The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (4 page)

I gave this to the old man and asked if he would make the phone call for me at a café and perhaps use the rest for a little food for me and for him. Though it was late at night, he returned with a fine chicken dinner for us. He told me details enough of his phone conversation so that I knew he had made the call. Our dinner together reminded me of sharing meals with my father. I had been away from my family a long time, and perhaps that is what I needed to think about in this dark time. My disconnection from them was causing my life great harm. Most of the money was still left, which I gave to the old man for his kindness and because I didn’t think there was more than a one percent chance anything could be done for me in time.

My friends in Cairo soon contacted Zaghawa tribal leaders, one as far away as Scandinavia. They in turn contacted Human Rights Watch and the United Nations. Somehow, somehow, somehow, all of that worked. On the day when I had already been sent in chains to a boat on the Nile, and just before the boat began its journey to Khartoum, I was taken off and sent back to Cairo. I would stay in the horrible prison there for a few more months. But then, great miracle, I was allowed to fly away.

It is hard to know where grace comes from. Perhaps the money was always there, waiting for the curiosity that
comes with right thinking. For a time, I thought the old jailer had perhaps slipped it in there as I slept. But it was so folded and faded that I think it was waiting for me a long time in that pocket, in the way that many things are waiting for us to be ready to receive them.

It was the summer of 2003; an Ethiopian Airlines jet lifted me over the Red Sea in late afternoon. My cousins in Britain had purchased my ticket home. The plane banked over the Nile and then floated south above the river with a view west into the Sahara. Almost as if I had died in the Egyptian prison and was now going home on the wind, there was a magic-carpet feeling to it. I could see, for the first time in my life, the immensity of the Sahara: a forever sea of sand below with scattered dots of green, with the curled and weathered backbones of dead mountains, with the chalk threads of camel trails and dry streams tracing delicate currents around the dunes.

As we continued to rise, the trails disappeared and the dunes became the rough weave of a canvas extending to the distant horizon. This desert of sand is about the size of the entire United States. From above, it is easy to understand why men must build great pyramids to achieve any notice
here.
Amazing to be alive and see such things
, I thought as I rested my head beside the window and sipped a tea. I watched a red sunset spill over the land.
Amazing to be alive. Humdallah, humdallah, amazing. God bless my cousins in London. God bless my friends in Cairo and the human rights groups. God bless the old jailer in Aswan. God bless the hundred-pound note in my jeans. God please even bless the person who invented those little pockets in jeans where such a note might become long lost and someday found. God bless Ahmed and all my brothers and sisters and my mother and father
.

After so many years away, I would see them all soon, though they were now, as my cousins informed me, in the middle of a war. My brother Ahmed would be happiest to see me, and would want to know everything of my adventures.
God bless Ahmed
. I could see him already in front of me, delighted to hear each turn of my story.

In the distance somewhere just beyond my view to the west was Khartoum, its lights probably just now blinking on, the blue dusk probably shining in the strands of the Nile River where it is born from the White and Blue Niles. The Blue comes from Ethiopia and contributes the most water, while the White comes a far greater distance through Lake Victoria, losing much of its water in the vast swamps of southern Sudan. In ancient times there was another great river in Sudan, running through Darfur west to Lake Chad. The great valley where it once ran is the Wadi Howar, also called the Dead Nile by the people. Except for the summer rain time, its waters now flow under the sand.

After a stop in Addis Ababa, I flew in a southern loop through Kenya, Uganda, and the Central African Republic, then cut back up across South Darfur in Sudan. Mostly it
was dark below, as most of this land has little or no electricity and goes to bed early. The stars and a new moon were all I could see for most of this time, until suddenly there were some flickering lights below.

“Where are we?” I asked the young flight attendant whom I had come to know a little; she was perhaps my age, about thirty. She leaned over to look out my window, letting her hand rest gracefully on my shoulder for balance.

“Nowhere, I think!” she smiled as she looked patiently into the dark.

