Kababish had so-called ‘dar rights’ in their own homeland, which meant that they could forbid strangers from making permanent camps or buildings or from sinking wells there. I asked Dudayn how the troubles had started. He told me that they had begun when a Zayadi called Karusha had come into the Kababish dar in the previous year with a Kalashnikov rifle for sale. ‘He disappeared,’ the Arab said, ‘and only God knows what happened to him. Then the Zayadiyya sent a gam of sixty men into our dar to search for him. They found nothing, but soon after that, many camels were stolen from our land. It was the Zayadiyya, and no doubt. One day, a raiding party of four Zayadiyya were surprised by a group of twelve Kababish. Two of them were shot dead, and the others escaped.’ This was the story I had heard in El Koma of the incident in which Tahir had died.

  I could imagine how it had happened: the four tribesmen waking at dawn with their stolen camels, hidden amongst the thorn bush, thinking they were safe; a spiral of smoke from their fire rising slowly above the trees as they hastily made tea and saddled their camels for leaving; the sudden shuffle of camels’ feet on the sand; the realisation that they had been caught; the hard bronze faces of the Arabs coming out of the acacia brakes; then the last desperate effort to mount their camels before the volley of shots came spitting towards them; the two bodies jumping as if they had been stung; the shrieks of the camels and the streaks of blood on the earth; the frantic gallop of the two survivors as they whipped their mounts out through the thorn trees and back towards Darfur; the flies settling on the silent bodies as they lay dead in the sand. Tahir’s body was found to contain twenty bullets.

  ‘The police arrested twelve men of the Kababish for that incident,’ Dudayn continued. ‘But no one knows how they got their names. Someone must have told the Zayadiyya. I do not know who it was, but I have a very good idea.’

  He told me how the Zayadiyya had taken their revenge. In February 1982, a Kababish youth named Hassan Wad Esa was herding his camels near Umm Qozayn. It was a warm, moonlit night, and Hassan and the three little boys with him were about to lie down on their sheepskins, when there was a commotion amongst the camels. Hassan seized his rifle and ran to the edge of the herd. Not ten metres away, he saw three dark figures driving off one of his camels. He called out a terse warning and was answered by a salvo of shots that cracked out of the shadows, spinning off the rocks around him and hitting several of the camels. The animals screamed in agony, and the boy dodged between them, throwing himself into the shelter of a boulder. More bullets whizzed above his head. The stricken camels wailed pitifully and the other camels reared up and stampeded, bounding madly away and breaking their hobbles. The bandits pumped bullets into five or six more for good measure, shouting, ‘We are Tahir’s people!’

  Hassan shouted back, ‘Then take me for Tahir!’ and was again answered by a blaze of bullets. While he lay in the cover of the rock, the Zayadiyya quickly collected the scattered animals and mounted their own camels, driving the stolen herd before them and disappearing into the night.

  Fourteen of Hassan’s camels had been shot. Some were dead and others lay moaning in bloody pools about the camp. ‘Stay here,’ he told two of his young cousins. ‘We will follow the bandits and get those camels back.’ He took the other lad with him and together they began to track the Zayadiyya in the moonlight. It was hard going, for the thieves were mounted and Hassan and his companion were on foot. After four hours, he sent the little boy off to find a riding camel and some water. By Kababish law, a tribesman pursuing raiders could requisition a camel from any camp and was not liable should that animal be injured in the pursuit.

  The boy went, and Hassan continued on the trail until dawn came like a blessing. He knew that the bandits would stop to make tea and was certain that he would catch them. Sure enough, he came upon them in a shallow depression amongst some rocks. Stealthily, he took up a firing position, and moments later shot one of them dead with a single bullet. The other bandits dropped into the dust and fired back before picking up their dead companion and jumping on to their camels, leaving the stolen herd. When some Kababish came on the scene later that day, they found Hassan’s body still propped up in a firing position. He had been shot four times, and was stone dead.

  I realised then how sacred was the quality of courage amongst these men. A herdsman was expected to guard the tribe’s animals with his life. Hassan had been little more than a boy, but his pursuit of the Zayadiyya had been in keeping with all the epic traditions of the Arabs, unchanged since pre-Islamic times.

