Being Malhalla for thirty years

Para los verdaderos Sufas.

Everyday, Mister Sufa and Mister Lapir drunk their midmorning coffee together. Some of the young teachers used their appearance in the library’s cafeteria as a cuckoo clock: they both announced twelve-o-clock. For many decades, from Monday to Friday, Sufa and Lapir had been going down to the cafeteria, had seated and had drunk their coffee on a 15 minutes break. The whole university community thought that the old professors, both in their eighth decade, were such close friends that they didn’t need to talk much. But they were wrong: Mister Sufa and Mister Lapir hadn’t held a conversation for 30 years.

The origin of this enmity traced back to a lost tribe from the Ecuatorial Africa, called “Malhala”. In the early sixties, when Mister Sufa was a young promising Doctor of Sociology, he discovered some clues of a unique tribe in Ecuatorial Guinea, in the region of Kié-Ntem. The Malhallas treated their women as equals and, among them, males and females shared the children education, food collection and village defense. In spite of this rarity in Africa Sociology and their importance for the Marxist School –predominant in those years-, no one had been able to contact them. Mister Sufa took the challenge of investigating them as a personal mission and involved his younger PhD student, Mister Lapir, who agreed to dedicate his doctoral thesis to the lost tribe.

For five years, both, thick as thieves, studied the complex sociology of the Malhalas, gathering the little information that arrived from Africa. In 1965 and 1967 they travelled to Ecuatorial Guinea, but they found twice that the tribe had moved deeper in Africa from their last known village. While they were preparing their third expedition for 1969, Spain recognized the independence of the country and the new dictator, Fernando Macias, promoted the hate for foreigners, especially Spanish. Sufa and Lapir cancelled the travel and decided to spend the stop finishing Lapir’s doctoral thesis. In 1970, Mister Lapir was a new Doctor in Sociology, although some member of his Dissertation Committee argued that “his theory is so brilliant that compensates the weakness of the poor practical application on the Malhalas, who remain almost unknown”.

In 1975, after Franco’s death, travelling to the deep jungle of Guinea was safer, so Sufa and Lapir came back to the field research. The result was a unmitigated disaster: the Malhalla’s had completely disappeared. The only investigation they were able to do was shopping on Bata flea market five bags of pieces of pottery, claimed by the natives as “100% Malhalla’s”. Back in Spain, the sociologists discovered that only three of the hundred pieces could have been artifacts from the egalitarian tribes.

After the travel, Mr. Lapir decided to change his investigation line. The afternoon that he told Mr. Sufa, the shouting could be heard two offices away. The older teacher called him “a traitor” and screamed that he was “one of the biggest disappointments of Modern Sociology”. Two weeks later, the scene of both having their coffee together was a relief for the university staff. Everybody imagined they had reached a commitment, but, actually, Mister Sufa had promised that he wouldn’t talk to Mister Lapir again, although his former pupil tried, again and again, to work things out.

But Lapir didn’t go back on it. He started a new investigation in formal and informal social networks. He became one of the most prestigious scientists in his field so, when Facebook and Twitter arose, he was first on the starting line of the rush of explaining such great phenomena. The evolution of both professors couldn’t be more different: Sufa still dressing his tweed suits, corduroy trousers and horn-rimmed glasses; Lapir changed often his style, always trendy, and he also looked much younger than his friend. Lapir was invited to the most famous conferences and he published in the top journals. Sufa started to investigate how other cultures (Portuguese and English essentially) had met the Mahallas in the last centuries (their discovery had been forgotten). Although he received the recognition of all the scientific community, few of his colleagues read or quoted his articles.

Nevertheless, for thirty years, both shared their coffee in silence everyday. In 2009, Sufa’s secretary (he never learned to use a computer) received an email from an engineer of ExxonMobil. Building an oil pipe in the middle of Gabon, they had found a tribe that matched exactly with the Malhalas. Intrigued, the engineer found Sufa’s research on the Internet. Suddenly, without telling anyone –he wanted to protect the scoop-, the old professor travelled three weeks later to Africa and developed, completely isolated, a one year investigation.

When he came back, he went, arrogantly, straight to Mr Lapir’s office. He opened the door with a big slam. But he found an empty room. After asking to a young student, he discovered that two months after he had left Spain, the old professor had died of an old cancer disease.

The fire alarms of Lapir’s office started to yell one hour later. The old professor was found burning old papers in a bonfire in the middle of his place, tears welled up in his eyes. He only repeated two things: “I could have known” and “But worst of all, when I got there, I found myself describing today’s Spanish society”.

14 de abril de 2011