The Sudan Handbook

thE WaR in thE WEst 235

intense waves of drought, rainfall that became increasingly variable and a

general reduction in the length of the rainy seasons. In Darfur, tempera-

tures rose by 0.7°C between 1990 and 2005, whilst rainfall fell by between

16 per cent and 30 per cent in forty years. The decline in rainfall in the

region coincides with a rise in the temperature of the Indian Ocean.

These factors converged in 1983–5 in a famine of unprecedented

severity which drew international attention to Darfur for the first time.

Abubakar Mahmoud, a Zaghawa teacher in a refugee camp in Eastern

Chad, was only four years old in 1985, but he remembers his parents

going to El-Fasher and queuing for three or four days to get what they

called the ‘sorghum of Reagan’, which was delivered by plane. 100,000

people died; that the number was not greater was a result not so much

of the Reagan durra, but of the resilience of the population. Abubakar’s

family also ate wild plants, in particular mokhet, the berries from the

tree Boscia senegalensis; ‘It is very bitter. It has to be dried on the soil and

cleaned, then put in water at least three times, the water poured from

time to time and the taste can become acceptable.’ The inhabitants of

Darfur, notably the Zaghawa in the far north, knew how to survive by

eating wild fruits and cereals during difficult periods.

The drought drove people south in search of less arid land. Already in

the 1970s, at the behest of members of their educated elite, and antici-

pating the coming droughts, thousands of Zaghawa moved to the far

south of Darfur. During the 1980s, other communities from North Darfur,

in particular Abbala Arabs, took the same path. Today the Arabs’ camels

graze on the green flanks of the volcanic Jebel Marra mountain range,

which is more than 3,000 metres high and lies at the centre of the Fur

heartland. A small community of Rizeigat Arabs from the Jalul branch,

that of Musa Hilal, the most notorious of the leaders of the janjawid. has

put its tents made of palm leaves to the south of the mountain. Its head is

the Sheikh Abdallah Abubakar, who was born 88 years ago in Um Sayala,

a settlement in north Darfur which has now become a janjawid base.’ All

the north has become a desert, there is no more water. That’s the reason

why we settled here’, he explains. In accordance with custom, he went

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors to ask his Fur counterparts, who own the Jebel Marra lands, if he could

(www.riftvalley.net).