(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In 1902, the Polish-British author Joseph Conrad published his novel Heart of Darkness. It was created on the basis of his own experiences during a journey up the Congo River, and in this way Conrad was created to the very European perception that there were dark spots on the map of Africa. Of course, this is a piece of colonial past, but nonetheless, there are still parts of the continent that for many people seem unknown. Jamal Mahjoub experienced this when, as a young man, he came to Sheffield to study geology at the university, directly from Sudan: there he was met by a wall of ignorance. Despite England's historical connection to the place, he experienced coming from a forgotten land, and it left a crucial mark on his self-esteem and identity.
Isolated from the world
Mahjoub never became a geologist. Instead, he chose to become a writer, and under the pseudonym Parker Bilal has written a series of crime novels in which the protagonist is rooted in Sudan. The author created his career in the West, and at one point he decided to do something about the dark spots on his own personal map. He wrote the book A Line in the River, which is his reunion with the capital Khartoum and its crooked political and historical conditions. The publisher presents it as a travel book, but it unfolds to be far more than what this slightly superficial genre designation offers.
In Karthoum, the very content of life is reduced to finding a chair where you can sit and wait for eternity.
His first visit to Khartoum starts with the approach. Under him the city glows in the night, but around it the desert and total darkness reign. Khartoum is isolated from the rest of the world and lives his own sluggish life in the middle of nothingness. Sudan has had its heyday through history. The author tells of the ancient civilizations, of the meeting between the Arab world and Africa, and also of the British General Gordon, who tried to give the British Empire a little delayed grandeur in the city, but ended up in mismanagement and European folly. There stands a city where the very content of life is reduced to finding a chair where you can sit and wait for eternity.
The degree of urbanization is unbelievably high in Sudan. Everyone seems to be seeking happiness in Khartoum, which has therefore transformed from a small trading station where the Blue and White Nile run together, to a million town where the majority live in poor slums. Changing regimes have proved incapable of uniting the great country, and in that regard, Mahjoub blames the world community for focusing solely on Darfur and South Sudan, while the country as such remains as one long chain of missed opportunities.
Volatile potential
Jamal Mahjoub considers Jaafar Nimeiri as the closest Sudan has come to actual gathering in modern times. The young officer came to power in a military coup in 1969, and introduced a socialist regime that closely aligned with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabism. Nimeiri tried reforms and in 1972 he ended the first Sudanese civil war.
The author's childhood was shaped by the artistic creativity and liberal way of life that had space in the country under Nimeiri. The father was of an old local official's family, and his mother hails from England, and this international element fit well in a time when the key words were openness to the world, development and five-year plans. But the socialist experiment ran aground. In order to stay together in the countryside, Nimeiri sought a common national identity, which he found by shutting Islamism into the heat. The result was division. The Christian South did not care about the new trends, and soon the many tribes fought each other for life. When Nimeiri was eventually overthrown, the Islamists seized power in Khartoum. Mahjoub's family fled to Cairo, as did the detectives in his crime novels.
The book is a personal journey into an unknown world where even the author feels foreign.
It is the remnants of this volatile development potential he visits. On several occasions, he seeks out family members in Khartoum. They are poor in the true sense of the word, trying to retain the seats of the past while being overtaken by a new and cultureless class that has earned fast millions in the oil industry. These people live in their own gated communities, cut off from the rest of the population – just like Sudan lives secluded from the rest of the world.
A personal journey
One could well miss the comparative element of this at once depressing and fascinating story. How does Sudan differ from other artificial states such as Syria and Libya, where internal ethnic tensions are equally pronounced? Or is there a basis for comparison at all? The answers are followed in vain in the book, nor is it intended to be found. The book is a personal journey into an unknown world where even the author feels foreign. And by its distinctive mix of own observations and family chronicles, excellent reporting and broad strokes with the historical brush, it creates a composite image of why so much has gone wrong for Sudan. The fact that the story above is rarely well-written is only an added attraction.
