Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan
Deborah Scroggins
Love, corruption, violence and the dangerous politics of aid in the Sudan, by an exciting new writer.Emma McCune’s passion for Africa, her unstinting commitment to the children of the Sudan, and her striking glamour set her apart from other aid workers the moment she arrived in southern Sudan. But no one was prepared for her decision to marry a local warlord – a man who seemed to embody everything she was working against – and throw herself into his violent quest to take over southern Sudan’s rebel movement.At once a disturbing love story and a penetrating examination of the Sudan, “Emma’s War” charts the process by which Emma’s romantic delusions led to her descent into the hell of Africa’s longest running civil war.
Emma’s War
LOVE, BETRAYAL AND DEATH IN THE SUDAN
Deborah Scroggins
For Colin
Table of Contents
Cover (#u0e5fc5cd-08f1-50fb-9c2c-3b07119cbad2)
Title Page (#u5e05bf69-aa88-5365-becf-362215367fc8)
Maps (#u7a6e1a07-4ca3-5c5f-a5e5-8ffa9ec7c9d1)
Prologue (#ud07243ea-5bf9-5e21-aa6f-1c22654ee8f9)
Part One (#uf4884343-7872-5079-a206-c8a6ad1d7816)
Chapter One (#u0039ef77-9f5a-584f-9614-481a6be29fed)
Chapter Two (#u0c511274-7767-55c1-8680-e4ea62af64cd)
Chapter Three (#u49d884e1-eca3-53d7-9853-e399e8886f84)
Chapter Four (#u1ad59a1c-c8a3-5d19-acdf-24065d0ca072)
Chapter Five (#u45cc7af2-adea-5dc8-b44f-d71a18306b33)
Chapter Six (#u5b367e09-3cd2-5ef7-8251-b59039858522)
Part Two (#u3150c830-8ac2-5f19-832c-3d2d95057771)
Chapter Seven (#uad3e6e14-afab-5cb9-85aa-b74050b4a2b9)
Chapter Eight (#ue0ffe04e-05ad-55e3-8315-d2bfc463a46d)
Chapter Nine (#uf80a0074-99e2-5156-bd9a-05260fa47477)
Chapter Ten (#uece39371-ba63-5579-8d81-dfdb97800efb)
Chapter Eleven (#uca8c2e97-864f-5e16-bb34-9abc24745e4a)
Chapter Twelve (#u4300903b-3346-52fb-808a-b4cdee437b72)
Part Three (#uec5ec160-b143-5438-ba84-5c50e2e90e03)
Chapter Thirteen (#u90802bc4-467b-5384-ab30-45233a2266bf)
Chapter Fourteen (#u5234068d-f6bc-5100-8015-5a12ad2d1ea6)
Chapter Fifteen (#u16126208-66a7-58ba-a948-0052c2251c7a)
Chapter Sixteen (#u1d17b4c1-dead-5aac-9c71-77d1b6d02471)
Part Four (#u2874ff95-5475-5fe8-992d-bad847c50b33)
Chapter Seventeen (#uea517ffa-764d-5f32-9ae1-d77fa6eeb6a1)
Chapter Eighteen (#u84746e02-7df1-567d-9c1d-cd9aeb4512f8)
Chapter Nineteen (#u4a43955a-51d1-52cb-8854-44300eb2a9c6)
Chapter Twenty (#ua4f4a629-eb1e-50c1-9d5b-b5311659b547)
Chapter Twenty-one (#ud256c68d-4ee4-5ac5-91ce-cb5c5ae76cb1)
Chapter Twenty-two (#u515dd96b-fb64-541d-84a7-155ee28dbf5a)
Part Five (#u109a012e-31df-5f94-848b-7bcb950847aa)
Chapter Twenty-three (#u923700ea-b43c-5e0f-95b3-baf46d44b10c)
Chapter Twenty-four (#u3f89cfd1-2c7f-58fc-8186-0f1ca43f7929)
Chapter Twenty-five (#u84e3c060-dbfe-5dfd-9cd1-88fc7a460e75)
Chapter Twenty-six (#u3a403d31-c81f-51fc-9a95-d0657c91092b)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#u0dc2237d-47a7-584b-b44a-a697406d59d9)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#u699a197a-8bbe-54b2-a2f9-8516e5eedaa6)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#u47f085be-edb1-58c9-ba7d-1e68d2ed698e)
Chapter Thirty (#u15d1a964-9f37-55a3-bbd9-de379349e7fe)
Chapter Thirty-one (#u96eee513-bc22-5dbf-9f49-bdf6fea024e3)
Epilogue (#u32559f6e-6cd8-57c1-959d-b02324c41a21)
Images (#uf5f48290-1c20-597a-a3f6-e7f5663d249b)
Source Notes (#u707c245a-8281-5cda-83e5-c3be971d22c6)
Select Bibliography (#ub4b3439b-10eb-57f2-a3a9-01e385720b4a)
Glossary (#ucc091232-fa3a-5a4e-a7b4-f1112a5651e8)
Acknowledgements (#u69bec526-3bc9-5fac-b594-04a0a40bb73d)
About the Author (#u83970d76-c125-5435-a61b-a9ba0b3dbe1e)
Author’s Note (#ud997963f-1ad7-530c-9633-55dee5ca5a1a)
Copyright (#ubabcb7e9-1e4b-55e4-afe1-c01802cd59ee)
About the Publisher (#uc7fc8220-b0f4-5dd4-897f-f47a1893f528)
Prologue (#ulink_f49bc1aa-ad6a-5284-8698-754244955764)
Even now, in the deep sweet busyness of a summer evening on Myrtle Street, I think of them. I’ll be giving my daughters a bath, there will be chatter and commotion and slippery little-girl bodies, and then suddenly I will hear the strange hum of the famine camp at Safaha, the sound of thousands of people coughing and gasping for breath, and I’ll remember how I lay awake listening to it. I will see my husband reading his book, and I will remember the contorted faces of the starving men who crossed the river and came to tell me something in a language I couldn’t understand. I will look out the window at the sun setting over the Atlanta skyline, and instead I will see Africa’s great violet ball of a sun sinking down over the river at Nasir. As the moon floats into view behind the branches of the big oak tree outside my house, I remember how it lit up the encampment outside the feeding centre at Safaha, turning the plain into a field of silver skeletons.
I think of them, and I remember Emma. I met her more than a decade ago in Nasir, a place that has been shrouded in ambiguity and irony from its beginning. An Arab slave-hunter hired by an Englishman to end slavery founded the town. A hundred miles east of the White Nile and eighty miles west of Ethiopia, it lies on the eastern edge of the seasonal swamp that makes up the better part of southern Sudan. Early in the twentieth century, the British established a command post there over the local people, a tribe of exceptionally tall and fearless cattle-keepers called the Nuer. By the time I reached it, Sudan’s civil war had destroyed most of the old town. The United Nations was delivering food at a crude airstrip made from the rubble of destroyed buildings. The rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) had located its provincial headquarters in a mud compound a few miles up the Sobat River from the ruins.
This was in December 1990, well before Emma McCune scandalized the region’s aid workers and diplomats by marrying the local warlord and going to live with him and his gunmen in that weapon-studded compound. But even then there was something unsettling about her. I was in Nasir working for the Atlanta newspaper. A photographer and I had been there for about ten days, reporting on the war between the Islamic government in the north and the Christian and pagan rebels in the south. I had been interviewing teenage soldiers and starving children. Since the war began in 1983, perhaps a million people had died, a quarter of them during the famine of 1988, which I had covered closely. Still there was an eerie beauty to this part of Sudan. The years of fighting had sealed it off from development, turning the blue-green wetlands between the White Nile and the Blue Nile into a vast wilderness refuge, whose silence was interrupted only by bombings, gunfire and the haunting songs of the local people.
The photographer, whose name was Frank Niemeir, and I had been waiting for several days for a UN plane to fly us back to Kenya. The plane had been delayed for the usual obscure reasons. Perhaps the government had banned flights to rebel-held areas; perhaps the UN was punishing the rebels for threatening to shoot down UN planes. No one knew. Or if they knew, they weren’t telling. Each day we walked up and down the banks of the Sobat, watching lyre-horned cattle roam through the ruins of what had once been a marketplace. We had seen a blue heron roosting on the wreck of an ancient steamer and marabou storks floating down the river on lily pads. In the evenings we had returned to the UN house, a derelict concrete structure of two rooms attached to a mouldering compound that had housed the American Presbyterian mission in Nasir. The missionaries had been expelled from Sudan nearly thirty years earlier, in 1964, but their houses were still the best Nasir had to offer. At night we played cards by the light of a paraffin lantern until we fell asleep on metal beds swathed in mists of purple mosquito netting we had brought from Nairobi.
