story 5: truth

The village of Nuri is opposite Karima. Click map to search ...
[Note how many neighbouring countries there are: Egypt, Libya, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea. For a brief account of the Sudan, click here, using the BACK button to return.]

In the early nineteen-seventies, I spent some time in the village of Nuri on the west bank of the Nile in the Northern Province of the Sudan. The province is huge, but consists mainly of immensities of desert with small numbers of nomadic groups travelling their traditional routes across the sand, and small sedentary communities next to the river. From the air you see, laid across the endless desert, a tiny gleaming ribbon which is the river Nile, flanked from time to time, on one bank or both, with a small rim of green, which is the vegetation of irrigable land, rarely as much as one kilometre wide. But people have made what is sometimes a quite good life, though a very precarious one, in this inhospitable environment.

I went one day to a market in the village. It was busy, though the atmosphere was relaxed. There were nomads, who had brought in sheep to sell, there were itinerant tinkers selling their hardware, and there were many other merchants.

A group of us, half a dozen from the neighbourhood in the village where I was staying, sat at a table at an open air café, to have a cup of coffee, and chat. After a while, a barber left the customers whom he had been shaving, and came up to our table. He was a somewhat imposing man, who carried his jellabiya (a long flowing white robe), and his `imma (a head-dress of fine white lawn), with style. We all wore the same dress, but he did cut a figure.

The barber began to orate. And his theme was religious. Soon, a small crowd gathered round. The barber began to speak of the Truth (al haq). I could hear, even with my limited Arabic, that he was orating in high style, and in the vein of the mystical Sufi tradition in Islam. Then I noticed, some distance away, a much thinner and somewhat younger man, dressed in tatty clothes, sitting on a low wall, and listening intently to what was said. His eyes were wide and fixed. "Where is the truth ?" intoned the orator. Some passers-by tapped their heads with a forefinger, as though to say that the barber was not right in the head. But the man on the wall was as intent as ever. Then the barber said, in a climax to his speech, and touching his breast with his hand : "Here, here is the Truth : it is in each one of us." At this point the man on the wall got up, and ran over to our group, and seized the barber (or did he just come very close ?), saying, with glaring eyes : "Where is the truth ? Can you touch it ? Can you show it to me ?" There was a silence ; there was no reply ; and then there was laughter from the spectators, a kind of relief. The barber went back to shaving his customers, and the younger man (the "village idiot", as he might have been called in other times and places) went back to his daily round of fetching and carrying.

I learned a little more about the two men later. A friend, and former student, born in the village, told me that when he went back there, from his life in international diplomacy, he always visited the barber, and always felt a bit uneasy under his razor. The barber had fought with the Allied Forces in North Africa during the Second World War, and had returned home shell-shocked. He was also reputed to grow and smoke considerable quantities of "bango" (marijuana). He was famous, a big strong man, for having gone through the crowd in his village, and planted a kiss on the forehead of the untouchable visiting leader of the large religious sect to which many villagers belonged. I wondered whether in more "advanced" societies these two men would each have been given clinical labels, and perhaps put into clinics to live, and why what appears as a certifiable disease in a modern city can appear as a pleasant and tolerable, perhaps a valuable, eccentricity in a simple rural community, and whether the small (and unresolved) drama which I had witnessed would ever have been able to occur in another place.

A simple-minded man, of low intelligence, sitting on a wall in the African desert, had heard talk of the truth. And he reflected: he wanted to know what it is, and whether we can put our finger on it. He put the question.

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