Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

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When Maggie confronted him, Julian acted as if he were above worrying about money, the opinions of others or even the law. He was arrested for drunken driving. He took up with a woman who lived in the local village. He was taken to court in Leeds for debt. He continued to come home with expensive presents that Maggie had no idea how he bought. Then he was charged with using his position as a treasurer of the local Conservative Association to steal Tory funds. When a judge asked Maggie why her husband had not appeared with her in court the day the two of them were summoned for failing to pay the rent at Cowling Hall, she had to tell him that Julian was too busy fishing for salmon on the river Tweed. In 1975 local bailiffs evicted the McCune family from Cowling Hall. Maggie and the children went to live in a cottage on the grounds of Aysgarth School; Julian retreated to a crofter’s hut high in the Dales, where he found occasional work as a farm labourer. Emma was ten when the family broke up. ‘Her childhood ended there,’ her mother writes.

The very night Maggie discovered that her husband was having an affair with another woman, she happened to be reading one of Emma’s favourite childhood stories, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Thumbelina’. The tale of a tiny girl rescued by a swallow from having to marry a mole, then flown to the warm lands of the south, where she became a princess, must have recalled to the McCunes the magical days in Assam, before they were exiled back ‘Home’. As their troubles mounted in England, perhaps it was only natural that the family should recall their years in India as a time and place in which they had been free to be the aristocrats that Julian, at least, felt himself to be. After a few drinks, Julian was wont to regale the local pubs about how, in India, he had been able to take the law into his own hands and do as he pleased. He loved to tell the story of how he had got himself out of jail after accidentally hitting a sacred cow with his car in Calcutta. He never could get used to how the roguish behaviour that his fellow expatriates had found so entertaining in India met with disapproval in England. When he invited the Yorkshire policemen who had caught him driving drunk to join him for a brandy before their court appearance, an English judge was not amused.

It was not Julian’s assumption of superiority that bothered his Yorkshire friends. Imperialism had not gone out of fashion in that part of the world. People did not mind if Julian complained about missing his Indian servants at the same time as he boasted about having ‘given service to the colonies’. They didn’t care if he saw it as his right to live like a lord. After all, some of his old school friends were lords. No, it was not Julian’s pretensions that set him apart from the society in which he found himself. It was his inability to maintain them. ‘I just think he was born too late,’ Gilbertson said sadly. ‘He should have been born forty years earlier and with a hell of a lot of money’ In the end, much of it did come down to money. To Maggie’s intense anger and humiliation, Julian pleaded for leniency at his embezzlement trial on the grounds that he stole to finance his wife’s extravagance. The two were divorced in January 1976. A few weeks later Julian killed himself.

Emma, who was eleven, was visiting the city of York the day it happened. Her father had never stopped seeing her. Indeed, he was the more playful of the McCune parents, forever taking the children out for a ride or a shooting expedition while Maggie fretted over how to buy groceries. That weekend he had invited Emma to go to the horse races with him, but she decided to go to York with her sister instead. She later told friends how much she regretted not going with him that day. She said she always wondered if she might have saved his life. With Julian’s death, the days of pony school and ballet lessons were truly over. Maggie and the children entered a period of their lives as grim and cheerless as the bleakest Yorkshire winter. Maggie, who had not worked outside the house during her marriage, embarked on a heroic struggle to support all four children. For a while, she had to pump petrol at the local service station to make ends meet. At last she found a job as a secretary to a headmaster at a state primary school in nearby Catterick Garrison. In her book, she chronicles the family’s series of moves from borrowed cottages to a grey cement council house before she and the children finally landed their own small semi-detached house in the village of Little Crakehall.

As the eldest child, Emma went from being the petted darling of Cowling Hall to becoming her mother’s second-in-charge. Maggie leaned on her to help with the housework and look after the other children. Emma had to learn to shop and cook and sew. She also had to console her mother, who was so depressed and angry and fearful that she came home from work each evening longing to crawl into bed. ‘After my father died, Emma was like my mother’s husband,’ her brother Johnny remembers. One of Emma’s friends from Kenya said that Emma told her she dreaded coming down to the kitchen in the mornings as a teenager to see the list of chores her mother would leave for her. The family worried constantly about money. None of the houses they lived in had central heating, not even the Little Crakehall cottage that Maggie bought and lovingly restored. The electricity was on a coin meter, and occasionally it went off because they did not have enough coins. It was so much like one of those fairy tales in which a princess is brought low that Emma might have lain in the freezing room she now shared with her sisters, dreaming of Thumbelina and a swallow who might spirit her away to somewhere warm where her rightful identity would be restored.

