Deborah Scroggins - Emma’s War - Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

Emma talked her lecturers into letting her use the aerial photographs she planned to take as coursework for her art degree. The Oxford Times covered the pair’s departure. ‘We will fly through extremely varied landscape, including jungle, desert and ocean,’ Emma proudly told the reporter from the paper. She persuaded newspapers in Australia and India to write articles about their 30,000-mile flight. One of them took a marvellous picture of her and Hall in the cockpit. Hall is looking up from a map, while Emma simply looks ravishing in pearls and a colourful print dress.

The trip took her to India for the first time since her family had left in 1966. Hall remembers that it brought back memories of her father and his wild colonial exploits. When Emma and Hall stayed at the Tollygunge Club in Calcutta, the manager told them a story about how Julian had been on a plane flying to Calcutta when the plane got lost. ‘Seems Emma’s father was a bit drunk, and he went up to the cockpit, pushed the pilot away, and flew the plane back to Calcutta,’ Hall remembers the man telling them. Emma celebrated her twenty-first birthday in the foothills of the Himalayas, not far from where her father and grandfather had been stationed during the Raj. The trip settled in her mind the notion that she must have a life outside the bounds of everyday English experience. And it taught her useful things about maps and radios.

Hall and Emma were only friends, but Emma’s mother half hoped the trip might spark a deeper relationship. Hall was kindly and dependable. He was the sort of man who could afford to indulge Emma’s appetite for adventure and yet provide her with the security that Maggie herself had always longed for. But Emma didn’t want to make her forays into other cultures from the safe confines of the West. When they left England, Hall gave Emma a wad of cash to keep in case of emergency. Emma promptly spent all the money in Luxor on clothes. Hall liked to stay in expensive ‘international’ hotels such as the Hilton or the Meridian, where you could count on air-conditioning and clean sheets. Emma preferred to scour the back streets for humble guesthouses frequented by local people. Fortunately she had inherited her father’s gift for appreciating vastly different characters. She and Hall remained fond of each other long after the trip was over. But what she really longed for was a much stronger experience. Even the exciting but essentially Western lives that her friends like Sally and Willy envisaged for themselves in Africa were not what she had in mind.

She had always been attracted to African men, though she can hardly have laid eyes on many Africans in Yorkshire. Her attraction was frankly erotic. She found black men more beautiful than white men, even joking with her girlfriends that the penises of white men reminded her of ‘great slugs’. She loved the warmth of African laughter and the rhythms of African music. She often said that, with all their troubles, Africans enjoyed life more than Westerners. After she came back from her aeroplane journey in 1985, she started waitressing at a trendy Indonesian restaurant on the way to Oxford railway station. The restaurant was a hang-out for some of the university’s more swinging lecturers, particularly those who specialized in Asia and Africa. One night Emma overheard Barbara Harrell-Bond, the American director of the university’s new Refugee Studies Programme, at Queen Elizabeth House, talking with some others about how they needed student volunteers. Among those speaking most animatedly at the table was a tall, thin African man with long fingers. This was Ahmed Karadawi, the Sudanese co-founder of the Refugee Studies Programme and a penetrating critic of Western relief efforts. When Emma brought Karadawi his food, he rewarded her with a smile so broad, it seemed almost too big for his face. Grinning back at him, Emma interrupted Harrell-Bond to volunteer for the programme.

African refugees and famine were in the air that summer, not only in Britain but in Europe and America, too. Ethiopia and Sudan were in the grip of the great 1984-5 famine. In October 1984 Emma and the rest of Britain had watched the film that Michael Buerk brought back for the BBC nightly news from the Korem famine camp in northern Ethiopia. As Bob Geldof later wrote in his autobiography, Is That It?, Buerk’s film showed pictures of people ‘so shrunken by starvation that they looked like beings from another planet’. As the images appeared on the screen, Buerk spoke in tones of sombre outrage. ‘Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of a night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century. This place, say relief workers, is the closest place to hell on earth.’ Geldof had come home that evening anxious and depressed about the failure of his latest album. Like thousands of television viewers, he found that the broadcast from Ethiopia ‘put my worries in a ghastly new perspective’.

Geldof described the reaction Buerk’s misty images of starving Ethiopians huddled under ragged blankets aroused in him. ‘Right from the first few seconds it was clear that this was a tragedy which the world had somehow contrived not to notice until it reached a scale which constituted an international tragedy. What could I do? I could send some money. Of course I could send some money. But that did not seem enough. Did not the sheer scale of the thing call for something more? Buerk had used the word “biblical”. A famine of biblical proportions. There was something terrible about the idea that 2,000 years after Christ in a world of modern technology something like this could be allowed to happen as if the ability of mankind to influence and control the environment had not altered one jot. A horror like this could not happen today without our consent. We had allowed this to happen, and now we knew that it was happening, to allow it to continue would be tantamount to murder. I would send some money, I would send more money. But that was not enough. To expiate yourself truly of any complicity in this evil you had to give something of yourself. I was stood against the wall. I had to withdraw my consent.’

Geldof helped galvanize Britain, then the Western world, with his moral outrage over the Ethiopian famine. Like millions of young people, Emma bought the Band Aid record ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ that Geldof produced for the charity he founded to help feed the famine victims. Her brother remembers her sitting in front of the television in the summer of 1985, mesmerized by Geldof’s Live Aid concert. Emma herself had always been good at fund-raising. She didn’t mind asking people for money; in a backhanded way, she almost enjoyed it. As a child she had enthusiastically joined in various charitable campaigns sponsored by Blue Peter. She liked the feeling of working together with others, and she liked the way championing a worthy cause forced adults to take her seriously. Geldof touched the conscience of people all over the world - Band Aid and Live Aid ultimately raised more than £70 million, and some 1.5 billion viewers in 152 countries watched the Live Aid concert - but in Britain he struck an especially deep chord. His appeals to help faraway and less fortunate people awakened so many memories of Britain’s crusading past that to this day British journalists call Geldof, now a multimillionaire businessman, ‘Saint Bob’. His heartfelt pleas on behalf of the Ethiopians awakened in Emma, as in many others her age, a sense of possibilities, a feeling that idealism still had a place in the world even in the waning last years of the cold war, when the aged prophets of capitalism, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, seemed to have no larger vision for the future than of getting and spending.