At last an SPLA officer with bloodshot eyes and a T-shirt that bore the legend ‘Martin’s Restaurant, St Paul, Minn.’, came to tell us that the UN had radioed and a plane would be arriving shortly. We gathered up our backpacks and carried them through the ruined town to the edge of the airstrip, where we sat on top of them. The morning sun seemed to be looking down on us like a giant white eye. A couple of rebel soldiers stood around in flip-flops, listening for the plane. The first thing over the horizon wasn’t a plane but a man. He came out from behind the rusted hulk of a bus that lay on its side near the airstrip. He was a middle-aged Nuer with loose skin and the six parallel marks of manhood across his forehead. He wore a bunch of pink flowers in each ear, brass armbands and a pair of navy blue cotton underpants. His hair was dressed in cornrows, and he was singing and dancing his way towards us. Our rebel escorts stirred uneasily.
‘Who’s this?’ I asked.
‘He is no one,’ one of the rebels answered shortly. The soldier’s face was a mass of scars in the intricate dot patterns with which the southern Sudanese decorate their bodies; slung over his right shoulder was an AK-47.
The man with the flowers was only a few feet away now, gesticulating wildly, hopping up and down and pointing at us, singing at the top of his lungs.
‘What’s he saying?’ I asked.
‘He thinks he is a prophet,’ the first soldier said. ‘He says he has had enough now. You have been coming and going, but you don’t bring anything.’
‘He is a madman,’ the other soldier declared.
Frank took the man’s picture. I had been keeping a sort of diary of our trip in a small pink notebook I’d picked up in Nairobi. I took it out and wrote on the cheap brown paper:
Madman
flowers in his ears
feather in hair
shells on right arm
piece of notebook tied to left
like a mime
ring in nose
Those are the last words in that Nasir notebook, for just then we heard a high-pitched whine. For a moment I wondered what it was, still transfixed by the prophet. Then we saw the shadow of the plane’s wings. It was coming down in the tight corkscrew the pilots always performed in case someone started shooting at them. It landed, the engine sputtered into stillness, the rebels ran to open the door, and out jumped Emma. Frank and I stared. She was almost six feet tall, pale, dark-haired and slender as a model. She was wearing a red mini-skirt. An SPLA officer climbed out behind her; she and the officer were laughing about something. Emma threw her head back. She had large white healthy teeth. It was hard to believe she was flying in on an emergency relief mission. She looked as if she ought to be stepping out of a limousine to go to a party.
In a way, I was not surprised. I had heard about Emma. Young, glamorous and idealistic, she had sent a ripple of excitement through the social circles of the aid business when she went to work for a Canadian aid group called Street Kids International. In Nairobi, headquarters for East Africa’s burgeoning humanitarian industry, she had gained a reputation for wildness: adventures in the bush, all-night revels in the city. She was an Englishwoman with entrée to the city’s most exclusive expatriate circles, yet she was said to feel most at home with Africans. Some admired her nerve; others considered her dangerously naïve. I’d caught sight of her myself a few weeks earlier at the mess tent in Lokichoggio, or Loki, as we called it, the staging ground inside Kenya for the UN relief operations into southern Sudan. She had been drinking beer with a table full of African men, and she was talking with great animation. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could tell that the men did not want her to stop.
Now in Nasir I thought I understood the current of disapproval that followed the stories about Emma. That gorgeous splash of a mini-skirt seemed almost indecent in a place filled with sick, hungry people catching their breath between bouts of vicious killing and mass starvation. To look happy seemed tactless - a flaunting of one’s good fortune. It occurred to me that the modest T-shirts and khaki shorts or blue jeans that were a kind of unofficial uniform for most of us expats were in some way an attempt to make ourselves sexless, at least in our own minds. We imagined that it announced, ‘We are not here to have a good time.’ It was like a surgeon’s scrub suit or perhaps a modern version of sackcloth and ashes: an unspoken signal that we thought we were wiser and more virtuous than the Sudanese and were in a kind of mourning for them. Not that the Sudanese were fooled. In truth the average aid worker or journalist lived for the buzz, the intensity of life in the war zone, the heightened sensations brought on by the nearness of death and the determination to do good. We wanted to be here, we were being paid good money to be here, and the Sudanese knew it.
On second thoughts, Emma’s mini-skirt seemed to me a refreshing departure from the usual pieties. It suggested that she was more honest than the rest of us, that she wasn’t afraid to admit she was here because she wanted to be here. She and I exchanged pleasantries, nothing more, and when I turned around to pick up my backpack, the man with the pink flowers in his ears had disappeared. I never saw him again, and I didn’t see Emma again for a long time. Frank didn’t take her picture, and I didn’t write about her in my notebook. But as the plane took off, I began to think about her for another reason that had nothing to do with clothes. I knew that she had been working closely with the SPLA’s ‘education coordinator’, a man called Lul Kuar Duek, to reopen Nasir’s schools. I myself had spent days in Nasir interviewing Lul about his plans for the schools. He had claimed to be a great friend of Emma’s. He was the kind of man the Nuer used to call a black Turuk, a name they took from Ottoman Turks who first introduced the Nuer to modernity when they invaded a century and a half earlier and that now extended to anyone who could read and write and wore clothes. Like most Nuer, Lul was dark as a panther, tall and thin with a narrow head and a loping walk. He was a former schoolmaster and an elder in the local Presbyterian church. He was also a bore and a bully. In the afternoons, he would drink Ethiopian gin out of a bottle and lecture me in his straw shack about the martyred American president John F. Kennedy and why southern Sudan was so backward and anything else that came into his mind. ‘The stage we are at now is the stage of the European in the stone age. We are in the age of stones,’ he would say, pointing his finger at me. ‘And you! You be careful. You should know you are talking to someone who knows everything.’
Lul’s baby son slept in a hammock next to his father’s automatic rifle during these conversations, and Lul would frequently offer to give him up for the cause of liberating Sudan from the domination of the Islamic government in the north. ‘Even this boy, he shall fight! Even if he should die! Even if it should take a hundred years…’ He recited the SPLA’s slogans with noisy fervour, insisting that the south would never settle for secession but would fight until the whole country had a new, secular government, though he was to be equally enthusiastic less than a year later when his fellow Nuer commander led a mutiny against SPLA leader John Garang on the grounds that the south ought to give up trying to change the north and start fighting for southern independence.
Like everyone else in Nasir, Lul was obsessed with a prophecy from the Book of Isaiah that he and the others believed foretold the future of southern Sudan. Whenever he had got about halfway through one of his gin bottles, he would wipe his hands on his red polyester trousers, take out the Bible from the crate beside his bed and start banging his hand on it. ‘It is all here - it is written!’ he would announce. Frank and I would exchange weary glances. ‘Isaiah eighteen. God will punish Sudan. People will go to the border with Ethiopia. “The beasts of the earth and the fowls shall summer upon them and all the beasts of the earth shall winter upon them.” I have seen all this come to pass. But it says that in the end we shall have a new Sudan.’
Lul was talking about the years in which hundreds of people had starved to death or been killed in the fighting around the town before the SPLA captured it from the government in 1989. Even then I wondered how Emma could stand it, handing out pencils to Nasir’s surviving children, while Lul raved on about fighting for another hundred years to make a new Sudan out of that blinding emptiness. I always made sure that Frank was with me before I went to visit Lul in his grass hut. But according to Lul, he and Emma got along famously. In fact, Lul was more interested in telling me about Emma than about the schools he was supposed to be running. ‘You know, Em-Maa’ - he pronounced her name with a satisfied smack - ‘is just like one of us. She walks everywhere without getting tired. She is bringing us so many things we need, like papers and chalks and schoolbooks. You people should know, our commander likes Em-Maa very much. Very much! And she likes him! She has been here, looking for him.’ Underneath the praise, there was something leering in his voice.