Despite their reduced circumstances, the McCunes remained part of the Yorkshire gentry. Maggie’s closest friends continued to invite her and the children to fancy dress balls at their Georgian estates. They and Maggie’s sister even helped with fees so that Emma could stay in public school, first at a Richmond convent, then at Godalming College in Kent. Maggie writes in her book that she hoped everything would come out all right if her children could just stay in the same schools and keep the same friends. ‘I think education is the most important gift you can give your children, don’t you?’ she told me. Emma was a hard worker, and she was good at organizing people and getting them to do what she wanted, but her strengths were not academic. Several of Emma’s friends from Yorkshire have grown up to be well-known writers, editors and artists; among this rich and clever group, Emma was considered a slow student. ‘Dippy’, ‘not very well read’, ‘not very articulate’ are some of the less charitable phrases they privately used to describe her intellect. Emma knew what they thought and resented it. Intensely competitive, she was frustrated and disappointed when her test scores were not as high as those of some of her friends.

She came off better outside school. Her set liked to show off, riding to hounds, holding extravagant parties and challenging each other as to who was the most adventurous. They all intended to live dangerously; reckless behaviour was part of what they regarded as their aristocratic sensibility. (Typical of the epic tone was a young man who rented the entire town cinema so that he and his friends could watch the 1948 movie Scott of the Antarctic over and over again. He went on to become a UN ambassador and to write several books about Arctic exploration.) This was an arena in which Emma shined. Even as a teenager, she loved hearing people gasp at her latest exploit. At an age when most people want only to fit in, she strove for glamour. Unlike her strait-laced mother, who favoured straight skirts and wore her hair neatly pulled back, Emma loved dramatic costumes with big hats and lots of jewellery. Once when she couldn’t afford to buy a gown for a grand party, she made one for herself out of black plastic bin liners. After passing through a gawky stage, she blossomed into a long-legged beauty, with pale freckled skin and a slow, seductive manner of speech. A classmate at the Convent of the Assumption school in Richmond remembers the entrance Emma made at a party when she was about sixteen. ‘Emma arrived wearing a striking black-and-white dress she’d made, and long evening gloves. The dress was long and straight. Everyone else was wearing conventional ball dresses, and no one could take their eyes off Emma. Our duckling had become a swan.’

Still, Emma knew that in clubby North Yorkshire she would always be her father’s daughter. Behind the admiring glances lay pity. The condescension stung. North Yorkshire is a place with long memories. The sound one most often hears in its pubs and mansions and brick Georgian hotels is the deep ticking of grandfather clocks. Emma’s school friends all remember hearing the gossip about Maggie and Julian. More than twenty years later I had no trouble finding neighbours who recalled every detail of Julian’s disgrace. ‘Their father’s downfall was quite a scandal,’ said one of Emma’s friends. ‘It must have been very painful for them to have stayed there.’ None of the McCunes stayed in Yorkshire any longer than they had to. Maggie herself moved to London as soon as her youngest child went off to boarding school.

When I first met Maggie in 1997, I asked how she thought her husband’s suicide had affected Emma. She paused. We were having lunch at a restaurant near St Paul’s Cathedral, where Maggie then worked as a secretary to the registrar. I was interviewing her for a magazine article about Emma. Maggie comes across in person as rather shy and reticent; several times in her book, she mentions moving through her life as if it were ‘a strange dream’. That day she was particularly reserved. She had already warned me that she did not want to talk about Julian. ‘I think it made her less materialistic,’ she said finally of his death, and she made it clear that the subject was closed. Some of Emma’s friends think Julian’s suicide might have helped create a split in Emma’s psyche between the sensuality and freedom she linked with her father and abroad, and the discipline and frugality she associated with her mother and England. Though as an adult Emma seldom talked about her father, she knew that in Yorkshire she would always be the girl whose father started out as an empire-builder and died living like a tramp in a crofter’s cottage. ‘She had a lot to hide, and she hid it well,’ said one childhood friend. ‘She knew everyone would always know, but no one would ever say anything.’ Whatever the reason, by the time Emma was offered a place to study art and art history at Oxford Polytechnic in 1982, Africa already beckoned to her.

Chapter Three (#ulink_aa692580-b765-531b-9a13-e8c9c56ce85d)

FOR THOSE who care to look, Africa is all over Oxford. It’s in the glass boxes at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, the iron-ribbed museum of a museum that the Victorians built to display the shrunken heads and feathered curiosities of the peoples they were about to introduce to Progress. It’s in the odour of borax at Queen Elizabeth House, an institution where some of Britain’s last colonial training courses were held before it was reinvented as a centre for development studies. It’s in the quiet stucco Quaker meeting-house in St Giles where some of the earliest anti-slavery meetings were held. It’s at the ugly cinder-block headquarters of Oxfam, the anti-famine group founded by Oxford pacifists during the Allied blockade of occupied Greece that has become Britain’s wealthiest international charity. Oxford has updated the ethic of service to the colonies that it preached a century ago when Rudyard Kipling wrote of ‘the white man’s burden’. Nonetheless, dozens of its university graduates still set off for Africa each year with what might be described as a modern version of that urge, an ambition to ‘develop’ Africa that arouses much the same pleasurable hopes and feelings as did earlier pledges to serve Kipling’s ‘lesser breeds without the law’.

