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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