Читать книгу Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan - Deborah Scroggins - Страница 13

IN LONDON LOVING NOTES and flowers are still placed at the base of the brooding statue of the martyr of Khartoum that stands along the Embankment. If you don’t hear much about the ‘white man’s burden’ any more, savage wars of peace and Britain and America’s duty to fill full the mouth of famine remain staple news fare. In Khartoum the great clash between Gordon and the Mahdi is remembered differently. The Mahdi’s Oxford-educated great-grandson, Sadiq el-Mahdi, is the head of the Ansar sect as well as Sudan’s largest political party. After President Nimeiri was overthrown in 1986, Sadiq, as the Sudanese call him, was elected Prime Minister. In 1987, the year Emma made her first visit to Sudan, Sadiq declared the anniversary of his great-grandfather’s victory over the British hero a national holiday. On 26 January crowds thronged Omdurman’s outdoor theatres to watch children re-enact the killing of Gordon. When the Ansar ran their spears through the Englishman - dressed in one skit in a red mini-dress over a pair of black bell-bottoms - the sky overhead burst into fireworks. Emma arrived in time for the celebrations, but she appears to have paid them no mind. To her mother, she wrote rapturously of the Sudanese men in their loose white turbans and long flowing gowns and of the hot breeze that in Khartoum smelled of exotic spices. Right away she wanted to stay.

In his letter, Emma’s admirer Tayeb Zaroug promised that he would prepare ‘All Showak to wait for you’. Evidently he kept his word. A friend of Zaroug’s picked Emma up at the Khartoum airport and drove her to the refugee administration centre 150 miles to the east in Showak. From there, Emma wrote to her mother that the Sudanese treated her ‘like a queen’. She was given her own room with a garden in an old British guesthouse. Every morning she opened the large wooden shutters on her windows to the cloudless desert sky. At the end of the day, Tayeb and the other refugee administrators would change out of their grey safari-style uniforms and into long white jallabiyas, and she would join them for a communal meal under an acacia tree in the garden of the administration compound. She never asked for a fork and knife but used the flat, pancake-like Sudanese bread called kisra to scoop up spicy Sudanese stews just as the men did. After dinner she and Zaroug might sit outside, drinking the bootleg alcohol called aragi and looking at the stars. Most of the men had left their families at home when they moved to Showak, and in any event it is customary for men and women in Sudan to eat separately. But Emma didn’t mind being the only woman. She liked it. As a guest of the government, she was not allowed to cook, wash, iron, make her bed or go anywhere unaccompanied. Far away from judging English eyes, she felt free, free to lie in bed as long as she liked, free to show up late for appointments, free to stuff herself with food if she liked. ‘It is a very conducive lifestyle,’ she wrote to her mother.

Showak had grown up around the railway line the British built in the 1920s to transport cotton to Port Sudan from the fertile Gezira land south of Khartoum. It was a scrubby little town of flat-roofed Arab buildings with a few acacia trees. In colonial times, British farmers had run some cotton farms near Showak. (The Anglo-Egyptian administration financed itself by running large agricultural schemes for profit.) Now the refugees from Ethiopia were the town’s main industry. UNHCR had its headquarters there, as did most of the private Western charities working in eastern Sudan. The gleaming white Land Cruisers favoured by the aid agencies nearly, but not quite, outnumbered the donkeys on the town’s sandy unpaved streets. In the government compound where Emma stayed, several dozen pins in a map on the wall showed the location of camps in the desert between the old railway line and the border with Ethiopia. The camps had names like Um Rakuba (Mother of Shelter) and Hakuma (Government) and Tawawa and Central One and Central Two.

