Saqia: A Family, a Drowned Homeland, and the Search for Sudan

SAQIA

A Family, a Drowned Homeland, and the Search for Sudan

A Memoir by Magdi M. Amin

Prologue

Apparently, a coup d'état is underway.

Monday morning, October 25, 2021. I meant to be at the Central Bank of Sudan by 7:30, but I was dragging. I’d fallen asleep near two in the morning watching the Los Angeles Rams lose on my phone; the night before, the Dodgers had lost to the Braves. I needed a win.

I showered off the grogginess, pulled on a suit, and made instant coffee while thumbing for the final score. Damn—the internet was down. After years of underinvestment that was ordinary, and I told myself I’d check from the car. I had meetings at 7:30, nine, and eleven. We were putting the last touches on a plan to reform the banking system, and I wanted feedback before Wednesday’s presentation to the Prime Minister and Cabinet. If they approved it, Sudan would receive a $500 million grant from the World Bank. We needed it badly; the government was broke. Already 7:15. I poured the coffee into a travel mug, dropped a handful of dried dates in my pocket for breakfast, and went.

I took the elevator down. At least that was working. An Ethiopian man lived in the parking lot since a nervous breakdown left him on the street; as I did every morning, I handed him a mango yogurt drink and climbed into the car. The road beyond the gate was empty—weekend-quiet on a workday. Cars should have been buzzing past, hauling people and produce to a hundred destinations. My mind was on the day ahead, and the silence didn’t register. I turned the key.

The security guard walked over.

“Mashi fein?” Where are you going?

“Bank al Markazi,” I said. The Central Bank.

“Didn’t you hear the radio? Prime Minister Hamdok is under arrest. General Burhan has overthrown the government. Stay here.”

The words landed like a gut-punch. I sat with the engine running, unable to take in what he’d said. My hands gripped the wheel—the same hands that had signed reforms, shaken ministers’ hands, hammered out urgent memos at two in the morning. Twenty months of work. Twenty months of believing we might finally break the cycle of poverty and corruption.

Gone.

I wasn’t ready to believe it. There had been a coup attempt in September; its only visible effect had been lighter traffic. There had been signs since, and I had refused to read them. The power-sharing agreement between civilians and the military had been fraying for months. Civilian leaders had splintered, and the generals were widening every crack. They had even conspired with a tribe at Port Sudan to throttle the country’s trade. The Minister of Finance’s own political party was out in the streets protesting the government he served, encamped downtown.

Still it did not seem real. Surely the people would never accept a return to the old darkness. Too many children had died for democracy—shot in the protests, burned alive in their tents in the June 3 massacre. Too many lives had already been ground down by the last dictator, who had hollowed out the economy and the institutions and called the rubble a state. The young knew they had no future—no agency, no autonomy, no chance at a life that was theirs—until the military’s grip was broken.

Between December 2018 and August 2019 they had done the unthinkable: toppled a regime entrenched for twenty-nine years. And they had kept the pressure on. Only last Thursday—four days ago—Khartoum and a dozen other cities had filled with a vast pro-democracy march. I had joined it for a while. But my work was to make the economy breathe.

That revolution had been a shaft of light through decades of bleakness. The Minister of Finance—an old friend from the World Bank, a man I deeply admired—had called and asked me to come help mend the economy. After a painful conversation with my family, I left them in the United States and flew out with two colleagues to try.

Now, standing in the lot, incredulous, I watched an Egyptian neighbor come down to take his son to school. The guard warned him as he had warned me; the man went anyway. Should I? My papers, my glasses, my laptop charger were all still at the Central Bank—and maybe their internet was alive. I could reach colleagues, get the real picture. Surely this was another false alarm.

And yet something in me sat uneasy. A voice I had barely heard since I was five—my father’s voice, the one the stroke had taken from him—seemed to whisper a single word: Remember.

I thought back over the past days. On Sunday, the start of our work week, the worst traffic in two years had strangled the capital. After two hours crawling toward the office I had given up and rerouted to my second meeting. To save time I talked a soldier into letting me cut past the military command—in Sudan, almost everything is negotiable. As I edged by, I saw the convoy of the U.S. Special Envoy, Jeffrey Feltman, flags snapping, sweeping into headquarters for an urgent meeting with General Burhan. Burhan chaired the Sovereign Council, minding the country until the civilians took the chair—one month away. Feltman had come to warn him: do not derail the transition. Surely Burhan would not tear up the agreement and seize power hours after shaking the envoy’s hand.

