The Educated African and Colonialist Myths in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

Through the example of Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North (1969), this article argues that education as provided by the colonial school system is an “undecidable” (Derrida), at once empowering and disempowering the educated non-Westerner. On the one hand, the knowledge and language appropriated by Mustafa Sa’eed (Salih’s African prodigy) enable him not only to belie, through his own academic success, the derogatory clichés regarding the Black man’s intellectual inferiority, but also to denounce imperialism in the impressive number of books he has written. On the other hand, as a system which perpetuates traditional values and codes of thinking, rather than promoting originality and difference, the (Western) educational machine ensures that its products unconsciously absorb Western ‘truths’ about the passionate nature and sexual appetite of the native races. This article shows that Mustafa Sa’eed reproduces these ‘truths’ both in his lectures and in his lifestyle.

Keywords

• African intellectuals
• colonial education
• colonialist myths
• failure
• resistance