Warriors

Life and Death among the Somalis

GERALD HANLEY

With afterwords by
Joseph Hone and Aidan Hartley

Table of Contents

Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Afterword to the 1993 edition
Afterword to the 2004 edition
Copyright

Chapter 1

TRUE SOLITUDE is when the most restless part of a human being, his longing to forget where he is, born on earth in order to die, comes to rest and listens in a kind of agreed peace. In solitude, once the taste has settled, a man can think upon death with as much pleasure as upon life, and it is in solitude that one can best understand that there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here, that there is no losing and no winning, no real end to greed or lust, because the human appetite for novelty can only be fully satisfied by death.

Thousands of days and nights spent in wildernesses taught me that a person can never truly know another, or be known by another, and that the pleasure of life is in the trying. A man can never convey fully what it is that so strangely disturbs him, the uneasy unrest in him that nothing material can properly satisfy. It is a fear of accepting this which makes a man fear what he thinks to be loneliness, a being alone, without other people. Acceptance of enforced solitude gradually dissolves this illusion. After long solitude when you sit and talk with others you realise that most of what we say to each other means very little at all. Perhaps that is why a Zen monk will give a silent sermon to a multitude, laughing without trace because he knows there is nothing to say which does not require emotional undertones to give it the appearance of credibility. Even so, one likes to go on talking rubbish with friends, while listening to oneself doing it. At least solitude teaches one to listen to oneself talking this rubbish, whereas before one thought one’s every word was golden with value. In the early months of isolation in a wilderness, particularly when burdened with responsibilities which may suddenly turn dangerous, among actively violent and savage people, a sort of hysteria develops in the character. Ferocity will be replied to ferociously, out of fear, and fear is hatred. One’s first sight of ferocity arouses hatred for the ferocious, and one is liable to respond with savagery. It is hard to describe the hatred and contempt one can feel for tribesmen who have slain the women of their enemies, or caused them to die of thirst. Later, when hysteria has been replaced by acceptance of isolation – the fact that one is hundreds of miles out of reach of ‘rescue’ should anything go wrong, one feels merely contempt for savagery. You do not hate the active savage anymore. You realise instead the size of the pitiful value he places on the need to kill, the need for revenge, the desire to humiliate his enemy (which includes you), especially when thousands of helpless people were being slain by bombs in European cities every night. One knew then that one was one with the savage, while not being so innocently honest about one’s savagery as the desert savage. Then despair tries to set in.

There is nothing like isolation in an atmosphere of electric violence for bringing before one’s mind the understanding that the varnish of two thousand years is so thin as to be transparent. It is living in civilisation that keeps us civilised. It is very surprising, and alarming at first, how swiftly it vanishes when one is threatened by other men, men of almost mindless resolve. They know if you are frightened of them. They know too if you will kill as readily as they.

But the fear does slowly seep in, if you are isolated for long enough among warriors who hate what you represent, a threat to their joyous wars.

I once told a chief that I would kill him myself if he let his warriors go killing again (something he was planning to do). He liked that. He smiled, after studying my face. After all he could understand that far more easily than the kind of government he thought I represented. Yet he knew I meant it because I had come to hate him, as much as he hated me. Even so he started laughing, and I laughed with him at the absurdity of our situation in that wilderness.

‘What if I cannot stop the warriors?’ he said.

‘Do you want to stop them?’ I asked him. He laughed. ‘I will be honest,’ he said. ‘I do want them to kill their enemies. But I will try and stop them. You are not allowed by the government to kill me, are you?’ he asked me, serious and calm.

‘I’m not allowed to, but I will,’ I assured him. ‘All you have to do is to see that your warriors do no more killing.’

That threat to the chief was a sign of fellow savagery, though I did not know it until years later. It was a sign of fear, fear of what might come if tribal killing started again. If one could kill the real cause of the blood feuds, this chief, then the cause of the trouble would be gone. It seemed simple, and the chief understood its simplicity.

I had no desire to civilise these wild nomads, and told them so quite often. They could kill again after I had gone, but while I was there among them I wanted peace. This seemed very unreasonable and selfish, to the chiefs with whom I discussed it.

‘Then you do not care what happens to us?’ one of the chiefs said, with that ready playful wit one appreciated so much among the nomads.

‘If you chiefs could vanish,’ I told them, ‘your young men would have a chance to forget the feuds of the past. You are out of date now.’

And that was true, and tragic too: the story of all the tribal cultures which have seen the cement mixers and the schoolmasters on the horizon, and feared them.

The nomads were just as maddened by that huge glaring sun above as were we few white men thrown by chance among them.

Yet it was the isolation more than anything which was hardest to bear, at first. Eventually one grew to love it, and those who knew long isolation in those Somali wastes and survived it, will miss it forever. It was the most valuable time of one’s life.

One had years of wilderness in which to brood on the reasons why men kill each other, in wilderness in which killing a man was only an act of pleasure, though disguised as a tribal duty. One had years to discover that one’s longing for mail, newspapers, radio, could slowly diminish. After Somalia nowhere would ever be lonely, or isolated, again. The silence of wilderness eventually seeps in and makes an area which will always long for that kind of silence again.

To wake up at first light, a flea on a prairie of rock and sand, each morning, is to realise that one’s own importance is something one highly overrates. It also teaches one to love life, and to try and not kick too hard when death slips in and it is time to go.

One was mad, all right, after a year of it. One sees that now, looking back.

Chapter 2

PASSING DOWN the long coastline of Somalia in an Italian ship the other week I saw again the scorched, burned, dried-out rock and hot sand on which I used to sit with Hashim at night and talk. I have never forgotten one particular thing he said to me.

‘When all your machines, and ships, and aircraft, and all those things you make, when they are all finished, our Arab dhows will still be sailing the seas, and we Arabs will hold together the world that we made, from India and farther East too, to here and to Europe. We are not finished yet, even though we are beggars now.’

Even if he had not confided that thought to me one could never forget Hashim; his gentleness, his fine presence, his dignity, his quiet, sardonic humour, and most important of all I can never forget how he helped Chas and myself to keep mutinous troops (and they had a right to be mutinous) from shooting us out of hand.

Kalanka. Hordio. Those two names for me will always summon up memories of swirling sandstorms, heat, and billions and billions of flies, and a threat of coming madness, and of Hashim, the merchant, the calm, knowing, patient, friendly Arab who was isolated with us in that wilderness of burning winds and hot rock.

Staring at the Somali coast, five miles off, I wondered if Hashim was still there, back in the trade which the war had destroyed for him, or if he had gone to Hadramaut or Yemen.

He used to wear a striped turban, a loose jacket of white cotton, and a long lungi reaching to his sandals. He had a face like an Andalusian Spaniard; long, sallow, grave, a handsome face with calm, watchful black eyes. He was about forty.

‘I have nothing left to give you,’ Hashim said to me the first time I sent for him. It was the end of 1941 and I had been a few months in that wilderness, a thousand miles or so from base.

‘What have you ever given me?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve never even met you before.’

‘I mean your army,’ he said. ‘I have lost my trade and my money because of this war, and when your army arrived here they took my camera and my pistol.’ He smiled. ‘I have nothing left to hand over to you. I am not dangerous any more.’ He spoke good Italian, and good Swahili.

‘I want to borrow some money from you,’ I told him.

‘Ah!’ He eyed me sardonically. ‘Money? The army wishes to borrow money from Hashim? Why? And what money? I haven’t any money.’

‘But you have more money than I have,’ I told him. ‘I have nothing. And I must find something to pay the troops with.’

‘I have loaned what I could afford to the other officer,’ Hashim told me. ‘A few hundred lire.’

‘You know the state of things here, Hashim,’ I said. ‘We are cut off, an enormous distance from base. No trucks come. We have no news. We are isolated here. We have had no money to pay our troops. I want you to help again.’ He laughed, and I laughed with him. Then Chas came in and he was laughing too, two conquerors trying to borrow money from an impoverished Arab so as to pay the troops, who were all recruited from ex-Italian askaris.

‘It is an interesting situation,’ Hashim said.

The pay department never did solve the mess that it made of the pay situation up in that wilderness.

Chas and I used to have conversations that went something like this: ‘Tension’s mounting among the askaris again. They’ve been sulking all morning.’

‘How long is it now since they were last paid?’

‘Five and a half months, except for that six hundred lire I borrowed from Hashim and gave them. But what’s the bloody use of that, about ninepence halfpenny. I don’t know why they don’t shoot us.’

‘How many times have they mutinied now?’

‘Three.’

‘They can’t get hold of any ammo, can they?’

‘No. But those bayonets look a bit longer than usual today.’

‘It’s certainly marvellous how they put up with it. But they know we’re living like pigs too, that we’ve had no mail for months, no pay, no booze, and anyway if I see any goat meat again on my plate I’ll kill the cook. I told him so last night too.’

‘Again?’

‘Yes. Again.’

We gave an order that in future the askaris could only mutiny on Fridays. They took it seriously, the sergeant explaining to me later that the troops could not understand why the conquerors had no money, sent no trucks up here, still had the troops using Italian weapons and equipment. Where was the conquest?

‘We’re still fighting in Abyssinia,’ we told the sergeant. ‘Every truck is needed. And even if we had trucks to spare they probably couldn’t be spared to come a thousand miles up here, yet. Patience.’

Alone Chas and I cursed the transport people and the pay department, wanting the transport officers, who were drinking gin in Mogadishu, marooned in a stifling wilderness, as we were, so as to learn, etcetera …

As if to dominate the troops, as if to show iron will, we drilled and trained them in the hot sand each day, and then drilled the raw NCOs, breaking them all from their Italian drill, and they began to respond, even forgetting their legitimate grievances for an hour or two. They were beginning to feel the approach of that mass surrender in drill on the square, when a unit begins to feel as one person in the steady, unragged crash of perfected arms drill. I used to watch their faces, their eyes.

Sometimes during these drill sessions, which were held on the hard open sand arena in front of the sun-dried barrack huts, Hashim would come and watch from the shade. I used to wonder what he thought of the sharp, savage cries of command and the intense crashing responses of hands, rifles and feet from the troops. Did he, I wondered, begin to understand that it was this machinery of drill and discipline which had torn his world, and other worlds like his, to pieces? His expressionless, handsome face, his steady stare as the drill progressed, his folded arms, his whole patient and perhaps contemptuous gravity as he watched the stamping, wheeling soldiers who came from so many tribes, noble and base, caused me for the first time in my life to see that what is most stirring and martial in our civilisation is also often the most ridiculous, if stared at long enough. One simply could not imagine Hashim ever allowing himself to be in the position in which he would have to cavort like these soldiers, a rifle on his shoulder, listening tensely for yells of command from someone like myself, for pay and rations.

The troops were getting no pay, and their rations were deteriorating as time went on and our isolation lengthened. Bully beef was finished, and now they had biscuits and dates and a cigarette issue, while we slew a ghostly, scraggy camel or a few famished goats for all of us as often as we could. We signed chits for these animals and handed them to the owners. One day everyone was going to be paid. I used to swear it to them, and they said they believed me, though I knew that a general rage and anxiety was growing on all sides. Hysteria came at times and we would compose long, bitter, sarcastic letters to command headquarters, which might have been on Venus or Mars, for we had no way of sending these cries of anger.

There was a signal station, an old Italian military relic, the equipment in it so dangerous, due to electrical shortings, that the Italian soldier who looked after it used to pray before he used it. We had sent many pleading signals to headquarters a thousand miles away, until finally warned to stop. We had been told for the last time that help was on the way. So we were silent after that, and waited.

How strange it was in 1962 to be sailing past that blazing yellow coast on which one had thirsted and yearned, and dreamed of onions and salad and bread and beer, and even of drinkable, living water. One would be going down to lunch soon, to the air-conditioned dining-room, to every kind of food, and with a bottle of wine to go with it.

One remembered the bully beef and the problem of halal, discovered by the Mohammedan troops only when reminded of it by a holy man who had stormed at them. They had eaten that bully beef gladly until the holy men came and told them that this imprisoned beef in the small cans had never been killed according to Islamic rite, was haran – unclean, and not halal, fit for eating after the beast had had its throat cut by a sheikh. And yet it disappeared if one left it around.

One remembered those nights at Gardo when one sat up and watched the fast-moving shadows of askaris moving across the sand to pick up the cans of bully beef one had thrown there in daylight, making sure in that daylight that one was seen throwing it away. It was good beef, and if even you wanted to commit suicide after months of it for every meal, it was still good beef, and very eatable, and they ate it, in darkness. Then the authorities, the Staff intellectuals, thousands of miles away, got a sheikh to kill some cattle, and after that a label appeared on the cans of beef saying in Arabic, Swahili and English that this beef was halal and had been killed by a saint, and was fit for all Mohammedans to eat. And one respected the holy men for making this struggle, even though one could have killed them in that wilderness, tortured as one was by a thousand insoluble problems, the biggest of which was oneself, while nodding understandingly as one saw those askaris gliding in darkness like hyenas to snatch up so silently the unclean, eatable bully beef.

How fast our date supply went once we had discovered how to make liquor with it, and what was the name of that brilliant, ragged, haggard Italian prisoner who had made the liquor for us? It was better than arrack, and then he had made liquore di datteri, a sticky, oily date liquor. The three of us had got drunk on it at two o’clock in the morning and then went for a swim in the ocean.

When the date problem became acute there was only one man to turn to, Hashim. He brought a dhow full of dates in to Kalanka six weeks later, how, we never discovered. He had his contacts. We doubled the date ration to the askaris, and drank more date liquor ourselves. And then one day, when the atmosphere among the troops was at its most delicate and worrying worst, a message came through on the dangerous sputtering radio to say that a convoy had left base and would reach us in about eleven days. There was money aboard, silver money. We rushed out and called the troops on parade, and I can remember that my voice was trembling with excitement as I told them that the long promised money was on its way. Carried away, Chas and I gave them an extra ration of the musty cigarettes, and the rest of the day off. Then we went back and started a date-liquor party. A few days after this Chas went down with dysentery again, and this time he nearly died. And thinking of Chas and that third attack of dysentery made me think of Carlo, the brilliant, lovable doctor of the Italian army who became our companion and friend as Chas sank under the ravage of that dysentery. How Carlo had fought to save him, with no drugs, and had saved him, and how he was repaid by the base wallahs two thousand miles away when they got their hands on him at Mombasa.

Chapter 3

YOU ALWAYS WOKE UP in the morning at Kalanka covered with slow-moving, exhausted flies dragging their way through your sweat, and the nausea soon lessened so that you learned to lie there and let the flies stay on you. It was only when they tried to get into your mouth that the anxiety mania fell upon you again and you sprang from the stale, sweat-soaked sheets. The flies liked to cluster on the edge of a cup of tea, and if you left a cup standing for five minutes there would be a struggling crust of flies drowning in it. At times during the height of the fly season you became hysterical and I once saw a friend of mine screaming at some flies, his face showing grief and hate, his left hand pressed tight over the mug of tea he was holding in his right hand. Millions and millions of flies swarmed on to us as the heat increased, and Chas lay sick under the mosquito net we had rigged up for him. Carlo was worried when he came one night and I told him that Chas had had thirty-seven bowel movements that day, and was weak and delirious, though still making his usual jokes.

‘Can’t they fly a plane up here for an officer as sick as this?’ Carlo asked me, his large, black eyes flashing with anger.

‘A plane?’ I said, ‘A plane? Why they won’t even send a truck with the rations.’ Even Chas laughed when I told him about ‘the plane’.

At about two o’clock in the morning Carlo would come in softly in his rubber shoes and stand over Chas’s bed and study him, watching how he slept. He found some old Italian army drugs and used these on Chas, and fed him goat-meat soup, and camel milk. There was nothing else anyway. Chas, tall and strong, with thick, dark, curly hair, seemed to be fading into a pallid, thin ghost, and what he longed for most was a few bottles of cold beer, or an onion, or a slice of bread covered with real butter. We used to talk about lettuce and beetroot and fresh eggs in increasingly burning and passionate words, while Carlo listened and then said, ‘If you go on like this you’ll get dyspepsia. You’re over-eating, both of you.’

There was nothing left to read in that place, and I was driven to reading the stack of military pamphlets I had used as an NCO, the grenade, the bayonet, the Bren, the Small Arms Manual, the two inch mortar, and that laughable answer to the Panzer Division, the .55 Boyes anti-tank rifle.

I must have been going ‘sand-happy’ at that time, for it was a few years before I realised the enormity of the act I committed when a convoy of camels at last brought the box of money to our piece of wilderness, along with rations, mail and the booze supply.

‘The money’s in a big wooden chest, Effendi,’ the excited Somali sergeant came to tell me. There had been a very sullen and angry conference with the troops that morning, about money and justice and loyalty and patience, and money.

I went down into the armoury, seized a pickaxe and ran through the sand to where the mounds of stores were being unloaded from the camels into the sand by the askaris. I forgot everything except the money for the askaris.

The chest of cash was a splendid thing, about six feet long, a foot high and a foot wide, of solid, heavy, smooth wood, and I noticed the red seal of wax in a counter-sunk pit in the wood. That red seal ought to have slowed me up, for even now, whenever I think of it, I know I must have been as sand-happy as I was relieved and excited. I ought to have realised that this chest was addressed to the political officer, who lived across the sand dunes, and whom we hardly ever saw, and who was farther round the bend than Chas and I, at that time. He was to commit suicide in about a year’s time, finally eaten away by wilderness and loneliness and outpost duty, but at that time, as I raised the heavy pickaxe over my head, he was still in possession of a good many of his faculties, and as desperate as I to see that long awaited money. I think it must have been the sheer anxiety to show the askaris the actual, shining, heavy money, on the spot, after these months of promising, lying, borrowing from Hashim, lectures about discipline and patience, and fear of a real mutiny, that caused me to shatter that perfectly carpentered chest of specie, which I had no official right to do. Heavy white canvas bags of Indian rupees glittered in the harsh sunlight as I tore away the splintered wood. A cheer went up from the askaris, and I think we were all a little insane together at that moment. They danced round the money, cheering.

‘It’s the money,’ I said. ‘It’s here. It’s actually arrived. I’m going to pay you at once.’ To the sergeant I said, ‘Get them on parade. It’s a pay parade.’ The troops, all of them stripped to the waist, rushed off to dress for the parade. I told the sergeant to put a guard on the dump of rations. I sent a runner to tell Chas that the money had arrived, and the runner came back with a note saying, ‘To hell with the money, what about the MAIL, and the BOOZE?’ Chas was getting better.

Chas, weak and pale, and as happy as I, got up for the pay parade which we held in the office. We wore polished Sam Browne belts, pressed khaki bush shirts and shorts, long puttees and our infantry side caps of navy blue trimmed with red cord. The askaris came in, saluted, held out their trembling hands for the heaps of silver coins as we entered up their paybooks, saluted, and rushed off into the poverty-stricken village of straw huts to buy themselves a dose of clap. When it was all finished I sent the remaining canvas bags of cash in the shattered wooden chest to the political officer, not forgetting to send with it an excited, happy note telling of the pay parade, and actually expecting an equally excited reply from the political officer saying something like, ‘I’m delighted for you all. This is wonderful. I’m paying my fellows too. What a day. Coming over tonight for drinks.’

He came over rather earlier than I expected him, and not for drinks. He was shaking with rage when he came running into the fly-infested room in which Chas and I were toasting the world in mugs of whisky, the table covered with opened letters and bottles of beer, gin and whisky. I had only met this political officer once before. He was the first mental casualty of Somalia’s fastnesses, for me, though I did not know what was the matter then.

‘You’re just in time for a snifter,’ I said gaily, and still gay, determined to stay gay even though I could now see that his blue eyes were glaring threateningly from Chas to me, and from me to Chas, went on, ‘Gin or whisky? The beer’s still boiling, I’m afraid, after the trip on the camels, so gin or whisky?’

‘Who did it?’ he whispered, clenching his hands. ‘Who did it? It’s a bloody court-martial offence, I’m telling you. Who did it?’

‘Did what?’ Chas had told me that this fellow was ‘sand-happy’.

Chapter 4

EVEN NOW, twenty years after, as I think over that wild scene with the pickaxe under that sunglare, the askaris laughing, their thin Somali faces alight with expectation, their cries of acclamation when the pickaxe tore the wood away and revealed the snow-white canvas bags of money, even now I cannot understand how I forgot that the political officer was the one who should conduct the slow, steady, careful ritual of the reception of money, its checking, its handing out, and its meticulous recording in various books. There is no doubt about it but that it was the beginning of the intense individuality, on occasions merging into madness, which that strange landscape and its fierce peoples brought out in all of us who wandered its wastes for years. One never knew when one was acting strangely. It was only the other fellow with you, whom you noticed was acting strangely, and he noticed your erosion too, but you never mentioned it to each other.

‘The askaris have been over five months without pay,’ I told the infuriated political officer. ‘What’s the difference? It’s money, there are the askaris, and they’ve been paid.’ It seemed as simple as that. I know now that the long and steady struggle to keep the askaris happy had affected my judgement. The punishments one had handed out which ordinarily would have been accepted as military routine over breaches of discipline, had seemed bigger and more ruthless than they actually were, to soldiers who were soldiering without pay, and the sight of that huge chest of money had united the askaris and myself in a delirious moment of long promised justice. But I still could not explain to the political officer, how I, a junior officer well drilled and disciplined through the ranks, wearing the badge of a famous regiment, had hacked down a whole traditional area of governmental procedure – which in out-stations is government itself. But he must have seen that the two junior officers with long, thick curling hair (there were no barbers), drinks in their hands, were marooned like himself in this lunar wilderness, and, like himself, were not quite in their right minds. So, after a long and neurotic lecture on procedure, he accepted a drink. But he never really forgave me.

Jaysee, our company commander, came back from a routine inspection of our wilderness shortly after that, and I told him about ‘the scene’ with the political officer. But even he, a soldier of much more experience than Chas and I, was too thrilled by the paying of the troops to see it as the mortal sin which had appalled the political officer.

We got out the drinks and wound up the sandy, rusty Italian gramophone and put on our three records. We had played them hundreds of times and they were now worn out, fine dusted sand in their grooves, but they helped to produce that careless, wild back-ground to our drink and talk. One record was by Edmundo Ros and his Rumba Band, called ‘Blen Blen Blen’, another was a strange, quavering, queer male voice against a background of drums and trumpets imploring a woman to walk the hills and heather with him, together, forever, and we used to sing this with him while the drink lasted. It says something for merciful time that I have completely forgotten the third record.

Jaysee came and saw the troops on parade, and approved. We sent for Hashim and paid him for the loans and the dates. There was still nothing to read and it was about that time that an askari brought me the skeleton of an Italian machine-gun he had found in the sand dunes. That machine-gun, and its companion, kept me sane for the rest of my stay in that God-forgotten place. We were short of automatic weapons and I told Jaysee that I thought I could remedy this shortage if I could only find the rest of the weapons where the retreating Italians had thrown them. There was plenty of the particular ammunition in the armoury and I knew that the machine-gun parts must be lying in the sands of the dunes. The askaris became as obsessed as myself in the search. None of us had ever seen this type of machine-gun before. It was a medium of nine millimetre calibre, a Schwarzlose from the Austrian Waffen Fabrik Steyr, part of the material captured by the Italians during the First World War. All I had to begin with was the barrel and the body casing with its traversing handles and trigger, and wandering in those rolling dunes one heard cries of triumph as askaris found parts of the gun, and one day two of them came staggering in with the heavy tripod itself. In the evenings we sat for hours in the armoury with the growing set of parts, learning by experiment how they fitted into the gun. The sergeant, now as obsessed as myself, used to haunt the dunes in his spare time, searching for a piece of steel we knew must fit into a long, curiously shaped groove which ran along the right side of the body casing. I knew it must be the piece that forced the oil-spray on to the working parts.

The sergeant was of a tribe considered inferior, by the askaris, to the noble tribes to which they themselves belonged, and Chas and I had opposed all their efforts to have him transferred, to have him disgraced, to cause him to appear a thief, a despot, an upstart, a mistake made in the chain of command; for them, command was dependent on nobility, which depended on tribe, and the sergeant was from one of the tribes of the Juba river in the far south. He was stronger, more intelligent and firmer in character than all of the askaris who so resented his command. And, worse, for they loved good looks, he was handsome.

They tried everything they could think of to bring him down, until one day I told them on parade, while the sergeant was absent, that even if the vendetta went on for a hundred years they were going to lose it, and that if ever the sergeant was transferred it would be to become a sergeant-major over other noble tribes. The sergeant himself had come to us one day, tired and dispirited that particular day, and asked us if we thought it was really worth all the trouble that he should stay sergeant over these tribal fanatics. ‘That depends on you,’ I told him. ‘There’s no tribal gradation in the particular kind of infantry we’re evolving in this country now. It’s all a matter of military talent, nothing else. You’ve got it. Use it. Dominate them. Don’t let them cow you back into what is supposed to be your inferiority of status. A soft touch here, a heavy hand there. Don’t give up. You’ve got the makings of a sergeant-major in you.’ The hysterical aristocrats among the askaris, brainless, brave, never gave up their scheming to destroy their sergeant. It was their hobby.

Remembering that quietly bitter struggle with tribal mania, I looked now, twenty years later, at the glaring, sunbaked Somali coast and thought of all the other struggles with it we had had in the two hundred thousand square miles of its interior, which we had controlled and administered with useless weapons, battered and broken down trucks, spavined camels, and I recalled all the suicides and strange insanities which had broken so many of our friends in isolated parts of the great wilderness.

Just over there on the right, behind that jagged cliff of yellow hot rock was where Sergeant Elmi and I had nervously and excitedly set up the completed machine-gun, the askaris assembled thirty yards behind us to watch the firing, or the explosion – none of us knew which it would be. You cannot tell how an unknown machine-gun will work until ammunition passes through it. Sergeant Elmi was number two on the gun. I was number one. We were laughing as we stood ready for the drill, waiting for my command of ‘Take Posts!’

I had cleaned and oiled every part of the gun after many doubtful assemblings of the parts sieved out of the sands during those obsessed months. I had put a gauze through the barrel – a gauze should only be used through a barrel as a last resort, and on the order of an officer – and it was pleasant being an officer and using one’s own gauze at one’s own will. I had selected the best of the coiled machine-gun belts in the armoury, and had even learned to work the Steyr-model belt-loading machine which we had found lying in a heap of old rifle parts. ‘Take posts!’

Would the oil-spray work properly? Would the cooling system in the water jacket function if I fired a lot of ammunition, if the gun did not explode?

‘Ready, Effendi,’ Sergeant Elmi said from where he lay beside the tripod. I pressed my thumbs against the thick red trigger, the traversing handles so different in shape and function from the Vickers machine-gun which the fanatical and patient Sergeant-Major Breen had taught me night after night in those cold, dank gun pits in Britain after Dunkirk.

‘Cracks like a bloody whip. Fires all day,’ he used to shout when he sat down to instruct me. ‘Hold up an army for ten years.’

I narrowed my eyes as if expecting a blast of metal into my face and pressed home the trigger for a burst of five rounds, and the gun obeyed. I could see the strike of the rounds in the sandhill three hundred yards to our front. A cheer went up from the askaris, for even though the low caste sergeant and the white officer who so perversely supported him in power, were firing the gun, it was our gun, having been salvaged by all of us, and it worked – even when I held the trigger down and fired a burst of thirty rounds. I fired the whole belt, and slabs of the hillside crumbled and collapsed under the blasts of fire.

Everyone volunteered to serve in the machine-gun platoon, and those who were chosen served willingly under Sergeant Elmi. They never let him forget that they were superior to him in caste, ridiculous as always in their doing so, for he was far their superior in brain and character, and as a soldier within the unit in which their whole life was lived, he was their superior officer and they obeyed him.

One of them had come to me one night, passionate, rolling his eyes, thin Somali hand on heaving chest, to tell me that he would no longer serve under this sergeant from a slave tribe, and that he was going to run away unless I altered things.

‘You want to run away?’ I asked him.

‘If I am to go on serving under this man from the Rahanwein (the river tribes of the south), yes, Effendi.’

‘You can strip off your uniform right here and now,’ I told him. ‘Strip naked, and you can go.’ I waved to the two hundred thousand square miles of desolation behind us. ‘Go. I will burn your paybook. You can vanish. Take off your uniform and vanish.’ He laughed with amazement, disbelief, until he understood that I was serious. Then he came to attention and said that he did not want to go, even if I did mean that I would turn him loose in the desert, naked except for his noble blood and his parasitical pedigree and his vanity. That vanity would be only of use in an action when its owner decided to show that he was braver than all the slaves from the river.

Now, the soothing bells were ringing for lunch as the ship lurched down past Cape Gardafui. Where were they all now, those quarrelsome, faithful, fanatical, patient askaris? Where was Chas? Where was Jaysee, and Carlo, and Sergeant Elmi? Did he ever become sergeant-major, or did one of the nobles plant a knife in him one day when all that soldiering time was over and the Somali wastes became their own again?

Drinking the pale Salaparuta from Sicily down in the ship’s dining-room I wondered how I would find Kenya, after seven years away from it, but Kenya could not get through the screen of flooding memories of the Somali country which the sight of that barren coast had evoked in me. I wondered if I could get permission to go ashore in Mogadishu, the old headquarters of the vast insane asylum we had been lost in. In that ocean of scrub and shale one had been like a flea on a blanket, an aching speck whose eye had turned more thoughtfully, fearfully, inwards, as month after burning month went by among those hostile wastes.

Chapter 5

IT DOES NOT FOLLOW that because all the suicides I knew were very serious, earnest men with little sense of humour, that only the humourless kill themselves when they are in good physical health and still young. We do not know the size and strength of our own manias until they fall upon us and drag us down, or the barrenness of our inner deserts until real loneliness, fear, bewilderment and sun-madness have cast us into them. There is something huge and dark in the African world which can chew through the defences of white men who have not been harnessed to that continent’s almost mindless friendship with suffering and annihilation. Concrete buildings, clinics and city settlements can hide it, almost, but out in the wastes you never forget that the friendly hyena is there to clean you if you should die in the grey grass among the thorns. It is truly a mighty continent and you feel it when you lie down in darkness under the stars, your blanket around you, and you listen to its powerful silence, a silence made up of various small sounds become one steady background drone and clicking, of cicadas, insects of every kind, mosquitoes, all whirring and hissing in one silence peculiar to Africa.

Of all the desiccated, bitter, cruel, sunbeaten wildernesses which starve and thirst beyond the edges of Africa’s luscious, jungled centre, there cannot be one more Christless than the one which begins at the northern foot of Mount Kenya and stretches to the foothills of Abyssinia, and from there to the dried-out glittering tip of Cape Gardafui where the hot karif winds blow in from where the long sharks race under the thin blue skin of the ocean. You can never think of those wildernesses without thinking of daggers and spears, rolling fierce eyes under mops of dusty black crinkly hair, of mad stubborn camels, rocks too hot to touch, and blood feuds whose origins cannot be remembered, only honoured in the stabbing. But of all the races of Africa there cannot be one better to live among than the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest; the Somalis.

I knew an Italian priest who had spent over thirty years among the Somalis, and he made two converts, and it amazed me that he got even those two. The Prophet has no more fervent, and ignorant, followers, but it is not their fault that they are ignorant. Their natural intelligence is second to none and when the education factories start work among them they should surprise Africa, and themselves.

I never saw a Somali who showed any fear of death, which, impressive though it sounds, carries within it the chill of pitilessness and ferocity as well. If you have no fear of death you have none for anybody else’s death either, but that fearlessness has always been essential to the Somalis who have had to try and survive hunger, disease and thirst while prepared to fight and die against their enemies, their fellow Somalis for pleasure in the blood feud, or the Ethiopians who would like to rule them, or the white men who got in the way for a while.

‘Now, take your pistol out of your belt and shoot me,’ a tall, lean, shining black Somali said to me after finishing his story. We were standing over the heap of hacked, slashed, bleeding meat which had been another Somali until this other one had dealt with him. That was the first time I had come up against this peculiar and terrific satisfaction in a killing well done and the readiness to die for it, having been caught.

‘You want me to shoot you?’ I asked him.

‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘That’s your law, isn’t it? Well, I’m ready. I’ve done what I want, so you can get on with your law. You have your pistol in your belt. Shoot me.’ His long, sharp, heavy dagger was on the sand at my feet. An Italian doctor was on his knees beside the meat with a hypodermic needle in the hope that something might still stir within the bloody mess. But no.

‘È finito,’ the doctor said, lighting a cigarette. He was very tired of Somalis, this doctor, having spent years amidst their electric violence. ‘Shoot him,’ he said to me. ‘It’ll save a great deal of trouble.’ The Somali really did want to die, totally satisfied with himself after waiting for this enemy for over a year. Instead of being about a camel, this death was about a woman, something of far less value than a camel. The woman was sliced up in a hut nearby, alive. She would survive, after a fashion. Every night at the same hour for ten days, the husband, the one who wanted me to shoot him, had gone to the hut and shouted a warning outside it, telling the interloper to go. They were both of a great and noble tribe, inland from Merca on the southern coast.

‘He would not go. He wanted to die, so I killed him,’ the tall warrior said to me. ‘I am happy.’ He pushed the dead meat with his sandalled foot, thoughtful, sombre. ‘He was stubborn,’ he said. ‘He could have gone, but he was stubborn, daring me to kill him. It was too much.’ It was the stubbornness, not jealousy over the woman, which had caused the killing; the stubbornness and the insult contained in it.

‘Take him away,’ I told a corporal, and as he was being handled off the scene the Somali turned, shouting, ‘You’re not going to start all that court business, are you? What’s the use of that? You’ve got your pistol. Shoot me and have done with it.’ He was trembling with anger, with impatience when he thought of the cell in the far town, the dreary court scene, the statements, the tiresome rigmarole of the legal machine far from the desert where this simple, logical thing had been done with a knife.

Death by shooting used to be the method of execution in the early days of the occupation after the Italian collapse, Italian law followed to the letter. The Somalis died as they liked to die, contemptuously, throwing off the cloak-blanket and staring at the firing squad, sneering at the trembling rifles. They had had their fragment of living, their brief satisfaction, and they had prayed. Now die. Hrun sheg! Wallahi!

I never knew a Somali to commit suicide, though I have been told they do it sometimes.

The first European suicide I knew was an officer who took over a year of loneliness in an outpost to decide that he had been a failure as a soldier. He was actually a very fine and able officer, but he had given up the effort to eat at a table months before his suicide, leaving half empty cans of bully beef about his bedroom in the fort, had given up shaving (in him a terrible offence), and had come to believe that the loss of a pistol over a year before, during the campaign, was a piece of criminal negligence on his part. He wanted to be court-martialled for it, but nobody would take him seriously. Nobody bothered about a pistol in a savage territory in which the Italians had left thousands of rifles and machine-guns which had come into the hands of the tribes.

It is almost impossible to describe the malaise, the very special weariness of spirit which isolation among fierce tribesmen brings, hundreds of miles from base, and which eats into one after the sixth month in the midst of the tension, and the hot silence. Fits of rage used to come over one after too many killings among the tribes, for one found oneself getting used to it and deciding to do nothing about it. Let them kill each other. They liked it. Yet one had to go on pretending that it mattered to one, while it did not matter to the Somalis. And there was the endless and ingenious intrigue among them, the only pleasure beside killing open to nomads in practically waterless country. At times you looked out across the silent glaring desert and began to wish you were dead, for a few minutes. With some it lasted longer than a few minutes, and they shot themselves, or went mad. I know of fifteen cases of madness in that wilderness. But the first suicide I knew did not shoot himself in his outpost. He waited until he was going on leave, and then shot himself after drawing his drink ration. None of us could find out what he was thinking of that last afternoon in Mogadishu.

