I wondered how she could stand it listening to him raving on day after day about fighting for a

I wondered how she could stand it, listening to him raving on day after day about fighting for a hundred years to create a "New Sudan" in that blinding emptiness But according to Lul, he and Emma got along famously. In fact, he was more interested in discussing Emma than the schools. "You know, Em-Maa" - he pronounced her name with a satisfied smack of his lips - "is just like one of us She walks everywhere without getting tired. She is bringing us so many things we need, like papers and chalks and school books. You people should know, our commander likes Em-Maa very much. Very much!" Underneath all the praise there was something leering in the schoolmaster's voice.When I learned, six months later, that Emma had actually married Riek Machar, the commander Lul had been talking about, the one who liked her "very much", I remembered that mingling of lust and envy and contempt in Lul's voice Naturally I knew of "Dr Riek".

A black Turuk, like Lul, with a PhD from Bradford University in England, he was the best-educated Nuer in the ranks of the SPLA Westerners found him unusually sophisticated and amiable. Lul was a former schoolmaster and an elder in the Presbyterian Church He was also a bore and a bully. He would recite SPLA slogans with noisy fervour, insisting that southerners would never settle for anything less than a new, secular government for the whole of Sudan, though less than a year later he was to be equally enthusiastic when Riek Machar, the Nasir-based leader of the Nuer, split from the SPLA and formed a new movement that wanted the south to secede and become independent.Emma was working with Lul to try to reopen Nasir's schools, which had been closed for six years because of the war. He was the sort of man his fellow Nuer used to call a black Turuk - a black man who wore clothes and could read and write and had adopted some of the ways of the Ottoman Turks and other foreigners who'd invaded Nuerland a century and a half earlier. Like most Nuer, he was black as a panther, tall and thin with a narrow head and a loping walk. We wanted to be here; we were paid good money to be here; and the Sudanese knew it.Emma's miniskirt seemed a refreshing departure from the usual pieties.

It suggested that she was more honest than the rest of us, that she wasn't afraid to admit that she was here because she wanted to be.Emma and I exchanged pleasantries, nothing more, and I didn't see her again for a long time. But I began to think about her for another reason, which had nothing to do with clothes. In Nasir, I had spent days interviewing the SPLA's "education coordinator", a man named Lul He had claimed to be a great friend of hers. The truth was that the average Western aid worker or journalist delighted in the buzz, the intensity of life in a war zone, the heightened sensations brought on by the presence of death and the determination to do good. In Nairobi - the headquarters of the humanitarian industry in East Africa - she had a reputation for wildness: adventures in the bush, nightlife in the city. She was an Englishwoman said to feel at home only with Africans.Now, in Nasir, I understood the undercurrent of disapproval that followed in her wake.