by Paul Theroux
Dessert was served and there were more pronouncements of this sort, gesturing south at the big hopeless heart of the continent.
A man with a Slavic accent claimed that he had met me many years ago. He became very friendly, though he could not remember where or when we had met – Uganda perhaps, he said, in the 1960s. At his matiest he confided in me, saying, ‘Colonialism just slowed down a process that was inevitable. These countries are like the Africa of hundreds of years ago.’
This was a crudely coded way of saying Africans were reverting to savagery. But in another respect what he was saying was true. After a spell of being familiar and promising, Africa had slipped into a stereotype of itself: starving people in a blighted land governed by tyrants, rumors of unspeakable atrocities, despair and darkness.
Not a darkness, in fact, but it was all a blankness so blank and so distant you could ascribe almost anything to it – theft, anarchy, cannibalism, rebellion, massacre, starvation, violence, disease, division. No one could dispute what you said; in fact, the literature that existed, the news, the documentation, seemed to support the notion that it was all a savage jungle. To these party guests Africa was the blank space that it had been in the nineteenth century, the sort of white space on a map that Marlow mentions at the beginning of Heart of Darkness. For Marlow, only the blank spaces on the map hold any attraction, and it was Africa, ‘the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after.’ Young Marlow exactly resembles young Conrad (little Jozef Korzeniowski) in this respect, in his love for ‘exciting spaces of white paper.’
I was not dismayed by the apparent ignorance in what these people said. Their pessimism made Africa seem contradictory, unknown, worth visiting. They were saying what everyone said all the time: Ain’t Africa awful! But really they were proving that the features in the African map had dimmed and faded so utterly that it had gone blank. Marlow goes on to say that about the time he set off for the Congo Africa ‘had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.’
Blind whiteness and crepuscular darkness amount to pretty much the same thing: terra incognita. There was a sort of poetic logic, too. In Moby Dick whiteness stands for wickedness. So the image I carried with me on my trip was of a burned-out wilderness, empty of significant life, of no promise, a land of despair, full of predators, that I was tumbling down the side of a dark star.
I was not dismayed. The traveler’s conceit is that he is heading into the unknown. The best travel is a leap in the dark. If the destination were familiar and friendly what would be the point in going there?
Still in Lower Egypt, in the opposite Arabesque corner of Africa from Cape Town, I had all sorts of chance encounters with Black Africa, the tantalizing suggestions of the bewitchment of the larger continent, the African faces that are sometimes identical to African masks.
Traipsing between my hotel in the shadow of the Sphinx and the Sudanese Embassy, in the middle of Cairo; the museum, the coffee shops, the university where I was buying books and checking facts; the party in El Maadi, the literary gatherings – I encountered the tall slender Sudanese, the mute watchfulness of Nubians, the big beautiful animals – lions, elephants, cheetahs – carved in bold relief on coffins and bedsteads; sometimes it was drumming, a syncopation in the night air, or the aroma of Zanzibari cloves, or Kenyan coffee, or a splintered tea-chest in a rubbish heap stenciled Tea – Uganda. Ethiopians and West Africans hawked tourist carvings in the markets of Cairo, and as the Haj was soon to start, and Cairo was a gateway to Jeddah and the holy places of Saudi Arabia, I got used to seeing the sneering small-boned people of Djibouti and Somalia, robed Muslims from Mali and Chad and Niger, Nigerian Hausas, Fang people and Dogons and Malian mullahs from Timbuktu, all robed in white, for their pilgrimage. Representations of the whole of Africa gathered here, as though this was the polyglot capital of a vast black empire and I was seeing examples of every animal and every sort of food and every human face.
What reassured me was the appropriateness of this African imagery in my Egyptian captivity, my prologue waiting for a Sudanese visa, for in that self-conscious mental narrative that serves a writer as a sort of memory gimmick, seeing these features and these faces was just right as an introduction, as grace notes and little pips that would be repeated themes, struck louder as my trip progressed, went deeper, grew denser, got blacker.
Needing to boost my morale with a sense of accomplishment, and to make use of my time in Cairo – Umm al Dunya, Mother of the World – I decided to apply for some other visas. I went to the Uganda Embassy, still with Guda at the wheel, utterly lost in the district of Dokki. ‘I have never taken an American to this embassy!’
