Page 169 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

166 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

As most native Kuwaitis were illiterate and unskilled, except in callings for

which there was now little demand, employment was created for them as
government functionaries of one kind or another. Twenty per cent of the
shaikhdom’s labour force is made up of Kuwaitis, and 70 per cent of these are
employed by the state. The overwhelming majority of them are still illiterate,
or at best semi-literate. They perform no manual tasks, they exercise no useful
skills, they provide no necessary services. Yet they, and the small section of
their compatriots who possess some commercial, professional or technical
competence, alone enjoy the privileges and responsibilities of Kuwaiti citizen­

ship. The immigrants, the Uitlanders (to employ the name given by the native
Boers to the foreigners who flooded into the Transvaal republic in the late
nineteenth century after the discovery of gold), whose labour and skills have
created modern Kuwait, possess no .rights. They cannot own property or
businesses in the shaikhdom and they are effectively denied, through stringent
residential requirements, any real opportunity of acquiring Kuwaiti citizen­
ship.

A fundamental disunity, therefore, exists in the shaikhdom between the
native Kuwaitis who constitute less than half the population and the Uitlanders
who outnumber them. There are other rifts in Kuwaiti society. The generation
that was adult at the time that the oil wealth began to pour in had lived their
lives up to then within the narrow limits imposed by their exiguous resources,
their relative immobility and their illiteracy. Their horizons, mental as well as
physical, were, except for the comparative few of them who ventured abroad as
merchants or sailors, those of their own society and of the immediate sea and

desert around them. Affluence enabled them to improve their material circum­
stances, to taste new pleasures, to divert themselves with novelties, to travel
abroad, and generally to acquaint themselves with the affairs of a wider world.
If they could not read or write, and were in fact never to learn, they could now
inform themselves of men and events far and near through the modern means
of communication which had become available to them - the radio, the cinema

and television.
The children of this generation of Kuwaitis are now grown to manhoo
nurtured by the state, educated by the state, and now, for the most part,
employed by the state. Between them and their parents, between those raise
in the old Kuwait and those raised in the new, there is a clearly de ne gap,
tenuously spanned by the ties of blood and adherence to Islam, but more

conspicuously marked by differences in political attitudes and style, Pers0^
tastes and conduct, and knowledge of the world outside. These youn
Kuwaitis grew up at a time when the ideas of Arab nationalism
penetrate the upper Gulf states, and when the cult of the late ama
Nasser was attaining its height in the Arab world. Their education
hands of Emigre Egyptian teachers, and to a lesser extent ose 0

Palestinians. The content of this education was strongly po iuca ,