They Planted A Stone (1954)

[Music] [Music] [Music] in the heart of Africa torrential rains in the mansions of your gander reigns was path twists like a snake as it searches for a way from the watershed to the sea from the peaks of Ethiopia another flood speights down into the flat plain of the Sudan Blue Nile and White Nile meet search on to the north through the desert wastes down the river valley of egypt the country with no rain to the sea four thousand miles from its source to us in the sudan the source of the flood had ever been a mystery we had heard that once each er it's crept over the valley of Egypt first filling the low places then the whole valley when the floor withdraws the saw will be bountiful but in the Sudan the Nile seldom overflowed its banks and only its path across the plains was fringed with green in summer it dropped far below the level of the plain but long ago men had learned how to raise its water they labored in the heat of summer not as slaves but as men creating the means of life by their own energy in time they invented the sake [Music] the saga was turned by oxen and the water was lifted out of the river lifted maybe a second time until it could flow upon the plain even when the river was little with such devices the people living beside the river created gardens for these small streams could make fatale only a narrow ribbon of green on either side of the Nile and the great river flowed on to Egypt and did not help the far greater number of my people living on the dry plains of the Sudan come with me across these Plains away from the river to Remy town the village where I was born sixty-five years ago in this my father's house once each year my father like all his ancestors since the world was young waited anxiously for the rains the one benevolent act of nature which made life on the plains possible [Music] all days after each fall of rain the land was busy with people sewing the one crop of dura millet which could be taken from it in each year [Music] our life depended on each grain of seed being multiplied a hundredfold by the miracle of growth and it was served the rains were sufficient but if they passed us by what could we do good man control the reins the son stole all the Nilan flood [Music] and so sometimes it would happen that even as he caught the heads of his Dora my father knew that it would not provide sufficient bread for him and his family until the next harvest was ripe a whole year away I his eldest son Hassan grew up in the knowledge that one year in seven would be a year of famine [Music] now the Daath are exhausted itself in giving us our brain it was cracked dead we poured the drain into storage pits [Music] covered it with earth earth already powdered with the heat of early summer then from a hundred metres in the earth we drew up water the plains were dry our herds were thirsty and from one sunrise on to the next for three months some more life became just a matter of drawing water at the whale [Music] Azrael a bird we dreamed that a Nile might flow upon the plane but it was only a dream and soon the Grayson round the village was exhausted and we parked our teams and all our worldly belongings and set out in such a better grazin within reach of watering places along the night we had set out in this manner every year since Adam was driven out of the Garden of Eden to wander in the wilderness there was endless land and there no crops would grow up on it for drought our goats could find 11 there without them we could not have live my mother Amira spun their wool into thread from this she could weave our tents our clothing and our blankets and we idled away the days six long months while the goats grazed even upon the bark of the thorn bushes and upon their roots and goats milk will lived throughout the dry summer on sour milk an unleavened bread from our door such was the pattern of each year each lifetime [Music] when I was 20 years old they anointed my head with sandalwood and sweet-smelling oils and I was married then I took earth and water from the well and built a home and I begat a son and I called him sight which means happiness there was a daughter and a second son and the dared weariness of our life soon descended upon them too then one day when the men of the village were out with their herds something happened which side was never to forget what was this thing that moved yet without legs from inside came people one of them white skinned and wearing strange garment when I shake dare to approach he spoke our language but where had he come from why was he here they set up strange implements and made signs one to another then they planted something in the ground it was a stone then after they had neither a dance rounded they went away the sound faded we were alone again but for the stone at the edge of the village we might have thought that this visitation had been a mirage yet we had heard the sound which was to change our lives [Music] near the river not one engine many engines were throbbing in 1922 the governor of Blue Nile province started yet bigger ones engines to pump water up from the river onto the Gojira plane great engines Nile conquerors doing the work of thousands of ox-drawn sagas this was only a pilot scheme part of a ten-year experiment to find a crop whose export would finance the whole country's development cotton was that crop this wasn't a plan on paper here was the evidence now the administration with the backing of the City of London and of Britain's cotton industry hoped to Dam the Nile at Sanaa and irrigate 2 million acres on the Gojira this scheme was but part of a still greater plan to control the whole length of the Nile the idea of Nile control was started in 1837 when Muhammad Ali planned by damming the Nile to raise the low sum of water onto a part of the Delta when repaired and strengthened in 1887 by British engineers it was capable of raising the summer water onto almost the whole of the Delta giving Egypt a second crop to feed her rising population the next step was more Weir's to double the harvest of Upper Egypt then in 1902 one of the world's most remarkable achievements the Aswan reservoir a hundred and sixty miles long to store five million tons of floodwater for use in the dry season when more storage was needed Egypt looked beyond her frontiers into the