The Rumoured Soccer War*

Sudan Studies, Number 13 (January 1993)

Anthony Quinn, the epitome of elderly wisdom, sat cross-legged in the dust of the Libyan village, instructing an attentive group of small boys on the nature of Islam. Aided by the classical Arabic script which had been dubbed over the English sound track, Quinn gave a credible performance as the celebrated Senussi guerilla leader, Omar al-Mukhtar, who was finally apprehended and executed by General Rudolfo Graziani's Italian troops in 1931.

Bellowing his way through the part of Graziani himself, was Oliver Reed, who subjected his subordinates to such ferocious tongue lashings, that each onslaught, albeit in impeccable Arabic, induced them to intensify their efforts to pursue and slaughter Mukhtar's band of resistance fighters.

The film which charted the fortunes of a group of desert dwellers stirred into action against the colonising aggression of a militarily superior Italian power, was peppered with moments of high melodrama; not least of which was the scene depicting Mukhtar's army of embattled heroes desperately standing up to an overwhelming enemy in an oasis. To ensure that none of their number lost their nerve and fled in the face of the encroaching foe, each man hobbled himself in the way nomads tether their camels, tightly folding one leg back on itself with the rope. Unable to stand upright then, they lay in the dunes, trussed and ready, waiting for the attack from which none of them expected to emerge alive.


I'd witnessed this cinematic extravaganza several times on various TV screens in the small Sudanese village of El Ghaba, where I worked as an English teacher. The video of the film was ubiquitous in those households which possessed a television and VCR, normally as a result of having a family member earning hard currency in a Gulf state such as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. On this occasion, I had been enjoying the cool air and leafy shade afforded by a house in the densely cultivated strip of land which separated the River Nile from empty desert. After the evening meal, my teaching colleagues, the local doctor and myself, settled down, courtesy of our host, to drink tea and watch the unfolding drama of Mukhtar and Graziani.

When the time came to take our leave and journey back to our 'mess', we loaded ourselves precariously onto the backs of two Toyota pick-ups, the property of the school and hospital respectively, and moved through silent fields of beans and date palms towards an empty Saharan landscape. On arrival outside our school, a noisy messenger accosted us, jumping from his Landrover in a frenzy of agitation. Breathlessly he informed us that Ed Debba hospital, some five to six miles up river, was overflowing with the dead and dying victims of a machine gun massacre whose perpetrators were systematically blasting their way north, up the Nile towards us. He had rushed up from Ed Debba in search of a doctor who was needed urgently, he said, to care for the ever-increasing number of wounded.

The news shattered the peace and tranquillity in which we'd passed our evening. My imagination sparked into activity, frantically calculating possible scenarios and means of escape should the gun-toting maniacs reach me in the middle of the night.

The unlikely story which we wrung from the harbinger of of these catastrophic tidings was a tale of everyday Sudanese normality catapulted into a nightmarish world of irrational violence. Apparently, some government soldiers from the south of Sudan, stationed in Ed Debba garrison, had played a football match against a team of local northern youths from a nearby island on the Nile. This match was a replay of an earlier clash in which foul deeds on the pitch and rising animosity between the teams had easily transferred itself to the spectators. Two of the main protagonists from either side had left the pitch harbouring considerable grudges which, with the passage of time had matured to the point where the locals turned up for the second game, more than a needle match by this time, armed with knives and primed for confrontation.

At half time the tension had erupted into brawling during which one of the southern soldiers was killed. Enraged, the story went, the remaining soldiers had chased the islanders to the edge of the Nile, burning their ferry boat so that they were forced to swim across to their village and then had stormed the police station, liberating all the automatic weapons and ammunition they could find there. At this stage the narrative roared into overdrive. The picture painted of the indiscriminate shooting and killing which followed the raid on the police station would have done a multitude of Graziani's proud. Women and children, sick and elderly, were mown down in equal numbers, so it seemed. The police had fled and the "loathsome" aggressors were mopping up every scrap of human life they could find along the Nile, with rapid bursts of machine gun fire.

As the Landrover forged into the darkness throwing a wake of sand from its wheels, I allowed the full force of the situation to sink in. Already I was unconsciously straining my ears for the crack of distant gunfire, the sound which an orgy of morbidity had convinced me would be my last sensory experience on earth. My colleagues appeared not to share my sense of foreboding and the way they absent-mindedly went about the routine tasks before bed, suggested to me that the prospect (so real to my fevered imagination) of a fairly immediate and gruesomely violent death, did not throw any of them off balance at all. On exchanging our customary night time pleasantries, I pondered on the ominous poignancy of us all urging each other to wake up in good health the next morning.

