The climactic moment of the Queen’s visit was a huge tribal gathering in El Obeid where a hundred thousand people and thirty thousand camels assembled to greet her as a seemingly endless parade of Kababish, Hawawir, and other nomadic tribesmen filed past. The worst moment came on the way into town where three thousand schoolboys lined the road shouting “Down, Down, Down with British Colonialism”…and one hurled a tomato at the Queen.
-Letters from Khartoum, Russell McDougall
I never asked KhairAllah if he had been in that welcoming committee for Queen Elizabeth back in 1965, a scant twenty years before he welcomed me in Nahud with tea and millet paste. But I know it could not have been he who threw the tomato. He never wasted food, even last night’s Aseeda pot was always licked clean at breakfast.