The General and the Frogs

By Mirghani Hassan

In a Sub-Saharan African country vulnerable to the whims of its dyslexic and tyrannical ruler, a young man named Abdulmoneim Ghoriesh, enrols in the countrys famed university, laden with the scars of a recent family tragedy. On his first night on campus, as he falls asleep on the lawn, Abdul has barely nodded off before he is jolted awake by hundreds of frogs croaking in eerie unison. And so begins Abduls satirical campus journey with five other desperately poor yet immensely motivated students, collectively known as Les Misrables. As the nation chokes under the haze of dictatorship, campus residents must endure the theocratic chauvinism of a students union controlled by radical Islamists. Trapped in the labyrinths of political repression, religious dogmatism and the horrors of final exams, the skeptical and talented Les Misrables cultivate an extraordinary capacity for transforming despair into dark and hilarious tall tales. Amid the turbulent chaos of their existence, the six survive an uprising against the dyslexic tyrant while achieving academic distinction. Even so, a gruesome murder of a friend casts insufferable sorrow at the end of a remarkable odyssey.

The General and the Frogs is a tale of the incredible power of humour and of the triumph of the human spirit at a time lived most dangerously.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491717462

Mirghani Hassan

Mirghani Hassan has a PhD in law from Warwick University and is currently a senior legal counsel. He has published more than a dozen short stories over the past few years. Mirghani and his wife, Sanaa Ibrahim, have two children and live in Vienna, Austria.

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The General and the Frogs

Copyright © 2014 Mirghani Hassan.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-1745-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1747-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1746-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013921861

iUniverse rev. date: 1/10/2014

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

In memory of my father, and of my youngest brother Abdulmoneim, who departed in distinctive haste. In addition, of course, for the Les Misérables of the impossible age.

"What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh."

Agnes Repplier, American essayist, 1858–1950.

ONE

H e was a dyslexic general. His soldierly face was laden with the tell-tale hallmarks of a president-for-life: the bullfrog stare, the starchy nose, and the hint of a donkey’s incuriosity. His ascendency to the pinnacle of power was a gift of the twin credentials of sporting size forty-nine boots and the proud record of gunning down more fruit bats in army camps than any officer in our cheerless history. However, when his adulators proclaimed him the redeeming oracle of the nation, immune to the indignity of death and lizard bites, he reached for symbols of eminence grander than the distinction of mighty boots and genocidal conquests of miserable bats. Like fellow tropical despots, he adorned himself with the customary imperial sceptre, the time-tested talisman for holding on to the reins of power until the end of time. His parity with veteran autocrats of the post-independence age was attested to even by stubborn detractors when, in a momentous September, he succumbed with wild joy to the mystical malady that has devastated the continent’s ruling class. As if by will power, an unspeakably nauseating stench began to exude from his cruel mouth and nostrils, unstoppably exhaled, his antagonists claimed, even on public holidays and at sombre state funerals. It was the common stink of interminable presidency that has soiled the corridors of power in numerous nation states. Even skunks, famed for inexhaustible scent glands, envied him the odour of tyranny. The reek was everywhere. It was a time of public angst; the nation still reeling from a bout of cyclical violence which, in that remarkable month, seemed to have turned the serial executioner of nocturnal brutes into the happiest living mammal in our homeland. While enemy corpses putrefied in the searing sun of the capital city-his toxic breath repulsing a cabal of experts beyond hearing distance—the General finally savoured the bliss of eternal leadership, perturbed neither by the nuisance of aides nor the hassles of ancient dys lexia.

There was no safer sanctuary from the savagery of a general in hefty boots than the suave tranquillity of university life. In the same September in which the redeeming oracle began to smell of dead fish, campus gates opened for several hundreds of us, allegedly the country’s best and brightest. The university was a magnificent edifice of a rich tradition and a proud history, a fitting monument for Queen Victoria’s favourite General in whose memory it had been built in Khartoum. The General was Charles Gordon Pasha, and Khartoum, a desolate shambles to which his destiny had led him to be slain nearly 90 years earlier, is the capital of the most ill-fated country south of the North Pole.

