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The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur

Less mighty than the sword

Daoud Hari
Penguin, 210pp, £8.99,

Caroline Moorehead

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Caroline Moorehead on Daoud Hari's memoir of Darfur

When Daoud Hari was a boy, the villages of northern Darfur were peaceful places. He had a camel called Kelgi, to which he was much attached, and a vast clan of Zaghawa traditional tribal herdsmen as cousins. Sent away to school in El Fasher, he developed a taste for Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens and as a young man he left home to travel in Chad and Libya. It is what he saw when he returned that forms the heart of his remarkable memoir, The Translator.

It was 2003. Crossing back into Darfur from Chad, he found the border full of frantic people, fleeing the violence that had broken out between rebel groups and the Sudanese army, helped by the Janjaweed raiders they support. Long before reaching his own remote village, Hari heard stories of unimaginable butchery and witnessed for himself sights which were to haunt him. Along the way, he noted that the women of Darfur, once dressed in brilliant yellows and reds, now wore brown, the safe colour of the surrounding desert. He had barely reached home, reunited with his large family, when the Janjaweed attacked, backed up by Antonov bombers dropping chemicals to pollute the wells, and gunship helicopters to mow down those who fled. Though he survived unscathed, his much loved elder brother Ahmed did not.

The tone of The Translator is conversational. Hari is telling his readers a story and he wants them to listen. Though it was extremely dangerous for him — neither the Sudanese nor most of the fractured groups of rebels trusted him — he decided to use his excellent English to become an interpreter for reporters wishing to cover the war in Darfur. It was a simple question of bearing witness. Among them was Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, who has done the most to keep the realities of Darfur’s long conflict before western eyes. Navigating perilously between rebels and government soldiers, calling for help on a network of contacts and his vast clan of cousins, Hari led party after party through Darfur’s scrubby, hilly deserts.

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