Notes from Sudan
- Arda Tunca
- Dec 15
- 18 min read
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I used to travel to Sudan from time to time for certain business projects. It never occurred to me how eye-opening what I would see and experience in an underdeveloped country like Sudan could be.
When I first landed in Sudan, the airport was covered everywhere with advertising posters of world-famous hotels. Familiar logos, familiar names. Yet the airport itself was terrible, with cats roaming all over the place. The cats were of a kind I had never seen anywhere else. The airport looked like a slightly more orderly version of Istanbul’s old Topkapı bus terminal. This was Khartoum Airport.
If the airport was like this, what must the city be like? I was full of curiosity and wanted to pass through passport control and enter Khartoum as quickly as possible.
Everything was brown. I had never known that constantly seeing the same color could tire one’s eyes. There was a scent of nature in the city that I did not recognize, one I was smelling for the first time. It was not familiar at all.
In the center of Khartoum, I was going to the office along dirt roads. I was welcomed with interest and great hospitality. In fact, with an excessively large amount of attention. It was impossible not to notice or feel that special preparations had been made.
With the conversations that began in the office, my Sudan experience quickly accelerated. At that moment, I had no idea that I would become exhausted from trying to learn and to digest and make sense of what I would experience. I was curious. This country was unlike anywhere I had ever seen, visited, or traveled to before. I realized this already at the airport and on the way to the office.
Sudan is governed by Sharia law. Taking photographs is forbidden. Despite this, I managed to secretly take a considerable number of photographs. For women and men to be together in a closed environment, there must be relationships such as spouses, siblings, aunts, or father and daughter. Otherwise, you are in serious trouble.
Women have their own distinctive style of dress. It is different from that of other countries governed by Sharia. For example, it has nothing to do with what exists in Saudi Arabia. It is more local, more specific to Sudan. This can be seen on the street. However, when I went to the office, all the women were wearing jeans and shirts or T-shirts. I asked why. They explained that they dressed this way out of respect for me. Yet they were taking a risk. I felt embarrassed and said that there was no need for this.
This was a strange feeling I had never known. I felt uncomfortable. However, in the following days, I realized that the matter was not personal to me. The women had changed their local clothing because they would be working in the same office with me. Because I was white and Turkish. Because I represented, in a sense, the Ottoman Empire. I was very surprised when I learned this.
In Sudan, there is a civilian police officer in the office of every foreign company. A kind of agent. But at the same time, this has a practical function. As a foreigner, if you want to go from one place to another within the city, you need to obtain permission from the nearest police station. You have no chance of moving without permission. I do not know whether anyone goes to Sudan for tourism, but I doubt it. It is impossible to wander around.
As a foreigner in Sudan, you are wrong under all circumstances. Even if you are driving, have pulled over to the side of the road and stopped, and a Sudanese person comes and crashes into you, you are still at fault. Why? Because you were born somewhere else. God had deemed it appropriate that way. What business do you have in Sudan? Being in Sudan is the same as defying fate. This was explained to me through the concept of faith in destiny.
I continued my days feeling like an Ottoman pasha. I gradually got somewhat used to feeling strange and uncomfortable. Otherwise, I would not have been able to do my job. I needed to be in dialogue with people.
At midday, I went outside for a break. The temperature was close to 50°C. Breathing was very difficult. A desert climate prevailed. At one point, a sandstorm broke out and my blood pressure dropped. I had to lie down for a while. During the break, I saw people outside lying underneath the engine compartments of trucks. Later I learned that they were resting during their lunch break. Since there was no shade to escape to, they lay under the trucks and chatted. Then they returned to their work.
Being in Sudan as a Turk made me think. Sudan is former Ottoman territory. The people did not seem to have desire to demand independence. They had a clear respect for Turks. For example, I am aware that the Palestinians are angry with the Ottomans. They think that because of the Ottomans they could not become independent and did not have the opportunity to develop culturally enough. The reflex in Sudan is very different.
They were angry with the British. I said, “You are right, they exploited you for years.” They objected. The reason for their anger was that the British had left without building houses, buildings, sewage systems, roads, and similar infrastructure. Their reaction struck me like a slap in the face.
