I particularly enjoyed the following scene, in which the heroine, a Nigerian refugee, is deported back to Abuja accompanied by her friend, a women's magazine editor.

The military police were waiting for me in a small room, wearing uniforms and gold-framed sunglasses. They could not arrest me because Sarah was with me. She would not leave my side. I am a British journalist, she said. Anything you do to this woman, I will report it. The military police were uncertain, so they called their commander. The commander came, in a camouflage uniform and a red beret, with tribal scars on his cheeks. He looked at my deportation document, and he looked at me and Sarah and Charlie. He stood there for a long time, scratching his belly and nodding ...

The military police followed our taxi from the airport. I was very frightened but Sarah gripped my hand. I will not leave you she said. So long as Charlie and I are here, you are safe. The police waited outside our hotel.

If anyone out there is short of a few bob, I would pay good money to watch you try that "I am a British journalist" line in a similar setting.

Bloggers spent the past few weeks writing posts inspired by the differences between Ethiopia and the far-flung nations which many Ethiopians now call home.

Zewge A. Assefa, the writer behind Negere Ethiopia, was unnerved when he first moved to Norway as a student. At first, he wrote in First impression is not always the lasting one, everyone seemed so quiet and reserved. When he got up the nerve to talk to his fellow students, he had to overcome other cultural barriers:

I do not ... mean to underestimate the difficulty for me as an African and in particular as an Ethiopian to give a proper picture of the place I call home. Many people seem to have a thick background reinforced with terrible images of war, famine and overall poverty...

Personally, I do not feel rejected. Neither do I feel fully embraced. I still live with the situation where more often than not, people prefer to sit by people of their color type even when I am sitting alone.

Read the rest on GlobalVoices.

So here goes — five reasons why Africa’s largest country might just manage to reach January 2011 without a return to catastrophe and bloody civil war, despite the worst predictions of most pundits.

Oil
Often the cause of conflict, oil could end up helping to prevent it in Sudan. The country’s oil industry, as it currently stands, only works when north and south Sudan work together. The south has most of the known oil reserves while the north has all of the infrastructure — from pipelines to refineries to a sea port. Talk of a southern refinery and an alternative pipeline route to the sea via Kenya are currently “pie in the sky”, one diplomat told me.Both sides may choose to fight it out over contested border oilfields after the widely expected “yes” vote for southern independence, thereby disrupting oil flows and scaring off investors. But it would be much more profitable for all concerned to work out a revenue sharing scheme and live side by side as business partners. The south’s government gets up to 98 percent of its revenues from oil sales so would struggle to survive without some kind of deal.

Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.

At the finish, once the tear gas and protests leaflets had settled, just one victor emerged - in the propaganda stakes at least - the protesters from a loose alliance between south Sudan's dominant Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and mostly northern opposition parties.

The SPLM and opposition groups called Monday's protest to urge north Sudan's dominant National Congress Party (NCP) to push through a raft of reforms they see as essential to elections, now just months away in April.

The Khartoum authorities played their part perfectly, first by banning the rally, then by starting the day detaining two prominent SPLM leaders...

Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.

The African Union delegation plane touched down in El Fasher, North Darfur's capital, at 9.35 a.m. on Tuesday. We were on the bus heading back to the airstrip at 4.40 p.m.

In between, the members of the African Union's peace and security council visited the governor's walled-in compound, where ambassadors watched tribal dancing and a PowerPoint presentation (complete with CD-ROM handout).

The next stop was the heavily secured UNAMID peacekeeping headquarters. Next, a razor-wired police station, 200 metres outside a displacement camp, where around 40 residents had been waiting for two hours to talk to the delegates.

Forty-five minutes later, the 18-vehicle convoy of buses, 4×4s and armed escorts drove slowly through Abu Shouk camp. Then there was one final stop at the governor's to eat dinner and admire his collection of gazelle and exotic birds. The AU ambassadors and women in the party received souvenir mats...

Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.

That was the conclusion of some observers of a bluntly worded exchange of views between two leading lights from the north and the south at a symposium in Khartoum on Tuesday.

