Tears of the Desert (19 page)

Eventually the swarm moved on, and at the end of our first year we had to take our foundation exams. Those that passed would go on to study their chosen degree subject. Those who failed would either have to retake the year, or leave. I was nervous as to how I would fare. Before now, I had always been up against girls from the provinces, but here I was being tested against students from Khartoum, and some of the other major cities.

The morning that the exam results were posted Rania and I rushed down to discover how we had done. I elbowed my way through the crowd of students and nervously ran my eye down the list of names. I found my own, only to discover that I had placed somewhere in the middle of the year. It was a pass, but hardly a good one. I was relieved to have got through, but disappointed. Rania’s mark was a little lower than mine, but still a pass.

As we studied the results I suddenly realized that the names of those who were away fighting the plastic jihad had been included on the board. I simply couldn’t believe it, especially when I realized that they had each been given a mark far higher than my own. I stared at the board with mounting anger, the words of the security officer who had addressed us upon the day of the university shut down ringing in my head.

Jihad is considered superior to academic study,
he’d said,
and so it is only right that those who fight should be rewarded.

So this was their reward! Without being present for most of the year, and without even turning up to take the exams, they had been given top marks. I was furious. I felt as if the university had betrayed me. I felt as if the grand ideals that it supposedly stood for were all just a pack of lies. What was the point of studying, if this was to be the reward for honest endeavor? I turned to Rania, jabbing my finger down the list of names.

“High pass marks,” I snorted. “
For them.
For the plastic jihadists! I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it!”

Before Rania could respond, a male voice cut in. “Why can’t you believe it? If you spend all your time buried in your books, it’s no wonder you don’t know what’s going on!”

I turned to find Ahmed, one of my fellow Zaghawa students, standing behind me. He was in his third year, and his family were traders in Khartoum. I didn’t know him that well, but I was aware that he was involved in political activities at the university. A few times he’d tried to engage me in political discussions, but I’d always shrugged him off, telling him that I was here to study. Rania and I wandered away disconsolately. Ahmed fell into step alongside us.

“Well done on passing,” he remarked. “But it’s time you opened your eyes, don’t you think? There’s no point in trying to pretend this is simply a place for academic study. It isn’t. It is a recruiting ground—both for those dumb idiots who support this regime, and those of us who oppose it.”

“And what about those of us who don’t want to get involved?” I countered. Ahmed shrugged. “Then don’t get involved. Bury your head in the sand. But you’d better prepare yourself for more favors for the jihadists, like those fraudulent exam results, and more trouble for those of us who refuse to join their jihad. Better get used to it.”

“D’you think they’ll be back again?” I asked. “Those men who closed the campus . . .”

Ahmed snorted. “You really think they ever left? Look around you.
Open your eyes.
They’re here. They have their people everywhere, talking to the gullible, showing their videos, recruiting, recruiting, urging students to go to war and be martyrs. No need to take any exams, they say
—come and fight.
No need to read any books, they say
—learn to shoot a gun. Write your name on the exam papers and leave the rest to us.
”

In Ahmed’s smoldering anger I reckoned I could see some of my cousin Sharif’s reasons for becoming the rebel spirit that he had. But still I refused to get involved. Instead, I returned to the village for the end-of-term break and tried my best to put such troubles to the back of my mind. I was about to start my studies in medicine proper. The dream was that close to being realized. I didn’t want anything to jeopardize that.

The medical degree breaks down into four subjects: general medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology. I had already decided that I wanted to specialize in the last one—the care of women during pregnancy and childbirth. This was where the need was greatest in our village: I had seen so many cases where babies had died during childbirth and mothers had become terribly ill.

During my second year I had to study all four subjects, and I knew I would face exams at the year’s end. In each subject I would be awarded either an excellent, a pass, or a fail. I would need to pass all four subjects, achieving excellence in obstetrics and gynecology, to be able to specialize in that area of medicine. I spent large amounts of time secreted in the library, poring over medical books and cramming. I did my best to avoid Ahmed, and others involved in the political struggle, keeping my head firmly on my studies.

I acquired the reputation of being a goody-goody, with my head always stuck in my books. Most students believed that I had not the faintest interest in politics, or even the vaguest sense of the trouble that was brewing across the country. The only context in which I showed a spark of dissention was human dissection. As part of our studies in surgery we each had to complete a course in the cutting and identification of the parts of the human body. We broke up into teams of four, the university providing each team with a human corpse on which to work.