Being white also offers a separate opportunity for observation in Sudan.
I left Khartoum and went to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast for a few days. While walking in the evening, I came across a wedding inside an unfinished construction site. Out of curiosity, I glanced inside. They invited me. I went in. Chairs were arranged in rows of ten to fifteen people, like cinema seating. Wooden chairs that dig into your hips, like those in Istanbul’s old open-air cinemas. They were placed in two blocks in an “L” shape. Women on one side, men on the other.
Nothing was being eaten or drunk. There was music and video recording. A wedding among iron rods hammered into the concrete of an unfinished building, yet with an impressive sound system. I was trying to understand the situation. Also, why had they invited me inside? Local dances were being performed. People were holding long sticks. They were used as part of the dance. Women and men were dancing standing up at the same time, but this was not a dance suitable for couples. Neither the music nor the culture allowed that.
The bride and groom were sitting on a two-seater couch under an arch-like decoration. Everyone lined up, congratulated them, and pinned their gifts. I joined the line as well. When it was my turn, suddenly the bride and groom stood up. Had I not seen that they did not stand up for anyone else, I would have thought it was normal, but it was not. Why were they standing only for me? Based on what I knew from the office, I told myself, “There is no way they could know I am Turkish.”
The next day at the office, I told everyone about the wedding. They said the couple stood up because I was white. A white person attending their wedding was an honor for them. In response to this, I felt even more ashamed and crushed. Yet the situation was not caused by me. At that moment, I also learned that women in Sudan, in some circles, make an effort to marry white men in order to lighten the skin color of future generations. People at the office told me that this was how it was discussed in certain circles in Sudan.
I had noticed the traditional clothing of the women at the wedding. On some, the upper and lower parts were the same color. On others, they were different. A single-color outfit indicated that the woman was unmarried, while a two-color outfit meant she was married. The clothing served as a signal to men. Because without relationships such as mother, sibling, kinship, or adoption, it was not possible for two people of the opposite sex to come together. They had found the path to marriage through clothing. However, I also heard from the women and men I met that all kinds of prohibitions were secretly being violated.
When I went to Port Sudan, I was taken to what was said to be a “five-star” hotel. I had seen nothing that would make me think such a hotel could exist. I was curious about what kind of place it would be. We went to the hotel and the brand name was quite familiar. But the name used was fake. Indeed, a young Sudanese man I had interviewed for the office had also told me that he graduated from Cambridge University. When I asked, “When did you return from England?” he said, “I never went, so how could I return?” It turned out that there was an institution called Cambridge in Khartoum.
The pillow in my room was so dirty that I had to use one of my T-shirts as a pillowcase, and when I left the hotel, I did not take the T-shirt with me. At that moment, it also dawned on me that all the hotel advertisements at the airport were fake. For days, I had been wondering where these hotels were. Not because I wanted to stay in them, but because I was curious where in the city such hotels could possibly exist. After all, everything was falling apart. In Sudan, there was not even a place where one could sit on the wicker stools of a tea seller in the ground floor of a business inn in Sirkeci, Istanbul and drink a couple of sips of something.
During the periods when I went to Khartoum, there was almost no asphalt road in the capital. A few hundred meters of asphalt, then dirt. I do not know what it is like now. At that time, Sudan had not yet been divided into north and south.
There was a large United Nations compound in Khartoum. It was surrounded by massive concrete blocks. It was protected this way because of suicide attacks. It was known that Osama bin Laden had lived in Khartoum for a long time.
There were very few reinforced concrete buildings in the city. The existing ones were also makeshift. Most of the population slept outdoors. There was a risk of encountering all kinds of poisonous animals, including cobras. For this reason, according to what I was told, people were injected with small doses of cobra venom at certain intervals during infancy and childhood. Over time, resistance to the venom developed, and even if they were bitten by a cobra as adults, they would not die.
When people needed to relieve themselves while walking down the street, they would stop, squat, do their business, and then get up and continue walking. Taking photographs was forbidden in the country, but I had secretly taken a photograph of someone doing this. I cannot find the photo today.