It was hard to imagine why my newspaper would want to know about an SPLA commander’s feelings towards a low-level British aid worker, and so I paid very little attention to Lul’s lewd suggestions. But when I learned, six months later, that in fact Emma McCune had married Lul’s commander, Riek Machar, the one who had ‘liked Em-Maa very much’, I remembered the mingling of lust and envy and contempt in Lul’s voice, and I felt obscurely frightened. Naturally I knew of ‘Dr Riek’, as the southern Sudanese called him. He was another black Turuk, but with a PhD from Bradford Polytechnic in England that made him the best-educated Nuer within the ranks of the SPLA. Westerners found him unusually smooth and affable, but we also knew that he was part of a violent and secretive guerrilla movement that was capable of the most ruthless cruelty. The news of Emma’s marriage provoked a surprising jumble of emotions in me. At twenty-seven she was just two years younger than I. I knew her only slightly, but the world of the khawaja - the Sudanese Arabic term for white people - is a small one, and she and I shared many friends and acquaintances among the aid workers, journalists and diplomats in Sudan. The same interesting British couple who had helped Emma get her job with Street Kids International, Alastair and Patta Scott-Villiers, had given me the tip two years earlier that led to my first big story in Sudan. A few days after I returned to Nairobi from Nasir in 1990, the Scott-Villierses had invited me to join Emma and a bunch of other people who were spending Christmas at Mombasa on the Kenyan coast (an invitation I had to decline, as I spent the holidays working in Khartoum that year). I had been writing about Sudan, off and on, for three years: it was the deepest and furthest part of my experience. Now here was Emma going deeper and further than I had ever dreamed of going, crossing over from the khawaja world into a liberation army led by men like Lul and the scarred gunmen at the airport, men responsible for some of the horrors she had been trying to alleviate as an aid worker. What, I wondered, had driven her to take such an extreme step? Later, after it was all over, I got the idea that her story might shed some light on the entire humanitarian experiment in Africa. Or at least on the experiences of people like me, people who went there dreaming they might help and came back numb with disillusionment, yet forever marked.
Part One (#ulink_2accde54-3a76-5700-bb07-6d361d6e484a)
My first impressions of Sudan were rather blurred and uncertain; I was so much more interested in myself than I was in my surroundings.
— Edward Fothergill, Five Years in the Sudan, 1911
Chapter One (#ulink_1530863a-1970-5acf-bcae-ca2115a3772e)
AID MAKES ITSELF out to be a practical enterprise, but in Africa at least it’s romantics who do most of the work - incongruously, because Africa outside of books and films is hard and unromantic. In Africa the metaphor is always the belly. ‘He is eating from that,’ Africans will say, and what they mean is that is how he gets his living. African politics, says the French scholar Jean-François Bayart, is ‘the politics of the belly’, The power of the proverbial African big man depends on his ability to feed his followers; his girth advertises the wealth he has to share. In Africa the first obligation of kinship is to share food; and yet, as the Nuer say, ‘eating is warring’. They tell this story: Once upon a time Stomach lived by itself in the bush, eating small insects roasted in brush fire, for Man was created apart from Stomach. Then one day Man was walking in the bush and came across Stomach. Man put Stomach in its present place that it might feed there. When it lived by itself, Stomach was satisfied with small morsels of food, but now that Stomach is part of man, it craves more no matter how much it eats. That is why Stomach is the enemy of Man.
In Europe and North America, we have to look in the mirror to see Stomach. ‘Get in touch with your hunger,’ American diet counsellors urge their clients. Hunger is an option. Like so much else in the West, it has become a question of vanity. That is why some in the West ask: Is it Stomach or Mirror that is the enemy of Man? And Africa - Africa is a mirror in which the West sees its big belly. The story of Western aid to Sudan is the story of the intersection of the politics of the belly and the politics of the mirror.
It’s a story that began in the nineteenth century much as it seems to be ending in the twenty-first, with a handful of humanitarians driven by urges often half hidden even from themselves. The post-Enlightenment triumph of reason and science gave impetus to the Western conviction that it is our duty to show the planet’s less fortunate how to live. But even in the heyday of colonialism, when Western idealists had a lot more firepower at their disposal, Africa’s most memorable empire-builders tended to be those romantics and eccentrics whose openness to the irrational - to the emotions, to mysticism, to ecstasy - made them misfits in their own societies. And the colonials were riding the crest of a wave of Victorian enthusiasm to remake Africa in our own image. If the rhetoric of today’s aid workers is equally grand, they in fact are engaged in a far less ambitious enterprise. With little money and no force backing them up, they are a kind of imperial rearguard, foot soldiers covering the retreat of a West worn down by the continent’s stubborn and opaque vitality. They may be animated by many of the old impulses, idealistic and otherwise, but they have less confidence in their ability to see them through. It takes more than an ideal, even an unselfish belief in an ideal, to keep today’s aid workers in place. Emma had some ideals, but it was romance that lured her to Africa.
Chapter Two (#ulink_375faa84-c37a-5724-8a20-70ac8ce7ed65)
SHE WAS BORN in India, where her parents, Maggie and Julian McCune, had met and married in 1962, and the direction of her life, like theirs, was pounded and shaped by the ebbing tide of the British Empire. Maggie, a trim and crisp former secretary, still calls herself an ex-colonial, though the sun was already setting on colonialism when she was born in 1942 in Assam. She published a memoir in 1999 called Til the Sun Grows Cold about her relationship with Emma. The child of a loveless marriage between a British tea planter and an Australian showgirl who met on board a wartime ship, Maggie spent a lonely colonial childhood as a paying guest at various English homes and boarding schools. Emma’s father, Julian - or ‘Bunny’, as Maggie called him - was an Anglo-Irish engineer who had knocked around Britain’s colonies for at least a decade before he and Maggie settled down in Assam.
Theirs was an unfortunate match from the start. Maggie, shy and wounded, was only twenty-one when she was introduced to Julian on a visit to her father in India. She married him, she admits in her book, mainly to escape England and the hard-drinking mother whose theatrics she despised. With depths of neediness her husband never seems to have fathomed, she wanted nothing more than to bring up lots of children in the safe and conventional family she felt she had been denied as a child. Julian, fourteen years older, was a charming sportsman who thrived on admiration. He also liked his whisky. He seems to have been unprepared to bear any responsibilities beyond excelling at shirkar, the hunting and fishing beloved of British colonial administrators in India. Perhaps their marriage might have survived if they had been able to stay in India, where Julian, simply by virtue of being an Englishman who had attended some well-known public schools, was able to provide the luxurious lifestyle they had both come to expect.
In Maggie’s words, life was ‘heavenly’ for the British hired in those days by London tea companies to run the Assam tea estates. The British lived in comfortable bungalows, the adults attended by Indian servants and the children watched by Indian nursemaids. The men began work at six o’clock in the morning, but after two hours they broke for breakfast. At noon it was time for lunch, and after lunch everybody took two ‘golden and silent’ hours of siesta. After siesta, Maggie writes, ‘there was a little more work to do, leaving time for tennis, a round of golf or a chukka or two of polo before the sun sank. Then the sun-downer drinks parties began, followed by dinner and dancing’ at the club. But by the time Emma was born in 1964 and her sister Erica in 1965, it had become plain that the postwar world was going to have a lot less room for people like the McCunes.
For India, as for so many other colonies, the end of the Raj in 1948 was only the beginning of the slow and subtle process of loosening Britain’s control over the country. In the first few years under the new Indian government, the British tea companies operated pretty much as they had under British administration. But by the late 1960s, they were under pressure from the government to replace British employees with Indians. Julian lost his job supervising the maintenance of the equipment used to grade and prepare tea leaves. Maggie’s father was pensioned off and decided to return to England. In her book, Maggie says that she and Julian enjoyed mixing with people of all races in Assam, but the only Indians she mentions socializing with were the petty royals for whom the dissolution of empire was almost as much of a disaster as it was for the British. Julian talked about emigrating to Rhodesia or South Africa, where many of their British friends from India had already gone, but Maggie worried about moving to another refuge that might prove temporary. She wanted to spare her children the uncomfortable colonial sense she had always had of never quite fitting in England. She wanted ‘Home’ to really feel like home for them. In 1966 the McCunes decided to move to Yorkshire, where Julian had gone to school and had family. Emma was two.