It was a Sunday, I was told months later, that he chose for his death, a hot, silent Sunday afternoon. He drove about in his truck, looking for friends, but they were all asleep, or away swimming in the sea. Perhaps the English Sunday which follows the English everywhere, perhaps even into hell, fell upon him, the grey memory of it, maybe the longing for it, like a shadow in that sunglare, for he drove off into the bush and stopped his truck at a deserted and broken Italian fort. Here he unloaded his drink ration from the truck, lined it up like a set of soldiers, took a piece of charcoal from an old Somali cooking fire and wrote on the wall of the fort. ‘This is the only way for a rat to die.’ Then he shot himself. Nothing very much happened about it. It was soon forgotten. It was not until about four years later, after many suicides and cases of madness, that some staff branch down in lusher Africa sent a psychiatrist up to see what was the matter in the Somali wilderness. I have a copy of his report. He did not go far beyond the towns of British Somaliland, a fairly quiet little area, never entered the real desolation, but his report said that nearly every officer was slightly to violently unbalanced.

We were only as unbalanced as the Somalis about us. Nobody could remain sane in that arid world.

I ran into the beginning of the end of the next suicide when I was on the last lap of a mad, frantic drive down from Cape Gardafui to Mogadishu, heading for my first leave in over a year.

Chapter 6

I HAD NEVER HAD any real patience, no application, had never done any inner grazing into myself, until marooned for the first time, completely marooned among the thorn scrub in the sand and shale of the Somali country. I had known loneliness in Africa before the war, but not a loneliness that got inside and rang and echoed in one as in Somalia. In Africa before the war I had hunted, worked with beasts, ridden long and hard in a kinder clime, and the Africans were not like the Somalis, the Somalis who were restless, violent, romantic, vengeful and proud.

It was fourteen months after my arrival in Somalia before I got leave, and I can remember throwing my kit into the back of the borrowed, battered, unreliable Chev truck which had had its heart broken long ago on the trail to Addis Ababa. Askaris going on leave climbed into the back, one or two of them with the big-hipped, rolling eyed, nubile women they had picked up during their service in the Mijertein country we were now leaving. A hundred miles south of the Nogal I stopped and shot an oryx bull and we feasted on it round the fire that night. I had no liquor and I knew that I would get a drink at El Lagodei where there was a friend of mine administering that slice of purgatory. We drank thin, smoky, salty camel milk. I begrudged myself the sleeping out in the bush, the delay, and I was longing for a drink of beer, whisky, anything. I took a poll among the askaris. It was midnight, the moon huge above us on the desert. They were for moving on. We threw our kit back into the truck, dragged the snoring women out of their cover, filled the radiator, lit cigarettes, and went on, the truck bumping and rolling over the rocks, and again and again we had to get out and push the truck out of the thick sand in the tugs, the river beds which had not seen a river since long before the Prophet’s death.

Drink never meant much to me, until I was marooned in Somalia, and has never meant as much since. I like drink, but not nearly as much as I liked it in Somalia. There were no hotels there, no pubs, no shops. You couldn’t get a drink there when you had finished your drink ration, and when you got your drink ration you drank it up as soon as you could, and then craved for more.

Driving down to El Lagodei in that ruined Chev I was in a kind of ecstasy, a ragged second lieutenant, overdue for full lieutenanthood and twenty-eight days leave, driving farther and farther away from that fly-infested hell-hole in which one had experienced for the first time the steady, silent creep of hysteria approaching. That place in which one had learned to do one’s first inner grazing, to gaze inwards, the thinking eye, driven inwards, perhaps by the harshness of the life outside, was disappearing now as one pressed the accelerator down and stared through the approaching dawnlight for the first signs of El Lagodei fort.

My khaki shirt, one of those early cellular well-cut shirts which vanished towards the end of the war as utility won the day, was ragged, torn, patched, and I had only one pip to wear, on my right shoulder. I had lost the other one and my left shoulder strap was buttonless anyway, hanging down in a flap. I had no stockings left and was bare-legged, wearing Somali sandals, and my shorts were ready for handing on to the company cook. I was badly in need of a haircut, and in the mood for one of those nervous-release drink parties that we in the field-force began to indulge in at that time, when we got the opportunity. During my leave I was going to buy a thousand books to take back with me to the next piece of wilderness, wherever that would be. I would order cases of gin, take drawing materials with me, steal a radio from some army dump in Mogadishu, arrange with some Italian or other to send me onions and fruit somehow on any convoy he could find going to my next piece of wilderness, and never again would I find myself without reading matter, or drink, or onions, but even then I knew, as we all did in that field-force, that after the third month in the wilderness we would be short of everything once more. And in Mogadishu I was going to seek out bread, and eat it until tired. Real bread. I could not eat another army biscuit, I thought then.

El Lagodei. I could see the faint grey squareness of the fort away on the horizon. I could hear the askaris in the back shouting, one of them thumping on the cab roof, shouting ‘It is there. We see it. El Lagodei.’ They began to sing in the back of the truck, the thin, yelling Somali singing on five sad, haunting notes. They too wanted a fresh scene, new people, gossip in the makaya, the coffee shop in the village, women, boasting.

I stopped the truck, paraded the askaris and let them adjust their equipment, button up their pockets, while I borrowed a safety pin from one of them and pinned up my left shoulder strap. I buckled on my web belt and pistol, hammered my side cap on the truck until all the yellow dust of the Mijertein had gone from it, put the cap on, laughed when one of the askaris said to me, ‘None of us can look smart in our rags, Effendi. But we must try.’

‘Will they give us decent uniforms, soon, Effendi?’ another askari asked. ‘In the Italian army we dressed far better than this,’ which was true, for the Italians had looked to the bright and dashing tastes of the Somalis in their army, going in for high fezzes with splendid badges, dashing grey cloaks, splendid bandoliers, stars and bright yellow, green and red tassels and pom-poms for the Gruppo Banda and the Dubat, those dashing irregulars who still spoke fondly of their major, Cimarutta, and proudly of Colonnello Bechis.

‘In wartime you wear rags,’ I said. ‘Smart rags, properly laundered when you can. The nice uniforms are for the clerks and the storemen at base.’ It was the only lie I could think of just then, having used most of the others up in the times of the sullen waiting for pay. They stood there listening to those lies, tall, black, lean, good-looking men who knew all about camels and the various tastes of the waters of widely scattered waterholes, their modello 91 rifles at the order, their grey square leather ammunition pouches which I had salvaged from dumps, starving for polish, their sandals broken and worn, a shower to look upon if I ever saw one, but a shower who could walk me off my feet in this wilderness anytime.

The officer at El Lagodei had no drink, and he too was aching, waiting for a convoy. He showed me his transport, a smashed Chev standing on four wooden boxes, and reminded me that the Chev I was driving was his, and when would I send it back? He had somehow stolen it, and I promised I would send it back, and did, with his drink ration in the back. As time went on we of the field-force were to look after each other more and more, stealing kit, scrounging materials of all kinds, sharing loot, united in a sort of military monkhood in our outpost cells.

I drove down through Garowei, that lonely fort in the brown barren hills of the northern Mudugh. Garowei was also drinkless, the officer there imploring me to shoot some of the staff officers for him when I got to base. He had been here six months and had had only one drink ration, and, heady and careless with joy, had drunk the lot in three nights with another officer in off patrol.

‘You look pretty far gone, you know,’ he said to me. ‘I hear you’re all round the bend up there at Gardafui.’ He added, before I could say it for him, ‘And I’m pretty far gone myself, I know it. I’ve begun to talk to myself. Do you ever do that?’ He looked at me keenly.

‘Often,’ I told him.

‘Do you know the Italians never let their officers do more than three months up here?’

‘With a wine ration every month. Yes,’ I said.

‘Hundreds of bloody askaris to carry the wine ration when they went on patrol.’

‘Green vegetables twice a month sent up by truck.’

‘It’s a bloody disgrace, that’s what it is. Don’t forget to go in and raise hell about my booze ration, and my mail. I’ve got to go on a camel patrol tomorrow. I hate camels. I really hate the bastards. Ever tried to load one?’

‘Ever eaten one? An old one? They tell me the young camel is like chicken.’

‘Catch me eating a bloody camel, boy,’ he said. Yet we ate plenty of camel together a year later east of that particular piece of wilderness, and we ate it young, freshly born if possible. New-born camel was the best meat I ever ate in Somalia.

On to Galkayu (‘The place where me White Men ran away’ – referring to a time when the Somalis repulsed an attack by European troops in the time of the Mad Mullah). It was at Galkayu that I saw the first tall cool bottles of beer in many months, proferred by a friend with a generous hand, and I sat down as I was, covered with dust, tired and sand-weary, and we began to graze each other in that special gladness of companionship known only to shagbags of that time and in that godless place.

Chapter 7

JOE WAS A TALL, dark, sardonic fellow, very good and fast with a rifle, very widely read, cool and able with the excitable Somalis, an old Africa hand, a few years older than me.

‘I’ve got a nutcase here on my hands,’ he said quietly after the second bottle of cold beer. ‘I want you to take him away for me before he opens fire on himself. He’s only loading and aiming at present, but it could get serious. He’s only been here a month but he took one look at the Shag and the Somalis and went into retirement. He’s in there.’ He pointed towards the green, paint-starved lattice-work which ran round the half walls of the room we were sitting in. ‘A good chap but more suited to the quartermaster’s store, say, or a staff job somewhere nice. Kidding apart, though, I’m worried about him. So take him down with you to Mog. This is my last chance. There’ll be no more transport to Mog for months. Be a chum, will you?’

‘The Shag’ was our name for all of endless Somalia.

‘How far gone is he, really?’

‘He’s swinging his thirty-eight up like this. Need I say more?’ Joe had an invisible pistol in his hand and swung it up to his temple, again and again. ‘He does that sitting in there. I’ve watched it. Go and see him. He’s quite a nice chap, but he’s had his chips already. In a month, mind you. He’s an expert. It takes me about two years before I start swinging my thirty-eight.’ Joe, the old Africa hand who had come to terms with wilderness a long time ago.

‘I’ve no room in the truck,’ I said. ‘It’s packed with ration-eaters and kit.’ Ration-eaters were askaris, like yourself, only interested in the next meal.

‘Now don’t start any of that, Gerry, there’s a dear,’ Joe said. ‘You’ve got to take him or I’ll find him splattered all over his room one morning, letter to mother on the floor, then courts of inquiry, and why didn’t I evacuate this officer before things came to this stage? etcetera. What with? Seen the transport here, even if I had the petrol for it? It’s special, Gerry, my transport – in pieces all over the sand. No, for Christ’s sake, take this chum down with you. I’m serious.’

The second lieutenant sitting on his camp-bed in the room I entered was far gone all right, no doubt about it. I could see that by the long, vacant stare he gave me as I introduced myself. Admittedly I looked strange in my rags, my long tangled hair, my bare sunburned legs and my rawhide sandals. In fact I was the living picture of what, it turned out, this officer feared he would become in this scorched and silent desert peopled by spear-carrying savages who were holding their Italian rifles in reserve, for now.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him, sitting down on the floor. ‘Are you feeling ill?’

He shook his head slowly, still staring at me.

‘If you’re ill I’ll take you down with me to Mog,’ I said. ‘I’m pulling out in the morning.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘Where have you come from?’

‘Cape Gardafui,’ I told him.

‘How long have you been up there?’

I told him. He put his head in his hands and murmured, ‘I didn’t join the army for this kind of thing. This isn’t soldiering. It’s impossible.’ He looked at me. ‘Do you call this soldiering?’

‘I can’t tell you what I call it,’ I said. ‘We’re too young for that kind of language. But bullshit apart, you’ve had your chips here, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘I hate it. I hate it.’

‘Come on, then, pack your bag and I’ll give you a lift out of it. You don’t look very well to me.’ He was pale, drawn, and his hands trembled when he lit a cigarette. He refused to come and I knew why. It would look to authority as if he had run out.

I went back and told Joe. ‘Let’s open the whisky in that case,’ he said. ‘I’ll send a signal to Mog and get them to remove him. I know he’s going to knock himself off, this character, if he stays here.’

The officer was removed a fortnight later, a special truck being sent for him. He proved to be seriously ill with a deficiency disease. Two years later I heard he was a major in the Middle East, on the staff.

Three hundred miles to the tarmac from Galkayu, three hundred of the worst miles, over white rock and through foot-deep sand, but the tarmac to Mogadishu, which suddenly started at a non-existent place called Firfir, a mere place-name, was always like a magnet to us on the last stage of the drive to Mog and salad and drink and bread and friends at a real bar in the officers’ club. I said goodbye to Joe at dawn, promising to see Humphrey, that marvellous doctor who tried to do so much for us in our outposts, and to tell him that the pistol-swinging officer was due for treatment in Mog.

I drove all out that day, stopping only once to eat a tin of bully beef and to drink some camel milk (the best anti-scorbutic in the world), and, like the askaris, had to piss over the side of the lurching truck as we moved, and made a game of it. Anything for speed out of the desert. It was twenty minutes past midnight when I saw the black gleam of the tarmac ahead in the moonlit sand and rock, and the truck climbed up on to that smooth tarmac laid by the Italian troops in 1935, as they advanced on Abyssinia. I was exhausted, and happy. A sleep at Bulo and then down the tarmac at sixty miles an hour to Mogadishu. I stopped the truck outside the headquarters at Bulo, a two storey house of white stucco with a verandah running round it, climbed out of the cab and stumbled stiffly across the sand, wondering who I would find in command here. A voice in English said, ‘Want a drink?’

‘I want about twenty,’ I said, ‘but one would be a godsend right now. Where are you?’

‘Over here. Where’ve you come from?’ I told him.

‘Never heard of it. Come on. Over here.’ I could now see the shape of a mosquito net and a figure sitting on a camp-chair beside it about twenty yards away in the thick, warm darkness. He was an old grizzled major stripped to the waist, tattooed on both arms, grinning at me as he handed me a bottle of whisky. ‘You’re one of these maniacs who live up there, I take it.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of the Shag. ‘Better you than me, anyway. Sit down.’ He pushed his ration-box towards me with his foot and I sat down, poured some of his whisky into a tin cup and wished him well.

‘I’ve just had the lousiest day in my life, son,’ he said to me. ‘And the bird has flown anyway, but what a mess he’s left.’ He then told me his story. It was about a transport officer who had fallen desperately in love with an Italian prostitute who lived far down the tarmac, in Mogadishu.

We did not know it as he talked, but the subject of his story had already shot himself that day in Mogadishu.

He was an officer who had been sent by Command to check on army transport coming down from the Abyssinian campaign, and while in Mogadishu had fallen violently in love with an Italian prostitute who had come down from Addis Ababa. He was stationed here at Bulo near the end of the tarmac and his trips to and from Mogadishu increased in frequency as the mania for her grew. She took all he had, and when he had finished all he had, he began to sell wheels, petrol, tools, trucks, used up the imprest account and started another, and went in for special book-keeping, until finally, when nodding Command suddenly sat up and took notice he knew that he was finished. But even then, alone at the end of the tarmac, thinking about the woman in Mogadishu, and knowing he was for court martial, he had to see her again. He must have passed my old grizzled major on the road as he drove down to Mogadishu, the major driving up to ‘look into things’, and to arrest him.

‘Yes, he’s flown,’ the old major said. ‘Have another whisky. The only thing he didn’t sell here was the sand. He’s flogged everything else. I wouldn’t mind if the woman was worth it. Have you seen her?’ He named her. I said I hadn’t seen her.

‘An all-leather job,’ the old man said. ‘Solid rock heart and a born bitch, I’m telling you. I knew her in Addis. I wouldn’t mind if he’d spent everything on a decent piece of crumpet, but this bag, it beats me. He’s gone crazy about her, crazy. He’ll get about five years for this little lot when they get him.’

I heard the rest of the story in Mogadishu the next night. The officer had gone around the town searching for his woman, but she, knowing that he was due for arrest, had retired into a convent in a hysterical state, begging for sanctuary, and he traced her to the convent. He ran up the steps of the convent in the glare of the midday, hammered on the door, calling her name. He had had a few desperate drinks by then. A nun appeared. He asked for the woman and the nun told him that she was very sorry but the woman could not be seen, would not be seen, and did not wish to see him again. The woman had already conveyed this to the officer, apparently, but he longed to see her and talk to her.

When he saw it was no use he drew his pistol and said, ‘Tell her I love her,’ and shot himself, rolling down into the sandy street in front of the Somalis. Died on Active Service. ‘Poor sod,’ everybody said. She was in action again some months later, a beautiful woman.

The club was crowded with officers drinking beer out of huge glass insulators which had been found in an Italian dump. Some of us from the Shag, officers come down on leave like myself, drank for twenty-four hours and talked, in our own Mess out on the Balad road, about who was going round the bend ‘up there’ in the Shag, who had gone round it already, and about the chances of transfer out of this wilderness, to anywhere, anywhere at all.

You can forget it,’ a senior officer told us. ‘You’re staying right here, so get down to it. Drink while you’ve got it at hand, and forget words like Transfer and Posting to battalions.

Chapter 8

‘GO ASHORE IN MOGADISHU?’ the ship’s officer said to me, his eyebrows raised. ‘Perchè? È il più brutto posto nel mondo. You really want to go ashore there?’

The ship would only stay in Mogadishu for a few hours. There was no dock and the ship had to lie off. The only way to go ashore at Mogadishu was to be swung out in a canvas bag from a derrick and then be lowered into a boat which would take one to the jetty a couple of miles off. I said I knew this and had been swung off in a bag before, and could I be swung off in a bag again this time, and I would promise I would be back on the ship in three hours.

‘Bene, signore.’

As the ship sailed towards Mogadishu in the warm darkness I could see lightning flashing over Somalia. Well inland, it would be over Eil and Sinadogo and Galkayu, the rare downpour which finished in hot steam, all sign of which vanished in a couple of days of the roasting sun. The angarara would come out of the earth for a while, the huge black centipede which appears with the almost unknown rain, and the camels would be worse tempered than usual, and the Somalis would run about naked, screaming with delight until the rain finished. That strange night with old Allen when we got caught in the rain on the way to taste the sweet water of Eil, a holiday from the wandering patrols in the bush. Eil has real water, water which is alive, fresh and sparkling, and you have to have drunk bitter, dead water from waterholes for months to know what real water can taste like.

All those who have had Wajir clap will know what good water tastes like after the desert waterholes. The ailment is called Wajir clap because it was coined at the wells of Wajir, but the ailment is the same from Wajir onwards, through El Wak, right across Ogaden to the rain pans in the haud on the borders of British Somaliland, on down into Somalia and south to the Juba river.

The first time I saw what it was we were drinking as water was when an Italian doctor opened a filtro idro we were using in a fort called Gardo. ‘Guarda,’ he said smiling, ‘il brodo.’ He showed me what was at the bottom of the filter, a thick white glittering mass of mica and gypsum.

‘Ecco, la causa del clap di Wajir,’ he said laughing. Yes, there it was, that scintillating white mass of paste filtered out of the water we had to drink. This filtro idro was the only one I ever saw out in the Shag, and I never forgot it.

Clap, known to old sweats as ‘pissing fish-hooks and razor blades’, was very common among the troops of the field-force, one company reaching seventy-eight per cent after eight months on the borders of Southern Abyssinia. (Don’t bother to mention ‘prophylactics’, please – we were in Somalia.) Wajir clap is a very good imitation of the real thing, a tough old British sergeant told me, when condoling with me because of the agony I was having in pissing at a place called Bogol Manyo, after a longish diet of one particular waterhole.

The tiny mica and gypsum crystals tore the lining of the urethra, and after that it would be agony. ‘I feel like a bloody shotgun today,’ one would tell one’s companion, ‘the rifling’s torn out of me.’

Sweet tumbling glistening waters of Eil, how I remember steeping my burning face in your coolness, and drinking you up, while Corporal Ahamed Hussein watched and laughed, for we had praised you before we got to you, drunk you in our heads through days of journeying.

The Somalis have as sensitive and knowing a palate for the taste of water as have some Spaniards, and like them will sing in praise of good water.

When old Allen and I decided we would go to Eil, on the excuse of ‘showing the rifle’ there (there were two machine-guns hidden down there, but we never got them), I told him of the wonderful water, and of the patch of sweet potatoes which an Arab grew there. Sweet potatoes? He was ready to go at once.

I can never forget old Allen, the delightful companionship and the laughter shared with him, the oldest who served with us up in the Shag, a man who would flout rules, who treated base wallahs and their pieces of paper with a special cynical disregard, who could ‘carry a can’ for you. I never liked British colonialism, but I could see what jewels it sometimes threw up when I got to know old Allen, who had spent most of his life in Africa, and knew how to feel Africa with all his instincts. He had been very badly wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916, was not romantic about soldiering, having been hit too hard on the Somme, and was a real shagbag in every sense. Much older than us, he never intruded his age. One forgot he was thirty years older than most of us, and he was wise and good and honest, and I would have gone anywhere with him, anytime, anyhow.

Perhaps I can convey something of his special style if I describe his farewell to a force we called Clapforce, when I and my officers paraded with the troops in front of a fort one midday, the laden camels bawling and showing their bladdered tongues twenty yards off. Old Allen came out wearing his bush hat side to front, so that it would look like Napoleon’s hat, and with his right hand stuffed into his shirt, like Napoleon. He knew that two hundred and sixty-three men, women and children had been speared, stabbed, hacked to death and those of the women who escaped, left to die of thirst in the bush, by the tribe we were going to operate against.

‘Officers and men,’ he shouted, while I shook with the effort not to burst out laughing (which was what he wanted), ‘my message to you on this solemn day, at this critical moment in our history, is – ’ he paused, and cleared his throat, lifted his jaw Napoleonically, ‘is – Shag them to the roots of their gonads! Do not rest. Press on regardless. Leave no stone unturned. Give your all. Shag them, I tell you. The booze ration, the mail, the fresh vegetables, all we hold dear, depends today on your endeavours. I am proud of you.’ He saluted, and I saluted for all of us. I gave the command ‘Fall out the officers,’ so that we could get away and laugh for a few minutes far from the troops, who had been most moved by the whole performance. And then we wound off in a long, trudging file into the Shag in search of the marvellous tribe who had only chalked up one more score in a blood feud a thousand years old, and now must pay for that. And I knew how well old Allen, who had hidden his feelings under this charade on parade, wished that all this killing would end and that Somalia would become like the other Africas, fatter, quieter, nearer the kind God of the Christianity that had been brought to them, while knowing that Somalia could never be like that at all.

The more I listened to survivors of the front-line fighting in the First World War, especially old Allen, who described it in detail for me, the less I could understand how and why they were able to go on doing it for four years. Millions of Germans, French, British standing in stinking, sodden trenches, flinging explosives as fast as they came from the enormous factories, and then rushing on to each other’s machine-guns, dying in swathes to capture a hundred yards of shellholes, until the counter-attack, when they threw explosives at each other all over again. When you look at the photographs of the faces of the owners of that world, the kings and lords and generals and politicians, you see a hardness, almost a ferocity in some of them which made that kind of holocaust inevitable, almost a necessity. Those tight, glistening riding boots on the generals, those monocles, those splendid chargers on which they sometimes rode past the next supply of troops waiting to run on to the machine-guns, the whole master and man relationship which had lasted so long. When you read the literature and listen to the tales of the survivors you see ‘The Front’ as a special closed-in world, cut off from France and Germany and England, in which the professional generals could use men by the million and ammunition and equipment by the mountain, and in which the troops went on suffering and dying, until it suddenly stopped, and everybody went home to unemployment, except the generals. I doubt if any owners of people, factories, colonies, ever had such freedom to fling people and their sweat about for four years, to tear a world to pieces as they did, but most amazing of all is to think of the millions of soldiers killed, and the even greater number of millions wounded, and how they went on killing and dying in those trenches for four years, and for the second-rate people who commanded them all to do it.

‘They used to shoot them then if they couldn’t face it,’ old Allen told me over a camp-fire on the safari to Eil. ‘Stand them against a wall and shoot them. You had to do it, if necessary.’ Perhaps the mutiny of the French army in 1916 was the only realistic gesture made during that insanity, unless it was the fraternisation of the German and British soldiers between the trenches in 1914, so quickly stopped. ‘They shot one in ten of the French troops who mutinied,’ old Allen told me, ‘and the machine started up again. It had to go on, to the finish.’

‘The world’s always been a bloody madhouse anyway,’ he said as we began to nod over the ashes of the camp-fire. We had curried the meat we had shot, eaten it while watching the black clouds massing over the moon and felt the chill coming into the tensing electric air. The storm exploded over us while we were asleep. We always slept in the open, never using tents, and we were very tired that night, and I found I had struggled up on to my knees, my head on my arms, still asleep, with a river racing between my legs and the rain lashing on to my back, while old Allen was shaking his fist at the sky a few yards away, sitting in a sodden mess of blankets, and angrily shouting, ‘Why didn’t you warn us, you bastard?’ The askaris were huddled under a thorn tree trying to light a fire. The fire lit and we all sat round it shivering, trying to smoke damp cigarettes.

‘And one day we’ll wish we were back here like this,’ old Allen said. ‘Curious, isn’t it?’

It is curious, for now, twenty years later, staring out from the ship in the darkness towards Eil, I wished I could have written to old Allen and told him he was right that night. I wished right then I could be looking down on Eil from the hills again as we did the day after the storm, the bush around us steaming in the sun, Eil, three or four tiny white buildings below us surrounded by green patches of cultivation, and the blue Indian Ocean washing up to it. Actual green, fresh, glistening gardens in which we knew there would be melons and sweet potatoes, and nearby, most precious of all, that beautiful, refreshing living water from the sweet spring.

‘Taste it,’ I said to old Allen, handing him a mess tin full of the spring water, and he drank it down, saying, ‘My God, that’s good, son. That’s really good.’ Here was water you did not have to pour six times from cup to cup until a few tired bubbles formed in it, as Doctor Ammanato had taught me up beyond Wal-Wal. He used to pour the water from one cup to another, fast, until a tiny semblance of life came into the dead, cloudy liquid, but even then when you drank it there was no life in it. Old Allen and I drank the Eil water, and then tried it out in the whisky we had with us. Once, with Jack, that best companion for long marches and dreary bivouacs in rocks, we had drunk water so bitter, so astringent it might have been the juice of aloes, that the mouth puckered up inside and the guts refused to work calmly for a couple of weeks after we got out of that place to another waterhole. A hot wind was blowing one evening while Jack and I had smoked under our sheltering rocks and had discussed whether we should finish the last of our one bottle of gin we had saved during the march. We had nothing to go with it but that bitter, angry water from that hole nearby. When we poured the water into our gin the mixture turned navy blue.

‘Some kind of chemical reaction,’ Jack said. ‘Still, there’s a taste of gin at least.’ I have never been able to discover what could have been in that water to produce a navy blue drink.

The sweet potatoes from the garden at Eil, dipped in the lumps of rock salt and eaten from the hand, and tea made with the spring water which had no treachery in it; unforgettable, and melons, and Jeb nuts given to us by an old Arab who tended the gardens there.

I never forgot Eil, its peace, its isolation from the blood feuds and the casual ferocity inland, and the sound of its friendly waters in the white stones so close to the ocean. Every traveller has one treasure, one place he has found in which he would like to spend one year, and mine is Eil; better than Gavai, better than Lamu, farther out of reach, in fact forgotten, Eil remains in the memory as a tiny oasis on the rim of that savage world of camels, waterholes and spearmen under a merciless sun.

The blue lightning was now quivering all over the dark coast, and the ship was gliding through the sea with only a faint throb of her diesels quivering in the deck under my feet. I could see one tiny speck of yellow light on that black coast, and I wondered if half a dozen Somalis were sitting round it, their nightfire, over which they talked genealogy and history and camels.

I was going to Kenya but now I wished it was to Somalia I was going instead, in search of Jibreel and Hassan and Hersi and Mohamed Saad, and Kadija, and other dispensers of wus-wus and to find out how they had fared, and to travel across those wildernesses again, unarmed this time, and to live with the Midgan hunters for a couple of months and collect all their lore before it vanishes forever.

Chapter 9

MOGADISHU; Mogadoxo of the Portuguese, Hamar to the Somalis. I could see it faintly a couple of miles off in the blue-grey dawn mist which was slowly lifting from the ocean. The ocean rolls smoothly here, like heavy liquid glass, blue, purple, green, white marble streaks running in it and fluxing in sudden patches of hissing foam. Somali fishermen in their tiny canoes disappeared slowly in the deepening valleys of smooth water, and rose again just as slowly as the ocean swelled and flowed on past them. There was a fruffing sound as a school of tiny fish scuffed the glistening blue skin of the water, turning the surface of the sea into a glittering, blinding million fragments of a broken mirror as the first sunflare was caught in it. I could see the small white buildings of Mogadishu now, and strained my ears in the hope that I might hear the wild, passionate cry of the muezzin who used to wake me from the sweating tropical sleep with his holy anger. ‘Get up! Get up and pray! Get up, all of you sleepers, and pray.’ And the sleepers would rise, and stumble to prayer, ‘Allahu Akhbar, the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ and, low voiced, take refuge in the Lord of the Worlds, and from the Slinking Whisperer, from the devil, and from men, for a time. And one then saw the red fiery anger of the sun beginning to fill the sky, and marvelled again at the devotion of Islam, its fixed, never forgotten regular prayers which I had seen said by the sophisticated and the simple on rivers in Burma, among rocks in India, in the ancient gardens of Kashmir, and in the farthest corners of the deserts beyond Mogadishu. But I could not hear the muezzin as the ship moved nearer to the coast, only the thin cries of the fishermen in the little boats as they sighted the schools of fish.

Now I could smell Mogadishu in the growing heat, sharp, almost rank, salty, mingled with incense and woodsmoke, like the smell of fresh camel milk in a smoke-cleansed gourd.

I was anxious to see Somali faces again, those lean, serious faces with the large black eyes, the skin brown, or black, an expression of strain, tension, a certain curious readiness in every face, as if listening for a magic word, the eyes watching always as if to see the unexpected. I wanted to feel again that strange almost electric energy they possess when in a crowd, when arguing, when laughing, when moving towards hysteria or quarrel, or decision after urgent discussion. And as the sun rose I could feel that sharp, stifling heat again. If the skin has a memory mine awoke then. It began to tingle as the sun struck it, as if suddenly startled by real heat again after years, and the sweat came as if by command. Once more one’s eyes screwed up, narrowed as I stared across the glaring water at Mogadishu, at the three ancient tramp ships lying at anchor in the slow swell, the rumble of their rusty winches the only sound.

I began to wonder now if I did want to see Mogadishu again, if I did want to hear the harsh Somali language again, if it was any use to walk up those streets again after twenty years. It had assumed the power of a longed-for paradise, once, as the months went by up in the wilderness, and had seemed the greatest place on earth when one got there, ragged and slightly crazy, driving in the heavily laden truck straight to the club, knowing that that marvellous old Colonel of ours would forgive one brief appearance in dusty rags at the bar for that one longed-for drink, the first on leave.

‘Here’s another shagbag come back for a drink,’ someone would shout at the crowded bar. ‘I heard you’d shot yourself long ago. Come and have one.’

Were those circles of Italian bayonets of every kind, a pedigree of blades, still on the walls of the Duca d’Aosta’s Club which we had used so well? The bar would be gone now, swept away in this new free Somalia where bars would be taboo, gone with the Kafir, the infidel. How one drank when one could get it at that time. How one would drink again like that if one had to live that life again.

‘Pronto, signore,’ the old Italian bosun said to me, smacking his frayed leather gloves together. ‘Ecco il motoscafo.’ He pointed to the huge motor barge wallowing towards the ship, the same barge of twenty years ago, battered, ragged motor tyres hanging all round her as buffers, Somalis in bright checked lungis waving from the stern. The bosun pointed to the big green canvas bag on the deck, ropes leading from it up to the ready derrick. It could take about ten men.

‘As soon as you’ve seen the police, signore, I’ll sling you down to the barge,’ the old bosun said. ‘Here are the police now.’

These tall Somali policemen in their greenish khaki shorts and tunics were friendly and courteous as they dealt with my permit to go ashore. I went with them into the saloon and handed them my passport. I think it must have been the first Irish passport they had ever seen. The three of them bent over it to inspect the golden harp stamped in its cover.

‘Ah,’ one of them said. ‘La Repubblica d’Irlanda.’ He smiled. ‘Republic? Good.’ He liked republics. And then one of the other policemen dashed off a written permit which allowed me to go free in Mogadishu for three hours.

Swinging high over the water in the canvas bag the fierce sun held me now and the sweat came out of me in a rush, soaking my thin shirt. A dozen lean Somali hands reached up and steadied the bag as it reached the deck of the barge. They were all laughing, greeting me, friendliness itself. The nakuda of the barge was fat and solid and black, a brightly coloured skull cap on his head.

‘Jambo,’ I said to the nakuda, guessing he would know Swahili with that shining blackness of his, a coast Swahili-Arab if ever I saw one. ‘Uhali gani?’

‘Jambo sana!’ he replied, offering me his big hand to shake. He said his news was good, his life untroubled.

‘Cigarette?’ I offered him the packet.

He smiled, telling me he was longing for a smoke, for he had come without any, having been working since two o’clock that morning. He sat down beside me in the stern of the barge and began to ask me questions about my voyage, the ship I had come in, my job, my plans.

‘How many passengers are in that ship?’ he asked me, pointing up to the towering white mass of the ship from which cases of wine were being lowered into our barge.

‘Hundreds,’ I told him.

‘I always wonder how they feed so many people for so many days,’ he said. ‘I have never understood it. You’re going to eat those. Do you like those?’ He showed me sacks of blue-brown spiky restless lobsters which were waiting to go aboard the ship.

He spoke real safi Swahili, and it was wonderful to hear and speak that beautiful, mellifluous tongue again, here in the heat, smoking a cigarette with a descendant of the slavers who had worked this side of Africa almost as hard as the whites at the other side.

‘My Swahili is rusty,’ I said, yet it was coming faster now, the mysterious machinery of memory working for my nervous tongue, stirring the files where lay the vocabulary in the rust of eight years. But we never forget a language we have used, and enjoyed using.

‘We are oiling it now,’ the nakuda said, smiling. ‘To talk is the best oil for the words. Describe the journey here, the places you saw. Were you in Italy? Egypt?’

He wanted to know the speed of the ship, how many days it took to come from Italy, shaking his head, saying, ‘Everything is going faster the older I get.’ What did I think of all the changes taking place in the world these days? Take his son, now. His son now read books in Italian and English and wanted to go to Europe and become a doctor. What with? How? He was laughing. ‘The young men nowadays don’t seem to worry about money. They write a letter to some foreign country and expect a shower of money for their education. Ashore then,’ he pointed to Mogadishu, ‘they’d go without food now for education. School, school, school, that is the word you hear every minute of the day. I suppose if I had been to a school I would be in an office now with a small boy bringing me cups of coffee every time I rang the bell. I have never seen anything like the madness about education that is going on in these times. They would eat a book if you gave it to them, some of the young men nowadays.’ He got up and uttered an angry rush of Arabic curses at one of the crew who had fouled a rope leading from the cargo sling. ‘That’s another one driven mad with the books,’ he said, nodding at the young Somali who had fouled the rope. ‘He wants to sit in an office.’

