Sudan, May 2014
The plane banked out of the clear blue skies above Khartoum, coming to a smooth landing on the runway below. Outside, the city rippled in the haze of a 122-degree heat. I stepped, squinting, onto the asphalt of the runway and sighed. The expedition was now broken – but somehow it had to go on.
On fleeing Bor, we had returned to Juba, where Siraje and I parted ways. Boston, by then, was already back in Kampala, his own expedition cut short – and, for the first time, I understood how he was feeling. The honour of becoming the first man to walk the full length of the Nile had been denied me, and it hurt. The Sudd had beaten me, like it had tormented so many other travellers along the Nile, and the disappointment was difficult to put into words.
Escorted by SPLA security, we had holed up in the airport at Juba until a plane was ready to take us out of South Sudan. The plan, hastily rearranged, was to reach Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and back-track to as close to the border with South Sudan as we could get. There, the expedition would begin again, north to Khartoum and the Sahara Desert beyond.
The man waiting in the airport, holding up a sign that read simply ‘LEVISON’ was to be my guide from the southern border to the crossing into Egypt, a journey of over a thousand miles. He was also a complete stranger. Tentatively, I shook his hand.
I had been to Sudan once before, four years previously, when I’d volunteered to lead an expedition driving two ambulances from England to a hospital in Malawi. It had been an eventful trip, not least because we were arrested in Egypt and detained for ten days by the secret police, a stop that had left us scrabbling to make up time by driving across the Sahara Desert in less than thirty-six hours. To say that I don’t remember much would be an understatement – those hours passed in such a sleepless blur that I can barely recall crashing through a police roadblock on the outskirts of the Sudanese town of Dongola, and almost being cast from the side of a cliff in the ensuing carnage. But one thing that did come out of that journey was my chance meeting with Mazar Mahir, a tour guide of Ancient Nubian descent whose family business controlled the tourist trade in Wadi Halfa, the town on the Nile that marks the border between Sudan and Egypt. Mazar was known throughout the world as the go-to man for Sudan, and over the past years, we’d stayed in intermittent contact. At first, I’d hoped Mazar himself would accompany me for the Sudanese leg of this expedition, but – perhaps wisely – he had declared himself too busy. I didn’t blame him – his life was consumed with hosting tourists and helping them get out of trouble with the Egyptian authorities. But it is not for nothing that the Sudanese are hailed, the world over, as the most hospitable of hosts. ‘I have a suggestion,’ Mazar had said to me, ‘and his name is Moez. He is my little brother. He’ll meet you at the airport. See if you like him, Lev. He says he can walk.’
And that was all I knew about the man waiting for me in the airport: not that he was a good guy, nor that he was very experienced, only that he could walk.
It was, I decided as he silently led me to his car, an inauspicious start.
After a night at the Acropole Hotel, I wended my way to meet Moez at his office in downtown Khartoum. Less than a week had passed since that fateful night in Bor, but already it felt like a lifetime ago.
With the morning light filtering through the shutters of his tiny first-floor room, nestled between a spluttering air-conditioning unit and a lethal-looking fuse box, I was able to consider Moez more thoughtfully.
‘Salaam Alaikum,’ he said, respectfully.
‘Inta Kwies? Tamam?’ I smiled back. ‘Sorry,’ I added. ‘I’ve forgotten most of my Arabic.’
‘Mafi Mushkila. No problem. I will teach you. Tamam?’
‘Tamam,’ I said.
‘Chai?’
Well, that one was easy. I gratefully accepted his offer of tea and followed him to the corner of his claustrophobic little office. Here, the walls were covered in photographs of Moez with tourists, scientists and archaeologists. In between hung traditional paintings: African masks, posters of the famous Pyramids of Meroe, shelves of Bedouin knives, fossils, pieces of broken pottery and even some bones. ‘It’s all original,’ Moez said with a smile. ‘Sudan is full of these things. I like rocks, particularly: granite, quartz, gold. Anywhere you go, you can just pick it up.’
‘Gold?’
‘Oh, it’s everywhere. It’s where the word Nubia comes from.’
