I am an 80-year-old Sudanese-American journalist who has lived in Washington, D.C., since 1980. I'm now finishing the first draft of a long memoir about my journey from a small Muslim village to the capital of American democracy. The death of Queen Elizabeth II took me back to the first khawajat (white people) I ever saw in my village, around 1950: They were a British administrator and his wife, during the last years of Britain's half-century colonial rule of Sudan.
Whereas the husband, a symbol of Western power, and the wife, a symbol of Western beauty, were looked at as kuffar (infidels) who came from a faraway place, they also gained respected for visiting the elementary school, the post office and the "hospital" (actually a clinic), all facilities that the British had built and maintained. That's not to ignore the Nile River shipping network, one of whose craft had brought the couple to our village.