There was an old manor house on the windswept edge of the Vale of York that Bunny McCune had never forgotten in all his years of wandering. Julian’s parents were dead, but his mother had come from Leeds, and as a boy he had attended Aysgarth School in North Yorkshire before going on to Winchester College. Cowling Hall, a long, thin brick-and-plaster Queen Anne mansion not far from Aysgarth on top of a hill overlooking a spectacular view of the Yorkshire Dales, had first captivated his imagination when he was a schoolboy. The house was shaped like an L, and the oldest part had been built from the ruins of a despoiled abbey. It was empty when the McCunes arrived. Local people said it was haunted. A child had died in the house, and a man had suffered a nervous breakdown. It was an imposing, if dilapidated, piece of architecture, but in the winter a bone-chilling wind whistled right through it. The house was so cold that Maggie tells in her book of warming butter for toast by the coal fire in the drawing room. But with six bedrooms, it was more than big enough for what would become a family of six - Jennie was born in 1967 and Johnny in 1970 - and Julian had to have it. He had already invested his inheritance in a franchise he planned to set up in North Yorkshire for a firm marketing closed-circuit-television monitoring systems. Charmed by Julian’s manners, the titled owners of Cowling Hall agreed to rent it to the McCunes for the nominal sum of six pounds a week.
A number of Aysgarth old boys still lived in the area, and these former classmates helped the McCunes settle into North Yorkshire’s county set. Wensleydale is the heart of James Herriot country, a misty green landscape of ancient stone villages and black-and-white cows that occupies a large place in the sentimental imagination of England. Bunny hunted and fished in the area’s magnificent forests and streams; Maggie organized cricket teas and was elected to the local cancer research committee. There were ponies for the children: Maggie saw a moral purpose in such outdoor pursuits. ‘Ponies are such good discipline,’ she told me once. ‘When you come back from riding, you can’t just think about yourself. You have to brush down the horse.’ And there were the all-important public schools. After attending the local primary, Emma became a weekly boarder at Polam Hall in Darlington. Emma is positively radiant in photographs from these years, her cheeks freckled and ruddy as she poses in front of Cowling Hall or astride her pony, Misty.
Julian and Maggie were a popular couple. If Julian had one talent - and by all accounts, it was an unusual talent in a place as rigid and class-bound as North Yorkshire in the 1960s - it was for striking up friendships with people of wildly different backgrounds. ‘Julian was a thorough gentleman,’ Peter Gilbertson, an old schoolmate from Aysgarth, reminisced many years later. ‘He could go into any worker’s cottage or any stately home with his boots on and his spaniels at his heels, and he’d be fine. He’d put two bottles on the table and say, “Right! We’re having a party.”’ Among their close friends, the McCunes counted Bedale’s local squire and his wife, the doctor and the vicar. Maggie, who had been raised Catholic, converted to the Church of England. Julian, whose political views Gilbertson describes as ‘conservative - very conservative’, became the treasurer of the local Conservative Association. The genteel McCune façade was impeccable, and Emma’s father seems to have felt that this really ought to have been enough. Like so many upper-middle-class public schoolboys of the period, he had been educated to serve the empire. He really had no other skills. After nearly twenty years abroad, he was at first baffled, then angry, to learn that in the Britain to which he had returned his social graces and his old school tie would not by themselves translate into a sizeable income. As Maggie later wrote, his indifference to work, easy to overlook in India, was harder to ignore in Britain. When his security franchise failed to prosper, he went to work for a cousin selling farm equipment to large landowners. After a year or so, the cousin fired him. Julian never discussed business matters with Maggie, and he did not tell her when he lost his job. Nor did he look for a position he considered beneath him. Instead, he pretended he was going off to work each day. After saying good-bye to her and the children, he would drive to a nearby river, park his car, and sit in it reading newspapers. Maggie never guessed that he was unemployed until his cousin finally phoned her to say he had fired Julian more than a year earlier for being ‘bone-idle, a scrounger, and a liar’.
When Maggie confronted him, Julian acted as if he were above worrying about money, the opinions of others or even the law. He was arrested for drunken driving. He took up with a woman who lived in the local village. He was taken to court in Leeds for debt. He continued to come home with expensive presents that Maggie had no idea how he bought. Then he was charged with using his position as a treasurer of the local Conservative Association to steal Tory funds. When a judge asked Maggie why her husband had not appeared with her in court the day the two of them were summoned for failing to pay the rent at Cowling Hall, she had to tell him that Julian was too busy fishing for salmon on the river Tweed. In 1975 local bailiffs evicted the McCune family from Cowling Hall. Maggie and the children went to live in a cottage on the grounds of Aysgarth School; Julian retreated to a crofter’s hut high in the Dales, where he found occasional work as a farm labourer. Emma was ten when the family broke up. ‘Her childhood ended there,’ her mother writes.
The very night Maggie discovered that her husband was having an affair with another woman, she happened to be reading one of Emma’s favourite childhood stories, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Thumbelina’. The tale of a tiny girl rescued by a swallow from having to marry a mole, then flown to the warm lands of the south, where she became a princess, must have recalled to the McCunes the magical days in Assam, before they were exiled back ‘Home’. As their troubles mounted in England, perhaps it was only natural that the family should recall their years in India as a time and place in which they had been free to be the aristocrats that Julian, at least, felt himself to be. After a few drinks, Julian was wont to regale the local pubs about how, in India, he had been able to take the law into his own hands and do as he pleased. He loved to tell the story of how he had got himself out of jail after accidentally hitting a sacred cow with his car in Calcutta. He never could get used to how the roguish behaviour that his fellow expatriates had found so entertaining in India met with disapproval in England. When he invited the Yorkshire policemen who had caught him driving drunk to join him for a brandy before their court appearance, an English judge was not amused.
It was not Julian’s assumption of superiority that bothered his Yorkshire friends. Imperialism had not gone out of fashion in that part of the world. People did not mind if Julian complained about missing his Indian servants at the same time as he boasted about having ‘given service to the colonies’. They didn’t care if he saw it as his right to live like a lord. After all, some of his old school friends were lords. No, it was not Julian’s pretensions that set him apart from the society in which he found himself. It was his inability to maintain them. ‘I just think he was born too late,’ Gilbertson said sadly. ‘He should have been born forty years earlier and with a hell of a lot of money’ In the end, much of it did come down to money. To Maggie’s intense anger and humiliation, Julian pleaded for leniency at his embezzlement trial on the grounds that he stole to finance his wife’s extravagance. The two were divorced in January 1976. A few weeks later Julian killed himself.
Emma, who was eleven, was visiting the city of York the day it happened. Her father had never stopped seeing her. Indeed, he was the more playful of the McCune parents, forever taking the children out for a ride or a shooting expedition while Maggie fretted over how to buy groceries. That weekend he had invited Emma to go to the horse races with him, but she decided to go to York with her sister instead. She later told friends how much she regretted not going with him that day. She said she always wondered if she might have saved his life. With Julian’s death, the days of pony school and ballet lessons were truly over. Maggie and the children entered a period of their lives as grim and cheerless as the bleakest Yorkshire winter. Maggie, who had not worked outside the house during her marriage, embarked on a heroic struggle to support all four children. For a while, she had to pump petrol at the local service station to make ends meet. At last she found a job as a secretary to a headmaster at a state primary school in nearby Catterick Garrison. In her book, she chronicles the family’s series of moves from borrowed cottages to a grey cement council house before she and the children finally landed their own small semi-detached house in the village of Little Crakehall.
As the eldest child, Emma went from being the petted darling of Cowling Hall to becoming her mother’s second-in-charge. Maggie leaned on her to help with the housework and look after the other children. Emma had to learn to shop and cook and sew. She also had to console her mother, who was so depressed and angry and fearful that she came home from work each evening longing to crawl into bed. ‘After my father died, Emma was like my mother’s husband,’ her brother Johnny remembers. One of Emma’s friends from Kenya said that Emma told her she dreaded coming down to the kitchen in the mornings as a teenager to see the list of chores her mother would leave for her. The family worried constantly about money. None of the houses they lived in had central heating, not even the Little Crakehall cottage that Maggie bought and lovingly restored. The electricity was on a coin meter, and occasionally it went off because they did not have enough coins. It was so much like one of those fairy tales in which a princess is brought low that Emma might have lain in the freezing room she now shared with her sisters, dreaming of Thumbelina and a swallow who might spirit her away to somewhere warm where her rightful identity would be restored.
