The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (3 page)

The three of us couldn’t hear much of anything for a few days. Eleven people died, mostly government soldiers.

Soon after that my father sent me to school in the largest city in North Darfur, El Fasher. I was his youngest son. Living with cousins, I could finish primary school and continue on to intermediate and secondary school. I was very sad to leave home.

Life in El Fasher was overwhelming—too many people, too many cars, too many new things. I got very sick the second week, mostly homesick. El Fasher is a city of mud buildings and sandy streets: so many streets that I got lost all the time. There are some government buildings and a large prison where, everyone knew, terrible things happened.

My brother Ahmed knew from our cousins that I was having a hard time, so he came to see me. He stayed for a week until I got better, walking me to school with his long arm over my shoulder and making me feel like home. He said that fate had given me a blessing, and that I should work hard at school. He came to visit whenever he could, which was quite often. He showed me good things about the town. Eventually I grew to like El Fasher.

I got a job cleaning tables at a restaurant after classes. I watched television for the first time. A cousin would put his TV outside his home so all the cousins and neighbors
could watch. I didn’t like it much because it was mostly about the government of Sudan’s military. I did like the movies, but the first one I saw was a Clint Eastwood movie, and I went running down the street when I thought the bullets would come out of it from all the shooting. My cousins came laughing down the street to get me.

A movie house played American films once a week and films from India the rest of the time. It was very cheap; I went to see every new film with a few coins of my restaurant money.

At the restaurant, and from the older students, I began to learn about politics. There were many military operations against the Zaghawa at that time, and many Zaghawa were leaving El Fasher to join resistance groups. Dictator Omar Hassan Ahmal al-Bashir had just taken over Sudan, which made us all angry. A Chad commander named Idriss Déby was fighting the Chad government for control of that country. He is a Zaghawa and we thought he was a great hero. Some wanted to go join him. He would later become president of Chad.

This fighting sounded like a good idea to me. I dropped out of high school and hid for two weeks, planning with friends to go to Chad and join up with Déby.

Ahmed came and found me. He sat me down under a tree and told me that I should use my brain, not a gun, to make life better. He said it would be wrong to turn away from the gifts given to me by God and my family.

“Shooting people doesn’t make you a man, Daoud,” he said. “Doing the right thing for who you are makes you a man.” So we walked back to town and I returned to school.
I became interested in English because of a wonderful teacher, and I became lost in the classic books of England and America. I particularly loved Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
, Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
, Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
, George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, and Alan Paton’s
Cry, the Beloved Country
. These changed me; they opened and freed my mind. I still paid attention to politics, however.

Around this time my father wanted me to accept an arranged marriage and come home to be a camel herder, just as the men of our family had always done. I thought I might do that, as I loved camels so, but I wanted to see something of the world first, and I wanted to choose my wife and let her choose me, too. A camel, by the way, can be away from its human family or camel family for twenty years and still know them very well when somehow it comes back. Camels are completely loyal and full of love and courage.

My urge to see something of the larger world was perhaps from all the television and movies and mostly the books. I finished my studies and, giving my apologies to my father, who took me for a walk and said I must learn to take care of my family one way or another if I was to be a man, I headed to Libya to find a good job.

I got there by camel and by truck. Déby, the new president of Chad, was traveling overland to Libya at the same time. He and his motorcade got hopelessly lost in the dunes. Helicopters from Libya found most of them and led them onward. The truck caravan I was in found the rest of his vehicles and gave the men much-needed water. At an
oasis, I saw Déby standing and went to greet him and shake his hand.

When you travel across the Sahara by camel, or even by vehicle, it is easy to get lost in the dunes—there are no roads. You just go.

A special red salt, dug from North Darfur, is put in camels’ water to help them make the long trip. Horses are of no use here, since it would take three or four camels to carry the water and food needed by one horse. It is better just to take the camels.

If you travel in the summer months, the sun and heat will be very hard on the camels; if you travel in the winter months, the freezing sandstorms will cut your face if you do not hide from them deep in your robes. These are not small trips: you might take your camels a thousand miles, which would be like traveling from Athens to Berlin through all of Serbia, Austria, and the Czech Republic, or from Miami Beach to Philadelphia—a very long way without roads or shelter.

There are many human bones in the desert, particularly where North Darfur blends into the great dunes of the Sahara. Some of these bones are still wearing their clothes and leathery skin, while others have been bleached by hundreds of years of the searing sun. Mirages make birds sitting on distant dunes—birds no bigger than your fist—look like camels. Mirages make dry flatlands look like distant lakes. Mirages make the bones of a single human skeleton look like the buildings of a city far ahead. This sounds impossible, but the Sahara is an impossible place. All trails are erased with each wind. You can note the stars
at night, if it is clear, or see where the sun rises or sets, also if it is clear, but it is not always clear, and the tilted horizon provided by the great dunes disorients you even under a cloudless sky. From ten in the morning until about four in the afternoon you cannot guess the direction.

You are modern and think your compass and your GPS will keep you from trouble. But the batteries will give out in your GPS, or the sand will ruin it. Your compass may break or become lost as you try to put away your bedding one morning in a hard sandstorm. So you will want to know the ways that have worked for thousands of years.

If you are good, like my father and brothers, you will put a line of sticks in the sand at night, using the stars to mark your next morning’s direction of travel; you can extend this line as needed. Be careful: some people die because they look to a distant mountain as their guide, but the wind moves these mountains around; you might travel in circles until your eyes close and your heart withers.

It says everything about this land to know that even the mountains are not to be trusted, and that the crunching sound under your camel’s hooves is usually human bones, hidden and revealed as the wind pleases.

