Africa Askew by Peter Boehm

Author:Peter Boehm [Boehm, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Babelcube Inc.
Published: 2014-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

Vehicles in their final stages II (Khartoum – border)

I could travel from Khartoum to El Obeid in an air-conditioned tourist bus. But then.... Where the wide red lines cease on my map, you have to be prepared for the worst. After this, there are no more tarmac roads, just dirt tracks.

I knew that the hardest part of the whole trip was awaiting me just after El Obeid. There isn’t a single red line over the whole of the 1,300 miles to the Chad capital N’Djamena.

In El Obeid, there were two buses going to Nyala, in Darfur, western Sudan. I studied them closely. They were both Jeeps from the 1950s, with a cargo space, and both looked dilapidated.

I decided to go for the one with the metallic green paint, because the luggage in that one wasn’t piled more than three feet above the driver’s cabin, and there weren’t as many people thronging in the luggage area.

It later transpired, however, that this was only because the driver and his assistant simply hadn’t yet got as far with loading the Jeep. When we set off, there were thirteen passengers in our luggage area too.

Four of them were soldiers, with coloured stripes on their lapels. In addition, there were four young men, each with a transistor radio slung across them. They’d made a little cover and strap for their radios from brightly coloured crocheted fabric. They had the devices with them all the time, took them everywhere with them, as though they were their most precious possession. But despite all this, I never saw them listening to the radio.

Then there were a couple of other men who would dash off straight into the bush to pray as soon as we stopped. I don’t know if they were travelling together. I knew nothing about any of these men. I couldn’t talk to them. None of them knew a word of English.

A man with a particularly impressive turban took his place in the passenger seat beside me. He was wearing a long, snow-white robe, carried a gnarled stick, and kept twisting his prayer chain around his fingers. When we stopped, he would often sit slightly apart from us, under a tree, to meditate. Before we set off, he’d always murmur some incantations which started with “Bismillahi....” (= in God’s name). He’d also do this when the bus began to stutter, and threatened to get stuck again.

It often did this, but the Sufi (as I identified him for myself) still never gave up. Even though, for three and a half days, his incantations never showed the slightest success, he continued to call fervently for God’s help. And for three and a half days, the vehicle persisted in getting stuck.

The Sufi’s skills were first put to the test as soon as we’d left the tarmac road. As the vehicle was hugely overloaded, the bodywork ground along on the back tyres. But the driver got by without the Sufi’s help. He and his assistant simply bent the bodywork outwards slightly, over the tyres.

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