THE FAMINE TOUR

A convoy of Mercedes sedans thundered up to the U. S. Embassy gates here and Harry Belafonte’s USA for Africa entourage climbed out into the evening air.

Out on the streets, the faint stench of donkey dung hung in the air. Sudanese soldiers sipped thick coffee, spitting the grounds in the dirt, and lepers begged from the shadows of urine-rank doorways. No one is starving in Khartoum, the way they are in the far corners of Ethiopia and the Sudan, but there is still poverty and there is still hunger.

Behind the embassy walls, the U. S ambassador was giving a garden party honoring the dozen men and women of USA for Africa who had just completed their two-week fact-finding tour of famine-stricken East Africa. The delegation had come to determine how best to spend the $47 million USA for Africa has raised for famine relief, but it was leaving with many questions still unanswered and with new problems to worry about.

Dress was semi-formal, canapes and soft drinks were plentiful and the fetid odors from the street were blocked out by Arpege and after shave. The embassy garden was as lush as a Salem cigarette ad.

Harry and Julie Belafonte were lightly applauded and cocktail conversation commenced over the strains of “We Are the World.”

A member of the USA for Africa delegation who had spent the previous day on the barren edges of the Sahara Desert with the Belafontes--walking among dead and dying refugees from East Africa’s killing famine--slowly panned the embassy scene:

“Gee,” he said. “You’d never know this was here if you were standing out in the street, would ya?”

In a refugee camp outside El Geneina, Sudan, 10 miles from the Chad border and about 600 miles west of Khartoum, the dogs have lost their bark and the babies don’t cry.

The children who have survived infancy drink mud and wear rags or empty grain sacks, if they wear anything at all. The newborn and toddlers who hang on their leather-breasted mothers taste nothing but dust and they die without a whimper at the rate of several dozen a day.

“I came over the rise into that camp and I thought: ‘Oh, no. The government’s staged this whole thing for us. We’re not going to see anything,’ ” said USA for Africa president Ken Kragen during a harrowing overland four-wheel drive caravan ride back to the village of El Geneina (Arabic for “the garden”) from the Asernea refugee camp.

In fact, Sudanese army troops did line up the 35,000 sick and dying residents of the camp to greet Harry Belafonte and the USA for Africa delegation. When the caravan pulled in to Asernea, the last field trip on USA for Africa’s famine tour, the camp’s one makeshift road was lined on both sides for over a mile with Chadian and Sudanese nomads and displaced villagers. They were the lucky ones, fortunate enough to have found their way to this welfare oasis.

In Asernea several tons of United Nations and Islamic Relief grain is distributed each week. There is rudimentary medical care and thousands of thatched tepees furnished with third- and fourth-hand blankets, shipped in from some fantasy land in another hemisphere where disposability and planned obsolescence are a way of life.

The gap-teethed survivors who had made it as far as Asernea applauded Belafonte, Kragen and the others as they drove through the camp.

“My God, what a spectacle,” Kragen whispered in genuine awe, though it is probable that the soldiers forced the cryless babies and the stoic, milkless mothers to squat in the dust until the USA for Africa motorcade bumped into view.

After two weeks of pomp and circumstance, replete with luncheons and gifts and stuffy formal meetings with African generals and heads of state, there was no doubt in the minds of any of those USA for Africans who made it as far as Asernea that they were seeing famine . . . up close and all too personal.

“This wasn’t staged,” Kragen said. “This is the real thing.”

Thirty minutes before the USA for Africa entourage arrived by Cessna jet at Nyala, Sudan, the last stop before El Geneina, there was a food riot.

Nyala is where the railroad ends. The grain that finally trickles over 1,000 desert miles from Port Sudan to the Chad border camp of Asernea must be hauled by truck the last 100 miles. Sometimes the trucks are hijacked by starving mobs. The truck drivers escape with their lives if they are lucky.

When there is a food riot, with 2,000 desperate men and women storming the granaries with sticks and hoes and howls, the relief shipments don’t even get beyond Nyala.

By the time USA for Africa arrived in Nyala, soldiers had beaten back the mob with leather straps and rifle butts. The only traces of the food frenzy were a handful of women and children, carefully picking through the dust for spilled grains of wheat and sorghum.

The Sudanese government officials in Nyala greeted Belafonte at the airport with native dancers, a public address system shrieking the strains of “We Are the World” and clean-cut children bearing portraits of Michael Jackson. They did not let on for a second that a riot had just occurred over a few bags of grain.

“If I were to invite someone to my home for the first time I’d want to put my best foot forward too,” rationalized USA for Africa executive director Marty Rogol.

