The Amulet

An eminent Sudanese biologist’s memoir of growing up in a remote pastoralist community, a world that has been swept away by history.

‘It was my early existence as a nomad, harsh and sweet by turns, that made me what I am,’ writes Hamid Dirar in The Amulet. ‘Under my lab overalls, my early life in nomad encampments is inscribed on every part of my body: a dog’s bite; a scar left by the slash of a cutlass; and scores of cuts and burns intended to cure the illnesses of childhood…’

The Amulet is the story of a boy’s pursuit of knowledge in a world of sheikhs and matriarchs, camel-raiders, poets and night-hunters. In this mesmerising account of a pastoralist society in mid-twentieth century Sudan, we are transported to Hamid Dirar’s ancestral homeland in the far north — Nubia, the land of rocks — then south to the seasonal settlements in the Butana, an endless grass plain close by the Ethiopian border. It’s a realm of violence and beauty, famine and plenitude, with its own laws, where the modern world is a distant speck on the horizon — until the time when a military coup in the capital, Khartoum, transforms the author’s life and the political future of Sudan.