Abel Majid Ali Bob was born on December 31, 1945. He died on February 11, 2017 at Kaiser Hospital Oakland California. He was a professor, an activist, an intellectual, a writer and a great friend to many throughout the globe in times of shine and sorrow. He was survived by his wife Sousan, their daughter Hadeel, and two sons Ahmed and Hisham. He was survived by his several books: Janoub al-Sudan Jadal al-Wouda wa al-Infisal, Tisitashr Youlyu: Idaat wa Watieq. Serialized book: Ismail al-Azhari. Unfinished book: Joseph Garang. A website: Abdel Khaliq Mahjoub.org. And many articles published in both Arabic and English in Sudanese Newspapers and websites.
———————————–
It was a mellow afternoon that day when a few of us met at that beautiful café on the bank of the Blue Nile where the two great rivers meet at the Morgan: Ali Abdel Quim, Fatah al-Rahman Mahjoub, Abdel Aziz Sidahmed, and me. There might be others in attendance that day, but I am sorry, I am unable to remember their names right now. We were told we were going to meet with someone who had recently come from East Germany where he was studying. His name is Abdel Majid Ali Bib. Even before meeting with him I heard a lot about him. Most of those in the meeting that afternoon started their relationship at the University of Khartoum a few years prior. Abdel Aziz, the oldest of the group, was then a teacher at Khartoum Polytechnic. He finished his studies at one of the East Europe universities. By that time singer Mohamed Hasanian made one of his songs popular Ya saiq al-Bobay. Our relationship with members of that group and others was based on our interest in poetry and creative writing. At the university, we were part of a multiplicity of communities that included al-Jabha al-Dimocratia, University of Khartoum writers, Qahwat al-Nashat group whose fame and their intellectual stardom went far beyond the boundaries of the university. A few of us made some female sweethearts popular when we described their hazel-colored eyes, and then they were picked as future brides by graduating members of the colleges of engineering, medicine, and teaching assistants. At the time, Ali Abdel Quim was recovering from one of his many accidents. After a brief round of introduction, Fatah al-Rahman Mahgoub, a brilliant short-story writer, well known for his dry humor and stinging satire, looked at us, drew our attention with a smile, and said “we are here today to babysit Ali.” Before Ali’s angry gaze translated into words, Abdel Magid—with a thundering laughter—introduced all of us into his world. It was the best icebreaker that he could have come up with, and it saved our day. We all got it. Abdel Majid himself might have had a similar accident or accidents from a green-eyed German sweetheart. O yah, it was the “kind of green that pushed its way through the piles of gritty snow to remind you that spring was coming.” The whole environment turned into a jubilant one when we were all captured into a moment of irresistible desire to listen to Ali when he happily accepted our request to read the poem he wrote during the time when colors were brighter. When he said “Bsaymatic tkhali al-danya shamsiya,” it was overwhelmingly upbeat. Most of us were reminded of the jet black color of Ali’s sweat heart and the numberless dreams they had then. At the same time Mohamed Wardi added to the lyrics more depth and an additional beauty with his golden voice and his explosive mastering of the tambour (https://youtu.be/sreLAR1prRc).
