Sudan in the 1980s was relatively quiet. In 1987 I was based there, working for aid agency Care in the final years before Omar al-Bashir seized power.
One day I was returning from the city of El Obeid to the capital, Khartoum. After two weeks of dust and extreme heat we were thankful to be travelling overland across the desert at night, when it would be cooler. There were no tarmac roads, just dusty tracks. Two colleagues, our driver and I left at sundown for what should have been a six or seven-hour drive.
But by about 2am, it was obvious our driver was hopelessly lost. He insisted we were still headed north-east but the stars told us we were, in fact, headed west. The dominant emotion wasn’t fear but exhaustion. The Sudanese people were well known for their friendliness, so I wasn’t worried about my personal safety as a foreigner. We were just tired and in need of rest.
Finally, we saw a small village taking shape out of the darkness, made up mostly of grass huts. We stopped and asked where we were and discovered that we were almost back in El Obeid, after eight hours driving. We’d been round in a huge circle.
The villagers told us to stay. In a moment, they had emptied out a hut, put four beds in there, complete with fresh bedclothes and wished us goodnight – an offer that, having lost all faith in our driver’s navigational skills, we gratefully accepted. In the morning they prepared a huge breakfast with fruit, tea and bread.
Here we were, a bunch of relatively well-off foreigners, offered quite lavish hospitality that the villagers could ill-afford in a blasted, sandy landscape where life was incredibly hard. They gave us what they had, then refused to accept any payment at all, telling us that it was their duty to help people in distress. Despite the extreme poverty and precariousness of their lives, they were unwavering in their commitment to offering hospitality and accepting nothing in return.
I have never forgotten their fidelity to their beliefs and innate generosity, and am always ashamed at the chauvinism that increasingly drives anti-Muslim politics. It is far too easy to demonise people for where they live and what they believe; harder to remember that they, too, have instincts that are profoundly human.
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