‘What is?’
‘Gold. Nub means Gold. Like my guiding company – Nub Kush. And the Nuba mountains – the Golden Mountains. This is where the Ancient Egyptians came to find gold, and then the Phoenicians, and then the Arabs, and then the English. And now . . . the Chinese. Sudan is a golden country.’
I looked at Moez as he poured the sugary black tea into two small, chipped glasses on a silver Chinese tray. He looked to be in his late thirties, with curly black hair. His face, finely featured, with big almond eyes, looked almost feminine and complemented his high cheekbones and rather large ears. He didn’t look Arabic, but nor did he look black. He was pure Nubian, an ancient Semitic people who have been the fathers of Sudan since ancient times, and whose homelands are in northern Sudan and southern Egypt. In the half-light of the room, I wondered how this man might fare as my guide. I didn’t have the luxury of time to decide. The plan was to be at the southern border tomorrow, back with the river. It had been too long.
I asked him outright: ‘Can you walk?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘But where are we walking?’
I had presumed Mazar had told him. It seemed inconceivable that he hadn’t – and I began to wonder if this was all a practical joke between the brothers.
‘I’m walking the Nile. I have been ever since Rwanda. Only . . . the fighting in the South drove me out. I’m here to start again. Tomorrow, I’m going south to the border and, from there, I’m following the river – all the way into Egypt.’
With a studious air, Moez wandered across the room and consulted his diary. ‘How long will this take?’
‘Two months,’ I said, ‘more or less.’
He contemplated it further, lost in the diary. ‘I’m free,’ he said with bewildering nonchalance, ‘but I’ll need to pack a bag first.’
The deal was done, whether I liked it or not. I had a new guide – one, I suspected, who would be as different from Ndoole Boston as water from sand.
The mountain at Al Jabalain loomed like a giant black hand over the arid savannah. Stepping out of the car, palming payment to Salaah, the fat Nubian driver who had driven us the two hundred miles from Khartoum, I stared into the south. Only two hundred kilometres further south lay the northernmost edge of the great Sudd. I must have been staring at it too long, because as soon as Moez had lifted the cheap bicycles we had bought from the back of the van, he came to my side.
‘At least you’re still alive.’ He smiled. ‘If you’d gone into that place, you’d be dead by now – and I’d still be looking for work. Do you know how few travellers come to Sudan in the summer?’
We had come as close to the border as local security agents would allow, into a land of arid plain and desert scrub. As Salaah disappeared into the north, it seemed unbelievable that this landscape could border the mightiest swampland on Earth. The only things to break the endless flatness were outcrops of evil, thorn-ridden acacia bushes – and, of course, the river itself. Here, the Nile surged due north, for a short time forming the border with South Sudan itself, before piercing the heart of Sudan. Along its length ran a bullet-straight tarmac road, gleaming black against the parched wilderness.
All of a sudden, the vastness of the journey ahead seemed impossible. Even the two hundred miles back to Khartoum felt inconceivable. Whether it was the defeat in South Sudan, or just the simplicity, the starkness of staring out at hundreds of miles of open scrubland, I wasn’t sure – but a strange sense of doubt was starting to bubble up within me.
‘You should ride,’ I said, as Moez balanced his packs on one of the bicycles.
‘Ride?’ he said, aghast. ‘Why should I ride? If you’re walking, then I’m walking. This is walking the Nile, not riding the Nile.’ He finished wrapping the straps around his bag and, without another word, began to push up the road. I looked at him, in his black jeans, polo T-shirt and baseball cap, discreetly covering a balding head. On his feet was a pair of fake-leather shoes, with one sole already hanging off. Moez might have claimed to have escorted archaeologists and scientists around the vast emptiness of the Sahara – but I suspected it was probably from the comfort of a Toyota Land Cruiser. Under my breath, I muttered to myself, ‘He won’t last the week.’
The truth was: I didn’t know if I would either.
The next days seemed to last for ever. Sudan was a new beginning, but for the first time, the walking seemed a pointless exercise. I found no comfort in putting one foot in front of the other. Flanked on one side by huge electricity pylons and featureless scrub, every day was the same. The road was so straight it began to feel interminable.