Sudan her hope to store water here near the junction of the blue and white Niles clashed with the Sudan's intention to bring water to the kazir a plane from a dam and reservoir at Sanaa this clash over the ownership of Nile waters was solved wisely by negotiation Egypt might build her own reservoir in Sudanese territory at jebel earlier and could have a half interest in the storage at Sanaa when Sanaa was being built in 1924 the pump stations raised water onto some thousands of acres later to be incorporated into the kaziri cotton scheme and thus it was that Hasson and his son saw green things growing ahead of them on land that had always been wilderness in the heat of summer when their world should have been dried up there was grazing for his hungry animals what is happening has denial changed its course what are those green leaves that grow instead of dried fawns the plant that was growing was cotton someone had stolen our land for cotton [Music] and I was angry and afraid for in my heart I knew that here was something stronger than me and all my people and therefore when another white man visited us poured water down a trench and told us to imagine it was the Blue Nile I was not willing to believe his words he took a head of adora stuck it in the ground to mark the position of Remy tab 30 miles away from the river I wondered what false promises he with me but he showed us ahead of Dura Versailles that had never been seen before we would all have such Dora he said if the nile came to rahmatan and there would be Libya for herds and cotton perhaps it wasn't just a plan to steal more of our land then he told us how the profits from the sale of the cotton would go as to four parts to the government for supplying us with water to the company which would provide the money and organize the work two parts and to the tenant farmers that is to each of us four parts for our labor the dura and Libya would be our own all these things were brought about he said when the government dams denial at Sonora what she said how the river would rise and flow across the plains even to remit up we built Sanaa two miles long with 80 sluice gates to pass the flood without obstruction when gages upstream report that the flood is slackening the sluices are lowered and the tale of the flood is trapped in the reservoir stretching 80 miles upstream for half the year the engineers passed the water 2,000 miles down the Nile to Egypt from August to January it belongs to the Sudan and is drawn off into the canal on the far side of the river the sluices of the head of the canal were first raised in 1925 a new pattern grew and famine and drought were banished from 2 million acres of wilderness [Music] our dream that the Nile would flow upon the plain had become true never again would there be drought yet though we had become partners in what they said was the largest farm in the world we were still simple people we might plant cotton instead of Dora with our digging sticks but everything else in those first years of a scheme was a mystery to us fertilizers mechanical plant what could we know about them it worked hard to go on even while we learned the companies block inspectors became my instructors they drilled the routine of our new life into us with strict discipline crops must be rotated I was told today we know that rotation is necessary but at that time how could I understand and I was angry since then many things which ones would have been miracles have become just a part of our everyday life of my life I cotton the spread as you will know to protect it from disease look at my irrigated Dora so tall yet when I was a child I had to bend low to cut it and there is the lluvia form I heard all this on land that was wilderness come again over the now fertile plain into Remi tab the surveyors stone is still there we still keep goats but never again will we wonder with them in the wilderness look if we are sick there's the health visitor come to tenders today and every day at the coop we can buy tea coffee a hundred things from distant lands that were unknown to us not long ago I can show my grandson how houses are built not of sun-dried mud but a fired bricks and mortar now we are drilling a deep well when it is finished six taps will give us cool water to drink all the time we're learning new ideas and our world is being transformed look is not Omar Yousef one of our own people already a field inspector have we not to schools where a few years ago we had none thus the knowledge of the whole world lies open to the sons of God hurts too little made my own grandson what opportunities lie before this children opportunities with my generation just missed yet we helped to create them with a new wealth from our cotton its flowers its ripening C bulbs only 30 years or so ago I drove my goats into the growing cotton but now [Music] for their labor the tenants receive four tenths of the profits from the cotton they grow a 2/10 share went to the company for financing and managing the scheme the company was the brain of the scheme controlling its millions of capital sale of the harvest the welfare of 900 villages it brought the science and Finance of the West to a primitive people and did not enslave them but made them partners to the government of a Sudan for building and maintaining cenar and the main canals a 4/10 share this revenue from this one scheme from this one dam provides more than 2/3 of the income of the whole of the Sudan Nile control did not end at Cynara more Weir's have been built in Egypt as Farnes hiked and storage have been increased there are plans for a new reservoir in the Sudan at Malawi in 1936 jebel earlier was completed above sooner a reservoir site has been surveyed at rosaries and plans finalized to bypass the wasteful start marshes one day Lake Albert will be dammed and of the source of the White Nile at Owen Falls the great hydroelectric scheme is about to transform the life of Central Africa and by damming Uganda's Lake Victoria it will form a reservoir the size of England whose stored water will break the drought in the Sudan you the pundit Azir a plane but has a a nation to raise its head in 1951 after a life of 25 years the company's investment was repaid with interest and the scheme became the property of the government and people of the Sudan [Music] [Music] [Music]