Weighed down by an insufferable grief over a recent family tragedy, I was astonished to afford an inner space for a sense of dread of the impending odyssey-the escapade into the tangled world of universities. It was a terror that tasted of warm sand, the variety of panic that strikes the bones at exceptional moments in life when an innermost dream has come true. The nearer I drew to campus, the louder the brew of melancholy and fear seemed to murmur in my entrails; until I stood at the ancient gate. I was a poorly dressed, lanky son of a dead railway official gearing up for the ominous feat with the edginess of a burglar. For it seemed to freshmen that a sense of grim foreboding was an impetrative disposition for admission to a university renowned for scholarly verve and unbending discipline.

I was assigned to a dormitory in a vast compound astride the Blue Nile front; once the chief camp for British forces in the country and still identified by its modest genesis, the

‘Barracks’. My lodging fate was a private matter for a stuttering Nubian housekeeper with hairy forearms, his eyes framed by a good many creases, his sunken cheeks further maimed

by deep, tribal marks. In reptile slowness he issued me a freshly laundered, linen sheet and a pillowcase with which to furnish the sagging mattress and a lean pillow on the upper level of a bunk bed. I accepted with fatalism a command to settle in Room 7 of the fourth block of Arba’at, a peripheral dormitory at the western end of the complex. A decade and a half after the Barracks had been abandoned to terrified young natives; it retained a lasting reminder of the acumen of its British founders. Why, we wondered, was our block the fourth and not the first, even though it was the first building after the main entrance? A plausible explanation had been that, for some colonial wisdom, the blocks had been named and numbered outwards from an imaginary centre. So, we could finally resolve the mystery of our hostel’s name. As residential halls had been named after the country’s rivers and tributary streams, the further away from the centre the less significant was the river on the weather-beaten name sign. At the western frontiers of the compound, the authorities ran out of waterways and our dormitory had to settle for an obscure namesake, a mountainous spring on the Red Sea hills that none of us has heard of.

It was unnerving for me to thrust aside a natural penchant for solitude to brave the stifling intimacy of a room I would share with seven other students from various faculties. Rather stolidly, I forced myself into the cheerful atmosphere, which had an international flavour, symbolized by Ghassan, a jovial, and classically attired Arab student of liberal arts. In a phony display of solidarity, I joined my roommates in a noisy protest about the lack of wardrobe space. To be sure, there was more space in my tiny cupboard than I could fill with the meagre clothing and trifling effects, just unpacked from a cardboard suitcase held together by a string on the side where a rusty clasp had ceased to function years ago. We barely exchanged banalities when Ghassan announced he would set the tone for a spirit of comradeship by a juicy tale, which he began to relate in a Bedouin, roller-coaster accent, flaunting an ominous propensity for sensual humour. As we listened in piercing unease, he spoke of a senile grandfather who had passed away recently of testicular malignant growth. The twice widowed 89 year-old man, the grandson recounted, stubbornly declined an excision procedure to save his life, scolding relatives that it was his verdict whether or not his hanging assets had residual value. When a surgeon implored him, for the last time, to reconsider his standpoint, the ancient patient allegedly snapped: It is easier commanding a crocodile to turn vegetarian than to have me castrated. Then turning to the wall in rage, he murmured that in the afterlife a dead man has to account for the tool box in its entirety and he wasn’t risking deposit forfeiture. Ghassan’s impulsive temperament would endear him to roommates who learned to suffer his explicit tales and refreshing candour.

On my first night, I went to sleep on the lawn like dozens of freshmen, beyond hearing distance of Ghassan and his lewd narratives. I had barely nodded off when I was jolted awake by the sudden onset of hundreds of frogs croaking in eerie unison from the four winds. I could hardly believe my ears. This campus, it seemed, doubled as a nightly stock exchange for the town’s frogs. After the initial shook wore off, I picked up a handful of bricks to stone a tribe of the tailless creatures nearest to my bed, only to be dissuaded by enraged pioneers who had tried to silence them with larger rocks to no avail. What a cruel irony! A university that demanded a minimum of five credits for admission seemed to have opened the flood gates, unconditionally, to all manner of the country’s frogs.

