Table of Contents
Jamal Mahjoub’s A Line in the River: Khartoum, City of Memory is a dense, multi-disciplinary work that blends personal memoir, travelogue, and a forensic political history of Sudan. Writing from the perspective of an “in-betweener” the son of a Sudanese father and a British mother Mahjoub uses his return to Khartoum between 2008 and 2012 to investigate why the dream of a unified, prosperous Sudanese nation failed. The book is structured around the five years Mahjoub spent revisiting the city, coinciding with the six-year interim period of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that eventually led to the secession of South Sudan.
Part One: Always Returning (2008) – The Ghosts of Omdurman
The narrative begins not in Africa, but in the Scottish Highlands at Blair Castle. There, Mahjoub discovers war trophies from the 1898 Sudan Campaign spears, hippopotamus-hide shields, and patched jibbas (the uniforms of the Mahdi’s followers). This “shock of recognition” triggers a deep existential crisis and an irresistible urge to return to the city of his childhood. He reflects on the Battle of Omdurman, where modern industrial weaponry (the Maxim machine gun) collided with medieval warfare, resulting in 11,000 Sudanese deaths compared to only 48 British casualties. Mahjoub identifies this moment as the start of a pact between Europe and Africa defined by an “unrestrained ability to do evil”.
Upon arriving in Khartoum after nineteen years, Mahjoub finds a city defined by “ceaseless air of decay” and “pathological urbanisation”. He stays at the Africa Hotel (formerly the Wady el-Nil), a creaky relic where Korean and Ethiopian staff symbolize the “New Scramble for Africa”. He visits his grandmother’s house in Hillet Hamad, a neighborhood originally settled by Nubian Mahas people at the request of Lord Kitchener in 1898.
His personal history is inextricably linked to the city’s elite past. His father, a student welfare officer who once worked at Sudan House in London, represented a generation of effendis Western-educated Sudanese groomed to take over the country from the British. Mahjoub describes his parents’ “unlikely” marriage in 1955 as a microcosmic act of optimism, creating a family out of opposites just as Sudan was attempting to do as a new nation. He recalls his father’s fondness for Scotch whisky, tennis, and polka-dot bow ties symbols of a cosmopolitan era that would later be purged by Islamist zealotry.
Part Two: A History of Lost Chapters (2009) – Nubia and the Modern Crisis
In Part Two, Mahjoub delves into the “blank pages” of Sudanese history. He critiques the National Museum for its intermittent closure of galleries dedicated to Christian Nubia, an act of “pious hysteria” intended to erase any truth preceding the word of Muhammad. He traces the history of Nubia, which once ruled Egypt in the 25th Dynasty, but whose script remains impenetrable and whose land was largely drowned by the Aswan High Dam in 1970 a trade of the past for a modernized Egyptian future.
The political focus shifts to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and the tragic death of John Garang de Mabior. Garang, the charismatic leader of the SPLA, died in a helicopter crash in 2005, just twenty-one days after being sworn in as Vice President of a unified Sudan. Mahjoub explores the conspiracy theories surrounding the crash and interviews Yasir Arman, a rare Northerner who fought alongside Garang. Garang’s vision of a “New Sudan” a pluralist state where citizenship replaced ethnic or religious dominance died with him, leaving the path to secession seemingly inevitable.
Mahjoub also investigates the conflict in Darfur, which he argues was never a simple “Arab versus African” genocide. He critiques the Western “celebrity status” of the conflict, exemplified by Bernard-Henri Lévy and George Clooney, noting that it became an American moral issue that ignored local complexities like climate change and the historical independence of the Darfur Sultanate. He uncovers the history of Zubayr Pasha, a notorious nineteenth-century slave trader who carved out an empire in Darfur and was portrayed by the British as a monster, yet was eventually seen by some as a civilizing trader.
The chapter concludes with an analysis of the “Black Book” (Kitab al-Aswad), an anonymous document that appeared in 2000. It provided a forensic statistical analysis proving that a tiny Northern elite (5.4% of the population) had controlled 80% of political posts since independence. This book, Mahjoub argues, was the “obituary” of the 1989 Islamist revolution, exposing its failure to deliver social equality.