In the 1970s, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) had been joined by other ethnic liberation groups seeking to overthrow Ethiopia’s by then communist government. The Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) each claimed to be battling to create an Ethiopian state. In addition to the bewildering acronyms of their names, they professed an opaque mixture of Marxist, Maoist and even Albanian ideology. The only thing that really united all the fighters was the desire to oust the Amhara people, who had dominated Ethiopia first under the emperor and then under Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Behind the thorn fences that surrounded every camp, the refugees were divided according to religion as well as ethnicity and political affiliation. Many of them had fled to Sudan during the Ethiopian famine of 1984-5. Others had come a decade earlier to escape the famine that struck Ethiopia’s northern provinces of Tigre and Wollo in 1973. Still others had been in this part of Sudan since the 1960s. The Eritrean camps, which were the oldest, had the best facilities. Over the years, some Eritreans had been able to build flat-roofed mud houses with painted metal doors like those of the Sudanese who lived in the region. It was possible to find an acacia tree or two in the Eritrean camps. More commonly the refugees found shelter from the sun in the round thatched tukuls they made out of mud and sticks and plastic sheeting donated by the aid agencies. The tukuls were set off with little fences made of thorn. They could be surprisingly cosy inside, with Ethiopian needlework hung on the walls and tea-kettles bubbling on the charcoal stoves that the refugees made out of tin cans. Beyond the camps were the graves of the dead, an endless expanse of mounds that rippled out into the desert, seemingly all the way to Ethiopia. The Tigreans and Tigrinya-speaking Eritreans, who were Christian, put crosses on their graves. The Muslim Eritreans covered theirs with thorn bushes. The sand swallowed up both with equal indifference.

The camps teemed with political intrigues; what the West saw as purely humanitarian acts were never viewed as such in Showak. Anything the aid agencies gave to one camp was assumed to be intended to benefit whatever ethnic or political group was in charge there. Emma soon learned that each liberation group had its foreign backers, even its foreign groupies. There were always rumours of secret deals and deliveries; somebody was always paying somebody else off. One day Saudi Arabia was supposed to be sending the EPLF a lorryload of new AK-47s hidden beneath sacks of grain and milk powder. Another time she heard about a US embassy official who had been seen meeting with members of the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Alliance. Then a group of stubble-chinned Frenchmen who said they were journalists but whom the Sudanese suspected were spies were seen hanging around town for a few days, waiting to cross the border with the TPLF on one of the rebels’ secret runs into Ethiopia.

The human consequences of this skulduggery were plain for Emma to see. Every third or fourth tukul contained its legless or armless young man; at any tea shop, she could find a table of war veterans smoking and arguing furiously in Tigrinya or Arabic. After big battles inside Ethiopia, the wounded would come flowing back from the event into Sudan by cover of darkness, like a kind of human sonic boom. The next morning she saw them lying in their bloody bandages on the stretchers their comrades had used to carry them down from the mountains. The camps were full of disease - malaria and tuberculosis above all - as well as suffocating idleness. The Ethiopians were forbidden to work in Sudan. Many Ethiopians worked illegally anyway in towns like Kassala and Gedaref and Khartoum, but they were subject to periodic round-ups called kasha in which they might be returned to the camps, if not imprisoned. The local Sudanese envied them their free food and medical care, but the camps were hardly havens of safety. Occasionally one would hear the sound of gunfire. Rival factions would assassinate each other’s members. Murderous rivalries broke out among hungry, bored people crowded into small spaces.

But to khawajas of a certain temperament, Showak’s appeal was all the more alluring for being less than obvious. (And in this self-enclosed world, Emma was quickly assigned a place: From the moment she set foot outside the administration compound, dancing children followed her wherever she went, pointing and shouting, ‘Khawaja! Khawaja! Khawaja!’ Her nationality and her pro-African sympathies meant little to the refugees, just as their nationality - Ethiopian - and their political sympathies - democratic, Marxist, royalist - meant little next to their more fundamental ethnic and religious loyalties. To them, she was a white woman, plain and simple.) From a Western point of view, the refugees were so pitiful, so poor, so utterly bereft that it seemed as if almost anything one did for them would help. The rush, the thrill, the excitement of living on the edge in itself gave the aid workers an excuse for all sorts of wildness that would never have been tolerated in their own countries. What was tedious for the refugees could be exciting for expatriates. Here as in the rest of Africa, khawajas were forever turning to one another to say, with pleased surprise, ‘Did you know my brother is a stockbroker?’ - and then smiling in mutual satisfaction for having escaped such a fate. And in Emma’s case, there was the haunting sense of kinship she felt with the Sudanese - the sensation that, in Sudan, she had come home.

