Season of Migration to the North

by Tayeb Salih

  The man was silent for a while and I had a strong desire to tell him that I knew Mustafa Sa’eed, that circumstances had thrown him in my path and that he had recounted his life story to me one dark and torrid night; that he had spent his last days in an obscure village at the bend of the Nile, that he had been drowned, had perhaps committed suicide, and that he had made me of all people guardian of his two sons. I said nothing, however, and it was the retired Mamur who continued:

  ‘Mustafa Sa’eed covered his period of education in the Sudan at one bound — as if he were having a race with time. While we remained on at Gordon College, he was sent on a scholarship to Cairo and later to London. He was the first Sudanese to be sent on a scholarship abroad. He was the spoilt child of the English and we all envied him and expected he would achieve great things. We used to articulate English words as though they were Arabic and were unable to pronounce two consonants together without putting a vowel in between, whereas Mustafa Sa’eed would contort his mouth and thrust out his lips and the words would issue forth as though from the mouth of one whose mother tongue it was. This would fill us with annoyance and admiration at one and the same time. With a combination of admiration and spite we nicknamed him “the black Englishman". In our day the English language was the key to the future: no one had a chance without it. Gordon College was actually little more than an intermediate school where they used to give us just enough education for filling junior government posts. When I left, I worked first as a cashier in the district of Fasher and after strenuous efforts they allowed me to sit for the Administration Examination. Thirty years I spent as a sub-Mamur — imagine it. Just a mere two years before retirement I was promoted to Mamur. The English District Commissioner was a god who had a free hand over an area larger than the whole of the British Isles and lived in an enormous palace full of servants and guarded by troops. They used to behave like gods. They would employ us, the junior government officials who were natives of the country to bring in the taxes. The people would grumble and complain to the English Commissioner, and naturally it was the English Commissioner who was indulgent and showed mercy. And in this way they sowed hatred in the hearts of the people for us, their kinsmen, and love for the colonizers, the intruders. Mark these words of mine, my son. Has not the country become independent? Have we not become free men in our own country? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar. This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do. They showed favour to nonentities — and it was such people that occupied the highest positions in the days of the English. We were certain that Mustafa Sa’eed would make his mark. His father was from the Ababda, the tribe living between Egypt and the Sudan. It was they who helped Slatin Pasha escape when he was the prisoner of the Khalifa El-ta’aishi, after which they worked as guides for Kitchener’s army when he reconquered the Sudan. It is said that his mother was a slave from the south, from the tribes of Zandi or Baria — God knows. It was the nobodies who had the best jobs in the days of the English.’

  The retired Mamur was snoring away fast asleep when the train passed by the Sennar Dam, which the English had built in 1925, heading westwards to El-Obeid, on the single track stretching out across the desert like a rope bridge between two savage mountains, with a vast bottomless abyss between them. Poor Mustafa Sa’eed. He was supposed to make his mark in the world of Commissioners and Mamurs, yet he hadn’t even found himself a grave to rest his body in, in this land that stretches across a million square miles. I remember his saying that before passing sentence on him at the Old Bailey the judge had said, ‘Mr Sa’eed, despite your academic prowess you are a stupid man. In your spiritual make-up there is a dark spot, and thus it was that you squandered the noblest gift that God has bestowed upon people — the gift of love.’ I remembered too that when I emerged from Mustafa Sa’eed’s house that night the waning moon had risen to the height of a man on the eastern horizon and that I had said to myself that the moon had had her talons clipped. I don’t know why it looked to me as if the moon’s talons had been clipped.

  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 concernin
g 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?