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Advice received from my sister this morning: "don’t type -fever khartoum- into google, the first two articles describe an
outbreak of ebola virus in the 1970s"
Woke up this morning at 5am feeling both hot and cold, a state that temporarily confused me into turning up the fan and wrapping myself in a woollen blanket before I surrendered to the state and indulged in morose musings as to which of the terminal diseases I had contracted in my consumption of Jibna (sudanese roadside coffee made with soaked coffee beans, ginger and cardamom and which is both lethally strong and addictive) and grapefruit juice (prepared at most roadside cafes and is perfect for the heat here, only sometimes they put in tap water). When I still hadn’t expired at 9am I began to regret the several texts I had sent out bequeathing my skirts and stapler to office mates (I was slightly feverish) and asking for my in-tray to be my headstone.
Instead I curled up with several bottles of water (brought at 8am with a grapefruit by one of the greek family that own this hotel and treat everyone like family friends) and started reading Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, (bought in a train terminal because it covers his trip across Africa through Sudan). It’s very weird reading someone’s experiences that almost mirror your own, you start sublimating your opinions into theirs, or at least in my case you do if you’re not sure what you think and are temporarily uncertain of reality and think there may be chocolate lasagnes under your bed (a sort of waking dream I had at around 7am). He stayed at the same hotel as me and was describing his visit to the whirling dervishes and the Omdurman souk (market), something I had done on Friday.
The difference was that in his experience the whole trip had been lacking in other tourists — he had gone while the civil war was still ongoing. My experience of the whirling dervishes on the other hand was punctuated with sights of fat (pardon the cliche but they were the ones who fulfilled it) american woman in sandals, baseball caps and bulging t-shirts being shooed with a stick out of the faithful inner circle by an irate huge man in a green robe and dreadlocks. The female tourist stood passively looking at him as if at some museum exhibit that had stepped out of place and displayed animation. "I guess it’s only the faithful allowed in the middle" commented her friend lazily beside her as they both looked affably at him "Should have worn my cross then" she replied, before finally rolling back an inch on her haunches.
The sufi spectacle itself was interesting if a little bizarre. I’m used to religion being a matter of newsreels or lengthy school assemblies but I’ve never been to a session where it’s contained elements of both party and pantomime. The Sufi dervishes created a circle around a sandy patch between two mosques situated in the middle of a cemetery. You are surrounded by large mounds that make no pretence of being anything other than bodies under dirt, and in turn you surround an ever expanding circle of men who are chanting/singing and rocking in time to the music from the drums and instruments at one end of the inner arena. Among the crowd of onlookers the sufi woman stand on the edges chanting, leading to the sound of music both in front and behind, first recorded invention of surround sound. In the very middle are some children, apprentices of a sort, and the high level dervishes. These men are dressed in all manner of robes, they carry canes and sometimes are draped in beads and wear inventive variations of pointed hats, most patchworked with different materials and colours, most however tending towards the sufi green. For the life of me I couldn’t work out if this was the original source of the concept of a wizard or if the sufi style had had some sort of revelation from the release of Harry Potter.
The dervishes in the middle to all intents and purposes conduct and control the chants, some focus solely on building up momentum to spin in some manner though only one did the endless rotation associated with whirling. Stand on one leg and hop around rhythmically half dancing dervishes probably doesn’t have the same ring though. The whole thing went on til sunset, they had several sets, the gig wasn’t ticketed and no t-shirts were handed out. Those in the inner circle seemed to be having great fun, some would stop to greet old friends, most had huge grins on their faces, a group of four across the circle from me started dancing just to a four year old who had wandered into their midsts, they swooped down on him on the chant of Allah Akhbar and then leant back and threw their arms back with them on the off beat in between chants. He in turn tried to hit them with a stick he had taken off another dervish.
At one point a family of three tourists — husband, wife, mother in law – clad in khaki safari gear, draped front and back in various makes of camera equipment, adorned with money belts equipped with extra pouches sized for passports, credit cards and film reels respectively — turned up. The mother and wife were standing slightly to the left and right of the kneeling spouse almost in perfect formation to repulse any sudden attack from Mahdi tribes had their cameras been Remingtons (I’ve also been reading about Gordan in Khartoum) — instead however they were enthusiastically taking multiple photos with their three identical highly sophisticated digital manual focus cameras from the same spot with angle differences of 5 degrees from each other. " Their holiday slideshow should be a blast" muttered Angus my companion, and then "in any country, anywhere in the world, place those three on a street and you have the universal symbol for ‘mug me’".
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