“When Allah created the Sudan, Allah laughed!” is a joke I came across in Khartoum in the 1970s. It was about the punishing climatic conditions: The sun, characterised by searing heat — easily 45°C on a good day — plus the sand-bearing windy mirages you could actually see shimmering as they come towards you.
I doubt that joke can be applied to the tragedies that have beset that country through the past few decades, during which we have witnessed all manner of atrocities committed by rulers against their people, without the latter having a snowball’s chance in hell to extricate themselves from their tribulations.
