The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur

By Daoud Hari
224 pp. Random House, 2008 $23.00

Reviewed by LiDoña Wagner

The Translator is Daoud Hari’s story of individuals who risked everything to get the truth of Darfur out to the world. His principal character is the place, Darfur, a desert area of Sudan that is home to indigenous farming and herding peoples who are being systematically wiped out because they occupy oil-rich lands. There are spaces in Darfur where: “Mirages make birds sitting on distant dunes – birds no bigger than your fist – look like camels. Mirages make dry flatlands look like distant lakes … make the bones of a single human skeleton look like the buildings of a city far ahead.”

For Hari, his older brother Ahmed epitomizes the Zaghawa tribesmen of Darfur. As a teenager, the author planned to go and fight alongside a charismatic rebel leader in Chad. Ahmed found his younger brother and told him to use his brain, not a gun, to make life better. “Shooting people doesn’t make you a man, Daoud,” he said. “Doing the right thing for who you are makes you a man.” Hari returned to school where he learned English, a skill that would later afford him a means to assist his tribesmen.

After years of working abroad to support his family in Sudan, Hari returned home. He arrived as Ahmed was preparing their village to escape an anticipated attack by the Janjaweed. Moments before the assault villagers began walking to Chad. For the next three months, the author and six of his friends scouted ahead on camels to find water for their desperate tribesmen. The seven men brought food from Chad; helped people find one another and safe routes; and buried men, women, and children who could not finish the trip.

The flood of refugees pouring into Chad impressed upon Hari the magnitude of what was happening. He began serving as a translator, leading dangerous forays back into Darfur. While accompanying Paul Salopek from National Geographic, the two men and their driver were captured, imprisoned, and tortured. Salopek gives a journalist’s report of that ordeal in the March 2008 issue of National Geographic. In The Translator you will receivea more graphic and gripping picture through the storytelling voice of Daoud Hari.

This Zaghawa tribesman tells us of strange new “characters” coming into an ancient land of familial alliances: cell phones that save lives, cross-cultural friendships that survive under torture, and international journalism that serves as a vehicle of truth. All are related to Darfur, a surreal environment where, “All trails are erased with each wind … mountains are not to be trusted … the crunching sound under your camel’s hooves are usually human bones, hidden and revealed as the wind pleases.”

I highly recommend you read this book, even though it will break your heart. Daoud Hari’s story may even move you to help in stopping the Darfur genocide.