Nevertheless, he conceded, tidied-up refugee camps and an unmentioned food riot were consistent problems for the delegation. The Hollywood professionals whose industry is based upon illusion were not always certain that what they were seeing and smelling and hearing in East Africa was not illusory--created for their personal consumption by grateful governments that want the Western relief pipeline to keep flowing.

“If you are headed up by a black artist who’s revered in Africa the way Harry is, you’ve got to expect a certain amount of staging,” Rogol said.

Veteran journalists and relief agency volunteers contend that the USA for Africa sojourn to Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya and Sudan was doomed to be orchestrated from the outset because none of the governments involved wanted the Americans to see the extent of the devastation brought on by both drought and vicious civil wars.

“I’m afraid it’s something of a whitewash,” said an independent Nairobi correspondent who has spent a decade covering news in Africa and Arabia.

John Richardson, a UNICEF official who accompanied the group on its visit to the Chad border, said, “If Kragen and Rogol wanted to see what was really going on, they should have come here quietly and unannounced.”

Because both the Ethiopian and Sudanese governments had known for several weeks that they would host Belafonte (and, during the Ethiopian leg of the visit, singer Marlon Jackson), they packed the official schedule with well-rehearsed tribal choreography, arts and craft displays, brightly costumed ring-in-the-nose natives and reception after tedious reception.

In Kassala, where thousands of Ethiopian refugees from the war-torn rebel province of Eritrea stream over the border into the Sudan each week, Belafonte had to endure three dance troupes, a reception and a brunch with local dignitaries before he was allowed to visit the nearby Wad Sharifee refugee camp.

After an hour at the camp, he was whisked back to a government guest house for another lunch, a speech and a special presentation of a three-foot long silver-hilted sword. Even members of the press corps tagging along with the USA for Africans were each ceremoniously presented with hand-made ebony-gripped daggers.

In exchange, the Americans made gifts of “We Are the World” T-shirts and red-vinyl Frisbees to the Sudanese.

“You’ve got to expect that,” Kragen said, who was also presented with a hand-forged Sudanese sword.

Kragen promises there will be further, and less frivolous, USA for Africa expeditions.

“This is the first time for us and we have to get to know them and they have to get to know us,” he said. “You don’t rearrange the furniture the first time someone invites you to their house.”

But you don’t let them confine you in that house simply because they invited you for a visit either, noted Mohinder Dhillon, a Nairobi-based photographer, who for eight years was the court photographer to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.

“I think they didn’t probe hard enough,” he said. “I think they could have asked harder questions.”

Since Selassie’s overthrow by a Marxist dictatorship in 1974 and subsequent death in 1975, Dhillon has been an independent film producer and cameraman, creating documentaries for British and American television, including the PBS “Nova” science series.

During the tour, Dhillon signed on as a production crew member for a prime-time TV documentary on the trip. In the fall, Kragen hopes to sell the program to one of the U. S. commercial networks for use as a television season opener. Whatever licensing fees the networks might pay for the show will go directly to the USA for Africa Foundation, which has accumulated $47 million to date.

Of all those involved in this first USA for Africa venture, Dhillon, his fellow crew members and his boss--journalist/entrepreneur Mohammed (Mo) Amin--stand to be the only ones who immediately profit from it.

Kragen and Rogol have made a major point of disavowing any profit-taking from the USA for Africa efforts and condemning those who do. Amin’s fees are rationalized both because he is well-wired in a territory the USA for Africa representatives knew nothing about and because he has volunteered to act as the USA for Africa representative in East Africa for free, now that this initial trip is over.

“He really believes in it,” Rogol said.

Amin rose to prominence last October for producing the Ethiopian famine footage aired on NBC that initiated the current popularity of the Eastern African relief efforts. He won several awards for that dramatic segment, depicting corpses stacked like cordwood and dry-eyed mothers whose children wasted away in their arms.

One journalist on the tour said Amin’s camera crew earned $800 a day plus expenses, but Rogol said he was uncertain how much USA for Africa was paying. Amin also made all of the group’s travel and government arrangements and is passing any discounts he has received on to the USA for Africa Foundation.

The $1.1-million “fact-finding” trip broke down to about $618,000 spent for relief supplies, $293,000 for the three-day lease of a Flying Tigers Boeing 747 to transport those goods to Khartoum and Addis Ababa and the remaining $100,000 for the 12-person delegation’s travel, meals, communication, film production and miscellaneous expenses.

“We struck a pool deal with the networks (all three networks accompanied USA for Africa through Ethiopia) so that we get all of their unused footage,” Kragen said.

That will all be tossed in with the Amin footage that will be edited into the documentary. Each night, following a day of relief camp and reception shooting, network crews and USA for Africa officials usually gathered over beer, soft drinks and munchies in a room at the Addis Ababa or Khartoum Hilton Hotel to “watch the rushes,” according to Kragen.