Despite their reduced circumstances, the McCunes remained part of the Yorkshire gentry. Maggie’s closest friends continued to invite her and the children to fancy dress balls at their Georgian estates. They and Maggie’s sister even helped with fees so that Emma could stay in public school, first at a Richmond convent, then at Godalming College in Kent. Maggie writes in her book that she hoped everything would come out all right if her children could just stay in the same schools and keep the same friends. ‘I think education is the most important gift you can give your children, don’t you?’ she told me. Emma was a hard worker, and she was good at organizing people and getting them to do what she wanted, but her strengths were not academic. Several of Emma’s friends from Yorkshire have grown up to be well-known writers, editors and artists; among this rich and clever group, Emma was considered a slow student. ‘Dippy’, ‘not very well read’, ‘not very articulate’ are some of the less charitable phrases they privately used to describe her intellect. Emma knew what they thought and resented it. Intensely competitive, she was frustrated and disappointed when her test scores were not as high as those of some of her friends.
She came off better outside school. Her set liked to show off, riding to hounds, holding extravagant parties and challenging each other as to who was the most adventurous. They all intended to live dangerously; reckless behaviour was part of what they regarded as their aristocratic sensibility. (Typical of the epic tone was a young man who rented the entire town cinema so that he and his friends could watch the 1948 movie Scott of the Antarctic over and over again. He went on to become a UN ambassador and to write several books about Arctic exploration.) This was an arena in which Emma shined. Even as a teenager, she loved hearing people gasp at her latest exploit. At an age when most people want only to fit in, she strove for glamour. Unlike her strait-laced mother, who favoured straight skirts and wore her hair neatly pulled back, Emma loved dramatic costumes with big hats and lots of jewellery. Once when she couldn’t afford to buy a gown for a grand party, she made one for herself out of black plastic bin liners. After passing through a gawky stage, she blossomed into a long-legged beauty, with pale freckled skin and a slow, seductive manner of speech. A classmate at the Convent of the Assumption school in Richmond remembers the entrance Emma made at a party when she was about sixteen. ‘Emma arrived wearing a striking black-and-white dress she’d made, and long evening gloves. The dress was long and straight. Everyone else was wearing conventional ball dresses, and no one could take their eyes off Emma. Our duckling had become a swan.’
Still, Emma knew that in clubby North Yorkshire she would always be her father’s daughter. Behind the admiring glances lay pity. The condescension stung. North Yorkshire is a place with long memories. The sound one most often hears in its pubs and mansions and brick Georgian hotels is the deep ticking of grandfather clocks. Emma’s school friends all remember hearing the gossip about Maggie and Julian. More than twenty years later I had no trouble finding neighbours who recalled every detail of Julian’s disgrace. ‘Their father’s downfall was quite a scandal,’ said one of Emma’s friends. ‘It must have been very painful for them to have stayed there.’ None of the McCunes stayed in Yorkshire any longer than they had to. Maggie herself moved to London as soon as her youngest child went off to boarding school.
When I first met Maggie in 1997, I asked how she thought her husband’s suicide had affected Emma. She paused. We were having lunch at a restaurant near St Paul’s Cathedral, where Maggie then worked as a secretary to the registrar. I was interviewing her for a magazine article about Emma. Maggie comes across in person as rather shy and reticent; several times in her book, she mentions moving through her life as if it were ‘a strange dream’. That day she was particularly reserved. She had already warned me that she did not want to talk about Julian. ‘I think it made her less materialistic,’ she said finally of his death, and she made it clear that the subject was closed. Some of Emma’s friends think Julian’s suicide might have helped create a split in Emma’s psyche between the sensuality and freedom she linked with her father and abroad, and the discipline and frugality she associated with her mother and England. Though as an adult Emma seldom talked about her father, she knew that in Yorkshire she would always be the girl whose father started out as an empire-builder and died living like a tramp in a crofter’s cottage. ‘She had a lot to hide, and she hid it well,’ said one childhood friend. ‘She knew everyone would always know, but no one would ever say anything.’ Whatever the reason, by the time Emma was offered a place to study art and art history at Oxford Polytechnic in 1982, Africa already beckoned to her.
Chapter Three (#ulink_aa692580-b765-531b-9a13-e8c9c56ce85d)
FOR THOSE who care to look, Africa is all over Oxford. It’s in the glass boxes at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, the iron-ribbed museum of a museum that the Victorians built to display the shrunken heads and feathered curiosities of the peoples they were about to introduce to Progress. It’s in the odour of borax at Queen Elizabeth House, an institution where some of Britain’s last colonial training courses were held before it was reinvented as a centre for development studies. It’s in the quiet stucco Quaker meeting-house in St Giles where some of the earliest anti-slavery meetings were held. It’s at the ugly cinder-block headquarters of Oxfam, the anti-famine group founded by Oxford pacifists during the Allied blockade of occupied Greece that has become Britain’s wealthiest international charity. Oxford has updated the ethic of service to the colonies that it preached a century ago when Rudyard Kipling wrote of ‘the white man’s burden’. Nonetheless, dozens of its university graduates still set off for Africa each year with what might be described as a modern version of that urge, an ambition to ‘develop’ Africa that arouses much the same pleasurable hopes and feelings as did earlier pledges to serve Kipling’s ‘lesser breeds without the law’.
Emma first found Africa at Oxford among her fellow students at the polytechnic. A red-brick institution in the suburb of Headington, Oxford Polytechnic then had a reputation as a haven for well-bred students who couldn’t get into more prestigious universities, let alone Oxford University itself. She was seventeen and in her first year when she met Sally Dudmesh, a sweet-faced blonde anthropology student standing beside a university notice board. Sally holds a British passport, but she was raised in Africa and considers herself a white African. She now designs jewellery in Kenya, though when I first spoke to her in 1997 she was spending the summer in England, as she does every year. She said she and Emma felt an instant attraction, particularly when Emma learned of Sally’s connection to Africa. ‘I felt like I was meeting my own sister,’ Sally remembered. ‘At that time she was very arty. She always dressed exotically. She had this sort of very wonderful calmness. She just glided into a room.’ Emma wore a long purple velvet coat. She was pale, with a husky whisper of a voice and a smile full of sparkle and mischief. ‘She made fun of disasters with people. She had a wicked sense of humour, a really fun, bad-girl side.’ The two girls struck up a fast friendship.
Sally lived with Willy Knocker, a white Kenyan from a well-known colonial family who was studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Through Sally and Willy, Emma was drawn into a circle of friends who shared a fascination with Africa. They liked to dress in African clothes and talk about African politics while smoking pot and listening to African music. They wanted lives with an edge. Although many of them came from colonial or diplomatic backgrounds, they all abhorred the British Empire and blamed colonialism for most of Africa’s problems. They felt their romance with Africa somehow set them apart from the restraint and tedium of middle-class English life. ‘It was just sort of a wildness - a spirit of adventure,’ said Sally, trying to explain the allure Africa had for her and Emma. ‘There’s an incredible freedom and scope to Africa that you don’t find in England. In England everything is so controlled. In Africa there’s an intrigue and a fascination and a sense that you can really expand. In England you have the feeling that you’re always having to play a certain role. You could always see that we would not end up living in England. We were not ordinary English girls.’
Sally and Willy’s house was a meeting point for other young people on their way to Africa. Emma met Alastair and Patta Scott-Villiers at a party there in the early 1980s. Patta - her given name was Henrietta, but she’d been called Patta since childhood - was studying international development with Willy in London. She and Alastair planned to move to Sudan as soon as she finished her master’s degree. Alastair and Patta were a couple of years older than Sally and Emma. Alastair was compact, sandy-haired and snub-nosed. His father had been with the Foreign Office, and he had spent part of his youth in Canada. Alastair seemed to have picked up some freewheeling North America ways in Canada. He was brash and friendly, an endlessly inquisitive chain-smoker. Patta was more reserved and watchful. She came from an aristocratic family but never mentioned her connections. She had soft brown hair and a magnolia complexion. She seldom wore make-up and liked to dress in blue jeans and T-shirts. Like many of Emma’s friends, she seemed to feel more relaxed outside England. In 1983 she and Alastair moved to Sudan. Patta went to work for the international charity CARE. Alastair, who had been dealing antiques in London, went along hoping to find some kind of work once they got there.