Once settled, I accepted a proffered wad of sa'ut with more than my usual eagerness from Ayoub, whose bed occupied the patch of sand next to mine in the yard where we slept beneath the stars. Like a large proportion of the men I knew, Ayoub was a habitual user of sa'ut, or snuff as it was sometimes called. Rock salt known as natrun (a name it shared with a desert wadi where it was extracted from the ground), tobacco and a moistening touch of water were the component parts of the substance. The function of the natrun, I had been told, was to graze the inner surface of the bottom lip, where the sa'ut was most usually placed, allowing the nicotine more immediate access to the bloodstream.

As a non-smoker unused to the effects of tobacco, my first-time 'hit' had sent my head spinning onto an elevated plane from where I had eventually plummeted, to crawl behind the house and vomit quietly in the sand. With practice I had become adept at kneading the lump of noxious material in the palm of my left hand with the fingers of my right until it was a compact pellet, ready to be wedged between the gum at the front of my lower jaw and my bottom lip. Rendering the pinch of sa'ut mudurdum in shape in this way, rolling the brown mass into a ball, dung-beetle fashion, was only one method used. Many older men brushed such niceties, scooping a liberal amount of snuff from the tin onto the open palm of the hand before throwing it loose under the tongue, all in a single, flourishing gesture. After the effects wore off, the gob of used tobacco was spat onto the ground and, in the politest company, fastidiously covered with sweepings of loose sand.

We lay in the still air, each on his own bed, each with an exaggerated bump below the bottom lip where the sa''ut generated its high voltage current around the nervous system. Ayoub, preoccupied with problems of the heart, told me again about the childhood romance he had had with a neighbour's daughter in Khartoum. Initially neither the welcome effects of the nicotine, nor the soporific rhythms of the familiar story, could distract me from thoughts of death. Haunted by the report from Ed Debba, I was in an advanced state of panic, belied by the dormant aspect of my body, lying beneath a Chinese blanket under the deep blue, star-studded dome of the night sky.

I fought repeated urges to rise (like some demented desert version of Wee Willie Winkie) and bolt through the sleeping village in search of a secure hiding place. The realisation slowly taking shape in my mind was, that there was nowhere to run to. Surrounded by desert, I had to resign myself to fate, hoping that somehow, when the gunmen came with muzzles blazing, I'd be lucky enough to dodge their bullets. Still on edge waiting for the first far off report of approaching machine gun fire, I viewed my mortal predicament as one would watch a video, and recognised that I was just as powerless to escape as the guerillas who had hobbled themselves to face their foe in the Libyan oasis.

The next morning dawned without incident and marvelling at the fact that I must have dropped off to sleep despite my fear, I brushed shoulders with my sleepy colleagues as we wandered around the yard, cleaning teeth, drinking tea and moving beds into the shade for the day. No comment was made in reference to the previous night's alarm. We were all spruced up, chalk in hands, poised at our blackboards by 8 o'clock and, as if with a life of its own, the school moved through the day in a procession of normal events. Lesson followed lesson. The talk over breakfast was the usual bout of playful verbal jousting and political debate. Of guns flashing in the moonlight, rampaging soldiers and random slaughter on a massive scale, there was not a whisper.

I managed to toil through my day graduating slowly from a state of apprehension (still alert for sounds of attack), to one of tired befuddlement, neither happy to be alive, nor convinced that the danger was truly over.

The second night passed more easily than the first. I took Ayoub's sa'ut and actually paid attention to tales of his blighted love life. By the week's end I'd all but forgotten the supposed massacre and my narrow brush with death in a foreign land. I stopped worrying about how my remains would be transported to Scotland and started to participate once again in various activities. I went to the souk and was drinking sweet coffee the colour of tar, when I overheard a fellow patron of the shop conversing with his neighbour on the subject of the fracas which had flared up at the Ed Debba football match. Politely butting in, I asked if he could tell me how many people had died in the mayhem that tragic evening. He looked at me steadily before saying that only one person, the soldier in the initial scrap, had lost his life that day. Reflecting on the power of suggestion in this sand-blasted northern Sudanese landscape where communications were so problematical, I was thankful that I had been in mortal dread of nothing more lethal than a rumoured soccer war.

On pigeon hunting duty in Amri.

*(With apologies to Ryszard Kapuscinski)