  Amongst the Kababish and neighbouring tribes, livestock raids were small, impulsive affairs, usually carried out at night and rarely well organised. If a man’s camels were stolen, he could apply to the sheikh of the bandit’s tribe for return or redress. By the Arab law of ’u
rf, it was the sheikh’s responsibility to provide either camels or compensation. If neither was forthcoming, then the Arab was legally justified in taking the same number of camels from any member of the bandit’s tribe. In this way, raids and counter-raids multiplied, soon becoming complicated by blood feuds between the tribes.

  If a tribesman was killed in a raid, his family’s first reaction would be to demand a life from the enemy tribe. When they had cooled off a little, however, they might be persuaded to accept a payment of blood money, or dia, instead. The settlement of dia was the responsibility of the sheikh. The usual course of events amongst the Kababish was for a series of killings and revenge killings to take place before all parties agreed to make a settlement; then the losses on both sides would be calculated and payments made accordingly. No matter which tribe of the Kababish was involved in the matter, the entire confederation shared in the payment of dia, provided the case concerned an enemy tribe outside the confederation.

  Often during my stay, we would change camp in order to find new grazing for the cattle. The camp clutter would be packed up in the early morning, with the nazir bellowing orders at anyone within range, including myself. When everything was packed, the Arabs would mount their donkeys as the great procession moved out into the scrub. Sheikh Hassan rode on a large, white donkey, looking resplendent with his carbine slung over the back of his saddle. Then came Dudayn, also riding a white donkey, and the Sharif, mounted on a smaller, mottled beast. Then came the cattle, a mass of tawny backs and sleek, shining hide, plodding on after the herd leader, a gigantic roan bull. Behind them came the camel riders like myself, and the slaves carrying all the encumbrances of the camp. We would ride on sometimes for nine or ten hours through the acacia scrub. The downs were full of Kababish camels returning from the south, as numerous as locusts on the pastures. In the afternoon, the nazir would select a tree from the millions around us and say, ‘This is our taya.’ Before anyone dismounted, Sheikh Hassan would send forward the Sharif on his donkey. The thin old man would chant out the call to prayers in a loud, stentorian voice to rid the place of any jinn that might be lurking there.

  The Sharif was one of many Arabs of Moorish origin who lived amongst the Kababish. They formed an entire subsection of the Nurab tribe known as the Shanagit, after the famous oasis of Chinguetti in Mauritania. Many of them lived in the camp of Umm Ejayja north of the nazir’s dikka. They had come across the desert in small groups, on foot or by camel and donkey. Many of them had been intent on making the Haj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. The tradition of Islamic learning had always been strong in the western Sahara, and many of the religious men, or marabouts, had memorised the entire Qur’an. However, their most valuable function amongst the Kababish was the writing of charms, which the Arabs wore in leather pouches on their arms. They believed that these charms, usually consisting of a verse from the Qur’an, were proof against gunshot wounds and knives. The belief was very strong throughout Africa, although it had no real foundation in Islam.

  Very few of the Kababish were able to read or write, and, like many illiterate peoples, they considered the written word a source of magical power rather than a means of communication. Often while I was with them, they would peer at me intently as I wrote up my journal, as if I had been engaged in some fascinating magical rite. Often, I was asked, ‘Why don’t you become a faki—a holy man? Then your writing would have some use!’ In reply, I would relate an amusing story that had occurred while I was a teacher in Darfur.

  A merchant friend of mine, Mohammid Zakariyya, had been approached by a faki, who said that he had a very special charm for sale. It was effective against guns and knives, and the price he asked was 100 pounds. ‘100 pounds!’ Mohammid told him. ‘If it is as good as you say, I shall give you 200!’ Then he instructed the holy man to bring the charm to his garden the next Friday. On the appointed day, the faki had turned up with his charm and Mohammid had turned up with a fat sheep and his shotgun. Tie the charm round the neck of the sheep,’ Mohammid told the man. After he had done so, Mohammid said, ‘We shall see if this charm is effective against guns!’ And so saying, he shot the sheep at point-blank range. The animal dropped dead instantly. ‘Well?’ Mohammid asked. ‘I must have made a mistake in the writing!’ the faki commented sadly. The reaction of the Kababish to this tale varied. Some laughed uproariously, while others sniffed and muttered, ‘Even fakis can make mistakes.’

  The charms made by fakis were sold to tribesmen for cash or livestock, and some of them had grown rich on this trade. The belief was not as innocent as it seemed. The Simba wars in the Congo had been based on the fanatic conviction that the Simba warriors, protected with their charms, were invulnerable against the bullets of their foes.

