Darfur, Minnesota, population 137, doesn’t have a newspaper or a café, but news still gets around. Ask at the bank, and they’ll show you the town’s hundred-year anniversary publication, which lists the history and members of every club, business, and family who’s been here since 1903. And if there’s important news for everyone in town, they just print it on the water bill. Still, before 2003, it’s doubtful that many people here knew that their town shared a name with a region in western Sudan. “It’s strange seeing our name on the news,” said Ione Elg, who, at eighty, has lived all her life in Darfur, about 45 miles west of Mankato. Her sentiment generally reflected that of some twenty other Darfuris who were sharing morning coffee recently at City Hall.
Since the café closed four years ago, this daily get-together has been taking place in the large room next to the mayor’s office; someone volunteers to start the coffee, others bring treats, and there’s a basket for donations to help cover costs. Some people drive five miles just to share coffee and news. The men and women sit at different tables, each caught up in their own conversations—a separation of the sexes being at least one commonality between the two Darfurs. Elg continued: “I was surprised I’d never heard about the other Darfur before.” There were more nods. It was a little strange to refer to a place the size of Texas as “the other Darfur,” but what else would you call it?
In the Twin Cities, where the main connection with Sudan is via the internet, the Genocide Intervention Network has raised thousands of dollars for peacekeeping efforts; last fall, that group and another nonprofit, Doctors Without Borders, each set up mock refugee camps in public parks. No such fundraisers or demonstrations were taking place in Darfur, where, as Elg pointed out, the weekly attendance at Bethlehem Lutheran is only thirty people, including three kids in Sunday school. Most residents are farmers or retired farmers. There was a drought on. They were not disconnected from news of other international conflicts—“We Support Our Troops” signs welcomed four local National Guard members, two from Darfur, recently returned from Iraq—but many people here were far more knowledgeable about the issues of their community (the new town septic tank to be installed, for example) and devoted to making it run better. Sitting in the city hall, eating homemade lemon cake, the Sudanese Darfur and its government-backed genocide felt far away indeed.
Darfur, Minnesota reportedly got its name for that reason: “We have to go da fur?” a Swede is said to have scoffed before boarding the train. Or perhaps a railroad worker complained, “What’re we stoppin’ dere fur?”
For those who weren’t born in Darfur, that was the general first impression. Bernie Mogler, one of the generally recognized keepers of oral history, arrived with her new husband in 1945; she recalled that if she’d had the money for a return ticket, she would have gone straight back to Connecticut. But Darfur has a way of getting inside you. The former town constable recently turned ninety, and there was a big celebration. Mogler, in her eighties, can walk nearly everywhere she needs to go. She’s never been back east.
In Sudan, Darfur means “land of the Fur,” the largest ethnic group in the region and one of three that has been systematically terrorized. Sitting by the grain elevator in the Minnesotan Darfur, it’s hard to imagine this village being attacked by rebels on horseback or by truckloads of men armed by the government. It feels a little twisted to try to picture people walking, exhausted and starving, to Comfrey, Butterfield, Mountain Lake, or fleeing to overburdened refugee camps in South Dakota or Iowa. Meanwhile, in Sudan, the continuing devastation is visible via Amnesty International’s “Eyes on Darfur” campaign, which allows internet users to watch over at-risk villages via satellite cameras. Look up “Darfur” on Google Earth and you can click on individual villages for updated body counts and photographs of a scorched-earth policy in action.
In a more peaceful time, it would be easy to imagine villagers in the overseas Darfur discussing topics similar to the ones bandied about over coffee here in City Hall: whether there would be enough water for crops, plans to check in on So-and-So that day, recipes, episodes of remember-when—the sort of casual, even idle conversation, in other words, that people are free to indulge in when no one is threatening their lives.
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