Season of Migration to the North (8 page)

In Khartoum
too the phantom of Mustafa Sa’eed appeared to me less than a month after my
conversation with the retired Mamur, like a genie who has been released from
his prison and will continue thereafter to whisper in men’s ears. To say what?
I don’t know. We were in the house of a young Sudanese who was lecturing at the
University and had been studying in England at the same time as I, and among
those present was an Englishman who worked in the Ministry of Finance. We got
on to the subject of mixed marriages and the conversation changed from being
general to discussing particular instances. Who were those who had married
European women? Who had married English women? Who was the first Sudanese to
marry an English woman? So-and-so? No. So-and-so? No. Suddenly — Mustafa Sa’eed.
The person who mentioned his name was the young lecturer at the University and
on his face was that very same expression of joy I had glimpsed on the retired Mamur’s
face. Under Khartoum’s star-studded sky in early winter the young man went on
to say ‘Mustafa Sa’eed was the first Sudanese to marry an Englishwoman, in fact
he was the first to marry a European of any kind. I don’t think you will have
heard of him, for he took himself off abroad long ago. He married in England
and took British nationality. Funny that no one remembers him, in spite of the
fact that he played such an important role in the plottings of the English in
the Sudan during the late thirties. He was one of their most faithful
supporters. The Foreign Office employed him on dubious missions to the Middle
East and he was one of the secretaries of the conference held in London in
1936. He’s now a millionaire living like a lord in the English countryside.’

Without realizing it I found myself saying out loud, ‘On his
death Mustafa Sa’eed left six acres, three cows, an ox, two donkeys, ten goats,
five sheep, thirty date palms, twenty-three acacia, sayal and harraz trees,
twenty-five lemons, and a like number of orange, trees, nine ardebs of wheat
and nine of maize, and a house made up of five rooms and a diwan, also a
further room of red brick, rectangular in shape, with green windows, and a roof
that was not flat as those of the rest of the rooms but triangular like the
back of an ox, and nine hundred and thirty—seven pounds, three piastres and
five milliemes in cash.’

In the instant it takes for a flash of lightning to come and
go I saw in the eyes of the young man sitting opposite me a patently live and
tangible feeling of terror. I saw it in the fixed look of his eyes, the tremor
of the eyelid, and the slackening of the lower jaw. If he had not been
frightened, why should he have asked me this question: Are you his son?’

He asked me this question though he too was unaware of why he
had uttered these words, knowing as he does full well who I am. Though not
fellow students, we had none the less been in England at the same time and had
met up on a number of occasions, more than once drinking beer together in the
pubs of Knightsbridge. So, in an instant outside the boundaries of time and
place, things appear to him too as unreal. Everything seems probable. He too
could be Mustafa Sa’eed’s son, his brother, or his cousin. The world in that
instant, as brief as the blinking of an eyelid, is made up of countless
probabilities, as though Adam and Eve had just fallen from Paradise.

All these probabilities settled down into a single state of
actuality when I laughed, and the world reverted to what it had been — persons
with known faces and known names and known jobs, under the star-studded sky of Khartoum
in early winter. He too laughed and said, ‘How crazy of me! Of course you’re
not Mustafa Sa’eed’s son or even a relative of his - perhaps you’d never even
heard of him in your life before. I forgot that you poets have your flights of
fancy’

Somewhat bitterly I thought that, whether I liked it or not,
I was assumed by people to be a poet because I had spent three years delving
into the life of an obscure English poet and had returned to teach pre-Islamic
literature in secondary schools before being promoted to an Inspector of
Primary Education.

Here the Englishman intervened to say that he didn’t know the
truth of what was said concerning the role Mustafa Sa’eed had played in the
English political plottings in the Sudan; what he did know was that Mustafa Sa’eed
was not a reliable economist. ‘I read some of the things he wrote about what he
called “the economics of colonization". The overriding characteristic of
his writings was that his statistics were not to be trusted. He belonged to the
Fabian school of economists who hid behind a screen of generalities so as to
escape facing up to facts supported by figures. Justice, Equality; and
Socialism — mere words. The economist isn’t a writer like Charles Dickens or a
political reformer like Roosevelt — he’s an instrument, a machine that has no
value without facts, figures, and statistics; the most he can do is to define
the relationship between one fact and another, between one figure and another.
As for making figures say one thing rather than another, that is the concern of
rulers and politicians. The world is in no need of more politicians. No, this
Mustafa Sa’eed of yours was not an economist to be trusted.’