We had reached Port Sudan from Khartoum with a one-hour flight. As the plane was taking off, the airport was beneath me. I could see the end of the runway. There were wrecked airplanes. I asked, “What are these?” The Englishman next to me said, “These are planes that have crashed recently while trying to take off.” I could not go beyond reacting, “What are you saying?” I was already under the influence of the Qur’anic verses read by the male flight attendant before takeoff, and we were in the air. There was nothing I could do.
On the return flight from Port Sudan to Khartoum, our plane was delayed for eight hours. How could an eight-hour delay be explained for a one-hour flight? The plane was about to depart from Khartoum exactly on time when passengers for Cairo suddenly appeared. “Let’s take them as well,” they said. In Cairo, this time, passengers for Jeddah appeared. For them too, they said, “Let’s take them as well.” The planes operated with a shared-taxi mentality.
After eight hours of waiting, we were finally able to fly. The captain apologized for the delay. But only for the last one hour of the eight. No one asked the airline company, “Why did you carry passengers to Cairo and Jeddah on a scheduled flight?” We learned the reason why the captain apologized for only the last hour about fifteen minutes after takeoff: the engine had not worked. Once again, we were in the air, and once again, there was nothing to do.
While in Port Sudan, we set out toward Sawakin. Since Friday and Saturday were the weekend in the country and that day was Saturday, we were taken somewhere along the Red Sea coast via Sawakin. The purpose was to see a place and spend time by the sea.
The road never seemed to end. I asked why we still had not reached the city. They said we had passed it. But I did not see anything that could be called a city along the way. There were no buildings. The city consisted of gazebo-like structures used as homes, made by planting four long tree branches into the ground and covering them with tarpaulins. I saw them all from the vehicle, but I could not imagine that this could be the city center. Those gazebos were people’s homes. They slept under them at night, then got up and went to work the next day.
We arrived at the place on the Red Sea coast. They said we would eat. We sat under a gazebo. We were told that this was a restaurant. However, there was no sign whatsoever that would make one feel they were in a restaurant.
There was a carpet on the ground of the gazebo. We sat down. Someone came and asked whether we would eat. We said we would. The boy turned around and left. I said, “He did not ask what we wanted to eat.” They said, “No need.” I watched the boy. He took a spear gun and jumped into the water. He would catch fish with the spear, cook it for us, and serve it (!) to us. In Sudan, there is no end to the feeling of astonishment.
While waiting for the food, I walked along the shore. I reached a place where there were seashells. Someone had clearly piled these seashells there. Children might have played. Someone might have gathered the seashells and tried to draw a shape they liked. But no!
I stepped over the seashells and immediately shouting broke out around me. Everyone was shouting at me. I could not understand what they were saying, and someone from our office ran toward me and told me that I needed to go back. I did as he said, but I could not make sense of the uproar.
The lines formed with seashells were in the shape of a mosque, and I had entered the mosque. If no one had come to warn me, I might have been attacked. That was how angrily the people around shouted at me. After some time passed, someone entered this “mosque” and began to pray. From the opposite shore of where we were, Mecca could be reached. The mosque was facing exactly toward the qibla.
This beach near Sawakin has an interesting and important story. The boy who jumped into the water to catch fish advanced with a long walk through the water. But the water did not get deeper. At a certain point in this shallow water, he dove in and caught fish with the spear.
We came face to face with a man wandering around the restaurant and greeted each other. He began speaking in perfect English. It caught my attention that someone we encountered in a place reached by crossing a vast desert, with no nearby settlements, spoke English at such a level. Sudan is a former British colony, but Sudanese people generally do not speak much English. We started chatting with the man.
The person I met had worked on ships for years. He had traveled all over the world. He had seen more than 50 countries. “There is no place like one’s own country,” he said. Referring to where we were, he described how perfect a place it was.
As I listened to him, I learned that Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau had once come to this shore with his ship Calypso. The boy who jumped into the water to catch fish with the spear had no chance to go any further. If he went a bit farther, he would reach the edge of a large underwater cliff. In the underwater area like a valley, there were sharks. It was their breeding ground. If the boy who went fishing reached that valley, he would not come out alive. Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau had wanted to study these sharks back in the day.
