Tag: The Black Nile

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Gratified in Gotham

I’m very pleased that The Black Nile has been named one of the Village Voice’s Best Books of 2010, joining the likes of Patti Smith, Milan Kundera, Jennifer Egan, and The Anthology of Rap. This comes on the heels of a swell December 5 write-up by Joshua Hammer in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Visa officials permitting, I’ll be back in Sudan next month, covering the January 9 referendum for an obscure online journal.

Until then, Happy Holidays. (That’s The Black Nile‘s paperback cover image, by the way.)

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Sudan: A Legend Predicts the Fall

Mohammed Wardi, the legendary Sudanese crooner, has joined the pessimistic chorus predicting a weak and battered Sudan after next month’s southern secession vote.

In a recent interview with the Al Ahdath newspaper in Khartoum, translated by the Sudan Votes website, Wardi says “the current unity [of Sudan] is nothing but a lie and it is not attractive.”

Do you mean that we are living on borrowed time?

We do not even have borrowed time. I am really worried about what will come later. Oil and borders are not the only issues to worry about; there is also the future of Darfur, the East and the North. Eventually, Sudan will turn into dub-districts.

As I recounted in this 2007 article, Wardi is beloved in Sudan and across the Sahel region for incorporating diverse melodies and rhythms into his songs. He’s been imprisoned and exiled for his stands against Sudan’s various dictators, and he was by far the most prominent northern member of  Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. (A more evocative account of my meeting with Wardi — complete with a pair of caged fauns and a fast-flowing bottle of Chivas — can be found in Chapter Nine of The Black Nile.)

Continue reading “Sudan: A Legend Predicts the Fall”

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A Glowing Review in The Washington Post

Travel writer Tahir Shah has published a glowing review of The Black Nile in the Washington Post. It’s especially gratifying coming from an author who knows first-hand the joys, burrs, and dangers of off-the-grid travel and reporting. Here’s an excerpt:

Morrison’s experience as a journalist shines through, as does his use of humor, which frames subjects of utter horror. These include intertribal conflict, pestilence, and the dams and deforestation that have destroyed swaths of East Africa’s ancient habitat. In the southern Sudanese town of Juba, Schon cooked up his last plates of oily spaghetti and came clean about not wanting to go on, especially since “on” was into the “malarial tinderbox” of the Sudd swampland, where “the war wasn’t quite finished in Upper Nile state — antagonistic militias stewed in camps while their leaders grappled for political power.” After his childhood buddy leaves, Morrison continues alone, and, now that the author can turn his full attention to the landscape around him, the travelogue steps up a notch. What’s impressive is how well he describes without judging. The Africa he depicts is a place where tribal rivalry complements religious and political friction; where illness, disease and utter poverty shape the lives of the majority, who lack the safety nets that so often catch Westerners when we fall.

As the journey progresses, it becomes much less of a whimsical jaunt and much more of a hard-edged report. This is Morrison at his best, lean and hungry in wild wastelands of Africa’s Sahel. His description of the Sudanese capital is memorable : “A dense static of orange grit came screaming from the desert; it filled the sky and trapped Khartoum’s eight million souls in a suffocating and radiant silica heat.”

Click here to buy your copy of The Black Nile.

And check out Tahir Shah’s most recent new book, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams.

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Lonely Planet Gives ‘The Black Nile’ 4.5 Stars

Travel guide author Steve Waters, writing at the Lonely Planet website, has this to say:

The Black Nile offers a fascinating and harrowing look at a country that continually makes headlines for all the wrong reasons. Morrison does his best to explain the historical events, tribal intricacies, external pressures and internal tensions that haunt Sudan today. Ok, not every traveller can flash their press card and jump a UN chopper, but then they normally wouldn’t end up under the bed sheltering from a firefight between local militias either. Morrison’s trip through Sudan becomes a quest for understanding; an attempt to unearth the truth behind his experiences as he interviews rebel leaders and local headmen, academics and taxi drivers, archaeologists and tour guides, all the time cadging his way a little further downstream.

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The One-Eyed Hunter & the Albino Fishing Cat

The forests of Bangladesh are dwindling by the day, creating a furry refugee crisis among forest-dwelling animals who are forced into towns and villages in search of food.