Emma first found Africa at Oxford among her fellow students at the polytechnic. A red-brick institution in the suburb of Headington, Oxford Polytechnic then had a reputation as a haven for well-bred students who couldn’t get into more prestigious universities, let alone Oxford University itself. She was seventeen and in her first year when she met Sally Dudmesh, a sweet-faced blonde anthropology student standing beside a university notice board. Sally holds a British passport, but she was raised in Africa and considers herself a white African. She now designs jewellery in Kenya, though when I first spoke to her in 1997 she was spending the summer in England, as she does every year. She said she and Emma felt an instant attraction, particularly when Emma learned of Sally’s connection to Africa. ‘I felt like I was meeting my own sister,’ Sally remembered. ‘At that time she was very arty. She always dressed exotically. She had this sort of very wonderful calmness. She just glided into a room.’ Emma wore a long purple velvet coat. She was pale, with a husky whisper of a voice and a smile full of sparkle and mischief. ‘She made fun of disasters with people. She had a wicked sense of humour, a really fun, bad-girl side.’ The two girls struck up a fast friendship.

Sally lived with Willy Knocker, a white Kenyan from a well-known colonial family who was studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Through Sally and Willy, Emma was drawn into a circle of friends who shared a fascination with Africa. They liked to dress in African clothes and talk about African politics while smoking pot and listening to African music. They wanted lives with an edge. Although many of them came from colonial or diplomatic backgrounds, they all abhorred the British Empire and blamed colonialism for most of Africa’s problems. They felt their romance with Africa somehow set them apart from the restraint and tedium of middle-class English life. ‘It was just sort of a wildness - a spirit of adventure,’ said Sally, trying to explain the allure Africa had for her and Emma. ‘There’s an incredible freedom and scope to Africa that you don’t find in England. In England everything is so controlled. In Africa there’s an intrigue and a fascination and a sense that you can really expand. In England you have the feeling that you’re always having to play a certain role. You could always see that we would not end up living in England. We were not ordinary English girls.’

Sally and Willy’s house was a meeting point for other young people on their way to Africa. Emma met Alastair and Patta Scott-Villiers at a party there in the early 1980s. Patta - her given name was Henrietta, but she’d been called Patta since childhood - was studying international development with Willy in London. She and Alastair planned to move to Sudan as soon as she finished her master’s degree. Alastair and Patta were a couple of years older than Sally and Emma. Alastair was compact, sandy-haired and snub-nosed. His father had been with the Foreign Office, and he had spent part of his youth in Canada. Alastair seemed to have picked up some freewheeling North America ways in Canada. He was brash and friendly, an endlessly inquisitive chain-smoker. Patta was more reserved and watchful. She came from an aristocratic family but never mentioned her connections. She had soft brown hair and a magnolia complexion. She seldom wore make-up and liked to dress in blue jeans and T-shirts. Like many of Emma’s friends, she seemed to feel more relaxed outside England. In 1983 she and Alastair moved to Sudan. Patta went to work for the international charity CARE. Alastair, who had been dealing antiques in London, went along hoping to find some kind of work once they got there.

It was exactly the sort of adventure that appealed to Emma and Sally. Already Emma was restless living in Britain. She had visited Europe several times on holiday. In 1985 she took off the better part of a year to fly in a Robin Aiglon single-engine plane to Australia with a young man named Bill Hall. Hall was the son of a distinguished Oxford professor. He had already finished university and gone to work for his family’s engineering business when Emma and a friend rented a house from his parents in the nearby village of Littlemore. A solidly built, meticulously careful man in his twenties, he was an accomplished pilot. He had always wanted to fly his single-engine plane to Australia, where he had family. He invited Emma to come along with him. In those days without satellite navigation, it was much more risky than it is now to fly all the way across Europe, Asia and the South Pacific in such a small plane. Emma knew nothing about flying, but she threw herself into the organizational details of the trip. She made the arrangements for their stops along the way, travelling to London to apply for visas at the embassies of half a dozen countries. For instance, Emma convinced the Saudi embassy to grant them a visa, even though as an unrelated, unmarried couple she and Hall should not have been allowed to enter Saudi Arabia.

Emma talked her lecturers into letting her use the aerial photographs she planned to take as coursework for her art degree. The Oxford Times covered the pair’s departure. ‘We will fly through extremely varied landscape, including jungle, desert and ocean,’ Emma proudly told the reporter from the paper. She persuaded newspapers in Australia and India to write articles about their 30,000-mile flight. One of them took a marvellous picture of her and Hall in the cockpit. Hall is looking up from a map, while Emma simply looks ravishing in pearls and a colourful print dress.