When I returned to Istanbul, I immediately researched what Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau had done in Sudan. He first visited Sudan’s waters in the mid-1950s. He mainly spent time around the Sha’ab Rumi reef. There, he established a settlement called Précontinent II. Although it has since disintegrated, some remaining structures on the seabed—such as fish cages, a tool shed, and small hangar-like remnants—can still be visited by divers.
Cousteau later conducted explorations and marine life studies along the Sudanese coast around Darraka Island in 1967 and the following years. During this period, he also visited the beach near Sawakin that I had been to.
A few fish arrived on top of rice with a porridge-like consistency, served on a large metal tray. There were no forks, knives, or spoons. Everyone gathered around the tray and plunged their hands into the rice. They brought the rice in their palms to a certain consistency with their saliva, did not swallow it, put it back into their palms, aerated it a bit, and then began to eat it. With this method, they said, the rice tasted better.
As for the fish, whoever tore off a piece got to keep it. Each fish did not belong to a single person. By swarming over the food, whoever tore off which piece ate it. I had been hungry for days. I was sure the fish was fresh. Nothing else mattered to me, and I too swarmed over the tray.
Before this meal on the beach, my last attempt at eating anything other than the fresh kasseri cheese and nuts I had brought with me had ended in failure. They had wanted to order pizza to the office as a treat for me. To avoid risk, I had asked for it to be only with cheese. The moment I took a bite from a slice of pizza, I felt as if smoke had filled my lungs. I realized that the cause was the cheese, but there was nothing to be done.
Using the excuse of getting some air, I went outside with my pizza and threw it away somewhere. It would have been a great shame not to appreciate the treat prepared for me with such sacrifice. Later, discreetly, I took out some fresh kasseri cheese and nuts from my suitcase and ate them. That last serious attempt at having a proper meal before the fish story had been a fiasco. I was hungry. I remember that I did not dare to eat anything in the restaurants around. I think the reason why I did not dare can be explained by the photos below.
As we were leaving the beachside restaurant, I saw the fish being cooked for others. There was an oil can standing on the side, and oil was poured from this can into the pan where the fish were being fried from time to time. On the oil can, it said “Castrol.” I swallowed hard and continued walking toward the vehicle that would take us back to Port Sudan.
Despite it being forbidden, due to the tolerance of the civilian police officer in the office and the fact that we were allowed freedom because we were doing business, I had listened to interesting stories in my conversations with women. The conversation had progressed to the point where I could ask how it felt to accept three other women besides themselves as co-wives. The women I spoke with told me that they never accepted this and tried to prevent it by putting pressure on their husbands. However, they were sometimes forced to endure the situation. They were not happy with it at all.
One day after I returned to Istanbul, I was reading an English-language newspaper. I think it was The New York Times. In the culture section, I came across an article describing how women in Sudan prepared for sexual relations with their husbands on Thursday evenings. I read it in astonishment. Because this story had been told to me in Sudan. Women would drape a sheet over their heads, covering their entire bodies. The smoke of incense would allow an aromatic scent to permeate their whole bodies. The entire day was spent preparing for the evening. This was a ritual and tradition in Sudan called “dukhan.”
Such a ritual or tradition may exist. Its origins are African. But was it not strange that in a country governed by Sharia, living under such strict rules and under constant threat of punishment, where human life could be so cheap, this tradition had been explained to me openly? And moreover, by women.
On one of my trips, I went for a walk with someone in Port Sudan. He said, “Let me take you to a place that sells souvenirs.” I accepted eagerly. There are countless tribes in Sudan. The owner of the shop we went to was an Englishman who collected items from tribes and sold them in a shop. Imagine a completely empty shop with makeshift shelves installed inside, and all the souvenirs carelessly placed on those shelves. That is what the shop was like. But that was not the interesting thing about the shop.
Inside, there were many Chinese people with worn-out clothes. It was impossible to move inside the shop. They had practically invaded it. But I did not leave the shop. I stayed inside to observe the people and pretended to look at the souvenirs.
When we went outside, they told me this: A significant portion of the people that Chinese companies brought as workers were actually prisoners. They were made to work for 1 dollar a month. Instead of investing in machinery such as cranes and forklifts, they used large numbers of prisoners as workers, and loads that such machines could lift were being lifted by many Chinese prisoner-workers. For 1 dollar a month!
