Season of Migration to the North: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

On a July night, during a summer season when the Nile river floods, Mustafa Sa’eed disappears. The village men search for him along the riverbank, but they cannot find his body—it seems that he has drowned. The narrator, who has returned to Khartoum for work, hears of Sa’eed’s death in the capital. Since the night of Sa’eed’s long narration, the narrator has been seized by strange feelings. He wonders, especially after Sa’eed’s death, whether Sa’eed had even existed, or whether he was simply a figment of the narrator’s imagination.

The narrator recalls that, after Mustafa finished narrating his life story on that night, he left Mustafa’s house and wandered through the deserted village. Although the village was deeply familiar to him, he had never walked through it at such a late hour. As he walked, he heard one of the villagers, Wad Rayyes, making love to his wife, and he remembered Mustafa Sa’eed’s description of “two thighs, opened wide and white” in London.

The narrator then went to his grandfather’s house, where he found him already preparing for his morning prayers. In the presence of his grandfather, the narrator felt a sense of stability and rootedness, feeling connected to the village again after missing it during his time abroad. He thought of the colonizers—the British—ruling over Sudan, and mused that, sooner or later, they will leave. With these thoughts, he left his grandfather’s house and finally went to bed. Soon after that evening of Mustafa Sa’eed’s narration, the narrator relocated to Khartoum to take up a job working for the ministry of education.

Although Mustafa Sa’eed died two years earlier, the narrator continues to think of him while living in Khartoum. Sa’eed has become a “phantom” in the narrator’s mind. At strange occasions, Sa’eed comes up. On a train journey one day, the narrator begins a conversation with a retired civil servant, a Mamur, who, reminiscing about his school days, suddenly mentions Sa’eed. The Mamur had been in the same class as Sa’eed in school, and he tells the narrator that Mustafa had been the most brilliant of the students—especially in the English language. He was so brilliant that he had been sent on scholarships to study in Cairo and London. But nothing was heard of him again.

The narrator listens to the Mamur, without mentioning that he himself had known Mustafa Sa’eed, and that he has died by drowning (quite possibly a suicide). When he died, Mustafa left the narrator as the guardian of his two sons.

Mustafa again appears to the narrator unexpectedly, less than a month after the encounter with the Mamur. At a party in Khartoum, a group of guests begins discussing who was the first Sudanese to marry an English woman. Someone identifies Mustafa Sa’eed as the first.

The man who identifies Sa’eed says that Sa’eed had settled in England and had worked for the British in the 1930s, helping them to keep a hold on the colony of Sudan. Mustafa Sa’eed, he says, was one of the most loyal supporters of the British—and of their colonial enterprise in Sudan. Now, the man says, Mustafa is a millionaire living in the British countryside. The narrator corrects him. He tells him that, at the time of his death, Mustafa Sa’eed owned very little and lived in a small, obscure village in northern Sudan.

An Englishman at the party goes on to recount what he heard about Mustafa Sa’eed: that he had become a darling of the British aristocracy in England, as well as of the leftists, who used their relations with him to show how liberal they were. In England, Sa’eed had developed a reputation for being a great ladies’ man.