We reached the town of Kosti on the second day, crossing to the river’s eastern bank to continue the endless trek north. Behind me, Moez struggled on without words. It was difficult to push the bike, especially along the riverbank where the sand was deep, but I kept my head down, ignored his travails, and barrelled on. Soon, Moez and I were walking some distance apart, saying nothing to each other for long hours. He was struggling in stoic silence, but I had no words of encouragement for him, and he in turn had nothing to say to me. I began to hanker for Boston’s wild conspiracy theories, his diatribes against the state of Africa, anything that might have distracted me from this vicious silence. Sights, sounds and smells – all of these were extravagant luxuries now, devils that slowed me down: all I wanted was this inane trek to be over. Even the river seemed a phantom. Pain had become irrelevant. The blisters, sores and cramps no longer mattered. Every day, I got up, walked another marathon – and either the pain would go away, or it wouldn’t. Whatever the case, the next morning, I got up and did it all again.
I would have walked through the night to reach Khartoum, anything to be rid of this endless expanse, but memories of Matt Power slowed me down. Pushing Moez too hard might have been fatal – but, by halving my pace, I doubled my frustration. Every slow day was a half-day, and a half-day wasted; half a day that I could have been closer to the finish, closer to home. I woke every morning, feeling sick to the stomach at the thought of the long months of nothingness, of endless dunes and unchanging horizon. The comforting greenery of the jungle was far behind – the variation, the hills, the wildlife that had kept madness at bay. With so much to see, it had been easy to be distracted, but here in the wasteland of Sudan, it seemed all I had to look forward to was an endlessness of searing heat and sleeping in roadside shacks amid piles of rubbish. The desert wasn’t supposed to be like this. I’d had romantic notions of sleeping under the stars against a backdrop of ancient ruins – but all of that lay somewhere to the north, in a very different desert. I had to get there first.
Conversation, when it came at all, was a laboured thing. ‘How long have you been working with tourists, Moez?’ I asked, and had to force myself to listen to the answer.
‘Since 2001,’ he said. ‘I like the tourists here.’ He winked at me, with the look of a devil. ‘Especially the Japanese ones . . .’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘They have skin like the waters of the Nile, so smooth and soft,’ he said dreamily.
Moez might have been a teetotaller, who bookended his days with prayer, but it seemed he had an eye for different things as well. He had trained as an artist, studying at the University of Sudan in Khartoum, and the paintings I had seen hanging in his office were, in fact, his own creations. He had also travelled widely. Somehow, he’d convinced several former – female – clients to show him around their home cities in Europe. ‘I even went to China once,’ he began, ‘and to Libya. We went over the border illegally, looking for gold. And prehistoric rock art. It’s amazing, the things you can find.’
‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘you might be even more opportunistic than Boston.’
‘Who?’
I pushed on up the road. ‘He was an almighty blackguard,’ I chuckled, and Moez just smiled.
There were imperceptible changes in the landscape. The villages we passed were no longer the thatched round houses of the south, but all adobe mud with high compounds. The men of these villages all wore white jellabiyas and the women – what few could be seen – wore the hijab, or the niqab. It was my first real reminder that Sudan is an Islamic nation. Indeed, this was the reason South Sudan had fought so long and hard to secede – to gain self-determination for the Christian and Animist peoples of the South.
I woke, that morning, as I did every morning: on a string bed, at the side of the road, listening to the morning traffic – Nuer refugees fleeing the South for the inner-city ghettos of Khartoum – hurtling past. From the houses that lined the road, men emerged to piss in the street and hawk up great globules of phlegm into the sand. As I did every morning – if only to remind myself that the days were continuing to trickle by – I checked the date of my diary: it was 5 May.
‘What is it, Lev?’
Moez was already up, refastening our packs to the bicycles.
‘Do you know what today is, Moez?’
‘Another fine day in the Republic of the Sudan?’
‘No,’ I said, tramping to the bicycles. ‘Today is the first fifth of May in my adult life that I won’t be able to get hold of a cold beer.’
