The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur Read Online Free PDF Page B

Zaghawa. If you live in a small town, you know a great deal about the families who live there. If your town had no television or other things to take you away from visiting all the time, your town could be very large and you would still know something about everyone. So it is like that. And of course when people travel close together like this on long journeys, you get to know a great deal about many people. Everyone is well-known eventually.
    We finally arrived in the sprawling mud-brick, tin-roof city of Abéché, the last big community in Chad before the Sudan border. It is home to sixty or seventy thousand people in peaceful times, but now was thick with refugees and Chadian soldiers arriving to control the long border and prevent trouble. The soldiers let the refugees come across from Darfur since it was the only humane thing that could be done, and because there is a tradition of hospitality that prevents you from turning away your visitors.
    In Abéché I found a ride for the last, but very rough, ten miles to the Sudan border, to the town of Tine. I had been able to get very little sleep so far. Tine would be a good place to rest.
    As we approached the town, the smell found us before we could see any huts. It was the smell of tea brewing and food cooking. Tine is Zaghawa, so the cooking smells were very nice after such a long time away.
    I went to the sultan’s home, a fenced enclosure of severallarge huts. All visitors there are always welcomed with a mattress to sleep outdoors in the enclosure and with good food, for the sultan is there to care for the people.
    The war was bringing people by the thousands to the sultan, who was asking his omdas, who look out for the several regions of his kingdom, and his sheikhs, who look out for one village each, to arrange hospitality for the refugees. In North Darfur, for example, there are five such sultans. Several more are in West Darfur, several more in South Darfur, and several more, like this one, in Chad. These compose the ancient nation of Darfur, and Darfur is still organized as it was in the 1500s. The sultanships are hereditary, while the omdas and the sheikhs are appointed by the sultan because they have earned the respect of the people they live among. It is a very different kind of democracy, with the people voting for their local leaders not with ballots, but rather with their attitudes of respect for those who stand out in their service to their communities. The tally is kept in the mind of the sultan. At the national level, of course, there are regular elections, though they are now so corrupted by Bashir that they have no power to reflect the will and wisdom of the people.
    The sultan shook my hand and held my shoulder when we first met.
    “How is your father and your brother Ahmed?” he asked me. When he said this with such respect, I knew Ahmed would someday be the sheikh of our village.
    He told me that I had some cousins who, having fled Darfur, were now living in Tine, and he told me exactly where they could be found. He welcomed me to stay aslong as I pleased, then went back to the thousand emergencies pressing down on him.
    Some of the arriving people were gravely wounded by bombs and bullets in the attacks on their villages across the border. Some of the children who had come a long way were thin and ill. Some of the women and girls had been raped and were seriously injured by that. Family members were searching from village to village to find one another, and the sultan, omdas, and sheikhs were helping to find these people and take care of everyone.
    Amid all this rush of people and trouble, I lay down on the ground to rest. Because it had rained, plastic tarps were put down under the mattresses provided to guests. Despite the constant coming and going of people and the crying of children, I fell deeply asleep.
    In the morning, after drinking green tea with many others, I went looking for a Land Cruiser that would be heading north to Bahai, which is