Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan. Deborah Scroggins
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after all. Emma was indignant, even outraged, about the misery she’d seen in the Ethiopian refugee camps, whereas for the exiles the misery and the camps were established facts of life. For a while they would let her go on, but eventually they, too, got fed up with her emotional tirades and wanted to talk about something else. ‘She was a lovely-looking girl, but too bossy,’ said one.
In the summer of 1987, she discovered that she was pregnant with Belay’s child, and she seems to have wanted to have the baby, but she miscarried. She became depressed, ill, lost weight. She stayed out all night, snorting cocaine and dancing in half-illegal African nightclubs to homemade cassettes of music from Zaire. She and Belay argued. When Khalid came to visit her in September, she told him she had been drinking too much and smoking lots of hash. Khalid packed Emma off to the household of the Hodgkins, a highly intellectual British family whose ties to Africa and the Sudan spanned several generations. Crab Mill, the Hodgkins’ golden stone house in the Cotswolds village of Ilmington, had been a refuge for all manner of eccentrics for many years. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, the brilliant, gentle seventy-seven-year-old matriarch of the family, was Britain’s only female Nobel laureate. Her daughter, Elizabeth, or Liz, as her friends called her, was working on a doctorate in African history. The Hodgkins helped Emma recover her romance with the Sudan.
Before winning the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1964 for her work on X-ray crystallography at Oxford University, Dorothy had spent part of her youth in the Sudan. From 1916 to 1926, her father had served as Sudan’s director of education under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. Her mother wrote and published The Flowering Plants of Northern and Central Sudan. Dorothy’s late husband, Thomas Hodgkin, a left-wing writer and lecturer, had been one of the first Western intellectuals to write sympathetically about African nationalism. In 1948 Thomas Hodgkin had travelled around British Africa advising the colonial authorities on how to set up adult education systems that would prepare Africans for independence. Like Khalid, Thomas had belonged to the Communist Party. He got to know many of the heroes of African independence, including Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. Liz Hodgkin taught for several years on the staff of the University of Khartoum. The Hodgkins’ generous internationalism extended to their easygoing personal life. At Crab Mill, the door was always open; Dorothy invited any guests who showed up to help themselves from a pot on the stove.
Dorothy and Liz knew Khalid’s wife well. At first they were disconcerted when he showed up at Crab Mill with a young English girlfriend in tow. But the Hodgkins were not the kind of people to pass judgement on the sexual morality of others. And the weekend they met Emma turned out to be one of those magical autumn interludes in the Cotswolds when the leaves turn all shades of gold and crimson. Emma and Dorothy talked for hours. They had more in common than anyone could have guessed. Dorothy’s recollections of being sent away from her parents’ Khartoum villa, with its banana trees and its lush rose garden, to the chilly gloom of England were like the stories Emma had heard about her mother’s youth. In the four years of the First World War, Dorothy and her sisters had seen their mother only once and their father not at all. By the end of the weekend, the Hodgkins agreed that Emma was a ‘wonderfully interesting person’. When Khalid suggested that Emma stay with them at Crab Mill for a while, it did not seem as outlandish as it might have a few days earlier.
Dorothy had been afflicted for several years with a particularly painful kind of arthritis that made it difficult for her to walk, much less to do the kind of entertaining that she enjoyed so much. She was beginning to cut back on the trips she made for various international scientific and peace groups, especially those campaigning for East-West disarmament. The then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, had been Dorothy’s student at Oxford. Thatcher admired her former professor so much that she kept her portrait on the wall at 10 Downing Street. When Emma came to stay in 1987, Dorothy was trying to use her connections with Thatcher and with Soviet scientists to convince the Prime Minister that the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, really represented something different from his predecessors. All of this required domestic and secretarial assistance. Liz was frantically trying to finish her doctoral thesis and did not have much time to help. When Emma volunteered help with the housework and gardening, the two women accepted gratefully.
At forty-six, Liz was more than twenty years older than Emma. The politically committed, rigorously international milieu of the Hodgkins could not have differed more from the provincial, class-bound world of the Yorkshire gentry in which Emma was raised. Nevertheless, Liz and Emma became great friends; to this day, Liz remembers her with enormous warmth and tenderness. Liz understood Emma’s desire to throw herself into a cause. After spending her twenties teaching in Zambia and Sudan, Liz had gone to North Vietnam in 1973 to teach English and edit English publications. She became disillusioned about the prospects for socialism in Vietnam, but she retained the longing that she had inherited from her parents and grandparents to make the world a better place. Emma’s generosity of spirit touched her. ‘She had this ability to get close to people and to accept people even if they were very difficult to accept,’ Liz told me in an interview. ‘She was capable of great love, and she inspired great love.’
The two months Emma spent at Crab Mill were a period of rest and reflection. Liz and Dorothy did not ask too many questions, but they gathered that Emma was in some way estranged from her own family. They tried to make her feel at home with them. Liz recalls that Emma became like another ‘daughter in the house’, cooking up huge stews with carrots and peas and lots of cumin for the Hodgkins’ many visitors. In a letter to Belay, Emma wrote that spending the winter in Ilmington brought back happy memories of her early childhood in Cowling Hall. ‘I like good snow. There is a purity and silence about it. When we were children, winter heralded new adventures, sledging, skating, building snowmen and igloos. Sometimes a blizzard would block the roads, school was closed and a free day appeared.’ Under the gentle influence of Liz and Dorothy, Emma agreed to try taking a more conventional route back to Africa. She applied and was accepted to begin work on a master’s degree in African studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
Liz had finished her PhD. Emma helped with the last frenzied printing and photocopying of her thesis, and the two women moved to London at the end of 1987. Khalid helped Emma find a part-time position administering student grants for Sudan’s cultural centre in Knightsbridge. Emma encouraged Liz to apply for a job as a researcher for the human rights group Amnesty International. They celebrated together when Liz got the job. Once Khalid satisfied himself that Emma was settled, he decided to stop seeing her. Their romance had been sweet, but as he and Emma later told Liz, he was not prepared to leave his wife, and he felt that Emma deserved better than to be a mistress. For a while Emma moved back in with her Ethiopian boyfriend, but eventually they split up for good. Belay was too secretive, Emma told Liz. ‘I just don’t understand Ethiopians the way I do the Sudanese,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know what they’re thinking.’
A decade later I went to England to try to track down Ahmed Karadawi and Khalid al-Kid. I wanted to ask them whether Emma had really understood the Sudanese as well as she thought she did. But they were both dead: Karadawi of lung cancer in 1995 and al-Kid of injuries he suffered the same year after he was hit by a car on his way to a Sudanese political meeting in London.
Finally I reached Emma’s supervisor at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Michael Twaddle remembered her well. ‘She was one of the better students we’ve had,’ he said. ‘A very original person.’ He never asked her why she wanted to go back to Sudan so badly. ‘No, we take it as a given that we’re all hooked, as it were,’ he said. Nor was he surprised later, when he heard that she had married a guerrilla and got mixed up in the civil war there. ‘A number of our students do marry dangerous people,’ he said. ‘People who get involved in Africa often do get involved in terrible things.’
If God punished man for his sins, not one creature would be left alive.
— The Quran, 16:56