SUDAN, THE LARGEST COUNTRY IN AFRICA, was known to Homer and Nero, but for centuries it was seen from Europe as little more than a desolate, empty hinterland of Egypt, even when Egypt was discreetly and unofficially folded into the British Empire in the late nineteenth century. Then, in 1881, a soft-spoken religious recluse called Muhammad Ahmad, who had for years lived on an island in the Nile 250 km to the south of today’s Khartoum, declared himself a second prophet, or Mahdi. He called for a holy war against Sudan’s decadent Egyptian masters and their Christian associates. By 1884...

CLINGHIG HIGH OVER THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA, the plane soon finds the Nile and settles onto its course south. To the right the sun sinks over the western desert, and the golden brown sand turns first pink, then black. As we drone onwards, the pilot announces first Luxor, then Aswan and Abu Simbel. The names conjure up the 19205; romance, comfortable decadence, and English tourists in white linen suits taking in the sights; the Winter Palace and the Old Cataract; Howard Carter and Agatha Christie.

Ninety minutes out of Cairo, we cross into Sudanese airspace. There are no more lights...

THE REASON CANADA OPENED a diplomatic office in Sudan in 2000 was oil. But not because we wanted to get our hands on the precious resource; in fact, quite the opposite.

After some four years of exploration in Central/South Sudan’s Muglad Basin, Chevron of the USA had made the first significant oil strikes in Sudan in 1978, close to the ramshackle riverside town of Bentiu. Estimates of reserves varied wildly over the next few years, but they were sufficiently to optimistic to lead then-President Jaafar Nimeiri to adjust borders handed down by the British and redraw the map of Southern...

WHEN SUDAN’S CIVIL WAR ENTERED its second phase in the 19805 and it became apparent that there was going to be no quick resolution, the international humanitarian community was faced with the major problem of how to access the benighted civilian population on both sides of the frontlines without infringing on the sovereignty of a recognized member of the United Nations. The answer was Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), the brainchild of then-United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) head James Grant. At the basis of OLS was a 1989 tripartite agreement between the Government of Sudan, the rebel SPLM/A, and the United...

FOR THE LAST TWO DECADES, Sudan has been one of the world’s leading examples of the callousness of powerful men towards the common people whom they claim to represent. A million - or two million? - dead in the war, three million - or four million? - uprooted from their homes by violence, drought, or famine and forced to migrate hundreds of kilometres and start again, with nothing. And much of this, of course, has been done in the name of God - not just Allah, but the God of the Christians as well.

The Gulu and Kitgum districts of...

THE HOME OF Sheikh Hassan Abdullah al-Turabi was a local landmark in the Khartoum neighbourhood of Riyadh, east of the airport, now rivaled in local folklore only by the rambling house nearby that Osama bin-Laden rented for several years in the early 1990s. I paid the sheikh a call in January 2001; as he welcomed me at the door he gestured to the newly asphalted road outside and chuckled: “See, I still have some influence ...”

Active in politics all his life and related by marriage to the Mahdi clan, Turabi had risen to the rank of attorney general under...

IN THE COLONIAL ERA, Southern Sudan was defined by the British as the portion of Sudan that comprised the states of Bahr al-Ghazal, Upper Nile, and Equatoria: roughly speaking, the territory south of the tenth parallel. But a salient of Upper Nile projects northwards like a thumb, and its northernmost town - Renk, on the eastern bank of the White Nile - is almost at twelve degrees north and is only 500 km due south of the capital. Like a number of other pockets within the SPLM/A-dominated South, this settlement was controlled by the government. This was just as well...

GETTING TO “THE OTHER SIDE”- rebel-held South Sudan - was complicated. Usually, from Khartoum, it meant taking the 3:45 a.m. Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi, spending a full day arranging a travel permit with either the SPLM/A and/or the smaller Relief Association for South Sudan (for areas controlled by the SPDF, Riak Machar’s lesser rebel movement that was only periodically and uneasily allied with the mainstream SPLM/A), taking another flight northwards to the United Nations base at Loki, then boarding some combination of expensive and slow UN nights into South Sudan from Loki. I made no secret, in Khartoum, of...

DOWN ON THE BANKS OF THE NILE, close to St Matthew’s Catholic Cathedral and the blue-shuttered Sisters’ School in Khartoum, was the Blue Nile Sailing Club, where in winter, when the winds were steady and strong from the north, the river low, clean, and not too fast-running, Jenny and I would spend much of our free time. This was no ordinary sailing club. The clubhouse was a relic of Kitchener’s 1898 expedition: the gunboatHMS Melik.

TheMelikwas originally commanded by Major “Monkey” Gordon, RM, a nephew of Charles Gordon; among the captains of two of theMelik’ssister...

ASSESSING SOUTHERN OPINION from an office in Khartoum was, at best, a guessing game. While the Northern capital had over the past fifteen years become home to upwards of three million Southerners - many of them fleeing the war and famine in the South - it was, for obvious reasons, difficult to find anyone who overtly sympathized with the SPLM/A: quite apart from it being dangerous to express such views in public, the fact was that, if you believed in the cause, you would probably want to be in the South, or at least in Nairobi. There were nevertheless a...

WHEN IN JULY 2002 the framework for a peace deal was signed at Machakos the government, while conceding the principle of self-determination for Southern Sudan, carefully excluded from the deal three areas that over the next year or so came to be known euphemistically as “the contested areas” (as though all of South Sudan was not contested). These were three quite separate regions of Sudan where the SPLM/A had an active and armed presence and/or where the Dinka were populous; yet these regions did not fall within the commonly accepted definition of South Sudan - that is to say, below...

WHILE THE OUTSIDE WORLD focused on the conflict in Southern Sudan, it tended to be forgotten or ignored (until early 2004, that is) that the far west had its problems as well. Simply reaching the west was very difficult, as I found out on my first venture in this direction. Starting from Khartoum at dawn one April day in 2001, and heading for West Kordofan, Babiker (who was driving) and I were - encouragingly - past Kosti and coming to our first stop by noon: the small village of Kandua, in North Kordofan.

The tiny brick medical clinic Canada was...

JENNY AND I SPENT MOST of an afternoon and all one evening rummaging around the house for a mislaid travel permit; the plan had been to spend the long Eid (post-Haj holiday) of 2003 at Dinder National Park, located on Sudan/Ethiopia border. But the paper was nowhere to be found. Should we hope for the best and seek to bluff our way through the many checkpoints we were sure to encounter on the 400 km drive southeast, or should we play safe and sit quietly doing nothing for the best part of a week in closed-down Khartoum? I made numerous...

GETTING OUT OF KHARTOUM WAS NEVEREASY. You needed first a travel permit, which, depending on your intended destination, could take weeks to obtain (at the very least several days), and, if you wanted to visit one of the archaeological sites, you needed yet another permit. You could not simply show up at, say, the pyramids of Meroe, pay for a ticket, and go in. Travel permits were demanded at city exits by surly plainclothes youths in sunglasses; although you might then go several days on your route without being stopped. The need to jump through these bureaucratic hoops made the...

IN MAY 2003, I’m back in Malakal for one of my last field trips in Sudan. I’m welcomed off the Sudan Airways Antonov flight by William, a heavily built Nuer man from Leer, Western Upper Nile, who works for the Irish aid organization GOAL. William lives with his two wives, miscellaneous uncles, and children in a mud-walled house in the quarter known as Malakiya. For four days, he is my guide.

Under William’s guidance, I keenly inspect the two supplementary feeding clinics that GOAL runs at Bern and Malakiya and its therapeutic feeding station (for severely malnourished children) in the...