The trip took her to India for the first time since her family had left in 1966. Hall remembers that it brought back memories of her father and his wild colonial exploits. When Emma and Hall stayed at the Tollygunge Club in Calcutta, the manager told them a story about how Julian had been on a plane flying to Calcutta when the plane got lost. ‘Seems Emma’s father was a bit drunk, and he went up to the cockpit, pushed the pilot away, and flew the plane back to Calcutta,’ Hall remembers the man telling them. Emma celebrated her twenty-first birthday in the foothills of the Himalayas, not far from where her father and grandfather had been stationed during the Raj. The trip settled in her mind the notion that she must have a life outside the bounds of everyday English experience. And it taught her useful things about maps and radios.

Hall and Emma were only friends, but Emma’s mother half hoped the trip might spark a deeper relationship. Hall was kindly and dependable. He was the sort of man who could afford to indulge Emma’s appetite for adventure and yet provide her with the security that Maggie herself had always longed for. But Emma didn’t want to make her forays into other cultures from the safe confines of the West. When they left England, Hall gave Emma a wad of cash to keep in case of emergency. Emma promptly spent all the money in Luxor on clothes. Hall liked to stay in expensive ‘international’ hotels such as the Hilton or the Meridian, where you could count on air-conditioning and clean sheets. Emma preferred to scour the back streets for humble guesthouses frequented by local people. Fortunately she had inherited her father’s gift for appreciating vastly different characters. She and Hall remained fond of each other long after the trip was over. But what she really longed for was a much stronger experience. Even the exciting but essentially Western lives that her friends like Sally and Willy envisaged for themselves in Africa were not what she had in mind.

She had always been attracted to African men, though she can hardly have laid eyes on many Africans in Yorkshire. Her attraction was frankly erotic. She found black men more beautiful than white men, even joking with her girlfriends that the penises of white men reminded her of ‘great slugs’. She loved the warmth of African laughter and the rhythms of African music. She often said that, with all their troubles, Africans enjoyed life more than Westerners. After she came back from her aeroplane journey in 1985, she started waitressing at a trendy Indonesian restaurant on the way to Oxford railway station. The restaurant was a hang-out for some of the university’s more swinging lecturers, particularly those who specialized in Asia and Africa. One night Emma overheard Barbara Harrell-Bond, the American director of the university’s new Refugee Studies Programme, at Queen Elizabeth House, talking with some others about how they needed student volunteers. Among those speaking most animatedly at the table was a tall, thin African man with long fingers. This was Ahmed Karadawi, the Sudanese co-founder of the Refugee Studies Programme and a penetrating critic of Western relief efforts. When Emma brought Karadawi his food, he rewarded her with a smile so broad, it seemed almost too big for his face. Grinning back at him, Emma interrupted Harrell-Bond to volunteer for the programme.

African refugees and famine were in the air that summer, not only in Britain but in Europe and America, too. Ethiopia and Sudan were in the grip of the great 1984-5 famine. In October 1984 Emma and the rest of Britain had watched the film that Michael Buerk brought back for the BBC nightly news from the Korem famine camp in northern Ethiopia. As Bob Geldof later wrote in his autobiography, Is That It?, Buerk’s film showed pictures of people ‘so shrunken by starvation that they looked like beings from another planet’. As the images appeared on the screen, Buerk spoke in tones of sombre outrage. ‘Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of a night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century. This place, say relief workers, is the closest place to hell on earth.’ Geldof had come home that evening anxious and depressed about the failure of his latest album. Like thousands of television viewers, he found that the broadcast from Ethiopia ‘put my worries in a ghastly new perspective’.

Geldof described the reaction Buerk’s misty images of starving Ethiopians huddled under ragged blankets aroused in him. ‘Right from the first few seconds it was clear that this was a tragedy which the world had somehow contrived not to notice until it reached a scale which constituted an international tragedy. What could I do? I could send some money. Of course I could send some money. But that did not seem enough. Did not the sheer scale of the thing call for something more? Buerk had used the word “biblical”. A famine of biblical proportions. There was something terrible about the idea that 2,000 years after Christ in a world of modern technology something like this could be allowed to happen as if the ability of mankind to influence and control the environment had not altered one jot. A horror like this could not happen today without our consent. We had allowed this to happen, and now we knew that it was happening, to allow it to continue would be tantamount to murder. I would send some money, I would send more money. But that was not enough. To expiate yourself truly of any complicity in this evil you had to give something of yourself. I was stood against the wall. I had to withdraw my consent.’

