“They said it’s over if I pretend to be mad.”
Adrian snorted. “Really? And are you?”
“No. I said I wouldn’t see a trick cyclist.”
“So what now?”
“I suppose I may have kept the case open,” I said sadly into a cupboard. “I wasn’t prepared to pay the price.”
I knew what I’d done was going to cost the Church a whole lot more money. And then there was the disciplinary action against me. That could cost me my ministry, whatever the newspapers and the Bishop said.
“So it’s not over,” said Adrian.
“It is finished,” I said emphatically. “They didn’t want to know if you were there or not.”
6
So, Sudan. Time to tell the truth. One time – the time I’m going to tell you about – I stole a lorry loaded with maize and beans and drove it into the bush. Well, we did. Over the half-dozen trips I made there, I watched skeletons that were alive, in a way, though not fully human. I held children with absurdly huge heads as they died. You know the sort of thing. It’s not that you’re providing any sort of comfort – there’s no time for that. It’s just that they’re easier to dispose of if you’re holding them as soon as they’re dead. And it’s more hygienic than leaving them on the ground. Their families, if they’re not too weak themselves, will very often try to hold on to the bodies for mourning, or seek to bury them in their own shallow graves, where animals might dig them up.
Sometimes we kept them alive and I guess that’s what people call job satisfaction, isn’t it? But you need to understand that a famine is as irresistible as a tsunami. You can’t stand in its way and hope to live. You’re always dealing with the aftermath. The killing is inevitable. It just is, whatever your charity adverts might say. We’d keep them alive to die next time. The only way to stop famine is to open the money valve from north to south, stop food trading and kick out crap African governments. But that’s not going to happen, is it?
There’s a Dinka lament, sung by the men as they drive stakes into the arid soil to secure torpid oxen, which repeats again and again that the gods of a new harvest will come to them in the husks of the dry crop seed that they are forced to eat. It’s a wail that hangs in the air of Bahr el Ghazal in the evenings as if the world has been stilled to listen. If only. The cycle of fighting and oppression over so many decades in southern Sudan had made starvation a commonplace. What conjures a sort of phosphorescent burning in the well-fed bellies of aid workers, those of us with our seven barns filled to the rafters with grain, those of us who are the self-satisfied refuseniks from late capitalism, is that we can’t slow the Monopoly board games, the market’s measure of success by excess. We’re treating the consequence in Sudan of the economic glut way north, in Europe and the US.
But enough. I’ve been in distribution camps where we’ve meas-ured starving children with a stick: tall enough and they take their chance; small enough and they are fed. It’s a form of selection. OK, not as gratuitously bestial as a Nazi death camp, but it was still a kind of system of selection for death. Less industrial, but the consequences for the luckless were the same.
The big relief charities ranked themselves by tonnage, while we smaller operators just got by on easing the processes of death. But The Fed’s founder, Jake, had been a charismatic figure in the early days of the aid business and it was he who had eventually, with Sarah’s help, secured a UN accreditation for evaluation and assessment. So we punched above our weight for a small outfit. And we got right on the tits of the big aid charities.
The fashionable rubric of our times was that fractured and fragmented interventions in sub-tropical African famine needed holistic management. Reaching the living bones of God’s forgotten people meant first negotiating the possibilities of charitable cooperation. We were the scouts, the pathfinders for the deployment of international aid.
I was to discover that that so often meant not so much feeding the hungry as analysing their plight. It was as if Screwtape himself had whispered in Wormwood’s ear and The Fed had been recruited as an unwitting double-agent for the devil. We withdrew our open hand from the mouths of infants in favour of trying to deploy big aid more effectively. But in reality that meant turning away to doff our cap to the great grain-mill owners of international development.
We flew into Nairobi and from there to Lokichogio in the north-west of Kenya towards the end of the second millennium, significantly enough for us. If there was a millenarian in me, I see now that we were approaching our end times even as we began. Ostensibly we were to establish where the hot spots of famine were in Bahr el Ghazal and identify “critical paths” to supplying them with British-sourced support. In practice, this meant naming who could realistically be fed and who was beyond reach. It’s a classic Western, neo-liberal approach and when we work with the market model, it’s always a mission of despair. But perhaps I didn’t know that at the time, or perhaps I just denied it.
We transferred to Juba and then to a dispersal camp in northern Uganda close to the Sudanese border, blagging a lift with UN transporters, as if we were on some kind of ghoulish pilgrimage to the living relics of Sudan’s starving. The air is thick with diesel in a transportation zone, but there was a smug little village of white plasterboard thatched cabins that had been purpose-built to house aid workers and crews. It was like the staff quarters of a holiday-let