Sudan's Muslim north fought a two decade civil war with southerners, most of them Christians and followers of traditional beliefs. The 2005 peace deal that ended that conflict set up a north/south coalition government and promised a referendum on southern secession.

Sudan's foreign minister Deng Alor told journalists at the symposium most of his fellow southerners, embittered by decades of northern oppression and imposed Islamic values, “overwhelmingly” wanted independence. Only a miracle would change their minds, he said, going on to appeal for a “peaceful divorce” should the south choose to split...

Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.

A rough count shows at least 10 international and local initiatives searching for a solution to the region's festering conflict. Many of them are at least nominally coordinated by the United Nation and the African Union. But with so many parallel programmes in play, the opportunities for duplication, competition and confusion are legion.

Top of the bill on the international stage is the double act between the United Nations and the African Union. Their joint Darfur mediator -- Burkina Faso's low-profile former security minister Djibril Bassole - spends much of his time shuttling between capitals, holding closed-session discussions with rebels, regional powers, Darfuri intellectuals and civilian groups.

The most high-profile initiative is a project launched at the Arab League for peace talks between Sudan's government and rebels hosted in Qatar. Those talks, currently stalled, are hosted “in coordination” with Bassole but their have their own separate identity -- Qatar has made its own statements and has held its own meetings with rebels.

During one crowded fortnight in August, both Libya and the United States held separate meetings with different sets of rebel splinter groups, urging them to reunite ahead of talks, with mixed results...

Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.

The next, a three-way fight had exploded between riot police armed with crackling electric batons, women's rights protesters waving banners and posters, and Islamists fuelled with righteous indignation and pious chants.

You couldn't have asked for a better illustration of the opposing forces that have come piling down on Sudan's government since the start of the case - opposing forces that also compete for influence at the heart of the Khartoum regime.

Women's rights campaigners and other activists were the first to get involved after Sudan's public order police barged into a party in the capital in July and found Lubna and 12 other female guests wearing trousers...

Read the rest on Reuters' Africa blog.

Khartoum, March 9 (SUNA) - President of the Republic Field Marshal Omer Al-Bashir is to address at the Council of Ministers Thursday a huge women mass rally, which is organized by the Secretariat General of the Working Women Association in Sudan in rejection of the allegations of the so-called International Criminal Court and to affirm support to the leadership.

Definitely one for the diary.

Senior government figure: Yes.

Centuries-old skeletons found at UK's Sudan embassy

By Andrew Heavens

KHARTOUM, Jan 12 (Meskel Square) - Builders uncovered fragments of three, centuries-old skeletons buried deep in the grounds of Britain's embassy in Sudan, officials said on Monday.
The contractors discovered the small pieces of skull and other bones while digging in the central Khartoum compound on Sunday, embassy spokesman Piers Craven told Reuters.
Police called in to investigate found the remains were up to 300-years-old, meaning they pre-dated the foundation of Khartoum as a major settlement in the early nineteenth century, he said.
"It is something of archaeological interest rather than anything more recent or more sinister," said Craven adding officers had not been able to work out the gender of the bodies or their age when they died.
Historians say humans have lived for thousands of years at the site of Sudan's capital at the meeting of the Blue and White Niles.
But it was little more than a fishing village until the 1820s when a Turkish-Egyptian expedition set up an outpost on the spot.
Embassy staff passed on the bones to the Sudanese police who were making arrangements for a re-burial, Craven added.

The wildcards

1. The International Criminal Court
   This is the only thing people are talking and thinking about in Sudan right now. What will happen when, as widely expected, the global court turns Sudan's president into a wanted man?

   Expected: Any day now
   

2. President Obama
   Will he follow President Bush's lead and keep the "normalisation" talks going with Sudan? Or will he follow President Clinton's lead and start ordering missile strikes on pharmaceutical factories?

   Expected: 20/01/2009

3. The economy
   The global slump has slashed the price of oil - Sudan's main source of export revenues. What happens when Khartoum and Juba stop booming?

   Expected: Happening now

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement

With all the attention that Darfur has been getting over the past six years, most people have forgotten about the much longer and bloodier north-south civil war. Darfur's conflict has killed between 10,000 and 500,000 people, depending on who you believe. The north-south civil war killed at least 2 million people in its last 21-year stretch.

