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Write To Life: From the Smallest Village to the Biggest City
My name is Sharif. I’m from Western Sudan. I come from a village called Sandikerow in the part of Darfur called Dar Massalit. Dar Massalit means the home of my tribe, the Massalit people. My nearest city is Al Jeneina. I’m 44 years old. I’m married and I have two children. I have 2 camels and a horse and a donkey. My children’s names are Mozamel and Mostafa. My wife’s name is Fatema Ahmed from the village Habila.
Until I was first arrested by the government in 1999, I was living in my village, working as a farmer and working at the market selling my mangoes. My life was very good and I was very happy at that time with my children and wife and all my people in my area. And all my friends and I did everything together, hunting, helping each other on our farms, going to the markets to sell our produce, helping our community to build their houses, collecting wood and other materials from the jungle to do this. We were always busy but we enjoyed our life in those days. It was a harsh life, we had to make or grow everything we needed to live on, but it was also easy because we had no stress or money problems we had everything we needed. We managed with very little money. We were self-sufficient.
But then the killings started. In the 1990s. And everything changed. In every village and in every family people were being killed. And no-one knew why. Soon there were funerals every week, sometimes everyday, for people from our tribe who had been murdered. It started with the educated people, and then it spread to the ordinary people in the villages. One man, a Massalit teacher called Ibramim Darfuri was murdered in his bed in Jeneina city. This was very shocking for all of us. We missed him because we needed good and educated men like this. This is just one example of thousands. But to even mention this murder in Jeneina was impossible, because you could then be killed yourself. Everyone was frightened but. no one could talk about it openly. Many people were asking questions about what was going on, but it was impossible to talk about it, everybody kept silent and kept quiet to save their own lives. The Janjaweed militia, this plague made by the fundamentalist Arab government, these terrible people who don’t have any good heart, they have hearts like stone, sometime a stone is better than they are – they were doing the killing. Burning our villages and our cattle trying to force us off the land we had lived on for 2,000 years to make way for their camels to graze on. For we were Africans and the Arabic word they used for us was “slaves” – for them we were non-people.
And we Massalit had no modern weapons and no tradition of facing change. And now change was happening all around us. Our forests were turning to desert as we cut down more and more trees for firewood and house-building and our lives were in danger from the Arab nomads supported by the Janjaweed, who wanted to get rid of us.
Even before these disasters happened, I was getting very fed up with my people, because they never questioned anything or tried to make improvements or changes. They just accepted everything and blindly continued to live the life of their ancestors. I found this very frustrating. If ever I made a suggestion to people that might improve their lives they were either indifferent or angry. Our lives were just eating and drinking and marriage . A man might marry more than two or three women and so have more than ten or twelve children by different mothers. But the chances are he may not be able to provide them with enough food or clothes or education. The men never think about this though, they think it looks good to have a lot of wives, it’s good for their image as a man. Even if they can’t support their different families properly and the children might not have clothes or go hungry. Men like this just say, “God will help us” which means they do not try to help themselves.
I used to believe it was all right to have a lot of wives and children because everyone did it. But later I changed my mind when I realised that you can’t really love more than one woman or really care and look after many children. And having more than wife creates jealousy and quarrels in the family. I observed how many bad marriages there were in our community and decided I would not do the same. This was one of the reasons I married late and for love and only to one woman and together we had two children.
One of my friends for example had two wives and eight children. He told me one day he wanted to marry again. I told him it was not fair to his wives and children. He started shouting and accused me of being jealous. He didn’t understand that I was trying to help. I didn’t believe in marrying more than one woman or having too many children. I thought it was not a good thing to do. But I was unusual and people thought I was odd to have these different ideas. Later he came to me and said he had been thinking about what I said and he had changed his mind.
But if you only have one or two children like me, people put pressure on you to have more or you are not a man. Mothers, family members , friends, neighbours. When the men eat communally in the evening and you don’t have enough sauce for your meal you get teased or humiliated because only having one wife means you are not properly looked after as a man. This is quite hard to put up with sometimes.
When life is bad or difficult people just say “Allah kareem”, “God is great” or “God will help us”. They even say this after thousands of our people have been killed. Still they keep saying to themselves “God is great”. I find this very difficult to understand but if I expressed this I would be in trouble and treated as an outcast. Because if you are different from the others or disagree people may think you are a bad person and you lose respect from your community. Some may even see you as the enemy. They are good people but they don’t understand life, because their world is so small and they have not experienced anything outside their world .
Women in our country are treated as nothing, specially in Darfur, because in Darfur nature is very harsh and so the women have a very hard working life. Women work very hard, much harder than the men. The women work in the fields from early morning until night time. And when a woman comes home she then has to go out to collect the wood for the fire and carry it on her head . And if she has a child she puts the child on her back and she walks about 5 or sometimes 10 miles to bring the wood home . And after that she puts a jar. on her head to go to the well to fetch water, still with her baby on her back who may be crying all the time. And then she has to prepare the food, first grinding the corn to make flour and after that she has to cook the food and then feed the children and her husband And only then can she sleep. The women are suffering a lot.
That why our life is going backwards – we don’t add new ideas or change our life to make it better, we just continue to live the same way as we always have done.. We think the same way as our grandfathers, that’s why we don’t make any progress. Nobody gives advice to our people, nobody cares.. We have to change that way because we have to do something for our children and our grandchildren . But before we can change our lives we have to change our mentality first, and this includes thinking for the future. .None of our people thinks about the future. We still we have the same life and we eat the same traditional food, nothing changes because we don’t know the meaning of the word future. Even now if somebody asks me about the future I say to myself “I don’t know” .
But since I came to this country bit by bit I have started to understand the future , because I saw the future with my own eyes – suddenly. It was culture shock for me, all my attitudes started to change and I was very confused. I am still trying so hard to understand everything here, even my brain feels like it has completely stopped sometimes because I feel it’s impossible to absorb so much in my mind. From a very small world to a very big world, from the village of Sandikerow to city of London, the biggest city in world. I have traveled a great distance not just with my body but with also my mind.