Each cadaver was kept on a rack in a giant freezer. It was immediately plain for all to see that the corpses were exclusively black Africans. Our corpse had the most amazing face, with a mass of dot-scarring in a swirling pattern over cheeks, nose, and forehead. Rania remarked that this was the scarring of the Nuer tribe, one of the main rebel groups fighting in the south. With black gallows humor we named our corpse “James,” as we reckoned that would be a suitable name for a man from the Nuer tribe.

I asked the laboratory technicians from where James had come. All the corpses came from the Capital Cadaver Collect. I asked how exactly a corpse ended up there. Various explanations were offered. Some were houseboys to Arab families. They had died, and upon their death no relatives could be traced, and so they were donated for dissection. Some were refugees who had fled the fighting in the south. Others had died in road traffic accidents, and as no family came forward they were sent for dissection.

Finally, I asked the question that was foremost in my mind: Why were there only black Africans? The lab technicians confessed that they didn’t know why, and this troubled them. On one occasion some Nuer people had turned up demanding to know why their son had been sold for dissection without their knowledge. The lab technicians felt terrible about this, but what could they do? Their job was simply to fetch corpses for dissection from the Collect, not to check on the provenance of the bodies.

The more I dwelled upon this the angrier I became. If some were victims of road traffic accidents, then surely Arabs also died in such accidents—so why didn’t we get their bodies? Why only ever black Africans? I discussed this with Rania, Dahlia, and the others, and it became a big issue among the students. At one point we were even considering boycotting the dissection course, but we realized this might jeopardize our studies.

“If it wasn’t for us black Africans the Arabs couldn’t feel so superior,” I fumed. “They need us—they need someone to keep down, to keep under them.”

Rania agreed. “They’re just playing games with the blacks in this country. They don’t give a damn about us when we’re alive, and even less when we’re dead!”

How horribly full of foresight those words were to prove.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rumors of War

I knew how valuable my qualifying as a doctor would be for the people of our village. That gave me the strength and fortitude to persevere with my studies, and I did well. There were several further shutdowns of the university, but luckily they largely left the medical faculty alone. Perhaps they realized that they needed doctors in the country, and to send medical students to fight in this futile, murderous war wasn’t very wise.

I became increasingly fascinated by the traditional medicines used by Halima the
Fakir,
and by Grandma. I had good laboratory facilities at my disposal, and I decided to determine what medicinal value such cures might have. I was particularly interested in the ointment made out of burned pigeon feces, which was used to treat cuts and burns. Then there were the scores of plants, shrubs, bark, and roots that Halima and Grandma took from the forest. Each time I went home I gathered a few more samples.

Some of these village cures had no medicinal value whatsoever. When someone had jaundice the medicine woman would burn their skin with a knife heated over the fire. Six or seven times she would apply the red-hot knife, the smoke and steam sizzling up from the skin. If you had a bad migraine, the medicine woman would use the hot knife on the side of your head, or on your neck if that’s where the pain was. There was every chance that this would make things worse, especially as the burns so often became infected.

There were other ailments that were treated by traditional “cutting”—but invariably the so-called treatment proved more dangerous than the illness itself. If a child had whooping cough their throat would swell into a big goiter. The medicine woman might decide to cut it in an effort to try to “drain” the goiter. But the goiter was in reality a swollen gland, and more often than not the child would die from the bleeding, infections, and trauma.

One lady in our village had given birth to seven daughters in a row. Her husband had decided to take a second wife, as he desperately wanted a son. Then, to the joy of both parents, their eighth child born was a boy. But he soon developed whooping cough, and so the medicine woman had cut the goiter. The bleeding refused to stop and eventually the boy had died. The distraught father had accused the medicine woman of murdering his son, and the mother had never really recovered her peace of mind.

But several of the herbal cures did seem to have merit. Grandma would make a paste out of the
taro
shrub to heal wounds. When I tested the
taro
plant I found it to contain cutins—natural chemicals that promote healing. The drying and burning of the plant simply rendered it into a fine powder, so that it could be more easily applied and absorbed into the wound.