But the Ugandan was friendly, Stephen Mushana, a youngish round-faced man in the dusty Second Secretary’s office in Midan El Messaha. He was fluent in Arabic from five years in Cairo. His home village was in a deep valley in craggy southwest Uganda. He was a Mukiga, a member of the Bakiga tribe, whose customs have always fascinated me, their frenzied dances, their ingenious terrace farming, their Urine Ceremony – a promise of polygamy performed by the groom and his brothers that assures that a widow will be guaranteed a husband, one of those surviving brothers.
‘My brother died,’ the Ugandan consul said. ‘But I didn’t have to marry his wife.’ He paused as though wondering how much more information to give me. ‘Well, she died a little while later.’
‘Sorry to hear it.’
‘AIDS is very bad in my country.’
‘It didn’t exist when I lived there.’
‘Maybe it existed but people didn’t know it.’
‘I left there thirty-six years ago.’
‘I was two years old!’
I got this all the time. The average life expectancy in Africa was so short that many diplomats were in their thirties, and some in their twenties, and they had no memory of their country as a big placid republic but only as a nest of problems. I had never seen these places at war; some of them grew up on war – there had been fighting in Uganda from the 1970s onward.
‘It must have been good then.’
‘Very good. Very peaceful.’ And looking back it seemed to me a golden age, and I remembered friends and colleagues.
‘Do you know Aggrey Awori?’
Mushana said, ‘He’s an old man.’
Awori was my age, regarded as a miracle of longevity in an AIDS stricken country; a Harvard graduate, Class of ’63, a track star. Thirty years ago, a rising bureaucrat, friend and confidant of the pugnacious prime minister, Milton Obote, a pompous gap-toothed northerner who had placed his trust in a goofy general named Idi Amin. Awori, powerful then, had been something of a scourge and a nationalist, but he was from a tribe that straddled the Kenyan border, where even the politics overlapped: Awori’s brother was a minister in the Kenyan government.
‘Awori is running for president.’
‘Does he have a chance?’
Mushana shrugged. ‘Museveni will get another term.’
‘I had some good friends - really funny ones. My best friend was a guy called Apolo Nsibambi. We shared an office at the Extra Mural Department at Makerere, and then I got a promotion - became Acting Director - and I was his boss! I used to tease him for calling himself “Doctor” - he had a Ph. D. in political science. I mocked him for wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase and being pompous. I went to his wedding. He came to my wedding. And then I completely lost touch with him. I wonder what happened to him.’
‘Doctor Nsibambi is the Prime Minister of Uganda.’
Perhaps the oldest inhabited street in the high-density city of Cairo, one thousand years of donkey droppings, hawkers’ wagons, barrow boys, veiled women, jostling camels, hand-holding men, and hubble-bubble smokers, among mosques and princes’ palaces, and a bazaar with shops selling trinkets, brass pots and sacks of beans, is Bayna al-Qasrayn, Between Two Palaces.
Through the lovely door of
the mosque I could see the faithful at prayer in the posture of submission, kneeling, bowing low, forehead bumping the carpet, like a dog hugging a football.
Raymond Stock, biographer of Naguib Mahfouz, was my guide once again. He said, ‘All the goods and the glory that were the lifeblood of the great city, al-Qahirah’ – Cairo – ‘the Victorious.’
By chance I had bumped into Raymond at the Semiramis Hotel one afternoon. He was sitting with a big pink-cheeked man, very elegant in a pin-striped suit and silk tie, a matching silk hanky in his breast pocket.
‘He is the son of the Khedive!’ Raymond said, telling me his name. ‘He is a prince!’
The face of the big pink-cheeked man grew rosier and princelier at the mention of his pedigree, Turkish rather than Arab, with a dash of snobbery, for the Khedives were giggly Anglophiles.
‘His family used to run Egypt!’
The big pink-cheeked man fluffed his silk hanky and tut-tutted. The last Khedive, an Ottoman relic, was seen in Cairo in 1914, dumped by the British when Egypt became a British Protectorate.