Part Three: Divergent City (2010) – The Islamic Experiment
Part Three explores the “experiment” of the New Extension (Amarat), the rectilinear grid where Mahjoub grew up, designed by Greek architect C.A. Doxiadis. Mahjoub juxtaposes his childhood memories of reading Pynchon and Burroughs in a house full of guava and lime trees with the current reality of “horizontal sprawl and vertical spiral”.
He provides a detailed history of the 1989 coup led by Omar al-Bashir and the intellectual influence of Hassan al-Turabi. Turabi, a Sorbonne-educated scholar, attempted to create a global Islamist hub in Khartoum, hosting figures like Osama bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal. Mahjoub notes the irony of this era: while the regime enforced strict dress codes and used whips to “chastise” women, the elite siphoned off oil profits.
A significant portion of this section is dedicated to the “martyrs” of intellectual freedom. Mahjoub recounts the execution of Abdel-Khaliq Mahgoub, the Communist leader who proposed a synthesis of Islam and Marxism as a path to national unity. He also details the 1985 execution of Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, a 76-year-old thinker who advocated for a “second message of Islam” that separated state from faith. Taha’s death on the gallows of Kober Prison is marked as a definitive “turning point in the country’s moral history”.
Mahjoub also recounts his mother’s shop, “Slimming,” which became a “refuge for strangers” in the downtown quarter. In a surreal anecdote, he describes a visit from Leni Riefenstahl, the former Nazi filmmaker, who ransacked the shop for silver bracelets and dresses while her film The Last of the Nuba objectified the very people the regime was currently marginalizing.
Part Four: Lines of Separation (2011) – The Referendum
As the 2011 referendum approaches, Part Four captures a city in “suspended animation”. Mahjoub moves into a flat overlooking the Nile and the Sayyid Mirghani mosque, sharing the space with a persistent mouse. He visits the offices of Al Ayyam, the legendary newspaper run by Mahgoub Mohammed Salih. The newspaper functions in a state of “minimalism” bare desks and shared computers constantly threatened by the ruqab (censor), who can seize an entire print run over a single editorial line.
The referendum for South Sudanese independence is the emotional core of this section. Mahjoub observes the “numb sense of disbelief” among Northerners who had convinced themselves the South would never leave. He critiques the regime for its blatant racism, citing Information Minister Kamal Obeid’s statement that Southerners remaining in the North would be denied even a “hypodermic needle” in hospitals. The secession is portrayed not as a solution, but as a “splitting of the problem into two parts,” with conflicts immediately flaring in the Nuba Mountains and South Kordofan.
Mahjoub reflects on his own education at Comboni College, an Italian missionary school where priests played the Beatles every day during break time. He visits the once-grand library of the English Department at Khartoum University, now a “gloomy place” where standards have fallen so far that graduates can barely understand basic English terminology due to the regime’s Arabization policy.
Part Five: Parting the Waters (2012) – Globalization and Corporate Mirages
The final part of the book opens with the demolition of Mahjoub’s childhood home in the New Extension to make way for a Syrian-built block of flats a literal “door swinging shut on the past”. He meditates on the nature of exile, arguing that his parents were forced to leave because the homeland they worked for had “shifted in its frame”.
Mahjoub investigates the rise of the DAL Group, a massive conglomerate that grew from a humble tractor company to the third-largest firm in Sudan. Led by Osama Daoud, DAL represents a “Brazilian model” of development practical, professional, and efficient that stands in stark contrast to the corrupt, “lazy” public sector. At the Alaifoun farm, Mahjoub witnesses a vision of the “breadbasket” dream through high-tech irrigation pivots and cloned Friesian cattle, suggesting that responsible capitalism might be the only workable approach to development left.
The influence of China is explored in detail. Chinese workers, like Mr. Tang and Miss Liu, live in shipping containers by the river and work the land with an adaptability Westerners lack. Mahjoub notes that while China provides the arms for the wars in Darfur and the South, they also provide the infrastructure (pipelines, refineries, dams) that the West abandoned during the sanctions era.
The book closes with the memory of the Melik, the gunboat that brought Kitchener to Khartoum in 1898. Once a majestic symbol of colonial power, it is now half-buried in the riverbank, “shrouded in neem trees and banyans”. This image serves as a final metaphor for Mahjoub’s central inquiry: the city and the nation are “unfinished stories” that have failed to find a language to express their own diversity. He concludes that while a nation cannot be “achieved” through words or novels, the act of documenting the “shattered puzzle” is a necessary reconciliation with the present.