It was exactly the sort of adventure that appealed to Emma and Sally. Already Emma was restless living in Britain. She had visited Europe several times on holiday. In 1985 she took off the better part of a year to fly in a Robin Aiglon single-engine plane to Australia with a young man named Bill Hall. Hall was the son of a distinguished Oxford professor. He had already finished university and gone to work for his family’s engineering business when Emma and a friend rented a house from his parents in the nearby village of Littlemore. A solidly built, meticulously careful man in his twenties, he was an accomplished pilot. He had always wanted to fly his single-engine plane to Australia, where he had family. He invited Emma to come along with him. In those days without satellite navigation, it was much more risky than it is now to fly all the way across Europe, Asia and the South Pacific in such a small plane. Emma knew nothing about flying, but she threw herself into the organizational details of the trip. She made the arrangements for their stops along the way, travelling to London to apply for visas at the embassies of half a dozen countries. For instance, Emma convinced the Saudi embassy to grant them a visa, even though as an unrelated, unmarried couple she and Hall should not have been allowed to enter Saudi Arabia.
Emma talked her lecturers into letting her use the aerial photographs she planned to take as coursework for her art degree. The Oxford Times covered the pair’s departure. ‘We will fly through extremely varied landscape, including jungle, desert and ocean,’ Emma proudly told the reporter from the paper. She persuaded newspapers in Australia and India to write articles about their 30,000-mile flight. One of them took a marvellous picture of her and Hall in the cockpit. Hall is looking up from a map, while Emma simply looks ravishing in pearls and a colourful print dress.
The trip took her to India for the first time since her family had left in 1966. Hall remembers that it brought back memories of her father and his wild colonial exploits. When Emma and Hall stayed at the Tollygunge Club in Calcutta, the manager told them a story about how Julian had been on a plane flying to Calcutta when the plane got lost. ‘Seems Emma’s father was a bit drunk, and he went up to the cockpit, pushed the pilot away, and flew the plane back to Calcutta,’ Hall remembers the man telling them. Emma celebrated her twenty-first birthday in the foothills of the Himalayas, not far from where her father and grandfather had been stationed during the Raj. The trip settled in her mind the notion that she must have a life outside the bounds of everyday English experience. And it taught her useful things about maps and radios.
Hall and Emma were only friends, but Emma’s mother half hoped the trip might spark a deeper relationship. Hall was kindly and dependable. He was the sort of man who could afford to indulge Emma’s appetite for adventure and yet provide her with the security that Maggie herself had always longed for. But Emma didn’t want to make her forays into other cultures from the safe confines of the West. When they left England, Hall gave Emma a wad of cash to keep in case of emergency. Emma promptly spent all the money in Luxor on clothes. Hall liked to stay in expensive ‘international’ hotels such as the Hilton or the Meridian, where you could count on air-conditioning and clean sheets. Emma preferred to scour the back streets for humble guesthouses frequented by local people. Fortunately she had inherited her father’s gift for appreciating vastly different characters. She and Hall remained fond of each other long after the trip was over. But what she really longed for was a much stronger experience. Even the exciting but essentially Western lives that her friends like Sally and Willy envisaged for themselves in Africa were not what she had in mind.
She had always been attracted to African men, though she can hardly have laid eyes on many Africans in Yorkshire. Her attraction was frankly erotic. She found black men more beautiful than white men, even joking with her girlfriends that the penises of white men reminded her of ‘great slugs’. She loved the warmth of African laughter and the rhythms of African music. She often said that, with all their troubles, Africans enjoyed life more than Westerners. After she came back from her aeroplane journey in 1985, she started waitressing at a trendy Indonesian restaurant on the way to Oxford railway station. The restaurant was a hang-out for some of the university’s more swinging lecturers, particularly those who specialized in Asia and Africa. One night Emma overheard Barbara Harrell-Bond, the American director of the university’s new Refugee Studies Programme, at Queen Elizabeth House, talking with some others about how they needed student volunteers. Among those speaking most animatedly at the table was a tall, thin African man with long fingers. This was Ahmed Karadawi, the Sudanese co-founder of the Refugee Studies Programme and a penetrating critic of Western relief efforts. When Emma brought Karadawi his food, he rewarded her with a smile so broad, it seemed almost too big for his face. Grinning back at him, Emma interrupted Harrell-Bond to volunteer for the programme.
African refugees and famine were in the air that summer, not only in Britain but in Europe and America, too. Ethiopia and Sudan were in the grip of the great 1984-5 famine. In October 1984 Emma and the rest of Britain had watched the film that Michael Buerk brought back for the BBC nightly news from the Korem famine camp in northern Ethiopia. As Bob Geldof later wrote in his autobiography, Is That It?, Buerk’s film showed pictures of people ‘so shrunken by starvation that they looked like beings from another planet’. As the images appeared on the screen, Buerk spoke in tones of sombre outrage. ‘Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of a night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century. This place, say relief workers, is the closest place to hell on earth.’ Geldof had come home that evening anxious and depressed about the failure of his latest album. Like thousands of television viewers, he found that the broadcast from Ethiopia ‘put my worries in a ghastly new perspective’.
Geldof described the reaction Buerk’s misty images of starving Ethiopians huddled under ragged blankets aroused in him. ‘Right from the first few seconds it was clear that this was a tragedy which the world had somehow contrived not to notice until it reached a scale which constituted an international tragedy. What could I do? I could send some money. Of course I could send some money. But that did not seem enough. Did not the sheer scale of the thing call for something more? Buerk had used the word “biblical”. A famine of biblical proportions. There was something terrible about the idea that 2,000 years after Christ in a world of modern technology something like this could be allowed to happen as if the ability of mankind to influence and control the environment had not altered one jot. A horror like this could not happen today without our consent. We had allowed this to happen, and now we knew that it was happening, to allow it to continue would be tantamount to murder. I would send some money, I would send more money. But that was not enough. To expiate yourself truly of any complicity in this evil you had to give something of yourself. I was stood against the wall. I had to withdraw my consent.’
Geldof helped galvanize Britain, then the Western world, with his moral outrage over the Ethiopian famine. Like millions of young people, Emma bought the Band Aid record ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ that Geldof produced for the charity he founded to help feed the famine victims. Her brother remembers her sitting in front of the television in the summer of 1985, mesmerized by Geldof’s Live Aid concert. Emma herself had always been good at fund-raising. She didn’t mind asking people for money; in a backhanded way, she almost enjoyed it. As a child she had enthusiastically joined in various charitable campaigns sponsored by Blue Peter. She liked the feeling of working together with others, and she liked the way championing a worthy cause forced adults to take her seriously. Geldof touched the conscience of people all over the world - Band Aid and Live Aid ultimately raised more than £70 million, and some 1.5 billion viewers in 152 countries watched the Live Aid concert - but in Britain he struck an especially deep chord. His appeals to help faraway and less fortunate people awakened so many memories of Britain’s crusading past that to this day British journalists call Geldof, now a multimillionaire businessman, ‘Saint Bob’. His heartfelt pleas on behalf of the Ethiopians awakened in Emma, as in many others her age, a sense of possibilities, a feeling that idealism still had a place in the world even in the waning last years of the cold war, when the aged prophets of capitalism, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, seemed to have no larger vision for the future than of getting and spending.
Chapter Four (#ulink_f475a3c2-77dd-5d93-9541-af1b2cc382f0)
NOW IN HER last year at the poly, Emma took up with Ahmed Karadawi, the elegant African intellectual with the brilliant smile whom she’d first met at the restaurant. Married and eighteen years older than Emma, Karadawi came from Kordofan, a dry and sandy province in north-western Sudan. He cast a sardonic eye on the self-congratulatory Western excitement over Band Aid and Live Aid. He was touched by the sincere enthusiasm of the young people who thronged his lectures at Oxford, but he argued that, too often, the Western aid agencies they went to work for were more interested in pandering to the prejudices of their donors than in actually helping needy Africans. Karadawi was witty and urbane; he could make you weep with laughter at the ridiculous mistakes the self-important khawajas made in Sudan, and he could be just as withering on the subject of the Sudanese government’s indifference to human suffering. In any event, he always said, no aid programme could fix the civil wars that had caused the hunger in Ethiopia and Sudan. Only the people who lived there could do that. Emma knew nothing about Sudan and its politics. But she was about to learn from a master.
