[RETRO] [EVENT] A Citizen of Khartoum

###A Citizen of Khartoum

Abdallah Hassan al-Nur
Personal Account,
March 1967 - June 1968

I will forever remember the night when the bridges came down. I was on the roof of my uncle’s house in Omdurman when demolition charges went off, one after another down the river. The sound rolled across the water like thunder in the dry season. My uncle said nothing. He just watched the smoke begin to rise along the horizon, and slowly went back downstairs. He had fought the British once, a long time ago, and I think he understood before the rest of us that this was already over. 

The Egyptians came into Khartoum street by street. I will not pretend it was clean, or that it was civilized. There were bodies in the road outside of the legislative assembly for two days before anyone came to move them. A neighbor of mine, a policeman, was shot in his own doorway by Egyptian soldiers who mistook his uniform for a soldier’s. Whether it was a mistake or not I cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that nobody came to apologise, nobody came to explain. His wife buried him without ceremony because there was a curfew and she was not willing to wait. I helped her carry him to the courtyard. He was not a heavy man. 

After the curfew was lifted, things became strange in a way that was almost harder to bear than the fighting. Egyptian soldiers handed out bread in Omdurman market. All around the city’s public places, there were now loudspeakers on trucks, playing speeches by the Egyptian President, Sadat, about Nile civilisation and the undoing of colonial crimes. Some people listened, some people walked past without even looking. A man I knew from university, an educated man, a lawyer, told me he found it all rather logical when he thought about it carefully. I did not argue with him. I had learned by then that arguing was a luxury the situation did not permit. 

When they announced plans for the ‘United Republic of the Nile’, I was sitting in a tea house right next to the Nile. Someone had a radio. Sadat’s voice filled the small room and nobody spoke. The man behind the counter filled everyone’s glasses and cups without being asked and without charging anyone. I am not sure what that meant. I am not sure that he knew either. Nobody was acting rationally then. The ‘Acting Regional Governor’, a Sudanese man, they were careful about that, they always made sure there was a Sudanese man in front, gave a speech in Khartoum the following day about partnership and shared destiny and the ‘long brotherhood of the Nile Valley peoples’. He was from a good family. He spoke well. I had met him once before, long before the war, at a reception. He had seemed like a decent enough man. I wondered, listening to his words in my brother’s sitting room, whether he believed what he was saying, or whether he had simply decided, as my lawyer friend had, that it was all rather logical when you thought about it carefully. 

The Constitutional Convention was the strangest thing of all. My cousin was appointed as a delegate. He is a civil engineer, prominent in his professional association, known to be reasonable. He came back after six weeks in Aswan full of talk about the provisions he and others had secured for Sudan, and how he had personally negotiated cultural protections into the language policy articles. He was genuinely proud. I did not have the heart to tell him what I suspected, which was that the Egyptians had decided before he arrived what the constitution would say, and that his six weeks of negotiations had been a performance staged for his benefit and for ours. Perhaps I am being uncharitable. Perhaps he did win something real. Things that are not nothing. 

But I keep thinking about those loudspeakers on the trucks in Omdurman market, and the bread being handed out, and my uncle watching the bridges come down and saying nothing. And everytime I think about it, I can't help but think to myself that these people, who know what they are doing, will not leave very much to chance.