Sudan: the class war in the capital
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By Magdi El Gizouli
July 16, 2013 - Over the past few years the Sudanese press has
dedicated more and more space to coverage of crime, reports that
attract a greater readership than the seesaw of Juba-Khartoum
relations and the bellicose politics of the ruling National Congress
Party (NCP) and its opponents. In fact, the widest distributing paper
in Sudan, al-Dar, is wholly dedicated to crime and scandal, feeding a
steady stream of the bizarre, extreme and shocking to the gossip
rounds of the nation, associated in the rule with the lengthy
multi-event weddings and extended funerals that channel rather than
interrupt daily life.
Thanks to an ever increasing number of cars and internet-wired mobile
phones, the more affluent middle-class inhabitants of Khartoum and
other major towns of the Sudanese heartland converted the norms of the
extended family into an urban art of socializing. Well informed about
the calamities that befall their own families as well as those of
colleagues, friends and acquaintances through the gifts of
communications technology, they find themselves obliged to criss-cross
the capital offering congratulations and condolences as the situation
might require. The less committed of course might restrict these
mujamalat (courtesies) to a phone call or a text message but drop them
they cannot, to the extent that the distinctive marker of a
middle-class Khartoum funeral is no more the anguished cries of
bereaved relatives but the cacophony of ringtones and exhibit of
parked cars, the more the higher the social value of the event.
In addition to birth, wedding and death less cyclical misfortunes like
a burglary or a car accident are also occasions for a mujamala, in
this case prayers for kafara, i.e. consideration of the mishap as
credit necessary to delete past sins from personal history. When
suffering from his throat ailment late last year President Bashir
invoked the kafara principle. He told a small group of supporters who
assembled in the Sudanese embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after
undergoing a medical procedure that his throat complaints were a
kafara for whatever grievances his citizens might have against him.
Sudan’s upper class proper, like their global counterparts, have the
means to shield themselves and their property from the menaces of the
less fortunate. In recent years, gated communities have mushroomed in
Khartoum’s suburbia with private security firms taking over the
responsibility for protection instead of the regular police, accused
in popular perception of colluding with the very burglars they are
supposed to nip and sharing in the booty of nocturnal house calls.
With the withdrawal of the filthy rich from the city to their own
sharia-free ‘liberated’ mini-worlds the immediate ramifications of
class conflict play out orders of wealth lower, foremost in the
crime-exposed neighbourhoods of the upper middle class still wholly
dependent on state benevolence for security and services.
As a boy growing up in Omdurman in the 1980s I remember vividly our
neighbourhood burglar, a lone bachelor who despite his disrepute
enjoyed the respect of children for being an adult and that of adults
for adhering to a minimum degree of civility. Hasan spent his free
time off burglary selling weed at discount prices to a small clientele
of local craftsmen, shopkeepers and rebellious secondary school lads
and running a one-man delivery service of ‘aragi’ (the famous Sudanese
dates liquor) for respectable gentlemen who could not possibly risk
buying the stuff themselves. A keen observer would spot Hasan in sneak
mode gliding through the streets from this to that door during the
early night hour when dependents were in trance watching the daily
Egyptian series and the alpha males pretended to be waiting for the
main news bulletin of the day but had their ears perked in expectation
of his welcome drop-off.
When business was down for any reason, or he just wanted to, Hasan
would resort to stealing the bed sheets left hanging on washing lines
by busy housewives, the random cassette player forgotten in the yard,
and when lucky the odd piece of gold jewellery neglected by an anxious
bride in the rush of matrimonial duty. In that regard, Hasan was more
a scavenger than an active burglar. He did climb over walls, usually
in the dark hour before dawn, but mostly only to pick whatever surplus
of household items was on display. In return, Hasan had the duty to
guard the neighbourhood against competing burglars, and in that he
proved quite efficient, usually the first to shout harami (thief)
whenever he spotted one during his regular rounds, and the most
vicious in punishing trespassers of his domain.
Almost every house in the neighbourhood lived partly off the
dispatches of an expatriate son or daughter, cash of course as well as
consumer products, electrical appliances, clothes, sugar, toothpaste,
you name it. Hasan, like all neighbourhood residents, awaited the
annual home vacations of these generous providers with great hope.
Keen to avoid his intrusions, judged as particularly scary for
children growing up in the safety and wellbeing of the Arab Gulf, the
better off parents preferred to buy Hasan’s abstinence from the job
with gifts, a new shirt or cloth for a new jellabiya was usually
sufficient to secure his compliance. This precarious symbiosis was
obviously not made to last. Trespassing gangs of thieves outcompeted
Hasan as the capital received more and more impoverished migrants from
Sudan’s devastated rural communities, drought stricken and war
ravaged. He was soon accused of assisting the “strangers” through
reconnaissance or the passage of crucial information on the in-country
itinerary of vising expatriates. The new burglary model of which Hasan
was charged featured ethnicity as a diagnostic cue of criminality.
Being a Nuba, he was accused of siding with his kin in forcibly taxing
dispatches from the Arab Gulf.
Private property had by then acquired greater significance, partially
as a result of the combined effect of the deterioration in living
standards in the capital and the inflow of hard earned remittances
from abroad. It was in Ramadan, the fasting month when believers are
encouraged to share in the woes of the less fortunate by abstaining
from food and drink from dawn to dusk, that the discrepancies between
an emerging class of particularly pious nouveau riches and the
sin-inclined majority were glaringly on display. Electricity
generators and air conditioners turned Ramadan into a vacation of
indulgence for the few while chronic power and water cuts kept the
left behind permanently praying. Some envious evil-doers were even
tempted to sabotage those beastly generators in order to silence their
exhibitionist noise, torture pure that robbed the sinners destined to
endure the glowing coals of Ramadan unmediated by modern devices of
their only consolation, sleep.
The ideology of the remittance economy featured on one hand a jealous
passion for private property and on the other confirmed faith in the
infinite wisdom and superiority of sharia. Fidelity to sharia was
perceived in this context as the reason behind a divine welfare scheme
for the good Moslems of the Arab Gulf and its disregard as one
definitive cause for Allah’s wrath towards the bad Moslems of Sudan.
Echoes of the same notion are still operative today and can be
discerned in the controversial statements of the one member of
parliament who at least has something remarkable to say compared to
the party-line parrots in the house, Dafalla Hasab al-Rasoul. The
punitive sharia regime introduced by Nimayri in September 1983
functioned in part as a tool to safeguard the wealth of the nouveau
riches from the extended hands of the rabble. The prompt justice
courts manned by power-hungry sharia judges were welcomed as such by
this powerful constituency at a time when the Sudanese judiciary was
triple crippled, overwhelmed by the sheer number of criminal cases
awaiting adjudication, depopulated by its Gordonian-trained staff of
judges and prosecutors who found more attractive employment in the
Arab Gulf and paralyzed by the intermittent strikes of those who held
out.
Today, even sharia seems incapable of disciplining Khartoum’s armed
gangs, the professionals who have slipped out of the subversive
civility of the likes of Hasan to join a global knighthood of adroit
operators. Last year a troop of such men and women targeted the house
of the NCP heavyweight Qutbi al-Mahdi, a Canadian citizen, and managed
to get away with a cache of foreign currencies and gold. They security
services eventually captured some of them but the trial proceedings
proved a greater embarrassment for Qutbi than for the ‘criminals’
behind bars. I suppose Bertolt Brecht’s resonating indictment “What is
the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” would have
served them well in court. “Hungry man, reach for the book, it is a
weapon,” he also said. Hasan recently passed away in an Omdurman
hospital. Farewell ya my friend.
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