Prologue
I: November 2005, Shamal Darfur
He stands out of place on the periphery of the world, bloodshot eyes hidden behind knock-off Ray Bans, lenses scratched by the sand. The periphery…how else can he describe the backdrop of craggy mountains set before the undulating plains and scrub of Wilayat Shamal Darfur. The edges of civilization are eroded away and raw humanity, with all its animalistic tendances, are barred open. He’s young for an ex-pat, Alexander Barr is, and he is new at this life, an overseas contractor at twenty-two. The austerity appeals to him. His dark hair has grown long, and he shaves intermittently, once every couple of weeks. The stubble makes him look older; he feels like he is becoming feral. He has never been further away from home. Does he even have a home at this point? No property, no debt, no car. Everything he earns is saved, not spent. If people are held hostage by their possessions, then he is a truly free man.
He was able to break away from his duties at one of the base camps south of El Fasher, the provincial capital, to accompany a group of advisers conducting live fire training with the Senegalese peacekeepers. A hundred armored vehicles, donated to the African Union peacekeeping mission by the Canadian Government, had recently arrived in-country, and the peacekeepers had to be familiarized with the vehicle’s functionality. He is hungover, eyes bleary and head ringing from radiator distilled aragi procured from the Abu Shouk IDP camp. He pulls a draught of warm water from a Nalgene bottle and spits it on the ground after swishing it in his mouth.
The advisors had placed targets at the base of a small mountain range about twenty or so kilometers east-northeast of El Fasher and staged the vehicles about half a kilometer back. The mountains themselves jutted out severely from the plains to heights of perhaps 800 meters. From the basecamp, they give the impression that one is fenced into Darfur, blocked as it were from escaping to Kordofan. That, however, is beside the point; Kordofan is no place of refuge. Wahba, the rizhaghet trader in El Fasher, told Alex that the mountain range is near Beringiya, the site where Darfur’s last Sultan, Ali Dinar, had laid an ambush for the Sirdar’s Camel Corps during the British campaign of retribution and conquest in 1916.Wahba had insisted that Alex accompany him on a tour of the museum near the souk shortly after he had arrived in theatre. It was there that Alex read about how Ottomans and Germans during the First World War had convinced North African tribesmen to declare jihad on the British. The great tribal leader Ahmed Sharif as-Senussi rallied to the cause and attacked Egypt through Libya. The smoldering discontentment of proud people, yoked in colonial holdings throughout North Africa, flared into a violence that spread like wildfire. At that time, Darfur was a quasi-independent state and declared allegiance to the Senussi movement. The Sultan launched raids through Kordofan and quickly incurred the Empire’s wrath. The Sirdar of Egyptian-Sudanese forces, Sir Reginald Wingate, quickly organized a flying column of British and Sudanese Soldiers to invade Darfur and neutralize the threat. The forces met in battle at Berengiya. The Sirdar’s men anticipated the ambush and, through their modern firepower, discipline, and tactics, succeeded in removing the Sultan’s Dervishes from the face of the earth and sending the Sultan on his fatal flight towards the peaks of Jebel Marra where an errant bullet fired from great distance ended his reign outside of the ancient city of Kabkabiya in December 1916. No man can escape his fate.
The ground around Beringiya was now being littered with fresh brass, as it was ninety years ago, and Alex walked from vehicle to vehicle, smelling the burnt cordite and watching the tracers arc towards the mountains. His stomach turned and, with his right thumb and index finger, he squeezed the pressure point on the meaty area between his left thumb and index finger. An old trick to combat nausea. Looking around, he noticed pottery shards on the ground. He picked one up and turned it over in his hand. It could be a thousand years old or a week old. Man has lived in Darfur since the dawn of history. Alex had seen the terraces eroding away in the Marrah Mountains in his flights throughout the decaying region. Ancient cultures, lost to the sands of time, once populated this land. He dropped the shard on the ground.
Alex took stock of his life, of where he was. Nine months ago, I was in college, about to enter my senior year. It’s amazing the turns life can take, the decisions and whims that brought me here, he thought. It boiled down to one moment, when he was honest with himself. A single intense and, paradoxically, sober moment despite his inebriation at the time. He thought back to the spartan dorm room in Washington D.C., him, slumped in a chair and staring at the dark-haired form in his bed. She was peaceful, beautiful. A feeling came over him that everything was wrong. His entire path, his trajectory, felt off. It was not a question of morality or ethics. There was no inner turmoil. Why do I keep thinking of it as a ‘feeling’, it was something deeper than that, but what word do I use? he thought.
That was the moment he rebelled, the moment he rejected everything, slumped in the chair, now oblivious to the girl in his bed. The feeling stayed with him through dawn, solidifying into resolve as sobriety finally asserted itself. It felt somehow stronger in the cold light of day. Within three months, he was in Sudan, in Darfur. Was it… rather, is it, a form of nihilism? The thought had played in his mind repeatedly since that night. Is this a pursuit of that feeling, the resolve to rebel…or am I fleeing from it? he thought.