Bilad al-Sudan. How languorously those Arabic words glided off Karadawi’s tongue, like a magic spell in an Arabian wonder tale. But Karadawi did not romanticize his unhappy country. He was the first to tell Emma about the Arab proverb that says, ‘When God made Sudan, He laughed.’ (Some Sudanese say God laughed with pleasure, but far more suspect the diety was laughing at his gigantic creation.) Karadawi knew that Sudan had been the frontier between southern black Africa and the northern cultures of the Near East two millennia before the Arabs named it ‘The Land of the Blacks’. He told her about how ancient Egyptians and Israelites knew the land south of Egypt first as the land of Cush and later as Nubia and as Punt. The Greeks and Romans called it Ethiopia or ‘The Land of the Burnt-Faced Ones’. Not until the Muslim conquest of the Middle Ages was it named ‘the Sudan’, or just ‘Sudan’, as it is commonly called today. From Karadawi, Emma heard about The Aethiopika, the third-century Greek novel about an Ethiopian princess who was mysteriously born with white skin and was raised as a Greek, who had to travel to the ancient Sudanese city-state of Meroë to find true love and her rightful throne. From him Emma learned how the Nile River snakes out from the Sudd, the world’s biggest swamp, all the way through the deserts of Sudan and Egypt to the Mediterranean.
In ancient times, the Sudd marked the limits of the world known to geographers. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs sent expeditions to discover whence came the river that gave birth to Egypt, but the swamp defeated every attempt to find out. The people of the Sudan included hundreds of ethnic groups, each with its own language and customs. The northern two-thirds of the country was mostly dry, while the southern third was wet and tempting, with good grazing, fat cattle, and rivers teeming with fish. With the exception of the Nuba Mountains, the northern people were mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic. Meanwhile the Nuba and the southerners remained ‘noble spiritual believers’, as Karadawi liked to call them, clinging to their African languages and religions. The struggle between the lighter-skinned desert peoples, drawn by the south’s water, slaves, gold and ivory, and the darker-skinned peoples of the swamp, who violently resisted intruders, had marked Sudanese history for thousands of years. Sudan’s contemporary civil war was in some ways a continuation of this antediluvian clash, Karadawi said.
Like most people in Britain, Emma had learned about the existence of huge refugee camps along Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia only during the famine of 1984-5. But Karadawi explained that there had been Ethiopian refugees in Sudan long before the famine. Ethiopia’s civil wars (like Sudan’s) had deep roots, and so did the tensions between the two countries. Christian Ethiopia had been at odds with Muslim Sudan since the Middle Ages, and supporting each other’s enemies had always been a feature of the contest. In 1961 the UN gave Ethiopia sovereignty over Eritrea, a partly Muslim former Italian colony that lies between Ethiopia and Sudan. When the Eritreans rebelled against Ethiopia, they set up bases in eastern Sudan with the help of the Sudanese government and its Arab allies. As refugees who had crossed an international border, the Eritreans and their families came under the protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which fed them. Meanwhile, Ethiopia gave sanctuary to Sudan’s rebellious southern pagans and Christians. Ethiopia’s patron, Israel, also gave the southern Sudanese rebels military assistance, as a way of weakening the Arab coalition.
Karadawi had been a child when the Sudan gained its independence from Britain and civil war broke out in the south. The war was still dragging on in 1970, when he went to work for UNHCR in the Eritrean camps along the eastern border right after earning his degree from the University of Khartoum. The southern rebels called themselves Anyanya, or ‘poison’, and they often behaved as poisonously to each other as to the northern army. In many ways, the tactics of the northern army resembled those of the nineteenth-century slave-traders. The army operated from inside garrison towns that had been founded on the sites of the old thorn-fence enclosures called zaribas, from which Arab slave-hunters had once armed their local allies and encouraged them to take captives. Now, as then, Arab army officers now handed out weapons to allied southern peoples, urging them to attack their local enemies and loot them of their cattle, women and children. The southerners were easily manipulated, and it seemed as if the fighting might go on forever. Then a series of events suddenly changed the climate. Jafaar Nimeiri, a military officer, took over the Sudanese government in a 1969 coup and began searching for a way out of the war. Then Israel concentrated its flow of arms on a single southern rebel commander, the Equatorian Joseph Lagu, enabling him to gain control of what had been a hopelessly fractured movement.
From his position in the camps, Karadawi watched how Nimeiri used the Eritrean refugees as one card in the political game that finally led to a 1972 peace agreement between northern and southern Sudan. When Nimeiri wanted to pressure Ethiopia, the southern rebels’ patron, he simply made it easier for the Eritreans to get weapons and supplies, including food, from friendly Arab countries. When he wanted to mollify Ethiopia, he squeezed the camps. In 1971 the aged Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie agreed to act as a mediator in Nimeiri’s talks with Lagu and the Anyanya. Largely united under Lagu, the southern rebels leaders were able to seize the opportunity for peace. In 1972 they and the government signed the Addis Ababa agreement that gave the south partial autonomy and ended seventeen years of civil war.
The Addis Ababa agreement ushered in a decade that Karadawi remembered as one of tremendous hope and promise. Sudan was going to be ‘the breadbasket of the Middle East’. Nimeiri agreed to support the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel. The United States rewarded him by making Sudan the next-biggest recipient of American foreign aid after Egypt and Israel. Sudan’s Muslim neighbours across the Red Sea were awash in oil money. Nimeiri’s government was able to borrow more than $12 billion from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the Arab countries of the Gulf to finance its development schemes. Biggest was the watchword of the day. With a population of only about 26 million, Sudan had a land mass the size of Western Europe. It was the biggest country in Africa, and it was going to have the biggest of everything. International businessmen spent Gulf money to construct the world’s biggest sugar factory south of Khartoum at Kenana. An Anglo-French consortium brought the world’s biggest digger to Sudan and spent $75 million to construct the Jonglei Canal, a massive scheme that was going to use water from the Sudd to irrigate northern Sudan and Egypt. There were many dreams, but by the end of the decade the dreams, as well as the money, had vanished into the hands of Nimeiri’s cronies and the Western expatriates who administered so many of the foreign projects. Meanwhile the Sudanese public was saddled with a debt twice the size of the country’s gross national product.
The old siren song of treasure in the south spelled the beginning of the end. Following the 1973 oil crisis in the West, George Bush, US president Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the UN, visited Khartoum at the invitation of Nimeiri’s foreign minister. Nimeiri had started out as a socialist, and the United States had kept its distance from him during his first few years in power. Now Bush, a former oil man from Texas, advised the Sudanese government that satellite remote-sensing intelligence available to the US government showed that oil might be found in the south-eastern part of the country, especially the triangle of land located in the Sudd region between Bentiu, Nasir and Malakal. Bush named some American companies he said might be willing to undertake such a venture. In 1974 the American oil company Chevron was granted a licence to look for oil in parts of the south and south-west. Chevron also signed a secret agreement to explore the Kafi-Kengi region in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, where uranium deposits that could be refined for use in nuclear weapons had been found near the border with Darfur.
The Middle East was just beginning to churn with what the followers of political Islam call ‘the Islamic awakening’. Disappointed with the failures of independence, young Muslims were turning to Islam in search of a more natural and authentic system of governance than the secular nationalism imported from the West. Political Islam found especially fertile ground in northern Sudan, where the biggest political parties were already associated with religious brotherhoods. After Nimeiri’s communist allies attempted to overthrow him, the president drew closer to these Islamic parties. They had opposed his peace agreement with the south on the grounds that it gave what the agreement called the south’s ‘noble spiritual beliefs’ and Christianity equal place with Islam in Sudan’s constitution. They also thought the agreement gave the south too much autonomy. They had mounted three armed uprisings against Nimeiri, in 1970, 1975 and 1976, the last two with the backing of Libya. The president did not have the strength to resist them forever. In 1977 he invited their leaders to come back from exile.
The Islamic politicians pressed Nimeiri to make Sudanese law - until now a colonial hybrid of customary, Islamic and Western law - conform with classical sharia, or Islamic law. In their view, the purpose of a Muslim government was to enforce sharia. But southerners bitterly resisted any proposals to make sharia the source of all the country’s legislation. Islamic law provides for harsh punishments such as amputation, stoning and flogging. More important, under sharia law, unbelievers may not rule over believers, so that the imposition of sharia law would effectively close off the highest political offices to non-Muslims. Christians and Jews, as ‘Peoples of the Book’, have fewer civil rights under sharia than Muslims; followers of Africa’s traditional religions have virtually none at all. Nevertheless Nimeiri continued his drift to the right. Naming Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of the Muslim brotherhood, as his attorney general, he embarked on a programme of making Sudan’s laws more Islamic. He set aside his safari suit and began appearing at Friday prayers in the mosque in the skullcap and jallabiya of a Muslim scholar.
