Colonialism is a dark subject in our human history. While it may appear noble in its premises, a nation educating other nations who aren’t yet civilized in certain contexts, its hypocrisy and hidden motives made for a scarring impact on those colonized. Beneath the reformation project, lied the hunger for power and rule.
The British Empire, while not the only colonizing nation in history, was nonetheless the biggest empire ever – bigger than Rome or Persian Empire, ruling over half the world or more. Their prowess in expanding their empire so vastly came not through military power, like the predecessing empires relied upon, but through trade, bureaucracy, and effective governance. The colonized parts of the world were first approached by the British for trade, the prime example being India, and once their businesses established, they progressed their rule through capturing, rather subtly, the higher posts while having the lay natives work for them. Eventually, they became the rulers for they had all the official posts, most of them created by the British, even to the point that the Mughal Emperor couldn’t deny them either.
I hope I had read something concrete on this subject matter, like the nonfiction book ‘Orientalism’, or Foster’s ‘A Passage to India’; then I would’ve been able to write more articulately, and with confidence, what I know to be true yet deprived of explaining well.
However, certain nations saw even darker episodes of colonialism, African being one of the tragic examples. In African countries, the colonial project was but a direct and brutal transformation program where the blacks were not only enslaved but put through a humiliating program of ‘humanizing’ them, as if they were less human and more savage than the Englishmen.
At some point in this book, the main character, Mustafa Saeed, mentions how the reforms brought into their lands were not for noble reasons, which their colonizers now portray them as, but were rather tools for governing over the colonized more efficiently. The rail-tracks were used to transport weaponry, bureaucracy to keep them organized, English ‘to teach them to say ‘yes’ in their own language’, and so on.
The colonial era is a past now; Queen Elizabeth II is dead; the British monarchy, the last of its kind, just a symbol. The colonized regions have gained independence, but their dark history forever looms in their government, buildings, transportation, English language. Yet the Britisher did not have a good gain out of it either; for them too it is a bitter past which has come to haunt them ever more. Adam Curtis brilliantly captures this uncomfortable and confrontational reality in his documentary ‘The Trapped’.
But to come across a tale of colonial revenge was new for me. Salih’s book is a fierce account of a mysterious and encaptivating black man from Sudan, Mustafa Saeed, with a brilliant mind and the gift of seducing, who outshines everyone in London where he goes for higher studies. We meet Saeed, now living on the banks of Nile in a village, through the narrator of this novel who has just come back home from London, having studied English poetry. Upon arriving, the protagonist hears a lot about this stranger, and eventually gets his acquaintance. But sooner he realizes how intoxicating and poisonous knowing, or half-knowing, Saeed would be for him.
We hear the story of Saeed, mostly from his own narration, how he was a gifted and earnest student from childhood and how his mother sent him away to become whoever he wants to be at an early age. Having studied in a few other countries, he arrived in London and gained fantastical fame through his exceptionalism, charismatic looks, and being a very educated colonized man. He went on wanderlust and seduced, slept with, and murdered many beautiful women, who fell for him slavishly. Others committed suicide. Saeed’s dark history has now brought him to this village, and the burden of his voracious past moves to the shoulders of the protagonist.
It’s a very rich novel: fierce, provocative, layered, beautiful, political, untamed, challenging, and deserving of multiple readings – for reading Salih’s book again and again, the reader would tame this wild story a bit more every time. There’s more than I can ever write about this book. Brilliant!
Ratings: 5/5 Oct.7.22.