When Habib Ould Mahfoud signed his first articles in the fledgling independent press, he added his social function: teacher of French. If we find in his pen accents that might seem borrowed from Rabelais, Voltaire and San Antonio, we should therefore not be unduly surprised.
Having become editor-in-chief of Mauritania's first opposition newspaper, Le Calame, he described a society in full transformation, sometimes in heartrending tones. We offer you this prose text, easily accessible to Mauritanians and a true social and political chronicle.
"Criticism is not action; it merely follows action" (Ludwig Feuerbach)
My dear camel,
I already know it is not easy to be a camel these days. You work hard enough to be able to think of other things. But I am sure you will forgive me, from the depths of your desert, for having addressed this letter to you.
I am writing, in fact, to say nothing. Brilliant, isn't it? First of all, don't worry about the epigraph. It means nothing. It is true that this Feuerbach is no fool... Well, no more than anyone else... it justifies nothing. At most it reflects our current intellectual inability to produce by ourselves and for ourselves... We have fallen back into an intellectual Middle Ages where the Magister Dixit is more current than ever. We have become full-time consumers... But we consume only by-products, toxic waste.
Our cultural space is a sad theatre where young men with Nietzschean moustaches step on the toes of old men telling rosaries of medieval quotations.
Everyone struts about on stage — shouting, hailing, accusing, refusing, excusing, demanding, obliging, setting themselves up... before an empty hall. The audience has left, weary of these antics. The orchestra of the "elite" drowns this masquerade in a cacophony no one listens to.
Camel, our culture is no more than a scrap of paper... in a toilet bowl. We have become masters of mimicry, of performance. The press, conformism, intellectual comfort and parroting are our watchwords.
We get drunk on imported ersatz. We gorge ourselves on ideologies cooked up in the McDonald's of universal mediocrity... We chew chewing-gum that others, elsewhere, spat out long ago.
Camel, we look for our clothes in ready-to-wear shops. And for our ideas in ready-to-think shops.
All this to tell you that I had to call on a German to express an idea that any camel could have found while ruminating.
Forgive me, dear friend, for wasting a few years of your precious time... Thank goodness you have no watch... You know, that diabolical object that measures time, that conditions us so thoroughly that I wonder whether it wasn't the watch that invented us. By the way, are you attending your literacy classes regularly? Don't tell me you always knew how to read and write — it isn't true. I know how frustrating it is for an adult to leave behind his certainties and his foolish comfort to learn to read and write. At that age one always wonders what education is for... especially when it has no purpose... Well, while you're at it, enrol your grandmother too — that way she will at least be able to listen to the Wednesday evening news on Radio Mauritania.
My dear camel, apart from that, all is well. Your nephew is fine. I saw him the other day. He told me he had carried his hump just about everywhere: the Gulf, Libya, Senegal. He has been hired as a taxi driver. And it's a job that pays. In Nouakchott there are so few taxis and so many people that I suggested to someone highly placed that from now on it should be the people who carry the cars. It's more economical and it solves the problem. We will all stick registration stickers on our foreheads and a number plate on our heads. And the cars will raise a front wheel to hail us.
The other day, I heard that from January '89 a licence would be required to drive camels... Can you imagine? TOOOT! Stop! Police! Papers! Hop to it! Handbrake! Indicator! Get down! What has your camel got in its belly? Insurance? Overloaded! One person too many! Tell me, can you picture it? A camel stopping at stop signs, slamming on the brakes at red lights, braking on all four legs to pick up a pretty young woman by the market?
It would be sublime… Let's stop dreaming...
You laugh, you laugh, camel... And you are wrong. Because deep down I like this life. Because it is only a transition. Because it will disappear of its own accord. Because the situation is difficult but not desperate… Because men and women still believe in their country, despite the idiotic rhetoric, the nebulous discourse, the outdated ideologies, the tautological analyses. Despite the fines issued to camels, the literacy classes for cows, the sale of dung in supermarkets, the bras imposed on goats.
Despite the fish we export only to import it back, our iron we sell so as to buy afterwards. Despite these businessmen who do no business, these directors who direct nothing, these millionaires who beg, these paralytic athletes. Yes, camel, we hope. And we are right to hope.
Camel, between your powdery dunes and your sad stars, you must be terribly bored… Come here to Nouakchott, bring your family, your neighbours, even your herdsman if you must, that sadistic tormentor! Come. Take some newspaper, a jerrycan, an empty tin of beans, and pitch your shack wherever you like... I can just see you striding with your lofty gait through the Cinquième market, between the veil sellers and the boubou merchants. Do as everyone does. You are Mauritanian too, for heaven's sake! Don't forget your identity card, your nationality certificate, your criminal record, and stick a 50-ouguiya stamp on your muzzle. That way you won't be able to open it any more, and you'll look like a handwritten application.
Camel, my brother camel. Don't come, if you prefer… I understand you, we understand you; like you we have known the intoxication of transparent spaces, of blue-tinged infinities.
We have drunk the moonlight, like you… Like you we have found mirages, sought elsewheres that exist nowhere… Camel, we came to know that poetry is the demand for a world that is not ours — and we left.
And my country, camel, and my people, revealed themselves to be one long, long unfinished poem. A poem making itself, alive, building its flesh from its own flesh, breathing the world, vibrating to the rhythm of its own perfume.
And I, and you, and we, are in the end nothing but traitors and apostates. Farewell.
Habib Ould Mahfoudh