‘All is ready,’ the Somalis shouted from the front of the barge. Four young Somali policemen were coming down in the bag now. They landed and came and sat down beside me, inspecting me, and then questioning me. The conversation with these young men for the next quarter of an hour confirmed everything the old nakuda had said about the passion for education among the Somalis today.

‘Are you coming here to teach?’ one of the policemen asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Only to look round the town for three hours. Why? Are you expecting a teacher?’

‘More than anything we want teachers,’ they told me, each butting in on the other as they talked in the way I remembered the Somalis talked when they were interested, hastily, urgently. ‘More than anything we want teachers of English.’ So far the conversation had been in Italian, none of them knowing Swahili. ‘Could I speak English?’ When I said yes, they beamed and began to try out their English, and as usual with the Somalis, without fear of hesitation, vying with each other for the longest sentences.

‘We want many school here to teach English,’ they told me. ‘It is the language everybody in the world must know now. We want teachers to come here, plenty of them.’ Then they began to praise a certain Englishman who was now in Mogadishu teaching English. They could not praise this man highly enough, telling me that he even made jokes and imitated various ways in which English is spoken throughout the world. He was a wonderful teacher and they only wished they could find more like him to come to Mogadishu and help the Somalis get ready for the world of today. As the fever of their pleasure in this talk got hold of them they came and sat round me and I saw that particular and likeable Somali urgency again, that thrill in self expression, that longing for every kind of information which could keep the talk flowing fast and bright. They began to try out long words, eyebrows raised for my nod of assent and understanding of their pronunciation, then racing on with the sentence. Sometimes one of them would sit back and sigh, with pleasure in this success in experiment, meanwhile thinking of new sentences containing new and longer words. They were all from the Mijertein, and when I told them I knew the Mijertein they were delighted, and hurled questions. Did I know the Daror, the Nogal, Alula, the Haud? I did? Tell us all about your time in the Mijertein, they said.

The pride the Mijertein tribes take in being of the Mijertein, the most barren of all the Somali deserts, is as if that territory was the garden of Eden itself. They always speak of it as a place in which you can get anything and everything, in which a man wants for nothing, in which men know the meaning of plenty.

Down south, on the Juba where the trees drip bananas, lemons, pawpaw, where the thick soil pushes up every kind of vegetable, where the small, fat, black men can eat chicken, eggs, beef and have never been without a drink of water, I have heard Mijertein askaris sneering at all this, and telling the local ‘slave people’ that until they see the Mijertein they do not know what living is.

And in the Mijertein you would have to kneel down and pray to a single blade of grass to come up, and cry on it every day to help it live.

I could not help laughing as these young Mijertein tribesmen in police uniform spoke of their wilderness with exaltation, and yet I was touched again at this loyalty. What these Mijertein people meant was that up there you got the finest camel milk, and for the nomads there is no greater praise of a howling wilderness than that.

The policeman stood up and shook hands with me as I got ready to land from the barge, all smiling. I asked them how they liked running their own country now.

‘We are proud,’ they told me. ‘We have a lot to learn and a lot to do, but we will do it. We need help and friends. Tell everyone you meet outside our country that we want their help and friendship. Tell teachers to come and teach us.’

There cannot be anywhere in Africa such ready and hungry people, with such swift minds, waiting to read their way out of a thousand years of dependence on the camel, and the spears that had ensured its possession.

Chapter 10

THE FIRST THING I SAW when I stepped on to the jetty from the barge was a camel, scrawny, evil tempered, stupid, faithful, a load on his back, being led by a small boy into the massing whirl of cars and motor-cycle taxis beyond the wicker gate at the end of the dock. I tried to feel some kind of affection for the camel, to forgive them all through this one behind the small boy, but it was no use. I hated them still. I remembered how one of them had broken out of that long stumbling line in the heat one day, Jaysee’s gramophone and records tied on its back (which I had promised so faithfully to transport up into the Shag for him from Mogadishu) and then how the camel had, in one of those mad furies which overtook them, rolled on its back until it had smashed all of that precious load. I had raced after it, the askaris streaming behind me, a pistol in my hand and an overpowering desire on me to murder it, to lecture it first, and then shoot it. Not quite as stupid as the horse, the camel is all right to work with once you have got into his rhythm, his sauntering stumble, but the hardest work I know is trying to walk at the same slow pace as the camels in thick sand, after the long, difficult ritual of the loading, the camels kneeling there and bawling while the grain is poured out for them on the sacks laid out reverently in front of them by the askaris. ‘Toog, toog, wario,’ the askaris used to croon to them.

It was cheering to know, standing on that jetty, and smelling camels again, that one would never work with them anymore.

There was a Somali waiting for me on the jetty, and his anxiety to take me over, to guide me, made me feel that he must be a police agent, for I had never seen a Somali dragoman before in Mogadishu.

In build, face, colour, bearing, he was obviously from one of the warrior tribes north of Wal-Wal, but he told me he was a third generation in Mogadishu, and that he thought his ancestor had been ‘a camel man’. He was wearing a clean, freshly ironed khaki drill jacket, white linen trousers, old battered sandals, and a blue and red cotton skull cap. I told him I had three hours and that I wanted to walk round Mogadishu, and would he take me to the Croce del Sud hotel first where we could have a drink of fresh lime and water, if they still served it, and if he wanted one too. He said he would be pleased. He suggested he paid for everything and that we reckon up the score when we came back to the dock, and I agreed.

We drove to the Croce del Sud in one of the new motor-cycle cabs, through streets swarming with Somalis in crowds I had never seen in the past. The guide, Ali, told me that more and more Somalis were pouring into Mogadishu. As we drove into a wide, sandy side-street I recognised it, with an unexpected and painful memory of something tragic I had come upon here at two o’clock in the morning nearly twenty years ago. I told the taxi to stop, Ali to pay the driver, for I wanted us to walk from here. While Ali paid him I walked across the street and looked up and down it, evoking that horrible scene again which I had once come upon in the moonlight, as a duty officer.

That street reminded me of old Seymour, whom I had not thought of for years and years. He must surely be dead now, that tough old man, that mine of African lore who looked up at me as the telephone rang at nearly two o’clock in the morning and said, ‘That sounds like trouble. Well, I’m sober. How about you two?’

‘Sober,’ we said. The old timer meant that whoever was going out on this call must be in control of all his faculties, and we had drunk a lot of whisky (and I was glad of this when I walked into that night’s mess). We were not even half shot, having been talking more than drinking. I was down in Mogadishu on temporary duty training two hundred ration-eaters in infantry tactics at a barracks called Wardiglei on the edge of the town.

At the other end of the telephone an Italian was speaking excitedly, telling me there had been a killing, and I must come at once. He named the street and said he would be waiting there.

‘È un soldato inglese,’ the voice said. ‘Lui è morto.’ He went on to say that the soldier had been stabbed and was lying in the street.

But the soldier, a heavily built, tough looking NCO, was alive, his false teeth lying in the sand, himself in a glistening pool of blood, his belly slashed open from side to side, his intestines beside him. He was unconscious. He was dressed in a khaki shirt, ripped across and bloody now, shorts, web belt, and his slouch hat was still on his head, the chin strap in place under his chin. He looked about thirty. Before he was put into the truck I searched him and found his paybook in his hip pocket, with thirty East African shillings in notes in the back of the AB 64 wallet of the paybook. I felt certain he could not live with that frightful wound, and I noticed that the whole length of his left arm was slit open on the underside. I knew what had caused those wounds; the big razor sharp bilau, the dagger used by the Somalis. The nearest hospital was the Italian military hospital and I sent him there at once in a truck, went back to the station and reported the business to the police officer, who rushed out with a patrol to join the other which had fanned out in the area of the stabbing. Then I telephoned the Italian military hospital, and asked the duty officer if the casualty had arrived.

‘Sì, è arrivato,’ the duty officer told me.

‘Operate,’ I told him. ‘Immediately.’

He said he did not think the man could live but that they were going to operate, adding, ‘As soon as we have the permission of the senior British army medical officer in Mogadishu.’

‘Why?’

‘If he should die on the operating table the major here thinks we will be accused of killing the British soldier through negligence.’

I threatened to come right up and arrest him if his major did not at once start the operation, but he would not retreat from his position.

‘You must understand, Signor Capitano,’ he said, ‘that we are in a delicate position here with a gravely wounded British soldier, and we must have the permission of the senior British medical officer to do this operation.’ So, anxious and angry, I roused the British Colonel by telephone, who then telephoned the Italians and ordered them to go ahead with the operation at once.

Old Seymour told me to go up to the hospital and get a statement from the wounded man, if it was at all possible. I found the Italian duty officer in his white uniform and blue duty sash pacing the verandah of the hospital.

‘È una cosa molto grave, Signor Capitano,’ he said, and then we argued the fine points of military bull about operating on enemy soldiers who were dying, and when he saw I was still angry he spread his hands.

‘The major has had his difficulties before in matters like these,’ he told me. ‘You must know that in a tragedy like this one we would not try and be difficult, with a man’s life in the balance, unless we had had awkward experiences before. I am sorry.’

I had a great admiration and liking for the Italians, knew them to be warm and kind, and they had shown enormous courage and dignity in their defeat and the poverty which followed it, and in the presence of the Somalis who could now insult them whenever they wished. They had conquered Somalia, and now they were conquered too, in front of their subject population, and in their humiliating position they showed the greatest stoicism and character.

‘Do you think the NCO will live?’ I asked the duty officer.

‘For a time, yes,’ he said. ‘But his guts have been badly damaged. He is healthy, but it is unlikely that he will live long.’ We smoked cigarettes until it was dawn, when I was told I could see the NCO, who had regained consciousness. I made it as quick as possible.

Name, number, regiment, home address, length of service. What happened?

He was a good liar, fatalistic, and, as it turned out, as loyal as they come to his friends, companions, or acquaintances who had deserted him when he most needed them. But the statement he gave me was well thought out, and even when I told him I knew it was untrue, he smiled and said he was sticking to it, and he did.

He told me he was coming along that moonlit street of sand, smoking a cigarette, when a Somali came up to him and asked him for a match. He was just getting his matches out when the Somali drew a dagger. ‘I raised my arm and he slashed me with it along my arm. Then he put it in my stomach, and when I fell he took my paybook. It had thirty shillings in it. Then he ran away and left me. I don’t remember anything after that, sir.’

I wrote it all down and then read it back to him slowly. He watched me steadily with his small, cool blue eyes, an old sweat with over ten years’ service. I asked him if his statement was correct, and if he wanted to add anything. He shook his head. I then took his paybook out of my tunic pocket and showed it to him, with the thirty shillings still in it.

‘There was no robbery,’ I said. ‘If you want to change this statement, change it now, and we’ll get this fellow who stabbed you. Help us and we’ll get him. What was the real score?’

‘That’s my story, sir,’ he said, meeting my eyes and I thought he was going to wink at me. Then he looked away, his face with a bitter expression on it. ‘My guts are hanging out,’ he said. They were in a huge wet bandage of a kind I had never seen before. ‘The bastards.’ Then he closed his eyes and I left him. He lived for three days.

He had been stabbed near the Abyssinian and Somali brothels, and it did not take K long to get the story, though the dying NCO refused to confirm it; even though it was plain to him that K, who went to see him, knew the truth, he stood by his original story.

What had happened was that the NCO and two officers who were passing through Mogadishu, had gone to a brothel together, and when they came away there was an argument about the prices. The pimp had come after them with a knife and the NCO stayed and took him on, while the others ran for it. Died on Active Service.

Ali and I walked to the Croce del Sud and gradually I began to remember the town again, the shape of the geography reforming in my memory as I saw this building and that one appearing.

Over there was where Chas was standing the night the Somalis came out with the rifles and grenades, a company of troops splitting into sections to surround the area, Chas with an NCO beside him, and Chas, pistol in hand with bullets flying over him, turned a fraction to speak to his NCO, when the bullet meant for him went straight through the NCO’s head, killing him instantly, while J, that relentless pursuer in action, stood waiting in the alley for a door to open, the rifle bullets smacking into the stones. He knew that door would open, and it opened and a Somali face looked out and J put three rounds from his pistol through it, trapping the Somali’s rifle with his foot as it fell before him. And at the other end of the shooting area was Johnny, huge and without much Swahili, and unfortunate to have Swahili speaking troops in the unit under his command. The Somalis were throwing their arms away and rushing past him, some of them being caught by the African askaris, one of them a Haji, a holy man with a red beard and green turban. Knocked to the ground by a rifle butt the holy man was set upon by a corporal with a kurbash he had found, a rhinoceros-hide whip, and Johnny, anxious for peace, trying to remember some Swahili, was shouting, ‘Piga sana, Piga sana,’ intending to mean ‘Stop hitting him. Don’t hit him,’ but actually saying, ‘Hit him harder, harder. Hit him hard,’ and almost in tears as the African soldier gave him a quick stand to attention and said, ‘N’dio, Bwana, I’ll hit him harder,’ and went on flogging the screaming holy man, harder and harder.

‘Eventually, I had to drag the bastard off the holy man myself,’ and it was some time before he knew why the corporal was puzzled.

I wondered where Johnny was now. Johnny, who, isolated in the Shag for months, alone, was found by the officer who relieved him, to be sitting at a table with a large looking glass in front of him, in deep conversation with himself, and eating bully beef straight out of the can (always a sign that you were ready for leave, or treatment). It was Johnny too, who, weary of the bloodshed between the two warring tribes near his fort, and who were using Italian rifles on each other, sent ammunition out to them and let them get on with it. Then, when they had come to a standstill, he arrested the chiefs and made the tribes ransom them with camels.

I could not recognise the Croce del Sud hotel. The white stucco had gone from it, crumbled and fallen away. It looked as if it had been hit by blast from a stick of bombs, and baulks of timber were holding the front of the building up. Ali told me it was being repaired, but the whole town looked like that, run down and tired. The open air café was packed with Somalis, every table with three or four of them deep in chat, most of them in the Somali town dress of lungi, sandals, light jacket and skull cap. It was the first ex-colony I had visited, a place where the subject population had taken over not only the government, but the places of amusement, the hotels, the once-sacred-to-whites-only cafés, and it was a relief to be the odd man out for a change. As all the dark eyes, hundreds of them, turned to watch Ali and his white companion walk through the sitting crowd to a table, I knew what it must be like to have tried this as a black man in a white hotel. Yet every eye I met was friendly. I never met any anti-white feeling of any kind in my three swift hours in Mogadishu, but was not expecting to anyway with Somalis, who had never smarted under any inferiority feeling. A Somali always felt himself to be twice as good as any white man, or any other kind of man at all, and still does, even when he is wrong. Islam does wonders for the self respect of non-white people and Christianity is right to worry about the spread of Islam in Africa, and must honestly face the question of why it has happened – there is nothing so depressing as hearing some unhappy bitch of an ex-suburban memsahib fretting at a hotel table because there is an African sitting at the next one, and watching the African listening to it in silence as he eats. I have never been able to find any colour bar in Islam, and, dreary though the ignorant and fanatical portion of Islam can be – as dreary as Victorian Imperial Christianity was – it does start off from a firm base about colour. It does not try to show it has no colour bar; it has none.

The Italians, unlike the British, did not hide their own peasants, labourers, artisans, from the Somalis and Abyssinians. The first thing I saw on the first day I entered Mogadishu in 1941 was an Italian blacksmith, stripped to the waist, burned dark brown by the sun, working at a forge with three Somali assistants. You would never have seen that in Kenya, and I got out of the truck to take the scene in properly. The Italian blacksmith had skill, and the Somalis knew it, and there was an accord there of a kind I had never seen before with a European and African. But the Italians did not allow Somalis into restaurants in Mogadishu, and an ex-sergeant-major of the Italian army, a Somali, who had a deep affection for the Italians, told me that ‘things became very difficult after fascism took over. But the genuine Italians ignored the Fascist outlook and we were friends.’

‘How do you like freedom?’ I asked Ali when a servant brought us two fresh lime drinks. ‘Does life feel any different?’

‘Now we have got it we have woken up,’ he said. ‘We see all the problems. We need help. We need friends. We have no money.’

Behind us, a couple of miles from where we were sitting, this jumble of white buildings ended, and then the Shag began, and there was nothing in the Shag anybody wanted except a few goatskins and some incense, unless the Japanese came and started a rock factory or found some use for sand as an export. Wandering in the Shag were Somalis with some of the sharpest intelligences in the continent, nomads who had been forced into being parasites of the camel, for centuries, and could anyone ever find a way of using all that courage and intelligence? This unique people, with their great vanity, and their touching bravery in the way in which they try and cope with their difficult life, have no palm oil, no cocoa, no coffee, gold, no diamonds to sell, only their camels.

Ali thought that God had handed the Somali race the most barren piece of Africa, and it was all I could do not to ask him if he had ever heard that the original fathers of the Somali race were cast out of Arabia into Africa because one of them had stolen the Prophet’s slippers. I have never been able to trace the origin of this tale which so used to enrage the Somalis whenever anyone threw it at them during an argument. Ali was gloomy when he discussed Somalia’s chances in a world dedicated to buying and selling, and while he talked I was looking across at the two grey towers of the Italian cathedral and recalling the stir in the crowded pews when, with another junior officer, I had walked up its aisle in the uniform of the enemy, to hear mass at a time when none of the conquerors were allowed to fraternise with the Italians.

When the priest came into the pulpit that hot morning to deliver his sermon I saw him look sharply at the two crisp khaki drill uniforms with their twinkling brass buttons and the glistening Sam Browne belts, and I thought our presence might alter the sermon, but I don’t think it did. His sermon to his flock, conquered by an army with no Catholic affiliations, and surrounded by a fanatically Mohammedan population, told them to stand together, to have courage, to keep up their morale, and their religion; to rise above their misfortunes and to give an example. It reminded me of when I was a small boy at mass in the Irish quarter of dreary Liverpool, when the flock, addressed by Father Daly or Father Hanlon, were told to stand firm by the faith which Saint Patrick had brought to our pagan ancestors, and to have dignity when the Orange fanatics around us took anti-Catholic action (spitting on your shamrock on Saint Patrick’s day, throwing stones at a priest who was on a sick call, or celebrating with grim passion and drums, with King Billy on a white horse leading the procession, the final defeat of the Catholic Irish at the end of the seventeenth century, the defeat which had sent them down into slavery and had finally cast them in rags into the far slums of Chicago, New York, Glasgow, Liverpool, perhaps the slums of Heaven, too).

How hard I had had to think back, when, with the regiment, the pipers and drummers in their green cloaks and their saffron, had led us, the Irish Catholic soldiers, to mass one week, and led the Irish Protestant soldiers to their service the next.

I knew at mass that morning in Mogadishu how the Italians must be feeling as they sat and listened to that sermon, for, coming together like this as a community they must have felt their oneness, their group identity in a hostile area, so that their personal loneliness was diminished for an hour and they felt some kind of strength and courage, for they could not know how many years they must live in their difficulties in occupied Mogadishu. I came away from that mass convinced that nothing was ever going to put an end to our human idiocy about the loot available in this world to the strong, about war which seemed to be man’s favourite pastime, and which had now condemned all these gentle women coming out of the cathedral to nobody knew how many years of poverty and danger in Somalia. Forty-eight of them were slain by the Somalis in one paroxysm a few years afterwards.

I could not see one Italian in the crowds passing where Ali and I were sitting opposite the cathedral.

‘There are only a few Italians left here now,’ Ali told me. ‘The times have changed in many ways.

Chapter 11

ONCE, at a place called Donkukok, I rose at dawn from the blanket laid on the sand and stared out at the oceans of desolation stretching on every side. Nearby, my patrol of askaris were moving about in preparation for another day’s march. A dozen of them, some sitting hunched over the fire gone suddenly shabby and pallid as the yellow sunglare engulfed it in greater fire, others cleaning their rifles, their black leanness shining in the sun. And I wanted to get out of there, soon, and forever. I felt a disgust with all that vast pointlessness stretching about me, and a sick weariness with the sun which was rising for one more day of crushing heat, and in those wastes there is no shade which is not broken, which is not thinly thrown from thorn trees which have no real foliage. There is no escape from the sun until night, and that morning as the sun hit me again and burned through my khaki drill bush shirt I felt faint and exhausted. I wonder why we remember some moments of our lives more keenly than millions of others, moments which add up to very little except a more powerful few minutes of vision or realisation, but from which come no particular lessons. But those few moments on that morning, when the flinching eye stared more sharply inward, while appearing to search outward, told me that ‘adventure’, as it is called, is a luxury and should never be daily life, for you get tired of it so quickly. The bought safari must be infinitely more rewarding as ‘adventure’ than the permanent safari which is daily life as lived in Africa. That morning I wanted a library, my own books, a room of my own to write in and read in, in a climate in which the eyes could range without being screwed up against incandescent light, and in which old men had happier memories to tell than those of the peculiar desert hell I was marooned in.

And yet I loved it, while hating it that morning. What did I own? All of it lay on the sand in front of me. A set of infantry web equipment, fraying now at the edges, unblancoed, thank God, for over two years. Its water bottle was Italian, my issue bottle cast away long ago to be replaced by this much better Italian one. Two blankets. A bedroll. A very accurate cut down 303 rifle. Two P.36 hand grenades. An Italian ammunition chest containing a dozen tins of meat and vegetable, bully beef, biscuits, a hurricane lamp, about five hundred Crown Bird cigarettes, some gin and whisky, matches, pepper, and the strange useless rock salt we had to use, and a few books, one of which was still unread, called Engineering Problems in Paraguay, and which I knew that one night, under some thorn tree, I would be forced to try and read. That was the lot.

I remember the chest from the Carnegie Library of America, which, by some slip made thousands of miles away in an army office, had been allowed to travel to Somalia. I stood around with other officers and dipped into this box of treasure, and we went at it in the same excited, ridiculous way as the infantry, who, when looting among stuff in a captured ruined town, cannot carry the loot anyway, and must leave it for the rear troops who have the transport, flinging the stuff right and left just for the sheer thrill of knowing it is there to have. Book after book I hauled out and dropped. Some old woman with a blue rinse in America, good hearted, anxious to do her part in some scheme for the Allied soldiers across the oceans, had unloaded her grandfather’s useless library and here was some of it after its thousands of miles of journey across oceans in convoy, and across deserts to this grey fort where we ransacked the chest with cries of laughter and disbelief. The Bower of Poetry, in blue leather, 1863, with grey pen drawings of long tressed girls languishing on window seats and gazing out at fallow deer above each sickening poem, The Chronicles of Penelope Porchinghurst, or Nailed to the Masthead, 1881, and in browned careful handwriting in the front, ‘To Hester, lovingly from Mother’, (that sudden gust of pity one feels for the vanished unknown dead who have left this fragment of handwriting), volume after volume, until Engineering Problems in Paraguay began to look like possible reading for the wilderness. I took The Bower of Poetry, sprinkled talcum powder throughout its pages, pressed sprigs of thorn tree among the glistening pages, and inscribed it in front, ‘To Bobsy and all the chaps of Bogol Manyo, from Auntie Geraldine and all the girls at Galkayu Hall’, and sent it off in a truck convoy to Bob who was desiccating on another frontier. He sent us back a large sack full of rocks and dried camel dung, a Christmas present from Bogol Manyo.

I never read Engineering Problems in Paraguay, though I tried many times.

Looking down at the small collection of kit that morning at Donkukok, and realising that it was all I possessed, and had possessed for years, and would possess for what threatened to be years to come, I felt that powerful nausea which must come to all soldiers far from what were called amenities, stripped down to what you could carry on your back in the end. A desert within and a desert without, and miles to go. I hated the war and the desert and the army and the world in general, and then sat down and had breakfast, black tea and a cigarette as the sun rolled above and poured down on us. To hell with it all. Why move? Why walk? For what? To where? For how many times again and again?

I knew I had had all the ‘adventure’ I could ever want. I would be far happier in a prison cell with a few books and no useless responsibility. I had only one ambition, to write, and I could not write. It took all the will I had to stay interested in this military wandering of which I was now weary. I wrote book after book in my head while walking on that bitter sand, but the only actual creative writing I could do was arms and ammunition returns, official reports, because I had to. One day, though, when this treadmill stopped, I would write something – but it might be too late then, I used to fear. A first novel should be published at twenty-five, and I was twenty-seven, and time was racing away from me, etcetera. My God!

At Donkukok that morning, while the askaris waited, I wrote some more controlledly hysterical demands for transfer, to the Italian front, the Burma front, to the new special unit said to be forming in Egypt, to anywhere at all where there was what one thought of as action, but which really meant a nearness to regular drinking and eating, books, white women, fruit, and all that went with it far from Donkukok and its surroundings.

‘Can we load the camels, Effendi?’

‘Yes.’

It was no use sending these applications for transfer on the truck that would roll south next month to the headquarters in the gin belt. They would only anger the good and patient colonel who had had enough of all our applications. I knew it gave him pain to read them, for we were splendidly trapped here, officers he could not replace, and another set of applications would take him beyond pain into anger. For we were devoted to this elderly colonel who did all he could for us, and of all the commanders I served under during seven years I never was to find one whom I would serve so gladly and fully. His name was Patrick Mundy, and he knew all about soldiering and campaigning and isolation, and it was with a special and knowing eye he watched us all succeed, or fail, or commit suicide, or go mad, and he tried to get onions and cheese and drink for us, for our particular wilderness came last in a world of finely graded priorities. He could look at you with his experienced blue eyes and know how far you could go, and how far you were never going to get too. He read books and he was witty. He was an unforgettable person.

So that evening, a long way from Donkukok I tore up the applications and watched them blow across the shale and disappear among the rocks.

I had developed a neurosis about spirillum ticks at that time. Africa finds all your fearful areas eventually, and develops them to the full, as you slowly fray in the sun.

One day, slumping down under a thorn tree, I had told the askaris to pitch camp, and then I saw one of the forgotten spirillum ticks wriggling about on the hot red sand towards my sandalled, sockless foot. I turned it over and yes, there it was, the strange white violin shape on the underbody which marked this disease laden blood-sucker. I would not have recognised it for what it was had it not been for Hankson, an officer who had stayed with me to hunt lion before the war above Isiolo in Kenya. The lion were killing the cattle and Hankson had heard about them, and being on leave he came to join me in pursuit of them. He was still in the early blood-lust stage of East African shooting, which all newcomers go through, a kind of fever, like looting, caused by living in a world swarming with herds of game.

He told me he was scared of spirillum fever down in the frontier region where he was serving, and one day he showed me a spirillum tick. Months later I got the news that he had been bitten by a spirillum tick and had been invalided out with the resulting fever. The disease can kill you, or ruin your heart if you live.

When I saw that first spirillum tick under the thorn tree in Somalia, I remembered Hankson, and after that I always looked for spirillum ticks when camping at night, and always seemed to find them.

As always, one had to give this kind of thing up, or you would drift slowly into the fretful, querulous obsession peculiar to Africa. We all developed these manias after some months alone in the rocks and sand, a sort of hobby with which to fill the emptiness, but a dangerous hobby.

To live in isolation requires training and experience. It is astonishing, the first discovery that one is unable, or afraid, or so mentally unfurnished that isolation becomes loneliness and that one cannot live with oneself and learn to screw down the wings so anxiously beating for flight. It is a very different thing when one has decided to ‘do a safari’, for pleasure or study, because one has chosen to, and which will end at a certain time. But to not know how many years the unchosen safari will go on soon gnaws at the edges of the will, especially when it is young and anxious to do a million other exciting things. Learning to wait was the good thing we of that small scattered unit learned best, I think, though on the whole the years I spent on that silent burning moon did me more harm than good. Harm that is in relation to other people, for though I could live with myself I did not learn to live with other people for years, and even now find, to my regret, that I can live without other people if necessary. Always gregarious, one had become a gregarious solitary. If people were there, splendid. If they were not, it was just a pity, and that is not a good thing in the long run. One had learned to live alone within one’s head; after much anguish it had had to be learned. I noticed this in my companions, especially those with the tendency to absorption into the bush life of the tribes among whom we were sunk. I say sunk because there is nothing fine or noble about savagery and illiteracy and superstition, no matter how splendid looking the warriors and the women. After a good long dose of savagery it is interesting how much one has learned to prefer the gentle and the sophisticated. Primitivism is a very much overrated way of life, and is merely pitiful in essence, no matter how fascinating the carvings and the masks and the quiet zoomorphic ravings on stone and wood, those endless circles in which the tribe has wandered and lost itself, waiting for the stranger to come with the message, even when it leads to the atom bomb. It doesn’t matter how you kill your brother, with a wooden spear or an atom bomb, it is a bore and a waste, but you can’t do very much with the energy behind a spear, at least. I suppose Hitler’s willing druids with their runic stones and their collections of skulls, and their gas ovens, were proof enough that it is easy to be primitive again, even after any number of centuries.

After the enormous orgy of torture and massacre in Europe and Asia, I felt it was impossible for any white man to preach again, self-righteously, about goodness and peace, to any non-white man. And that shame may have been the reason, bigger than African and Eastern restlessness, which caused the white man to pack his kit and go home after the second world war. We must have all felt something of that shame, I think, and acted upon it without really knowing why. That was why, in 1945, I stood at the back of an army cinema and watched with a sort of sly, ashamed fascination when African soldiers were watching the film of the liberation of Belsen, and the other film showing the bulldozed hills of corpses. I watched the African soldiers when the lights went up and I am certain that many of them were looking at us, the white men, with a strange, new kind of eye. They were as appalled as the rest of us by the scenes in Germany, but they had an extra reason for puzzlement, and perhaps they knew that until the white man could manage his own anthropoid passions he should stop feeling superior to blacks merely because he was a white man. There was no doubt that the African recognised, by 1945, that it had long been agreed that the white man was a very special and superior sort of person who had been sent into this world by a sort of guardsman–public-school-educated God to rescue the non-white world from its savagery and dirt. They agreed no longer with that. Mau Mau itself was a scream of anthropological rage, a puzzled and bloody turning upon the Christian varieties of religion which the white men themselves did not bother with. It was not enough for the Kikuyu that God should be a good chap with the right background, a gentleman who lived in a church reserved for white men.

Despite this I have never subscribed to the school of worship of the African primitive, or any other primitive, Nazi or Stalinist. The whole world, it seemed to me during those long nights on the sand under the thorn trees, was in need of rescue, as one world of people. I have never believed that any race of people is better than another race. They are all splendid when allowed to be, and brutes too when the chains break, and they need a government now, and in about a century or two they will have it, if they can resist the longing to smash it all up when boredom sets in. For men will be bored without war for some time to come, that oldest way out and pastime of all, an historic habit.

‘What do you want most?’ I once asked an old Somali.

‘To be well governed, but to be left alone,’ he told me.

I often thought of that and found that I agreed with it, but how to get it?

Chapter 12

IT WAS VERY STRANGE to be walking alongside Ali in the white glare of the sun, feeling the surge of memories certain places in the town aroused; memories of a time which seem bruised with all the violence and tragedy of the period, violence which had thinned in the memory in the years away from the scene. As usual the memory had held hard to the good and amusing things of that time, the friendships which had been so precious in those conditions, the comical happenings which had learned to overlay the horrific and the brutal. Here on the left was the spot in which an Italian, a Somali dagger locked in his bones, had bled to death so that his skin was snow white when he was found, and over there was the restaurant, its wooden lattice-work the same faded yellow, in which poor doomed H had fallen face first into the enormous plate of piled spaghetti.

Of all the suicides H was the most unlikely person, I thought, to take that lonely, despairing way out, though what was in character was the way he used an automatic weapon to do it, firing a burst into himself, for he was always thorough, painstaking in everything he did. Perhaps he was too painstaking, too thorough, too scrupulous. He was in a far off place when he killed himself and I often wondered if he ever wanted his body to be found, if he did not wish to vanish altogether so that nobody would ever know what had happened to him.

I looked into the restaurant after twenty years, and it had not changed, except that the customers were now all Somalis, and I could remember the manager being delighted when I used to ask him to play records of Carlo Buti singing those troppo dolce, troppo triste songs he specialised in. It was here that H had got into his trouble, when, frayed after many months with us on operations up in the Shag, and well filled with whisky he had gone into this restaurant for the thing he had craved for during those months in the bush – a large plate of spaghetti con sugo di pomodoro. None of us in that group of officers which had just left for Mogadishu, were in our right minds, I feel, looking back now. Yet you do not know when you are near the end of your resilience, when your nervous structure is too tattered to last out, and H had had a few months too long in hopeless places, and when he once found himself walking through a shower of poisoned arrows, while pursuing some raiders, he felt, as he told me back in the fort, that he was ‘due for a change of scene, even a lousier scene than this one’. He was physically tough and could walk as far as his Somalis, but he was more bitter than most of us because he could not get a transfer out of our particular purgatory of frustration. After the operations I recommended him for a captaincy, which he got.

He was not able to cope with the piatto abbondante of spaghetti when it came, and weary after his long journey across the Shag to Mogadishu, battered inside his head by those miserable months behind him, and made sleepy by whisky, he fell face forward into the piled tomato-sauce covered spaghetti. Conduct Unbecoming and all that regimental, but it was a very long way from here back to the world of the whitewashed coal dumps, the Mess dinners, the glittering quarter guard, and the lively climate of the drilled battalion, a whole desert away. When he awoke to the Italian manager’s gentle prodding he stared up at that fat, kindly Italian who knew a sand-happy officer when he saw one. H’s face was covered with spaghetti and tomato sauce, and it hung from his big moustache in strings.

‘It’s a bad show, isn’t it, signor,’ H said sadly. ‘It looks as if you’ll have to feed me with a spoon yourself. I can’t manage it,’ and then fell asleep again, until the military police arrived. He lost his new captaincy.

Soon he found himself in another moon landscape among armed bands of savages again, alone, and when we heard of this reward, after his long dose of desert with us, we felt it might have been better had he been given a desk job for a few months instead, nearer to ice-boxes, a plentiful supply of cold beer, somewhere in Mogadishu where the going could be so good when you knew your way around. He must have thought it over one night among the rocks of his new parish and perhaps saw no end to this procession of days and nights in isolation, and, used up, he had fired half a sub-machine-gun magazine into himself. Died longing for more Active Service, with a little more civilisation to hand than had been obtainable during the past three years. I often think of him and wish that some accident by some headquarters clerk had sent him mistakenly to a unit far from that country which had finally eaten him up.

As Ali and I strolled through Mogadishu he asked me about communism, looking searchingly into my eyes as he spoke, and I told him I had never heard of it, did not know what it was, which did not seem to satisfy him. Once, in a certain country during a time of tension, I had a police agent pounce on a radio I had in my station wagon. He was going to confiscate it as a transmitter, and ever since then I have hated police agents, out of a sort of boredom with their pipe dreams of reporting in to the boss with the big news about the spy. He asked me if I would like to see the Russian Embassy and I told him I had seen a couple of them in other places and that would satisfy me for a few years to come. I got him talking about the Arabs and as we walked I went on with my awakened memories of this place which seemed now so much less handsome, so much more shabby than it had appeared to us in the Shag when we looked to it as the fountainhead of drink, rations and mail.