Geldof helped galvanize Britain, then the Western world, with his moral outrage over the Ethiopian famine. Like millions of young people, Emma bought the Band Aid record ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ that Geldof produced for the charity he founded to help feed the famine victims. Her brother remembers her sitting in front of the television in the summer of 1985, mesmerized by Geldof’s Live Aid concert. Emma herself had always been good at fund-raising. She didn’t mind asking people for money; in a backhanded way, she almost enjoyed it. As a child she had enthusiastically joined in various charitable campaigns sponsored by Blue Peter. She liked the feeling of working together with others, and she liked the way championing a worthy cause forced adults to take her seriously. Geldof touched the conscience of people all over the world - Band Aid and Live Aid ultimately raised more than £70 million, and some 1.5 billion viewers in 152 countries watched the Live Aid concert - but in Britain he struck an especially deep chord. His appeals to help faraway and less fortunate people awakened so many memories of Britain’s crusading past that to this day British journalists call Geldof, now a multimillionaire businessman, ‘Saint Bob’. His heartfelt pleas on behalf of the Ethiopians awakened in Emma, as in many others her age, a sense of possibilities, a feeling that idealism still had a place in the world even in the waning last years of the cold war, when the aged prophets of capitalism, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, seemed to have no larger vision for the future than of getting and spending.

Chapter Four (#ulink_f475a3c2-77dd-5d93-9541-af1b2cc382f0)

NOW IN HER last year at the poly, Emma took up with Ahmed Karadawi, the elegant African intellectual with the brilliant smile whom she’d first met at the restaurant. Married and eighteen years older than Emma, Karadawi came from Kordofan, a dry and sandy province in north-western Sudan. He cast a sardonic eye on the self-congratulatory Western excitement over Band Aid and Live Aid. He was touched by the sincere enthusiasm of the young people who thronged his lectures at Oxford, but he argued that, too often, the Western aid agencies they went to work for were more interested in pandering to the prejudices of their donors than in actually helping needy Africans. Karadawi was witty and urbane; he could make you weep with laughter at the ridiculous mistakes the self-important khawajas made in Sudan, and he could be just as withering on the subject of the Sudanese government’s indifference to human suffering. In any event, he always said, no aid programme could fix the civil wars that had caused the hunger in Ethiopia and Sudan. Only the people who lived there could do that. Emma knew nothing about Sudan and its politics. But she was about to learn from a master.

Bilad al-Sudan. How languorously those Arabic words glided off Karadawi’s tongue, like a magic spell in an Arabian wonder tale. But Karadawi did not romanticize his unhappy country. He was the first to tell Emma about the Arab proverb that says, ‘When God made Sudan, He laughed.’ (Some Sudanese say God laughed with pleasure, but far more suspect the diety was laughing at his gigantic creation.) Karadawi knew that Sudan had been the frontier between southern black Africa and the northern cultures of the Near East two millennia before the Arabs named it ‘The Land of the Blacks’. He told her about how ancient Egyptians and Israelites knew the land south of Egypt first as the land of Cush and later as Nubia and as Punt. The Greeks and Romans called it Ethiopia or ‘The Land of the Burnt-Faced Ones’. Not until the Muslim conquest of the Middle Ages was it named ‘the Sudan’, or just ‘Sudan’, as it is commonly called today. From Karadawi, Emma heard about The Aethiopika, the third-century Greek novel about an Ethiopian princess who was mysteriously born with white skin and was raised as a Greek, who had to travel to the ancient Sudanese city-state of Meroë to find true love and her rightful throne. From him Emma learned how the Nile River snakes out from the Sudd, the world’s biggest swamp, all the way through the deserts of Sudan and Egypt to the Mediterranean.

In ancient times, the Sudd marked the limits of the world known to geographers. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs sent expeditions to discover whence came the river that gave birth to Egypt, but the swamp defeated every attempt to find out. The people of the Sudan included hundreds of ethnic groups, each with its own language and customs. The northern two-thirds of the country was mostly dry, while the southern third was wet and tempting, with good grazing, fat cattle, and rivers teeming with fish. With the exception of the Nuba Mountains, the northern people were mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic. Meanwhile the Nuba and the southerners remained ‘noble spiritual believers’, as Karadawi liked to call them, clinging to their African languages and religions. The struggle between the lighter-skinned desert peoples, drawn by the south’s water, slaves, gold and ivory, and the darker-skinned peoples of the swamp, who violently resisted intruders, had marked Sudanese history for thousands of years. Sudan’s contemporary civil war was in some ways a continuation of this antediluvian clash, Karadawi said.

Like most people in Britain, Emma had learned about the existence of huge refugee camps along Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia only during the famine of 1984-5. But Karadawi explained that there had been Ethiopian refugees in Sudan long before the famine. Ethiopia’s civil wars (like Sudan’s) had deep roots, and so did the tensions between the two countries. Christian Ethiopia had been at odds with Muslim Sudan since the Middle Ages, and supporting each other’s enemies had always been a feature of the contest. In 1961 the UN gave Ethiopia sovereignty over Eritrea, a partly Muslim former Italian colony that lies between Ethiopia and Sudan. When the Eritreans rebelled against Ethiopia, they set up bases in eastern Sudan with the help of the Sudanese government and its Arab allies. As refugees who had crossed an international border, the Eritreans and their families came under the protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which fed them. Meanwhile, Ethiopia gave sanctuary to Sudan’s rebellious southern pagans and Christians. Ethiopia’s patron, Israel, also gave the southern Sudanese rebels military assistance, as a way of weakening the Arab coalition.