The north-south conflict came to an end in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. But here are some of the things that could test that deal to breaking point in the coming months and years.

1. The census
   A population count that took place last year, seen as a vital pre-requisite of elections promised under the peace deal. The south may reject it when its initial results finally get published in February. At best, the resulting wrangling will delay other parts of the peace deal.
2. The elections
   Everyone you speak to privately admits these can never happen by the deadline of July 2009, not least because the rainy season makes large parts of the south inaccessible around then. But no one will admit to it publicly. Southerners will greet any delay with suspicion and disappointment. The elections, when they come, will be hugely complicated, with their multiple votes and weird mix of proportional representation and first-past-the-post counting. If they go ahead, the current carve-up of parliamentary power between north and south is going to change with inevitably divisive results.
3. Abyei
   Fighting has flared in this disputed central oil town twice since May. Both times, the clashes were sparked by relatively minor incidents. It wouldn't take much to set it going again. And what will happen when the Hague's Permanent Court of Arbitration finally rules on the border? The north has already rejected the findings of another independent body.
4. Disarmament
   The country is still filled with young men with guns.
   
5. South Kordofan
   There has been a series of research groups, queuing up to describe the region as the "next Darfur". Here's what Foreign Policy had to say about it. And here's the Small Arms Survey [PDF].
6. The southern referendum
   The peace deal promised southern Sudan a referendum on secession in 2011. At best, all the problems listed above will give the country less time to prepare for it. A contested result would be a disaster. See what Alex de Waal has to say about it:

   With little progress towards making unity attractive, the fundamental question is whether the referendum on self-determination will take place and if so, how it will be managed. If the process or outcome are contested, few have any doubts that the result will be a violently-contested partition of the country. A new war of this kind would not only be a humanitarian disaster but would scar the political futures of both north and south Sudan, and drag the entire region into the conflict in one way or another.

Darfur

People are still fighting. No one is talking. Peacekeepers and aid workers are still facing regular attacks and harassment.

Problem neighbours

Uganda
Or, to be more accurate, Uganda's truly heinous Lords Resistance Army rebels, who keep on slaughtering south Sudanese villagers and abducting their children.

Chad
Which is supposed to be going through a friendly patch with Sudan at the moment. But the countries keep on accusing each other of harbouring each other's rebels. The relationship will come under enormous stress if Darfur's rebel Justice and Equality Movement - which has strong links with Chad - has another go at attacking Khartoum after the International Criminal Court makes its ruling. Which is where we started.

The challenge - to get this into a story by the end of the year.

And then there is the cartoon version, brought to you this time by UPI:

There was the continuing genocide of Christian African tribes in Darfur in Western Sudan. The United States, the European Union, the United Nations and the African Union all proved totally useless in even stemming the violence.

Just for the record, there are no Christian tribes in Darfur. Everyone is Muslim. Everyone is black. And everyone is African (through the fact of everyone being Sudanese and Sudan being in Africa).

Three ancient statues sit at a dig at el-Hassa, the site of a Meroitic town in Sudan in this undated photograph. Archaeologists said on Tuesday they had discovered three ancient statues in Sudan with inscriptions that could bring
them closer to deciphering one of Africa's oldest languages. René-Pierre Dissaux/Section Française de la Direction des Antiquités du Soudan

Sudan statue find gives clues to ancient language

KHARTOUM, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Archaeologists said on Tuesday they had discovered three ancient statues in Sudan with inscriptions that could bring them closer to deciphering one of Africa's oldest languages.

The stone rams, representing the god Amun, were carved during the Meroe empire, a period of kingly rule that lasted from about 300 BC to AD 450 and left hundreds of remains along the River Nile north of Khartoum.

Vincent Rondot, director of the dig carried out by the French Section of Sudan's Directorate of Antiquities, said each statue displayed an inscription written in Meroitic script, the oldest written language in sub-Saharan Africa.

"It is one of the last antique languages that we still don't understand ... we can read it. We have no problem pronouncing the letters. But we can't understand it, apart from a few long words and the names of people," he told reporters in Khartoum.