Khartoum, Sudan

Some cities grab you at once with their beauty. Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Budapest, Hong Kong, and Cape Town come to mind. Khartoum is certainly not that kind of city. Although the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile is indeed dramatic, it is masked in the dusty chaos of this modern city. There is another kind of city that doesn’t have the immediate romance I describe above, but can grow on someone as they become more familiar with it, discovering its hidden melodies and mysteries. Sao Paulo, Bucharest, Moscow, and Cairo fit in this second category for me. Perhaps Khartoum with its stately colonial buildings, tree-shaded sidewalks, and tea ladies fits there as well.

I visit in the midst of the short Khartoum “winter.” This means dry weather and average highs in the mid 80s Fahrenheit (summer means average highs of 107!). Much like Egypt, Sudan for the most part draws its life from the Nile, with life clustering along the wide banks of the river. Khartoum is not an ancient city in itself, although it lies at the southern edge of the Egyptian/Nile cultural zone with millennia of history. The city sits at the confluence of the Blue Nile (with its origins in Ethiopia) and the White Nile (with its origins in Uganda and Rwanda). The oldest part of Khartoum (a row of government ministries, mostly), faces the Blue Nile right before the confluence.

Since I arrived a bit before my colleague (who joins me today), I spent Sunday morning exploring the city a bit. The owner of my hotel suggested a walk along the Nile Avenue to the National Museum. I had pictured something akin to elegant corniche of Cairo, Alexandria, or Beirut. This wasn’t that. Instead it was a sea of flowing traffic with interrupted sidewalks. As in much of Africa and Asia, pedestrian traffic mixes in along the edges of the traffic.

The National Museum of Sudan contains many individual pieces that would be the centerpiece of a museum in America or Europe, including ancient Neolithic artifacts, Egyptian tombs and art galore, and brilliant artifacts of Nubian and Merotic civilizations that flourished in northern Sudan into the modern era. While the staff are doing their best (admission is about US25 cents), the whole place feels kind of like an artifact itself. At one point, I found myself wishing I’d brought a flashlight…

The highlight for me was the exhibit about “the Christian era,” or Nubian Christianity. While poorly lit and at times labeled in English script small enough to tire the eyes, the frescos presented were amazing. Ancient Nubia, which those who know more than I say is referenced biblically as Kush or Ethiopia (distinct from modern-day Ethiopia) stretched from what is now southern Egypt to the regions just north of present Khartoum. This was a culturally rich region that formed an integral and at times a leading part of Ancient Egypt. Christianity came to the region as early as the fifth century and several Nubian kingdoms adopted Christianity as the official religion in the sixth. Christianity flourished here with influence from both the Egyptian Copts and the Byzantine Orthodox until the late medieval period. Some evidence suggests that missions from this Nubian heartland established Christian communities as far afield as what are now Chad and the Sahel region of West Africa. Small Christian communities continued to function into the eighteenth century, although most churches fell to ruin long before this.

The magnificent paintings from the Cathedral at Faras (near what is now the Sudan-Egypt border) compose the majority of the collection in Khartoum. The paintings were remarkably well preserved under the sand and were excavated by a Polish expedition in the 1960s shortly before the whole area disappeared under Lake Nasser after the construction of the great dam at Aswan. Beyond their beauty, they also raise a number of interesting questions. At least one painting of the nativity draws on both canonical and apocryphal gospels for subject matter. At least two depict the Trinity as a single body with three heads. In short, there are many questions for students of African Christianity and eastern theology. What I find perhaps most interesting is the value of Nubian Christianity in helping to better understand the faith’s extension both eastward and southward from Jerusalem. Until quite recently, standard church history has told of the extension northward and westward, largely ignoring (or certainly dedicating less energy to) the study of the growth and flowering of Christianity east through what is now Iran and Central Asia into China and India and south toward at least Nubia and Ethiopia. The focus has been primarily on the church’s Protestant and Catholic manifestations, with interest in Orthodoxy decreasing after the Great Schism. It is good to see a number of people reframing these historical questions, drawing on rich resources. Certainly, the displays here in Khartoum have an interesting part to play in thinking about truly global Christianity.

Unfortunately, my accompanying photos are “trapped” on my camera without a proper USB cord to transfer them. Attempts to include one from Wikipedia seem thwarted by internet. Perhaps later...