‘Paul’s a writer,’ Raymond said.
The big pink-cheeked pin-striped prince smiled at my safari jacket and baggy pants and scuffed shoes.
‘I’ve just come from the Sudanese Embassy,’ I said, explaining the dust. ‘They’re renovating.’
‘Paul’s going to Africa,’ Raymond said.
‘People keep saying that, but isn’t this Africa?’
The prince’s chubby cheeks went pinker and pinker with mirth. He didn’t say much but he had a way of glowing that took the place of conversation. He finished his meal, dabbed at his lips, and left, murmuring a farewell in French.
‘Son of the Khedive!’ Raymond said.
I had last seen Raymond six years ago, when I had been traveling around the shores of the Mediterranean on my Pillars of Hercules trip and had docked in Alexandria, having sailed from Istanbul in a Turkish cruise ship, with 450 Turks, my genial mess-mates, Fikret, General Salih, and Onan among them.
Then, May 1994, Naguib Mahfouz had been in intensive care, after being stabbed in the neck by an Islamic zealot. Mahfouz was not expected to recover; yet he had, his stab wounds had healed, he coped with the nerve damage, he was back from the brink – had even resumed writing.
‘Naguib-bey shows up some nights around Cairo. He has a sort of salon,’ Raymond said. ‘I could show you where he was born and grew up.’
That was how it happened that we were strolling down Palace Walk, in the district of Gamaliyeh, which means ‘Place of Beauty,’ a noisy cluttered and crowded suburb, though its inaccurate name was part of its charm, like calling a frozen waste Greenland or a garbage truck a honey wagon.
But the people are the interest now, not the littered streets and alleys.
We went to Judge’s House Square, Midan Bayt al-Qadi, to see some beat-up and dusty trees, ‘Pasha’s beard’ trees – named for the furry shape of their blossoms, the Indian walnut, the scrupulous Raymond Stock informed me, Albizia lebbek. The center-piece of ‘this complex compact and nearly self-enclosed world.’
In the square, we passed the mosque school of Al-Mithqal (‘The Sequinned One’ – a sort of Ottoman Sparkle Plenty), Harat Qirmiz (Crimson Alley) to house number eight, Mahfouz’s childhood home. He was born in this ancient tenement with its tall cracked edifice and named after the doctor who delivered him on 10 December 1911, and growing up in that house (‘He used to stare out of that window’), he wrote about his early passions - for a certain revolutionary, and Charlie Chaplin, and a neighborhood girl whom he idolized.
‘Harat Qirmiz has a high stone wall,’ Mahfouz wrote in Raymond’s translation.
Its doors are locked upon its secrets; there is no revealing of its mysteries without seeing them from within. There one sees a quarter for the poor folk and beggars gathered in the spot for their housework and to take care of their daily needs; and one sees a paradise singing with gardens, with a hall to receive visitors, and hareem for the ladies. And from the little high window just before the ‘qabw’ sometimes appears a face luminous like the moon; I see it from the window of my little house which looks out over the harah and I wander, despite my infancy, in the magic of its beauty. I hear its melodious voice while it banters greetings with my mother when she passes out of the alley, and perhaps this is what impressed on my soul the love of song. Fatimah, al Umri, the unknown dream of childhood.
He also wrote about the afreets, the demons, that lurked in the tunnel that linked Judge’s House Square to Palace Walk. Clapping our hands to disperse the afreets, we crawled through the tunnel and alley, which were so littered we were knee-deep in household rubbish and trash and garbage, more demonic to me than any afreet.
‘I’d like to see Mahfouz again.’
‘He might be somewhere tonight.’
Cairo had a very old-fashioned literary culture, with cliques and salons. The city’s most endearing characteristic was that all this socializing was accomplished through word-of-mouth. Raymond made a call and found out that at a certain time Mahfouz would be in a certain hotel in a certain district near the Nile.
We arrived at the place at the same time as Mahfouz, who was being guided, a burly man on each side of him, steering him to an upstairs lounge, for he is somewhat enfeebled, and almost blind, and nearly deaf; he is sallow and diabetic, yet looked much healthier than the last time I had seen him, supine in the intensive care unit of the Military Hospital. Looking like a head of state, he wore a heavy overcoat because of the February chill of nighttime Cairo.
