Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan. Deborah Scroggins
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her friends, something happened to cool her initial infatuation with Sudan. The air started smelling to her of diesel fumes rather than exotic spices. She began to see the cruelty that lived alongside the Sudanese charm.
She learned about the northern Sudanese custom of ‘circumcising’ girls. When a Muslim girl reaches the age of four, a midwife cuts off her clitoris and all the surrounding flesh. The midwife then stitches the remaining tissue together, except for a small opening maintained by inserting a small stick into the vagina. The operation is intended to preserve virginity, but it gives women excruciating health problems, not to mention a loss of sexual pleasure. When the British ruled Sudan, they sought to discourage female circumcision through public education. More recently, the United Nations has named it a human rights violation. Almost every Muslim Sudanese girl has the operation anyway. Emma’s male Sudanese friends claimed to detest the practice, but she learned that their sisters, wives and daughters were all circumcised. Yes, it was unfortunate, they admitted, but superstitious women refused to give up the custom. Sudanese women were more frank when she asked them why they mutilated their daughters: No Sudanese man would marry an uncircumcised girl. No, no, no, they laughed, a bride must be tahur, pure, clean, not dirty and smelly with a clitoris hanging down between her legs like an infidel. Besides, everybody knew that Sudanese men liked a tight vagina - tight and dry. The women demonstrated for Emma with their hands the way their men liked it. Emma may have laughed, but privately she was horrified.
She visited the squatter camps outside the city where hundreds of thousands of southerners fleeing the civil war had gathered. She saw now why the Sudanese officials at Showak often said that many Sudanese wished they were lucky enough to be Ethiopian refugees. Conditions were much worse in the squatter camps than anything she had seen in the east.
On her VSO salary, she could barely afford to live in a cheap Sudanese guesthouse. She wrote to her mother that she no longer slept inside her stifling room, but lay outside swatting at flies and mosquitoes on a rope bed in the courtyard. The way the Sudanese ignored the flies and let them land on their eyes and mouths had begun to disgust her. She complained that the men at the guesthouse treated her like a female servant. Possibly she was sexually harassed or worse. In traditional Sudanese culture, a woman travelling alone without the protection of a husband or male relation is considered sexually available. Emma adored flirting and playing sexual games, but she reserved the right to say no. She wanted to stay in Sudan, but not like this. Some three months after arriving, she asked her mother to book her a ticket back to London.
ON THE AEROPLANE, Emma met Khalid Hussein al-Kid, another learned, married Sudanese exile who wanted to take her to bed. Khalid was a former army officer and Communist Party member, a poet and a hilarious raconteur. In Sudan the Communists were the only northern party that did not call for Sudan to become an Islamic state. Khalid told Emma about how he had tried to lead a 1966 coup against Sudan’s then-parliamentary government. The Sudanese government had outlawed the Communist Party and arrested its officials after a visiting Syrian Communist had ridiculed Islam in a speech. Khalid and his friends struck back by trying to take over the Khartoum radio station and thus overthrow the government. His punch line was always that he had been so drunk, he hadn’t known what was happening anyway. After he was exiled, he earned a degree in literature from Reading University. He was teaching literature when Emma met him.
Emma told Khalid that she planned to return to Showak as soon as she could. But that proved more difficult than she had anticipated. In London the VSO turned her down for a permanent teaching position in eastern Sudan. Then she heard that Sally and Willy’s old friend Alastair Scott-Villiers had found a job as Band Aid’s representative in Sudan and was temporarily working from London. She approached Alastair with a proposal to send her back to start a magazine or a library in Showak. Emma’s friends at the Sudanese refugee commission had told her that the town needed a library. There were no books of any kind in Showak and especially none about refugees and development. Nor did the town have any language tapes that refugees and administrators could use to learn each other’s languages. They had also spoken of the need for a refugee magazine. Emma wrote to her friends at the refugee commission to see if she could seek funding on their behalf. They endorsed her plan.
If Emma was anything, she was a self-starter. She rushed around London collecting information on the cost of producing a magazine. She wrote away to British magazines volunteering to work as a production assistant so she could learn something about the publishing business. But her proposal discomfited Alastair. Ever since he had landed the Band Aid job two years earlier, he’d been inundated with appeals for money from friends with one plan or another for Sudan. Now here was Emma, a very young, very inexperienced Englishwoman coming forth with a proposal on behalf of a Sudanese government agency. If the Sudanese government wanted a library in Showak, why not ask for it themselves? To make matters worse, Emma kept playing up their old acquaintance, hanging around the Band Aid office in London and looking beguiling. ‘But I’ve just got to get back there,’ she moaned, seeming not to understand that it was against the unspoken rules of aid to admit that all one really wanted was to get away from home. Alastair turned her proposal over to an Ethiopian colleague, an Amhara refugee expert named Belay Woldegabriel.
Belay decided not to give Emma the money. He said that if Band Aid wanted to fund a project run by the Sudanese refugee commission, it should fund the commission directly, rather than through an expatriate with no particular expertise in library work or publishing. Belay observed that in the supercharged atmosphere of the camps, starting a magazine that was ‘above politics’, as Emma promised, was impossible. As Alastair later recalled, the camps ‘already had newspapers. The EPLF had a newspaper, the OLF had a newspaper, and all the parties mounted this sort of propaganda campaign to bring the refugees around to their point of view. So to come marching into the middle of it with a new publication that was supposed to be for everybody and to try to stop rivalries was very dangerous.’
Alastair and Belay were right. Sudanese and Ethiopians were always suspicious of khawajas who were so eager to leave the comforts of the West to come and live with Africa’s poor. Apparently a letter Emma wrote about her plan to start a magazine in Showak sparked rumours that she was a spy, rumours that dogged her for the rest of her life. Just what the letter said remains unclear, but it was something about the political personalities in the camps. Her friend Khalid al-Kid, who read it, defended Emma, saying she’d been defamed by refugees who thought that every foreigner who took an interest in Ethiopian politics was an intelligence agent.
Belay had another reason to scotch Emma’s scheme to get back to Showak. The two of them had become lovers. When Emma realized that she would not be going back to Sudan any time soon, she moved into Belay’s council flat in East London. Tall and quiet, Belay impressed Emma’s friends with his intelligence and calm air of authority. As far as his British colleagues knew, he remained scrupulously above politics, yet the Ethiopian factions in the camps all seemed to hold him in high esteem. Even Emma’s family liked him, but the relationship was turbulent. Emma seems to have been suffering from the alienation that so often afflicts people who return home from wars and places of deep suffering, though Showak was tame compared to what she was later to experience in southern Sudan. She kept telling her English friends about the awful things she’d seen and heard, as if she wanted to shock them out of their complacency. She spoiled a dinner party at her mother’s house with a graphic description of female circumcision. She and Belay showed up hours late at her aunt and uncle’s house, then acted as if they were small-minded for being irritated with her. The reaction she got was defensive; her friends assured her that they had travelled, too, and didn’t need to be lectured about the existence of poverty and injustice in the world. And behind that, at least for some of them, was the unspoken implication that Emma was not quite serious, that perhaps she was using Sudan and its refugees as means for self-dramatization, and that she would be better off to put the whole experience behind her and start getting on with her own life.
Emma retreated into the demi-monde of East London’s African exiles, a world of thin-walled flats and studios smelling of fenugreek and coriander, of tired women in bedroom slippers serving sweet tea to men arguing politics while television blared in the background and little children in ill-fitting school uniforms struggled with their homework on the coffee table. The exiles shared Emma’s fascination with the Horn of Africa, but in a different way they