As I rolled sleeplessly, it suddenly dawned on me that the so-called independence history that crowded our heads in high school had been sheer nationalistic fiction. It wasn’t the marches or the strikes, our independence must have been a gift of the frogs. This had been the headquarters of the British military that sustained the colonial order. Hence, visions of General Julian Armstrong, commander of the forces, swam into my head; the man driven to insanity by decades of frog festivities and corresponding imperial insomnia, jumping onto the bed, boots and all, breaking bed springs and yelling at the top of his military voice: That’s it boys. Pack up for home. I’d rather be driven mad by British frogs. The pencil-moustached, Sandhurst-elite and decorated-hero of the World War II invasion of Sicily, surrendered without shame to infantry divisions of the Blue Nile frogs. Really, a colony couldn’t achieve an easier independence.

Amassed under one roof by a lottery of fate, we sensed an unspoken urge for celebrating, or perhaps testing, a nascent spirit of camaraderie beyond the confines of Room 7. Under the radiant sun of the following morning, we embarked on an exploratory trip of our new surroundings; Ghassan looking like an Arab Charlie Chaplin in shapeless suit trousers and an out of place necktie. Waving our new identity cards, we entered the central campus and strode along the famous main road with an immeasurable sense of pride. On the left, as we entered, was the faculty of law and on the right the faculty of economics, both majestic and forbidding, the symmetry and stunning likeness lending them an air of sibling rivalry. The road was lined with towering trees, planted perhaps by some Englishman in a distant age of glory. Rather aptly, the epicentre of the scholarly wonderland was a grandiose examination hall, an architectural marvel as commanding in its vicinity as a sun in a solar system, its flamboyant sign teasing a vague sensation of chill. Awed by its breath-taking presence, we were oblivious to how the monument has scared our companion to his Arab bones.

Male and female students of senior classes, in trendy fashions, sat on concrete benches on both sides of the main road, basking in relaxed certainty, giggling in arrogant delight at the new comers scornfully branded ‘Prelims’; an irreverent allusion to ‘Preliminary year students’. The road forked in front of an awesome Victorian building with a haughty belvedere, tall and ancient palm trees flanking its east and west wings. English literature students rumoured that these had been the inspiration for William Faulkner’s Wild Palms, even though the Nobel laureate hadn’t even heard of our heat-drenched country. We instantly recognised the splendid structure-the central library, depicted on the face of the half-pound note of the national currency. Campus legend had it that the belvedere was home to General Gordon’s ghost. Renowned for extravagant religious meditation at the break of dawn, the ghost recited Mathew 10:28 in a grave Scottish accent that reverberated across the river: "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. This was the verse that Chinese Gordon whispered repeatedly as he sat cross-legged in his study, biting on his pipe, longing with great desire for death", as he had written to his sister, waiting for his native killers as excitedly as he had awaited news of victory at the Battle of Changzhou.

The further away we wandered, the more we were dwarfed by stately faculty buildings, laboratories and lecture halls; monumental statements of antiquity veiled in fresh paint, all gleaming brilliantly in September sunshine. This campus of mystery and wonder, with its calming bearing, belonged in another world in comparison to the mediaeval jumble of our capital city. However, it was impossible, we thought, to resist a daunting sense of ambivalence after the tour, oscillating between sorrowfulness for the murdered Gordon Pasha and gratitude to him for getting himself killed to be memorialised by a lavish campus.

To our embarrassment, as we returned, Ghassan froze in visible horror in front of the examination hall, and, indifferent to the sniggering of senior students, rubbed his hands on the main entrance as if it had been a holly shrine, reciting a long and loud prayer for success in whatever undertaking destiny might drag him to its doorsteps. His spell of terror notwithstanding, Ghassan was spellbound, his festive gestures betraying wild jubilation for selecting this campus for his career. To the rest of our amazement, he had declined full scholarship at universities in West Berlin and Arizona. He was a poet who thrived on admiring, Arabic-speaking crowds and they were not easily found in West Germany or the Arizonian plateaus. With an easy air of confidence, he assured us that the great wealth of lovers on campus would launch him into orbit; inspiring poems that would captivate the Arab nation from the Atlantic Ocean to the Sea of Oman. Sadly, he was heedless of the lethal dangers lurking behind the façade of the soft and refined campus of this foreign country, the country that would become the land of his failure and hurt. Of all places in our galaxy, he would hide beneath the formidable clutches of an obese hairdresser in whose animal allure he sought to heal the scars sustained in the country of generals and frogs.