What captured the attention of everyone that day and continued ever after was Abdel Magid Ali Bob’s fascinating style of storytelling and his ability to bring together events, backgrounds, concepts, names, and analyses to easily and brilliantly blind together, construct and deliver arguments—truer plain things into interesting conversations and creative narratives: dialects in action. That has always been his fascinating way, his character, and his pleasant personality. Yes, we were all loved, and we took turns dumping on each other within some serious experiences and relationships. We wrote and recited our poetry to our groups and to the ones we loved as flashes of insights. Sometimes newspapers published our poems, or some of our poems were picked up by famous musicians, which gave the poets a national fame and made the beloved university icons. A tradition that started as early as the time the generation of Mohmed al-Mahdi Magzoub and his famous poem about his Jewish Gordon Memorial College class mate Loosi: tilka Lossi fajnibani Loosi. But whether in Khartoum, in Berlin, Moscow, Belgrade, Bucharest, London, Paris, New York, Khartoum or elsewhere, what was important to Abdel Magid’s community of conversation in addition to other serious academic and social activities, was such or similar romantic relationships. Whether they succeeded and turned into matrimony or failed was part of the grace of finding our humanity in each other. That was the time when our female students entered al-Barracks building (male Students Dorms) for the first time to encourage their male students to continue on their demonstrations against the police brutality that night. It was the night that made the October revolution. It was the time when female students did far better than male students in the General School Examination and entered the university in higher numbers. It was a time when Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim—advocating for women’s rights in her 20’s—would help lead a revolution via her magazine Sout al-Maraa and would later become the first woman member of Parliament not only in Sudan, but in all of Africa and the Middle East. It was the time when Khadija Safout was accommodative to most of us in her only woman lead Sudanese Writers Association. The Women’s movement went in tandem with the liberation movement. It was the time that Abu Amna Hamid wrote bin hib min baladna ma bara al-balad. Again Wardi was the one who made it popular as a song of its time.
But, that was not the end of the story. It was only the beginning of an important part of the task of one big issue we were all engaged in and part of an organic new community, which I describe as an intimate community of conversation. To understand the actions of the intimate community of conversation you need to look at how those young men and women observed their universe with a wider vision of social investigation that was much broader and more complex than ideologies. It was what can you call the relationships between social institutions, civics, cultural productions and relations, and liberties interwoven with historical and everyday life realities and distant features of faraway [such as Germany] and close at home[Sudanese] societies.
At home it was the aftermath of October, 1964. October was, is, and will always be the key moment in postcolonial Sudanese history. It is extremely rich in meaning and signification, and it constituted one of the most democratic movements in the history of the Sudan, Africa, and the Middle East. It opened doors for uneasy, intimate, and academic and intellectual extendable and expandable conversations. Most of the time we give examples of this wide-ranging conversation from the Roundtable Conference of 1965, the intimate conversation that ensued outside the official sphere, and the first international Sudan Studies Conference: Sudan in Africa, which was held at the University of Khartoum in 1968. October was about the South and Abdel Magid made the South the concern of his life. He lived thirteen years in Juba among the faculty, students, staff, and workers, as well as among different groups of Juba citizens that included different ethnic groups of southern and northern Sudanese, professionals, jellaba, army officers, and different political and religious groups. His main message of modernity was more hospitable to differences than other ideas because modernity begins with the recognition of differences within the demand of uniformity of citizenship. That is why Dr. Hilmi Sharawi, who spent two important years with Abdel Majid as faculty at Juba University, described it as a future project for the New Sudan. Juba University at that time was a hub for many scholars, including Abdel Rahman Abu Zied, Joseph Awad, Moses Mashar, Fayza Hussian, Robin Miles, Taban Loluoung Abdel Gafar Mohamed Ahmed, Karin Abu Zied, Farouk Kadoda, Mohamed Sulaiman, Fawzi Abdel Majid, Abdel Maunim Mohamed Osman, and other Southern and African scholars. In addition to visiting speakers that including and not limited to Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim. That is why and how Abdel Majid was the only person among the university community and faculty body who was trusted by different parties in dispute at the Roun Tree. https://youtu.be/gwGAaEjt26c
When he brought the tenth anniversary of Juba University to the University of Khartoum in 1985, he was bringing to the Sudanese collective memory of the 1965 Round Table Conference cognizance as one of many forms of our life whose worth cannot be compared. That was October, 1964, and what can thrive from its scheme of value.That event was another round table, and it brought together Mohamed Omer Bashir, Andrew Weiw Riack, Modathir Abdel Rahim,Ushari Ahmed Mahmoud,Mohamed Bashir Hamid,al-Tayib Zien al-Abdin, Abdel al-Aal Abdalla, and Ali Mazrui who was visiting Khartoum at that time preparing his great project,The Africans:Triple Heritage.
