Chapter Three
3
Months in Khartoum
Last December my son Bassam and I travelled from Seattle to Khartoum via Istanbul, driven by longing and yearning for our beloved homeland. At the airport, however, we were surprised to find that our checked bags had been opened by force and robbed. It was not only the valuable things that disappeared; even the modern electric whisk was not spared the appetite for possession. We complained, but when we saw how hopeless the solution was, we gave up.
My return after almost a year was exceptional. During my absence my beloved sister Fatima had died, and my sister Umm Al-Hassan had returned from a long treatment in Cairo. My loved ones therefore hurried to contact us in person and by telephone, offering condolences, congratulations on the recovery, and welcome on our arrival, while some of them remained absent. After a short rest we went out to return entrusted items, visit people offering condolences, and greet our elders.
I spent my first day in my beloved neighbourhood of Hay Al-Haj Youssef, coming from Al-Maamoura with a heart full of emotion. I visited my wonderful neighbours and the beautiful circle around me, house by house, amid an overwhelming welcome. Coronavirus was spreading, ruling, and casting its shadow over everything: condolences now ended with the burial ceremony, while weddings went ahead only with whoever happened to attend. Gatherings shrank and social life weakened. Some people, however, did not care and treated it lightly. People still sat around the tea ladies, while others believed coronavirus was a false rumour or that Sudan’s scorching sun would defeat it. The result was a continuing harvest of precious lives, leaving grief over every circle.
As usual I remained interested in public affairs, following and examining conditions made bitter by the ogres of scarcity, high prices, and exploitation—the most serious being water cuts that lasted for days and slow, star-filled nights. After several months I went on, hoping the following might come true, carried by a flood of hope that refuses to rule out the impossible:
To enrol the nearly three million children outside school by making basic education universal, because education is the locomotive of the future; to process the accumulated waste that has become difficult to manage, benefiting from its outputs while cleaning a capital that deserves to remain bright and pleasing, especially for our guests; to establish well-equipped, cooperative hospitals so citizens are spared the burden of expensive treatment abroad, alongside expanding pharmaceutical production; to prevent Israel from controlling our agricultural lands and to avoid relying on its inputs such as seeds and fertilisers, while benefiting from its experience in manufacturing machinery and technology; and to change laws that mortgage land to foreigners under the pretext of investment for periods of seventy or even ninety years—ten years would be enough, with easier access for citizens, especially cooperatives that need to be revived.
We should establish an authority for inventions, projects, and constructive ideas held by specialists, enthusiasts, and talented people—ideas capable of moving us forward, guided by the experience of countries with similar circumstances that succeeded in their beginnings, such as the African and Asian tigers. We should make the national number universal, our only fence against the human flood from neighbouring countries and their unrestricted movement, which multiplies the burden of consumption, disease, and underdevelopment. The process should carefully review claims of Sudanese nationality from independence until today. We should design a phased national project containing the most important desired development programmes, ordered by priority by a group of specialists, and present it widely so the popular base can gather around it and adopt it with energy and conviction.
The armed forces should be stationed outside the old capital and its emergency concentrations, to guard against possible clashes, reassure people, and limit ordinary individuals’ possession of weapons. We should expand agricultural manufacturing as our way to catch up with the world moving rapidly around us and to reduce smuggling across borders. We should ban the import of provocative luxuries in this delicate moment; necessities come first. We should adopt renewable-energy projects, especially wind and solar power, both of which are available to us.
My friends, I do not claim that my proposal is perfect or the final word. It is the ambition of a concerned citizen who may be right or wrong, acting for a homeland we carry in our eyes wherever we are and to which we return with longing, repeating:
How could you forget the bank, and the Nile become easy to leave?
By God, we are longing for you.