A Journey to the Red Sea #2

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On and off the road

Conditions at the outset were something less than perfect; the ‘haboob’ was gusting strongly and the dust whipped up had rendered the sky a curious yellowy brown colour and made sitting on the backs of lorries loaded with sacks of cotton, bound at one time for the cotton mills of Lancashire, a dirty affair.

We reached the border of the Eastern Region and the Central Region at the town of Gedaref in a disheveled state – dirty, thirsty and tired. Sudan’s extreme flatness at this point makes the 4-hour journey an uninteresting one with the only thing to make you sit up and take a look being a caravan of hundreds of camels plodding eastwards to be sold in the markets there.

Our driver turns into Gedaref by a back road to avoid the Policed checkpoint on the edge of town. He knows that the presence of ‘howajad’ on the back of his lorry will delay him and may even land him in trouble.

In a towns without street names, the radio mast is a welcome sight and one that will help us find our way about later. After the small towns and villages of Gezira (El Hosh, Messelemiya, Hasaheisa) with their traffic of donkeys, horses and carts and the odd lorry, Gedaref town centre feels like Oxford Circus on Saturday afternoon.

Lots and lots of huge lorries with equally large trailers, loaded with sacks of cotton or grain hurtle past at terrifying speeds. Taxis, Land Rovers, Japanese 4 b y 4s and small trucks crowd the streets and make crossing them difficult. It has been said of Gedaref, that it has more millionaires than Manhattan, and the many mansions give it the look of affluence. Unlike Manhattan however, adjacent to the large, imposing buildings owned by rich grain merchants, are huddled grass huts with pointed roofs, the home of the less well off majority of Gedaref.

Being near to the border with famine stricken Tigray, the town is a magnet for refugees who either live in camps that surround the town or else live in these huts, sandwiched between the grand homes of the rich. A walk around the open market though, might lead you to believe there is no famine or hardship of any sort. The vegetable suq is a colourful couple of acres of bright tomatoes, mangoes, bananas and melons. The shops that surround this thronged area are full of the things we had forgotten existed back in Gezira - tins of pilchards, bars of chocolate, tins of cocoa – all manner of foodstuff that originates from either America or Europe.

This apparent glut blurs the image of the Sudan , its people and their hard lives – shops full of food don’t necessarily mean full stomachs. The price of these ‘luxury goods’, for example, would be well beyond the reach of the refugee population and many of the town’s poor. A Mars bar costs five Sudanese pounds – the same price as five meals or twenty cups of tea. We declined the luxury and the shelves remained well stocked.

Robert L. Fielding