My foot went through the crumbling sidewalk, up to the knee, and Ali helped to drag the leg out again, explaining that a recent fall of rain had loosened the old cement up, and there was so little money to do things with. This was outside the old Italian café where we used to sit over coffee when on leave, when the novelty of plentiful alcohol had worn off, where there had been a barber who used to shear the long hair we brought down to Mogadishu. It was now some kind of headquarters for a youth movement, but swarming with old men in skull caps who were talking excitedly about the chances of more rain to come. Nothing can be done for the poor old men of a finished culture when the new time comes among them like a denial of their very need to exist at all.

You come across these old men in all countries with long, unbroken race memories and tradition, some of them holding the remains of cultures in their illiterate heads, in those marvellous memories unimpaired by reading, knowledge which waited too long for the new popular interest in archaeology, folklore and anthropology to come and rescue it and give it the dignity which would make it respected by the youth who despise the old men. You can find these old men in Ireland, India, Africa, the remains of the ancient world which was defeated and cast aside for the worship of money and machinery during the time of the alien imperial power which had smashed their world so pitilessly. All their conquerors could do was consolidate and administer what they had conquered, and despise the losers, often degrading them. It is interesting how a few generations after the conquest, the descendants of the conquerors start seeking for the bits of manuscript, the spoken traditions, the sad curios of the thing their forefathers trampled upon as not worth consideration. Germans, Poles, Swedes, Frenchmen, Englishmen trying to piece together remains of race memory in Ireland which might give them a clue to the kind of world that existed in Gaul before the Romans stamped it down into something which paid tribute and obeyed orders on time, and meanwhile, firing rockets in the first probes for the journeys which will carry them and their hungers into other worlds – where there might be new people to control, administer, order about, civilise. If there are people there they are bound to be inferior, that is to say, strange, different, due for instructions, overdue for conquest. The whole bloody journey of the powers had been, it seems, to create consumers for consumer goods, and one must hasten to admit how arduously one pursues those consumer goods, while trying to despise them, so that one’s grief for the shattered civilisations is comical, and yet undeniable.

In a desert like this Somalia, cut off long ago from the culture of Islam, and left with a religion which became dried and narrow, fit for desert nomads who lived in fear of each other, the old men became only rejected, tired warriors who recalled times when the fighting was heavier, spoke of the Mad Mullah as the last hero, yet even so there is something pathetic in their wistful bewilderment with the new world which has fallen upon them in dark glasses and text books.

‘He will die in a day or two, that old one, Effendi,’ one of my Somali askaris said to me one morning. We were camped beside a waterhole in the northern Mudugh, watching a Somali camel train amble slowly away towards the flaring yellow glow on the horizon where the sun was about to rise. The thin chill of the desert night was dissolving in the rising heat and the askari was pointing to an old man who was stumbling along on the tail of the caravan, far behind the young warriors with their spears.

Nothing would be said one morning when that old man could no longer get up from his sleeping place as the camels were loaded. He would lie there and watch the kariya of his group move away without him, knowing it was done, this lifelong wandering between waterholes, and he would be composed for his end. There would be no weeping, no cries of despair, no questioning. He would lie there, old and finished, and await his death, and a day or so later a couple of the young men of the kariya would come back to that place to find the corpse. There may be a sheikh with them, one who knows the law and has the right to ritual. One of the young men will open up a hole in the parched sand while the others wrap the body of the dead elder in a piece of cloth. The sura for the dead, Yassin, will be recited. A circle of stones will be laid round the grave and the sheikh will gravely go through the short ceremony, intoning in a mournful voice the farewell and the consignment to God. ‘God made you from the dust,’ the sheikh tells the wilderness, ‘He gave you life until this last day here, and now he has returned you to the dust. You are alone. If a stranger asks you who made you, answer, “Allah made me. There is only one God, Allah, and Mahomet is his prophet.”’

Then two angels come to the grave and stand invisible guard there. Swallowed up into eternity, the old man has vanished under the sand. The men who buried him hasten back to their kariya, to the camels, tearless, griefless, for how can a man weep at what is inevitable, as inevitable as birth?

Here was the old Savoia restaurant still closely latticed against the glare, and it was just here, I remembered, as I was about to report in to headquarters for details about my next place of exile, that I had heard a cry of surprise, turned round, saw that small, neat, laughing figure in white Italian uniform, and, to hell with non-fraternisation, we embraced and slapped each other’s backs, for it was Carlo. I had not seen him for well over a year, had not seen him since he had waded out into the surf, a thousand miles north at Gardafui, beside the sick officer lying on a stretcher carried by four Somalis to the rusty iron barge. The ship bound for Mombasa had been lying a mile off and Carlo had volunteered to accompany the sick British officer to Mombasa, for the ship had no doctor.

I had warned him to be careful before he went ashore in Mombasa as I had heard of other Italians, down in Kenya on a trip under our auspices from Somalia, being arrested and swept into the prisoner-of-war machine. Carlo would not believe that the military police would interfere with him, for after all he was part of our machinery in this wilderness, was a doctor, was on a journey of mercy and necessity.

They arrested him in Mombasa as soon as he had delivered the sick officer. They put him into a prisoner-of-war camp. It was a year before he saw Somalia again, and when I met him that day outside the Savoia he told me he felt bitter. I told him that he must know that all armies had this brainless, disciplined, and even vengeful machinery far back at base, and that that machine was there to arrest strangers in enemy uniform.

‘Una bibita,’ I had said to him, and we had gone into the Savoia, had a drink together, separated, and never saw each other again. He died in Italy in 1961. Since the war I had often tried to find him, had written to the Italian army authorities in Rome, but never was able to trace him, and it was in a strange way that I did come across his tracks, too late. I had corresponded on and off with a friend in Italy, and not knowing that she had known Carlo in Somalia, had described him, named him in a letter in 1961, and had said how I wished I could see him again and talk of Kalanka and our time there together twenty years ago. Back had come a letter to say that my friend had known him well in Italy, and that he had just died. My friend had telephoned Carlo’s wife immediately after getting my letter from Ireland, and his wife had said that it was very strange, for Carlo too had often wondered where I was and had wished we could meet again. So, as I stood outside the Savoia restaurant in 1962, where we had last met, the fact of his death and of how very near I had been to meeting him again, had I only mentioned his name in one of my letters to this friend in Italy during the past years, became real for the first time.

It was all I could do to keep up the conversation with Ali about the possible discovery of oil by Americans in Somalia. Here were all the white buildings, the same though shabbier, and inside the Savoia was the table at which we had sat and had that last drink together while he made his usual, glittering, sharp jokes and gave me advice about how to stay healthy in the sick piece of country to which I thought I was about to be transferred. For a moment I could see why the desert Somalis, close all the time to death, never complained about it, never sought to deny it, accepted it as the end of the long and mysterious series of accidents which animate the forty thousand-odd days between birth and death. It was Hashim who had said to me once, ‘You go that way, to some town, and your life is changed completely. But had you gone to another town instead it would have changed just as completely, but it would have been another kind of life altogether. It is no use trying to be exactly right. We have no control of the future, only of what we have let happen to us.’

Ali and I turned down a side-street into the alleys where the houses were low, and I could smell incense burning again. I asked Ali if he ever saw any people from the tribe called Malablei from the Webi Shabeli river who used to dance here during their ceremonies, and he said he had seen them in Mogadishu but thought little of them.

‘All those river people are very strange,’ I told him. ‘They know many curious things.’

Chapter 13

THE FIRST TIME I saw the Malablei dancers in the narrow streets behind Mogadishu’s façade they were wearing their goat masks, real goat skulls cut so that they covered the dancers’ faces, and the long horns twisted upwards from them. There was something very sinister about the slow, jogging, turning of these dancers as they obeyed the thudding drums carried by the solemn men who so slowly turned and jogged with them. The tall Somalis of nomad blood stood back and made way for these black negroid-looking bodies with goat masks on top, men who had forgotten all around them.

These Malablei who were here on a visit from the big river a few miles south, who had been in this country long before their taller invaders, the Somalis, seemed now as if they owned it again. There was a dark denial of all non-pagan religion in their pagan masks, so dedicated to the goat-power, and there was a kind of threat in their sensuous, sidling, circling movements, so that their conquerors, those tall, religious Somalis who despised them, kept well back and let them slowly pass through the streets with their cunning-handed drummers. They represented the real Africa, the Africa which has invented a thousand more new religions since the several hundred versions of Christianity began to puzzle them, the continent of the enormous brown rivers and of packed trees and alligator men, leopard and lion men, rainmakers and cursers and poisoners, and these haunting yet menacing drums were the pulse of it, brought out into the temporary streets, as if to show that not very much had happened to Africa yet.

As always, those drums had stirred me. They give you a feeling of the immensity and the age of Africa, these drums, and they beat their way right into you, right down into the invisible and forgotten areas of the soul, which open for their sound. Two of us had once danced to them, up on the Juba river, near Dolo, with about five hundred tribesmen and women who had welcomed us in our two dusty armoured cars.

‘Captanka Armati wai,’ they had chanted in Somali and Italian gibberish, dancing round us, clapping their hands to the long-booming drums on the flat red sand by that wide river. Swept into them, into their rhythm and into that mindless happiness, caught by the pounding drums around us, we had danced with them, clapping our hands with theirs, celebrating our being there in their raided wilderness with these machine-guns in the armoured cars, while we waited for their chief to come and meet us. We were in sweaty shirts and shorts, bare legged, sandals on our feet, hatless, and we danced faster as the drummers worked up their tempo, all those white teeth; bony, black handsome faces spinning in the thin red dust which we sent up until it hung in the trees. Then the feast of camel milk and meat as the moon came up.

That evening in Mogadishu when I had watched the goat-masked Malablei dancers has always stayed in my memory as an unexpected manifestation among the buildings, of an Africa which may never completely disappear, which lived on through centuries while to the north Greece and Rome rose and fell. They never came down here, those conquerors in helmets. They went to cold Gaul and Britain instead. Those Malablei and their brother tribes along the hot river were still part of the forest, of its spirit, and they looked it as they danced through the Somalis who knew nothing of their secrets, their magic, their black mystery. It was K who was to be privileged to see what these river people could bring out of darkness with their drums and chants.

I was stationed for a while on the southern Webi Shabeli river, at a time when it was very disturbed following the collapse of the Italian army and its retreat. When the thin cement of European police and order is torn off, a cement which has frozen the normal processes of an occupied country’s life, history begins again, usually violently. The only way a country is truly conquered by another is when all the original inhabitants are slain, wiped out completely, unless they are mumbling themselves away into their own kind of cultural death, like the aborigines of Australia. But it is the police, with the threat of soldiers farther behind, who lay on the thin cement of alien peace in conquered countries containing the aboriginal people still vitally alive, and on the Webi Shabeli, as all over Somalia, they drew their knives in 1941. They had to, for an order had collapsed around them.

It is very hard for Europeans to realise how dull, how heavy is the crushing boredom of the order, the habit, the daily round of the work-day which they brought with swords into South America, Africa, India, Ireland, everywhere where a completely different set of appreciations had been at agonised work for centuries. That the Irish tribe-families slew each other gave the invaders no right to take their country, while churls by the thousand groaned in Britain. That the Aztecs piled up mountains of hearts in bloody temples was not why Cortés went there and wrecked the world he found. He went for gold, just as the English went to Ireland for land, to Africa and India for raw materials, for money and power. Most pathetic of all was why the Italians went to Somalia, because there was nothing else left of Africa to take, the Nordics having carved up the rest among themselves. Yet ironically enough, while the conquered everywhere resented losing their country and their freedom, they nearly always took advantage of the policed peace forced upon them, nearly always relaxed, their swords left at home, yet they wanted their country back for themselves, while enjoying the ‘peace of the grave’, as Pandit Nehru once called it, in which they now toiled under aliens. And they revolted when they saw a hope of success. But time is always on the side of the original owners, if they can only survive.

On the Webi Shabeli river in 1941 the tribes refused to give any more labourers to the Italian plantations, for, having been liberated from Italian rule, after long British propaganda telling them to help the preparing invaders break the Italians, they could not see why those plantations must work again to give food to the world that was still at war outside. They said they were finished with working for white men, and they went amok among the Italian plantations, until some of us appeared with platoons and weapons and started to lay down the thin cement again. When I told them that I had come to find labour for the plantations they took off into the bush. Africans hate work for its own sake. They cannot understand how it can be a virtue to toil regularly at dull tasks, keeping to a piece of tin and glass called a clock. I sympathised with these people who had had enough of working on plantations, and then sent out scouts to bring in their chiefs. The first chief to appear was a fine, tall old man, old enough to be my great grandfather. As a young man he had fought long and stubbornly as a warrior of his tribe, the Bimal, against the Italian invaders. He was grave and stern, most concerned to hear that I had come here to the first clearing beside the river to ask the chiefs to send labourers to the deserted plantations. He stood in front of me, a staff polished by years of handling stuck in the brown soil in front of his sandalled feet, his bald head shining in the sun, regarding me solemnly as he listened to my request, which he knew would become an order if not acceded to as a request.

‘The young men will not go back to the colonia, Signor Tenente,’ he told me, shaking his head. ‘They will not go back to those heavy Italian tasks and live in those colonia villages. Your coming here as an army was the very thing that freed them from that life. I cannot ask them to go back to it.’ Here was a real chief, one who did not rush to offer his people and get a medal, a certificate, a reputation for ‘reliability’, ‘loyalty’ (that word which has sent so many to their deaths when the revolt against the alien comes).

‘I will be organising the work contracts,’ I told him. ‘The colonia is finished. I will regulate the work tasks, and the pay, and I will see to it that they are not ill treated in any way.’ Most of the Italian plantation managers had been good to their labourers, but there had been the usual small quota of white gods from over the sea who felt better when Africans were slaving for them. As I finished speaking to the chief another old man came in, dramatically, pointed his finger at me, and shouted, ‘You can shoot me this minute, but I will never give you one of my people as a labourer on a plantation.’ A crowd formed behind him, drawn from under the far trees by his fierce, declamatory shout, one with him in his anger.

‘I cannot shoot you, old man,’ I told him. ‘Go and sit down again under the trees until I send for you. You have made your point and your people are proud of you.’ When I smiled all the people laughed, not unkindly, and the old man narrowed his eyes and stared at me for a few seconds.

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘I would die rather than give you my men to work on the plantations. I thought you had come here to put an end to that.’

‘There is a difference in being made to work, and wanting to work,’ I said. ‘It’s right that your people are enjoying freedom from being taken to work which they had not chosen, but soon a time will come when they will want to earn money again, and it will be on the same plantations but under different conditions. I am here to look after you, to prevent raiding and killing, not to make you work, yet I have been asked by the new military government to get food from here for the soldiers who are fighting to end colonias everywhere, and we cannot get that food unless your men will help to grow it on the plantations.’

‘We do not want to work for the Italians anymore,’ the old man said.

‘You will actually be working for me,’ I told him, ‘just as the Italians will be working for the military government. The food must be grown somehow. Think it over for a day and then come and see me again and tell me what you have thought. I am not here to arrest you, or force you. I am asking you to find men among your tribes who will work on the plantation under new contracts which I will arrange.’

‘We will think over what you have said,’ the first old chief said to me. ‘We are glad you are giving us time to speak this matter out.’ He beckoned to a man nearby, who came over obediently, a tall youth with a shock of thick woolly hair. ‘Take off your cloth and show the officer your back,’ he said sharply. The young man slipped the cotton cloak off his shoulders and turned to show me the healed, shining, grey scars of whip strokes on his back.

‘That was done at the whipping post at Shalambot,’ the chief said to me. ‘My people wanted to kill the Italians when their army was retreating, but I would not let them. Are you going to kill the Italians or not?’ He stared into my eyes.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They are defeated. One cannot kill those who did not die in the battle. One gives them a chance to live another kind of life. Would you kill unarmed people after a battle?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t. We wanted to hear you speak on that subject. It was said that the new army would kill all the Italians. Do you now say that work and pay will be just?’

‘Yes. Discuss it and we will meet again tomorrow.’

When men, Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, or those wearing their insignia, sit at desks in countries not their own, but borrowed by gunfire, or bribes, or handy accident, tell the inhabitants (the actual winners) what is going to happen to them tomorrow, they cannot help acting the strangers, as if they, and what they feel they represent, are going to last for centuries here, in this country which is not theirs, and may last for all eternity. They cannot help feeling that. They have to feel it, or go, resign, be court-martialled, cease to believe in what they only half believe anyway – that they have come here with a special message; in fact they must administer the accident they find themselves involved in. And it takes acting. Acting is important to kings, barristers, administrators, judges, officers, all who assume cousinship to God. And I felt it that hot, sweaty day beside the Webi Shabeli when I sat with six chiefs and listened to their decision.

Of course they were going to send the labourers. They had numbered them off already. Of course they saw that the two white races had fought each other in Africa, in front of their eyes, one white race being downed, and of course they saw that this made no difference at all in who owned the plantations, and who slaved on them in the heat. The Italians owned the plantations, and would own them as long as the new conquerors backed them in their ownership (though the actual owners were sitting around me in the sun that day, and would never forget it), so they would supply the labourers. I told them I was very happy, for them, for me, for the government, for the Italians, and for the human race in general. Men must work with one another, tolerate each other, help each other, etcetera, and I meant it, though not quite for the reasons I gave at that time and in that situation. I began to understand politics, government lying.

Yet there is something touching about being an administrator, and one can see how easily it can become a habit, and then a conviction, a way of life if carried on long enough with enough power behind to ensure its continuance. And it had been the history of the human race up to then, this taking of other people’s countries, the setting up of incomprehensible governments, the governing, the policing, the pensioning, the retirement, the memoirs detailing the failings of the governed (who yet might rise to civilisation).

Even then, in 1941, 2 and 3, I sensed that just as it was about to die, the British Empire had almost risen above the cash and factory image which it had so long worked for, above even its stuffy racial prejudices sometimes, and it was too late then. But it was not till I got to the Fourteenth Army in Burma, with its many races, that I saw what the British Empire might have been, despite the fears felt by those upstairs in London about the servants downstairs. Too late after too much cant.

It was the oldest of the chiefs who, when the first drafts of labourers for the plantations came in, said to me what I had always known I felt, but had never heard spoken by one of the subject races.

‘We are lending you the labourers,’ he told me. ‘But only because you are living with us here on the river, and because you have spoken well, and not because we recognise this new government which has replaced the Italians. We do not want to be ruled by any strangers anymore. They beat us with cannon, but every inch of this land is ours. Ours. It can never belong to any strangers. Men cannot live under strangers who have taken their lands. Never. If I had a spear and you had nothing and I came and took your house from you, and made you work in your own garden for me, you would not like that. That is what they have done, these governments. And it must come to an end now. You can tell them that, for that is what we all feel.’ There was a good opportunity for some cant here, to tell him about the docks, the roads, the harbours, and all the handout material about how good it was to be ruled by clever white men, but I let it go. I agreed with every word he had said, while looking grave, and enigmatic, and non-committal. These chiefs, when young, had fought against the Italian invaders, and this tribe had been difficult to subdue. All these people everywhere would have to be let free, left alone, lectured to no more, or this war would be as useless as the last one.

Chapter 14

ABOUT A THOUSAND MILES NORTH from this crowded street in which Ali and I were walking in the sunglare Humf lay buried. He was killed while I was in Burma, a friend I grieve over, and it was over there in that palm shaded house, its white stucco shabby and greying now, that I last met him, in 1943 when I was certain I either had cancer of the throat, or something like it.

Fear is interesting in the way it can either drip in slowly, given time and circumstance, or blast in like a flash of flame in a millionth of a second. But I did not know that the body and mind can make their own arrangements for you by forcing buried fear into an actual lump, a rocklike lump in your throat, until Humf explained it to me.

‘It’s just strain,’ he told me laughing. ‘Strain caused by fear, and fear caused by the fear of going wrong, of balancing a situation too long, as you have been doing lately up country.’

Humf was a marvellous doctor, and greatly interested in the effects of the wilderness on each of us. He knew the breakdown signs in the eyes immediately, and always fought to get leave for an officer when he saw these signs.

‘Isolation among the wolves,’ he used to say, ‘can bring about exactly the same effects as a good long drenching of shellfire. The body has to find some getout.’ He always referred to the desert tribes as ‘the wolves’, rather fondly.

‘But listen, Humf,’ I protested, ‘this is an actual lump. Here.’ I showed him. ‘I can’t swallow. I can actually feel it there. It hurts.’

He shook his head patiently. ‘I’m telling you,’ he said, ‘it’s just strain. If you hadn’t ended the operations when you did, you’d have cracked up completely. This “lump” as you imagine it to be, is merely your body’s getout, its effort to help you crack up and get sick, and – ’ he grinned – ‘have the right to desert your post among the wolves, honourably. That’s all. Now do what I tell you. Go and get drunk with your friends. They’re in the bar now. Get drunk for a few nights. Talk all night. Go to a few parties. There’s no actual lump. It’s quite normal to get apparently ill, when you’re ready to have a rest and you can’t.’

He was right. I woke up with a hangover about a day and a half later, the sun burning on me through the open window of the room, the bed soaked with sweat, and while in the shower clapped my hand to my throat and found that the lump, which had been hardening there for about two months, was gone. And I sat down after drying myself and thought about how remarkable that was.

What would have been the strange machinery of emotion which could have caused that actual lump in my throat, which had got worse, so that I had to make an effort to swallow towards the end of my term in that worst of all places from which I had just come, emptied, sickened, tired, and shattered after a truly demoniacal malaria? It was true that I had not enjoyed what I had had to do up there, nor had the others. That was why drink was good at night. You could feel the fourth drink slowly melting the iron tension in the head and body, and you could feel your frame sighing with relief. It was the third year that that lump had gone, and I had never had a nice soft job on the coast, in the gin belt, and had begun to want one, and to resent wanting one, preferring to belong up there with the friends who preferred it too, and who all wanted a nice soft job for a while on the coast.

I did not like to think that my machinery could invent that psychological lump for me, preferring to believe that one was in full control of the emotional works all the time.

It helped me to understand the crackups, that lump, and the suicides. It became obvious to me that when you were done, and ready to bend, you would not know what you were doing, and would do it. It was obvious that you could not live in violence and threat for overlong periods and not be diverted into those side lanes of fear and doubt. It was all too personal, too close, too tiring to one’s reverence for charity, and pity. It was having to live like a savage for too long, becoming casual about brutality, revenge, blood lust, which set up intense inner struggle, disgust, while all the time you had to stay the wary, watchful, confident white stranger who revelled, apparently, in this warrior world where the standards of fighting spirit had been set by the ‘Mad Mullah’ twenty-odd years before. Many of one’s opponents, proud to be known as Dub-Ad, had been in his ranks. For a time it was feared that another ‘Mad Mullah’ might arise, but those of us close to the Somalis knew it was unlikely.

‘Well, how’s the cancer tonight?’ Humf asked me in the bar that evening.

‘Gone,’ I told him. We laughed.

‘But of course, it’s not funny,’ Humf said. ‘I’ve asked for a psychologist to make a report on the officers up country. It’s not just the general tension of living among “the wolves”, it’s the long stretches, a year and more, you’re having to do up there without proper food, without civilisation in fact. You’d be surprised what other forms of “lump” in the throat I’ve dealt with during the past couple of years. Symptoms, that’s all, of used-upness. But there’s nothing I can do about it.’

I told Humf that I actually enjoyed living among ‘the wolves’, while hating it too, that when I was away on my annual twenty-eight days leave I longed to go back again. He nodded.

‘That’s because you’re a romantic,’ he said, ‘like your friends. You’ve learned a common unit feeling, living a life that only a few of you live. It can get so bad that officers have to be ordered to go on leave. In other words, if you’ve got to live rough, then live the roughest, with your friends. That’s romanticism, and highly necessary in an army, of course.’

He then explained to me some of the forms of mania he had glanced at in some of the other officers who had consulted him. These manias and tensions were dissolved quite often by action or leave, but it was usually responsibility involving the possibility of a wrong decision at any moment, especially among a volatile and violent people, which found the hidden cracks in one. A decision, no matter how many hours, weeks, months, it has been coming up, or considered, takes a moment only, and there is usually no going back, and probably fear comes from the fear of making the wrong decision, and a wrong decision could mean a disaster too far away from base to be, well let’s say it, safe. So it probably came down to a rationalisation about personal fear in the end. However you try and shape it, personal fear, of disgrace or death, must lie behind this kind of neurosis. The root of the erosion, though, lay in the fact that one sought so hard to keep peace among tribes who despised it, while one often waited, through frustration and anger, stoked by climate and living conditions, to have it out with them in the way they wanted it, through violence. One swung between pity and rage, while slowly one eroded. When the violence came, however, one hated it, and one came to know how it damaged one’s slightly phoney ideals about how Man longed only for goodness and peace, whereas, actually, he loved fighting and knew he shouldn’t. Hypocrisy is the keystone of civilisation and should be cherished.

Greater than your own petty anxieties and fears, though, was the sense of desolation when you saw the nomads dying or dead on the hot bitter rock of their prison, the wilderness; and made worse by the realisation that they did not resent it, did not want a washing machine or to live forever, and that they despised pain and death, perhaps the true nihilists, these famished wanderers of the wastes come to their bloody rest by treachery. Their scorn of death was both depressing and exalting, as your civilised and primitive selves tried to be truthful.

They always made me feel, those nomad dead, as if they announced to the world that there was no purpose after all behind life, and that it was all like this beneath the tapestry, loneliness and vengeance and waste. I think that that was what I hated most about their wilderness; that it showed you how the world had once been, everywhere, and could be again if the compassionate will of civilised men was ever finally defeated by the spirit of death, which the scientists have packaged at last, and who know, far better than the warrior generals, that there can be no next war, only the last one.

Chapter 15

IRECOGNISED FINN’S HOUSE across the busy sandy street, the lattice-work still faded green, the yellow walls still cracked and scabrous, the palms as wilted and as dusty as ever, and I wondered where he was now, tall, lean, patient, hospitable Finn in his dark glasses and big upturned moustache. The sun beat down hard on his house, and if I knew Finn, at all, he was now in some African wilderness, stroking his moustache and listening to a tribesman explain some finer points about a murder (known as ‘a killing’ to the tribesman).

‘Who lives in that house?’ I asked Ali.

‘A merchant,’ he said. ‘Do you like that house?’

‘Yes. It is very attractive,’ I told him. It had been two o’clock in the morning when I had gone to that house for the last time, invited there by a telephone call from Finn. He had wanted me to interrogate an Italian who had been found wandering in the desert, a kettle in his hand, by an askari patrol.

Finn was in one of his very stiffly starched and pressed khaki drill uniforms, buttons glittering, thick dark hair brushed back, great moustache sharp against his haggard, big-boned handsome face, tall and massively shouldered, the living embodiment of the linen-shirted Gaelic warriors who had met the English with a crash on many an Irish field, warriors and strangers, until time had melted down their race memory into Tom Moore’s honeyed songs for drawing rooms.

‘He’s in there,’ Finn said, pointing to his living room. ‘He’s round the bend, poor fella. A kettle, mind you, that was his kit for the desert. Let’s give him a drink and you can question him. He’s in a hell of a state.’

The Italian was even bigger than Finn, a man of about six feet three inches in height, grey haired, tragic-eyed, sitting at a table and staring at the wall with tears in his eyes. He looked at us accusingly and when I greeted him in Italian and asked him how he was he shook his head wearily.

‘I must go home,’ he said. ‘I must.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Give me my kettle and let me go home. I will bother nobody. Nobody, signore. I will walk it and bother nobody. But I must go.’

Finn poured a shot of O.B., Cioffi’s local brandy, and handed it to the Italian who held it in a trembling hand, and when Finn and I had a drink we both sat down, and the Italian sat down too and stared at the wall again.

‘Where is home?’ I asked the Italian.

‘Italy,’ he said.

‘And you were walking there?’

‘I am walking there,’ he said, nodding sadly. ‘It is the only sensible thing to do. I cannot rot here any longer in this hell. My family are bombed, Italy is being destroyed, and I am here in this hell in misery. I must go home. I must. I will bother nobody.’

‘You are not bothering anybody,’ I told him. ‘We will do anything we can to help you.’ He jumped to his feet, smiling, his hands held out to take ours in friendship, a sad smile on his lean, red face.

‘Then let me go,’ he said. ‘Just let me go. I had left this hellish town and was in the desert with my kettle when your soldiers arrested me. Give me a pass and let me walk home. I cannot stay here while Italy is being destroyed. Please give me the pass and I will go.’

‘Finish your drink first,’ I told him. ‘We have plenty of time yet. Sit down and finish your drink. What were you going to do with the kettle? Had you nothing else but your kettle?’

He sat down again, sighing, staring at the wall, thinking. ‘The kettle,’ he said, ‘was for condensing the sea water. That’s all you need, a kettle and a small tin. The askaris took my small tin.’

‘You were going to walk along the sea coast right up to Egypt, and then sail across to Italy?’ I said.

‘That’s my plan,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way.’

I asked him if he had ever seen these wild, burning coasts, and if he knew of the thousands of miles of it peopled by dangerous tribes all the way to Egypt. He looked me in the eye and laughed.

‘Such things are nothing to a determined man when he is walking home,’ he assured me. He was trembling and sweat had broken out all over his face and hands. I opened one of those round tropicalised tins of fifty cigarettes and offered him one. He could hardly hold it in his hand he was trembling so violently. ‘This war,’ he cried, ‘this useless stupid war, what can it ever achieve for anybody in the world except suffering and death? Why have they started this war, these generals and politicians with their lies? What about my wife and my children?’ Finn went to telephone the Italian hospital for a doctor while I tried to soothe the weeping grey-haired giant who had had enough of this savage coast, of separation from his horn and family, and who had gone insane with despair.

‘They’ll be here in five minutes,’ Finn said, coming back into the room.

‘You have contracted malaria in the desert, signore,’ I told the Italian. ‘You see how you are shaking? That’s malaria. We will get you well first, and then we’ll do something about your plan to go to Italy.’ He looked at his shaking hands, nodding, saying, ‘Sì. Sì. Sì. I am eaten with malaria. The world is eaten with it, war and malaria and suffering.’ We gave him another drink and a cigarette. Under the table the Italian was sawing at his left wrist with the jagged edge of the metal diaphragm I had cut from the tin of cigarettes, and we saw him at it and I tried to snatch the piece of metal from him. He drew back, his wrist bleeding slightly, wild eyes looking at Finn and then at me.

‘Give it to me,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘Give it to me, or we will take it from you. Give it to me.’

‘Let me do it, signore,’ he pleaded. ‘Let me finish it now. You have sent for them. I know you have sent for them. I will be locked up. They will not believe that a man could walk to Italy with a kettle. They have heard about my kettle. I have been laughed at before about my plan. Let me finish with it all.’

‘Give me that piece of tin,’ I said. He handed it to me and laid his head on his hands on the table and wept, his shoulders shaking. I could see him, tiny on the edge of that great desert, the moonlight on the sea, trudging through the sand with his kettle, on the way to Italy, a wild happiness in his head. Finn and I could hear ‘them’ arriving and I went out to meet them, an Italian doctor and his assistant. I showed the doctor the weeping Italian through the lattice-work and he nodded, shrugging one slow sad shoulder, saying, ‘Ah, sì. He is mad, this one, poor fellow. A financial crash with his friends here in the town. Italia, il bombardamento, la famiglia, la guerra, il sole, disperazione, povertà, etcetera. The formula for collapse.’ He shrugged his shoulder again with kindly Italian cynicism. ‘Who is not liable to run off with a kettle from this pesthole we are all trapped in?’

‘I’ve told him he has malaria,’ I said. ‘It will help you to give him an injection of sedative, if he thinks it is quinine. He calls doctors “them”. He is afraid.’

‘How long do you think this war is going to go on?’ the doctor asked me.

‘Ten years.’

‘Ah. An optimist.’ The doctor shook hands with me with comic gravity. ‘I had settled for twenty years. You have cheered me up, Signor Capitano. Let us proceed.’ They took the struggling Italian away, the doctor whispering and coaxing, the assistant quietly tough and strong.

‘Maybe we should have let him go on with his kettle up the coast,’ Finn said to me when they had gone. ‘That’s what I’d want if I went round the bend here, with a kettle. They’ll put him in a strait-jacket, I suppose.’ We had a melancholy drink together in the hot, still night, talking about many people who were going round the bend in Somalia. (Everybody thought everybody else was going round the bend.)

‘The Italians are a marvellous people,’ Finn said. ‘The way they’ve stuck it out here in Mog, defeated, broke. But it’s better than Italy just now, I suppose.’

Yes, better than Italy. ‘La Macchina,’ as the Italians called the Germans, was just then starting to drag its fiery, destructive way up Italy, but even so the Italians in Mogadishu wanted to go home. As the vecchi coloniali liked to say, ‘Un anno in Somalia è come cinque anni in Italia,’ so cruel was the climate, and it was worse in defeat before the Somalis. Nevertheless the Somalis liked the Italians, when all was taken into account; most people did when they got to know them.

Chapter 16

THERE IS A FEELING of threat in the air of some Islamic places in certain parts of the Middle East, and particularly in Somalia, which you seldom feel in Muslim India. There is a tindery dryness and a harsh flintiness in Muslim Somalia which you feel might go up into flames at any moment, with hoarse screeching and knives, as a relief from the relentless pressure of the sun and the glare upon the frustration which haunts this tortured landscape. Fanatics abound, and I remember one of them who had gone down in action against us, dying on a straw mat in the blue lacework of shadow from a thorn tree. His thin beard stained with henna, withered and dried-out after the long campaign in his wilderness, which had once belonged to the ‘Mad Mullah’, he had stared up at me with the eyes of a wounded leopard. He had led the attacks, sword in hand, supervised the hacking to pieces of over two hundred men and boys, and was dying happy, old and full of corpses, ignorant, brave, frightful, a victim of the murderous ghost which seemed to live in the sand, in the thorn trees, in the ravines and rocks and waterholes. Bravery and courage and steeliness of heart was all that mattered to his generation, but already some of the younger warriors were restless with this generation’s old monster of blood which had ridden their backs since childhood.

Perhaps the most unforgettable of all the fanatics I had come across was a young warrior dying on an enamel-covered table in ‘the surgery’ of the fort at Galkayu. I could smell him through the open window ten yards away in that still heat as I walked through the sand to talk with him. It was at the beginning of the operations in the Mudugh when we were assembling to hunt down the roving killer-bands who were haunting the waterholes in the bush. This one had been carried in to Galkayu tied to a camel with bloody cords and the camel led by a silent little boy wearing a dagger. They had been three days on the way under the fiercest of suns.

The warrior lay on the table absolutely still, the only sound his slow, hoarse breathing and the soft rustling of the thousands of maggots which now formed his chest.

The officer who was with me rushed out to throw up while I stood there with my craw heaving, ready to follow him, but perhaps it was the two large fierce eyes which rolled to look at me that helped me to stay there. The two black eyes studied me. I went and looked down into his face. It was narrow, strikingly handsome like all the faces of his group, but grey and damp now, the fine, thick lips covered with a dry whitish sediment. His hair was the usual shock of dusty wool. He had been speared through the chest days ago, and I knew, had it been I who had received that spear-wound, I would have been dead in a few hours, never mind the terrible journey tied to that camel across a bush waste full of his enemies. And I could not forget the courage of the little boy who had brought him in here, too late to be saved. But the warrior was not worried about being saved.