Moez just looked at me, dumbly.
‘Today is my birthday,’ I said woefully, wiping the sand out of my matted hair and grimy beard. With shock, I realised it was now well over an inch long.
Moez reached out and pumped my hand vigorously. ‘Happy New Year!’ he declared. ‘Today is a great day! You will not forget this birthday. Here you are, in the middle of Sudan, surrounded by beautiful desert and friendly people . . .’ He grinned wildly. ‘How old are you?’
‘Thirty-two,’ I conceded.
Moez let go of my hand, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I thought you would be thirty-seven, thirty-eight. More like my age?’
I took a deep breath, squinting into the morning sun. Thirty-two, and had it not been for the diary in my pack, I would have forgotten. There had to be something better than this. Unknown months of walking still lay between me and the river delta. I couldn’t spend every day of them in abject misery and self-pity. I drew myself up, fixed my eyes on the road ahead, and spoke out loud: ‘Lev, you are walking the Nile. You have set out to do it. You will do it. It will be shit at times, but you will reach the end. Nothing you can do will make it any easier, or any quicker. Just accept it.’
Moez drew his bicycle alongside mine. ‘Lev, what are you doing?’
‘I am giving myself a birthday present, Moez.’
He looked at me, perplexed. ‘What present?’
‘I am becoming a fatalist. Fatalism is my present to myself.’
As Moez walked off, up the road, he looked back down. ‘You could get yourself a new pair of boots, too,’ he said, grinning, and the day’s walk began.
By the time we reached Khartoum, another week had passed. Moez’s body seemed to be in a better state, and so too did my mind. Somehow, reaching that epiphany on my birthday had transformed me. Whatever black clouds had been smothering me since the failure to make it through South Sudan had parted, and slowly, I began to see the real beauty in the road along the river.
Perhaps because I’d read so much about its history, the name Khartoum evoked in me images of towering minarets, bustling souqs, dusty back streets choked with camels, donkeys and the crumbling remains of a colonialism that had been thrown out with the rubbish. I thought of the great siege, of battlefields and whirling dervishes, of Winston Churchill’s last great cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman, when the British reclaimed the Sudan in 1898; of shifty-looking Bedouin coming in from the desert to trade in gum Arabic, silks and cotton. But, whilst all of this is there, the reality is that Khartoum is also surprisingly modern, with wide avenues, modern banks and hotels sitting on the lush riverside. After months of walking through the wilderness, this was the first metropolis I’d seen since Kampala – and I entered the city with a sense of relief, even joy, at the prospect of being surrounded by people, cars and a ready supply of food.
Khartoum began its existence as an outpost for the Egyptian army after Sudan had been incorporated into Egypt in 1821. Soon, what was a resupply outpost for soldiers became a centre for other kinds of trade as well, and Khartoum exploded as a thriving community. Here, all the goods of Africa could be transported and traded – and, most infamous of all, Khartoum became one of the hearts of the slave trade in central Africa. Key to this was the river along which I had been walking – for it is in Khartoum that the White Nile merges with its sister river, the Blue Nile.
The Blue Nile first erupts from Lake Tana in the heart of Ethiopia, and has already flowed for 900 miles by the time it reaches Omdurman, the suburb of greater Khartoum that sits on the west bank of the river. This confluence of the two great rivers makes Khartoum unique in Africa, a natural melting pot of peoples and cultures. It also marked the last transformation in the river before the long trek to the delta, and I was eager to see it for myself.
In the Acropole Hotel, I waited for Moez to pick me up. Our task for today was simple: head north, through the city, to the point at which the rivers meet. From there, we would cross into Omdurman on the west bank. There was one more provision we needed before continuing the trek north – from Khartoum, we would enter the edges of the Sahara Desert, and the bicycles we had fought doggedly to roll from the border would no longer suffice. From here on in, we were going to need something more stalwart to ferry our packs – and only camels would suffice.
