Word passes in whispers [among the Egyptian traders] that we’ve arrived from Nahud…Muhammad truly needs help in this camel trading business. Making a profit from a simple sale is a new concept for him, a man used only to working hard for honest pay. The EXIM game confounds him, where two Sudanese pounds equal one Egyptian pound, where prices can double in a single sentence [are you speaking Sudanese or Egyptian Arabic?], where two thousand miles of trail in forty days multiplies what a camel is worth, where, as here in Binban, neither a man’s word nor handshake is held true. Money…count it twice.
-Day 42, Trail Diary, Kordofan to Cairo, February 1984, on the day we arrived in Egypt’s Nile Valley camel-trading town of Binban, 30 kms north of Aswan on the western bank
Muhammad was the most naive, honest, kindly drover in our group. Adam was the designated camp cook but Muhammad did most of the aseeda making, despite already having done most of the other camp chores. Once Adam asked for a rag to clean a pot and Muhammad tore him off a piece of his own riding tunic. He was too poor, too miskeen (unlike in classical Arabic where the word means miserly, in Sudanese colloquial it is miserable) to have any turban cloth left at all. We joked that he was too miskeen even to be buried properly, turbans being a man’s ever-present shroud.
So when Muhammad tried to sell his camel to the shrewd Egyptian traders, KhairAllah stepped in to help him negotiate. There was some shouting, dowsha, but that is normal in Egypt, and in the end Muhammad seemed satisfied with the price. KhairAllah himself was not well versed in trading- he was the khabeer, trail boss, expert of the route not the market- but he proved again and again that he could do most things and many things well
I was not happy that day in Binban. The trail camaraderie had ended too abruptly. Egyptians can do that to you, in a minute break a magic desert spell that has lasted for forty two days. Just look at the last scene in Voice of the Whip, when the narrator says, “But this is the end of their journey, Egyptian workers load the train”, and the film goes to slow motion as fat peasants with sticks beat the camels and the drovers look on impassively from the side.
Robert Gardner had a point when he objected to our funding pitch. No, he said, it does not sound like an ethnography about men. What I hear is a tragedy about camels, they walk across the Sudanese desert only to be sold and slaughtered by Egyptian butchers. In Egypt, money…count it twice.