‘Tell me who stabbed you,’ I said. ‘Which sub-tribe was he of? Tell me what you know and I will avenge you. You are going to die here in this room. So tell me who did it.’

‘I will kill him myself when I am well,’ the warrior said to me in a whisper, baring his marvellous teeth in a grin of ferocity. ‘I will get well and I will kill him myself. He was treacherous to me.’

‘You will not get well,’ I said. ‘You are going to die. Be prepared for that.’

‘I will live,’ he told me, his wild eyes rolling as they took in the whitewashed room. ‘I will take my own revenge.’ The air was whistling through the sea of maggots which hid the hole in his chest. ‘I will live. Hrun sheg! I tell you the truth. I will live to kill him.’

‘So you know him?’

‘I know him.’

‘And you will not tell me who he is?’

‘It is my affair. Give me medicine and let me go.’

He was buried the next day in the hot sand on the edge of the fort area. I have never been able to forget his terrific will, his tragic, innocent belief in the magic of health. There is no one alive as tough as the Somali nomad. No one.

An askari wounded in a fight in the Haud country walked fourteen miles holding his guts in his hand, was sewn up and lived to soldier again. And the women are as spiritually strong as their men. One day I came on a poor old hag crawling in the sand, dying of thirst where she had been left by her group when unable to walk anymore. ‘Give her water,’ I told the askari with us. When time has used you up, and you cannot rise one morning from the sand, you are left to die.

‘But she is finished, Effendi,’ he said. ‘Left here to die. Old. Finished.’ My concern for her irritated him. She was used up. Why waste the water? He was not cruel. He was a nomad.

‘Give her some water.’ The askari knelt down and took the water-bottle out of his webbing sling, removed the cork, and the old woman smelled the water and came at him like a cat, seizing the bottle while the askari laughed and fed her the water. Then he poured water over her head and shoulders. She died the next day, all her senses intact, silent, acceptant, sadly splendid after her pointless life of servitude to camels and men and waterholes.

The noblest and most touching gestures can be made by these nomads, some of them efforts which only the brave and patient would attempt when the difficulties and dangers of their world are counted.

One day, during operations north of the Mudugh, Jaysee and I were driving through thick bush, our eyes ranging for sight of the killer-bands who were known to be moving across this piece of country. Bullet wounds had been increasing and I knew that these tribesmen were moving their rifles out of the way of the patrols harrying them towards the Ogaden. I suddenly saw two armed men running, about two hundred yards off on my left. They saw me jump out of the truck with a rifle and race into the bush to cut them off. Jaysee went the other way to get behind them. As the two men vanished into the bush I saw their weapons flying through the air where they had thrown them. I ran all out until I knew I must be ahead of them, and, with a round up the spout, I moved slowly through the thorns in long quiet steps, eyes watching for a movement. I knew where they must be, lying in the thorns watching for me. I went silently in my sandals through the thorn bush and suddenly saw the black-red gleam of Somali flesh in the sunlight, and stopped, ready to shoot, and could hardly believe my eyes when I saw a beautiful Somali girl sitting under a thorn tree with her back to it. She was naked and was holding something in her arms. I saw her teeth glisten like snow in a smile, and quite mystified I called to her.

‘Where are the men?’ I shouted. ‘Call the men. Tell them to come to me. I won’t shoot if they come unarmed.’ And she called out for the ninkan, the menfolk, and I saw the two of them rise out of the scrub about a hundred yards away. They held their hands in the air and came towards me. I walked to the thorn tree where the girl sat and saw she was holding a recently born baby. Milk was dripping from her beautiful breasts. Her whole perfect body was shining. She was radiant, so happy that she raised her right hand and greeted the white man in the khaki shorts and sandals with the rifle in his hands. I greeted her too and knelt down in front of her and admired the baby and she was too happy to even worry about the evil eye, but stole dark glowing looks at me and enjoyed my admiration for her baby. The two young men stood in front of me, warriors wearing strips of reddish cloth about their loins and daggers in their soft belts.

‘Were those rifles you threw into the bush?’ I asked them. They said no, they were spears and sticks. I told them to bring them and they came back with them in a couple of minutes and showed them to me. What were they doing wandering with a girl and a baby through an operational zone they knew to be dangerous just now?

‘We had to come,’ they told me. ‘We were taking our sister here to her tribe to have her baby, but we were too late, and she had it here, just here under the tree. We were out there guarding her when we saw your truck and we knew you would think we were shifta, so we ran.’ They both laughed and I praised them for their courage and goodness in taking this risk. They had come over two hundred miles with this girl, and this was her first baby and she had borne it in the easy nomadic way under this tree within easy reach of the savage war-bands, to whose tribe they were aliens. They might have pleaded Magan, protection, ‘Adigaba magantaida,’ but the shifta were usually merciless.

I gave them an escort of two askaris to see them across the Mudugh to the girl’s tribe. The girl was so absorbed in her baby that she hardly knew where she was, and she reached her tribe.

The easy-going Somali capacity for adventure and endurance is very closely woven into their contempt for pain and death, particularly for death, death which you feel they would like to meet and kick in the teeth, contemptuously. On the desolate northern coast of Somalia two castaways were once brought to me by an old chief.

‘Give them a piece of rag each to cover their loins,’ the old chief said. ‘They have come out of the sea naked this morning.’

The two castaways were innocent, hopeful youths with thick hair, their hands over their groins while the swarms of little boys yelled laughing at them.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked these grave, worried youths who sighed with relief when they wrapped the cloth I gave them round their waists. They told me they had stowed away on a British ship at Aden, a ship bound for India, and all had gone well for a day until they were found. They were then thrown over the side, a plank following them into the sea. They floated for two days on that plank in a sea full of huge sharks until they were washed ashore near Bosaso, where I was going slowly round the bend at the time.

‘Did the captain give that order?’ I asked them, incredulous. ‘The order to throw you into the sea? Or was it done by the bosun, the nakuda? Who did it?’

‘The captain,’ they told me. ‘He was very angry with us. The ship was in a hurry. He could have thrown us off nearer the coast than he did, but he was too angry to think of it. If he had thrown us off nearer the coast we might have only had one day instead of two on the plank.’ They bore no resentment for this strange, brutal captain. I checked on this story and was satisfied that it was true, and sent a complaint about it by dhow to Aden. It takes a really hard man to throw two stowaways into the shark-swift Gulf of Aden, a man as hard as a Somali but with much less excuse for it. The old chief was laughing so much about the captain’s action, when the stowaways had gone clothed into the village, that I thought he was going to hurt himself. And when he stopped laughing he was indignant about the business, both reactions being heartfelt.

‘What are we going to do about all these starving maskin children, these orphans?’ I asked the old chief one day. ‘The town is full of them.’

‘We?’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do anything about them. They seem quite happy to me. What do you want to do about them? What are you going to do to them?’

‘Feed them,’ I said. ‘They’ve got to eat. There are too many of them running about in the Suk and stealing. They are becoming a tribe on their own. Call the elders.’

‘What’s the use of that?’ the chief said. ‘The maskin are quite happy, I tell you. We’ve got to have the poor so that we can give charity. I was a starving maskin myself when I was a child, and they threw coin to me now and then at the mosque. What harm has it done me? Leave the maskin alone, Effendi. They’re necessary for charity. It is the religious law that we give charity to the poor. If you abolish the poor you attack religion.’ He had been serious until he thought of that last part and I could not help joining him in his screech of laughter. He was a hard, cynical, laughable old criminal, who would have cut my throat for pleasure any night, and the throat of any other Galka, had the situation been safe enough. I once made him get out of a bogged truck in a flooded river bed of the Daror, and haul on the rope with the rest of us. ‘But I am a chief,’ he told me, enraged. ‘I cannot possibly pull on a rope with these ordinary men.’ He pointed to the Somali askaris, sodden and muddy like myself.

‘I give you ten seconds to get on that rope behind me,’ I warned him. ‘Or I’ll throw you into the flood.’ He could see I meant it, and that the askaris were longing to seize him, and he joined me on the rope. That incident had formed a sort of angry friendship between us and he told everybody he met that not until he had joined us on the rope was the truck able to move out of the mud, which was true.

He fought my plan to help the maskin, fought it to its death, and I could not help admiring the way he helped me in public and sabotaged me in private.

Once a year the rain-floods up in the Abyssinian foothills came down the hot desert valley behind us and turned everything green for a few days. I planned to dam the water, and hold it long enough to grow millet for the starving children. I sent for the seed and it made its way slowly up through the wastes from Mogadishu until it reached us on the Gulf of Aden, and well in time before the rain in Abyssinia.

The population of the huddle of huts turned out to see me unload it. ‘It’s getting serious, this business,’ the noble warriors said to each other. ‘But I’ll die before I’ll take a digging tool in my hands.’ This was their fear, that I would force the spear-carrying nobles to labour with their hands. But I had a respect for their traditional prejudices, with all of them except killing.

We built the dam, the swarms of children and myself, and when the rain came they put the seed into the mud, and when it sprouted the warriors used to go out to look at it.

‘It’s getting worse,’ the warriors told each other. ‘These brats are now becoming intolerable with their vanity. The stuff’s actually growing.’

‘There’s money in it,’ the merchants said.

‘You’re ruining these children, you know that?’ the old chief said to me. ‘They are of noble blood and here you have them working like slaves. No good will come of all this madness. I tell you I was a beggar outside the mosque myself as a child, and has it harmed me? Has it?’

‘It has,’ I told him.

‘How?’ He nearly took me by the throat in his anxiety to know. ‘In what way?’

‘I’m not going to tell you that,’ I said. He almost pined away during the next few days, continually asking me to tell him what I had hinted at, but I assured him solemnly that I could not tell him. On my very last day at that place, when I presented him with a permit I had promised him for the first post-war pilgrimage to Mecca, and he gave me a beautiful Muslim rosary, a tusbeh, which I still have (he had always hoped I would become a Mohammedan), he was still pining. He asked what it was that I had hinted at that day months ago, but I said I could not tell him.

‘Tell me,’ he shouted. ‘Tell me. You can tell me now, you’re going.’

‘I can’t. I’m sorry,’ I said. He saw me explode into laughter, and all the elders bent and laughed with me, still bent as they followed me to the truck, still laughing as I drove away, the chief frowning and puzzled in the middle of them.

By the time the merchants and that old chief had finished with the grain-market after the maskin had reaped what remained of the crop, there was about twopence halfpenny left for the poor. They beat me there, I had to admit it, and I never quite discovered how, but the money found its way into the usual pockets, the trained pockets of the merchants. All one could say was that the children had enjoyed themselves, but nothing changed. Only the Somalis can change things, when they want to, which is the way it should be.

It was in Bosaso too that the old men of the Omar Suleiman tribe, the magicians of that northern area, called a girl to them for a ceremony, out of her sleep, every night for ten days. I would not believe it when I first came across it.

I had had to put a curfew on the town after a number of stabbings, friendly enough stabbings in their way, but one of them had grown into a riot. Anything to break the hot, stifling boredom of that coast.

One night an askari came to me with a beautiful girl and reported that he had found her breaking the curfew while she was asleep. He had seen her walking, asleep, through the sand towards the other side of the town, had woken her up and brought her to me.

‘Were you asleep?’ I asked her, thinking she must be a sleep-walker, though one could not, somehow, imagine sleep-walking among the Somalis. She told me she had been called and had had to go. The old men often called her and now it was the curfew which had caused the trouble for her. I sat her down on the step of the company office and got her to tell me about the business. The askari was laughing. ‘It’s those Omar Suleiman, Effendi,’ he said. ‘They’re at their magic again.’

Chapter 17

AFRICAN MAGIC IS REAL, quite often, and at other times it is the application of practical human psychology by the medicine-men or druids.

I had first come across the respect and fear of the Omar Suleiman during a long safari with a young and brilliantly intelligent, impatient and ambitious Somali called Abdi Karim.

We were spelling each other during the long drive from Galkayu to Bosaso, a distance about half the length of Somalia, and I had a brand new three-ton truck loaded to the top with kit and askaris, with no room for even a small boy to get aboard as an extra passenger. Abdi himself was adamant that we could not even load one extra kitbag aboard, and we took the truck carefully over the rocky surface of Somalia, while Abdi poured out story after story of the days of the ‘Mad Mullah’. We drove through the Mudugh, the Nogal, on towards the northern coast, refusing many wanderers on the way who begged for a lift. We were about a day from Bosaso when Abdi slowed the truck as three bearded and turbanned men waved to us and came running to the two sets of tyremarks on the hard sand, which was the road in Somalia.

‘Get on with it,’ I told Abdi. ‘No lifts, remember?’

‘But these are Omar Suleiman, Effendi,’ Abdi said, shocked at my uncaring attitude. ‘We can’t refuse Omar Suleiman. We don’t want a curse on us, do we?’

‘Now listen, Abdi,’ I said. ‘Get that thing into gear and on to Bosaso.’ I waved refusal to the three tall men beside the track, pointing up to the stack of askaris smoking Crown Bird cigarettes on top of the cargo of kit. Abdi stopped the truck and begged me to reconsider the matter, to remember what I was doing, and not to risk a curse on us all by refusing the Omar Suleiman, the greatest magicians and sorcerers in Somalia.

I had just had a long and interesting lecture from Abdi on modern thinking among the Somalis, on the necessity for the ending of all tribal differences, even tribal designations, so that there should be one Somalia with one Somali race who would take up politics and modernise their country. Abdi was an early and devoted member of the Somali Youth League, a body designed to bring about the modern, tribeless, feudless Somalia he had described to me. I did not use this as a weapon on him now, but I refused the Omar Suleiman a lift.

‘Drive on,’ I told Abdi. ‘The springs won’t take one more person aboard, and you know it. Drive on.’ Grieved and strained he leaned out of the cab and shouted a stream of apologies to the three grave men and we drove on. What happened next went into the folklore of the Northern Mijertein. About two hours after passing the Omar Suleiman the truck began to yaw, right out of control, and it was obvious that the steering had gone. We braked carefully to a standstill. Abdi stared through the windscreen and then looked at me.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ I said. ‘But it’s the steering column. It’s broken. Do you think the Omar Suleiman broke it with a curse?’

‘Yes, Effendi,’ he said, looking accusingly into my eyes. ‘What else could have done it? Have you ever seen a new truck do this before?’ I had to admit that I had never seen the steering of a truck, and I had driven hundreds, give out before. All the askaris were perturbed, but Abdi ran about like an old hen, fretting about what we had done to the Omar Suleiman, and then wailing about what they had done to us, because I had not listened. I should have listened.

We were stuck there for two days and when we finally got into Bosaso Abdi worked his way round the town and received free coffee on all sides as he told the story of the curse on the truck. I have often wondered about that curious coincidence, which had so suited Abdi’s fears.

There was no doubt about the girl who got up out of her bed each night, and walked obediently, asleep, to the old men who had called her from the other side of the town. I gave it a meticulous examination and was satisfied that it was magic. I had to tell the askaris to let this girl walk in her sleep whenever she was called, until the end of the curfew.

Some of the Rahanwein medicine-men in the south of Somalia have another way of calling a person. They drive a nail into a tree each night and chant the person’s name, and they say he comes no matter how far away he may be.

The Rahanwein put on a show of magic for a friend of mine which affected him so much that he could never bear to look again at anything out of the ordinary performed by Africans. I found this out one night in bright moonlight when we were having a rest from patrols in the fort at Galkayu. The askaris were performing a dance which breaks the spirit called Mingis, a form of possession in a person, and one of their number was certainly possessed, I thought then, filled by a malevolent jinn. If I had only known it he actually had meningitis, which led to a horrible situation in the end, in which several of my askaris died, and I sweated quietly as I waited for my own infection, but luckily escaped it.

For the Mingis dance the men form two lines, each line facing each other, their feet bare, and they strike their flanks with their flat hands for rhythm as they sway and chant. The possessed man lies on the ground between them, this one with his back arched, resting on the ground on his head and heels, the body quivering and shaking as the dance went on. One of the dancers will eventually pick up the jinn and go spinning about, foaming at the mouth, but if anyone wearing sandals should come close before that happens this person will take in the jinn first. We sat in the moonlight and watched the dance, my companion telling me he did not like any of it, and after one of the askaris had gone shaking and shuddering into the darkness, full of jinn, a little black withered and demonic looking Rahanwein cook came on carrying a pot made of white soapstone full of redly glowing and smoking luban, the gummy incense of the Mijertein which gave Somalia the name of the Land of Punt in ancient times, many believe. A drummer followed him about and played to him as the old man whirled around with the pot in his hands. Then he placed the pot in the sand and danced round it, and as the drumming got into him he would throw himself on his knees and try and burrow his head into the sand, howling and gibbering. Finally he stuffed the burning luban into his mouth until it was full, and danced while he sucked in air, and his open mouth shone almost whitely hot with the blazing incense, a human fireplace drummed out of his ordinary mind.

‘I want to go,’ said my companion, about to rise. ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’ll tell you why afterwards.’

‘One more dance. Watch this one,’ I said to him. Two tall slender black askaris ran on, both Hawiya tribesmen, each one having in his right hand a six foot, iron-hard rhinoceros-hide whip. They faced each other like fencers, smiling proudly, while three drummers began to boom out the rhythm for them and the two men began to circle, waving their whips over each other, dancing slowly and beautifully into a gradually hastening movement. The moonlight flooded down on to them, and we sat up with shock as the two men struck each other across the naked bodies with their whips, the blows they had given each other so hard that they rang like pistol shots. They struck each other again and again, the blows timed to slide between the drumbeats so as to add to the rhythm. The watching askaris were swaying and clapping to the rhythm. The whips curled about struck harder and harder and the sweat came out on their chests and faces with the exertion they used in striking each other. Of the various uncanny things I have seen this terrible rhythmic flogging with the rhinoceros-hide kurbash was the strangest, frightening and disturbing, yet at home here, part of Africa. How could they bear such pain? How could they go on with this lashing of each other, their senses acute enough to do it to rhythm, and they laughed as they did it. This dance is called Kurbash, the Whip Dance. It finished in a rain of blows struck with all their strength, the askaris with their feet planted firmly in the sand, their bodies swaying and undulating as they struck each other, and the drummers leaned towards them and thrashed out a final crescendo of drumbeats. The dancers ended their frightful exhibition by pointing the whips at each other’s hearts like swords, and uttering a fierce laughing sound. They had not a mark on their bodies, but there had been no trickery. They had given each other a fearful beating and showed no sign of it, nor was there any mark or stiffness next day when they ran out on parade with the rest of the troops.

‘It’s weird, isn’t it,’ I said to my friend as we strolled back into the fort and the askaris went to their lines under the NCOs. (It was a few days later that the mingis turned out to be meningitis, and our miseries began.)

‘It’s not as weird as what they put on for me down below Janali,’ he replied. ‘Just after I relieved you there last year it was. Just seeing that stuff tonight gave me the creeps and took me back to that night at Janali again.’

That was the country of the Malablei, the men who slowly spun to drums in goat masks, the men in touch with something right down below the skin of the world as we know it, a swarm of black ecstatic divers who plunged down into unknown darknesses, which somehow seemed to be their real world. And they had shown some of it to Sydney, my companion, shown some of the mysteries the divers could bring up out of the mindless depths they could reach, through drumming and a sort of take-off from the so-called real world of soil and water and trees about them.

Their river swarms with crocodiles and you must be very careful when you move along beside that river at night. One day a crocodile had come up and taken an askari who had gone a few yards from the parade ground beside the river, and his comrades could not get him back, even with rifle fire. They had had to watch him pulled down into the brown waters, down to the larder somewhere below. And a young officer, brand new and pale from Europe, transfixed, had watched it all happen and end, in a few seconds.

‘Come and we will show you some of our secrets,’ the little black glistening men had told Sydney, and thinking he was to see some dancing he had gone, taking a few of his askaris with him to the village near the river. Drumming had begun once he had seated himself beside his askaris. Before them was a patch of red sand, an arena in the middle of the village, and around it were the Rahanwein with their drums, an old man as master of ceremonies, announcing each secret before it happened.

‘What would you like to see first?’ the old man asked Sydney, ‘We will bring it. Ask for it.’

‘An Arab dhow,’ he had called back facetiously, and the Arab dhow sailed slowly into the sandy arena while the hair on Sydney’s neck stiffened and he stared at the dhow full of cheering Arabs.

‘No lights of any kind,’ the chief had warned him. ‘You will spoil the magic if you use a light.’ But Sydney had a cigarette in his cupped hand and he burned his leg with it to make sure he was not hypnotised. He burned himself and it hurt. The dhow sailed slowly off. Then a dog with flames pouring out of its mouth appeared, its eyes two smouldering coals. It stood in the arena and growled and snarled, lashing its long ragged tail. Then it disappeared. Next a truck full of askaris drove into the arena. The askaris beside Sydney were terrified by now, and so was he, his hair prickling.

Sydney was a man with a deep and unwanted feeling for the occult, hating what he possessed, an attraction for the ghosts and spirits which do not bother people like myself (though I have seen others in terror of things visible before them, and which I could not see myself). When the lorry full of ghostly askaris had driven off into the darkness Sydney got up and left, and never asked to see any Rahanwein secrets again. Perhaps the Rahanwein knew that he was their man, a man they could reach immediately with their magic. He was a deeply religious person, with a hard mind, a police officer of many years’ experience in Africa. And he hated African magic.

Until I lived on the Webi Shabeli I had thought that the ‘talking drums’ were purely West African, never having come across them in Eastern Africa myself, but they were there on the River of Leopards among the small black forest people. Once, two officers from Mogadishu had decided to pay me a visit on that river, to hunt elephant, and, not telling me they were coming, had set out in a fifteen hundredweight truck.

Two of the river tribesmen came in to tell me that two officers were lost, their truck broken down, far up the river. They said the two officers were ten miles away, stressing that the truck had broken down about an hour ago. After questioning I put this time statement down to exaggeration, but I sent a corporal off in my truck and he found the two officers wandering in a swamp, lost, over ten miles up the river. It was wild country, a few tracks running through it, and the two officers were mystified, as mystified as I, by the unexpected help they received. They themselves had heard the drumming, and I found later that news of them had been drummed down the river, though the Rahanwein were not too anxious to discuss the matter.

My African sergeant, a tribesman from Tanganyika, feared and hated these river tribes. One of them had threatened to turn him into an idiot (not difficult with some of the herb mixtures known to the medicine-men). I hated the place myself because of the constant malaria I suffered while there. The whole population was malarial, the oily heat sickening, and the old stone building in which I had my headquarters seethed with millions of black cockroaches two inches long. The askaris used to sit, for pleasure, hour after hour spraying the trains of cockroaches with kerosene. I used to get old men to come in and talk to me in the evenings. They would tell me old stories, legends, customs, winding up with the genealogy of each tribe. Again and again I came across the story of the snake which carries a blindingly bright jewel in its mouth by the light of which it makes its long journeys through the night across swamps and savannah. ‘Look out for it,’ they would tell me. ‘It is a great fortune to see it.’

Down the river and near the southern Juba there is a dance tradition called Sarlugéd. You, the guest, sit watching as the tribesmen dance with their spears about twenty yards from you, dancing to and for you to the drums. They advance slowly in the dance until they are only a few yards from you; they then spin and charge, plunging the spears at you in one determined thrust, the points resting, halted, on your chest, and you are not supposed to flinch, even at the savage exultant shout that goes up from all the throats around you. When the women dance to the long drums, all of them decorated with fresh green leaves, in the rhythm called Mudundu, forbidden by the Italians, and allowed again by myself, they go out of their minds, thrust their heads up into the hollow ends of the drums and shout, line up again and shiver their way across the sand, and then when the true dance ecstasy seizes them they jerk their necks so that the tight bands of coloured beads break, the beads showering among the dancers. The old men and the children get up and move in on the rhythm, and the drummers increase the beat until the sweat flies like thin rain from the dancers in the firelight.

The last time I went down with malaria in that piece of country was the day I disbanded the last Abyssinian troops of the Italian colonial army. They had been used in the operations along the Juba and now were aching to cross the enormous sands to their mountain homes in Abyssinia. I had a surprise ‘loot inspection’, and found the usual dozens of wrist-watches, Italian automatic pistols, ammunition by the thousand rounds, left them the wrist-watches as doubtfully theirs by right (they had looted madly), and then lined them up for a last ration issue before they climbed into the big diesel trucks for their journey.

When the diesels carrying the homesick Abyssinian soldiers had gone, I went to see the seven malaria cases in my platoon, carried out the light machine-gun drills with the rest of the platoon, and then felt the iron weight of malaria filling my bones, the beginning of the longing to die which that horrible disease brings on, and I remember saying to Sergeant Lehani Baruti that he was to wrap me in soaking wet cold sheets when my temperature hit high, like last time, like I had done for him, and then I vaguely recall wandering through the palm trees towards my headquarters where I had my camp-bed. I was trying to go fast, for before the war I had once passed out on the edge of a swamp with malaria and had lain there for a day until found by the Kavirondo neapara of the plantation block. I remember leaning against a tree and then hearing Sergeant Lehani’s voice saying in my ear, ‘Come, Effendi, wewe na tetemeka sana sana,’ and he took my arm. The shakes had begun. You can get the shakes so badly with high malarial fever that you can shake your way out of bed on to the floor, again and again. You feel these shakes are going to break your bones.

I woke up a couple of days later in a military hospital in Mogadishu, having my thick long hair cut by a Rhodesian nurse, and I have never seen that stone building again among the palms with its millions of cockroaches, its whining mosquitoes, and its one smoking hurricane lamp. Now, it is confused for me, that building, with other things belonging to malarial delirium. That is one of the curiosities of malaria, how real people and things about you during the delirium, can occur again in another malarial delirium, perhaps years later during a fresh infection. But malaria is a very strange disease, and it affects people in many curious ways, like hashish, depending, it seems, on your personality type. Hashish used to make me laugh. It makes some people cry.

Chapter 18

WE HAD WALKED about Mogadishu now for two hours, Ali and I, he talking to me about his life, and I thinking about everything which the sight of certain buildings, clumps of palms, and old Italian monuments evoked for me. But I knew it was finished for me, all that wilderness, all those safaris, and that I would not want to live that life again with this small sprawl of decaying Italian and Arab buildings as the longed-for paradise behind us a thousand miles south. One had been drunk here with excellent friends, people like oneself, the scattered fraternity of the Shag, drunk more with talk after long separation than with liquor, and they were scattered now, all over the world. A few had stayed in Africa, but there would only ever be one Africa for them and that was where the silent scrub began at Isiolo in Kenya, the scrub which stretched through Sudan to Egypt, to the mountains of Abyssinia, and to the Gulf, Aden and Gardafui. About fifty or sixty of us had controlled two hundred thousand square miles of that scrub and rock.

All through my wanderings there I had sought to find someone who would show me how the powerful arrow poison, called Wabaio, of the small Sa’ab tribal group was made. It became a goal for me but I noticed early on in my enquiries that the Somalis themselves, the conquerors of the Sa’ab group who claimed to be the original inhabitants of Somalia, did not want me to take an interest in these people.

I read about Wabaio for the first time while idling in a troopship early in the war. Sir Richard Burton, that marvellous person, pauses for a few lines in his First Footsteps in East Africa to say he had heard that somewhere in the Somali wilderness he knew they made a virulent arrow poison called Wabaio. He was on his way to Harar in Abyssinia, disguised as an Arab, when he heard of this poison, but he never found out much about it.

I finished First Footsteps in East Africa in a captured Italian fort in a bitter nook of Somalia which Burton never reached. When I asked an ex-askari of the Italian colonial forces about Wabaio he lifted his thin black hand, cracked the long fingers in the particularly Somali way and said, ‘Molto, molto velenoso.’ Yes, but had he even seen it? ‘No. Only a fool would want to see it, and anyway you would never see it, only feel it on the end of an arrow-head shot into you. They would never show it to you as a thing to look at. They are full of secrets, and anyway they are only a kind of slave race.’

‘Who are they?’ I asked him.

‘The Midgan,’ he said. ‘A race of impudent dogs of the Sa’ab group. Never trust them. Never believe anything they tell you. Nail everything down if they come near your possessions. They are not really a people. We will not even allow them to have a chief. But we have had to bear with them ever since we, the noble ones, first came to their accursed country, and the secret is never to trust them. Such is the race which has invented Wabaio. That is all they could do, mix a poison.’

After the dramatic warnings given me by the ex-Italian askari, I sought hard to find a Midgan, but was never allowed by the Somalis to see one, for I was too interested. When it became obvious to me that the Somalis had come to an agreement about this matter, I questioned the headman of the village near the God-forsaken fort in which I was living.

‘Why is it,’ I asked him, ‘that I am always being put off about the Midgan? Why is it that you don’t want me to meet one?’

This man was an old, subtle and battle-scarred veteran of the long struggle to keep the white man out of his violent and happy world. He had a short grey stiff beard which he plucked at with both hands while he thought about this approach I had made so directly and brutally.

‘It is because you are young,’ he said at length. ‘We want you to be our friend. Why should you take an interest in the Midgan? It is us in whom you should be interested.’ He placed his black claws on his thin chest. ‘Us. We are the ones in whom you should be interested. Our ways and our customs, not those of the slaves who have no chief. They will only lie to you. And you will make them proud by questioning them and showing interest in them. For they have nothing to show you or give you. That is why men are unwilling to bring you a Midgan. They say to me, “The white man is asking again about the Midgan, about their language and their poison. Why is this?” So you have worried them. That is what I have to say in answer to your question.’

‘This is a waste of time,’ I told him. ‘You can’t prevent me forever from meeting the Midgan. What are you afraid of?’

‘We don’t want to help in the matter,’ the old man said. ‘There is no harm in that, is there? We do not mean to insult you. It is only that men wish you would not ask them to bring you Midgan people to talk to. A Somali does not want to go to a Midgan and say, “Come, a white man wants to speak with you,” and then bring him to you. It would make the Midgan proud. He could well say to the Somali, “So, it is me, a Midgan he wants to see, eh? And he sends you, a Somali of the Darod race to bring me.” The Midgan could laugh then and a man could want to kill him for that. That is my answer.’

‘It is a very good one,’ I said, impressed. The old man relented a little then. He said, ‘If ever you go to Donkukok or Garowei you could arrange something there on your own, perhaps. But not here. We do not want the Midgan to become proud here.’

As it turned out the old man had a very good reason for his unwillingness to make the Midgan ‘proud’. They had never been allowed a chief, and now they had plans to influence the new conquering government of the British to grant them one. When they thought of such a possibility the Somali could not sleep. They told me about it later when the great danger had passed and the excited hopes of the Midgan had died along with other enthusiasms which the British military occupation had kindled.

The first Midgan I ever met was lying in a patch of blood-soaked sand, stabbed through the shoulder. He had got in the way of a tribal raid near a well and had not had a chance to defend himself. We brought him in to the camp and a medical orderly, a man of a noble blood, sniffed and mumbled while he dealt with the outcast’s wound.

The Midgan was small and black and cheerful, wearing a scarlet turban tightly wound round his shaven skull. He bore no malice for the terrible spear-wound in his shoulder. He knew which tribe his attacker belonged to but he made no claim for revenge. He was too wise for that.

A white skin is no help at all in the acquisition of military secrets among the Somalis, though a Somali woman, if she loves you, can help. It was not for a long time that I found that this Midgan’s family group had been making spear and arrow-heads for the traditional rivals of his attacker’s tribe. The wound was all part of the business risks, and it was better than being killed.

The Midgan belonged to a group, he told me, called Sa’ab. The Sa’ab are a sort of outcast people made up of four groups called Midgan, Tomal, Yibir, and Yaha. ‘We,’ he said, stabbing a long finger against his bare glistening black chest, ‘we, the Midgan, are the most important of the Sa’ab. Without us there could be no Somalis.’ Then he burst out laughing to think of it, like all conquered races when they consider the proud masters who are frightened of them.

When there were Somalis nearby he was silent. When they were not actually present they hovered nearby, fretting, thinking of ways to end my conversation with the outcast, chatting worriedly in small groups. Any white man who imagines he has got very far under the surface of the remains of warrior Africa, when that Africa has plans, is deluding himself, perhaps even in Rhodesia, maybe in South Africa too, even now. But if he skims along the surface with it, and is interested, he can learn as much as the warriors feel is good for him to know, and they are quite right not to trust him. They know that his ultimate aim cannot fail to mean the end of their particular world. The white man wants order in which to go on killing other white men in Europe, they suspect.

Four days after being stabbed the Midgan disappeared, leaving behind a quiver of arrows and a beautifully made long-bow. A merchant called Hersi brought these to me.

‘A present for you from the Midgan,’ he said when he gave them to me. He saw my surprise. I had met Hersi on a few occasions when he came to arrange about the importation of sugar into our fortress-village area which was like a small sprinkling of mud-pies on the enormous Mijertein desert.

‘He asked me to give them to you,’ he said.

‘Why you?’ I asked.

‘Because I am a Midgan,’ he said.

I was amazed and Hersi laughed. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know you have sought a Midgan for months, and I know you did not expect to find a Midgan merchant.’ Then he grew serious. ‘I have had a long struggle,’ he said. ‘But I have come to help you.’

‘Ah!’ I said, all caution at once. Like a sounding-board he responded to me immediately. He raised his small pudgy brown hands and said, ‘Do not fear, Effendi, I have no snare in my tongue. I am no Somali. I have no plan to lie about. I am a merchant grateful for your interest in my people.’ He had superb manners, great character, fit to mingle anywhere in the great world of Islam, from the Maghreb to Chittagong and on.

I was impressed, though still cautious. In the lands of the Somali you need quicksilver in your mind in order to keep pace with a Somali plan for greatness, money, revenge, in which your aid is sought with steady, subtle and admirable patience. Things might be at stake which are of the greatest importance to the Somali, tribal position and pride, rights to a waterhole, camels (the greatest single possession of a man in this world) or the removal of an insipid chief. The longing to kill in the terrific excitement of a raid, the protracted and fascinating negotiations afterwards about blood money, these are real and important things.

Later, across this ancient tangle of feuds, the newly formed Somali Youth League cut like a bright light. No more would there be tribes of which to be proud to kill for or ashamed to die for, only one united Somali people.

But meanwhile what did Hersi want? He must want something. It might take many hours to find out, for again, among the Somalis the matter in the real plan is not brought to the tongue until the white man has been tired, brought to a stop by long talking, the keen caution dulled and the official brightness dimmed by several arguments about unimportant things.

‘I want to talk about Wabaio,’ he said, flashing a bright smile, and laughing when he saw how the word had worked.

‘You are not going to try and make a bargain with me?’ I said.

‘Effendi,’ he said, ‘these lying Somalis have made you very suspicious. I assure you that I have no plan hidden, no Somali trick to try on you.’

‘All right, Hersi,’ I said. ‘Tell me something first. Why are you, a Midgan, who has known for a long time of my interest in your people, and of the Somali effort to block my way, why are you now here, ready to say you are a Midgan and to talk about Wabaio? Tell me that.’

‘Because of the war, Effendi. The Allies are going to win the war. That is why.’

