WITNESS: Hunting empire treasures in Sudan market

Andrew Heavens is a reporter and photographer who has worked with Reuters since 2005, first from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and now Khartoum, Sudan. His African career followed 10 years of reporting for newspapers in Britain and the United States. In the following story, he describes a visit to Sudan's huge and historic Omdurman Market.

By Andrew Heavens

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - The shelves of Mahjoub Mahmoud's market shop glint with piles of broken watches, coins and dented silver plates.

"See this here. It is very old. It is your king," he says, holding up a tarnished metal disc. It is actually not my king -- it is my grandfather's king -- Great Britain's King George VI, stamped on the front of a World War Two service medal and mine for an asking price of 100 Sudanese pounds ($50).

It is tempting, but the price is not brilliant and it is not quite what I am looking for.

What I am looking for is treasure: real historical, high-value treasure, hidden in the twisted alleyways and darkened corners of Sudan's sprawling Omdurman market.

People say you can find anything in Omdurman, if you have the time to look and the constitution to put up with hours of open-air shopping in temperatures topping 47 degrees centigrade (117 Fahrenheit).

"It is like a spider's web," said one friend who grew up in the capital Khartoum just half an hour's drive along the Nile. "There's a part that I know. But if I wander too far, even I get lost."

"You can find anything, even from the British time," says Moumar, an 'Amjad' minibus driver, referring to Britain's on-and-off 66-year control over the country. "You could find a pistol here, a sword there. But you have to look."

So I have started at Mahmoud's tiny shop -- one of a huddle of "folklore" junk stores that have built a business out of selling Sudanese souvenirs, mixed in with the flotsam and jetsam of British rule.

Omdurman -- once the military base of the 'Mahdi', the visionary Islamic leader who defeated Britain's Major-General Charles Gordon in 1885 -- is the only place to go if you are digging for muskets and broadswords and other relics.

Its folklore stores are some of Sudan's last repositories of empire memorabilia, a hidden treasure trove largely untapped by collectors.

"We sell most of our things to foreigners working here with the U.N., or business people looking for souvenirs to take home," says Mahmoud. "There are very few tourists."

An exception is Ed Dalziel, a stamp collector from Scotland visiting the market at the end of a camel-trek across the Sudanese desert.

In 20 minutes in another store across the passageway, he uncovered four empire-era stamps, overprinted with Arabic characters soon after independence, and a rare first-day cover.

"There aren't that many really interesting Sudanese stamps but these are some of them," he said. "The price I paid was roughly what they were worth. He knew what he was doing."