The native town of Omdurman which was the capital under the Mahdi regime…with room for upwards of 100,000…became the scene of the most atrocious cruelties and the most extravagant orgies…
The warlike oppression before 1899, the fanatical enthusiasm for pilgrimages, the desire for plunder, and the devastation of whole provinces have assembled here a confused medley of the most diverse races and stocks…[and] tribes from the desert, such as Nuba, Baggara, Kabbabish, Gowameh, and Kowahleh Arabs...
-Baedeker’s Guide to Egypt and The Sudan, Seventh Edition, 1914
Karl Baedeker and his son Ernst were the Frommer and Fodor of the 19th Century, but Ernst died of sunstroke in Egypt in 1863 in the month of July, which if he had followed his own advice would not have happened because one should never go in high summer.
Their 1914 edition covers the Sudan just 15 years after it was retaken by Lord Kitchener in the Battle of Omdurman, killing 10,000 Sudanese against a handful of Britishers, as narrated in the cold-blooded derring-do voice of Winston Churchill’s The River War- “Talk of fun! Where will you beat this?”
By then safely subdued, Baedeker described Omdurman as a tamed beast. His fold-out map identifies the city’s British-made ruins- “Arab Quarter Ruins”, “Khalifa’s Body Guard Quarters Ruins”, “Ruins of Taishi’s Quarter”, etc.- right beside the new “Polo Ground” and “Golf Links”- as if Baghdad’s Oz-like Green Zone was adjacent to Bush’s shocked and awed busted bunkers, never having been rebuilt.
But fast forward seven decades to 1984 and years following to my own visits to Omdurman, to sit in the office of my camel merchant family friends located where golf and polo were once played, in a city grown twenty if not fifty times larger than Baedeker said it had room for.
Despite Baedeker’s recommendation to tour Omdurman by donkey and not by tram, I took a taxi from Khartoum across the old White Nile bridge, then along the river’s west bank past the Mahdi’s tomb and into the rabbit warren streets of the city proper. On each new visit I forgot the route and each time the taxi driver and I had to navigate by dumb luck. But we always managed to find the ‘Imaarat Abu Jaib, the Abu Jaib Building, where I might have to wait downstairs if Sayyid had not yet arrived with keys to open the office.
When he was late, Khairallah would be sitting with Sakeena, the jebena coffee-making lady whose stall and low seats were near the front door. We all laughed about Sakeena, maybe because the word “sakeen” means knife, and Sakeena’s tongue was sharp. She knew me by name which was satisfying, and she knew KhairAllah as my friend from the camel road to Egypt, which was even more so. In the streets of Omdurman, “desert cred” got one far, since most people there were from the western provinces and knew the way of the sand.
I took my coffee unsweetened, which made Sakeena joke that I must have a very sweet girl at home not to need any sugar here. KhairAllah and I told her stories from the desert, about camel thieves and bedbugs and such, before Sayyid would pull up in his chauffer-driven blue Mercedes diesel sedan, and then we would go upstairs to the majlis to talk more about camels, leaving Sakeena on the street to make coffee for people wearing shirts and trousers, not ‘araagis and sirwals as her tribal compatriot KhairAllah wore.