The persistence of movie metaphor throughout the trip caused some grumbling among some of the accompanying journalists and relief workers. The gap between a Disney-esque vision of Africa and the harsh, primitive reality that Hollywood consistently fails to convey to America is still too wide and these critical voices warned that the fall season’s USA for Africa documentary could still come out as scripted and stilted as an MGM jungle adventure if post-production attention to reality is not exercised.

An Associated Press photographer assigned to the Sudan leg of the trip said that the filming of such stars as Charlton Heston, Cliff Robertson and, now, Belafonte in the sub-Saharan countries had brought such heavily covered media events to the level of “famine tourism.”

Though he hoped the final documentary would continue the stark drama that Amin’s original footage initiated last October, photojournalist Dhillon feared that the willingness of USA for Africa to be steered away from the very worst famine areas by government officials could damage the final product.

At the end of two weeks of filming the USA for Africa visit, Dhillon said filming he did recently on Egyptian locusts for “Nova” proved to be more interesting.

Harry Belafonte knit his brow and put a serious grin on his face as he went into his stand-up.

“Everywhere we’ve been on this journey, trucks have been the big problem,” he said to the camera. “That’s why it’s so great to see this one with this written on it.”

He slapped the door of a United Nations Land Rover like a used car salesman. The ABC camera zoomed in on the insignia that credited the British famine rock coalition, Band Aid, with contributing funds to buy the vehicle used by relief agency volunteers in the Ethiopian-Sudan border camp at Kassala.

“This was donated by Band Aid, our sister group in England. I would love it in a few weeks if we could see trucks that say ‘Donated by the people of the U.S. through USA for Africa,’ ” Belafonte said.

“No, no. Cut, cut,” hollered the ABC field producer. “Can we do that again, Harry?” Belafonte did take after take during the famine tour, mugging tirelessly for up to 15 hours a day and still finding time to schmooze with reporters, hobnob with Sudanese generals and cuddle up to Ethiopian orphans.

“If I only spoke your language, we’d have a hell of a conversation, wouldn’t we?” he confided to one snaggle-toothed waif in a greasy blue and white “Cyprus--Land of Aphrodite” T-shirt.

Whatever other show biz taint the USA for Africa juggernaut may have had, the 57-year-old calypso singer was its most eloquent saving grace.

“Harry speaks brilliantly and, as far as I can tell, has a genuine love for Africa,” said Nicholas van Praag, a field officer in Sudan for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. But his praise for the remainder of the USA for Africa group was more cautious--particularly in comparison to Bob Geldof’s Band Aid organization.

“Band Aid’s people are here actively looking for specific projects to fund right now,” van Praag said. “USA for Africa seems only interested in teasing with its money. They’re acting like a virgin who’s afraid of being violated.”

Representatives of UNHCR, UNICEF and the World Food Program all spent days trying to persuade Kragen and Rogol to donate $3 million immediately to underwrite food transportation costs in the Sudan, but they were refused.

“I’m not going to give anybody a blank check,” Rogol said.

Insisting that the money would be completely accountable, the relief agencies said the more realistic figure that Sudan needs to distribute food over its feeble rail and highway system in the next few weeks is closer to $20 million, not $3 million. They contend that they know better how to allocate limited funds than the fledgling USA for Africans.

“What USA for Africa seems to want to do is start its very own Marshall Plan,” said UNICEF’s Richardson.

While existing agencies such as the Red Cross and UNICEF may resent the institutional arrogance of upstarts like Band Aid and USA for Africa, they also applaud the public spotlight that they have brought to Africa.

“I’m glad that USA for Africa came,” said the World Food Program’s Allen Jones, “but I’d feel a lot better about them if they had actually given some of their millions to the people who need it.”

Ken Willis is a good ol’ Southern boy who likes his beer, especially in the dry Sudan where Islamic law prohibits possession of alcoholic beverages. “Every week or two, I send one of the boys down to the Ethiopian border to run across and pick up some Scotch,” Willis said between puffs on his Louisiana brier. He waited patiently for Belafonte’s media groupies to finish up their antics on a remote airstrip in the middle of the Sudanese desert.

ABC’s Karen Burns posed for pictures astride a small shepherd’s jackass, prompting Willis to make a few lascivious asides about the size of her donkey.

When Belafonte clambered into his own donkey cart amid cheers from the press corps, Willis muttered:

“That’s show business for you.”

Willis is operations manager for Arkel-Talab, an American administered cargo company that specializes in moving relief supplies over an expanse of desert half the size of the United States. Unlike the United States, the Sudan has only one main roadway, extending two-thirds of the way across the country. From that point on, camels and the undependable Sudanese national railroad are about the only overland transportation.

