Life in Chartum is a strange, slipshod, uncravatted sort of existence…a sort of black Regent Street where every variety of vice stalks abroad with a publicity as shameless, if not as importunate, as in our own. With all this, and perhaps on this very account, a stay of a few days is highly agreeable and not without instruction.
-Wanderings around the Aethiopian Desert from Sawakin to Chartum, James Hamilton, 1857
Khartoum has changed a lot between Hamilton’s visit and my first. I remember that Sayyid Bashir took me to a soccer match in Omdurman where we ate peanuts, not a vice in a country that calls them Sudanese Beans, but I was not reluctant to leave its bright lights for Kordofan. Forty years later the war has almost destroyed Khartoum, making it even stranger, more slipshod and uncravatted than ever before.