SUDAN · NUBIAN DESERT · NORTH OF KHARTOUM
A dust storm, a Land Cruiser, a Japanese colleague who did not understand the desert, and a meal that was not what it appeared to be. A dispatch from the road to nowhere north of Khartoum.
The poles appear every kilometre. That is all there is — a steel stake driven into the sand, then nothing, then another stake a kilometre ahead, barely visible through the dust. Without them you are dead. With them you are merely lost.
There were three of us in the Land Cruiser: Vivek and I in the back, a Japanese colleague in the front passenger seat, and a Sudanese driver who had been navigating this desert since before any of us had a passport. We were travelling north of Khartoum on the groundwork for what would become one of the most successful community development projects in northern Sudan. At the time it did not feel successful. It felt like a dust storm.
The driver had the radio on. Arabic music — steady, rhythmic, perfectly suited to the landscape outside, which was moving in ways that landscapes are not supposed to move. The Japanese colleague reached forward and turned it off. The driver said nothing. A few minutes passed. The music came back on. The colleague turned it off again. The driver waited longer this time. Then it came back on. By the third attempt the colleague understood something important: in the middle of the Nubian Desert, we were entirely at this man’s mercy. The music stayed on.
The Nubian Desert does not negotiate. Neither did the driver.
He was having fun with the terrain. Every dip in the sand — and there were many — he took at speed, so the Land Cruiser would catch air at the crest and land with a thud that sent the three of us into the roof. He did not do this by accident. There was a slight adjustment of speed before each dip that told you he had done this before and intended to do it again. We were shocked the first time. After that it was a thrill. Everyone laughed. The music played.
Through the dust and the haze, shapes appeared and disappeared. Trucks — ancient, overloaded, the kind that look like they have been running since the 1950s and will run for fifty years more through sheer stubbornness. Buses with people sitting on the roof. A camel. Figures in white robes that seemed to dissolve back into the sand as we passed. It was not like driving through a foreign country. It was like driving through time. The haze gave everything the quality of a dream, or a memory — something seen but not quite touchable.
We arrived at the village as the light was going. Low mud-brick structures, a compound, a group of men who had been waiting for us. They had laid on a meal. It was huge. One dish caught my attention. It was set out on a low table — a large, dark, slightly domed centrepiece that had a peculiar texture in the fading light. My first thought was that it was some kind of cake, dense and dark, perhaps made from dates. I was looking forward to it.
Then the air moved, and the surface of the cake moved with it.
It was not cake. It was a salad – covered, entirely and completely, with flies. The Nubian flies are not like other flies. They are patient, numerous, and committed. The surface of the dish was alive with them in a way that was, once you understood what you were looking at, oddly impressive. Our hosts gestured toward it with great pride. They had gone to considerable trouble.
It looked like black cake. It was actually covered with flies.
This is the moment that defines a journey. Not the dust storm, not the airborne Land Cruiser, not the poles in the sand. This moment, at a low table in a Sudanese village, when you understand that hospitality is not about the food. It is about the gesture. These people had almost nothing and they had laid on their best. The flies were not the point. The welcome was the point.
We ate. I do not remember how. I remember that it was important to eat, and that we did. Vivek and I were fine. Our Japanese colleague spent the night in the loo.
The community development project that brought us to that table worked. Years later, looking at the outcomes — the wells, the schools, the health posts, the local governance structures that actually functioned — it was one of the best results I saw in two decades of this work. I have thought sometimes about whether the meal had anything to do with it. Whether the willingness to sit down at that table, in that dust, with those flies, established something between us and the communities we were working with that made the work real rather than transactional.
Probably I am making too much of a meal. But the Nubian Desert was full of things that looked like one thing and turned out to be another. That was part of what made it extraordinary.
— Parminder Brar