I asked him if he had ever met Mustafa Sa’eed.

‘No, I never did. He left Oxford a good while before me, but
I heard bits and pieces about him from here and there. It seems he was a great
one for the women. He built quite a legend of a sort round himself — the
handsome black man courted in Bohemian circles. It seems he was a show-piece
exhibited by members of the aristocracy who in the twenties and early thirties
were affecting liberalism. It is said he was a friend of Lord-this and
Lord-that. He was also one of the darlings of the English left. That was bad
luck for him, because it is said he was intelligent. There’s nothing in the
whole world worse than leftist economists. Even his academic post — I don’t
know exactly what it was — I had the impression he got for reasons of this
kind. It was as though they wanted to say: Look how tolerant and liberal we
are! This African is just like one of us! He has married a daughter of ours and
works with us on an equal footing! If you only knew, this sort of European is
no less evil than the madmen who believe in the supremacy of the white man in South
Africa and in the southern states of America. The same exaggerated emotional
energy bears either to the extreme right or to the extreme left. If only he had
stuck to academic studies he’d have found real friends of all nationalities,
and you’d have heard of him here. He would certainly have returned and
benefited with his  knowledge this country in which superstitions hold sway;
And here you are now believing in superstitions of a new sort: the superstition
of industrialization, the superstition of nationalization, the superstition of
Arab unity; the superstition of African unity. Like children you believe that
in the bowels of the earth lies a treasure you’ll attain by some miracle, and
that you’ll solve all your difficulties and set up a Garden of Paradise. Fantasies.
Waking dreams. Through facts, figures, and statistics you can accept your
reality; live together with it, and attempt to bring about changes within the
limits of your potentialities. It was within the capacity of a man like Mustafa
Sa’eed to play a not inconsiderable role in furthering this if he had not been
transformed into a buffoon at the hands of a small group of idiotic
Englishmen.’

While Mansour set out to refute Richard’s views, I gave
myself up to my thoughts. What was the use of arguing? This man — Richard — was
also fanatical. Everyone’s fanatical in one way or another. Perhaps we do
believe in the superstitions he mentioned, yet he believes in a new, a
contemporary superstition — the superstition of statistics. So long as we
believe in a god, let it be a god that is omnipotent. But of what use are
statistics? The white man, merely because he has ruled us for a period of our
history; will for a long time continue to have for us that feeling of contempt
the strong have for the weak. Mustafa Sa’eed said to them, ‘I have come to you
as a conqueror.’ A melodramatic phrase certainly; But their own coming too was
not a tragedy as we imagine, nor yet a blessing as they imagine. It was a
melodramatic act which with the passage of time will change into a mighty myth.
I heard Mansour say to Richard, ‘You transmitted to us the disease of your
capitalist economy. What did you give us except for a handful of capitalist
companies that drew off our blood — and still do?’ Richard said to him, ‘All
this shows that you cannot manage to live without us. You used to complain
about colonialism and when we left you created the legend of neo-colonialism.
It seems that our presence, in an open or undercover form, is as indispensable
to you as air and water.’ They were not angry: they said such things to each
other as they laughed, a stone’s throw from the Equator, with a bottomless historical
chasm separating the two of them. 

But
I would hope you will not entertain the idea
, dear sirs, that Mustafa Sa’eed
had become an obsession that was ever with me in my comings and goings.
Sometimes months would pass without his crossing my mind. In any case, he had
died, by drowning or by suicide — God alone knows. Thousands of people die
every day. Were we to pause and consider why each one of them died, and how —
what would happen to us, the living? The world goes on whether we choose for it
to do so or in defiance of us. And I, like millions of mankind, walk and move,
generally by force of habit, in a long caravan that ascends and descends,
encamps, and then proceeds on its way. Life in this caravan is not altogether
bad. You no doubt are aware of this. The going may be hard by day, the
wilderness sweeping out before us like shoreless seas; we pour with sweat, our
throats are patched with thirst, and we reach the frontier beyond which we
think we cannot go. Then the sun sets, the air grows cool, and millions of
stars twinkle in the sky. We eat and drink and the singer of the caravan breaks
into song. Some of us pray in a group behind the Sheikh, others form ourselves
into circles to dance and sing and clap. Above us the sky is warm and compassionate.
Sometimes we travel by night for as long as we have a mind to, and when the
white thread is distinguished from the black we say ‘When dawn breaks the travelers
are thankful that they have journeyed by night.’ If occasionally we are
deceived by a mirage, and if our heads, feverish from the action of heat and
thirst, sometimes bubble with ideas devoid of any basis of validity no harm is
done. The spectres of night dissolve with the dawn, the fever of day is cooled
by the night breeze. Is there any alternative?