Then in 1978 Chevron struck oil just north of the town of Bentiu, in a mixed Nuer-Dinka area a little south of the north-south border. The oil well was located on a spot known as Pan Thou, or ‘thorn tree’, in the Nuer language. In a move suspicious southerners saw as a clue to Arab plans to seize the southern oil, Chevron and the government insisted on changing the Dinka name of the spot to Heglig, the Arabic name for the same tree. Extracting Heglig’s oil was to prove thornier than the company ever realized. Chevron had confined most of its dealings to the central government. But under the terms of the Addis Ababa agreement, the southern regional government was to receive the revenues from any minerals or other deposits found on southern land. Rather than see that happen, Nimeiri and his Islamist attorney general in 1980 tried to change the boundaries between north and south so that the land under which the oil and uranium lay would belong to a new northern province that the government named Unity. The south erupted in riots, and the president backed down. But the tension and mutual distrust kept mounting.
In the Bentiu area near the oil fields, angry Nuer men formed themselves into a militia they called Anyanya II; small clashes broke out in various parts of the south. In 1983 a battalion of southern soldiers stationed in the town of Bor mutinied over a pay dispute with their commanders. Colonel John Garang, a taciturn Dinka army officer with a PhD from Iowa State University, was sent to mediate. Instead, Garang fled with the men of the 105th Battalion across the border into Ethiopia. From there he urged the Sudanese to rise up against Nimeiri’s government as part of his newly formed Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). This time, Garang said, the south and its allies would fight not for independence but for a secular, socialist Sudan. A few months later Nimeiri imposed an unusually harsh version of sharia law on all of Sudan. The civil war was on again.
Ethiopia welcomed Garang and his mutineers, just as it had embraced the southern Sudanese rebels of the 1960s. Ethiopia’s wars and famines were a mirror image of those in Sudan; the same whirring cycle of disaster had rekindled that country’s civil war. For a short while after the signing of the Addis Ababa agreement, the Ethiopian government had gained the upper hand in its battles with the Eritrean rebels. Then famine struck northern Ethiopia in 1973. A widely publicized BBC broadcast accused Emperor Haile Selassie of having ignored the famine. The United States and Europe withdrew the aid that had propped up his regime. A Marxist military regime seized power, and Sudan resumed its support for Eritrea. With Sudanese support, a variety of new Eritrean and Tigrean groups opposed to Ethiopia’s government sprang up in the refugee camps on the border.
Like most Africans, Emma’s friend Karadawi took it as obvious that to feed and house people on one side of a conflict was to help that side. He considered the UN agencies’ pretensions to neutrality a laughable bit of Western hypocrisy. In Sudan he had been one of the first to suggest that the government recognize the humanitarian wings of the rebel armies fighting in Eritrea and neighbouring Tigre province, allowing them to raise funds and import materials just like every other foreign relief organization. In Oxford, Karadawi had gained a certain fame for his willingness to criticize all sides involved with aiding Sudan. When he and Emma met in 1985, President Nimeiri was refusing to ask for international assistance even though thousands of people in western Sudan were starving. A BBC journalist asked Karadawi where the fault lay, and he did not hesitate. ‘With the government,’ he replied. At the same time, he was engaged in writing a doctoral dissertation arguing that the West had turned refugee aid into a self-perpetuating industry that often did more harm than good in Sudan. His colleague Barbara Harrell-Bond ultimately incorporated many of his insights in her book, Imposing Aid. Alex de Waal, a fellow student at Oxford with Karadawi, is today Britain’s best-known critic of humanitarian aid. De Waal credits Karadawi with inspiring him. He dedicated his 1997 book Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa to Karadawi.
Karadawi could go on for hours brilliantly analysing the Islamic concept of barakat, or ‘blessings’ - the wealth and power that naturally flow to the pious - always with cigarette in hand. In 1985 a group of army officers overthrew Nimeiri but refused to dismantle the sharia law he had enacted. It was going to be much harder to get rid of Islamic law than it had been to get rid of Nimeiri, Karadawi predicted. Islam, he said, was a genie that would not go back into the lamp. He explained that Islamist politicians would accuse any Muslim who tried to revoke Islamic law of being an apostate, a crime punishable by death under sharia. Meanwhile the abolition of Islamic law remained the key demand of the southern rebels. The officers who had seized power wanted to hold elections, but Garang and his SPLA refused to participate unless a constitutional conference was held to decide the place of religion and ‘nationalities’ in Sudan. The officers, mostly conservative Muslims, refused. When a vote was held in 1986, the Islamic parties were the winners. Karadawi told Emma that this probably spelled the end of any peace talks for a while. ‘Malesh,’ he would exclaim, using the half-amused, half-bitter Arabic expression that means something like ‘What a pity!’ but can also mean ‘So sorry’ and ‘Too bad’.
Karadawi introduced Emma to many of the young Africans studying at Oxford University. Heirs to the university’s tradition of training colonial elites, the Africans tended to come from the most privileged families in their own countries. Some were hereditary chiefs. Most had held or were on their way to holding top positions in their governments or armed forces-perhaps with the next coup. In their papers and in their seminars, they spoke of economic development and the need for democracy and institution building. But in private they talked of power as a family affair, a game of intrigue, honour and greed into which they had been born and in which they might well die.
Emma had never shown any interest in ideology, though as an art student she had disavowed her father’s Conservatism. The left-leaning political opinions she voiced could have come straight out of the pages of The Guardian. She felt a little insecure in the highly intellectual environment of the refugee programme. But Karadawi assured her that as an artist she had at least as much to offer refugees as the so-called experts who were always blathering on about ‘early warning systems’ or ‘coordination planning’. ‘Most of the refugees in Sudan can’t read. You can use your pictures to teach them,’ he told her, one friend remembers. In any event, it was not a political programme that attracted her to the world of Karadawi and his friends. It was more like the high drama of it all, the almost Shakespearean sense that, behind the sham parties and borrowed ideologies, character is all. A few people, some of them her friends, might decide the fate of whole countries. She could speak as glibly as anyone else about the need for refugee participation and grassroots involvement, but her friends believe that, inside, she thrilled to the stories of kings and queens, prophets and warriors, heroes and villains.
Karadawi never discussed his relationship with Emma, but everyone at the refugee programme knew they were having an affair. When Emma staged an exhibition at Oxford’s Poster Gallery of the aerial photographs she had taken on her trip with Bill Hall, Karadawi invited all his friends to come. The relationship distressed Karadawi’s wife, Selma, but she kept her feelings to herself. Sudan, like most of Africa, is polygamous. While northern Sudanese men expect strict fidelity from their wives, few Sudanese women are in a position to demand the same from their husbands. ‘Let us just say Ahmed’s wife was very tolerant,’ a Sudanese colleague of Karadawi’s laughed indulgently when asked about Selma’s response to the affair. And Karadawi was not the only Sudanese man to fall for Emma. Hamid el-Tayeb Zaroug, another northern Sudanese refugee official, met her while on sabbatical at Oxford. Zaroug was a Sudanese government administrator of the Ethiopian refugee camps that Emma had heard much about from Karadawi. He continued writing to her after he returned to Sudan.
Emma finished her degree in early 1986. For a short time, she went to work for the art department of Harper’s & Queen. The job didn’t work out. The magazine’s arbiters of fashion expected the young girls they hired to model the smart clothing featured in its pages. Emma insisted on wearing her trademark Indian caftans and big wooden bangles. When Tayeb Zaroug invited her to make a field trip to the refugee camps at Showak, she decided to take him up on his offer. She had saved some money from waiting on tables. At the end of 1986, she wrote to Zaroug that she had booked a flight to Khartoum. She planned to make a display of her photos for refugee children. Alex de Waal remembers her coming over to the Oxford flat he shared with his Eritrean girlfriend, excitedly asking for help translating captions for her photos into the Tigrinya language.
Zaroug wrote back immediately. ‘I read [your] letter three times to make sure I went over every word,’ he said. ‘Your face with that beautiful smile is always in front of me…. You don’t believe how much I do want to see you my sweet untamed cat who trained me so much in UK on how to accept pain from whom you love. All I need from England is that I do want Emma and please tell her to come soon.’
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