Far in the Waste Sudan: On Assignment in Africa

In 2000, with controversy raging over the presence in Sudan of Canada’s largest independent oil and gas producer, Ottawa decided to open a watching post in Khartoum. Nicholas Coghlan was recalled from his assignment in Columbia - another war zone - to set up and run the first diplomatic presence in the largest country in Africa. In diplomatic circles, you cry when you hear you’ve been posted to Sudan, says Coghlan. But you cry even more when you leave. Far in the Waste Sudan weaves together a personal and political account of Coghlan’s three-year posting. Oil rich and on the front-line of the divide between Africa and the Middle East and between the West and Islam, Sudan is one of Africa’s most inaccessible countries. Far in Waste Sudan is as an excellent introduction that takes the reader from Khartoum, former home to Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin-Laden, to the Wadi Halfa desert, where Canadian travellers played a key role to lift the seige of 1885 and rescue British General Charles Gordon, to the rebel-controlled swamps and jungle lowlands of Equatoria where the rebel People’s Liberation Army have held sway for twenty years.Coghlan explores the mountain ranges of Darfur and the forgotten national park of Dinder and races a fifty-year old steel sailing dinghy on the Blue Nile. With new conflicts smouldering in Darfur, Far in Waste Sudan also explores the moral and ethical dilemmas of delivering aid to a country at war with itself. Coghlan’s rare first-hand account of Sudan offers a unique perspective that leaves an indelible impression.