Karadawi had been a child when the Sudan gained its independence from Britain and civil war broke out in the south. The war was still dragging on in 1970, when he went to work for UNHCR in the Eritrean camps along the eastern border right after earning his degree from the University of Khartoum. The southern rebels called themselves Anyanya, or ‘poison’, and they often behaved as poisonously to each other as to the northern army. In many ways, the tactics of the northern army resembled those of the nineteenth-century slave-traders. The army operated from inside garrison towns that had been founded on the sites of the old thorn-fence enclosures called zaribas, from which Arab slave-hunters had once armed their local allies and encouraged them to take captives. Now, as then, Arab army officers now handed out weapons to allied southern peoples, urging them to attack their local enemies and loot them of their cattle, women and children. The southerners were easily manipulated, and it seemed as if the fighting might go on forever. Then a series of events suddenly changed the climate. Jafaar Nimeiri, a military officer, took over the Sudanese government in a 1969 coup and began searching for a way out of the war. Then Israel concentrated its flow of arms on a single southern rebel commander, the Equatorian Joseph Lagu, enabling him to gain control of what had been a hopelessly fractured movement.

From his position in the camps, Karadawi watched how Nimeiri used the Eritrean refugees as one card in the political game that finally led to a 1972 peace agreement between northern and southern Sudan. When Nimeiri wanted to pressure Ethiopia, the southern rebels’ patron, he simply made it easier for the Eritreans to get weapons and supplies, including food, from friendly Arab countries. When he wanted to mollify Ethiopia, he squeezed the camps. In 1971 the aged Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie agreed to act as a mediator in Nimeiri’s talks with Lagu and the Anyanya. Largely united under Lagu, the southern rebels leaders were able to seize the opportunity for peace. In 1972 they and the government signed the Addis Ababa agreement that gave the south partial autonomy and ended seventeen years of civil war.

The Addis Ababa agreement ushered in a decade that Karadawi remembered as one of tremendous hope and promise. Sudan was going to be ‘the breadbasket of the Middle East’. Nimeiri agreed to support the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel. The United States rewarded him by making Sudan the next-biggest recipient of American foreign aid after Egypt and Israel. Sudan’s Muslim neighbours across the Red Sea were awash in oil money. Nimeiri’s government was able to borrow more than $12 billion from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the Arab countries of the Gulf to finance its development schemes. Biggest was the watchword of the day. With a population of only about 26 million, Sudan had a land mass the size of Western Europe. It was the biggest country in Africa, and it was going to have the biggest of everything. International businessmen spent Gulf money to construct the world’s biggest sugar factory south of Khartoum at Kenana. An Anglo-French consortium brought the world’s biggest digger to Sudan and spent $75 million to construct the Jonglei Canal, a massive scheme that was going to use water from the Sudd to irrigate northern Sudan and Egypt. There were many dreams, but by the end of the decade the dreams, as well as the money, had vanished into the hands of Nimeiri’s cronies and the Western expatriates who administered so many of the foreign projects. Meanwhile the Sudanese public was saddled with a debt twice the size of the country’s gross national product.

The old siren song of treasure in the south spelled the beginning of the end. Following the 1973 oil crisis in the West, George Bush, US president Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the UN, visited Khartoum at the invitation of Nimeiri’s foreign minister. Nimeiri had started out as a socialist, and the United States had kept its distance from him during his first few years in power. Now Bush, a former oil man from Texas, advised the Sudanese government that satellite remote-sensing intelligence available to the US government showed that oil might be found in the south-eastern part of the country, especially the triangle of land located in the Sudd region between Bentiu, Nasir and Malakal. Bush named some American companies he said might be willing to undertake such a venture. In 1974 the American oil company Chevron was granted a licence to look for oil in parts of the south and south-west. Chevron also signed a secret agreement to explore the Kafi-Kengi region in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, where uranium deposits that could be refined for use in nuclear weapons had been found near the border with Darfur.