Yes,it was that and more than that,and that is why the October revolution cemented itself as an event in time and as a cultural moment of the most serious conversations signified by sociopolitical vehemence mitigated by a great awakening of the complex diversity of the Sudanese society. The legacy of the awakening is the obligation for an all-encompassing national agenda for change in the nature, function, and ideology of the state and performance of its government systems. All of these functions of the state, citizenship, and “the creation of a new person and new forms of living through the transformation of everyday life,”1 emerged as serious challenges and great opportunities. October was and is the “hour of the citizen” that “through stunning victory lifted citizens to new hope and glory”2 from which “all that is sold melts into air”3 and the civil society has emerged. Hence, it is the epitome of an alternative modernity where every Sudanese man and woman got a “grip of the modern world and [made] themselves at home in it.”4 Our modernity story can be traced through three routes that open up solidarity as a collective action by virtue of being public and civil and by opening a wide horizon to the imagination and the possibility to social change while restricting and controlling it as a fact in itself.
It was a time when social scientists,poets,and intellectuals,knowledge workers were called upon to generate knowledge about social movements, ordinary interactions between individuals, power struggles, and everything that could deepen our knowledge of specific, collective, and general human actions. That was the time many young Sudanese joined the Soviet Union and East European institution of learning. It was a new and exciting experience for some of us. It was a terrible one for others. But for people like Abdel Magid,Abdelrahim Abu Zikra, Usama Abdel Rahman al-Nur, Mohamed Kabalo, Kamal al-Jizuli,and Yousif Aidabi, Ibrahim Shadad, Abdel Halim Mustafa, Hydar Ibrahim, Mustafa al-Mubark, Mohamed Sulaiman,Khalid al-Mubark to name a few,who were part of that community of intimate conversation, it was an expression of human spirit,its passionate concerns,vanity,and blindness.That part of a Sudanese human experience was sometimes deliberately overlooked.
Abdel Magid and those who studied in the Soviet Union and East European universities seriously engaged with that human experience within its myriad strands of human, social, and tyrannies of uniform systems. They introduced us to the intellectual developments in the aftermath of the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th conference, Nikita Khurtshiv, and his report “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” It was a time we started to come to the reality of how dangerous could be personalities like Lavrentiy Beria, J. Edgar Hoover and later Salah Nasr and Salah Gosh. It was a time when many needed to know, read, and perform some Bertolt Brecht plays. Many were eager to go beyond the propagandist narrative of Abdullah Obied’s two books: Sudani fi Moscow (A Sudanese in Moscow) and Sudani fi al-Seen (A Sudanese in China). Many were interested in the tones that one can hear in Mohamed al-Makki Ibrahim al-Shuraf al-Jadida (New frontiers) or al-Nur Osman Abakar’s energetic loud voice dominating the conversations, and everybody wanted him to say more and to read Sahaw al-Kalimat al-Maniya. Others liked to see the world within the prism of Mohmed Abdel Hai al-Awada ila Sinner (A Return to Sinner) or through the disillusion of al-Tayib Salah’s Mousim al-Higra lil Shamal (Season of Migration to the North). That was the time were we met face to face with Russian super star Natasha Anastasia Vertinskaya when she came to Khartoum brining with her Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace which dramatized as one of the the longest and most expensive films of all time. Also, to meet face to face with Mimi’s Theodorakis, fight with Stockily Carmichael over race and class, debate al-Sira al-Hilaliya with Jacques Berque, debating issues with Abdel Rahman al-Sharqai, Salah Abdel Sabour, Moieen Basiso and Abdel Rahman al-Khamisi at Omdurman Radio, Abdel Khaliq Mahjoub House and the undersecretary of Ministry of Information Ibrahim HasanKhalil’s residence.
