Читать книгу Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan - Deborah Scroggins - Страница 10

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.