7 January 2014 / leggypeggy

The Sudan remembered in poetry—read aloud with gusto

Africa, African Trails, agriculture, Dinkas, farming, grains, Kenya, Nairobi, Nile, overland travel, poetry, South Sudan, Sudan, travel, villages

The Sudan (especially South Sudan) could be Africa’s breadbasket

South Sudan has been in the news lately—sadly because of internal conflict—but the media attention brings back memories of my amazing travels there in the 1970s.

Back then, a friend, Don, and I took about five weeks to traverse the north-to-south extremes of The Sudan. Back then, it was the largest country in Africa, and we covered about 3000 kilometres of it, starting in Wadi Halfa (near the border with Egypt) and finishing in Juba (in the deep south).

Life in The Sudan is still simple

I promise to write more about that trip in general, but for the moment my mind focuses on The Sudan because I encountered another blog by people who lived in The Sudan in the 1980s.

James and Terri have a wonderful travel blog that I’m working my way through. If you enjoy my tales, you’ll enjoy theirs too.

Their talk of The Sudan reminded me that I should share a couple of poems I learnt in Kenya more than 35 years ago—when life wasn’t very politically correct.

Bill Swinson (an old hand from the British days in The Sudan) shared these poems with us when we met him in Nairobi in 1977. He had worked in soil and water conservation in The Sudan for five years. I can’t remember how he came to have the collection, but he said the poems had been penned by English men and women who worked in The Sudan in earlier decades.

Grain storage in The Sudan in the 21st century. Note the traditional huts in the foreground

Bill had lots of interesting stories, but this one sticks in my mind. After one harvest, Bill worked hard to convince the Africans in what is now South Sudan to bury their grain and sell it later when times where harder and food was scarcer for the northern Arab Sudanese. His plan worked, which brought some much needed income to the locals and made Bill not very popular with the Arabs.

So here are the poems. The first appears nowhere else on the internet, and the second occurs only once. I posted it in 2009 when I was travelling on an overland trip with African Trails. Please don’t copy and paste this all over the internet. If you want to share it, link back to this post so that the history of it remains intact. Thanks.

For full effect, please read the poems aloud and with gusto.

P.S. The Sudd is a vast swampy area of the Nile. Malakal and Shendi etc. are towns and villages from which the British departed to go on their annual holidays in the UK.

P.P.S. I know both these poems by heart and can perform them as a party trick.

P.P.P.S. I know it’s outdated, but I still call The Sudan, The Sudan. Does anyone else, or is it just me?

Sudanese National Anthem
It is a bloody country, it is a blood-stained land,
with miles of desolation and tons of red-hot sand.
There are millions of mosquitos and a thousand miles of mud,
but the sanguinary prefix is best applied to Sudd.

When God in all his glory, let loose the following Nile,
he winked a cunning optic and smiled a knowing smile.
He said, ‘I’ve done it this time. I never did create,
such a bloody awful country in to God’s estate.’

From Malakal and Shendi, Meshra, Renk and Bor,
from Korda. Wau and Juba, we’ll board that boat once more.
And leave this bloody country, to those whose aims would be
to love their dusty brothers much more than you and me.

And when we hand our chips in, before the pearly doors,
with many a boon companion, old friends, old flames, old whores,
Saint Peter, he will mutter and murmur, ‘Oh well, well,
let the bastards in to heaven, they’ve spent their time in hell.’

A Sudanese community looks after its harvest

Where the Dinka’s Doo-dad Dangles All the Day
In that grim and gaunt Sudan
Home of prehistoric man
Where slimy crocodiles await their prey
Lying prone upon the mud
In that everlasting Sudd
Where the Dinka’s doo-dad dangles all the day.

Where the Nile is mis-named white
And mosquitos ping and bite
And hippos grunt and gurgle as they play.
In the middle of the mud
That everlasting Sudd
Where the Dinka’s doo-dad dangles all the day.

Where the white man sweats and sings
Til that welcome tsetse brings
A sleeping touch of permanent decay
Where the best of pink gins pall
In that land of sweet damn all
Where the Dinka’s doo-dad dangles all the day.