Abdel Magid and his generation of Sudanese students who were in Moscow, Berlin, Braque, and other metropolitan socialist centers introduced us to the fascinating and non-fascinating sides of a different human experience. Abdel Magid and his generation added to the story of Tag al-Sir al-Hassan of Asia wa Afriqua (Asia and Africa) with vivid stories about South America from their colleagues at the different universities. Out of their socialization with class and dorm mates they met in Lummaba and other universities. They added to our curious urge that invited further exploration of the realities of the new world of post colonialism, post-Stalinism, and post-totalitarianism or transfer of totalitarianism. Already the Khartoum bookstores were good in bringing everything new from Jan Paul Sartre, Colin Wilson, the Angry Young Men, John Osborne and his Look Back in Anger, and Kingly Amis, Angela Davis, Malcom X, Black Panther Party, the Beatles and the American Beat Generations. Some heard stories about Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the way he recites his poetry that others laughingly shout Voznesensky’:
I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged.
And then mix all that with verses from Allen Ginsberg famous poem Howel: The United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep.
Khartoum and other urban centers were an open-air forum for contemplative thought. As everyone knew then, you only went to Atinie café in downtown Khartoum at 5 pm and knew about the agenda of the night: a debate bringing together leading politicians: Ismail al-Azhari,Mohmed Ahmed Mahjoub, Mubarak Zaroug, Hasan al-Turabi, Abdel Kaliq Mahjoub, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and others at the University of Khartoum students’ union and other high education Unions. In addition to poetry reading at one of many of the three cities clubs, or Abdullah Hamid al-Amin house, or in one of Khartoum Hotels where Sharhabil Ahmed singing and Ibrahim Afriqano dancing, or where other bands playing somewhere. Groups of like minds meeting somewhere debating issues. Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim once wrote that the best of speech in the Sudan is articulated after 6 pm. Out of that open-air discourse emerged organizations like Apadamec or Tajmou al-Kutab wa al-Fananin al-Taqudmieen (the Association of Progressive Writers and Artists). It emerged out of and served at least one long-debated aspect of the underlying discourse about identity, modernity, and the arts. It brought together some of these members of the intimate conversation who were at home and inspired others like Abdel Majid in other centers of the world to look around them and to contribute to an account of an ultimate structure in which its outline is neither fixed nor final.
Indeed, Abdel Majid’s real community of conversation was within the communist party. For the last half-century or more he surveyed every aspect of his surroundings, whether he was in Germany, England, or the United States, to detect the heart of the most intellectual aspect of any movement, verbal or written, what may be needed to help his party grow into an effective movement. Those who were very close to him knew the tireless effort that included his messages, telephone calls, websites he built and debates he organized. Those who were close to him knew very well the pain he kept in his heart for the disregard that he received from his al-zumala at home. It might be a good idea for those who might be concerned to read Abdel Magid’s resignation letter from the communist party.
Yes, it is true, the 1960s were very exciting years for most of the world. They were also exciting for social movements, social sciences, humanities, the arts, and the new discourses that emerged out of the conversation of the liberation movements, which included but were not limited to civil rights, women, discontent of the marginalized and gender studies. It was the time when the issues of race, identity, tradition, religion, and all the fields that investigated and studied the social reality were made unthinkable and thinkable thinking. The local, regional, and global discourses too were touched by the angel of change and started serious efforts toward liberating themselves from past colonial conditions and their remaining authorities of silence. The university of Khartoum campus turned into a hub for younger scholars from Britain, the United States, and Arab countries, scholars who started with their Sudanese counterpart’s new exploration of ideas that not only questioned colonial studies but also started new models. This group of scholars includes: Sean O’Fahey, Jay Spaulding, Peter Woodard, Tim Niblock, Mark Dufield, Ahmed Shahi, Bill Adams, Jay O’Brian, and Sondra Hale from the United States; Mohamed Gunami Hilal from Egypt; Salma el-Jousi from Palestine; Ahmed al-Shahi from Iraq; and graduate students like Carolyn and Richard Lobban. Randall Fegley was teaching teaching at al-Golid high school. To mention a few. The Sudan Studies Association emerged as another meeting place for Sudanese and Sudanist scholars in the United States and Britain.
Yes, the Sudan Studies Association survived all these years. However, by an odd paradox, the fewer the Sudanese that were in the United States during the time of Majid Satti and Noble Dew Ali and Alijah Mohamed, Duse Mohamed Ali and Marcus Garvey, and Shiekh Hasoun and Malcom X, their intellectual contribution to the everyday life in their host community was far greater than when the pace of their numbers increased.