The Middle East was just beginning to churn with what the followers of political Islam call ‘the Islamic awakening’. Disappointed with the failures of independence, young Muslims were turning to Islam in search of a more natural and authentic system of governance than the secular nationalism imported from the West. Political Islam found especially fertile ground in northern Sudan, where the biggest political parties were already associated with religious brotherhoods. After Nimeiri’s communist allies attempted to overthrow him, the president drew closer to these Islamic parties. They had opposed his peace agreement with the south on the grounds that it gave what the agreement called the south’s ‘noble spiritual beliefs’ and Christianity equal place with Islam in Sudan’s constitution. They also thought the agreement gave the south too much autonomy. They had mounted three armed uprisings against Nimeiri, in 1970, 1975 and 1976, the last two with the backing of Libya. The president did not have the strength to resist them forever. In 1977 he invited their leaders to come back from exile.

The Islamic politicians pressed Nimeiri to make Sudanese law - until now a colonial hybrid of customary, Islamic and Western law - conform with classical sharia, or Islamic law. In their view, the purpose of a Muslim government was to enforce sharia. But southerners bitterly resisted any proposals to make sharia the source of all the country’s legislation. Islamic law provides for harsh punishments such as amputation, stoning and flogging. More important, under sharia law, unbelievers may not rule over believers, so that the imposition of sharia law would effectively close off the highest political offices to non-Muslims. Christians and Jews, as ‘Peoples of the Book’, have fewer civil rights under sharia than Muslims; followers of Africa’s traditional religions have virtually none at all. Nevertheless Nimeiri continued his drift to the right. Naming Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of the Muslim brotherhood, as his attorney general, he embarked on a programme of making Sudan’s laws more Islamic. He set aside his safari suit and began appearing at Friday prayers in the mosque in the skullcap and jallabiya of a Muslim scholar.

Then in 1978 Chevron struck oil just north of the town of Bentiu, in a mixed Nuer-Dinka area a little south of the north-south border. The oil well was located on a spot known as Pan Thou, or ‘thorn tree’, in the Nuer language. In a move suspicious southerners saw as a clue to Arab plans to seize the southern oil, Chevron and the government insisted on changing the Dinka name of the spot to Heglig, the Arabic name for the same tree. Extracting Heglig’s oil was to prove thornier than the company ever realized. Chevron had confined most of its dealings to the central government. But under the terms of the Addis Ababa agreement, the southern regional government was to receive the revenues from any minerals or other deposits found on southern land. Rather than see that happen, Nimeiri and his Islamist attorney general in 1980 tried to change the boundaries between north and south so that the land under which the oil and uranium lay would belong to a new northern province that the government named Unity. The south erupted in riots, and the president backed down. But the tension and mutual distrust kept mounting.

In the Bentiu area near the oil fields, angry Nuer men formed themselves into a militia they called Anyanya II; small clashes broke out in various parts of the south. In 1983 a battalion of southern soldiers stationed in the town of Bor mutinied over a pay dispute with their commanders. Colonel John Garang, a taciturn Dinka army officer with a PhD from Iowa State University, was sent to mediate. Instead, Garang fled with the men of the 105th Battalion across the border into Ethiopia. From there he urged the Sudanese to rise up against Nimeiri’s government as part of his newly formed Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). This time, Garang said, the south and its allies would fight not for independence but for a secular, socialist Sudan. A few months later Nimeiri imposed an unusually harsh version of sharia law on all of Sudan. The civil war was on again.

Ethiopia welcomed Garang and his mutineers, just as it had embraced the southern Sudanese rebels of the 1960s. Ethiopia’s wars and famines were a mirror image of those in Sudan; the same whirring cycle of disaster had rekindled that country’s civil war. For a short while after the signing of the Addis Ababa agreement, the Ethiopian government had gained the upper hand in its battles with the Eritrean rebels. Then famine struck northern Ethiopia in 1973. A widely publicized BBC broadcast accused Emperor Haile Selassie of having ignored the famine. The United States and Europe withdrew the aid that had propped up his regime. A Marxist military regime seized power, and Sudan resumed its support for Eritrea. With Sudanese support, a variety of new Eritrean and Tigrean groups opposed to Ethiopia’s government sprang up in the refugee camps on the border.

Like most Africans, Emma’s friend Karadawi took it as obvious that to feed and house people on one side of a conflict was to help that side. He considered the UN agencies’ pretensions to neutrality a laughable bit of Western hypocrisy. In Sudan he had been one of the first to suggest that the government recognize the humanitarian wings of the rebel armies fighting in Eritrea and neighbouring Tigre province, allowing them to raise funds and import materials just like every other foreign relief organization. In Oxford, Karadawi had gained a certain fame for his willingness to criticize all sides involved with aiding Sudan. When he and Emma met in 1985, President Nimeiri was refusing to ask for international assistance even though thousands of people in western Sudan were starving. A BBC journalist asked Karadawi where the fault lay, and he did not hesitate. ‘With the government,’ he replied. At the same time, he was engaged in writing a doctoral dissertation arguing that the West had turned refugee aid into a self-perpetuating industry that often did more harm than good in Sudan. His colleague Barbara Harrell-Bond ultimately incorporated many of his insights in her book, Imposing Aid. Alex de Waal, a fellow student at Oxford with Karadawi, is today Britain’s best-known critic of humanitarian aid. De Waal credits Karadawi with inspiring him. He dedicated his 1997 book Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa to Karadawi.

