The Whip Hand

How to Exercise Power

‘The Russian people, as a whole, over-compensating for their profound anarchial tendencies, gloried in the mystique of autocracy. The Russian nobility bowed willingly to it on the understanding that the monarch would reward them for their subservience. Only a very few seemed to realize that the assumption of absolute authority by a solitary individual breeds irresponsibility in him, and often worse in all the rest.’

Edward Crankshaw writing in 1976 about the situation in Russia in about 1800. The Shadow of the Winter Palace.

In 1983 I went to teach English at Darfur Secondary School for boys in the Sudanese regional capital of El Fasher.

One morning a few days after we had marked the exams, the headmaster announced that classes were suspended. In the staffroom we drank glasses of sweet tea and chatted. No one knew what was happening. There seemed to be a large number of soldiers around. The classrooms were dotted around a dusty parade ground and each one had an armed guard standing outside. The students were noisily talking and staring out the barred windows, hoping to be sent home.

The atmosphere in El Fasher was tense. The Sudanese leader, President Nimeiri, had introduced shari’a law, apparently without warning and without consulting the substantial non-muslim population of the country. When I had gone to market a few days earlier, a huge excited crowd was milling around. People said that the women who sold beer were going to be punished. Police had already visited the houses that acted as informal drinking dens and broken up all the large terracotta pots in which the millet beer was brewed. It had not been difficult for them to identify the correct houses since most of the police force were regular visitors there themselves.

Pushing my way through the crowd I got close enough to the centre to see a raised an arm holding a whip, lashing down. The crowd was noisy, but the women apparently bore their punishment without a sound. It was hard to tell if the crowd were in favour of the action or not. The atmosphere was like a school playground when a fight breaks out: a kind of crazed excitement, a pandemonium of wild rumours, an urge to see, a feeling of barriers breaking down and things being overturned. I had seen something like it once before in El Fasher’s open-air cinema during an Ursula Andress film. The packed audience, mostly young boys, sat in stony silence as Charles Bronson and some samurai warriors pursued Alain Delon and his desperadoes through New Mexico. When Bronson found himself alone with Ursula in a lonely log cabin, the Sudanese audience were cracking sunflower seeds and chatting. Even when Ursula bared her splendid chest in a somewhat provocative manner, there was little reaction. Then Bronson kissed her.

The place erupted. Gangs of lads attacked the screen, others started fighting. Stones were thrown, seats trashed. The film, Red Sun if you want to check it out, had to be stopped. I escaped to the darkness outside and bought some fried sausages off the Libyan chef who’d trained in Italy and ran a stall. He had an interesting take on the disturbance. “It’s because Charles Bronson is not married to Ursula Andress.”

“Of course he isn’t. They’re actors.”

“I mean the characters that they’re playing are not married. But they kissed.”

“So it doesn’t matter that they are not actually married, but it’s important that the fictional characters they play are? What if Bronson and Andress were married in real life, but the characters they play were not?”

“Do you want some bread with those sausages?”

The riot lasted a few minutes then everyone sat down and demanded the film be resumed. The projectionist, a little flustered and no doubt wishing to avoid further trouble, ditched Bronson and Andress and put on a single-reel spaghetti western that was simply one long bar-room brawl. The audience cracked sunflower seeds through it and enjoyed every minute. Watching other people pretending to riot didn’t seem to stimulate any copycat activity. But I had been impressed by the speed and power of the crowd.

Back at the school there was now movement. The headmaster was marching out to the centre of the field, flanked by his lieutenants. Behind, in a brown robe and white turban, was the unfriendly Egyptian cleric who everyone said was an Islamic extremist. This was hard to judge since he never spoke to us, the small cohort of British teachers, nor would he shake hands or even look at us.

Another teacher, one of the friendly Egyptians who wore shirt and trousers and ate breakfast with us every morning, came in. “The headmaster has decided to punish the whole school for the poor exam results,” he said. “He’s going to whip every student.”

Now there was pandemonium inside the staffroom. Everyone talking at once. Some teachers were laughing, others looked furious. We expats were disbelieving: Why do this? What about the few who actually passed the exams? Surely this could not happen.

But it was true. The soldiers assembled the entire school around the field, then started marching each student into the centre to receive his lashes. The headmaster did the job himself with a whip of hippo hide. I went to my bag and got my camera and took some shots through the chicken wire that covered the staffroom windows. I was incensed at the injustice of it, and the futility, but when I spoke to the students afterwards they couldn’t understand my anger. “Our fathers whip us all the time,” was the general consensus, “And much harder than the headmaster. He was weak.” Now I got annoyed with them, for conniving in their own oppression, I suppose. But that, of course, is part of the equation.

Next day I was called to see the headmaster. “I am told you took photographs yesterday,” he said. There didn’t seem much point in denying it. He wanted the film so I fetched the camera. He opened it up, ripped the film out and threw it in the bin, then handed the camera back.

There was one English teacher who had converted to Islam and adopted a supercilious attitude to his fellow Brits. I ran into him in the souk and he mocked my liberal sensibilities. I can’t remember how I reacted, but I didn’t tell him I’d switched the film. The real one was safely hidden, although the last laugh was not destined to be mine: the photos proved to be hopeless. I didn’t have a telephoto lens and the chicken wire had caused a lot of flare. My campaigning contribution to human rights had fizzled out.

At the cinema that night there was a real treat: Jaws. The place was packed, but as the action went on, the crowd drifted away and by the end it was almost empty. Had it been because the projectionist had got the three reels mixed up? We started with two men successfully killing a huge shark, then things went quiet: there were lots of shots of the peaceful sea although the composer of the music seemed to be having an overly dramatic response to the tranquility. Didn’t he know that Dreyfus and Duvall had killed the monster? Then it reappeared, magically reborn, and started eating swimmers. At the end it was still out there, lurking, hungry for more mayhem.

The Libyan chef didn’t think the reel mix-up was important. The audience reaction was because El Fasher is 1,500 miles from the sea and no one in the audience had ever seen a fish. “They cannot imagine that the sea is vast and dangerous,” he said. “They cannot even imagine that so much water can exist – the most water they ever saw is when their camel takes a piss.”

In town I went to see if the beer houses had reopened. They had. The women had bought new pots and were serving. All the regular customers were there, including the policemen who had rounded the ladies up and whipped them. The beer ladies were laughing and joking with the same men who had whipped them.