By asking the time until landing, I calculated that we were probably crossing over southern Sudan and very probably South Darfur. The lights below were likely the lights of war—the last flaring of huts and villages attacked earlier that day, of great, centuries-old village trees that had become like bonfires. Darfur was burning.

I rubbed the Zaghawa scars on my temple as I looked down at this dark scene. Somewhere down there—though north of there, really—were my friends, my mother and my father, my sisters and my brothers, uncountable cousins, aunts, uncles, our camels, donkeys, our songbirds, our thousand years of stories. You can imagine this for yourself, friend, flying home and seeing your homeland below in points of fire. Whatever warrior blood comes to you from your ancestors would be working inside you.

Yet, perhaps because I had already seen something of the larger world, it was not so simple as that; I was indeed observing from this altitude. I counted among my friends the people of many tribes and many races, and this makes a
difference in our hearts. I counted also among my acquaintances Jane Eyre, Long John Silver, and Oliver Twist.

Altitude itself is a powerful thing. When travelers are in space, looking at our small planet from a distance where borders and flags cannot be seen or imagined, this also, I am told, bends one toward a peaceful view. That is what I wanted, really, just peace. I was sad and anxious for my people but not angry. I didn’t want to kill any human person. I didn’t even hate the man who was organizing all these crimes, the president of Sudan, though I wished deeply to take him for a long walk through the villages of my childhood and perhaps change his way of thinking about how best to serve the people, which is surely his job.

We floated in the predawn over the deserts of Chad, descending finally into the oasis of N’Djamena (you just say it “Jameena”). Here I had friends and cousins who would give me a place to sleep. With a few dollars from my cousins, I could cross Chad and slip into Darfur in a remote place unnoticed by the Sudan government.

The stairway rolled up to the plane a little after 5 A.M. in N’Djamena. Last off, I paused for a moment atop the stairs; the moist smell of the river, the great starry sky of my freedom greeted me—
Humdallah, humdallah, the Africa of my friends and my family!

From this small porch I could see, even at this early hour, Chadian military vehicles and aircraft moving around the base beside the small airport. The city, too, was already awake with its normal business and the added seasoning of war’s excitement.

The body responds to this. The smells and sounds, the movements of soldiers and vehicles, are all taken in quickly with the keener perceptions that awaken in dangerous times.

Some cousins were at the airport and I was soon eating a wonderful breakfast: kebab meats in rich, very spicy sauces. The news of the war in neighboring Sudan surrounded me: news from cousins here and there in North Darfur; news learned from cell phones and passing travelers; news about villages attacked here, of deaths in the family there, of cousins taking arms to defend their villages, of sisters missing and mothers killed or raped. There was a great sadness and also a great excitement everywhere: our great nest of bees had been swatted hard.

After several days to recover my health, I told my eldest cousin that it was time for me to go to Darfur. He shook my hand and held my shoulder as if he would not see me again. I was given the money I would need for fares in the Land Cruisers that string together the villages of Africa. The women of the family wrapped some food for me to take. I went to a marketplace and found a ride in what looked like a good Land Cruiser with a good driver.

Packed shoulder to shoulder with other travelers, I was soon heading across the rain-flooded wadis.

The Darfur regions of Sudan are on Chad’s eastern border, about six hundred miles and two days away from N’Djamena on bad roads. We stopped in village marketplaces where some riders would leave and others would pile in. The newer riders bore the ceremonial scars of the Zaghawa, my own people. From these people I learned of
the troubles ahead: the burned villages, the rush of people across the border into Chad from Darfur. My stomach hurt with fear for my family.

Everyone knows the family of everyone else among the Zaghawa. If you live in a small town, you know a great deal about the families who live there. If your town had no television or other things to take you away from visiting all the time, your town could be very large and you would still know something about everyone. So it is like that. And of course when people travel close together like this on long journeys, you get to know a great deal about many people. Everyone is well-known eventually.