Or could he?

I turned off the ignition.

I went back upstairs. The mobile network was dead now too. I tried a backup phone on a rival carrier—nothing. They had shut down the whole system. Since the protesters lived and organized on their phones, it added up.

Maybe this is real.

I did not know whether it would turn violent, or who would be taken. I doubted I was a target, but I was not invisible either. And I remembered my father’s own exit from Sudan, fifty years before—1971, when the wrong friendships could make a man vanish into one of Numeiri’s ghost houses.

My father never set foot in Sudan again.

With no internet and no phone, I could not call a friend, piece together the truth, or buy a plane ticket. I stood in the middle of the apartment—this borrowed home I’d made in Khartoum—and gathered my thoughts. I decided to pack.

But what do you take when you may never come back? I packed what mattered: my father’s doctoral thesis, pressed on me by a relative—his last act of devotion to Nubia, written at UCLA even as his homeland sank beneath Lake Nasser. Some clothes. My saxophone. Running shoes, because I might need to keep moving. The rest of the dried dates.

I drank the last of the coffee, bitter and cold now, brushed the fine Khartoum dust from a chair on the balcony, and sat down to think. Light shivered across the surface of the Nile. On the far bank, smoke rose from the brick kilns I had watched for twenty months, my private calendar of seasons: the flood withdrawing, leaving its black gift of silt; farmers pressing seed into the mud; workers cutting the same earth into bricks and firing them with the stubble of the harvest. The cycle turning, as it always had.

But this morning, no one worked.

I started to picture the end of my road in Sudan. The dictator before us, Omar al-Bashir, had poured the country’s oil wealth not into its people but into his own survival—buying loyalty with contracts, quieting the rest with cheap bread and fuel, and arms for when that didn’t work. When they finally jailed him after the revolution, police found $130 million in cash in his house, the next round of bribes already counted out. The treasury was empty.

He had left behind not one army but three. The regular Sudan Armed Forces still held a few clean and patriotic officers; distrusting them, Bashir had built a rival in the security service, whose gleaming sports complex I passed each day in a city that could not pay its teachers. When that force grew strong enough to threaten him in turn, he raised a third—the Rapid Support Forces, conjured from the Janjaweed militias that had burned their way across Darfur. He let them keep the gold they tore from the ground. The guns multiplied; the hospitals, the schools, the roads fell to ruin.

I did not yet know, that bright morning, that two of those armies would one day turn on each other. That some fourteen million Sudanese would be driven from their homes, more than any other people on earth. The wheel had not finished turning. It was only gathering speed.

The arithmetic of the ruin was plain. When South Sudan seceded in 2011 and took most of the oil with it, Bashir’s lifeline ran dry. He borrowed abroad until the debt crossed $60 billion, and when the lenders shut their doors he ordered the Central Bank to print money. He was gone now, but the wreckage remained: inflation off its leash, the economy in shards.

This was the mess we were asked to clear. The economics were simple; the politics were a minefield. We stripped away the fuel subsidies that had been devouring half the budget, retired the fiction of an official exchange rate, and began wiring modest monthly payments to families to soften the blow and earn a little trust. Every move drew fire—from holdovers of the old regime, from committee theorists who insisted the subsidies didn’t exist, from UN agencies that wanted the money routed their own way. We pushed through. By September, eight million Sudanese were receiving those payments.

And it was working. Inflation was cooling; the currency held. The crushing debt was being forgiven in a great bargain struck among foreign governments. Children were being fed at school. Nearly a billion dollars in support was due within weeks. Investors had begun to circle—agriculture, mining, a country suddenly worth the wager. Every Sudanese had carried the weight of these reforms, and the reward was almost in their hands. In November, more power would pass to the civilians. We were turning the corner.

And now this.

Was it really over—because the generals could not bring themselves to share? Had the whole effort been a charade?

Sudan seemed cursed. The people rose, overthrew a dictator, another would return. Each one had broken something in my family. Was I to be the next general’s casualty?