I reached my final year at university proud that I had come so close to achieving my father’s dream. But early one morning I awoke to the stomping of heavy boots just outside the dormitory window. Word rapidly spread that the security men had locked down the boarding house. No one was being allowed to leave. For several minutes I crouched in the darkness, worried sick that this was it—that they were going to forcibly carry us off to the jihad. I vowed to myself that I would resist.

One or two of the city girls had mobile telephones, and they managed to contact their parents. They found out the gist of what was going on. Word was passed around the darkened dorm, whispered from student to student. Fighting had broken out in my area, Darfur. A group of rebels had attacked the airport at El Fasher. Dozens of soldiers had been killed and several aircraft destroyed. After the attack, the rebels had melted into the desert. It was seen as being a major victory for the Darfuri rebels, whoever they might be.

Soldiers had been ordered onto the streets of Khartoum and all the major cities, as the National Islamic Front feared a nationwide uprising. Security men were posted at every university to ensure that the trouble didn’t spread. The parents of the city girls were urging them to return home as soon as they could. But with all students locked in their dorms, there was clearly no way that any of us were going anywhere just yet.

“The Africans, the Darfuris—they’re trying to crush the Arabs!” Dahlia whispered. “They killed lots of soldiers. They’re saying it’s a big defeat for the government. . . . Can you believe it? This isn’t the south.
It’s Darfur.
It’s
that
close to Khartoum!”

“You know something—I
can
believe it,” I replied. “And
I
am a Darfuri, or had you forgotten? I’m also a black African.”

“But this isn’t people
like you,
” Dahlia hissed. “I mean, you’re a model student. You don’t
support
what they’re doing.”

“Listen, if you keep the black people down under your boot for so long, what d’you expect? In their own country! D’you expect them to be happy? D’you expect them to do nothing?”

Dahlia was gazing at me in amazement. Some of the other Arab city girls had gathered around. They were equally astonished. I was the goody-goody from the library. I was the perfect student. How could I be saying such things? I guess I was emboldened by the news that my people were fighting back; maybe that was why.

“Look, this is war,” I told them. “And it’s a war that may come right to Khartoum.
To Khartoum.
And if it does, d’you think I won’t be supporting my tribe, my people, my fellow black Africans?”

“But we’re all friends,” Dahlia objected. “There’s no trouble between us. There never has been. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“There’s one thing you have to understand,” I replied. “You have trodden us down for too long. You can try to ignore it, but it’s true. You treat people worse than animals, and eventually they will turn and bite you.”

Dahlia and the others stared at me. Their astonishment had turned to apprehension. Perhaps they had never heard such fighting talk. Perhaps in their privileged lives, in their plush houses with their black servants, they really did have no idea what was going on. But that was no excuse. Did they never talk to those servants? Ask them why they were so hopelessly poor? Ask them what had destroyed their happy lives and forced them to flee as refugees to Khartoum? Ask them how they had ended up as fourth-class citizens, barely any better than animals?

By midafternoon the security men had relented. Students were being allowed out to get food and to wash. Many took the opportunity to return home. In no time, the campus was empty. All that remained were the village girls like Rania and myself. The people of Darfur had finally shown their hand, and proven how strong they could be. How far would this go, I wondered? Would they fight their way to Khartoum and topple those who had stolen power? Would they return this suffering nation to an open, civilized, and democratic one?

Two weeks after the attack on El Fasher airport life at the university had returned pretty much to normal. The Arab students trickled back and we resumed our studies. There were barely four months to go until our final exams, so there was little time to dwell on what had happened. But the attitude of Dahlia and the other Arab girls had changed. They were distant toward me now, and in a way I wasn’t surprised. I had shown my teeth, revealed my claws. I was no longer the quiet little goody-goody in the library. I was the enemy within.

Further reports of fighting filtered in from Darfur, but the news was worrying. The army was counterattacking, burning and destroying whole villages. The fear of an imminent takeover of the country was receding. There was little being reported in the media, but rumors came via word of mouth and there were scores of horror stories. We heard of whole villages being massacred. Innocent men, women, and children were being gunned down. Increasingly, I was worried for the fate of my own village and my own family.

There was a great deal of tension between the black African and Arab students now. The trust and friendship that had once existed had almost completely broken down. Occasionally, Dahlia would ask me if I had news of my family, or if everything was all right in my village. But there were others who breathed not a word of concern.

