The Imperialist Design of Khartoum

Article by: Muhsin Khalid

Part Five

The Mahdi in "Khartoum" is portrayed as a Ghoul, a black vampire whose guest room is noticeably occupied by jars filled with cut off heads, whose talk is threatening to kill women and children, every soul..!
The Amazigh in the "Gladiator" are shown as no different. They sip their wine from the skulls of messengers and mail deliverers who are not, by convention, to be killed.
In the movie "300" of 2006, the invading Persians come to fight the Spartans by an army from the underworld; an army of mirabilia; of exotic creatures as though bred from marine and some monster organisms which, in their onslaught in battle have children and women entangled in the cracks of their hoofs and under their folds, before they meet their doom.

In another Hollywood movie we are introduced to a Muslim terrorist. We cannot tell whether he is Palestinian or Egyptian because he uses both accents! He is on board of a ship in which missiles are being smuggled in the dark of the night. When the Americans approach the ship, the terrorist threatens them that he would blow up his mother's head.  The Americans save the innocent Western world from the abominable act of dealing with missiles (which are made in the western world,anyway!) by killing this terrorist. They also save the mother from dying at the hands of her evil son!
This is the image promoted to represent the Eastern in general and the Muslim in particular.  An image meant to be impressed in the minds worldwide.
  
Games and Gameloft 

 
Violent computer games are frequently designed to be set in battlefields in the Middle East. An innocent child in the West can spend long hours at the computer sniping at 'terrorists' in mid-eastern playgrounds: Iraq, Palestine, Somalia and Sudan.
He is poisoned and prepared by this early-age indoctrination to become biased against 'the mad and bloody' East. One such game-making company is Gameloft which deserves to have its products studied seriously and objectively.
What is purported as Western civilization has always been based on invasion, captivity and contested expansion on borders. In spite of this, the West is civilized and the rest are barbarians and blood-shedding savages! As mentioned earlier this word 'barbarian' was  invented in the old days to describe people not living within the walls of Rome.
Africa has no place in the Western mentality except as a savage land inhabited by carnivores who feed on human flesh and drink their toasts in human skulls. But it should be borne in mind that this poor Africa has often been on the defensive against Western attacks!
 

Kings of the World (The Kushites)

{Word reached the Assyrians that the Egyptian army, led by king Tirhakah of Sudan, was coming to attack them.} the Bible, Kings. {Black warriors coming from the land of Kush raise panic.} Bible, Kings, Kushite.
Tiharqa
The Bible refers to rare incidents in the very old history of kingdoms when some African kings and emperors invaded West Africa. Some of these kings are grandparents to the Mahdi, the subject of mockery in this movie. For the Mahdi is a Kushite as per the ancient history and a Nubian in modern terms. 
His grandparents were the kings Amani Pia also known as Bianchi and his counterpart Taharqa or Tirhaka, both known as members of the "Twenty-Fifth Dynasty,"  which ruled old Sudan and Egypt, They were also known as "kings of the world".
All these historical events took place tens of centuries before Christ!
What injustice and what partiality from secular intellectuals living on the eve of the twenty-first century!
Partiality breeds Biased Descriptions
In battle, the British artillery never miss. They always hit with precision both Mahdist horsemen and infantry. On the other hand, when the Mahdi fighters aim their guns carefully they hit and ruin buildings unrelated to the battle! It is not a surrealistic destruction that is intended to create a new reality. It is just to say that while civilized Westerners build, these ignorant mobs destroy!
Before shifting to the narrator of the movie who will verbally confirm this reading, it is worth stressing that, upon the entry of the mobs into Gordon's palace, his aide hands him his sword but Gordon takes a cane instead. Interpret this as sheep to the shepherd are like the Mahdists to Gordon!
It is funny that the Mahdists who were ruthlessly crushed by the guns outside the palace, come to back up on seeing the cane in Gordon's hand! He stands on the top of the stairway while they retreat down to the bottom step. Below him. Underneath him. We have observed and followed this since that scene of the meeting of the Mahdi with Gordon when the Mahdi is shown as having a much shorter stature than Gordon.
We observe this here and will observe it later on when we 'read' the statue of Gordon mounting a camel way above all the people of Sudan.
King Tiharqa
The River War by Winston Churchill

"Khartoum" is a movie that is densely populated by comic and Mirabiliac reality. The men at the bottom of the stairway who backed up on seeing a cane are the very people who are described in real dairies of imperialism as "the bravest that walked on earth", a term yet to be carefully verified. They are the very men we are told about by Winston Churchill who had been a military correspondent in Sudan at that time before he later became the Prime Minister of Britain and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!
Invaders should reap dynamite not prizes! 
Churchill (Nobel for Peace)
In his book "The River War", Churchill describes various races and origins in Sudan but settles down on two distinct categories. The Kushites or Negroids, blacker than 'coal'. A comic but racist expression derived from how Western mythology perceives black. The other category he calls the Arab settlers in Sudan.
Churchill emphasizes the stereotyped image of the African at large and the black Africans specifically.
His descriptive imagination does not leave the box that negates people not within the walls of Rome and labels them 'barbarians'.
Churchill does not miss out on clarifying the picture of the Mahdists in light of their counterparts, their fellow country men, the barbarians using the same mind-set which propagates barbarism as a standard, a yardstick as it is rooted, unfortunately in the Western mind.
Nevertheless, Churchill shies away from calling the Arab-Kushite entity of the Mahdists cowards. In fact he attributes to them such qualities as strength, manhood, decision, courage and integrity. All these qualities are passed along with many ethnic and religious name-calling. Yet, he denies any description of the Mahdists that resembles how this movie shows them.
Here is a quote from his book 'The River War':


"The Soudanese are of many tribes, but two main races can be clearly distinguished: the aboriginal natives, and the Arab settlers. The indigenous inhabitants of the country were negroes as black as coal. Strong, virile, and simple-minded savages, they lived as we may imagine prehistoric men--hunting, fighting, marrying, and dying,
with no ideas beyond the gratification of their physical desires, and no fears save those engendered by ghosts, witchcraft, the worship of ancestors, and other forms of superstition common among peoples of low development. They displayed the virtues of barbarism. They were brave and honest."

End of Part Five. MK.



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