Thus I used to spend two months a year in that small village
at the bend of the Nile where the river, after flowing from south to north,
suddenly turns almost at right angles and flows from west to east. It is wide
and deep here and in the middle of the water are little islands of green over
which hover white birds. On both banks are thick plantations of date palms,
with water-wheels turning, and from time to time a water pump. The men are bare-chested;
wearing long under-trousers, they cut or sow and when the steamer passes by
them like a castle floating in the middle of the Nile, they stand up straight
and turn to it for a while and then go back to what they were doing. It passes
this place at midday once a week, and there is still the vestige of the
reflected shadows of the date palms on the water disturbed by the waves set in
motion by the steamer’s engines. A raucous whistle blares out, which will no
doubt be heard by my people as they sit drinking their midday coffee at home. From afar the stopping place comes into view: a white platform with a line of
sycamore trees. On both banks there is activity: people on donkeys and others
on foot, while out from the bank opposite the landing stage little boats and
sailing ships set forth. The steamer turns round itself so the engines won’t be
working against the current. A fairly large gathering of men and women is there
to meet it. That is my father, those my uncles and my cousins; they have tied
their donkeys to the sycamore trees. No fog separates them from me this time,
for I am coming from Khartoum only after an absence of no more than seven
months. I see them with a matter-of-fact eye: their galabias clean but unironed,
their turbans whiter than their galabias, their moustaches ranging between long
and short, between black and white; some of them have beards, and those who
have not grown beards are unshaven. Among their donkeys is a tall black one I
have not seen before. They regard the steamer without interest as it casts
anchor and the people crowd round where the passengers disembark. They are
waiting for me outside and do not hasten forward to meet me. They shake hands
hurriedly with me and my wife but smother the child with kisses, taking it in
turns to carry her, while the donkeys bear us off to the village. This is how
it has been with me ever since I was a student at school, uninterrupted except
for that long stay abroad I have already told you about. On the way to the
village I ask them about the black donkey and my father says, ‘A bedouin fellow
cheated your uncle. He took from him the white donkey you know and five pounds
as well.’ I didn’t know which of my uncles had been cheated by the bedouin till
I heard the voice of my uncle Abdul Karim say; ‘I swear I’ll divorce if she
isn’t the most beautiful donkey in the whole place. She’s more a thoroughbred
mare than a donkey. If I wanted I could find somebody who’d pay me thirty
pounds for her.’ My uncle Abdurrahman laughs and says, ‘If she’s a mare, she’s
a barren one. There’s no use at all in a donkey that doesn’t foal.’ I then
asked about this year’s date crop, though I knew the answer in advance. ‘No use
at all.’ They say it in one voice and every year the answer’s the same, and I
realize that the situation isn’t as they say. We pass by a red brick building
on the Nile bank, half finished, and when I ask them about it my uncle Abdul Mannan
says, ‘A hospital. They’ve been at it for a whole year and can’t finish it.
It’s a hopeless government.’ I tell him that when I was here only seven months
ago they hadn’t even started building it, but this has no effect on my uncle
Abdul Mannan, who says, ‘All they’re any good at is coming to us every two or
three years with their hordes of people, their lorries and their posters: Long
live so—and—so, down with so—and—so, We were spared all this hullabaloo in the
days of the Eng1ish.’ In fact a group of people in an old lorry passes us
shouting, ‘Long live the National Democratic Socialist Party’ Are these the
people who are called peasants in books? Had I told my grandfather that
revolutions are made in his name, that governments are set up and brought down
for his sake, he would have laughed. The idea appears actually incongruous, in
the same way as the life and death of Mustafa Sa’eed in such a place seems incredible.
Mustafa Sa’eed used regularly to attend prayers in the mosque. Why did he
exaggerate in the way he acted out that comic role? Had he come to this faraway
village seeking peace of mind? Perhaps the answer lay in that rectangular room
with the green windows. What do I expect? Do I expect to find him seated on a
chair alone in the darkness? Or do I expect to find him strung up by the neck
on a rope dangling from the ceiling? And the letter he has left me in an
envelope sealed with red wax, when had he written it?