Just prior to our final examinations I managed to get a call through using a public phone box to Uncle Ahmed, in Hashma. The fighting was far away from our area, he reassured me, and my family wasn’t in any immediate danger. I tried to put my worries to the back of my mind, as I readied myself for my exams. But even as I did so, I knew that my dream of becoming a doctor had somehow turned sour. At a stroke, war seemed to have overridden everything, making the years of study seem somehow so irrelevant.

My final-year tutor, an Arab academic, tried to encourage me. He told me that I was on course for a top degree mark. I had attended each and every one of my lectures, and he knew that I stood to do well. Those students who skipped lectures used to rely on me to copy their lecture notes from. The three weeks of back-to-back final examinations were hell. At the end I was completely exhausted, but I felt confident that I had done well. All that now remained was for me to pass my oral exam—my
viva.

The
viva
is a one-on-one interview, and I knew it could make all the difference in getting a top mark. As I stood before my tutor and the external examiner, I felt confident that they would back me with a strong recommendation. The external examiner asked me a few questions, all of which I answered easily. Then he turned to my tutor and asked how my attendance had been at lectures. Just for an instant I saw my tutor hesitate, his eyes flickering in my direction, and then he gave his answer.

“I’m afraid that’s the one area wherein this pupil has failed to excel,” he remarked. “If the truth be told, there were many times when she failed to attend. As her tutor I have looked into this, and I understand that she had a similarly poor record with all lectures.”

I stood there in shock, refusing to believe what I had just heard. Barely a month ago my tutor had been congratulating me on my attendance record, and urging me to do my very best. Yet here he was telling the external examiner a pack of lies. The external examiner fixed me with a severe eye, but I figured I could detect just the hint of an amused sneer.

“Being a medical doctor is a huge responsibility,” he remarked. “In fact, I cannot think of another degree qualification that carries such onerous responsibility. Your studies are about saving human life. You must ensure you know your subject inside out. Failure to attend lectures is a serious matter.”

“But I . . . I did attend,” I replied. I glanced at my tutor in confusion. “I did attend. I attended everything . . . All of my studies. In fact, I can’t think of a single lecture that I missed . . .”

I saw the examiner bend to his desk and scribble a note onto my
viva.
“Your duty as a doctor is not only to uphold life,” he remarked, without glancing up at me. “It is also to be truthful. . . . Thank you, Miss Bashir, your
viva
is over. You may go now.”

I turned to leave the room. As I reached for the door handle I felt hot tears of rage pricking my eyes. Just as soon as I stepped out of the room my friends were around me, asking me what had happened. Rania wiped the tears away from my face, as she tried to comfort me. Her
viva
was coming next. At least now she knew what to expect.

“The tutor’s a coward,” Rania told me, as she gave me a reassuring hug. “A coward and a liar. No one has a better attendance rate that you. Everyone knows that. You know what this is all about? It’s their way to make sure you don’t get a top mark. That examiner’s been put there by the government, and your tutor’s scared of him, that’s all.”

Several of the other students agreed. With Darfuris rebelling across the country, how could they let me, a Darfuri, come in at or near the top of my year? I had been marked down as a shirker and a liar in my
viva—
that’s how they had got me. In due course I did graduate, but it was with a middling mark. I wasn’t surprised: It was what I had expected. Yet I still felt cheated and betrayed, as if the system and the country were against me.

In contrast to how I had so often dreamed of receiving my medical degree—in a blaze of happy glory—it was a sad, empty affair. My parents didn’t even attend my graduation, and neither did I. The very day that I heard my result I set off for home. There were few goodbyes that I felt like saying. I had an emotional parting with Rania, and I said as warm a farewell as I could to Dahlia. But all I really wanted to do was to reach home and see that everything was all right. That was what was foremost in my mind.

Together with a dozen other students from Darfur—Zaghawa, Fur, and others—I set off on the train journey back to Hashma. Ahmed, the Darfuri student and political activist, came with me. Our conversation was forever about our fears for our village and our families. Fear was like a corrosive acid eating away at us. We talked continuously about the war and the fighting and who was going to win. Each of us prayed that our own village had remained untouched by the killing.

We all hoped for the best, while secretly fearing the very worst. I prayed to God to protect my family, and to keep the war away from them. As I retraced the journey that I’d first taken with my father, some six years earlier, I reflected on how things had changed. Then my heart had been full of bright hope and dreams for the future. Now it was full of a dark apprehension and dread.