Back at the room teaming with humanity, Ghassan demanded that we swore solemnly to strive for love on campus with every fibre of our being so that he is catapulted to stardom with the energy of home-grown romance. It was like pledging to keep on breathing. For the nation of Prelims, all libraries, however central, lecture halls however majestic, and all laboratories, dining halls and green fields, however expansive, paled in comparison to the prize asset of campus-the girls. Our elegant classrooms offered Prelims some precious, if sporadic, opportunities for sitting shoulder to shoulder with female coevals, the ultimate in intimacy that a Prelim could hope for. A male student endowed with good looks, or whatever it might have been that appealed to girls, had no difficulty attracting a gorgeous female to his side. The rest of us had to resort to time-honoured trickery. A man would enter the lecture theatre in advance of class to reserve two seats-a strategic aisle seat, preferably in the centre of the hall, and the seat next to it. The hopeful hunter would lie in wait on the aisle seat, leaving a note-book on the adjacent seat to which to move after successful trapping. He would stare malevolently at other males looking for seats, or seeking to foil the hunt, barking that the seat next to him had been taken. Once a girl has asked for the seat, the hunter moved merrily into the next seat with a triumphant smile. An ideally located aisle seat was an infallible girl trap.

We waited in eager anticipation for the girls who nearly always stepped in just before a lecturer, each striving for attention, craving for hungry looks. Their arrival was announced by the click clacking of high heels, the sharper the buttering of the floor the more male necks craned in the direction of the entrant. As a girl walked up the aisle, she was inundated by the awkward gestures of the hunters, competing in a bizarre auction in which the highest bidders surrendered the coveted seats. The curviest of the girls demanded a special surveillance procedure. As they climbed the steps, we took a good rear view, sometimes by turning the head gently, as we might, say, when at the barber’s, or at other times swiftly under the pretext of chatting with someone on the bench behind. Rear inspection was a tropical heritage that prized amble proportions. We had no appetite for heeding an intellectual plea by a science student roommate who urged that we transcended sensual urges to ponder the rounded parts of the anatomy in evolutionary perspectives. In the African female body they are, he alleged, merely a repository for fats for times of cyclical droughts, and that, generally, the gluteal muscles provide body balance to mammals that have lost the tail to natural selection. We could never have imagined that the science of buttocks would be of any consequence to us, until the day after the uprising against the bat-murdering General when the veracity of the evolutionary claim was established to us beyond doubt-the larger the tail lost, the greater the reparation to the rear. To be sure, when the ill-bred officer Omer, the man we met that day-and nicknamed the ‘Oval officer’- turned his back to us to parade evolution’s reparation on his back, it was impossible to contemplate the monstrousness of the tail that he’d shed in an evolutionary journey and for which he was so lavishly compensated.

One day in class, I was entranced in a wasteland of rear surveillance, staring in awe at a supremely beautiful hour glass-shaped young lady, sporting short skirts and smiling her way up the aisle. I was summoned from my daze by the sudden entry of a massive African American man with an athletic build, storming in haste to teach us African history. A definite eccentric, he was a brilliant lecturer and an extraordinarily talented narrator of tall tales. His dazzling looks had the gift of beautiful dark eyes and a large nose with a wide bridge and a broad tip. He was an open book, he announced, but since Prelims didn’t read books, he would introduce himself verbally. He was an unrepentant draft dodger. At college, he asserted, he learned that the Vietnamese ate grilled lizards all year round and thought they descended from a dragon god. Legend had it, he claimed, that this novel deity married some heavenly female who laid him a hundred eggs, which hatched into an equal number of children who then reproduced profusely to create the Vietnamese nation. For him, neither a taste for lizards nor descending from an egg-laying Eve was justification for spraying Vietnamese children with napalm or booby-trapping their parents’ paddy fields. His mission to the ancient continent, a sanctuary from the horrors of Vietnam, was a moral, epic journey.

