Navigation of a Rainmaker

Jamal Mahjoub

Although Jamal Mahjoub is half-Sudanese and half-English, he was — unlike the main character of this bleak but highly distinguished novel — brought up in the Sudan, the country which is the setting and focus of Navigation of a Rainmaker (1989). The novel provides its readers with a remarkably vivid, almost visionary sense of the dry, drab, Sudanese landscape: “There was nothing, and then there was sand” (6); “In another ten years there would be nothing left of the roads. They’d given up repairing them” (20); “boundary lines that divided the map” are described as “the lines of greed and complete ignorance” and we are told that:

The map of Sudan looked like a face, the face of a man gazing down; the face of a man in mourning. The wars were carried on; tyrants come in all shapes and colours of the skin. So much hatred buried together — not even this country was big enough to hide them all. (25)

For although this huge tract of land appears entirely barren, as if “the land had shed its skin and now lay bare for all to see the truth” (57), it carries the scars of ethnic and religious enmity, slavery, banditry, class disdain and neglect of responsibility, and of being the prey to the foreign prospectors (for oil, for uranium) and the fomenters of mere mayhem who arrive here to pursue their own dark power hungers. As Tanner, the main character, knows:

Africa had become a modern-day arena in which the super-powers could safely challenge each other for superiority. The price on offer was the untapped wealth that lay beneath these fields of destruction. (34)

At a time when an exceptionally devastating drought besets the country, as Tanner’s woman friend Nina (who is an aid worker) informs him, the government sells off grain reserves for hard currency instead of providing food relief (40). As if the drought were not sufficient persecution, the ancient divisions between the dominant, Muslim-Arab north and the frequently enslaved Negroid-animist peoples of the south are again intensifying to the point of open warfare, with marauding bands of armed men roaming the countryside. In the cities, a curfew rule and increasing police brutality are intensifying the anxiety. Tanner’s friend Mikele declares portentously: “It is too late for the government to ask its people to condemn this violence”, “the flame that will eventually engulf this whole huge country”, for: “The people are this violence” (43).

No wonder Tanner’s Sudanese father warned him (in Britain) against going back to try and re-trace his African roots (18). In any case, the Tanner we meet in the first part of the text is consumed by existential guilt at having been partly responsible for a young woman’s death (on a geological expedition) and seems to live on the edges of society in a strange, apathetic condition. Mikele castigates his “solitary disdain” and his supposed “detachment” (43), but, ineffectual and isolated as he may be, Tanner feels a profound sense of commitment to the ordinary, victimised and impoverished members of Sudanese society — the beggars and lepers in the city and the starving nomads in the countryside. He is appalled at the lifestyle of “the young nouveaux riches of a land that [is] perched on the verge of an abyss” (47), and will not allow them to draw him into their circle, though his own lifestyle does not seem perceptively less futile.

Tanner feels that “he had been caught between the narrow walls of this would-be metropolis [Khartoum]: a savage burlesque in which the war and the starvation were nothing more than side-show stands” (69). As repression intensifies to “a state of siege” (86) in the city, Tanner once again opts for going on a futile-seeming expedition that will take him south into the war zone. He is to escort a mysterious African-American, Gilmour, who has arrived to investigate the prospecting activities of the company for which Tanner works.

Even when it becomes evident that the camp of geologists will have to pack up (war having demolished their most important drilling enterprise), Gilmour refuses to fly out to safety. He insists that Tanner must drive him across the war-infested territory to pursue his increasingly sinister-seeming investigations. As they make their journey, they encounter the claw marks of the war. One young man tells them that the “children [of his clan] are scattered like branches broken from a tree” by the war (132), while in another village where men of rival tribes have killed one another they are told:

They are all armed, you see. The army or the rebels, either side, they hand out … modern automatic weapons, rockets … [as a] way of gaining allegiance, making the conflict a tribal … rather than a political one. Then the people [are] more willing to be involved. (141)

Matched with these evil war-fomenting activities of the locals are those of the foreign instigators — of whom, as Tanner now realises, Gilmour is a chilling example. The American declares, even boasts: “I’m here to instil confusion, to sow the seeds of discontent, as it were, but in the right places” (168).

Gilmour causes an accident (in which Tanner is seriously injured) and they take refuge in the surreal shelter of a decrepit paddle steamer, beached and abandoned in a dry riverbed. It was Gilmour’s blood- and war-lust that made him jerk the steering wheel of their vehicle; now he plans to join some nearby soldiers/rebels, packing the pistol with which he came equipped. In pain and malaria-ridden, Tanner the drifter at last revolts. He kills Gilmour, battering him to death with his own camera.

In the increasingly dreamlike final scene, the rains at last come down, almost re-floating the boat. But Tanner crawls away from it into the now muddy landscape. He is found and taken to a mission, but without the necessary medical skills and supplies available, he dies there.

Interspersed throughout the Tanner narrative are italicised passages outlining the plight of nomadic communities as a vague sort of parallel to the Tanner story. For them, too, there is no relief in sight; they are caught between the rocks of the desert and the hard hearts of uncaring government bureaucracy: “There was no more to it. Their prayers had been answered and they had made it out of the desert and into this place of human desolation” (94). The unnamed old patriarch who has brought his people to the gathering of refugees knows how unlikely they are to be aided. But there is no alternative recourse. For himself, he knows he has to go back into the desert to die there, for “his place was the desert, the only place he knew” (94).

In his fever-stricken dreams Tanner had imagined a visit by an ancient prophet. Concerning the Sudan, he tells Tanner, “they say when God created it he laughed. You can still hear his laugh if you listen to the dry wind coming across the cracked earth and the stones” (159). Maybe “only the wind and the stars [live] here” (57), but Mahjoub gives one glimpses of dignity and nobility in this society — like the hidden wealth under the desert earth. Even Tanner’s strange, brief life becomes a small seed of hope — for this life, and the act of violent, righteous fury that preceded its end are a contrast to, and an outcry against, the desertion of countries like the Sudan by their most privileged and talented people, particularly the young. Of such, Tanner had noted with a contempt of his own that their thoughts were

a mixture of puritanical pride in [their own] beliefs, and blatant ignorance of [their] surroundings and disdain for the future of the land. [They] took what society gave [them] without question, and in return [they] cast judgement from on high. (49)

Tanner, at last, has become one with his land.

to the top

© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf.