Africa has begun
Added on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Camels crossing
In Gederef, a tough little town two hours from the Ethiopian border, black Africa had begun.
Perhaps this happened a few hours earlier, just after Wad Medani, two hours south of Khartoum, but this was the first black African town I had reached. Nothing I haven’t seen before but surprised at how fast the boldness of the people changed from the gentle flow of the Arabian north.
As soon as I turned left at Wad Medani, the mud round houses of African villages replaced the square breeze-block style of the north. A social anthropologist would categorise the differences in list form but as a casual observer, they were obviously sudden and sharp. In the southern and eastern Mediterranean countries you are out of Europe, in Sudan you are in the desert and that drives the mindset more than the anthropology. Once the desert disappears, the people regain their power and position in the assembly of things that are important. Africa has begun. If I had a GPS I would tell how many degrees north I was, offer an exact way-point along which I could pitch this project precisely along what line of latitude; but more prosaic is the parallel world I was now entering or perhaps had entered days ago. On this side of the continent, round house were forming in sub Saharan Africa.
In Gederef, I needed to change some money and the first hotel was expensive and arrogant, so I rode on. By the roundabout at the northern edge of this small town, a two story pink building proved to be an excellent choice of lodgings. There were no signs in English and I had no guidebooks - how do I carry them on an R1? - but, use your eyes, it looked like a hotel. The elderly guy at the reception was sprightly and spoke excellent English. He insisted I brought my bike into the small simple front area which was enclosed, before discussing the rate, which at $10 was good. The rooms were also pink. I guess there was a run on pink paint, say 15 years ago when it was decorated. A high ceiling gave space to a fast, well balanced fan. Mosquitoes would have to be quite macho to do battle with this hurricane. The old guy gave me a lad to lead me to a money-changer and we wondered through the town to the market. People here were unlikely ever to have seen a tourist at such close quarters and they could hardly conceal their enthusiasm to welcome me to their town. There were undertones of hard living and some desperation, but the bustle and humour overrode any miasma of complex feeling a westerner gets when confronted by such poverty.
Women squatted by small piles of wood which must have taken hours to gather in this woodless terrain. Men were already tipping water onto their feet and hands from plastic jugs of water pivoting on rods braced by upright stanchions. Ubiquitously, donkeys brayed, complaining of their lot. Poor beasts of burden they may be, but incredulously, in these parts they rank higher than women.
A dust storm was beginning to blow. The early signs were in the purple sky. It had been awesomely hot, forcing me to rest several times. The air conditioning in Khartoum had instantly stripped me of my resistance to high temperatures built up in the desert.
It was refreshing to film less and take few photographs today. Instead I mostly caught snap shots in my head. Camels still crossed the road on their way to be watered. Unless you move, vast plains become your prison. Unable to know how to go anywhere, villagers can live locked in such a landscape. Some poor people get lost even though they go nowhere. Demented villagers come up and touch my bike and it only the few locals who act as judge and jury, decide whether they should live or not. One wrong inappropriate move, made in a moment of madness, in a rashness of unclear thinking, and the strange ones would tacitly disappear. It was biblical law in a biblical landscape and an intensity of feeling was heightened by rocky hills which had come in from the horizon to settle beside the road. There was a closed-in feeling which made me not to want to stay, so I bought a gallon of benzine and rode away. Tourists don’t ever stop here. They don’t have to meet the ’strange ones’.