“Kosti is basically where the road ends,” he drawled when he finally lured Belafonte’s attention away from the camera crews. “Say, you know I’m a big fan of yours, Harry. I used to listen to you when we was both kids.” “Ho, boy! That was a long time ago,” Belafonte replied.

After a laugh and a handshake, Belafonte asked, “What is the biggest transportation problem here, Ken?”

Willis puffed thoughtfully on his pipe for a moment.

“Bad weather. Old roads. Slow trains. No communications. And it’s hot. Hell, it’s the Sudan, Harry,” he chuckled, holding his hands up in resignation.

“People do this all the time,” Willis said of the famine tour.

“They fly in here, get off the plane, take a few pictures, talk about the great things they’re going to do, get back on the plane and leave,” he explained with a shrug, with more empathy than contempt in his voice. “I never see ‘em again.”

Willis came to the western Sudan in 1976 for a nine-month assignment with Standard Oil of California. He stayed on for the money and because he developed a kind of affection for “Abdul and his goats,” he said. The current famine is catastrophic, but it is nothing new to Willis.

“In a good year, half the children die. In a drought year, maybe 90% die. But two weeks later, they’ll be making more babies.

“I’m sorry how it sounds, but that’s how she works out here. Some say its survival of the fittest. Some say it’s just nature’s way of flushing the commode.”

He refuses to apologize for his cynicism. Most Westerners who try to judge East Africa by American standards instead of “bush law” wind up disappointed or dead, he said.

Watching Belafonte and the television crews wandering through a roadside refugee camp, with hundreds of hands reaching out to the singer to touch him as he passed by, Willis observed:

“The local Sudanese who live here in town believe the refugees get so hungry, they turn into hyenas at night. Good thing Belafonte’s not out there walking among them all by himself. They’d eat him alive.”

In nine years, Willis has found the Sudanese to be wise and ignorant, cruel and generous, pathetic and noble, but he’s never been able to understand why they live and die with such blind resignation.

“They say it’s God’s will. It’s always God’s will,” he said.

“There’s only so much you can see in two weeks,” Rogol said in his room at the Khartoum Hilton, after the last of the side trips was over and the last of the sultans had been honored by Belafonte’s presence.

Just before boarding a jetliner back to the United States, the 40-year-old attorney had this assessment to make of the group’s maiden safari into the world’s poorest, harshest and most enigmatic continent:

“I never expected this one trip to be the end-all and be-all of our effort. It doesn’t mean that, in another month or two, myself or somebody else from USA for Africa won’t come back quietly and try to look at things differently.

“There was a marked improvement over the images we all saw on television last year. We were all emotionally prepared to see some real human tragedy . . . to have a life-changing experience.”

The match-stick children and thirsting mothers continue to die beneath the throbbing East African sun. The Asernea camp, with its malarial display of doom straight out of a biblical epic by Cecil B. DeMille, was proof enough for Rogol that death still stalks the Sahara.

But relief efforts now seem to be working and the children that USA for Africa was allowed to see are no longer dying like mayflies.

Curiously enough, the tour of the famine areas was still very much a life-changing experience for Rogol, even if it wasn’t quite what he expected.

“Africa is completely different from anything we know. I now have a new lens to look through . . . a new way to see things.

“People live on mountaintops in Ethiopia. There are no roads. If their crops fail, there’s no way to get help to them except with 25,000 helicopters. If a car breaks down in the Sudan, you can’t walk around the corner to a phone booth and call the garage. Getting anything done at all in Africa is a miracle.

“Africa is where we were 150 years ago. After being here, I’ll never again complain about a pothole. I’ll never again complain about the phone company. I’ll never again complain about New York City cab drivers.”

When the USA for Africa trip began June 10, some members of the entourage were still swapping Ethiopian jokes:

Question: How many Ethiopians can you get in a phone booth?

Answer: All of them.

Tasteless, yes. But even gallows humor has its place in taking the edge off of abject tragedy, they reasoned.

When the group returned to the United States, Ethiopian jokes were passe. They were replaced by a cryptic story of the crocodile and the snake. It means little to a Westerner who hasn’t been there, but the story never ceases to send Rogol, Belafonte, Kragen and the others who spent June in East Africa into peals of laughter:

Take me across the river on your back, said the snake.

Are you kidding? If I do that, you’ll bite me and I’ll die, replied the crocodile.

No, I won’t. I can’t swim. If I bit you, we’d both die, said the snake.

So the snake slithered on the crocodile’s back and they proceeded across the river. Halfway across, the snake bit the crocodile.

Why’d you do that? Now we’re both going to die, said the dying crocodile. Hey, that’s Africa, said the snake.

The USA for Africa delegation was not always certain that what they saw, smelled and heard in East Africa was not created for their personal consumption by grateful governments who want the Western relief to keep flowing.