Dispatches from Khartoum: Lollipop Diplomacy and the Muddy Banjo Blues

Ibrought a bag of lollipops and a banjo to Sudan. Needless to say, at the airport in Khartoum on a very hot evening in January of 2009, they invited the suspicious curiosity of the military police battalion, dressed in their baby-blue jumpsuits that were just a bit too 1970s, a bit too tight in the crotch. I winced as an officer strode over with his wedgie. What is THIS? he asked, presenting me with the neck of the banjo. I had detached the neck from the pot, the drum-like part, so that it all fit into my duffel bag. I planned to put it back together and restring it once I was settled in my room, a small but comfy suite in the nicer part of town with a sunset patio, hot plate, and screaming window air conditioner that kept ejecting its cover in the middle of the night. This was the start of the “year of abandonment” as my children came to call it. Sudan was the first leg: a six-week consulting gig for a large international nongovernmental organization that would take me to Darfur, Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile State, and a few internally displaced persons camps near Khartoum to evaluate an education reform project. Then, I would head to South Sudan for another nine months, where I would resume my ethnographic research on schooling and war for my PHD. Mixing a little Arabic with some English and wildly over-acted pantomimes, I tried to explain the banjo. Baby-blue jumpsuit man raised the banjo neck in the air toward his battalion comrades as a few perked up from their newspapers and cigarettes. As I pulled the pot out from the bag, he grabbed it suddenly, lifted both banjo parts above his head, and waved them around as if he was signaling in semaphore that sharks lay just beyond the waves. Banjos do that to people. We stood at a long, stainless steel table just beyond the immigration desk as more parts of the banjo were extracted from my bag. Earlier, the guy at the immigration desk, pimply and armed, had also delayed me because, after standing up and giving me a full-body once-over, he declared the entrance visa fee had changed from one hundred dollars to two hundred dollars. I didn’t bring that much cash, I said. ATM? Next thing I knew, I was being escorted onto a Kenya Airways flight back to Nairobi. That’s when Joseph swept in to save the day. Joseph is Kenyan, looked to be in his late twenties, and is clearly in with the KRT bureau-