He had been brought up on a real-estate magnate’s farm where his father cared for the owner’s horses. He was so fanatically fixated with horses that after one class he earned the nickname Syce. Invariably, the first few minutes of his classes, dubbed horse time, were passionate sermons on the Equus caballus, known to lay Prelims as the horse. As a prelude to dreary academic narratives on the King Shark of Dahomey and trivialities of the Axumite Empire, we explored trotting, cantering and galloping patterns, learned how a horse’s ears were windows to its personality and speculated on which pedigree could go without water and food for days. His mother, a devout Christian, chewed tobacco from dawn to sunset as she toiled the farms of Durham County, North Carolina, hymning and singing gospel songs with fellow women workers. But her cheery son had no time for gods or chants. Priests, he maintained, were nothing but Bible-armed robbers of elderly ladies. He once informed a crammed audience that if his morality had been anchored in the Bible, he would be busy killing Vietnamese now, not lecturing on the rise and fall of the Bamana Empire. God had massacred too many people in one Bible, he raved, than he could bear to count. Nonetheless, his busy eyes abidingly welled up as he sang, in a creaky, whispery voice, his mother’s favourite hymn, There will be Peace in the Valley:

Well, I’m tired and so weary

But I must go along

Till the lord will come and call, call me away, oh yeah

Well the morning’s so bright

And the Lamb is the light

And the night, night is as black as the sea, oh yes

Before he graduated, his mother had lost her tongue to a malignant tumour and ever since, he chuckled, he’d been one of few people on Earth who didn’t have a mother tongue.

At the end of class, we rushed with genie speed to the libraries, driven to the fringes of civility by a voracious appetite for reference works. And it was in the libraries, with their leather-laden air and swollen silence, oblivious of the grandeur of vaulted arches, ceilings and Victorian light fixtures, that we experienced the backbreaking pain that libraries exact on visitors. There were no photocopiers-we didn’t even know they had been invented. Surrounded by towering book stacks we copied reference works with starchy patience for dreadfully long hours. Time was marked by the pain of sore thumps and index fingers; our cheap pens squiggling endlessly in the sprawling handwriting of freshmen. Sometimes the torment was mercifully interrupted by a power outage, but the more politically astute Prelims claimed that power cuts were intentional; the military regime being anxious that messing with books would inspire the abominable habit of thinking. Most popular reference books had been ancient editions, terribly mangled by generations of copying Prelims, the edges of rusty pages dissolving into yellowish ashes upon mere touching. The ordeal was made all the more strenuous by our modest English. We had no filtering skills, no scholarly sense of condensing a text to a core message. Quite the contrary, we devoutly believed that any sentence had featured in a book for a reason, and a Prelim should copy it now and ponder the reason later.

A well-lit wing of the central library was popular with students of the humanities and allegedly better served by librarians than other parts. During the day, in my favourite section of the wing, there was an assistant, ‘Sayda’, a plump-lipped, mournful woman with a coppery complexion and a sneering sense of humour. She was a bright, hot-blooded person, defined by a doctrinaire certainty that all Prelims were a regrettable nuisance. Thus, she wouldn’t fully listen to a request for help, and never seemed in the right temperament to identify a catalogue, guide us to the relevant shelf, or, indeed, offer any assistance of any sort. She merely snapped irritably, waving the enquirer to her boss, an affable fellow with the gleaming eyes of a tarsier and a perennial smell of vinegar, with who she hadn’t been on talking terms for as long as any Prelim could remember. Although she did little else besides sitting listlessly with no sense of urgency or purpose—not even reading-she bore the appearance of extravagant despair, as though she had been in penance for her pregnancy. She was ceaselessly pregnant so she was aptly nicknamed Isis, after the Egyptian goddess of fertility who became pregnant of her husband, the god Osiris, after his death. Her nuclear temper notwithstanding, she never took offence when we called her by her nickname. For a reason that remained a lasting mystery, she took a liking to my circle of friends, sometimes bringing us home-baked cookies for tea breaks. As she handed me the delicacy one mildly cold December morning, she asked me in a signature tone, part sulk part reproach, why I didn’t go to medical school to become a doctor. I responded wryly that, upon graduation, I planned to work for the department of wild life. Sensing my mockery, she probed me about the department and why I was so desperate to join it. In an even more sardonic tone, I explained a fictitious childhood fascination with the department officers’ distinctive uniform and a great love for their gear. That’s clever, she retorted. "Just with the shotgun you’d make more money selling python