It was not nihilism. And it definitely was not altruism that brought me here. An opportunity presented itself at the right moment and it just happened to be on this contract, in this remote corner of the world. And that felt appropriate. It was not nihilism, nor was it altruism. But certainly, it was not for mercenary reasons either. The money is good, but that’s just an added benefit. If I am honest with myself, it was curiosity more than anything else that brought me here. And what good comes from curiosity? Alex ground the ceramic shard into the sand with his boot and walked back to the firing line.
By late afternoon, the training had ceased, and the soldiers began preparing for the return to El Fasher. The convoy, in its totality, consisted of about fifteen vehicles, including eight of the newly arrived armored vehicles. Alex jumped in a Land Cruiser pick-up with Mubark, a short Fur tribesman with a game leg attached to his contract.
Within minutes, one of the escort vehicles got stuck in a sand drift at the base of a ridge and the whole convoy stopped while attempts were made to extricate it. Mubark pulled the Land Cruiser to the side of the trail and Alex got out and walked to the top of the ridge. He waited with Mubark and basked in the light of the setting sun. An outlying ridgeline paralleled theirs at a distance of about a kilometer and a half. The sun was low in the sky and beginning to set behind the ridgeline. Silently, they both watched the sky darken. Alex steeled himself for the cold that would inevitably come with the night. His eyes focused on the ridge, and he distinguished the outlines of three small figures walking up its spine in a close group. They were the size of ants; indeed, his first thought was how much they looked like insects from this distance. He watched lazily, wondering who they were. Are they shepherds coming back from a long day of herding their immense flocks of flat-tailed sheep? Sheep, now safely resting in a kraal by some unnamed village on the outskirts of Fasher. Or perhaps they’re rebels of some sort, returning from a sortie or reconnoitering ambush spots between government outposts.
The group stopped at the apex of the ridge and remained still for a few minutes. Boredom and curiosity overtook Alex, and he pulled out a pair of cheap binoculars to study the trio. Even with the binoculars, he could only make out their silhouettes. They appeared to be discussing something with great animation.All three started gesticulating wildly. One of the group seemed to strike at one of his comrades with his arm. The other followed suit and the injured man he fell to the ground and disappeared from view. Then the remaining two start fighting each other. After a moment, the fallen figure arose and joined in again. All three tore at each other. The action was silent from Alex’s vantage, making the violence all the more off-putting. He turned to Mubark and pointed at the group. Mubark nodded and Alex offered him the binoculars. He looked briefly at the melee and shook his head solemnly. From afar, whatever the fight was about seemed like nothing; it was almost entertaining. The cause and intensity of the clash could not be understood by either Alex or Mubark. Alex looked back at the stuck vehicle. No progress was being made.
Alex motioned to Mubark, for the one spoke but little English and the other a mere smattering of Arabic, to get in the truck and drive to the opposite ridge. The baser part of Alex wanted to see the fight up close, and the kinder part of him wanted to see if it could be stopped. He was still very much a youth, both in years and maturity, and he thought little of putting himself in difficult situations. Mubark drove. They approached the ridge and parked at its base. Two of trio were still fighting and one lay on the ground. They were no longer ants in the distance. They were people, human beings. The silhouettes now had faces with unique and features…faces that were battered and flowing with blood, bodies with torn shirts and bruised limbs. They hardly seemed to notice the arrival of the newcomers. The one on the ground lay motionless, with unblinking glass-like eyes and a gaping mouth-full of yellowed teeth bespattered with flecks of red.His neck was twisted in a severe manner and dust clung to his body. Alex thought of a recent exchange with Henri, a viciously efficient South African colleague, in which Henri said that the quickest way to determine if someone was dead in “High Africa”—his term for the scrubland and desert—was to look at how the dust acts on the skin. “A living body is charged with electric currents; the static keeps the dust from clinging too close. When you’re dead, the static dissipates and the dust melds in with the skin,” he had explained.
These men were youths, no more than twenty or so. The fight, however, was no youthful scruff. No, this a life-or-death struggle. These youths, these children, were ripping each other to shreds. Alex and Mubark were now twenty yards away. He shouted at them to get them to stop. They paid no heed to his calls. He started to walk towards them, he could separate them, he thought. He was physically strong, with endurance and a high pain threshold. It would mean nothing to pull these two apart and keep them separated using his brute strength. Mubark placed a restraining hand on his shoulder and gestured not to approach. The boys continued in their fight, hands at each other’s throats, screaming and grunting with brutal ferocity. Mubark shouted something and they ignored him. He shouted at them again, this time louder, and receiving the same treatment, he threw his hands up in the air and hobbled back to the truck. Alex followed. To intervene would be to invite their wrath. They drove back to the convoy; the soldiers were still working on the stuck vehicle. As the sun disappeared behind the ridgeline, a strong wind blew from the north and filled Alex’s eyes with sand. The haze obstructed the parallelling ridgeline and the remaining silhouettes, still locked in combat, disappeared from view.
Through gesticulations and a sort of pidgin, Alex questioned Mubark as to what it could have been all about. He shrugged and muttered, “Shaytan”. A hollow sadness filled Alex. God-damned curiosity, he thought. Would it have been much better had I not approached? He suppressed deeper, more profound thoughts as they rejoined the convoy.
Sand and dust clung to a still form on the ridgeline. The neck remained twisted, and the body and bones would soon be rendered and scattered into infinite nothingness by the fattened, thick jawed dogs of Shamal Darfur.