As I waited for Moez, I leafed through a copy of The Times, left behind by another guest on his return to the UK. On the front page, not for the first time, events in Sudan had made world news. Beneath a damning headline lay the story of Meriam Ibrahim, a twenty-seven-year-old Sudanese woman who also happened to be a doctor. After marrying a Christian Sudanese man, educated in the USA, she had been accused of adultery and apostasy – the formal renunciation of religion – and sentenced, first to the lash for adultery, and then to death for the crime of abandoning Islam. The fact that her Muslim father had abandoned her as a child and she had grown up a Christian under the faith of her mother was apparently deemed irrelevant by the judge. The international community, incensed at this disregard for basic human rights, was pushing for Ibrahim to be pardoned – but, so far, Sudan had remained silent.
Lost in the article, I didn’t see Moez appear at my side.
‘Have you seen this?’ I asked.
Moez nodded, grimly. ‘Bashir will not listen, Lev. It is not the way.’
Omar al-Bashir had been the President of Sudan since 1989, rising to power at the head of a military coup, and had then been elected three times in succession, each time in elections under international scrutiny for corruption. Bashir’s record on human rights had always been in question, but never more so than in 2009, when he ordered a systematic campaign of pillage, rape and mass murder against the citizens of Darfur in the west of Sudan. The crisis in Darfur led to Bashir being the very first incumbent president of any nation on Earth to be indicted by the International Criminal Court – but, partly due to the unwillingness of other African states, the warrant for his arrest has never been executed.
I flung the newspaper down, eager to think of better things.
‘It has always been the way in Sudan,’ said Moez as we stepped, blinking, into the blinding light. ‘We fought a war with the South because they are Christians. We fight little wars every day, because we are Muslims and Christians trying to live together.’
Together we crossed the city, through concrete skyscrapers and gaudy hotels, past university buildings and boutique shops, through crowds of men in smart designer gear and sunglasses, women in loose-fitting hijabs and skinny jeans. It all seemed so surreal. After the wooden huts and mud shacks, even the traffic lights and pedestrian crossings seemed absurd. At last, we reached a leafy park nestled between the two rivers – the White Nile surging by on my left, the Blue closing in on my right. A rickety-looking Ferris wheel rose out of the bushes of the Blue Nile riverbank, its deadly carriages containing young couples. A miniature roller coaster, equally lethal, twirled alongside the White. All around, families and couples were having picnics as the fierce sun shone down.
Up ahead, where the park tapered to a point as the two rivers met, security guards manned a barrier. Reaching out a hand to stop me, Moez uttered, ‘Stay here,’ and strode ahead to shake hands with one of the moustachioed guards. After a few minutes, he returned. ‘It’s okay. We can go through and film the river – but we have to be quick. If you see anyone wearing a suit, hide the camera and smile.’
‘Moez, isn’t this just a family amusement park?’
Moez shot me a look and, without another word, I followed him through the barrier.
The path ran through entangled bushes, down to a headland overlooking the river. Standing at its pinnacle, where the White Nile rose from the south and the Blue Nile from the east, we could see fishermen arrayed along the grassy bank, their rods projecting out into the flow. At the point where the two waterways converged, the liquid was slow, the brown water gently lapping against a muddy shore. The fishermen ignored us as we ventured to the bank to dip our hands and symbolically wash our faces. This was a special moment, and in an instant, I felt as if I was back at the beginning, stooping down to drink from the headwaters with Boston in the Nyungwe Forest. Moez must have done this a hundred times already, but he took to the ritual with such obvious relish that I liked him all the more.
‘I am Nubian,’ he said. ‘We’re the people of the Nile. We wouldn’t exist without it.’
‘It looks so . . . ordinary,’ I admitted. ‘The water from one river’s just the same as the next.’ I lifted my camera to take pictures of the confluence, and the vast sprawl of Omdurman on the opposite bank.
‘It’s different in the rainy season. The Blue Nile is usually much clearer than the White. The White Nile should really be called the Brown Nile, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it.’