  At night, we slept on our rope beds with our rifles near at hand. The Bahr belonged to the disputed interface between Kababish and Zayadiyya country, and it was not impossible that Zayadiyya bandits would attack such a promising herd, even though it belonged to the Kababish nazir. As the days passed, the reports of thefts and bloodshed continued. One night, just before sunset, we were visited by four tribesmen of the Meidob. They were tall, black-featured men, led by a negro who wore the saffron-coloured headcloth of a court bailiff. They couched their camels nearby but carried their rifles with them as they sat down before the nazir: they were armed with .303s, and they carried heavy bandoliers of cartridges across their stomachs. The negro told Sheikh Hassan that they had been tracking some Zayadiyya who had stolen five camels from their kinsmen in the region of Umm Qozayn a few days before; the bandits had come in daylight and the Meidob had opened fire on them. The Zayadiyya had shot back and one of the Meidob had been killed. The four men had been sent by one of the sheikhs of the Meidob to track down the murderer. I realised that the bandits who had passed by while I had been with the Haworab were the ones, and I told the four men all I knew. Fortunately, they did not ask why the Haworab had not stopped them; it was well known that the Meidob and the Kababish were bitter enemies and had been so for generations.

  On the fifth day after my arrival, we watered the cattle in the muddy shallows of a rainwater pool, where the liquid lay like a green mould over the mudflats, full of algae. There were many white cattle egrets perched at the water’s edge, waiting to hop on the shoulder of a cow. These birds fed on the ticks that were found on the skin of cattle and camels. We saw one or two wild duck, which took flight before anyone could shoot them. There were some Arabs of the Hamdab at the pool, watering about twenty camels. They were dapper little men with oval faces of walnut-brown, who carried old service rifles. Two of them stood calf-deep in the gelatinous mud, keeping their camels together as our flying picket of cattle came tromping down to the water, wreathed in a veil of dust, and charged into the mud slick beyond the water’s rim. We dismounted from our riding animals and greeted the Arabs. They referred to the nazir as ‘Sheikh Hassan’ but otherwise showed no sign of self-effacement. The nazir told me, ‘These men are Arabs of the desert. You will not find Hamdab in these parts very often.’

  I had met men of the Hamdab on a previous journey and knew that they were one of the Kababish tribes scattered around the wells at the northern edge of the dar, where the Wadi al Milik turned towards the Nile. In summer, their camel hair tents were to be found amongst the thick ’ushur and markh bushes in the wadi-bed, while in winter, they herded their camels and goats out north and west into the desert pastures. They rarely ventured this far south. Once, the Hamdab had grazed their animals beyond Jabal al ’Ain and Jabal Abyad, deep into the Libyan desert. Those grazing lands had disappeared forever, and now the Arabs were forced to move farther and farther south each year.

  The Hamdab were only one of the Kababish tribes who had adapted themselves to life in the inner desert. The other desert dwellers were the ’Atawiyya, the Awlad Huwal, the Awlad Sulayman, and some sections of the Sarajab. Each of these tribes was of different descent. The ’Atawiyya were the Bani ’Atiyya, a branch of the Bani Hillal, whose relat
ions had settled in Constantine. The Awlad Huwal were a smaller offshoot of the Hillal, while the Awlad Sulayman were a bedouin tribe who had settled in the Fezzan in Libya, where they had been decimated in a war with the Berber Tuareg. In 1850, they moved into central Chad, where many still remained. The Sarajab were a branch of the noble Kinana tribe that had been left behind when the rest of the tribe moved south to settle in the central region of the Sudan.

  The Nurab, to which the ruling house of the Kababish belonged, were one of the largest sections of the tribe. They were Arabs of the Sahel who rarely ventured far into the desert wastes. They lived side by side with the Barara, another large tribe thought to be descendants of the Juhayna Arabs, because, unlike the other Kababish, they branded their camels on the left side. Another tribe whose homeland lay to the northwest of the Nurab was the ’Awajda, one of the richest of the Kababish groups. The tribes who were to become the Kababish had moved south over centuries, until they found the rich pastures of North Kordofan, which they claimed as their own. Their possession of these pastures was disputed by tribes such as the Zaghawa of Kajmar, the Bani Jarrar and the Dar Hamid. The Kababish eventually pushed these three tribes southwards and established their dar. Though a loose confederation, the Kababish invented the mythical ancestor ‘Kabsh’ to explain their relationship. Kabsh was the Arabic word for ‘ram’.