ANC's pal, Bashir

Ah, yes, Sudan. I had some tenuous dealings with Sudanese during the late 1980's, working for Armscor, and during the early 1990's in another capacity. I always wondered: "Who are these strange people?" They seemed to specialize in raising the notion of 'taciturn' to a new level. You could not really engage in any kind of conversation with them. Eating with them was awkward, they were Muslims, so they just about ate only chicken. And mostly raw vegetables. And they didn't drink wine or beer, which put a bit of a damper on things. This was before internet, and when local news was so much more important than international news that we all were, politically, terribly naive. Probably wouldn't have mattered, anyway - I was never much of an ideologue. But, at the time, I had absolutely no idea of what was happening in Sudan. It was some place in Africa.