DISASTER IN DARFUR

Until the depredations of the fearsome rabble known as janjawid began to filter into the international consciousness in 2003, Darfur was one of the least-known places in the world. Poor, remote, landlocked, and sparsely populated, it was obscure even to the rest of the Sudan. Darfur's western borders are as far from the Red Sea as they are from the Atlantic, and the overland journey from Khartoum, the Sudanese capital on the Nile, still takes days across the desert. Darfur has no valuable minerals (although oil drillers live in hope), no famous sons or daughters, no natural wonders or monuments to attract any but the hardiest foreign visitors. When word of the killings began to seep out in 2003, it seemed to a perplexed world to be news from a void.

But Darfur has a history. At a crossroads of Africa and the Muslim Middle East, it has traded for centuries between them, and its peoples reflect in their languages and cultures, and in their blood, a rich heritage. As part of bilad al-Sudan – the “land of the Blacks” – the medieval Arab geographers' term for the Sahel, Darfur also straddles the hajj routes along which West Africans have for centuries made the pilgrimage to Mecca and left their mark. Arabic and Muslim culture slowly permeated, and coexisted with, indigenous traditions. To the outsider, all the people of Darfur are black, and it is ethnicity rather than “race” that sets them apart.