I thought of the water wheels of old Nubia—the saqia of my grandmother’s stories. An ox turned them, blindfolded, plodding forward, certain it was getting somewhere, arriving again and again at the same patch of trodden ground. The wheel dipped into the Nile, lifted its water to the fields, came back empty, and dipped again. An endless circle.

Movement without progress. Labor without reward.

The ox never sees that it walks in circles. But I could see. Three generations of my family, all watching the same wheel turn: my father’s people driven from Nubia by Nasser’s dam; my father himself fleeing Numeiri’s paranoia, then felled by the stroke that silenced him for good; uncles and cousins chased into exile by Bashir’s men. And now me, packing a bag as another general took the country, as another generation’s dreams went under.

The wheel keeps turning. But who drinks the water it lifts? Not the ox. Not the people. Only the ones who own the wheel.

I sat on the balcony as the sun climbed and the silence of a city holding its breath settled over Khartoum. Somewhere out there the young people who had risked everything for democracy—and the leaders they had carried into office—were hiding, or being hunted, or already plotting their resistance. Somewhere mothers who had buried sons for freedom were weeping again. Somewhere the future Sudan had nearly closed its hand around was running out between its fingers like water.

In the distance, I could hear the first chants rising.

How did I get here?

The answer, I knew, lay fifty years back—and five thousand years before that. It lay in Nubia’s drowned villages and my father’s stolen voice. It lay in my grandmother’s stories of date palms and riverbanks, of a world where everyone was kin and loss had not yet been written in water. It lay in the journey I had made with my son Tariq in 2013, to find what was left of our history, to learn what we had lost and what might still be saved.

If I was going to leave Sudan again—and I knew now, with certainty, that I would—I had to understand the pattern. I had to see how we got here, how the wheel had come to turn this way, and whether it could ever be broken, or whether we were condemned to walk in circles forever.

PART I: THE PILGRIMAGE

Chapter 1: Coming Home

Fifty years.

The number had haunted me since I began planning the trip. Fifty years since a hundred thousand Nubians were driven from homes their families had held since before Egypt had a name—my grandmother among them, torn from the riverbank where her ancestors had lived for millennia. Fifty years since the last trains pulled out of the Nubian villages for New Halfa, leaving behind a civilization that had outlasted invasions and empires.

And I was finally bringing my son to see what was left.

December 2013. Cairo.

Tariq lay asleep across the hotel bed, sprawled in the careless, bottomless sleep of the young—one of the quiet casualties of the thirty-four years between his age and mine. Beyond the balcony the Nile caught the city’s light, the same river that had fed us and then drowned us, the thread tying this night to every night that had come before it.

I couldn’t sleep. My grandmother had been gone eleven months, buried in California soil a world away from the Nubian sand where she belonged. I had lowered her into the earth with my own hands, turned her to face Mecca, felt the awful finality of it—and understood, too late, that I had failed her. For all her stories, for all the years she gave up her own life to raise my brother and sister and me while my father clawed his way back from the stroke, I had never truly known her. Never grasped the full weight of what she had lost, what we had lost, what Tariq might never even learn to miss.

What was it that made her so unwilling to let go?

That question had carried me across eight time zones—through airports and rental counters, through cousins and nephews and the logistics of hauling a thirteen-year-old into the past. To understand it, I had to stand on the land her stories came from, and to see what had become of the people uprooted in 1964.

I needed to know her, and through her to know myself—to know what to say to Tariq and to my daughter Noor when they asked who we were, where we came from, why any of it mattered. Noor and my wife, Malahat, couldn’t come; Malahat’s mother had fallen ill and needed her. Tariq and I would make the journey for all of us.

Fifty years since the Nubians on both banks of the Sudanese-Egyptian border were lifted out of homes inhabited since 3,000 BC and set down in New Halfa, near the Eritrean line, or in Kom Ombo, deep in the Egyptian desert. The round number was only part of what moved me. The rest was the sense that time was running out: the generation that still remembered was dying. Soon no one would be left who had walked those lanes, swum in that stretch of river, climbed those date palms as a child.

Two years before I was born, the last trains left the villages of Nubia, leaving behind a way of life and a land that had sustained one people, unbroken, for seven thousand years. My family was aboard those trains.

Seven thousand years.

While Europeans were still in their caves, before they had learned to farm; while the Americas held no cities; while China’s dynasties were not yet even dreamed—Nubians were building kingdoms. They were drowned.