At last our train rolls into [Khartoum]…It is well after sunset when we reach the Grand Hotel and find comfortable rooms and baths awaiting us. As we enter we are met with some roaring lions in a neighboring garden…The Blue Nile rolls at our feet, broad and blue and delicious…How profound the peace and repose of the city tonite! I feel inspired to mount yonder white camel and so wander off into the city, anywhere, everywhere…cross the river, and all alone save for the camel and the moon, enter the very house of the Khalifa and be greeted by, “Have a whiskey and soda, old man”.
-Islam Lands: Nubia and the Sudan, Michael Myers Shoemaker, 1910
Less notorious than Shepheard’s [in Cairo] is the Grand Hotel, Khartoum…a result of General Kitchener’s unique replanning of the city following the crucial Battle of Omdurman…In the new city of Khartoum which he laid out in the pattern of a Union Jack in a symbolic statement of British dominance…
-Anthony King, Imperialism and the Grand Hotel
Nothing says British dominance more than putting a whiskey bar in the home of the Mahdi’s Khalifa, Successor to the Rightly Guided One. After independence, the Khalifa’s house became the museum of the Mahdiyya, with such souvenirs of the world’s first successful uprising against British imperialism as the depiction of General Gordon’s beheading. But all that was in the “native town” of Omdurman. It was the year 1988 and a century had already passed.
Back in Khartoum, Steve and I were up at dawn, jetlagged and eager to get to Kordofan. We wandered out Nile-side hoping to have our breakfast at the Grand Hotel. I had taken tea there a few years earlier and thought he’d like its old world charm. But we found it a wreck with broken windows, doors off their hinges, cats running wild, and a toothless guard heating his kettle over a kerosene stove in the middle of the lobby. Tafaddal, he said. So we joined him. ‘Atlan, Out of order, he didn’t need to say. Ingileezi or Sudaani? I asked. Both, he answered. Here, have some date wine, O My Brothers. And we were served just like in the old days.