The stereo throbs with the latest Lebanese ballad and a European football match unfolds silently on the big screen as the waiter sets down the drinks: fruit juices and milkshakes. In the dimly lit surroundings of one of Khartoum’s hippest bars, young women slide their headscarves down to their shoulders and sit on sofas holding their boyfriends’ hands.
They are the modern face of Sudan’s capital, but their conversation reflects a traditional anxiety.
”My mother says that if I gave her all the money I spent on hair-straightening products, she’d be a rich woman,” one woman says.
Her copper-coloured skin reflects her Arab heritage, but it requires a dedicated chemical battering to remove the mark of her African genes from her glossy, jet-black hair.
Her companion smiles and slips off her headscarf to reveal straight hair cropped close to the scalp.
”My mother can’t understand why I cut my hair,” she said. ”She says, ‘You have dark skin, but at least you had that long hair’.”
Across Africa, straightening hair and lightening skin are considered essential elements of good grooming for women. Pharmacists’ shelves are stacked with bleaching and defrizzing products, some of which contain levels of damaging chemicals that would be banned in Britain.
But in Sudan it is not just a question of vanity, but politics. The Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa meet in the continent’s biggest country, which stretches from the fringes of the Sahara in the north to equatorial marshland and jungle in the south.
Even the country’s name contains a reference to colour: Bilad al-Sudan means ”the land of the blacks”.
Skin tones range from the nut-brown of northerners of Arab descent, to the aubergine-black of the southern Sudanese. The perfect tint for a woman’s skin is described as ”wine-colour” — not a reference to grape wines, but the golden honey wine fermented in the horn of Africa.
Islam urges its followers to treat all Muslims as equals and in Khartoum’s mosques, black believers and Arabs pray together in fraternity. But in wider society, a colour bar is evident.
The men laying tiles, digging foundations or watering lawns are always black: tall, shaven-headed southern Sudanese dressed in sweat-stained vests and baggy cotton slacks.
The dusty children who tap at car windows to beg are invariably black, too.
At one traffic-snarled junction, I saw an impatient driver lean his head out of the window and snap ”abid” at a persistent child. The word means slave.
Behind Sudan’s dysfunctional race relations is a history of slavery. Khartoum was once a slave-trading centre, in which the black southern Sudanese were the human commodities.
”We are the grandchildren of those who were being sold like goods,” says the Reverend Enock Tombe, at Khartoum’s Anglican church, All Saints. ”But now we are saying, ‘We are your equals’.”
The prejudice takes its ugliest form in Darfur, where predominantly Arab Janjaweed militiamen have used racist epithets while raping black women. The women have spoken of being called zurgha (black) and abid .
In some cases, women have reported that their rapists told them: ”We want to make a light baby.”
If Sudan is to make peace with itself and heal the divisions that have ravaged it for years, some Sudanese believe it must first address the race question.
Tombe says: ”When you come to the crux of the matter, these northern Sudanese are the same colour as the Eritreans and the Ethiopians, but they call themselves Arab.
”Then when they go to Arab countries like Egypt, the Arabs say, ‘No, you are African’. So they have an identity crisis.
”We, the Africans, have to assure them that we are one people, ‘You don’t look like us, but you are our brothers’.” — Guardian Unlimited Â