That’s where Sitesh Ranjan Deb comes in.  The subject of my most recent piece for Nat Geo News Watch, Sitesh is a one man International Rescue Committee waging a lonely battle to save the animals of his native land. I think you’ll enjoy this tale of a gunman turned conservationist.

(Looking for news of The Black Nile? Check out this review by Issandr el Amrani in The National, and this exclusive excerpt from The Faster Times. )

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More Reviews!

* “A masterful narrative of investigative reportage, travel writing, and contemporary history.” – The Daily Beast


* The Black Nile “combines wit with deep reporting…Getting in and out of dangerous locations is clearly Morrison’s forte.” – BusinessWeek

* “Captures the sun-baked, hallucinatory aura that slow boat travel can induce…Excels in bringing the place, politics and history of this fragile region alive.” – The Boston Globe

* The Black Nile “avoids the evangelical zeal and naïve prescriptions other Africa books fall victim to . . . Morrison teeters dangerously close to gunfights, disease, and run-ins with the authorities while relying on former rebels, proto-entrepreneurs, and crooked bureaucrats to get him through.” – Outside

* “Adventure is only half the story in this marvelous book, and maybe the lesser half…A beautifully-written tale of an American on a journey to find out who else is out there, what they’re thinking, why they do what they do, and hey, check out that sunset with the cranes flying low across the horizon.” – Tom Robbins, the Village Voice

* “There’s enough grist in this excellent travelogue to craft a dozen killer Microkhan posts.” – Brendan Koerner, Microkhan.com

* “If you’re weary of cliched newsbites, misery memoirs and exoticised adventurism, and want more insight than disaster reporting or parched analyses can offer, this is a refreshing relief.” – Peter Verney, Sudan Update

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The Black Nile featured on Apple’s iPad

Starting today, The Black Nile will be featured as a Book of the Week on Apple’s iBookstore, available to users of the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. There are millions of these devices out there, though I’ve no idea how many people use them to buy and read books. I just saw my first iPad this weekend and I’ve got to say it looks really cool. It’s easy to see the allure of the iPad, Kindle, Nook, and other e-readers, but I think I’ll be sticking with dead trees for the time being. It’s hard to scribble in the margins of an electronic ink screen.

If, like me, you still prefer hard copies to hardware, you can order a physical edition of The Black Nile from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Powell’s, and your local independent bookstore.

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The Black Nile reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Please check out this great review by Hugh Pope in the weekend Wall Street Journal. Here’s the kicker:

Above all, Mr. Morrison’s peppery anecdotes, his refreshing honesty and his ability to show how Africans view their difficulties save “The Black Nile” from being simply a memoir of an author’s self-prescribed endurance test. Instead, the book gives us a compelling portrait of life along the Nile—from lonely fishing communities on Lake Victoria to the cacophonous collisions of Cairo. Mr. Morrison’s more discouraging encounters also quietly pay tribute to triumphs of the human spirit. Mr. Bryan, the author’s companion and verbal sparring partner for the first third of the account, later writes to him: “It’s good to be desperate once in a while. Gives you an appreciation of the looks on people’s faces when they’re desperate and you’re not.”

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Egypt’s Battle to Control the Nile Waters

My newest piece, on the struggle for control of the Nile. Here’s the lead:

I was standing inside a colonial-era circuit house in a sprawling, malarial city called Malakal in southern Sudan. I had come to see a man about a river, but the man, an Egyptian hydrologist, wasn’t talking.

“It is forbidden,” he said solemnly, “to speak of the Nile.”

I pointed towards the window. “But it’s right there,” I said. This was, after all, a measuring station of the Egyptian water ministry, one of several it maintained in Sudan and Uganda to track the volume of the world’s longest river.

The hydrologist didn’t need to look out the window. He knew where the Nile was–he’d devoted his life to its study. But there was nothing he could say to a stranger about something so important to his nation’s survival. I might have had better luck inquiring about Tehran’s nuclear program.

You can read the whole article here, and check out other great writing on the environment at the NatGeo News Watch blog.