‘I feel better now,’ he said, when I complimented him on his recovery from the stab wound.
He kissed Raymond in the Egyptian way, and groped for my hand and shook it. Then he seated himself on a red plush sofa, and held court – silent court, for he said almost nothing. Men took turns sitting beside him, shouting into his left ear, his reasonably good ear, and because he is so deaf they seemed to rant. They monologued to Mahfouz and to the room at large, they engaged in debate, they read articles they had recently published. And Mahfouz simply listened and smoked cigarettes and looked Sphinx-like.
Mahfouz held these audiences as majlis ceremonies, like a pasha on a divan, to lift his spirits, Raymond said. He had been very low after his stabbing and made a deliberate effort to get out of the house, as a way of sending a message to the fanatics that they had not put him out of business.
One man took a seat next to Mahfouz and shouted the contents of a whole long article he had written, rattling the pages of the morning paper, while Mahfouz puffed his cigarette and sat staring through his thick lenses with a stern concentrated gaze. His expression hardly changed as he listened but when he responded he did so with a crooked-toothed smile of jeering triumph.
The United States and Britain had just bombed Iraq, claiming that Iraqi planes had fired on their planes in a ‘no-fly zone.’ The view of Mahfouz’s audience was that although Iraq was an unfriendly country still it seemed like Anglo-American provocation to declare portions of it forbidden zones and then arbitrarily to strafe it, inviting the sort of attack as a pretext to justify a severe bombing. In other words, Iraq was being bombed for defending itself against the humiliation of hostile fighter planes in its skies. I refrained from saying that to call the bluff of the United States Iraq had, early on, actually agreed in writing to the no-fly zones.
Reflecting on the bombing, Mahfouz murmured a sentence in Arabic and then laughed and lit another cigarette.
‘He says, “The attack on Iraq is like the random attack in Camus’s The Stranger.” ’
The sun-dazed Meursault in the novel shoots the shadowy Arab on the beach for no logical reason.
‘As usual, America is simply trying to appease Israel,’ one man said.
‘Israel is part of America,’ another man said.
‘Yes. We say Israel is America’s fifty-first state,’ a woman said. ‘What do you think, Mr Theroux?’
I said, and Raymond translated, ‘What I t
hink is that Israel is the window through which America looks at the Middle East.’
‘Yes! Yes!’ said the man sitting next to Mahfouz.
And it is rather a small window,’ I said.
‘Say some more.’
‘The window is too small to see every country clearly – for example, Egypt is much larger and poorer and more harmless than it appears. But Israel insists that we see every country through its own window. And by the way, it is not an American window.’
While all this was translated for Mahfouz and the others, I felt that I was being drawn into a fruitless political debate. I was encouraged to elaborate, but what was the point?
‘It’s tribal warfare,’ I said. ‘I want to stay out of it. Anyway, what does Mahfouz think?’
‘No one cares what I think,’ Mahfouz said, and everyone laughed, including him.
More people arrived, some writers from Alexandria, a French journalist, a German woman, and the writer Ali Salem, a big man with a melon-like paunch and a bald head that seemed like part of his elongated and satirical face.
One man leaned over and said to me, ‘Israel is America’s baby.’
I said, ‘Many countries are America’s babies. Some good babies, some bad babies.’
‘We don’t like to fight,’ he said. ‘Egyptians want peace.’
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Ali Salem said, unfolding a large newspaper page. He smacked it with the flat of his hand and sat next to Mahfouz. ‘You must listen to these jewels.’
Declaiming rather than reading the article, he bugged out his eyes and went on smacking the sheet of newsprint. This was an article he had written about a trial of some Islamic fundamentalists who had attacked Mahfouz’s novels for their secularity. Mahfouz, who had made a career out of twitting and needling Muslims, just listened, staring into space, holding his burning cigarette sideways like a snack.
When Ali Salem finished another man took his place by Mahfouz’s good ear and began to shout into it in a very loud voice. Mahfouz, unmoved by the man’s screeching, went on puffing his cigarette.