Karadawi could go on for hours brilliantly analysing the Islamic concept of barakat, or ‘blessings’ - the wealth and power that naturally flow to the pious - always with cigarette in hand. In 1985 a group of army officers overthrew Nimeiri but refused to dismantle the sharia law he had enacted. It was going to be much harder to get rid of Islamic law than it had been to get rid of Nimeiri, Karadawi predicted. Islam, he said, was a genie that would not go back into the lamp. He explained that Islamist politicians would accuse any Muslim who tried to revoke Islamic law of being an apostate, a crime punishable by death under sharia. Meanwhile the abolition of Islamic law remained the key demand of the southern rebels. The officers who had seized power wanted to hold elections, but Garang and his SPLA refused to participate unless a constitutional conference was held to decide the place of religion and ‘nationalities’ in Sudan. The officers, mostly conservative Muslims, refused. When a vote was held in 1986, the Islamic parties were the winners. Karadawi told Emma that this probably spelled the end of any peace talks for a while. ‘Malesh,’ he would exclaim, using the half-amused, half-bitter Arabic expression that means something like ‘What a pity!’ but can also mean ‘So sorry’ and ‘Too bad’.

Karadawi introduced Emma to many of the young Africans studying at Oxford University. Heirs to the university’s tradition of training colonial elites, the Africans tended to come from the most privileged families in their own countries. Some were hereditary chiefs. Most had held or were on their way to holding top positions in their governments or armed forces-perhaps with the next coup. In their papers and in their seminars, they spoke of economic development and the need for democracy and institution building. But in private they talked of power as a family affair, a game of intrigue, honour and greed into which they had been born and in which they might well die.

Emma had never shown any interest in ideology, though as an art student she had disavowed her father’s Conservatism. The left-leaning political opinions she voiced could have come straight out of the pages of The Guardian. She felt a little insecure in the highly intellectual environment of the refugee programme. But Karadawi assured her that as an artist she had at least as much to offer refugees as the so-called experts who were always blathering on about ‘early warning systems’ or ‘coordination planning’. ‘Most of the refugees in Sudan can’t read. You can use your pictures to teach them,’ he told her, one friend remembers. In any event, it was not a political programme that attracted her to the world of Karadawi and his friends. It was more like the high drama of it all, the almost Shakespearean sense that, behind the sham parties and borrowed ideologies, character is all. A few people, some of them her friends, might decide the fate of whole countries. She could speak as glibly as anyone else about the need for refugee participation and grassroots involvement, but her friends believe that, inside, she thrilled to the stories of kings and queens, prophets and warriors, heroes and villains.

Karadawi never discussed his relationship with Emma, but everyone at the refugee programme knew they were having an affair. When Emma staged an exhibition at Oxford’s Poster Gallery of the aerial photographs she had taken on her trip with Bill Hall, Karadawi invited all his friends to come. The relationship distressed Karadawi’s wife, Selma, but she kept her feelings to herself. Sudan, like most of Africa, is polygamous. While northern Sudanese men expect strict fidelity from their wives, few Sudanese women are in a position to demand the same from their husbands. ‘Let us just say Ahmed’s wife was very tolerant,’ a Sudanese colleague of Karadawi’s laughed indulgently when asked about Selma’s response to the affair. And Karadawi was not the only Sudanese man to fall for Emma. Hamid el-Tayeb Zaroug, another northern Sudanese refugee official, met her while on sabbatical at Oxford. Zaroug was a Sudanese government administrator of the Ethiopian refugee camps that Emma had heard much about from Karadawi. He continued writing to her after he returned to Sudan.

Emma finished her degree in early 1986. For a short time, she went to work for the art department of Harper’s & Queen. The job didn’t work out. The magazine’s arbiters of fashion expected the young girls they hired to model the smart clothing featured in its pages. Emma insisted on wearing her trademark Indian caftans and big wooden bangles. When Tayeb Zaroug invited her to make a field trip to the refugee camps at Showak, she decided to take him up on his offer. She had saved some money from waiting on tables. At the end of 1986, she wrote to Zaroug that she had booked a flight to Khartoum. She planned to make a display of her photos for refugee children. Alex de Waal remembers her coming over to the Oxford flat he shared with his Eritrean girlfriend, excitedly asking for help translating captions for her photos into the Tigrinya language.

Zaroug wrote back immediately. ‘I read [your] letter three times to make sure I went over every word,’ he said. ‘Your face with that beautiful smile is always in front of me…. You don’t believe how much I do want to see you my sweet untamed cat who trained me so much in UK on how to accept pain from whom you love. All I need from England is that I do want Emma and please tell her to come soon.’