That was the aftermath of October, 1964, Revolution. In the years that followed the October Revolution, there was a seditious reality—sometimes latent but uncontested—in the foreground of the Sudanese political scene, and at the background of everybody’s mind, of what remained from the October achievements and what might come out of that. As a result of the October, 1964, Revolution, the country witnessed the rise of a new generation of politicians and a new and younger leadership in most of the political parties and associations. These new leaders participated enormously not only by compromising, but they also sometimes vigorously and violently acted against the ethos of a possible new social contract for a liberated Sudan. The mutual hostility and conflict within this new leadership was implacable since day one. Whether by default or by design, that was no less true for those who took over from the older generation. The next generation of leaders also devastated the Sudanese political and social landscape during this time and on critical occasions. Each saw in himself and his program a political party or an ideology that was a divinely prearranged “errand into the wilderness.”5 Hence, most of those new players were decidedly narrow minded and provincial in their partisanships, both in nature and agenda. Individually, they were condescending to each other as well. In other words, because each side functioned and maneuvered from an essentially different conception of authority, weight, power, and measure of moral and political sentimentality, neither side would ever be able to persuade the other of the futility of its own claims. Yet, while conversation could be open sometimes, the etiquette, value, or ideal of courteousness and civility was absent. Similar attitudes were clear, also, behind each other’s talk to the media, as well as during face-to-face conversations and within their contribution to the public discourse. Of course, it did not take long to discover that the totality of liberation had never reached a reasonable degree of favor in its local constituencies or political parties’ programs or expressions. Consequently, the counter-revolution manifested not so much as a break from the liberation ideal but as its reversal—a reversal that centered on the role of the state. Hence, the verbal ferociousness, toxic language, and antagonism, in addition to violence, continued to be conjoined and sometimes to have had a mutual tone and temper of absolute disdain. Hence, the identification of irrelevant conflicts easily shifted to other impulses and the ability to differentiate between a number of groups in which the role of liberation was banished or replaced by anti-liberation discourse.
Sudanese human experience of a generation that sometimes people overlook which is Ali Osman group of Islamists. Or, they never see the formation of the vessel that the Islamists of the same generation bequeathed to the Sudan and the world at large under the camouflage of al-Turabi Islamism that placed everything in their pressure-cooker state. Al-Ingaz from the coup to the state is there brain child and that is why al-Turabi and Islamism were its victim. Second, the route toward the counter-movement or counter-revolutionary impulses that invoked pure difference, which continue to remind us that “repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it.”6 This is the essence of violence that is already prepared and later practiced: “wa a‘idu”.7 The Sudanese Islamists counter revolution never changed that motto. They added all that to the violent result and the deployment of aggression that started at university campuses and on the streets and materialized in the coup and its state. It was the premature death of Abdel Magid that evokes a series of very important parts of both the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary tails of that curve. Ali Osman and group on the negative tail and Ali Bob and school of modernity and intimate conversation on positive tail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2315Vn3VPMA&feature=youtu.be
____________________________
1 George Katsiaficas,The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Edinburgh, AK Press, 2006) 4.
2 Ralf Dahrendorf,Reflections on Revolution in Europe (London, Crown, 1990) 93
3 Marshal Berman,All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, Penguin Books, 1988)
5. Also see Carl Marx: The Communist Manifesto.
4 Ibid
5 Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1956)
6 Gilles Deleuze,Difference and Repletion (London, The Athlone Press, 1994) 71
7 On the Muslim Brotherhood logo is emblazoned Wa Aidu in Arabic under two crossed swards and a Quran book at the top. The term itself is taken from Surat al-Anfal (the Spoils of War Surah 8v. 60) the verse says “Hence, make ready against them whatever force and lathering of horses you are able to muster, so that you might deter thereby the enemies of God,who are your enemy as well.” This has been used by Islamists and all terrorist organizations and individuals to justify their atrocities.