Letter from Sudan # 7

-7-

The month of September is right in the middle of the rainy season. It ends in October, when winter begins. This afternoon there was an uncharacteristic downpour (it normally rains at night here) that would have done credit to any self-respecting cloudburst in England.

It lasted about twenty minutes, during which time the Heavens opened, mostly, it seemed to me, onto my leaky roof. The rain fell and my roof seemed more like a sieve. Muddy water poured in on my newly washed shirts. Those shirts were washed by hand in cold water, and I was the launderer, so the air was as blue as the ‘zahara’ (dolly blue) that I had soaked them in after scrubbing.

A leaking roof is nothing to write home about for the Sudanese teachers who live next door. Rain is accepted as the will of God, along with the baking sun that returns minutes after the deluge has ended. Leaking roofs don’t matter so much when there is nothing to get wet. In my house, things are different; I have the trappings of a life in England to protect and keep dry.

The teachers from Messelemiya are uncomplaining – they have little to get wet. The entire contents of the average Sudanese home wouldn’t fill a teenager’s bedroom in England. The meager furniture usually consists of several upright, and very uncomfortable steel chairs, a small table for visitors, and of course, beds, usually wooden with a colourful bant for a spring mattress. Sundry pots and pans and a small charcoal stove complete the inventory.

As I said, there is nothing much to get wet if the roof does happen to leak. Personnel possessions are few and men are not measured by them. That man might have seven goats, that man a bicycle, but that doesn’t single him out as being any different to anyone else.

It used to be said of Sudan that you could leave a suitcase at the side of the road and return a year later to find it exactly where you left it. Whether that is still the case would be difficult to tell without the acid test, and as I have neither twelve months, or a suitcase to spare I will probably never know.

The fact is this though; crime here is but a fraction of the level that it is in Britain or America. The punishments are severe; under the now deposed Nimeiri, cross-amputation was the punishment short of capital punishment. The right hand and the left foot were amputated leaving the criminal a social outcast for the rest of his life.

Eating is a thing to be done with others here, using the right hand only, the removal of which renders the amputee a social pariah for all time, however much reformed he may become. Cross-amputation is a thing of the past although the amputation of the hand is still reserved for the Sudanese equivalent of the highwayman when he is found guilty and sentenced in a court of law.

Such harsh punishment, however, should not be looked upon merely as a deterrent, but rather as the wrath of God that is being transmitted to the wrongdoer in much the same way that a crime was once considered as being a crime against the body of the king in medieval times in England, where the criminal had the offence to the king’s body inscribed on his own in the form of torture and ultimately death and the hanging, drawing and quartering of his body to show the people that the king had rightly and properly been avenged.

In Sudan, civil law is supplemented by Islamic law or rather that civil law is the supplement to Shariah Law, which is the law of God. The deterrent then is not amputation but the transgression the will of God. In a country with a population of more than 22 million people, the vast majority of which are Muslim, and whose devotion to God is absolute, any act of this kind is anathema and is punishment itself. The subsequent amputation then, seen in this light, is the judgment of wronged God as much as God’s revenge.

The act itself, rather than the punishment, is the deterrent and the fact that this might be all but incomprehensible to Western ears is testimony to the difference between us and the people of Sudan.

In Britain, it is presumed that the punishment is the deterrent. There is little or no mention of the act itself being the deterrent. The criminal, in our society, is motivated by those very same motives that everybody is moved by: material acquisition and selfishness. In the case of criminal behaviour, it is the means rather than the motive that is being punished. The breach has to be filled although the motives remain untouched. The very same motives – material acquisition and selfishness are lauded, wholly approved of and rewarded where the means are seen as appropriate and sanctioned by the state’s judicial system.

Little wonder that crime flourishes when the only vigilance exerted is taken by the forces of the status quo. Vigilance is external in Britain. In Sudan, it is both external and internal, and in that lies a world of difference.

Where vigilance is external, the forces of law and order become increasingly strained and stretched in the same proportion as internalized vigilance decreases in the public. In those countries where the opposite is more usually the case, the forces of law and order have to exert much less control and expend much less energy.

Paradoxically, in countries where there is a decline in respect for the rule of law, there are less severe punishments, with the reverse being the case in countries where standards are nearer honesty.

Here, you would be in error if you imagined that I was advocating the return of capital punishment. To m y mind, the act of bringing back capital punishment would be similar to shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. Remember that the use of amputation and execution in Sudan is not used purely as a deterrent to criminals. That is provided by moral and public censure and, more effectively, by an internalized system of beliefs by which the individual is directed to act and behave, even when not in sight of others – especially then .

In those nations where material acquisition has become a way of life, we can surely expect criminal acts to increase if we deny individuals the same chances to acquire, particularly when such denial is viewed as entirely arbitrary by those so denied.

Only education and faith show Western democracies ways out of this dilemma. Both show us that money isn’t everything.
Robert L. Fielding
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