Energy, wealth and peace to flow from Sudanese dam

New Straits Times (Siti Nurbaiyah Nadzmi)

THE 20,000-strong crowd of men in white robes, women in colourful wraps and children in Western clothes danced before the main platform on the Merowe desert in Sudan, in what looked like a massive rock concert under the baking sun.

Set against the foreboding backdrop of a warrant of arrest on their leader from the International Criminal Court (ICC), the people seemed more concerned with being set free from poverty.

Certainly, the desert dwellers -- farmers who had lived on and worked this land since the Pharaohs -- saw the US$2 billion (RM7 billion) Merowe Dam as a catalyst for change.

One of them, economics graduate Sarah Omer, 29, had returned to her hometown in Merowe after completing her studies in Khartoum to work with one of the engineering companies at the dam, Lahmeyer International.
Omer belongs to the Shaygia tribe. Her ancestors had once ruled northern Sudan and built pyramids along the Nile to mark their rule over Egypt for more than a century.

The "Black Pharaohs", as they were dubbed by Western archaeologists, were in no way inferior to the Egyptians when it came to intellect and technology, and had built more pyramids along the Nile than their neighbours.

Once a bustling kingdom, the area is today filled with mud-house villages.