What was I in for, I wondered, when I agreed to review a book with this title? A sassy
edition of Arabian Nights Entertainments, based on a newly discovered manuscript of Sir
Richard Burton. A collection of Nuer or Baggara folktales sung to the pampered cattle at
full moon? Or of stories told to themselves by DC's to pass the lonely hours as they
swayed on the camel's back in Darfur or plodded through "The Bog"? In the event, Sudan
Canterbury Tales is none of these things. It is, quite simply, a new and valuable
contribution, imaginatively designed and admirably executed, to that important genre of
Service history introduced twenty-five years ago in Charles Allen's sparkling trilogy of
Tales: The memories of a once-upon-a-time career in imperial service overseas, recorded
as an unpretentious but essentially persuasive part of eyewitness history before it is too
late to retrieve and preserve it.
What Donald Hawley has done is to bring together a score of personal narrative
accounts by British men and women who served in the Sudan. "I had in mind", he
explains, "a sort of Canterbury Tales, with individuals telling their stories against the
general background of their work in the Sudan" . How "haphazardly and
opportunistically" (the description is his own) the collection was assembled is made
charmingly plain in the way some of them were commissioned: from a lady sitting in the
row at a concert in Bath, from a guest at a wedding, or simply offered out of the blue.
Unlike many of the composite collections of reminiscences to date, Hawley has
deliberately eschewed the common context of the Administrative cadre alone. Instead he
has carefully sought his contributors from among the Sudan Civil Service's departmental
offices - the agriculturist, the veterinary inspector and the surveyor, the doctor and the
nursing sister, the soldier, the judge and the missionary and the university lecturer - as
well as several from the Sudan Political Service. The Zoologist's Tale, apparently a
production hiccup, is available as an 8 page separate, thanks to a truly noble gesture by
the publisher. Some of the stories have echoes of Blackwood's revisited or read like
diaries rewritten in extenso. Others read like exciting narrative job descriptions or the best
of letters home. All are full of experiences, facts and - so important for Service cameos -
names: for this is history, not creative literature. All amply fulfil the Kiplingesque
criterion of recounting, with exactitude and with passion. The Day's Work'. Most of the
tales are a comfortable five to ten pages in length; only two nudge fifty. There are three
brief appendices and a good working bibliography.
Sudan Canterbury Tales represents more than a joy to read and a
happy solution to what to give to Uncle G. this Christmas. It stands as a Colonial Service
challenge. Might not those who served in the territorial Services consider compiling its
own Canterbury Tales, not by just another collection of 'The Administrators' Tales' but
by including reminiscences (fact, not fiction) not only from our professional departmental
colleagues, but also from those in the private sector who shared in our work and lives, for
instance missionaries, lawyers and lecturers, and those in commerce, banking and
transport? Such a novel approach to what one might call the Colonial Service 'collections
of recollections' could have a number of advantages. First, it would literally be a Service
enterprise, not just a departmental project, presenting the fuller, rounder picture of what
empire was all about at the grassroots. Secondly, it could help the administrators, who so
far have dominated the 'composite portrait' field (often very effectively) to understand a
little more sharply how they might have been perceived outside their own magic circle of
sometimes self-assumed heavenborndom. Thirdly, only thus can we achieve the full
picture of what colonial government was all about: the art, impact and legacy of colonial
administration were far wider and far deeper than simply what administrators did. Finally,
as Hawley himself hints, there could be the bonus of encouraging Africans, Malayans,
Pacific Islanders, etc., to tell their own tales of how they viewed empire.
In Sudan Canterbury Tales Hawley has much to offer, to entertain and to teach us. One
cavil remains. Might not the average reader, unlikely to have been brought up on who was
who in the Sudan Political Service or the Diplomatic Service List (and maybe having over
looked p.67 of the last issue of the Overseas Pensioner, rightly criticise the publishers for
failing to say anything at all about who the author is? Reticence can have grave
drawbacks. For all that the dust-jacket cares, we do not know whether the author might be
the Chaucerian character "who hadde a fyr-reed cherubinnes face" and "Well loved he
garleek, onyons, and eek leekes. And for to drinken strong wyn, reed as blood", or else
(let's guess!) Chaucer's "Verray parfit gentil knight (who) loved chivalrye, Trouthe and
honour, freedom and curteisye". Unhelpfully and unacceptedly, the dust jacket here is as
blank as the Nonne Preeste's face on first hearing The Tale of the Wyfe of Bathe.
|