Blind Man's Buff in a Sandstorm? Literary education in the late condominium Sudan

Abstract

In the early 1950s, as it began to contemplate the decolonization of its African colonies, Britain judged it essential to isolate Black Africa from the alleged corrupting influence of the Middle East. Winston Churchill gives a fair idea as to the consistence of that corruption, based on his own experience at the Battle of Omdurman, where the severed head of the fallen hero of empire, General Charles Gordon, had been paraded on a spike. In Churchill's vivid account of Kitchener's reconquest of the Sudan, he declaims the "dreadful" curses of Mohammedism, which induces a fanatical frenzy in its followers "as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog" (Churchill 1899: 248-50). Somewhat paradoxically, Islam was believed also to bring about a "fearful fatalistic apathy": "Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live" (248-50). In short, the disease of Islam in Africa threatened "to paralyse the social development" of any newly independent nations and so undo all the good work British imperialism had invested in them. According to Churchill, "No stronger retrograde force exist[ed] in the world"; and if Islam once overwhelmed the Christian values transplanted in Africa, then, as Churchill said, "the civilization of modern Europe [itself] might fall" (248-50). The Sudan was the crucial 'cordon sanitaire' between Black Africa and the Middle East. For this reason it too was effectively divided, in an attempt to preserve the Southern Sudan from Islam and confine Arabism to the North. To a large degree it was the discipline of English literary studies that would provide the mechanism for maintaining this boundary.