We finally arrived in the sprawling mud-brick, tin-roof city of Abéché, the last big community in Chad before the Sudan border. It is home to sixty or seventy thousand people in peaceful times, but now was thick with refugees and Chadian soldiers arriving to control the long border and prevent trouble. The soldiers let the refugees come across from Darfur since it was the only humane thing that could be done, and because there is a tradition of hospitality that prevents you from turning away your visitors.

In Abéché I found a ride for the last, but very rough, ten miles to the Sudan border, to the town of Tine. I had been able to get very little sleep so far. Tine would be a good place to rest.

As we approached the town, the smell found us before we could see any huts. It was the smell of tea brewing and food cooking. Tine is Zaghawa, so the cooking smells were very nice after such a long time away.

I went to the sultan’s home, a fenced enclosure of several
large huts. All visitors there are always welcomed with a mattress to sleep outdoors in the enclosure and with good food, for the sultan is there to care for the people.

The war was bringing people by the thousands to the sultan, who was asking his omdas, who look out for the several regions of his kingdom, and his sheikhs, who look out for one village each, to arrange hospitality for the refugees. In North Darfur, for example, there are five such sultans. Several more are in West Darfur, several more in South Darfur, and several more, like this one, in Chad. These compose the ancient nation of Darfur, and Darfur is still organized as it was in the 1500s. The sultanships are hereditary, while the omdas and the sheikhs are appointed by the sultan because they have earned the respect of the people they live among. It is a very different kind of democracy, with the people voting for their local leaders not with ballots, but rather with their attitudes of respect for those who stand out in their service to their communities. The tally is kept in the mind of the sultan. At the national level, of course, there are regular elections, though they are now so corrupted by Bashir that they have no power to reflect the will and wisdom of the people.

The sultan shook my hand and held my shoulder when we first met.

“How is your father and your brother Ahmed?” he asked me. When he said this with such respect, I knew Ahmed would someday be the sheikh of our village.

He told me that I had some cousins who, having fled Darfur, were now living in Tine, and he told me exactly where they could be found. He welcomed me to stay as
long as I pleased, then went back to the thousand emergencies pressing down on him.

Some of the arriving people were gravely wounded by bombs and bullets in the attacks on their villages across the border. Some of the children who had come a long way were thin and ill. Some of the women and girls had been raped and were seriously injured by that. Family members were searching from village to village to find one another, and the sultan, omdas, and sheikhs were helping to find these people and take care of everyone.

Amid all this rush of people and trouble, I lay down on the ground to rest. Because it had rained, plastic tarps were put down under the mattresses provided to guests. Despite the constant coming and going of people and the crying of children, I fell deeply asleep.

In the morning, after drinking green tea with many others, I went looking for a Land Cruiser that would be heading north to Bahai, which is forty-five miles up the border and a good place to cross into Darfur without notice.

In the Tine marketplace, men were cleaning their guns—mostly old rifles and Kalashnikovs—and talking about where they might be most useful. They were buying and trading ammunition and supplies. Others, without guns, were also organizing to go back into Darfur to find relatives and friends. That, of course, was my situation, and I was soon on the road.

As we traveled, we could look to our right across the great valley separating Chad from Sudan and see the white bombers and helicopters in the distance. These aircraft
were bombing villages. We saw funnels of smoke against the horizon. We saw Janjaweed militia units moving down in the wadi, not far from us.

Bahai, my last stop in Chad, was finally in view. It is a small town of scattered huts and mud-brick stores on the flats near a river crossing. Because it is a different Zaghawa kingdom than Tine, there is a different sultan in the area. I paid my respects to him. Like the sultan in Tine, this one was also surrounded by many people who had crowded over the river. And as in Tine, the town was filled with families seeking their lost members, with wounded men, women, and children seeking care. Vacant-eyed people, shocked by the sudden loss of their homes and families, were walking everywhere. Groups of armed defenders were organizing everywhere.