The Allies were going to win the war. That was now obvious, he said. There had been a time when it seemed that the Fascisti officers might come back to rule the Somalis, and then the tribes might take revenge again upon each other in the massive way they had done when the British drove the Italians out. Now, if a man, even a Midgan, showed his real hand he could be safe. The new government seemed settled and permanent. Men were no longer nervous. That, said Hersi, was why he was now here before me, as a Midgan, to talk about Wabaio or about anything else I wished. Did I not see this? It was purely a gesture from the heart.

Somehow one had never connected the Somalis, or the Midgan, with ‘the war’. In this howling wilderness silence had fallen again following the swift East African campaign of 1941. The war was in another world altogether.

‘As a merchant,’ Hersi went on, ‘I have to think of the war and of trade, Effendi. Men need sugar, salt, coffee, cloth. Once Africa is quiet again, why trade will begin with Kenya, Abyssinia, India, Arabia. The latest news that Abyssinia is completely cleared of Italian soldiers has made me realise that I need no longer fear to show my hand. Before now I have had to go slowly, carefully. The jealousy of the Somalis is like a wound in the heart. It burns them night and day.’ His hand, which he was showing now, was only that of friendship.

Hersi was a small fat man with indoor Arab skin, yellowish-gold and well nourished. He wore the Somali lungi or sarong, a khaki drill jacket and a small brightly-coloured Arab skull cap. Clean shaven, he had large intelligent black eyes, and his whole face had calm and wisdom in it.

‘So you have known for a long time of my interest in the Midgan?’

‘We all know of it, Effendi. We have discussed it. It is a surprising thing to us. As you are interested in our group I have given orders that when the time comes all must help you in your questioning and writing down.’

No, he said he was not afraid of the Somalis now. He had watched carefully the problem of the world war and the feuds and fears and plans of the Somalis. But he knew now that I would protect him and his people. He looked hard at me and saw the flicker of suspicion again in my eyes. He laughed aloud, and said, ‘Sicuro, Effendi, che non ho detto anche una bugia.’ He spread his hands, selling me the truth of this statement with his wide eyes; he had no plan. His interest was my interest. I believed this at last, never looked back from it, and made a friend.

He promised to bring a Midgan who was ‘a man of the desert’ and who would tell me all about Wabaio.

Not long after this conversation, killing began on a large scale some miles away and the tribes tried once more to settle their ancient accounts with each other; camels and water and honour, the dreary trinity of the Mijertein desert. They slew each other without mercy in the first few days and we hunted them through the wastes for weeks, disarming raiding groups and picketing the waterholes. It was during this period that I met the Midgan as nomads. They came pouring into camp, little lithe men with information about Somali raiding groups. Hersi, they said, had ordered this. They were to help the officers in every way with information, as guides, and trackers.

The ancient tribal hate, a terrifyingly determined force when it drew its long pitiless dagger, flickered down into a smoulder after a time, but revenge for injuries received during the Italian collapse had been taken and for a time the fanatical tribal honour was satisfied. They were willing to pay for the dead, in camels, and they paid, sneering.

‘I,’ said one of the Midgan trackers, ‘I am the one chosen by Hersi to be your teacher. I am to tell you everything you want to know.’

‘Even your language?’ I asked him, delighted. The Midgan have a secret language of their own. ‘And the way you make Wabaio?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That is Hersi’s order.’

His name was Hirad. Burned by that fierce sun to the colour and lustre of coal, he glowed with heat, as if his skin had sucked up a million years of sunglare. His hair was as thick and wild as a young Somali warrior’s, standing up from his head in a thick woolly halo. He had great black eyes which flickered fiercely and which saw everything. He wore only a lungi and old worn sandals of camel hide sewn with thick white sinew. In his soft, tanned leather belt which was hung with magical talismans, was a long bone-handled dagger. Under his left armpit was a small skinning-knife which was as sharp as a scalpel. He looked the absolute spirit of that savage lunar landscape, his big white teeth wet with saliva when he laughed. He was, I was to find out one day, the nearest link to a wild animal in his nose, his sensitivities about water, beasts, and the right track to follow in a trackless waste, that I ever met.

There was a great pile of curved swords, spears, daggers, bows and quivers of arrows which we had taken in the operations. I took some arrows from one of the quivers and showed them to him. They were war-arrows with the long cruel barbs which would lock them in a man’s guts. They were smeared with a dry khaki-coloured paste.

‘Is this Wabaio?’ I asked, showing him the arrow-heads.

After scratching the dry stuff on the arrow-head, he tasted it, his eyes staring far off as he nibbled at it.

‘That is Wabaio,’ he said. ‘But it is dead.’ He spat out the dead poison and threw the arrow back into the heap of weapons.

‘It is a long way to where the tree grows, Effendi,’ he told me. ‘Near Yillig in the mountains.’ That was days of driving by truck across the bone-shaking rocks and sand. There was no possibility of my making such a journey just then, during the operations. I told him I could not go. Could he not bring the stuff and make the poison in the fort?

‘No,’ he was definite about it. ‘We have never before shown any Galka how Wabaio is made. It is secret. I would not bring it to you here because the Somalis would find some way of making trouble about it. And anyway the root would die if I brought it down here to cook. It is best cooked on the hills where it is cool, near its home. It is happy there, and when it is made and brought down here on to the desert it must still be kept happy. We have a thing for that.’

I did not argue. I did not want to look this gift-horse in the mouth, something Burton, who saw so many rare things, would no doubt have given a lot to see made. I also felt a very young white man’s pride in being chosen as the recipient of such a secret. I trembled lest I spoilt it and seal off this gateway by some stupid move.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘When I can come to Yillig, you will be ready?’

‘That is Hersi’s order,’ he said. ‘I will be ready when you are ready.’

It was four years before I got to Yillig, for not long after meeting Hirad I was transferred to another piece of wilderness hundreds of miles away on the south-eastern Abyssinian border, and then, after long and involved effort, to the Burma campaign. In India in October 1945 I had a letter, a splendid surprise out of the Somali wilderness, from Hersi. He had taken great trouble to trace me and had even found the number of the infantry division I was with. The letter was full of news of trade. His business was happy. Now that the war was over was I going to come back and study the Midgan and write it all down on paper? If I were to come back he was there to help. May God protect and look after me (he was, of course, a devout Mohammedan) always. Peace had come again to the world and men could again turn their hands to trade. ‘Non sabbiamo la futura di nostra Baese. (He, like most Somalis, always used the letter b for p in Italian.) Gli Nazione Unite sanno, sberiamo.’

A few months later I found myself again in the eye-searing glare of the Somali desert. ‘This time,’ I told myself, ‘I will fill in this small gap left by Burton. I will see Wabaio made if I have to walk all the way to Yillig.’ If there is anyone I would like to have known, travelled with, learned from, especially of his enormous knowledge of the lore of Islam, it is Burton.

In early 1947 I was at Bosaso, the place of the winds, on the Gulf of Aden, and one day while I was drinking a melancholy gin on a verandah overlooking the shabby huddle of skin huts and rickety houses which dribbled wearily to the sea’s edge, Hirad appeared, dressed for the wilderness, lungi, sandals, and dagger. He gave me his lean dry hand, laughing, and said, ‘I have arrived.’

He had come on a trade-truck from a fort over four hundred miles to the south. Hersi sent greetings. He was well, and more prosperous than ever.

Was I ready now to go to Yillig? We were nearer now than ever before. A day in a truck. A walk up a mountain. Burton had passed near Bosaso. Had he known he was that close to the Wabaio which interested him? But he had no truck in those days, and he was in great personal danger.

‘Yes. We will go,’ I said. ‘In a week from now.’ Then I said something which I had nursed in my mind for a long time. Now it was so close, could Wabaio really be so powerful a poison?

‘This poison,’ I said, ‘it cannot be as powerful as they say. Will I be seeing the real and true poison?’ Surely such a secret must be lost by now. Like many things in Africa might it not be exaggerated? I was afraid of disappointment.

Hirad shook his head gravely and cracked his fingers in disapproval. ‘I will show you,’ he said. ‘It is true Wabaio, stronger than anything you have ever seen. Even tribes beyond Kismayu buy it if we will send it to them.’ Kismayu is on the Kenya border, many days’ journey south by truck from Bosaso. ‘You will see, Effendi,’ he said, ‘and believe’.

Hirad wanted to make his way among the buildings of Bosaso, the only ‘city’ he had ever seen. Bosaso is a crumbling sun-beaten village to which the dhows come from Aden and Mukalla, taking away hides and incense, the luban which the Somalis chew like an aromatic cud, and over which whole families fight, generation after generation, not being able to decide about the rights and title. (And I had to decide it; another sad story.)

Bosaso lies stunned most of the day in the blinding sun, and the only really active people are the whores and their pimps who make great play with one like Hirad come out of the desert full of wilderness and with a longing to be a sophisticate for a few hours. Arabs stride through the narrow sandy alleys, throwing alms to the herds of starving Somali orphans if the voyage from Mukalla has been profitable, a few coins, a kind of sop to the Prophet who said that we must never forget the poor, the Maskin who forgather near the mosque, and whom I had failed to save from poverty by my petty effort at millet growing.

In the morning Hirad came, smelling of charcoal-brazier smoke and Arab perfume, a ring on his finger, the nails of his right hand varnished with scarlet paint. He was to tell me about the Sa’ab group.

He claimed that they were the original inhabitants of the Somalilands who had lost the great and final battle near Hargeisha and were then taken into slavery until they became Mohammedans. After that they were Mohammedan slaves instead of mere slaves. They became metal-workers, carpenters, herbalists, hunters, leather workers.

Every Somali woman, when she was ready to bear her child, liked to have a Midgan woman present. Weddings and dances were not complete without Midgan dressed in their gay colours and bringing luck to the nobles.

Hirad came of a family of hunters. He and his younger brother, who had come with him and was in Bosaso, had been taught the skills of the chase by their father. In Somalia more skill is needed to hunt and kill meat than in Kenya and Tanganyika, where, even now after years of slaughter the game is still plentiful, and stupid and lazy compared with the rare game of Somalia’s deserts. Even the lion in Somalia is smaller and thinner compared with those of Kenya. The plains leopard of Somalia is a yellowish, haggard creature compared with that of Bantu Africa. Everything in Somalia is thinner, more nervous, sharper minded, than in the fat lands of grassy Kenya and Tanganyika.

‘He has taught us nearly everything,’ said Hirad, speaking of his father. ‘He teaches us more and more as he grows older and slower.’

The old man would not give all his wisdom until he was too slow to use it. In that way he would keep some power, some respect and mystery. He was a hard master, said Hirad, and if a boy made a mistake he would beat him severely so that he should never forget. ‘He once beat me as one would beat a woman,’ Hirad explained. ‘And he did that until I was a man, when he knew I could kill as well as he.’ Kill what? A man, a wild beast? Probably both. I did not ask.

‘He taught us how to stand still, without even blinking in the sharpest sun. For you must stand until you are ready and the shot is ready, then you bring up the bow, drawing the string as you do so, in one movement, with no mistake.’ The Wabaio did the rest.

Not like Kenya, where in the rains the panting hunter, who has run his fat eland to a standstill in the heavy mud, stabs him to death. Here in Somalia the game is moving away before you have got within riflerange. For the bowman it must be a work of art, of great patience and with a thrilling reward for a hungry belly. These nomads live in a state of continual hunger. They can get drunk on camel milk and poetry, the declamations of some genealogically demented elder who will stand up and cry the glory of this tribe’s particular genes, perhaps the Midgan standing by, listening, older genealogically on this bitter sand and rock, but now without a chieftain.

The nearest approach to the Midgan are the Wandarobo of Kenya, the hunters, though they are forest dwellers and not nearly as tough and resourceful as the Midgan. They too brew an arrow poison, but they will use the Wabaio of the Midgan in preference, when they can get it.

We left a few days later, before dawn, heading the truck for Karin, an old and deserted Italian post, but Hirad was not in the truck. His brother had come instead. A long and mysterious story had not cleared up the reason of why Hirad could not come. He just could not. Certain things were not right. No, he could not tell me. It was a matter of deep shame, he said. He could not explain. But I must believe in his brother, Jama, who knew everything about Wabaio.

I had waited by the truck in the first light, smoking many cigarettes, and no sign of Hirad. The youth who came, carrying a bundle wrapped in a dirty white cloth, said, ‘I am Hirad’s brother. Hirad cannot come.’

‘They’ve got at him,’ I thought. ‘The Somalis have fixed something.’

‘Where is Hirad?’

‘He is ill,’ Jama said. ‘I am to show you how to make the poison.’

‘You are too young, Jama,’ I said. ‘You can’t know as much as Hirad.’

He was not annoyed. He smiled and shook his head. ‘I know more than Hirad,’ he told me solemnly. ‘I am my father’s best son. I have killed more in one day than Hirad has ever done. My father has said that I am his best son.’

I made him take me to see Hirad. He was lying on a heap of palmleaves in the corner of an old hut near the market where the butchers sold their fly-wrapped goat meat. He looked like a malaria case, sweating and racked, though very far from delirious. He had been taken ill in the night. He swore that Jama was as clever as himself. I could not believe that the noble race had not in some way reached out a hand to spoil this opportunity to see the making of this famed and mysterious poison. You get into that way of thinking in the Somali waste. You think that way because the Somalis bitterly resent the white man, and struggle continually, and admirably, by lies and intrigue, to fight off his influence which spells the end of their peculiar world. You cannot beat them. They have no inferiority complexes, no wide-eyed worship of the white man’s ways, and no fear of him, of his guns or of his official anger. They are a race to be admired, if hard to love.

From Karin we drove into the rough, stony hills towards the borders of British Somaliland, the country moonlike in tumbled rock and grey bushless loneliness, not a beast or a man for hundreds of miles. We were topping a rise when Jama pressed his hand on my arm and said, ‘Meat.’ His eyes were staring into the grey distance. I stopped the truck and it was some time before I saw the oryx bull standing beside an enormous boulder about two hundred yards away, greyish-yellow, lonely-looking, perfectly camouflaged, and, as far as Jama and I were concerned, doomed. Fresh venison after the starved leathery goat meat brought up in me as much of the ancient wish to kill as ever Jama knew.

‘Will you let me shoot it, Effendi?’ Jama asked.

‘Are you good with a rifle?’

‘I am an expert, Effendi,’ he said. ‘I will show you.’

He did not want the sporting-model I had with me. He preferred the Italian army rifle as carried by the two Somali askaris accompanying us. Grudgingly, one of the askaris handed over his rifle to this inferior man whom the white man was favouring and spoiling.

‘These people cannot shoot, Effendi,’ they complained, pointing at Jama. ‘They lie. They boast. It is waste of ammunition.’

Jama ran forward then, for the oryx was moving, bulky and fast, his long tapering curved horns set back, and a thin trail of dust at his feet. Jama did not aim or use the sights at all. He simply swung the rifle up, moving it left as he did so, firing as the butt came into his shoulder. The oryx slithered forward and fell in a heap on to his chest, rolling then in that slow upward lift of hooves which the heavy antelopes often favour when mortally wounded.

He was stone dead when we reached him, the small red hole glowing in his dusty shoulder. Jama cut its throat with his sharp knife, the ‘halal’ for the Prophet’s sake, a deceitful ‘halal’, for the beast was dead, but good enough, just as sand is good enough for a ritual wash before prayer in the desert where water is scarce.

‘Now, we will have to lift this fellow’s kill for him,’ the askaris said to each other, angry with admiration and jealousy.

‘Where did you learn to shoot like that?’ I asked Jama.

‘We have a rifle at home,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But I swear to you we have never fired it at a man or taken part in any raiding.’

We paunched the oryx and loaded it into the truck and drove on to the mountain of Yillig.

I was full of excited anticipation now, wishing Sir Richard Burton was alive, so that tomorrow I could write him a letter saying, ‘I have seen them making Wabaio.’ Surely he would have been interested. Solitude causes such wishes, just as once I had sat down to write to Gogol after an all night sitting reading Dead Souls near Isiolo before the war, twenty years old, before remembering with a deep regret that he was long, long dead. If you read Gogol’s foreword to that novel (in which he asks for letters) in a really lonely part of Africa, after you have finished Dead Souls, you will definitely want to sit down at once and write your gratitude to Gogol.

The Italians had left a grass-roofed stone hut on the mountain near Yillig. A group of Somalis was camped nearby in tents made of grass mats, the kariya of the small family group, young warriors carrying spears, a couple of tired wives, hags already at thirty or so, for the nomad life in that climate quickly takes away the bloom of these most beautiful women in Africa. The family were naturally suspicious of me, apprehensive about a white man in that isolated spot they had chosen for their camp. A white man means orders, questions, or some unknown governmental plan for the eventual ruination of the nomad’s life. There must be some particular reason for this particular white man coming to their camp, and I was the only white man in hundreds of square miles. So why was I here? The young men stared sullenly at us, exchanged tribal names with the two askaris, found they were as noble as they looked and then began their questions. When the askaris told them that I had come to watch a Midgan make poison, an elderly withered man with a wall-eye came forward and said to me in Italian, ‘I am of the Omar Suleiman. We are magicians. We know more than the Midgan. We are the wisest. Men are frightened of us. And we will never show anybody our secrets, because they are powerful. Why then is a Midgan ready to show you his poison? I will tell you. For money. You will pay him for a lying trick. That is all.’ The rest nodded in satisfaction. The two askaris were respectful and without argument. I told the old man that I was very impressed by what he had said, but even so I had my own wishes to consider.

It was Jama, the Midgan who was angry. He went up to the elder of the Omar Suleiman and said, ‘We will see about the poison. You believe I am lying to the white man? In the morning you will see the poison. Give us a goat and I will show you. I will use the poison on the goat.’

They did not like that. They talked in low voices for a long time among themselves, Jama standing by, watching them proudly and contemptuously. Why did he not fear their curse? He laughed when I asked him later. ‘It is I who can curse,’ he said dramatically.

‘So you want to trick us as well as the white man?’ one of the warriors said when they had finished their low-voiced conference. ‘And you want a goat into the bargain?’

‘Yes,’ said Jama. ‘If my poison is no good why should you fear for your goat? If it does not die under the poison you can have it back, sound and safe.’

He laughed pitilessly while they considered this, for he had hurt their pride. They began to shout among themselves, arguing angrily as to whether such a risk was worthwhile.

‘You see them,’ Jama said to me. ‘They are like children.’ Then he goaded them and the elder said with heat that he would give a goat. When was the poison to be made?

Jama said that only the white man would be allowed to see the poison made. It would be made at dawn.

‘And you will not show us?’

‘No.’

‘Will you not show the askaris?’

‘No.’

A long bitter argument began and I left them, preferring to watch the plains from the hut doorway while sipping a gin. They enjoyed the wrangle for about a quarter of an hour and then Jama came to say that he was ready to go to the poison-trees. There was something, he said, he must now tell me about why Hirad had not been able to come. Hirad had gonorrhoea.

‘But nearly everybody in the towns of Somalia has gonorrhoea,’ I said. ‘What is important about gonorrhoea and Wabaio?’

‘No one who has gonorrhoea or syphilis must go near the Wabaio tree, or be present while the poison is being cooked,’ he replied. ‘And Hirad is very unhappy to have got the disease. He got it at El Lagodei from a girl when we were coming up on the trade-truck. “Lucky it was that I brought you,” he said to me. “God did it. Otherwise between the angers of the white man and Hersi, our rich King, what would I do?” That, Effendi, is why it is I and not Hirad who has come here to show you the cooking of Wabaio.’

It said a lot for Hirad’s beliefs that he should stay away because he had contracted this disease, for he would have to confess it to Hersi eventually. He would have to confess that a youth, though his own brother, still a youth, had replaced him in the exhibition of wisdom for the white man who was so interested in Midgan things, a white man who had nagged for so long about this Wabaio.

‘This disease would kill the poison, Effendi,’ Jama told me. ‘A man with this disease in the presence of the tree I will take the bark from, or nearby when the poison is made, would kill the power of the Wabaio at once. So Hirad is sad.’ He smiled. ‘And Hersi will shout at him when he hears of it. A man must be clean when he makes the poison.’

There were many things which could destroy the poison, he explained. Some of these things he could not tell me. They were magic, and he would have permission from his father to tell me about them.

So the making of Wabaio itself was not magic. But there was a great deal of magic built about it for its protection.

The Somali, like many throughout the Muslim world, will drink the ink washed from certain Koranic writings to get strength, to empower his dagger-hand, or to win a potency for a time, but I never found what the Midgan’s own magic is made of, though he too will drink a Koranic potion in a pinch, just in case.

The tree was about eight feet high, dark strong-looking leaves thick on it, nothing very remarkable or sinister about it. Only its green health was strange in a land of starved grey tormented thorn brush and snarling spine-covered creepers.

The tree itself is called Wabai. The correct name for the poison got from it is Wabaio. Jama explained this and then said that a truly powerful tree was the one on which the birds would never sit, for it would kill them. On the other hand a tree with many dead birds under it, skeletons, feathers, or even freshly dead birds, was a tree to choose when you were going to make the poison. We went into this for a long time but got nowhere at all. In loyalty to the unmade Wabaio I decided that it was up to the birds, the difficult part being that there was not even a feather beneath the clump of Wabai trees before which we stood. Jama could not see anything curious in his description of a tree’s power and a bird’s choice of resting place, and a complete absence of bird-relics to back his lore. I felt depressed then. Perhaps the poison was only a legend.

In Kenya and Tanganyika the hunters brewed a thick stew of euphorbia juice, snake venom and bug-essence, which can kill meat or men efficiently. Somehow, after this lore about the birds and the Wabai tree, the Wandarobo of Kenya seemed much nearer to the mystic killers of fairytale than Jama with his calm contradictions about the strength of a Wabai tree.

‘Now I will begin,’ he said. He took the heavy matchet we had brought and began to dig into the harsh flinty soil at the base of the chosen tree. He dug for a long time until about a foot down he found a root which pleased him. Then he took a coloured cloth from his belt and wrapped it about his face so that his mouth was covered. Expertly he chopped long pieces of bark from the thick twisted root, placing each piece on a growing heap. There must have been two or three pounds of it when he had done and said he was satisfied.

He showed me the bark. It was hard, though bleeding a thin colourless sap where his matchet had cut it, and on the inner side of it it was a dark shining blue, like gun-metal, and it had a strange lethal glow. It gave off a sharp bitter scent and Jama drew it sharply away from my nose when I sniffed at it.

‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘Your skull will ache and you will go blind if you smell it like that.’

‘Is this all we need?’ I asked him. No, there were other things. A poor unlearned kind of man would be satisfied with this, he held up the pile of bark which he had wrapped in the coloured cloth, and would complain to God when the wounded beast went on and on across the country, its death delayed. Swift and sure death was the hunter’s ambition, and for that only a proper and careful making of the poison would do.

‘There are many kinds of men,’ he said. ‘Just as there are many kinds of Midgan. Our old father was the greatest hunter of all his family-group, because he had knowledge and he took care. He was beaten by his father when learning as we, his sons, were beaten. He taught us every wisdom there is about making Wabaio, for, as he said, “What is the use of the good bow-string and the right arrow and the patient waiting for the beast, if the poison on the arrow is made by a fool who does not know the secrets, or who, knowing, is too lazy to give care to the making of it?”’

When we got back to the hut the sun was sinking. A very old man with a loaded donkey was waiting. He saluted Jama and was as respectful to him as a young Somali would be to an old man. Jama spoke with him in their own tongue, which sounds like the hard, brittle Somali language, but is very different, their secret language. This was an old Midgan whom Jama had sent to cut a special wood called shillin. The old man, I found, had been waiting at Yillig for days on Hirad’s orders. God knows how the word goes out across these vast Somali wastes, how the old man had heard the order, who fed him, where he would go after this making of Wabaio. Jama brushed my questions away by saying, ‘He must obey my father’s group. He belongs to a kariya of the Omar Mohamed tribe and where he is told to go he goes. Pay him little, for he is old and they eat little.’

He treated the old man like a servant, ordering him to put the wood by the hut, and the old man obeyed with a deference that was touching, for he did not know, despite all his years, what the youth knew of the tribal lore.

‘Shillin wood is not always used for the fire on which we cook the Wabaio, Effendi,’ said Jama. ‘But it should be used. Its smoke makes the poison happy. The smoke of this wood when it is burning will blind a man. Always I use it, as my father said we should.’ The wood looked like ordinary dry, twisted thorn branches.

That night we broiled some of the oryx meat over a glowing ashbed of wild olive wood (the very best wood for a cooking fire in the bush) and Jama told me stories of the days of the ‘Mad Mullah’ which his father had told him, and he sang several Midgan songs. One was about the angarara, the black centipede which comes from the earth after the rains.

He told me how a Midgan could live (if he had listened to his father) when hungry and thirsty, without meat or water, in the wilderness.

I had seen hangeio, a smooth greyish creeper which grows in the crevices of rocks, and had been told it was eatable. Jama said it forms a satisfying pulp in the mouth when chewed, fills the stomach and sustains life ‘until you can reach other men and cry “Magan!”’ He laughed, saying, ‘And a Midgan cannot be Magan with a Somali. But he can cry for food.’

Magan is a word a warrior will cry to a man of another tribe, even an enemy, who, spear raised, is ready to kill, and the man cried to must protect and feed the crying one for a certain time. I had an askari who was Magan to a tribe which hated his, but he had satisfied them by claiming protection. It is not surrender so much as a temporary admittance of need, and it satisfies the one who is proud to accept the hostage.

Yoho is another plant which will yield enough moisture when chewed, to keep you this side of thirst-madness. It makes a wet sponge in the mouth, ‘and is paradise when you are dying’, as Jama put it. As he talked one had a look into the hopes and fears of the nomad, who did not know when he might die suddenly in the dark with a spear blade between his shoulders, or perish far from a waterhole with only the certainty that God will remember him, for that is what he must think as the sunglare fades on his dying stare. That is the law.

We ate meat and drank black tea until a thin wind rose in the dark desert and sighed in the thorn trees, making Jama restless and uneasy. He rolled his black eyes and smiled when I asked what worried him. He would not tell me. He said it was nothing for a white man, only for a Midgan. When I nagged him he rose and said he must go now. Before dawn he would be ready to start the cooking of the poison. He would wake me at the false dawn, and before he went to sleep he had one request. Would I ensure that no Somali would be present during the making of the poison? Yes, they pretended they were too proud to want to know any Midgan customs, but, secretly, they had a great wish to find out what they could. They liked to stand idly by and pretend not to watch. They were cunning men.

I promised that we would cook the poison on the stone floor of the broken down kitchen next to the hut and that no Somali would be allowed to see a single part of the proceedings.

‘Then that is good,’ he said. ‘They are jealous because you are interested, and angry because I know what they do not know.’ He was going into one of those passionate sermons about jealousies, hatreds, tribes and wisdoms, which the races marked down by the other races for conquest are always making to their friend, the agent of the conqueror, trying to help, to explain – sermons which become ‘Int.I. Tribal. Tensions’ in a file for some future day, which may never come. If there is oil there, of course, that day will come.

The sun was quivering in soft pink and green veils when Jama and I lit cigarettes. The dawn threw slow wings of brilliant light beyond the mountains until the soft flux of darkness and false light began to retreat and revealed the shabby desiccated world, and the jagged rocks stood out, flinging long shadows on to the surface of our particular barren world, the enormous silence undisturbed by a single cough, or by the first exciting religious cry of Mohammed’s special world. Our cigarette smoke hung in the fierce gold light of the dawn as it climbed. Jama smoked like an Indian, sucking the smoke up through the closed fist, the cigarette hanging down from the base of his curled palm, like one who missed the hukkah and must make do with a cigarette.

‘All is ready,’ he said. Then he went into a detailed description of duk’neya (and habar-daar), which he had walked two miles before dawn to cut. Without duk’neya the poison would not kill. Duk’neya was the great killer, the real killer, not the killer who actually extinguished life’s delicate light, but the substance without which Wabaio could not come to sinister fruition. Daar is an aloe but the word habar interested me. It is the word for a curse, in Somali, but the names of the materials used for the arrow poison are Midgan.

‘Duk’neya,’ Jama said, ‘is like salt in the food we eat. It draws the strength of the good.’ He showed me the white sap melting from the thick, coarse green cuttings in his hands. This sap threw off a thin malevolent smell, acid and bitter, pointless until you knew what it was for, until you were a Midgan. It was like a part of a terrible salad which could be cut up with crisp fresh sounds, for it was innocent to see despite what Jama said.

‘It is the salt,’ he told me. ‘It is what draws out the final poison. Without this the poison is useless.’

He used an iron pot for cooking. When he unwrapped the necessary parts for the mystery the scene had a kind of tawdry grandeur, the grandeur given to it by Jama’s quiet gravity. The iron pot was black, bent, pitted, yet scrubbed and shining inside, like a rifle barrel after a gauze. A few large, heavy, yellow sea-shells, a long peeled dry twig, some rags of multi-coloured cotton which he tied to a string and hung round his neck. There was something subdued about him. He was nervous. He was afraid, possibly that the poison was no good. I was only a white man, but I had been promised.

The whole bitter-smelling mass of Wabai root he poured from a sack on to the black stone floor. He took a large flat stone which he laid between his crossed legs. In his right he held a piece of jagged rock, the pestle. He laid the pestle beside the Wabai root and then, taking a thick black and yellow striped cummerbund in his hands (a waistband of an Italian army colonial battalion) he said, ‘Cover up your mouth and nose now, Effendi. I am going to crush the Wabai root, and if you breathe it in you will be in great pain.’

I was tense and nervous now, wondering if the Wabaio would work. I wanted it to work because I so admired the Midgan. I believed that the Midgan had once made it, and that it was as powerful as Burton had been told. But I did not believe that this wisdom had survived into 1947, for so many tractors had been driven across so many folk-wisdoms.

Jama wound the striped scarf tightly about his mouth, binding it above his eyes so that he was staring through a slit. He was about to begin pounding the coarse bitter-smelling pieces of Wabai when he looked sharply at me. He put down the pounding-stone, loosened the scarf and said, ‘Effendi, wrap up your mouth and nose while I am crushing the Wabai. You will have pain otherwise. I tell you you will have pain.’

You couldn’t make a white man do anything if you were black, in Africa. You suggested. Then you left it when you got the reply I gave.

‘I’m all right,’ I told him. ‘You carry on with the Wabai.’ I did not believe the pounding of the Wabai root would affect me.

Jama beat each piece of Wabai into a heap of trash which sent off a sharp, wet, acid stench. The iron pot was boiling on the fire now, the spring water in it rippling and bubbling. When all the Wabai was crushed Jama put it into the pot, handful after handful. A thick stifling steam poured from the pot while he pushed the mass of poisonous bark below the surface of the boiling water.

He then chopped the duk’neya into pieces with his dagger. He lifted the dagger which was now smeared with the thick white sap.

‘That sap would blind you,’ he said. ‘One drop in your eyes and you are like the very old, begging for alms.’

Now he stuffed the pieces of shillin wood under the pot, and as they caught fire and crackled they began to send off clouds of thick bluegrey smoke. My eyes filled with tears and began to burn and Jama laughed.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘Let us go until it has burnt down. You can blind a man with shillin.’ Covering his eyes with the scarf he put all the chopped duk’neya into the pot, placed the lid on it and then came with me into the hot fresh air.

‘Do you know about dunkál?’ he asked when we had lit cigarettes. When I said I had never heard of it, he shook his head and said, ‘It is a wonderful poison. One of the best there is. No good for the hunter, but for killing a man peacefully you cannot find anything better than dunkál. You can kill a man with it hours after he has drunk milk or tea with you. You give it to him in his drink, and if you have measured it properly, he goes into his final sleep several hours later. He longs for death, he is so tired. No one can keep him awake, or alive, for he must sleep. Yes, that is dunkál. They say it is an Arab poison, though the Arabs deny that, as they deny everything until they know why you have asked them about it. Ju’us is theirs too. You know Ju’us? It will give strength where there is none. That is an Arab thing too.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Always in our stories the Arabs are the cunning ones, but are they as cunning as we Somalis and Midgan? No. They cannot be.’

Occasionally we looked at the simmering poison in the pot. It was thickening to a brown bubbling soup and giving off strong rank acid fumes. The smoke of the shillin wood had thinned now but could still bring a rush of tears to the eyes.

While Jama was telling me of how, wearing a donkey’s head to which oryx-horns had been strapped, he had sat for hours near oryx, waiting for them to approach, my head began to ache. It was no ordinary headache. My gums and teeth felt enormous and full of dull, heavy pain, as if swollen after a beating, and pain grew in my jaws until I could no longer feel my teeth when I simulated chewing. The pain in the skull was terrific and when Jama saw me holding my jaws and in obvious pain, he said, ‘I told you, Effendi, to cover your mouth and nose. Now you are hurt because you did not do it. The Wabai dust is poisonous.’

‘Well, what is the cure for it? There must be a cure.’

‘There is no cure. It will go away after a time.’

The headache stayed with me all day.

Yes, Jama would sit wearing his donkey-head, poisoned-arrow ready in the bow-string until an oryx came near enough for a safe shot. Then the twang of the bow-string, the soft thud of the arrow striking, the rush of the oryx while the fire of the Wabaio hissed in his blood, then heart failure, a stumbling and a shivering as the oryx died. How long before it died?

‘Well, there is no rule, Effendi. It depends on how old the poison is, how big the oryx. It depends on many things.’

‘So you can’t say how long?’

‘I could, Effendi, but only for this or that oryx. It differs.’

‘Well, roughly how long?’

He would not say. The hunter was not worried about ‘how long’, but was satisfied to follow the animal until he fell. ‘How long’ was a typical white man’s question. ‘How sure?’ was a Midgan’s question, and once that Wabaio-smeared arrow had gone into the beast he was as good as dead. After death the poison all came back to the wound. The hunter cut that portion of the meat out and the rest of the beast was safe to eat. How explain that? Jama could not say, but it was so.

‘If the game is afraid and will not come near the hunter, no matter how clever and patient he may be, then we have another way of killing him with Wabaio,’ said Jama. ‘There is a plant which the game like to eat. We scoop out the centre of the plant and put Wabaio paste into it. Some time after a buck has eaten it he will die. But it takes much longer than an arrow-wound.’

When the pot had been bubbling for about four hours, Jama took one of the big sea-shells, called dalla, and decanted enough of the thick dark brown soup from the pot to fill the shell. He placed the brimming shell on the hot coals and when it sizzled and boiled he stirred it gently with a peeled twig. As it boiled the liquid turned to a thick blackish gum. It looked like hot tar and it now gave off a heavily sour perfume.

‘It is time for the first test.’ Jama went to the doorway of the hut and called the old withered man who had been so ready with the shillin wood. I heard Jama use the word ‘shimbir’ (a bird) and when the old man went hobbling off to Jama’s sleeping place, I asked, ‘Why shimbir? What shimbir?’

He said the hunter always used the new poison on a bird first. It must be tried on a bird. That was the tradition. The old man brought a dove in a small cage made of twigs. ‘Must it be this bird?’ The dove was so peaceful, so harmless, I was wanting to be coaxed.

‘Always it must be this bird.’ Jama looked steadily into my eyes, as if he knew the great sentimental complication of the white man who would spare a bird and massacre a city full of men and women (from the air preferably, for then he does not know what he is doing! The ‘savage’ has known all about this for a long time. Will the white man forgive him for knowing?).

