8-15-08, 9:57 am

Tears of the Desert by Halima Bashir and Damien Lewis New York, Random House, 2008

Original source: Morning Star

The awful tragedy that is Darfur is given depth and color by this searing first-person account.

Yet, immediately, there is an ambiguity in that leading title word. Is it a noun or a verb? Are these the tears that have been Africa's bitter fruit since 'the white plague' – in songwriter Ewan McColl's telling phrase - descended on the continent or is Africa still being torn apart by the unsated blood-lust of new empires and their acolytes?

Quickly, you realize that it is both.

In just under 350 pages and beginning with her birth in 1979, Halima Bashir describes her journey from a remote tribal village in Sudan, through adolescence to university and to qualification as a doctor of medicine specializing in gynecology and obstetrics.

This is a very long journey, physically and culturally, from primitive superstition and bizarre folk remedies to modern medical practice and, in parallel, from crude tribalism and racism to some elementary political awareness.

Confrontations with rapist secret policemen and racist university examiners are further, almost inhuman, stresses that no-one should have to endure. They culminate in Bashir's arrival in London, subject to Britain's own refugee system, with its inbuilt racism and finely tuned psychological inhumanities.

Interwoven with this moving personal narrative are important facets of contemporary African life. Bashir's recollections of her own female circumcision – which is actually female genital mutilation – at eight years of age, make her realize how she has been betrayed by those closest to her.

With the benefit of her later training, she sees that this mutilation has led, for some, to infection, sterility or difficulty in childbirth and sometimes death.

Other facets come to the fore, seemingly inadvertently. Bashir comes from 'a proud warrior tribe,' the Zaghawa, which had actually sided with the British forces in their conquest of the Sudan.

Yet the Arab peoples who also inhabit the Sudan are spoken of with contempt by the Zaghawa. Seemingly the problem of racism is as serious in the Sudan as it is here and now.

It is also clear from Bashir's chronicle that the indoctrination that seems to be a feature of many 'modern' societies is at least as well-rooted in tribal ones.

She tells how she looked forward to her 'rite of passage' at eight years old, unaware of the awful reality and, later in the book, she can still write: 'To this day, I still believe in the Evil Eye and the power of hijabs, medicine women and the Fakirs.'

Such an admission is surprising, coming as it does from a woman who has studied modern medicine and even tested in her university laboratory some of the folk cures from her childhood. Yes, roasted pigeon shit mixed with sesame oil may be an effective skin balm, but I'll wager that the sesame oil is the only active ingredient.

Darfur is quite rightly a current cause for concern. This book gives a fascinating background to the present crisis. But any solution demands that the roots of that crisis should at least be recognized.