I was just one of many who were moved to action by the Live Aid concert 40 years ago and that harrowing video segment, introduced by David Bowie, of huge suffering in a world of plenty set to the song Drive by the Cars.
It planted a seed which led me to board a plane to Khartoum in 1986 as a GOAL volunteer, with £10,000 sterling strapped to my waist, necessary hard currency for the agency’s running expenses.
The plane landed late at night, and the equatorial heat hit me immediately as I struggled my way across the tarmac, sweating profusely, burdened as I was with a jacket containing a bottle of contraband whiskey.
I wasn’t a doctor, a nurse or a logistician. I was on a year’s leave of absence from the Irish Press and my brief was to help write donor reports and newspaper articles on GOAL’s work and generally to make myself useful.
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By the time I got there in 1986, the great hunger that had swept the horn of Africa in 1984, had abated. Happily ensconced in the GOAL house in Khartoum, I had a false sense that the worst was over as I perused a well-thumbed copy of Bob Geldof’s autobiography Is that it?
The office work of an aid agency reliant on funding from the European Union et al is drudgery of a high order so at any opportunity I accompanied GOAL nurses on their expeditions into the slums around Khartoum where they provided desperately poor people with the only health services available to them.
I was never proficient enough in the art of home brew to become a member of the KGB or the Khartoum Guild of Brewers, set up to circumvent the local ban on alcohol, and which bestowed the blasphemous title Defender of Sharia on whoever offered up the worst beer for tasting.
In those days, a GOAL volunteer got full board and $15 a month. Any traveller’s cheques I had were stolen soon after my arrival, so any social outings had to be at someone else’s expense. Luckily the GOAL nurses always had plenty of invites to expat parties and would bring me along with them.
I saw Crocodile Dundee in a free screening on the roof of Khartoum’s oldest hotel, the Acropole, a home from home for aid workers, journalists and archaeologists, with reliable phones and telex machines, run by George Pagoulatos and his extended Greek family.
Behind reception, they proudly displayed a love letter from Bob Geldof on Band Aid headed notepaper to George and staff in which he makes light of the hotel’s lack of material comforts.
Despite the shambolic state of the roads and footpaths, the appalling heat and mosquitos, and the squatter encampments that ringed the more affluent urban centre, Khartoum had a certain other worldly charm.
It lies at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles with a street plan in the shape of a Union Jack. In the evening it was pleasant to walk the tree lined riverbank dotted with kiosks and drink an ice-cold soda.
Khartoum was untouched by war except for the stories brought to the city by refugees fleeing conflict and repression in neighbouring Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the civil war that would give birth to South Sudan.
And then there was Darfur.
A mechanic and I delivered a new vehicle, 1,500 kms across the desert, to the GOAL operation in El Geneina, Darfur, which supported a local midwifery school and provided outreach to remote settlements including refugees along the border with Chad.
It was a hair-raising three-day drive. We stopped at El Daein train station in east Darfur and saw the remains of the wagons where hundreds of Dinkas were burned alive in a massacre carried out a few weeks earlier in March 1987 by a local Arab tribe, the Muraheleen militia.
It was a reminder of how isolated Khartoum was then from the mayhem in other parts of the country.
The Muraheleen became part of the dreaded Janjaweed, a militia armed by the government and held responsible for a death toll possibly as high as 300,000 and the displacement of millions in ethnic cleansing across Darfur some 20 years ago.
They morphed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who fell out with government forces and took the proud, once inviolate city of Khartoum in April 2023 committing war crimes on a scale hard to comprehend and destroying many of Khartoum’s institutions including the humble Acropole Hotel which the Pagoulatos family had run for 71 years and where GOAL and other aid agencies collected their mail.
After 50 years or more of warfare, Sudan’s ruin now seems complete. The sacking of Khartoum and the withdrawal of all support by the country’s biggest aid donor, the US, means that Sudan risks becoming the world’s largest hunger crisis in recent history as famine takes hold and 24.6 million people, almost half the population face food insecurity.
Last year the US gave $830 million to keep four million people alive in Sudan.
Withdrawing that funding is a very perverse way to mark the 40th anniversary of Live Aid which helped create the mood music – no pun intended – for George Bush, Tony Blair and other G8 leaders to forgive debt and increase aid to Africa on Live Aid’s 20thanniversary.
That seems so long ago.