‘We are ready?’ he said. He opened the dove’s beak and inserted a drop of the Wabaio. The dove closed its beak, sat still, obediently, and then fruffed all his feathers so that he resembled a ball of grey-lilac fluff. He closed his eyes, shivered, and in a few seconds fell dead on Jama’s hard pinkish-yellow palm.

‘There,’ he said. ‘The Wabaio works.’ He stared triumphantly at the bird. ‘Now for the goat.’

The desert goat is tough and could live on a diet of sandpaper and thorns if necessary. When even the camel is desperate for a meal the goat will find sustenance. He helped to make the desert and the desert can support him. To see a goat chewing a mouthful of grey sharp thorns is always a surprise, and they thrive on it. I once watched a goat eat a packet of cigarettes, remembering from my farming days that nicotine is splendid for wireworm and for other parasites. The desert goat will eat anything, staring ahead with those strangely beautiful insane eyes, tougher by far than the camel.

Jama wanted to stab the goat and then insert Wabaio deep into the wound, ‘like an arrow would’. I said it was needlessly cruel, and anyway was not a fair test.

‘Cruel?’ he said. ‘Why is it cruel? It is a part of the thing we are doing about the Wabaio, is it not?’

I fell back on the fact that it was not a fair way of testing the poison. The blood carried the poison to the animal’s heart. It was not necessary to put the poison deep into the animal ‘as an arrow would’. The poison smeared on a cut would do, if the poison was any good. It would be the best test of the Wabaio I had so long waited to see made.

This perplexed Jama, and he did not like it. ‘It will not work then,’ he complained. ‘When it does not work that way you will laugh and say the Wabaio is no good. Then you will tell the Somalis, and they will be glad. No, it is not a proper way of doing it.’ He held the bilau, the long sharp Somali dagger in his right hand while the goat, seeing the knife, and knowing its purpose, struggled in the crook of Jama’s left arm.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The Wabaio is good. It killed the dove. I want to see if it will kill the goat in the way I have suggested.’

With a razor-blade we shaved the coarse hair from a square inch of skin on the goat’s shoulder, made a small incision which bled, and Jama then pressed as much of the tarry Wabaio as would cover a teardrop on to the wound. While doing this, he told me of the curious way in which a hunter will test Wabaio made by another. He makes a cut on his inner arm, lets the blood stream down to his wrist, places the tip of the arrow-head, which is freshly poisoned, in the blood at the wrist, and if the poison is good it will race up through the trail of blood (‘you can see it go’) and as it travels ‘it burns up the blood’ until it reaches the cut, across which the hunter has pressed his finger. After such a test the hunter will use it. Bad Wabaio will not race up the blood. It will do nothing.

The goat stiffened, ran backwards, its eyes closed, beat its forefeet on the stone floor for a few seconds, sat on its hindquarters, and then opened its eyes to stare with a sort of sad amazement at us and then fell over dead on its side. From the time Jama had applied the Wabaio it had lived one minute and forty seconds, and Jama was disappointed, while torn by gladness that anyway the Wabaio had worked.

‘It is much swifter than that when it is done as the arrow does it.’

‘But if it will kill an animal when it is smeared on a cut doesn’t that show you it is even stronger than you knew?’

This time it was Jama, and not the white man, who was worried about ‘how long’. I told him that the blood moved like a river and that it had carried the Wabaio to the goat’s heart because of that, but he was unable to decide whether he was relieved because the Wabaio he had made had worked for the sceptical white man, or whether he had not had a real chance to show what it could do ‘as the arrow does it’.

So there it was. A root out of the earth contained a toxin powerful enough to stop an animal’s heart in one minute and forty seconds after it was laid on a small cut made in the animal’s skin. How much stronger is it, I wondered, than the curare of the South American Indians? If that curare could be used as a medicine, why not Wabaio?

I like to believe what Jama told me, that I am the only white man who had seen Wabaio made. But am I? Surely some Italian officer, bored in those wastes, had been invited by the Midgan to see Wabaio made. The Somalis liked the Italians, even if they did not like their rule (a very important distinction about ‘empires’ and ‘occupations’, not always appreciated by the white man up on the hill, who thinks he represents some abstract mystique and not just himself), and there is no reason why the Midgan should not have shown an Italian this curious ritual.

When they heard that the Wabaio was good and that it had killed their goat, the Somalis in the kariya refused to come out, not being willing to be amazed, or discomfited, or convinced. They stayed quietly sullen in the shade and we left them to it, for after all it was their country, and the Midgan were their parasites and their problem, and in some way I had disturbed an accepted fact, unwillingly, but I had done it out of a curiosity awakened by Burton, long dead, while reading one of his books in a troopship.

I never saw Hersi again, that subtle, warm-hearted uncrowned chief of the Midgan. When I next saw the fort of El Lagodei, surrounded by its tatty sun-beaten slum of crumbling huts, he had gone – ‘into politics, Effendi’. What politics? I hoped he would become the leader of his ancient tribe.

The Somali race, the most interesting, the most proud, the most courageous and intelligent, and the most ‘difficult’ of the races of Africa, has gone into politics, for if they don’t others will, in this age of turmoil, and if by some strange chance Hersi should read this (he was always in touch with ‘the West’) I would be happy to have contact with him again.

We put the Wabaio into a special container, and Jama sewed it into a piece of khaki drill (‘a soldier’s colour which Wabaio would like’) and then he stitched about the neck of the receptacle all the gayest colours in wool he could find (plucked from the bright pompoms worn by the Banda of the Italian colonial soldiers, who had taken Wal-Wal for Mussolini when he decided that ancient Rome was right about empires). These colours would keep the Wabaio contented, wherever I might take it in my travels. When it was sewn up in its khaki and decked in its black, yellow and red woollen collar, Jama burned the wood of two different thorn trees, mixed the grey ashes and then, after placing the gay Wabaio container in one of those English cigarette tins which hold fifty cigarettes, packed the mixed ashes tightly about it. Why? Because if one ever carried the Wabaio to territories near the ocean, the poison would ‘turn to water’, melt and be useless. The ashes held a peculiar magic which would prevent that. My white mind guessed that the ashes would absorb the great moisture of the Indian Ocean which washes Somalia’s coast, the great water known to Jama, but who knows? Who knows what magic really is?

When leaving London for India in 1950, I was over-burdened with baggage. So I buried the Wabaio, with nostalgic thoughts for Somalia, three feet deep, in a garden in London, where it now lies, ‘happy’ in its khaki and colours.

Chapter 19

‘ONE MORE FRESH LIME AND WATER before I go back to the ship,’ I suggested to Ali. He agreed and we walked through the crowds back to the Croce del Sud. Perhaps it was the old taste of the swift violent spirit of this land, of the threat of melancholy coming over me, which made me want to leave Mogadishu now. Perhaps it was the memory of the seven suicides I had known personally (there were many more suicides than that), and how many cases of madness and breakdown I had counted up in memory as I had walked these streets with Ali. Fifteen or sixteen of them. People who, if they had never been tried out in that restless threatening country, would be alive today, or would never have cracked in the loneliness that was too much for them. For every one of us there is a situation, a crisis, a place, a commotion, which will force us into what we cannot do, will find us out as lacking, or unable, and most of us spend our whole lives without being trapped in that particular set of circumstances which will break us. You do the wrong uninspired thing, rushed and fearful, a moment’s decision, as the tangle of mess piles up, until there is a moment after which nothing can go right again.

Some of us have been mad without knowing it until later, much later, though the mask may not slip off completely. There may be only a little odd behaviour which hints at the turmoil, the shaking of reason behind. It used to be after the sixth month, on bully beef and biscuits, with tea in which the condensed milk would not dissolve but floated about in sickening lumps, because of the well water; after long and varied threats by the chiefs, strings of killings, the situation aching more angrily every day in the heat, with the possibility of massacre (and your own little, enormous death as well), that the loneliness fell like a wolf on a will here and there. One fine officer, cut off, surrounded by thousands of the warriors of two tribes who were about to fall on each other (and he with his few askaris in the way), tried everything he could think of to bring the two sides together, coaxed, pleaded, reasoned, and the two murderous chiefs, knowing that here was an honest, trusting, gentle person who thought only of their good, put on the pressure, each for his own side, and watched the young officer slowly lose his way among their threats. They finally broke him, for he became so obsessed with the need to bring them to peace (without the violence they loved to use, and feared if you used it on them), that he forgot that he was in a jungle full of splendid animals who understood emotion better than reason. The real panic-bringer is to remember that you are absolutely alone, and that you are not sure even that your askaris, if they are of the tribes you are tangled with, will stand by you. But it is the all-out gambling gesture that often saves the day (which is so often your life disguised as duty), the feeling handed out by the gesture that the gesturer will follow his threat or his order right to the end, no matter what it costs.

One day, during operations in the Haud and Ogaden, a subaltern, Steve, promised me that he would outpace the raiders and get round them, driving them down to me about fifty miles south-west of him. He was tougher than his Somalis, for after three days of the forced march in that glare and rock, thirteen of his platoon, the only askaris with him at that time, mutinied, backed off with their rifles and stood in a line fifty yards from him. He had a .303 rifle in his hands, the magazine full but with nothing up the spout. The thirteen askaris, he knew, had full magazines, but with nothing up the spout, and they threatened to shoot him if he did not give in to their demand for a day’s rest. The argument became angry. One of the askaris pulled back the bolt of his rifle (the emotional storms which come down on the desert Somalis are total, blinding, frantic), and this officer held up his hand and they listened.

‘You’ve seen me shoot,’ he said. ‘I’m good, and you know it. I’ll kill five of you before you get me. Five. And I’ve chosen the five. I’m ready. Put down your rifles, or open fire. Take your pick.’ He was a very good shot. It was one of those moments when no mistake can be made, and they knew he was willing to die, but that he would kill five of them before they finished him. The storm of rage collapsed, the moment was gone, and they sought to bargain, but he refused. ‘Ground arms,’ he ordered them, and they grounded arms. With their rage finished they knew they were out of these operations now, anyway, and under arrest. They said they would soldier on if he would forgive them, but he refused their offer. This officer was a gentle, sensitive person, but with a will which nothing could break; no isolation, crises, threats, ever climbed over his cool ability. The Somalis admired him, but it was when it looked to the ringleader of the mutineers that the officer was, unintentionally, tougher than themselves (and the Somali is vain of his staying powers) that they mutinied. That was the only time I ever knew a white man to outlast Somalis in their own geographical hell.

I knew a cynical old Irishman who tried everything he knew with five raving bloodthirsty chiefs (they shake their fists, scream, threaten, if you once let them start), and these chiefs, at loggerheads with each other over the waterholes, were ready to send their tribes against each other. And they had come in to the old officer to frighten him, and each other, and to work up to the point where the meeting would end in hatred and rage. Then they would rush off to their tribes, who were waiting to kill. The five chieftains shouted each other down and then looked at the old Irishman, and he knew he had tried everything and found no solution to the problem of the waterholes, and to the generations of quarrel which had gone before him. He said the first thing that came into his head, gravely, ponderously, and perhaps it was his white hair and his age which gave it the poetic and sagacious weight it had for them.

‘Remember,’ he said, looking into all their eyes in the pause, ‘remember that it is the elephant asleep in the long grass which defeats the greatest men.’ He had no idea what he meant (though he used to invent wonderful, idiotic tribal proverbs), and told me he had said it cynically, out of weariness, exhausted anger, but the chiefs stared at him, exchanged glances with each other, and nodded, went on nodding, and sat down, saying, ‘Let us thrash this matter out again. That is a splendid thing you have said.’

Finn of the big moustache and the dark glasses, in a crumbling fort in the Ogaden one hot, tense night, had talked two chiefs, who hated each other, into signing an agreement not to fight, and their powerful tribes were armed, ready, and he had the paper on the table there in front of them, the purple ink pad beside it ready for the two hard right thumbs of the chiefs to sign their agreement to the peace. He had wooed and coaxed them for hours, sometimes telling them of the millions of troops who were waiting to swarm to the attack, from far south, if their tribes went to war; sometimes reminding them of their age, responsibility, religion, better natures. Then, in the fort behind him, a single pistol shot exploded across his soft voice. The officer representing the ‘millions of troops’ who could be called up into these wastes had just shot himself. The wilderness had used him up at last.

‘Just here,’ said Finn, pointing to the paper, taking the thumb of each staring chief in his big hand and pressing it on the bottom of the agreement. ‘That’ll do for tonight.’ He dismissed them and went back into the fort. The officer was alive, with a bullet hole through his head. He had fired the round from his .38 through his forehead, but he was alive, and talking, from where he lay back on his bed. He told Finn that he had just crashed his truck and was injured, badly injured. ‘Got to get him right out of here,’ Finn decided, ‘for two reasons, to try and save his life, and to keep any of the Somalis from knowing what has happened.’ He drove all night with him across the wilderness towards a fort where he knew there was a doctor, but just before dawn the officer died.

Some characters are made for wilderness and strain and privation, come to their happiest in that dry, sterile loneliness. It is a fact that barren wilderness grows on you far more mysteriously than can any lusher landscape. Often, staring at the rocky horizons far off, at sunset, sitting under a thorn tree while the camels fed and the askaris brewed their tea, I wondered what it was that fascinated one, that captured one in this threatening loneliness. I loved the soft, thin whistle of the evening breeze in the black ant-hollowed bulbs of the thorn trees, the almost friendly groans and howls of the hyenas sneaking round the camp, the monotonous low-voiced arguments of the askaris squatting over the glowing fire, and, despite my weariness of their bloody feuds, I understood the mindless happiness of the Somalis who had known and would know no other life than moving like ants across these wastes. I liked to squat with them and drink the cold salty camel milk, their eager eyes watching to see if you enjoyed this particular milk (for camel milk has a thousand tastes for these desert experts), and to listen to them tell me the histories of their tribes. I enjoyed sitting back and hearing them argue a point, about divorce, about punishment, about the abilities of one kind of camel against another, about the true, severe shariat law of ancient Muslim times compared with the milk and water law which was allowed now.

Frightened of nothing on earth, willing to try anything anywhere, the Somali is never over-impressed by what he sees in the West, and they are great travellers. If he sees New York, or London, or Paris, the sight of these places with their superb machinery in no way diminishes his love of his desert home. He will go back there one day and wander with camels again. Once, in as blasted, dried-out and stark a piece of scenery as I ever sighted in Somalia I met a tall lean Somali who spoke to me in American. He had lived in America, after sailing the world as a stoker, and had been a cocktail barman in Baltimore for some years. He spoke of it casually, even contemptuously, as just something that had happened to happen to him. This was Jibreel, Willie Ritchie’s interpreter. He was glad to be back here, with nothing except a piece of cloth round his loins, a knife and some camels. Like the two stowaways at Bosaso, who had survived the sharks on the plank so thoughtfully thrown after them into the sea, this Somali who had shaken cocktails in Baltimore, who had seen all the things so many millions sigh for in the West, saw it all as mere happenings, mere pictures walked through and seen with the eyes. As avaricious as can be, about camels and money, the Somali is never blinded, like the Bantu, by the big show, the white man’s ‘magic’ and power. And they are obsessed about their rights, and about justice. Anyone who has commanded Somali troops, and lived with them for a long time in the field, sieved and shredded thousands of complaints brought to him by Somalis, dealt with their delicate prides and vanities wounded by some feather of unintended injustice, can put up with almost anything afterwards, even himself. But they only fret and nag for kit or equipment, or some luxury like sweet pepper, if they know it is there somewhere, to be had, within arguable reach. If they know it is unobtainable they will wait until they are near it and it is gettable, and then cry for justice.

I could never hear the word ‘ghee’ (subuk) for years after Somalia without a tightening up of the whole nervous system. They used to cook their food in ghee, clarified butter, and when the ration ran out in the bush and I knew we would get no more, perhaps for months, I used to drag the rags of my will together and get ready for months of anguish about ghee. Like white troops without cigarettes, they talked about the ghee all day and night, but unlike white troops, held conferences about it, drew up statements, compiled measurements of the ghee they had not had, and must expect from me when the time of ghee came again, and some of them would come trembling with fury to me about the ghee, after having worked each other up over the camp-fire.

‘There is no ghee here, or for hundreds of miles,’ I screamed one night at them, a deputation who had not even got a word out of their mouths before my scream, and they were convulsed with laughter, and I laughed with them, and it passed off in further laughter. But the next day they came again, the corporal sternly holding up his hand to silence any scream from me before they had said their piece, about the ghee. I once threw a ghee party after some operations in the Nogal, throwing the ghee about with a wild carelessness, having crookedly managed to get far more than I was entitled to on the ration scale, and the askaris ran about with their huge ghee issues in four gallon petrol tins in such a state of childish delight it was almost pitiful.

If you have the patience and use the slow, steady drip technique, keep your temper, stick to your points, and never let yourself be rushed, you can beat a Somali in argument. I have never known a Somali to admit he was wrong, once he has taken up his position, but I have managed to exhaust quite a few, when it mattered. And I have crawled away, completely worn out, after many a bout with the chiefs on the finer points of justice.

You develop manias in the bush after a time, various manias which may last for some weeks on end. I once worked up a mania about rags being used as plugs in the ends of rifle barrels. I used to tell the askaris how this made the barrel ‘sweat’ and damaged the rifling, and how in other ways it was unsoldierly and dangerous, even if it did keep the desert dust out of the barrel. I went on about this until there was only one askari left in the unit who still sneaked a rag plug into his rifle muzzle when on the march. One day I sent a patrol out and this askari was one of the number. He was carried back a few days later with his right eye missing and a good deal of the bone of his right cheek as well. He must have been in terrible pain when I stood over him and had a look at the frightful wound. I knew what had done it but said nothing. It could wait, but the askari started on it right away.

‘You think it was a rag in the end of the rifle muzzle, don’t you, Effendi?’ he said. The other askaris standing round the bed smiled and looked at me to see what I would do with the possibilities in this piece of brazen nerve.

‘I didn’t say anything about any rag,’ I said innocently.

‘There was no rag in the rifle muzzle,’ the askari said sternly. ‘I don’t want you to think that. When I opened fire there was this explosion and now my eye is gone. It’s going to cost the army a lot of money.’

‘The bullet blew the bolt out into your eye, didn’t it?’ I said.

‘I didn’t make the rifle or the bullet,’ he said. ‘It’s your rifle and I know nothing about what made it knock my eye out – ’ The corporal of the patrol came in then with the smashed rifle and showed me the split muzzle, the shattered breechwork, and it was quite obvious to all of us that there had been a plug in the muzzle, forgotten in excitement until the explosion and the tragic wounding. The corporal told me that the askari had already admitted he had had a plug in the muzzle when he had fired, but had said he was determined never to admit it to me.

‘Lies,’ the askari moaned on the bed. ‘Lies, lies.’ All the askaris laughed.

‘I’m sorry about your eye,’ I said. ‘We’ll get you down to Mogadishu as quickly as possible.’ He was a fine looking, healthy Mijertein tribesman but he was not in any way upset about the pain and disfigurement he had suffered, only about being right.

He called me as the truck carrying him to Mogadishu crashed into gear, gripped my wrist and stared into my eyes with his one splendid eye.

‘Don’t believe the corporal or the others,’ he said to me. ‘They’re all against me in this. There was no plug in the rifle. You told me never to use one, didn’t you?’

‘I did.’

‘Haven’t I always been an obedient askari?’

‘Always,’ I said, ‘except for that plug in your rifle.’ He turned his face away, disgusted, weary of me and the whole effort of the miserable business. The other askaris, like hawks about the truck, listening to this final passage, looked sharply at each other as the truck drove away and left us there in the sand outside the fort.

‘You won there,’ the corporal said to me.

‘It’s not a question of winning,’ I said. ‘It’s a question of discipline.’ (A lie. It was a question of winning.)

‘No, but you won. You beat him. You got him right down there with that last bit. He thought you were going to give in. But you won.’

‘And he was a good liar too,’ an askari said, thoughtful and admiring.

Chapter 20

ALL DURING THE WALK through the town, and while Ali and I sat for the last fresh lime and water in front of the Croce del Sud, I had been watching for faces, for the face of Mohamed Saad, Ahamed Hussein, Hersi, Elmi, just in case they should happen to be in their capital, Hamar by the sea, but I did not see one face I recognised. And they did not belong here anyway, among the smells and the thieves and the town men who had forgotten their tribes, who did not know who they were anymore.

I brought a savage here once to this town, a fierce, impetuous youth whose parents had been killed near El Wak during the fighting; El Wak, a blinding sheet of white rock away up in the north where Kenya meets Somalia and Abyssinia. He had come quietly to the convoy in the warm darkness and stood over me where I lay on a blanket, smoking and watching for the moon. He had six bottles of Italian Aranciata, green conical bottles wrapped in a dirty cloth. He knelt down and showed me one.

‘You want that?’ he said in a low, urgent voice. Want it? I nearly tore his hand off grabbing it. I had the top off in a couple of seconds and poured the delicious cold fruit drink down my throat.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked him. It was magical, this production of cold fruit drinks in the middle of the wilderness after days of dazzling heat over those rocks. ‘More.’ He handed me another bottle. ‘You got it from an Italian army dump,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’

‘This is the last of it,’ he said, coyly revealing the other four bottles. I gave him two shillings for the four bottles and he gripped the money in his narrow black fists and said, ‘I’ll work for you. Take me with you.’ He spoke good army-type Swahili.

‘Impossible. What is your tribe?’

‘I am a Garrei,’ he said, and he looked it, black face like a ferocious eagle, two enormous black eyes, and a shock of woolly black hair that you could have filled two cushions with. He was about fifteen. All he had on him was a piece of white cloth round his loins and a long dagger. He was ready to go anywhere, tomorrow, now.

The Garrei are even harder, fiercer, more emotional than the Somalis (to whom they are related through the Hawiya tribal group), but this lad, Mohamed, was like a quivering black harp which burst into flames during emotional stress. He turned out to be the most savage, hysterical, loyal and dangerous human being I ever had with me in the bush. If he felt rage he acted upon it at once, with a knife, or with his nails and teeth; if he felt generous he gave everything away in sight, most of it yours. He stole, lied, made many enemies.

I should not have taken him with me from his own hell-home of El Wak, and I refused to do so, though weakly after long argument with him, but he stowed away in the convoy before dawn and it was five hundred miles afterwards that he showed himself, with his big burning, serious eyes.

‘I have done it,’ he said. ‘I have come with you. Thank you. I will serve you. I have always wished to travel and now I am travelling.’

‘It will not be like you imagine,’ I said. ‘Your life with me. You think it will be in houses in towns, but it will be like your own life, safari, safari, safari, on rock and in thorns. You will be sorry you have come, but it will be too late. It is too late now. When will you see your home again?’ Among the Somalis he was like a Swede trying to be a Greek in Greece, and it was impossible.

‘Some day,’ he said. That was savage freedom, for a boy to jump on a truck and disappear, perhaps forever, without needing to run and ask his elders, without knowing where he was going, or how he would live, or even what he would earn. He just wanted to go and he had gone. The next day he stabbed an askari who upset him, and the askaris took hold of him and beat him until he fell down unconscious. Then he came to me to report, after the stabbed askari had shown me the knife wound through his shoulder.

‘Give me your knife,’ I said. He was shaking with anger, his big eyes devouring the askari’s face, as if he wanted to kill him right there. He hesitated about giving me the knife.

‘I must speak,’ he said. ‘I have a right to speak.’

‘You stabbed before you spoke. Give me that knife.’ He handed me the knife and I turned with it and threw it far and high and we watched it fall into the thick grey thorn bush.

‘If I ever see you with a knife again, without my permission,’ I told him, ‘I’ll beat you myself, with a whip. Do you hear that? And then I’ll take you a hundred miles from wherever we are and I’ll drop you in the bush, naked. I’ll leave you with nothing. Have you heard that, and believed it? Do you still want to work with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘And remember about the knife?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then finish. The shauri is finished. The askaris flogged you. Next time I will do it.’

‘He insulted me – ’ Mohamed began.

‘I don’t want to hear now what happened. You used your knife. That cancels all your case for me. No more talk. Finish.’

In the camp, among the Somalis and Abyssinians he was a complete stranger, and they jeered and laughed at his strange efforts to talk their languages. A true savage has never had to control his angers and appreciations. He has never had to keep silent when in the wrong, never had to hold back when insulted, never had to behave in stages of childhood, boyhood, manhood. Mohamed was a headlong type, who screamed aloud with fury when upset, and the askaris goaded him, and it looked as if he might have to learn to control himself. But I cursed the night he came with that Aranciata and attached himself to my caravan.

I stopped the convoy half a mile out of Mogadishu so as to wash and change into a clean bush shirt and shorts, and we could see the white flashing buildings below us on the edge of the Indian Ocean, glittering silver and blue water with a horizon flatter than even Mohamed had ever seen. He was standing, as if in fear, his head forward, staring in unbelief at the ocean and the buildings. And the askaris were watching him and laughing. He had never seen anything like it in his life before, and there was no doubt that it scared him, all of it.

‘The water is moving,’ he said to me, not taking his eyes off it. ‘It’s like milk boiling.’ He was watching the surf swell and burst on the rocks far off in snowy foam, and the surge of the ocean catching the golden sun, and to him it looked as if the whole safe universe was in motion.

‘Let’s take him down to see and feel the water,’ I said to the askaris. We piled into the trucks and drove hard until we came round Mogadishu and I stopped my truck not far from the waves. The sharp, salty, almost rotten, bitter stench of the Indian Ocean filled the nostrils, and when Mohamed got down off his truck he was paralysed, rooted there in the sand and trembling from head to foot as he watched and listened to the great tumult of the ocean rolling to him. He had never visualised anything like it and he could not speak. Even the askaris were silent as they watched him study it all with his rolling, worried eyes. It was a most solemn moment.

‘What’s the matter with it?’ he said to me. ‘What’s it for? Why does it smell like that? Where does it go to? Is it boiling?’ He could hardly speak with fear and wonder.

‘There’s a big fire under it and it’s boiling,’ one of the askaris said, and all the others laughed at Mohamed and took pleasure in their worldliness and knowledge, but for me it was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had, seeing a desert savage shivering in front of the ocean for the first time, as if expecting the ground to melt and swallow him up at any moment. We must all have been like that once, in a time of thunder or storm, a million years ago in innocence.

He was silent for hours afterwards, looking almost crushed by the experience he had had. But that very evening he vanished into the town and I warned police patrols to watch out for him.

They found him in a mosque arguing with an old man who was threatening to have him hanged unless he took his savage self off the premises. He had been chased there by a crowd of Somalis with whom he had begun a quarrel, God knows what about.

As a Garrei, Mohamed thought of himself as the bravest, cleverest, noblest human being alive, and he took a great interest in fighting with the Somalis, whom he had said he hated.

‘It’ll be easier to handle in the bush, all this,’ I thought. Had there been a convoy travelling back the thousand miles to his home I would have put him on it, under guard, and yet I knew that in the bush, in trouble, he would be good, headlong, and perhaps might become tamed enough for him to enjoy his new life.

I had to go after some raiders on the other side of the Webi Shabeli shortly after arriving in Mogadishu, and I was given a gogli, a guide and messenger who knew that country and all the elephant herds in it like he knew the back of his hard slender black hands. This was Ibrahim, a tall, grave man, the finest looking human being I have ever met, and the most fearless. He once brought me two killers through moving herds of elephants, in darkness, and laughed while we went over the incidents. He had had to run, the two murderers tied to his left wrist, between the screaming elephants whom he had disturbed, with the murderers trying to bite through their bonds as they stumbled in fear beside him.

Ibrahim was the only person I ever knew to frighten Mohamed, who challenged Ibrahim to fight after the older man had rebuked him for impudence. He seized Mohamed, lifted him high in the air, and hurled him into a clump of thorns, and then went after him and seizing him again, dragged him through the thorns by his ankles. Mohamed, bleeding and humiliated, got up to fight again, with his nails and teeth, but Ibrahim flung him back into the thorns. I heard the high shouts of rage and the threatening cries from my camp under some thorn trees, and Ibrahim came, dragging Mohamed through the sand by one foot. He left him at my feet, saying, ‘Unless this one can be restrained, Effendi, a man will kill him outright. He has the tongue of a snake. I have not met one like him before. I have had to be hard with him. I would kill a man for less than this snake said to me, but he is your servant and I merely chastised him, for his sake and ours. I have presumed, I know, but I could not help it.’

‘What have you to say, Mohamed?’ I asked the lad, who was glowering at the whole world and wiping his body which was criss-crossed by long white and bleeding scratches.

‘I was wrong,’ he said. ‘And then he was wrong. He has threatened to kill me. What do you think of that? Would you let him kill me?’ It was his admission to being wrong which astonished me. I had never expected to hear that from him.

‘So you were wrong, were you? You admit you were wrong?’

‘I could not help being wrong. These people want to treat me like a slave. I am no slave. I am of a fighting race. I am a Garrei. I cannot be expected to put up with the insults I am treated to by all these people.’

‘But you admit you were in the wrong this time? That is good, to say that.’

‘I say it because I know this man will kill me unless I say it. He said so. He will stab me in the back some night. I know these people.’

‘Don’t you know Ibrahim is an official, a man of learning and years of experience who cannot be expected to stand by and listen to a boy insult him? I tell you you will get killed here if you go on like this, and I want you to live, and to learn. You must control your temper, or you will be killed.’

‘I will try again,’ Mohamed said, scowling at Ibrahim. ‘I will shut my mouth, even when I am insulted, if that is what you want.’

‘The shauri is finished,’ I said.

Then Mohamed went down with malaria, the shattering illness which the Webi Shabeli gives generously to all who linger by its brown flood and its gloomy thickets. All the askaris rallied to save the savage, their goad, their whipping boy. It looked as if Mohamed would die at one time, for he had the shakes so badly that you could feel the heat coming off his wet skin in waves. On the morning he came out of his delirium and was lying in that post-malaria state when you feel like a twisted, wrung-out steaming towel, light in the head and quite careless about dying (in fact it would be a pleasure), Mohamed sent for me.

‘I have not died,’ he said when I sat down on the floor beside the straw mat on which he lay.

‘No, you are alive,’ I said. ‘Wallahi.’

‘Ibrahim brought fruit to me.’ He peered into my eyes as he went on, ‘Is that a good thing, to bring fruit to your enemy? I do not understand that kind of thing. What am I to make of it? What is the meaning of it?’

‘It means,’ I said, ‘that Ibrahim has accepted other customs than the old ones, of killing and revenge, and never forgiving or forgetting. When I am angry with you I am angry with you, and then it is finished. I do not go on punishing or shouting, do I? The anger is only for that time, for that particular time when you have caused some trouble through losing your head. The anger is not for always. It is finished, forgotten. We begin again immediately afterwards. That is what Ibrahim has done. He is a man, a man who could kill, but does not. Open your thick skull, Mohamed, and understand. Let your akili, your intelligence, show you what is simple. You have no enemy if you refuse to have one, and Ibrahim is like that. He is a true man. Have you understood that?’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I understand your angers when I have been foolish, and your forgetting of them, because you are a white man and have no time for remembering these things. You have the rations, the drill, the patrols, the bundles of papers to write on, the looking after of the askaris and the remembering of all the things that have to be done, with the corporals and the sergeant listening to you. But I cannot understand my enemy, a black man like myself, coming with fruit when we have made enemies of each other. I would not eat his fruit. I gave it to the old woman who sweeps the camp.’ He sat up, his teeth bared, ‘And I will never eat his fruit, or the fruit of any man like him. That is my custom.’

‘You are only a boy, and a stupid boy,’ I told him sternly, trying not to laugh aloud. ‘But God will give you wisdom one day and you will look for friends and not enemies.’

‘I am learning things,’ he said to me. ‘New customs, and lies, and troubles, and I will not always be a boy.’

‘Do you want to go home?’ I asked him. ‘Would you like me to send you to your country again? I did not want you to come here. This is a hostile land where nothing much matters, and where you are a stranger. Do you want to return to El Wak?’

‘So you are finished with me? You have had enough of my work? You want me to go?’ He looked accusingly into my eyes. ‘Where is the fighting, the trouble? You said there would be fighting. Have you seen me fight? Have you?’ He challenged me to wait until I saw him fight.

‘I have seen you stabbing and making fights,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want that. You are a servant. Serve, or leave.’

‘I will serve,’ he said. ‘But you think I cannot fight?’

‘The askaris and I will do the fighting,’ I said. ‘That is our work. Yours is to clean and bring and make fires. When you are a man you can become an askari, if you like, but not now. Serve.’

‘I will never be an askari,’ he told me.

‘Why not?’

‘I would not allow a sergeant to call me the names your sergeant calls the askaris when he is angry. I would not put up with it. That is no life.’

‘It is only a custom,’ I said. ‘The askaris know it. It is something you do not understand unless you are a soldier. The askaris were not forced to be soldiers. They asked to be soldiers, and they know what it all means.’

‘I cannot understand any of it,’ Mohamed said, sullenly. ‘It is all madness, all of it.’ And he never said a truer word, though I shook my head, patient and sighing.

Three months after this, wildernesses away from the Webi Shabeli river, he stabbed my cook, a fat, cynical man who lived only for ghee, and who had a tongue like a knife. He gave Mohamed a public genealogy which sent Mohamed running screaming for a knife, which he got, and came back into the kitchen and drove the knife right through the fat arm of the genealogist who had gone too far. (‘Son of a sick hyena, grandson of a noseless thief, descendant of vultures, father to be of a hermaphrodite baboon, filth and refuse untouchable, animal without religion’ – and so on.)

I felt this was the end. It was over two thousand miles of nothing until you got to Mohamed’s country, but I was by then up to my neck in more serious troubles. Yet even so, I was tired enough of Mohamed to carry out my threat, to take him and dump him, yet I knew I could not do it, though he volunteered to be dumped.

‘Finish with me,’ he said bravely, defiantly, while the bandaged, enraged cook gave his screeched, emotional evidence over Mohamed’s thin shoulder. ‘Take me and throw me into the bush, as you said you would,’ Mohamed went on. ‘For it is right. I cannot put up with what these beasts and imbeciles say to me here. So I must go. Let it be so. There is no other way, for I cannot put up with this pig here – ’

‘Now he is calling me a pig,’ the cook screamed, wringing his fists in the air. ‘You heard him, this beast-child, this insolent little filthy boy. I cannot stay here. I cannot cook. My brain and my heart are aflame. My stomach is burning.’

‘Get out, both of you,’ I shouted. ‘I’ll think it over and do the punishing when I’ve thought. If either of you raise one finger I’ll kill you. Do you hear, I’ll kill you.’

‘Kill both of us,’ the cook yelled, ‘kill both of us.’ He was dragged off to his kitchen by the askaris, and the orderly corporal took Mohamed by the ear and led him to the lines.

‘And if I see either of you today in front of my eyes, anywhere,’ I yelled after them, from the doorway, ‘I’ll shoot you both, I swear before God. I swear it.’ A silence fell over the camp. Then I called in the manic chiefs for one more effort to make them give up the Italian rifles their tribe possessed.

It was the askaris who pleaded for Mohamed, the askaris who had goaded him and who had been threatened so many times by this savage from the rim of the Somali world, a nomad like themselves but who was so maddeningly and pointlessly proud of being a Garrei, when all knew that to be the chosen of God here was to be a Somali.