I did not know whether to feel sorry for the state of the world, curse it, or ignore it for the sake of my inner peace. Let me add a note here: The start date of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is 2013. The date of my visit to this shop was 2009.
On the same day, we also went to see the port of Port Sudan. On the way, my Sudanese friend told me that dentists were very expensive. There was a dual pricing system. One rate for tooth extraction was 20 dollars, which was already very high under Sudanese conditions. The other rate was 100 dollars. When I asked, “What is the difference?” he said that under the first rate, the tooth extraction was done without anesthesia, while the second was with anesthesia.
After seeing the port, we continued wandering. When I saw a sign on the road, I asked them to stop. The reason for stopping was the university seen in the photo below. The gate was the entrance to the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences of the university. At that moment, I could not restrain my curiosity.
On the flight back to Istanbul, I was on the plane. Next to me was a Turk. We started chatting. He told me that he was a doctor and had served in the Darfur region through the Red Crescent. Darfur is a region in western Sudan where people have been displaced due to violence by armed groups said to be linked to the state, turning the border with Chad into an escape route. Doctors were normally assigned for two months, but the doctor sitting next to me had requested to return to Turkey after one month.
The doctor said, “If we are to operate on a patient, we open the relevant area, perform the surgery, and then close it.” But in the cases he encountered in Darfur, he reached a point where he could not even tell which part of the body to collect and how, and because if he endured what he experienced any longer, he might have had to quit the profession, he asked to be relieved of duty. His psychology could not bear what he had experienced.
Once again, my heart ached. How difficult it is to be human. While these things are happening here, there are completely different lives in completely different parts of the world. This should not be destiny. But how can anything be done with people who think about traffic fines in terms of faith in destiny?
I understood that humans are not very pleasant beings, but on the other hand, there are also people who cannot endure these things. Darfur and the Chinese prisoners are not images that can be erased from the mind. On the other hand, just a few days earlier, it was also me who had been forced to pounce on porridge-like rice and fish on the same country’s coast. While listening to the doctor’s stories, it was also me who watched Sudanese youths come to that same coast for fun and drank the coffee they offered me after it had been strained through a scouring pad together with them. Different points within the same country, different people.
My next visit to Sudan began with a painful surprise. I arrived at the office again. I was no longer surprised by anything. Or rather, I thought I would not be surprised. Someone in the office was burning with fever and shivering. I said, “Why don’t you go home and lie down?” I was also thinking to myself how one could get sick like this in such heat, but of course I did not say that. When I learned that it was malaria, I became worried. I informed those around. They said, “We know.” So? The medicine was sold in grocery stores. In Turkey, once upon a time, a medicine called Gripin was sold in grocery stores. Malaria pills in Sudan were sold the same way. But what is malaria anyway?
The people in the office were sadder than I had ever seen them. I could not easily ask what had happened. Someone who noticed the curiosity in my eyes said, “We received very bad news.” Someone from the office, overwhelmed by the heat, had entered the Nile River and was virtually destroyed by crocodiles. I collapsed onto a seat. I could do nothing all day. We can tolerate death caused by health problems to a certain extent, but I could not bear the images that came to my mind of such a death.
As I said, Sudan was very eye-opening. For a person to gain life experience and broaden their horizons, seeing underdeveloped places is as important as seeing developed ones.
I came to know dictatorship under Sharia rule in Sudan. From the conversations of people, especially women, I reinforced my idea in Sudan that religion was not so much a belief as it was a tradition.
I understood why China’s Belt and Road Initiative emerged when I saw the Chinese prisoners in Port Sudan. I realized that until that day, I did not know the meaning of the word “yok” (nothing, absence) in Turkish. I discovered that it is possible to encounter all kinds of people in every corner of the world and that the human capacity for transformation is limitless.
I learned that some people and societies have few demands beyond basic rights (life, food, shelter, clothing, and similar). I saw that not every society embraces concepts such as independence and democracy, and that some do not even want them. Through human scenes, I witnessed certain theses and views in psychology that argue that “people value order more than democratic rights.”
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