Chapter 29\ Helping Sudan to drive on the right

One of the surprises of my first visit to Sudan was finding out that they drove on the left-hand side of the road. I had experienced this when I visited Cyprus in 1959 with the International College Boy Scouts troop. But being in the midst of a left side driving market when my task was to consolidate and streamline Shell’s advertising activities across Lebanon, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Oman, of whom all were right-hand driving markets, did not seem to work well.

The challenge of switching driving sides remained dormant and exclusive to the government rather than private companies. Either way, the Sudanese government had more pressing issues on its plate. However, in mid-1972, the Ministries of Interior, Road Works and the Sudanese Police appointed a task force to prepare for the switch. Delegations were sent to several Commonwealth countries that had completed the switch to learn from their experiences. Ferdie Farwaji picked up the news of this development during one of his routine visits to Shell Sudan, so he extended his stay and launched a lobbying effort to bring Shell on board the task force as he saw a golden PR opportunity that he did not want any of the other competitors to claim.

On his return to Lebanon, he instantly put his global contacts to work rushing us examples of all the educational material that had been used in those countries that had made the switch. The perfectionist regional advertising coordinator did not restrict his search to the countries that had recently switched, like Iceland (1968), Finland (1967) and British Honduras (1961). He even contacted the Shell offices in Taiwan, where the switch had happened as far back as 1946, and Canada, which aligned with the non-Commonwealth world in 1947.

The material that started to arrive at Farwaji’s desk helped to get us started. However, we soon realized that the Sudanese people had their own peculiarities, and we were encouraged by Abdel Rahman Swar El Dahab to resort to originating rather than adapting. My visits to Khartoum revealed that the government was actively developing a comprehensive educational campaign. As Shell’s objectives were to capitalize on the occasion to create maximum goodwill with the government and the driving public, we rushed a lot of the received examples to them since they could make better use of them. We concentrated on developing a lot of communication items that we knew the government would not invest in or its freelance designers would not be capable of producing. Our efforts were focused on designing and producing items with such a high level of quality that they would rub off positively on the image of Shell, while highlighting the public benefits of the switch in traffic direction and enhancing the communication and retention value of the campaign. We composed many jingles, which we had written by a Sudanese poet who had taken political asylum in Lebanon, and whom we were introduced to at the Sudanese Cultural Club behind the American University Hospital in Beirut. We did the recording in Khartoum using a popular Sudanese singer. While we supplied these to the Ministry of Information to guarantee their broadcast, pro bono, on all radio stations in the country, we produced thousands of cassettes to be given away to motorists out of the Shell stations. We hired a cartoon illustrator and commissioned him to develop a typical slow-to-understand Sudanese driver. We made him the hero of a long series of drawings, each depicting a funny – but dangerous – situation, which Al Aam Hassanein gets into because of failing to switch to the righthand lane. We negotiated with Al Raii Al Aamnewspaper to run these instead of its own daily cartoon on the last page as a contribution from the newspaper’s publisher to the national initiative that was underway. We also produced these drawings on the billboards of the Shell stations as the date of the switch was approaching.

Finally, at midnight of 17 August 1973, all the vehicles on the roads of Sudan changed from the left lane to the right one, with all the media hype and formal celebrations that usually accompany such a major event. The Sudanese president and all senior government officials and military top brass were there.

Jack Von Buren and his overseas guest, Ferdie Farwaji, were treated as royalty. Next to them on the VIP stand were my close friends Hassan Issa and Abdel Rahman Swar El Dahab, who had arranged to have me seated next to them. As the president concluded his speech and the fireworks lit up the skies of Khartoum, I floated into a trance of sorrow for allowing my responsibilities to overtake my personal feelings of staying in Lebanon next to my wife and first-born on the night of our second wedding anniversary.

It was a sleepless night, but it made all of us so proud as we met for breakfast on the terrace of the Palace Hotel the next morning. To my surprise, the towering Nubian waiters did not come for our drink and food orders as usual. Instead, they first came with large jugs of guava and mango juice as well as thermoses of coffee and tea, which several of them began serving simultaneously and in what seemed to be a ceremonial way. Then, a Sudanese breakfast of kisra, aassida, medeeda, foul moudammas and fried eggs with beans. I looked around to see even Jack and Ferdie ripping the loaves of kisra to small pieces, shaping them to form spoons for digging into the various dishes. I followed suit using the guava juice, which I love, to help some of the strange-tasting food sink into my stomach. Jokes continued being exchanged with a seeming focus on the reaction of visitors to some of the Sudanese dishes, like the Ras El Nifa (lamb head).

Then the conversation suddenly stopped as the singer that we had used to record the jingles appeared, surrounded by his band with an oud and different types of what looked to be bagpipes and flutes singing “Happy Birthday to You” in its Arabic version. The Arabic words worked for both anniversary and birthday. The singer and his band were followed by the chubbiest of the waiters, who was carrying a large tray that had a cake and three lit candles. He placed it in front of me and encouraged by the cheering of my client, I blew out the candles and cut the cake. This was my second surprise from the wonderful people at the Shell Company of Sudan, who realized the sacrifice I had made by personally joining them to see our project through to the finish line on my wedding anniversary. I appreciated that they made it up to me, in their own sweet way.

In the same way that Abdel Rahman Swar El Dahab walked out of my wedding ceremony the previous year and vanished into the night, my involvement with the Shell advertising account ended abruptly when the Lebanese Civil War began in 1975. Shell Lebanon was purchased by its employees and the name was changed to Coral. Ferdie Farwaji left the country, and his job was terminated. In Sudan, the company was nationalized by the government, while in the UAE and Oman, national companies were established and took over the entire Shell retail network.

Sadly, I lost contact with this extended family since I kept changing my operational base during the 17 years of unrest in my home country. However, I resumed contact with the Shell people in Dubai, namely Johnny Theodory who remains a close family friend, and Sami Abdel Massih, who had moved out of Lebanon and settled in the UAE. I also kept in touch with Omar Assi of Shell Markets Dubai until he passed away in 2004.