But a haze of suspicion hung over Westerners in Showak. In the nearby Tawawa camp not far from Showak, Emma met some of the Ethiopian Jews left behind a few years earlier when Israel managed to spirit away some 16,000 falashas, as the Ethiopians called them. It had been against the stated policy of Sudan to assist the Jewish state in any way, but with American help the Israelis spread around enough cash that they were able to land a plane more than once outside Showak and load the Ethiopian Jews onto it. Ahmed Karadawi had often pointed to the Ethiopian Jews as another case of Western hypocrisy, noting that US and Jewish charities raised $300 million to finance Operation Moses, the most dramatic of the Israeli airlifts, and care for its 8,000 beneficiaries - ten times the amount raised in the United States at the height of the famine to care for 600,000 refugees remaining in Sudan. When news of the falasha affair broke, the Sudanese media portrayed it as an outrageous violation of Sudanese sovereignty by a conspiracy of Zionists, CIA agents and humanitarian agencies. The outcry helped lead to Nimeiri’s downfall. In the trials and investigations that followed, several refugee administrators lost their jobs. Those who remained tended to view the khawaja commotion over the famine in Ethiopia as a smokescreen for the West to pursue its own interests, such as aiding Israel and making the Soviet Union look bad.

Emma’s Sudanese friends assumed she would have no trouble finding a job with one of the Western aid agencies. Zaroug and the others were forever complaining about the arrogant young foreigners who ran so many of the refugee programmes. Just as the Victorians in the nineteenth century trusted Gordon and Baker more than the Egyptians to carry out their anti-slavery agenda in Sudan, so twentieth-century North Americans and Europeans trusted their own nationals more than Africans to carry out their schemes for African improvement. Frustrated by what they perceived as the inefficiency and corruption of African governments, they channelled an increasing amount of their aid through private, non-governmental organizations such as World Vision and Oxfam. The overseas aid workers were often hired not for their knowledge of Africa but for their familiarity with Western ideas about what should be done for Africa. In the 1980s, that meant concepts such as women’s rights and ‘grassroots development’.

In the eyes of the Sudanese, the Western aid agencies’ preference for hiring khawaja over Sudanese managers looked at best like a case of tribal favouritism, at worst like a neocolonial plot. To them, these university-educated Europeans and Americans seemed painfully incompetent. Few spoke any of the languages of Sudan or Ethiopia. They seldom knew anything about the way the refugees had lived back at home. They were hardly capable of penetrating the internecine politics of the camps. They outraged local mores with their clothes and their music.

Volunteers hired in their home countries to work for organizations like Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) for about $100 a month, lived closest to the people. Their stipend was still almost four times the average annual Sudanese income of $360. After gaining some experience, however, expatriates who liked the life could graduate to better-paying jobs with an established charity such as Oxfam or Concern or CARE. At the top of the aid caste system were the high-ranking UN officials and Western diplomats in charge of dispensing the government money that kept the whole system operating. They did not visit the camps often, being busy in Khartoum with logistics and paperwork, but they sailed back and forth in air-conditioned vehicles between their offices and walled villas with cooks and gardeners. The United Nations and its specialized agencies such as UNHCR and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) regarded Sudan as a hardship post. In addition to an annual salary of $50,000 to $100,000, such expatriate officials in the country received a per diem of $100 a day. To obtain one of these jobs, certification from a Western university in development studies or refugee affairs was usually the ticket. The aid workers in Showak welcomed Emma to their Friday-night rooftop parties. But with a degree in art history and no aid experience, she didn’t have the credentials for them to hire her.

After a month in the east, she gave up looking for work in Showak and went to Khartoum. In the capital, she found a short-term position funded by the VSO, teaching English and art to children at an Italian convent school. Initially she hoped to extend her contract. But the sprawling Sudanese capital was not Showak. According to her mother and 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 were just as sceptical as her old friends of her new-found political ardour. These were their countries, 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.’