One of the fishermen laid out a rug on the grass and stood with his hands upturned. Facing the east, the Qiblah – the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca – he began to pray. Closing his eyes, he began to recite verses from the Koran. It was a mystical vision and suddenly I felt very humble to be in his presence. It seemed that the world around this man no longer mattered. The city, the fairground, the sudden plop as a fish jumped to evade a fisherman’s line, the history of a city born out of slavery and destruction, even the constant surging of the Nile – all of this was nothing compared to the thought of this man’s God. To him, this special place was just a piece of dirt on which to prostrate himself. I was watching him, transfixed, when suddenly Moez grabbed me by the arm.
‘Move!’ he said. ‘Let’s go. Now.’
There was something in the tone of his voice that made me obey. Watched by the inquisitive eyes of the fishermen, I took after him up the bank.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Put the camera inside your shirt . . .’
I fumbled to hide it away.
‘Now smile and look back cross the water.’
At the top of the bank, Moez pointed and grinned, beginning to talk loudly about the beauty of the water and the greenery of Tuti Island, the three miles of citrus orchard, vegetable farms and arable land that sits in the middle of the river and provides Khartoum with so much of its fresh food.
I barely noticed a speedboat in the distant water of the Blue Nile slow down and then speed up. After it had passed, Moez stopped his oration and whispered as we hurried back along the path.
‘It’s security. They were watching us.’
‘Moez, they barely glanced at us. They hardly slowed down at all . . .’
‘They saw.’
‘Who gives a damn if they did? What were we doing?’
‘Lev, you don’t understand. They are everywhere. They watch everything. They don’t like foreigners at all – especially English ones with cameras. Do you know how many times I’ve been arrested, for no reason at all? I’ve been with tourists who’ve had their cameras smashed in front of their faces. I had a security agent try to stab me with a bayonet in the Nuba mountains . . .’
The Nuba mountains lay in the south, close to the border with South Sudan. ‘That’s different, surely? Moez, this is Khartoum, not some half-forgotten backwater . . .’
‘You’d be a fool to think so. You’ll find the people of Sudan welcoming and friendly – but the government is another matter. I don’t need any trouble, Lev. They’ll close my business and lock me up. They’re already following me for my other activities . . .’
At last, we had reached the fairground. The rollercoaster tumbled by on my left, children in the front seats screaming in hedonistic abandon.
‘What do you mean . . . other activities?’
‘I’ll tell you later . . .’
We hustled across the fairground. Every time I thought Moez was mad, things twisted in the corner of my vision – and everything looked suspicious. Every man in black shoes became a spy. The slightest look in my direction made me imagine secret policemen. Sideways glances, women in burqas, even teenage boys – they all seemed out of the ordinary now.
‘Before we go for the camels, we should get jellabiyas,’ Moez said. ‘We’ll look less like tourists. With your beard, you’ll pass for Sudanese – or at least an Arab . . .’
I stopped dead. ‘Moez, is there something you’re not telling me?’
At the edge of the fairground, Moez relented. When he looked me in the eyes, I saw a man who was scared.
‘I’m Vice President of the Nubian Front,’ he said. ‘And Secretary of the Anti-Dams Coalition. We . . .’ At first, he did not have the words. ‘We campaign against the dams they build along the river. You have heard of the Aswan High Dam? In 1964, they submerged the entire Nile valley south of Aswan in Egypt for 450km – it wiped out the Nubian heartland, even here in Sudan. It was the biggest forced migration in history – 50,000 of my fellow Nubians had to leave their homes or else be drowned.’ He paused. ‘I can’t tell you how many times the security have tried to take me away – but I’ve always managed to talk my way out of it. I don’t want to take any risks, Lev. The only reason I’m helping you with this expedition is because I think it’s good for Sudan. I’m a patriot. I love this country more than the government that gives it a bad reputation. I want to show the world that it’s a beautiful place, full of beautiful people, not just the government and its terrors – and you, Lev, you can help do that. But I need you to understand: I’m risking everything here, so, please, just do as you’re told.’
Not once, in the weeks we had spent together, had I heard Moez speak like this. Without another word, I nodded in assent.
Moez smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘And while we’re at it,’ he said, ‘you can double my pay . . .’