When the Khalifa ruled he feared education and had all the books in his dominions destroyed. Hence not one Sudanese in a hundred can read and write. But the natives respect learning and those at Gordon College are good students.
CHAPTER XXIV
GORDON COLLEGE AND THE WELLCOME LABORATORIES
Away up the Nile valley, so far from the Mediterranean that it took me four days by steamship and railroad to reach it, almost within a stone’s throw of where whole tribes are going naked, and near the site of what was one of the slave centres of Africa, the English have built up a school that is turning out native teachers and judges, government clerks and bookkeepers, mechanics of all sorts, and within certain limits, civil engineers. It has already several acres of college buildings, including large dormitories, well equipped classrooms, a library, a museum, and one of the most remarkable research laboratories of the world.
I refer to Gordon College, which was founded just after the Battle of Omdurman and named in honour of the great general who was killed in sight of where it now stands. The idea was suggested by Lord Kitchener, and the money was contributed by the people of England. The amount raised was seven hundred thousand dollars, to which has been added the munificent gift of Mr. Henry S. Wellcome, an American, who has established the famous Wellcome Laboratory as a part of this institution.
It was through a note of introduction from Sir Reginald Wingate to Dr. James Currie, the president of the college, that I was taken through it and given an insight into its workings and possibilities. The institution stands on the bank of the Blue Nile at the southern end of Khartum, between the British barracks and the palace of the Sirdar. It is a handsome structure of dark red brick of Moorish architecture, built around three sides of a square, with the front facing the river. At the back are beautiful gardens and an experiment plantation where Dr. Currie is testing whether tea and certain other shrubs can be successfully grown.
The college building is of two stories with a tower over the centre. About the inside run wide corridors, or galleries, separated from the gardens by great columns forming cloisters where the students walk between their hours of recitation and study. In the wing at the left of the entrance are the laboratories, museum, and libraries, while in the front and in the wing at the right are the many classrooms which, during my stay, were filled with students.
After I had chatted for a time with Dr. Currie about the college we took a walk through it, visiting the various rooms. I found the college has something like three hundred students, ranging in age from ten to eighteen years and over. The students come from every part of the Sudan. They are of all colours, some having faces as white as our own, while others are the deepest and shiniest of stove-black. Many of them bear gashes and scars, denoting the tribe to which they belong, so that could we read the “trade-marks” we should find that their homes are located in all parts of the regions tapped by the Blue and White Niles. I saw some who came from the province of the Bahr el Ghazal, far up on the edge of the Belgian Congo. Others were from villages in Fashoda, near the River Sobat, while yet others came from the borders of Abyssinia and from the regions along the Red Sea. Quite a number were the sons of the richer chiefs of Kordofan and Darfur, and not a few came from Dongola and Berber. Some of the boys were dressed in the fezzes and gowns of Egypt, others wore the white turbans and long robes of the people of Central Africa. Among them were Coptic and Mohammedan Egyptians, some few Bedouins, and here and there a Negro.
Many of the students have features like ours. Their noses are straight, their lips are thin, and their hair is not kinky, although they are black. Such boys are not Negroes, but the descendants of people from Arabia. Their ancestors had reached a high degree of civilization during the Middle Ages when the Arabic schools and universities were noted over the world.