not understanding why it should keep Muhammad from attending university in Khartoum.
The boy hesitated, his eyes sliding away to one side. “There are two problems,” he continued, lowering his voice. “First, my father may not live much longer.”
Martin nodded. Listening to the daily conversation of Muhammad’s family, he was astonished by how simple illnesses, easily treatable in America, decimated communities here. Many children died before they reached ten years of age, and women died in childbirth at a rate not seen in the West for hundreds of years. Many girls died after the traditional female genital mutilation ceremony at the age of six, and there were few medical facilities or doctors to save them.
Muhammad explained that the uneducated rural people put their faith in God, assuming it was a matter of fate if so many of their babies died in infancy. If your child was born disabled, that was the way of the world, and some people might even suspect it was God’s judgment on some past evil act by the parents. Disease came not from dirty water or unwashed hands, but from divine will. “We have so much to learn from America, you see,” Muhammed explained, embarrassed.
Martin had also experienced the nutritionally limited Darfuri diet. At mealtime the men and boys, taking the majority of the food, shared dishes, using their right hands to scoop up a tasteless bread-like starch from a communal bowl. Apart from beans, there wasn’t much protein, and meat was a luxury.
“It’s also hard for boys from here to get into university,” Muhammad continued as they walked, his voice barely above a whisper. “Sometimes we’re looked down on by our rulers in Khartoum. Few of the benefits of development reach here, as you’ve seen for yourself.”
Martin thought back to his brief stay in the capital. The city had struck him as a poor, ugly, dirty, charmless sprawl, with open sewers along the main street. Now, comparing it with the town in Darfur, he could see that it was much wealthier. Given a choice, he preferred it here in El Geneina, with its polite citizens and gentler lifestyle, its fields of maize stretching to the horizon and its innocent isolation. But if he were a Darfuri, he might wonder why his children had to die for the want of simple medicines that were more readily available in the capital.
“A few Arabs, not many of course,” the boy added quickly, “point to the passages in the Koran that justify taking black people as slaves, and they say that God created the black Africans to serve the Arabs. Very few think like this, I hope, but it’s not pleasant when they call you ‘slave’ to your face, or treat you like a backward child.”
Martin tried not to look astonished. To him the Arab people in Khartoum looked every bit as black and African as the Darfuris.
Muhammad saw Martin’s baffled expression. “For centuries the Egyptians ruled our country, and they called this land Sudan, which is a corruption of their word for black. In other words, the Egyptians thought the Arabs here looked just as black as the non-Arab tribes, and ever since then, the Sudanese Arabs have had an inferiority complex about their skin color. Hence the dislike of those of us with more African than Arab blood in our veins.”
The boy’s eyes flashed with pain. It wasn’t hard for Martin, who was a Jew, to imagine the countless indignities the Darfuris suffered. He recalled his father’s fury when, driving through Maine on a family vacation, they had been unable to stop at motels because they displayed signs reading, “Restricted Clientele.”
“I don’t wish to give you the impression that all Arabs regard Africans as racially inferior,” Muhammad continued. “We’re all Sudanese and there’s been a lot of intermarriage, but what matters is how you think of yourself and your identity, not the precise composition of your blood.”
Martin nodded. “And you share the land here, the Arabs and the Africans?”
“We’ve lived together here for centuries, yes, but as a rule, the Africans tend to be the farmers, and the Arab tribes are nomads, moving their animals to where there is the best grazing. It gives rise to disagreements, but over the centuries we’ve solved them through negotiation and compromise.”
It sounds like the disputes between the farmers and the ranchers in the Old West, thought Martin. “And in Khartoum?” he prompted, intrigued.
“Let’s just say that the less-educated Arabs have been known to show hostility toward people from Darfur,” the boy continued, as if weighing each word. “And toward people from the south of Sudan. Of course in the south they are Christians or animists, whereas here we’re all Muslims.”
“Christians, in southern Sudan?” Martin asked, surprised.
“The colonialists left us with borders that put several different ethnic and religious groups in the same country together. Let’s hope this will be a source of strength for us in the future.”
“Let’s hope so,” Martin echoed doubtfully.
Suddenly Muhammad stopped and met his eyes, his mood still uncharacteristically somber. “I have something to show you this weekend, if you will come with me.”
“Of course,” Martin replied, who was loving every minute of his life-altering experience as it unfolded.
CHAPTER THREE
El Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan, the next weekend
On Friday, after school finished, Muhammad and Martin began their hike into the countryside, leaving the battered cement and stone buildings of El Geneina behind them. Carrying only their sleeping mats, they passed women and girls bent over in the fields, hoeing the earth with short, inadequate homemade implements. Their labor looked back-breaking and inefficient to Martin, especially in the intense heat. When they weren’t working the soil, they were pumping water to irrigate the perpetually thirsty earth.
The hikers passed a steady stream of barefoot women and girls on the unpaved path, baskets balanced on their heads, posture perfect, slender and erect, never breaking their elegant stride. Their multicolored robes and scarves glowed vividly against their dun-colored surroundings. Even in the middle of nowhere, they passed people on their way from somewhere miles behind them, heading to somewhere miles ahead.
“They don’t look the least bit despairing or resentful,” Martin commented. “I mean, they all smile and greet us.”
“What good would it do them to complain?” asked Muhammad simply. “In Darfur we accept, and we improvise and cope. That’s how we survive.” He paused. “This is what I wanted you to see: the real Africa.”
They spent Friday night with some of Muhammad’s cousins in a village composed of a few dozen compounds, gathered around a water source. The compounds were fenced by shoulder-height woven reed walls, containing mud huts with conical grass roofs. If a man was wealthy, Muhammad explained, he had several huts housing each of his wives and her offspring. The less affluent kept their animals in the compound with them, fenced into a corner at night.
Apart from a little mosque, standard in every village, there were no public buildings—no shops or restaurants or gas stations, or indeed any indication that they were not still living in the year 900, when Islam arrived in Darfur courtesy of caravans of Arab traders. Martin knew there were as many varieties of Islam as there were Christianity or Judaism. The faith practiced in Darfur seemed as peaceful and tolerant as he could imagine. People were interested that he was Jewish, but no one was hostile.
Eating dinner that night with Muhammad’s cousins, Martin was especially impressed by how people made so much