My years away from Darfur were mostly good years. It takes nothing away from them to say that I ended this sojourn as a prisoner in Egypt.

In a prison in Aswan, southern Egypt, a very old jailer—perhaps the age of my own father—was kind enough to let me talk to him through the bars late at night. My Arabic served me well with him, and he asked about my adventures. His company was very welcome.

“Why did you go to Libya? How is it there for a young man like yourself?” he asked as he made a cigarette for himself and one for me.

I told him that I had found a warm community of Zaghawa friends and cousins working along the seacoast there. They made a place for my mattress and found me a restaurant job at a military academy. The Arab students there were also kind to me and lent me their books to study,
constantly encouraging me. And always I was asking for more books.

“Ah, you were like the ancient Library of Alexandria once on that shore, demanding the loan of every book from every traveler so it might be copied for the library,” he said.

I told him that the library in my head was not quite so good as that, but that I did read about philosophy and history and some politics—and the great novels, of course, which I love and which are read everywhere.

“But you had no passport?”

I told him I did have a visa at first, but I did not have permission to move from Libya to Egypt, where some of my friends had gone and were telling me of much higher wages. Because such workers suffer lonely lives away from home in order to send money to their families, the lure of better pay is very powerful. It is the only thing. So I went to Egypt and worked in restaurants along the Red Sea. I made many friends in Egypt, from every race and background. Then I heard that the wages were even better in Israel. If I could get on the other side of the Red Sea to the Israeli resort town of Eilat, I could go from a hundred dollars a month to about a thousand. This would provide me with enough money to go to college and still send money home. Or perhaps I could find a job in Beersheba, where Ben-Gurion University would be just right for me. I had been working in a restaurant on the Red Sea owned by a Bedouin. I then met a Bedouin man who helped people get across the border to Israel. He showed me where to cross. For me, it was not a good place.

I was immediately captured when I came out of the Gaza Strip into Israel proper. Exhausted, I had fallen asleep by the gushing irrigation pumps of a beautiful farm. I woke to see Israeli soldiers standing around me with their guns pointed at my head.

So I did get to Beersheba, but only to the prison there. It was actually very nice, with television and free international calls. I would recommend it even over many hotels I have known.

I was soon sent back to Egypt, where I was harshly imprisoned. You might have some idea of how bad a prison can be, with the filth and darkness and violence of it, but you would have some ways to go.

“Many die in those Cairo prisons,” the old man in Aswan said, but he did not need to tell me that. I had taken my own turn kneeling in the sun all day begging for water and being beaten by the bare fists of a huge guard. I had spent months in a cell so crowded that we had to take turns sitting down. Some of the ninety people in this small room had been there for thirteen years. It was very hot and filled with stench.

A ten-year-old boy was beaten so brutally that he was dying as I tried to comfort him.

How completely sad that he would die so far from his family! In Africa, our families are everything. We do all we can to help them, without question. But I had long known that I could not help my family quite like my brothers did. I could not herd camels and cattle as well as Ahmed, or solve village problems like him; I could not be as hardworking
in the bush as Juma, or as patient and good at keeping the family together. For to do such things well requires that they be done happily and forever, and my particular education had inclined me toward a hungry curiosity for the world. But I was not doing so well without my family.
If, if,
if
I am ever released from this place
, I told myself,
I must return home
—not forever, for that was not my life, but for long enough to heal all the wounds of my long separation.

However, nothing is all bad, and there were many good people to meet in prison from all over Africa with interesting stories for us to listen to as we stood through the nights and days, stepping on roaches and scratching lice but at least getting to learn something interesting about other countries and other people.

After too much of this, the Egyptians were going to send me to Sudan, where, as the old jailer in Aswan advised me, I would probably find my doom. From Aswan, I was going to be put on a Nile boat and taken south to Khartoum.

“It’s too bad you could not have stayed in the jail in Israel,” the old man said.

Indeed, I agreed, it was a shame to leave.

“If you have some friends, you should get them to try to stop you from being deported to Sudan,” he advised.

Some Sudanese men had tried to sneak into Israel from Jordan a few years earlier. After the Israelis sent them back to Jordan, the Jordanians in turn sent them back home to Sudan, where they were executed in Khartoum. This
harshness was, I believe, the Arab government of Sudan’s way of trying not to be embarrassed in front of other Arab nations regarding its poor economy. When this atrocity was made public by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Israel and other countries agreed not to extradite people to Sudan or to other countries that might do so. When Israel sent me to Egypt, they had Egypt sign an agreement promising not to send me to Sudan. It was happening anyway, unless I could get my situation known to the human rights groups.

Besides this problem, the Egyptian prison had taken a heavy toll on my health, and the old man could see I was very weak. He seemed to have a father’s concern. I said that I had no way to contact anyone, and I asked if he could perhaps make a call to my Zaghawa friends in Cairo, who might contact the groups.

“That would be very expensive from here, and I have no money, my son,” he said sadly. “Maybe you have some money and I will do it for you.”

What happened next was not the first miracle in my life, but it was one of the best. It doesn’t matter how many times you put your hands in your empty pockets; when someone asks if you have any money, you will put your hands in there again. This time, after so long in prison, after wearing these old jeans for many months in the vilest of prison cells with nothing to do but stand in the heat and put my hands in my pockets, I somehow let my thumb slip into the tiny watch pocket above the right pocket of my jeans—a forgotten pocket. I felt the edges of something.
Folded into a small square was an Egyptian hundred-pound note, worth maybe twenty U.S. dollars, that I had no memory of ever putting in there. It was tightly folded and frayed after so long, but I unfolded it carefully. It was more than enough for an expensive phone call, certainly.