‘He is sitting at the edge of the camp, silent and without food,’ the deputation of askaris told me the next morning. ‘He will not speak to anyone. We have decided that we are sorry for this little fool, Effendi. We know now that he cannot understand anything. He should be sent away forever, but we have come to ask you not to send him away. There he is. Look.’ One of them went to the doorway of the company office and pointed into the whitish yellow glare. I went to look. Mohamed was sitting like a yogi, about two hundred yards off, about twenty yards beyond the line of white rocks which marked the boundary of the camp.

‘He has been there since first light, Effendi, and says he will stay there until the cook is punished. He is mad, this boy, Effendi, and God likes the mad. What will you do with him?’

‘So you accept him at last, do you?’ I asked.

I still do not know, and perhaps will never decide if what I did after that was the right thing, but that it was the right Somali thing, the right thing for the desert Muslim world of rough justice, I have no doubt. And it finished the feud between the poisonous-tongued cook and the ferocious Garrei youth.

I took them both into the stretch of hard shale we used for a parade ground, and when they saw the rhino-hide whip I had in my hand they both stared.

‘Justice,’ I told them, ‘is a kind of official revenge men can perform on each other, and you both need justice. Say nothing – ’ they were going to unload another million words about their case against each other. ‘You,’ I said to the cook, ‘called him vile names, after he had insulted you, and after you had insulted him, and so on. Say nothing! I will go on. And you,’ I said to Mohamed, ‘took a knife and stabbed the cook. So you have seriously wronged each other. Lie down,’ I said to the cook.

He pointed to his wound which the dresser had dealt with again that morning. ‘Lie down?’ he cried. ‘After I have been stabbed?’

‘This thing is being ended here and now,’ I said. ‘Lie down, or do you want the askaris to put you down?’

‘What happens after I lie down? Do you mean to beat me?’

‘No. Mohamed here will give you six lashes, and then he lies down and you give him six back. And after that, if I ever hear one word of quarrel, one single word, I’ll flog you both until you can’t walk. I have no gaol here, and no transport to send you away from here, but you will give each other justice instead. Now lie down.’

He lay down and I threw the whip to Mohamed, who seized it and shook it over the cook, who stared up at me and said, ‘I agree to this as long as there is no trick.’

‘There is no trick. You shall beat Mohamed as well.’

‘Remember that, beast,’ he shouted up at Mohamed. ‘Remember it. Now strike.’ Mohamed lashed him six times and the cook lay in silence with his face on his hands, stiffening as the whip came down each time. Then he got up and said, ‘Give me that whip now and lie down there, yiro, little impudent child.’

‘If I hear you utter one more insult from this moment,’ I told the cook, ‘I’ll beat you. Do you hear that?’

‘I hear,’ he said. Mohamed had hurt him, and Mohamed did not want to lie down now to get the other half of the justice we had set in motion here.

‘So that is the Garrei way,’ a corporal cried at him. ‘To punish and then to run when it is your turn. Lie down,’ and with burning eyes Mohamed lay down. The cook gave him six lashes which he took in enormous and powerful silence. Then he got up and the cook threw the whip down on the sand.

‘Are you satisfied that you have had and given justice, you two fools?’ I asked them.

‘I am satisfied,’ the cook said. He knew he had hurt Mohamed.

‘And you?’ I asked Mohamed.

‘He cannot walk properly,’ Mohamed said. ‘I hurt him more than he hurt me.’

‘No, I hurt you more than you hurt me,’ the cook said angrily.

‘It’s finished now,’ I told them. ‘That’s an order. And remember if there is one more word between you I’ll flog you until you can’t walk. Now get back to work.’

They never spoke to each other again, though they worked together often, and I think it was the beginning of Mohamed’s first try at controlling himself. But some months later, in Mogadishu, he attacked an Italian in a repair shop, who gave him such a handling in return that Mohamed could not eat for three days. The Italian came to me and apologised, though puzzled by the sheer savagery of Mohamed’s attack.

‘Where is he from, this animal, Signor Capitano?’ he asked me. ‘From what tribe is he?’ I explained and the Italian said, ‘I am glad I never soldiered in that country, then, for this creature is of a kind quite new to me. Like a leopard. A leopard. I had to defend myself as if against a leopard.’

Mohamed’s explanation of the affair was, ‘He is your enemy, an Italian, who insulted me, so I would not take it, from your enemy.’

‘This is the finish,’ I told Mohamed.

‘I will try again. I will try to be good,’ he said. ‘I will.’

‘No, it is the finish this time,’ I assured him. ‘I am sending you to El Wak.’

‘I don’t want to go back there,’ he said. ‘I will try again.’

‘I want you to go back,’ I said. ‘More than anything I want you to go back.’

‘What about my work? It is good work. You have said so.’

‘It is splendid work,’ I agreed. ‘But you are mad. Mad. And one day you will kill somebody and hang for it, or somebody will kill you first. And I am weary of this situation now. I have other things to worry about. Many other things.’

But I did not get rid of him. He appeared again after I had arranged his transport to Mandera, near El Wak, and in despair, and fury, I took him on again.

He disappeared in the Ogaden one night, and at that time I felt certain that the local tribe had taken him and killed him. He just vanished, after being in trouble with the local headman, in an area where it did not pay to have trouble with local headmen. I think they must have killed him, that quivering savage whose knife hand moved faster than his brain, for it was a very long way from El Wak, and in a country where you can get your death, free, at any time, especially if you are a stranger. None of my enquiries for him came to anything. I was silent and let the time slide and pile over him, but I never forgot him, or those moving moments when he stood transfixed by the sight of the heaving blue Indian Ocean. All over a bottle of Aranciata brought one night to a white man lying smoking beside a convoy where Kenya, Somalia and Abyssinia meet on the map.

Chapter 21

THE TWO BEST SOMALIS I ever knew, and I mean men who can take the city for what it is, a pleasant experience for a time, and be at home in the wilderness again, after missing it, were Mohamed Saad and Ahamed Hussein. With these two I weathered all kinds of situations all over Somalia, and I would give a lot to meet them again. I put out feelers during my few hours in Mogadishu with Ali, but nobody had ever heard of them. The wastes had swallowed them up again.

Mohamed Saad was one of the best friends I ever made in the bush, or anywhere else for that matter.

He had fought with the Italian army as a member of the irregulars called the Dubat (Quinto Gruppo), and what was good about the Dubat was that they were not drilled and broken down into infantry, but were allowed to stay Somali, operating like raider bands, living frugally and never dependent on truck loads of ghee, flour, and the usual mass of requirements required for the usual infantry troops. We more or less continued the tradition of the Dubat in those wastes, from necessity, turning to camel and goat for food as soon as the rations ran out. The Dubat irregulars were very proud of themselves and their traditions, and cherished the memory of their Italian commanders, particularly of Colonnello Bechis, and Maggiore Cimarutta, of whom they often spoke to me. I recruited as many ex-Dubat as I could find, and the word went round in the bush that if you were ex-Dubat you could always get a job with me.

I first came across Mohamed Saad at about three o’clock in the morning when about to leave on a raid with a section of askaris. I wanted to be at a certain waterhole far into the bush at sunrise so as to surprise some armed raiders who would be watering their camels there before moving north.

One of my askaris brought Mohamed Saad to us as we were sitting in the warm moonlight oiling weapons under a tree. The askari told me that this man knew the waterhole as well as the fastest way to it. I told him to sit down and he squatted down in front of me on the thick red sand.

You cannot mistake human goodness in a face when you see it. You can be mistaken about all kinds of other things but never about real goodness in a human face, and Mohamed Saad was good, I knew, as soon as I saw him. He was a lean, well dried-out bush type, about thirty, with steady, honest eyes.

‘I need work,’ he said. ‘I am starving since my tribal section was raided and all the camels taken. If I take you fast to the waterhole will you give me work? I am a good tracker and used to weapons. I will serve you well. Maybe you could use me as a servant.’

He had fought in two battles, the last of them on the Abyssinian border a year before when the Italian army was collapsing. After that he had been captured and had spent some months in a prison camp. When he was released he made his way back to the Mudugh country to find his tribe being raided and looted by more powerful tribes around, the tribes we were then trying to disarm and subdue.

I gave him some rations and cigarettes and he led us through the bush in the darkness at such a pace that my shirt was ripped to pieces on the thorns and my bare legs lacerated, but I could not complain. It was I who had pressed for haste. We took three prisoners who gladly and proudly admitted that they had taken part in the big killings of a couple of months ago. I signed Mohamed on as my servant and he taught me the construction of all the tribal groups in the Mudugh, as well as teaching me the camel brands used by every tribe. Hour after hour we would sit over the dying camp-fire and talk, askaris of every tribe telling of their service as Italian soldiers against the Abyssinians and the British, recalling the failures or virtues of this and that officer, a loot, of good eating times after a victory, and of bitter retreat with thirst and wounds. And then, like all men of action, they would begin to argue as to who had suffered most, endured more, outdone other men, except Mohamed Saad who smiled and listened. He was wise, and he had compassion for men, while possessing the vanity which made him tough and tireless.

‘Do you like this life?’ I asked him one night when we were marching behind the camels. The wastes rolled and glittered all about us in the fierce moonlight and the only sounds were the scuff of the askaris’ sandals and the clink of rifle barrels. You felt you could see to the ends of the earth, so far off were the jagged moonlit horizons around us.

‘There is no other life, Effendi,’ Mohamed said, smiling. ‘What more can a man ask than to be young and to have health and to be free? When the sun comes up we will drink fresh camel milk and then we will sleep, and then we will get up again and pray and eat, and then we will walk on. I am contented.’

He would check all my possessions, my web equipment, pistol and ammunition, grenades, sub-machine-gun, clean and oil them all. He would examine my shirts, sew on buttons, launder them with the foaming root called gasangas, a fine replacement for soap but liable to leave painful splinters behind in cloth, and high up in the hills on the old Abyssinian frontier, where it was very cold at night, he would lay out my bedroll on the scorching earth at four in the afternoon, so that when I crawled into it at night it was like entering an oven. He sewed and repaired sandals, trimmed the frayed edges of puttees, and then, one day, revealed casually that he could repair truck engines. He was a good shot with a rifle, and he could cover amazing distances with messages at a tireless, steady lope.

Imagine the trust a servant placed in his wandering employer in the great spaces of Asia and Africa, the total commitment involved in travelling enormous distances, sometimes thousands of miles from his tribal home, to some outpost, malarial or parched, where he may be thrown out of his employment by his master. They have done this for centuries for men of all colours and creeds, and asked very little in return. In a way they place their whole life in the hands of the stranger, who may be cruel, or mean, or thoughtless. They never know. These servants were the true adventurers, the men who gambled all, took all kinds of chances, survived all sorts of dangers, forgave and were forgiven, and usually possessed little more when they were finished with their master than they had set out with. In the chaos of the worlds in which they were born and raised they found a kind of safety, a kind of anchor, with the man they went to work for. They knew far more about their masters than even the women their masters returned to one day. They had no trade unions, no fixed hours, no scales of wages. They pilfered, drank, used their masters’ position to raise small loans in far off places, often enough, but in many ways were far better people than their masters.

Mohamed Saad stayed with me for two years and when I was transferred to the Burma campaign I smuggled him into Kenya with me, hoping to take him with me to Burma which he wanted. He was a subject of the Italian empire and should not have been in Nairobi at all, which was ridiculous, as he was a Somali and had as much right to be anywhere in Eastern Africa as any other Somali, and more right than all the white men. But I could not get him into military service, or even take him with me to Burma as a signed up batman, though I knew one officer who had managed to get an Italian Somali to Burma with him. So we said goodbye over a coffee in an Indian duka down River Road one morning.

‘If ever you come back, Effendi,’ he said, ‘to Somalia, just send for me. I’m going back to my tribe.’ He did not like the green jungle battledress I was wearing. He said it would not iron well. I told him that ironing had not been going on in Burma since 1941. ‘Uniforms should be ironed,’ he insisted. ‘We are in a city, remember.’

When the war was over I went back to Somalia but I never found Mohamed again, though I sent messages right through the Mudugh and the Nogal. He had vanished.

I never found Ahamed Hussein again either, the brilliant linguist, expert corporal, all round mixer and subtle handler of varied problems. He too had vanished into the two hundred and fifty thousand square miles which had been our parish.

Like all Somalis, Ahamed had had no feeling of inferiority, no complex about being black, no worry about proving anything to the white man. All Somalis stroll up to you to talk. They do not hesitate or straighten themselves, or look haunted by any doubt as they approach a white man. They treat you like a Muslim, a brother. The rest is with you.

Ahamed was of a holy tribe called the Shekál. No one must ever attack or raid this holy tribe. There are two Shekál groups, one in the Ogaden, and one down south on the way to the Juba river. They are respected by even the most rapacious camel collectors.

Superbly intelligent, witty, philosophic, Ahamed never moaned when we were in difficulties, say, marooned for a couple of days in a rare flood when the rains exploded up in Abyssinia’s foothills and sent brief raging rivers coursing down dried-out dongas far south in Somalia, or isolated for months in some God-forsaken litter of hot rocks and burning sand. Since his country’s independence I have always hoped to come across his name as a member of the Somali government, for that is where he should be. He had compassion, firmness, sensitivity, a marvellous character. How strong this character was I was able to understand in 1947 when the Somali Youth League was becoming a great and vital force all over Somalia.

It was then astonishing to sit and listen to a Somali deny that he was a member of anything called a tribe, and to hear him acclaim that he was a Somali only, and that there was only one Somali race, and that there were no more tribes which had separated men and had made them enemies. While it made administration as we had known it, and still had to make it, impossible, it was wonderful to see this new movement among a race to whom tribalism had become a curse.

It was a part of the great stirring of all the peoples of Asia and Africa, set in motion by Gandhi and hastened by the Japanese army. Nothing can stop it now, luckily, and I have always counted myself as lucky to live in a time which saw this tremendous revolution, when even the coolie decided it was time to see what he could do outside the shafts of his rickshaw.

The Somalis wanted freedom too, and it was an Englishman who set the idea of the Somali Youth League in motion, and it was strange and exhilarating to see the speed with which the idea raced across the Somali wilderness, reaching the farthest primitive nomads behind their camels and giving the young men something to feel about beyond the length of their spears.

The askaris were not supposed to take part in this feverish movement, but they did, quietly. They had to, but Ahamed Hussein would not join, much as he believed in the movement. He said he would join it as soon as he was out of his uniform. He would join then because he was ready to do so, on his own decision, but he would not do so now, in uniform, when he was being threatened if he refused. Askaris told me that ‘they’ would kill Ahamed Hussein if he went on refusing to join.

We were in a lonely little town on the edge of the deserts, a straggle of white buildings strewn along the coast and dribbling into the warm, blue Indian Ocean.

‘They’ broke his jaw one night, while trying to kill him. They looked upon him as a person of importance and felt that his refusal to join the League would in some way discredit it.

Ahamed used to sleep in a room on the edge of the barrack area. In those areas you sleep lightly, especially if you have slept for years under the stars in places where it pays to wake quickly, and Ahamed told me that something, he did not know what, caused him to turn quickly in his sleep and jump off the bed. He swore he had heard no noise. As he turned over and moved off the bed an iron bar smashed down and caught him on the edge of his jaw and neck. Had he not moved it would certainly have broken his skull. He went for the attackers in the darkness but they got away. I bound up his jaw and sent for ‘them’. ‘They’ in no way represented the best of the League, but were old men who were trying to cash in on the new movement which was taking the youth away from their old and bloody hands. I knew the old man behind this violent determination to enlist every askari into the League. But I could prove nothing, and Ahamed told him he would still not join the League.

Several times I had told Ahamed he should join the League, for soon Somalia would be free anyway, but he had always refused, and now he refused again, and refused the offer of a transfer to Mogadishu which I offered to arrange for him. Young members of the League came in to see me and to apologise for what had happened to Ahamed, swearing that they had had nothing to do with it. But they told me that the old men were trying to keep control of the League, old men who had sworn when the League first appeared that they would forbid it to function because it denied a man’s most precious possession, his tribe.

‘It will take years for men here to forget their knives and spears, Effendi,’ Ahamed told me. ‘They were stupid to want to kill me. They still think that killing changes things.’ He used to laugh at my perplexity caused by the impossibility of trying cases when the accused would not divulge their tribal status to me. The League almost brought administration of justice to a standstill. And it could be very funny too.

I remember one old hardened bandit in his turban and loincloth, a man who could lift your clothes off without your knowing it, so able was he as a thief, laying his withered old claws on his chest in the court and saying cynically to me, ‘Tribe? My tribe? I have no tribe. I am a Somali.’ The whole court shook with laughter, for many could remember how those claws were often pressed against the lean chest when the old man had screamed the name of his tribe in pride, before the League came. The old man had to join in the laughter himself, unable to contain it. He went on refusing to name his tribe.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll put you down as a Rahanwein tribe,’ naming one of the ‘slave tribes’ of the river Juba, knowing this would incense him.

‘I am not of that tribe,’ he screeched across the court, again joining in the laughter. ‘I am not of a slave tribe.’

‘How do I know that?’ I said. ‘I’ve got to put you down as some tribe so it’s going to be one of the Rahanwein.’ Because of the nature of the case I had to have him declare his tribe. He lost his temper, forgot his plan, and screamed the name of the tribe across the court at me, and then stared round him as everybody in the room howled with laughter. I had to close the court for the day.

Genuine members of the League I eventually allowed the right to refuse to give their tribe names. This rallying to the League in that great wilderness, among such tribally obsessed people, was one of the most wonderful things to witness (and yet, that sentimental reverence I had for tradition silently mourned).

The League ran an administration of its own, preparing for self-government. It was touching to see the young men trying so hard to put an end to the tribal strife which had been their curse for so long. But I could not believe that that marvellous fervour could last, and the pride with which the three police askaris in Mogadishu twenty years later told me their tribes made me think that it must have been easier to stick to tribalism. The blood feuds of tribalism have been their curse, and the blood price, diyya, which must be paid in camels.

When it was time for me to throw aside my uniform and leave Somalia behind, I asked Ahamed Hussein what he would do with his life. He said he would go back to his tribe and the camels. He spoke four languages fluently, could read and write them perfectly, and could have gone far in many a career away from his desert, but he was going back to that lonely life of the nomad. Perhaps this is a real strength in the Somali. He does not think there is anything discreditable in being a member of his primitive living group. They do not have the sad longing of the Bantu and the white men for a collar and tie and a desk, yet it will be the Bantu who will soften and civilise Africa, because he longs for comfort and ease. The Somali never surrenders to the armchair or the big house. In fact, in the small Italian settlements in southern Somalia when the Italian army was collapsing in 1941, I noticed how the nomads who broke into the big cool Italian houses used to shit exactly in the centre of every room, and then leave. I have never come across this strange form of savage wit anywhere else. The Somalis swore that the Abyssinian deserters from Italian units were doing it, when I asked them the reason for this custom with its almost mathematical care for the placing of insult.

I went after some of these marauding Abyssinians when hunting down a band of them who had broken into an Italian house where an Italian woman was alone with her children. They had thrown hand grenades into the lonely house, then broke in and had smashed in a beautiful little girl’s face so horribly that I had to go out to vomit after seeing her. One of them had done this with a club. The mother, whose husband was a prisoner-of-war, was out of her mind, holding the silent, stupefied child in her arms. Well armed, some of these Abyssinians liked to fight it out when they were tracked down in the bush. Italian East Africa was a place of turmoil during the time of the Italian defeat, and rough justice of all kinds was dealt out on all sides, and, much as one had an understanding for Abyssinian sentiments towards the Italians who had invaded their country, I found I did not wish to extend it to the animal who had destroyed the child’s face when we ran the raiders to earth one night in the bush.

There were more pathetic Abyssinians than these armed bandits, men who had been rounded up in Addis Ababa after the attempt there on Graziani’s life. Some of them were in terrible physical straits, many of them being unable to hold down food which was given to them, and these I looked after in a disused barracks for some weeks until I could get transport to start them on the first move of their long way home.

I asked Ahamed what he thought of Abyssinians. ‘There are always too many flies about where Abyssinians camp,’ he said.

The Abyssinians liked to hang strips of raw meat in their barrack rooms. They liked it high, and raw, and the flies swarmed. I recruited some of the healthy Abyssinians as askaris and fought a losing battle against the raw meat in the barrack rooms. In the bush it never mattered. When I armed them and lined them up in threes for their first march into a deserted Italian barracks the right hand man at the head of the marching unit broke ranks, ran a few paces ahead, raised his rifle and began to leap in the air and declaim in Amharic, and the troops answered him in fierce shouts. This was a custom allowed them in the Italian army and I was sorry when I had to forbid it as it seemed a sensible way of dealing with the boredom of long marches. The Italians seemed to me to have been very understanding in the way they tended to allow colonial troops to retain some colour in their lives. The British tend to flatten everything out into a disciplined sameness which gets on the nerves of exuberant peoples, though it pays off in action.

‘It is not fair,’ a Somali chief shouted at me when we made him and his raiders prisoner one night at a waterhole he was sure we would never reach. ‘It’s not right that officers like you should be running across country like this, and in ragged clothes too, standing to eat your meals out of a tin with a fork, and behaving like us instead of officers. The Italians never did this. It is not right and it isn’t fair. Why don’t you behave like officers, like the Italians used to?’

This old chief spoke good Italian and had received a medal and a rank from the Italians for his loyalty during their war in Abyssinia, and he tried hard to convince me of the ungentlemanly and improper life we officers were living in Somalia. ‘We cannot have a proper respect for you,’ he said again and again, fretfully, querulously.

He asked me what the whole war was about anyway, and I can remember sitting by the waterhole that night and wondering how it was that the war I had joined because it was against fascism had landed me in ragged shorts and shirts in a geography like the moon where fascism had vanished like a thin mist and the war had rolled far away into distant silences.

It was an interesting conversation we had beside that waterhole, for I learned for the first time how world news penetrated to these nomads, and how much it interested them. They hungered for and cherished news from the outside world, and the best of it seemed to come from Arab dhow captains on the coast far away. They were very much interested in the future of Palestine, and the old chief liked to hark back to the days of the Turkish empire. The average Somali, I found, had more of an idea of the shape and extent of the world outside Africa than had the Bantu in the bush of Kenya. This may have been because they regarded themselves as a part of Islam, an ancient empire, whereas the Bantu remembered nothing equivalent, though they too had a long but now forgotten past.

The old chief asked me to tell him about Hitler and Mussolini. His summing up on various white races was interesting. German and British rifles were excellent, finely and strongly made. Belgian rifles (from the old Ethiopian army), which could be found among the tribes where the Ogaden met Abyssinia were good too, but Italian rifles when compared with the others were cheap and poorly made. ‘As soon as I realised this,’ he told me, ‘I began to worry, for I knew that the Italians must lose, and my pension would go with them. What are you going to do about my pension, Signor Capitano?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, regretfully. ‘I am going to arrest you for raiding and stealing camels, for now. Years from now, when the war is over, you will be able to go into the matter of your pension. I will make a note of it on your papers when you are tried.’

‘Will the Italians come back here when you have gone from here?’ he asked me.

‘If you want them back they’ll come back,’ I told him. ‘There is a thing called the United Nations, and one day you will all be able to tell them your story. The world will be rearranged, shaken up. All will be changed everywhere.’

‘I have seen it all change before,’ the old chief said to me bitterly. ‘You are too young to have seen anything change yet. Change is not always for the good.’

‘It depends on who and what you are,’ I told him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It does, and it does not pay to lose, either. I had honour under the Italians, and now I am a prisoner. That is what change has done to me. And you still haven’t explained to me why the white men are all fighting.’

‘That,’ I said, ‘goes back for about two thousand years. È un abitudine adesso.’

‘War is all right,’ this old embittered warrior said. ‘But it is good to know what the war is for. White men do not seem to know why they fight. We Somalis fight for camels, and here you are chasing us about and annoying us for doing it, while you, the white men are fighting all over the world. Do you expect us to understand that kind of thing?’

‘No,’ I told him.

‘Men fight for power and honour,’ he said. ‘That is why they fight, no matter what they say. You win or you lose. Do they feed you well in a prison?’

‘Quite well.’

He got up and brushed the red dust off his lungi. ‘Remember what I have said, Signor Capitano,’ he finished. ‘Dress like an officer, and behave like one. Stop this running about in the bush. I cannot respect you for this kind of behaviour. May I sleep now or are you going to start walking back to your fort at this hour of the night?’

I had many conversations with this chief while he was a prisoner. He finally admitted to me that he was tired of tribal fighting and only wished there could be a Somalia in which old men could live in peace. I hope he has it now.

Chapter 22

‘WHEN THE EUROPEANS go from Kenya,’ Ali said, ‘what will happen to the Somalis who live there? They will not live under Kikuyu, rule. They will refuse.’

I told him I did not know what would happen to all the Somalis in Kenya, but I agreed with him that it was unlikely they would be willing to live under what he called ‘Kikuyu rule’.

Africa is like an enormous Europe, full of people of one colour, but who differ like Swedes and Spaniards, Greeks and French, Czechs and Italians.

The Somalis, whether they live in the place still called French Somaliland, or what was British and Italian Somaliland, and in the Ogaden which is now ruled by Ethiopia, and in the Somali country of northern Kenya, are all one race with one language and one religion and one way of life, and eventually they must all unite as the pencil lines drawn by European powers on the African map a century or so ago blur and vanish.

I had once tried hard to get the Somalis to give up their contempt for Bantu people, at a time when we had Nyasa soldiers in the scattered garrisons of the Somali moonscape. But they broke the hearts of the softer Bantu soldiers.

‘We cannot obey slaves,’ Somalis told me. ‘It is impossible for us to live under slave people even when they are in uniform and have arms.’

‘We cannot go on living here among these people,’ a Nyasa askari had cried hysterically at me. He was charged with causing a riot in a coffee shop in one of the more sun-blasted of the desert outposts. ‘They despise us, they sneer at us, they hate us,’ the Nyasa told me. I knew all this but could not change the Somali feeling of superiority over these chunky black people from the lush south, nor wipe out the memory they had of a time when these Bantu people were slave material for the Muslim world to the north. That was the trouble, the curse of race, looks, noses, lips, eyes, legends. Colour has little to do with it.

They liked to taunt the Bantu askaris, and the Bantu innocence had little chance against the sharp, splintered wit of the nomad Somalis. Fights were frequent, and the unhappy Nyasas pined for home. They also had the misfortune not to be able to go long without water compared with Somali askaris, and the Somalis used to enjoy baiting them about this, especially on long patrols in the fierce heat.

But the average Nyasa soldier had a staunchness of personality which took a lot to bend and break it, and the Somalis, and their wilderness, were able to do it in the end.

Many of the Nyasas fell, insanely sometimes, in love with the beautiful Somali women, and when they got them they worshipped them, to the amusement, and anger, of the Somali males who watched it all. Far more beautiful than the Bantu women so far away, the Somali girls first laughed at this worship, and then grew to like the strange experience of being precious to a man. Somali men knew how to love, but not with the hopeless tenderness which the Nyasa soldiers brought to it.

The Somalis never treated the Bantu as their equals, not even when they soldiered together in the same units. A slight warmth might be shown to a Bantu who proved that he was a Mohammedan, though even then there could still linger suspicion and hostility. A great deal of it had to do with looks, facial features, and the Somali, lean and handsome and hawknosed, felt himself to be more becoming than the Bantu African. In fact the Somalis resented being considered Africans at all, and they demanded different treatment in rations and uniform than that given to the Bantu. Bantu troops like discipline. Somalis resent it. Every individual Somali fights to stay himself, a person. The Bantu liked the certainty and safety of unit life, and functioned well as a receiver of orders. The Somali fumed under discipline and loved the irregular life, the scattered patrol and the lone effort which might bring him to individual notice, to recognition for what he might achieve on his own. The Bantu had patience. The Somali had to control himself, even when learning how to handle weapons, which he loved and cherished. I have seen a Somali tear a machine-gun out of the hands of an instructor and prove on the spot that he needed no more instruction, that he knew it all and could handle and strip and assemble the weapon after one lesson. He had resented the very implication that he needed the long dreary lessons which the instructor seemed resigned to giving him.

When the Somali battalion sailed for the Burma campaign they demanded Indian scale rations, and uniforms with collars on them, ‘like Indian troops’. They did not want to dress like the Bantu troops, who wore collarless khaki blouses. They all went into green jungle battledress anyway when they reached the front.

When the Somali battalion, after a shattering artillery bombardment from the Japanese guns, finally attacked with the bayonet, they went headlong and their officers could not keep up with them. One of them who was decorated for bravery in that battle, a Degodiya from the northern frontier of Somali Kenya, told me that he had enjoyed it, and that he admired the way the Japanese infantry liked to stand and fight it out. But he was not satisfied with the ghee ration they were getting. We had a long conversation about it, and it made me think of the ghee problems in Somalia, and the Somali askari could not understand what I was laughing about.

In the deserts of Somalia the Nyasa soldiers were all right for about six months, but after that, worn down by isolation and heat, insult and hostility from the Somalis, they deteriorated. They could not understand this continual challenge, this nomad machismo, or the sharp, impatient bloody-mindedness of the Somali.

Chapter 23

‘IT’S TIME FOR ME TO GO,’ I told Ali. We had one more fresh lime and water and then we got up and left the hotel.

I did not like all the memories that those hot streets had brought up for me about the world which lay behind Mogadishu. Many of the memories awakened I had suppressed, but they kept trying to break through and be inspected for what they were, mere memories of brutal things which quailed if looked at directly, like all evil memories of the silent area we call the past. There is no such thing as justice, only the effort towards it, and the effort is everything. One had tried to give justice, in impossible conditions, but I knew I was still lacerated inside by most of the life in that wilderness which I still loved, even though one had gone nearly insane in it at times, and had done insane things, and some good things by accident. Some people like to issue justice, to sit and judge and condemn, and to feel that smug certainty, so necessary when dealing with lies and half truths and imagined happenings, all of them grouped about a mystery. But when you have condemned a killer to death, even the most ferocious human animal, you never forget that terrible moment which shows you your puny little assumption, between meals, that you can know what has brought another human into the trap. It is the very imperfection, I suppose, the very shaky machinery behind the pomp and mystery put up – the wigs, maces, woolsacks, black caps and other claptrap, which makes one pity our condition which forces pretence upon us, the pretence at making the dirty thing great and grave. The world has been a jungle since it began, no doubt of it, and The Bomb may be the one thing which has brought it to an unwilling stop, for war was man’s only holiday from his poor effort at coping with the great mess which all our ancestors have left us, history which stinks of blood and lies and suffering and hunger, and which we have not even yet begun to face properly.

They may burn all the flags, the wigs, the thrones and robes and parchments and the paranoiac history books one day, may even teach real history – how one half of the human race sucked the life out of the other half and hid in stately homes, courts, gaols, barracks. August 15th may, in an ironic way, turn out to be the greatest day in history, and the burned thousands of Japan, the new heroes.

It is moving and splendid that man has at least reached a sense of nothingness, that the colossal mountain of petty certainties, smugnesses, and comic folklore about national greatnesses, and preciously protected myths, is melting away in the flood of life giving despair that we must swim in now and in which we must rescue each other, rescue all, regardless of height, colour of eyes, texture of hair, religion, skin. It is thrilling that we are faced with the choice of walking out of our history of muck and blood and lies, forever, and together, or of dragging down a flaming sky on top of us, a blazing blanket in which to wrap our ineradicable savagery, for it may prove ineradicable. After Somalia, human toughness and the rest of the claptrap meant very little to me, and what little it meant was swept away by the magnificent idiocy of the Japanese troops I saw die, for nothing, in the rain and muck of Burma. One poor woman bringing up a crippled child means more in human heroism than all the billions who must have died in battle for various reasons in the last few thousand years.

It is splendid that at last the human race has run up against the wall, beyond which lies the end, a rain of ash and a silence. It is great that this tremendous revolution, so silent following the echoes of The Bombs on Japan, has poured into the works of the world like a terrifying mist, terrifying for the politicians and the generals, who no longer have their glorious way out, the battlefield and the medals and the cenotaphs.

And now Ali had a flag to die for too, a flag which would draw men’s eyes away from their little tribal killings, and give them something to die as one for, and one hoped it was too late for races like the Somalis to taste the putrid springs of military glory.

Ali had talked about The Bomb several times during our three hours in Mogadishu. He wanted me to help him imagine it, this thing which the human race had learned to speak about in a very peculiar way, as if talking about a key to hell.

I tried to explain to myself, while appearing to talk to Ali how never before in man’s time on earth had there been such a wish to have done with exploitation, hypocrisy, cant about justice, war, poisoned religion disguised as nationality, and never before had it been so difficult for man to understand what had happened to him and his world of habit since August 1945.

‘There is no solution,’ I told him. ‘None. But there is a will to work the permanent mess without war and without the old cause of it, human greed, and there is such a hatred growing everywhere of petty sovereign reasons for prolonging the old mess, that the established order everywhere, including Russia, is becoming quite frightened. The Bomb has been a godsend because for the first time it has held up the usage of the ancient way out, war for a dozen splendid reasons which are forgotten six months after the war has started. The Bomb can really be the finish, not only of your enemy, but of yourself, even after you have finished him; you die too, in the ruins. If it had not been for The Bomb we would have had a world war ten years ago, for human freedom, democracy, world revolution, pick your slogan, any will do, but we would have had the war. Never before have the generals been proved quite redundant, and all their military colleges as well. The true problem is – who will begin to tear the old fabric of political and military lies to pieces? Who will take the risk? For it is a risk, in this jungle. Can a country like Russia, or Britain, or America, really trust the rest if it gives its generals a decent suit of civilian clothes each and bulldozes all the weapons, which cost so many billions of lives in the long pedigree of war, into the sea? Can it be risked? We are on the edge of either the greatest breakout from the human mess of centuries, or we are due for the end. The Bomb is up in the air, right over our heads while we’re speaking. It’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to the human race in all time. And naturally we’re all shaken.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But will there be war, or not?’

He was staring hard into my eyes as he asked this question, as if he thought someone from outside must know more than he knew, and it made one feel anger to think that the maniacs in Moscow and Washington and London, with their rockets and bombs, now had the whole human race in a state of fear. With the rapid spread of the radio set, and of literacy, the Alis of this world, who live on desert rims, can now wonder daily how long ‘they’ are going to give them to live.

As our conversation progressed it came out that he knew a lot about the gas ovens and the world-wide slaughter of the Second World War, and one could not forget that ‘they’ for him, ‘they’ who had made the two terrible world wars, were white, and that scientific war was a white occupation, and that another one, the last, now appeared to be ready for launching.

One could understand the hatred and frustration felt by the black, brown and yellow races when, poverty stricken and yet now in tiny sight of relief, they watched final war being prepared in which they would die without having had a word to say. The mystery for them, contained in the white race which could do splendid things for human welfare, was surely in the frightening violence with which each white race dealt with each other about power and loot called principles. And all the years of preaching about Christ must have been almost as mystifying to Ali as it had been to the Kikuyu of Kenya who had watched the dozens of Christian sects quarrelling about the ownership of Christ before they, the Kikuyu, took to the despair of Mau Mau. But the white man never took time off to see himself as Ali and company saw him, especially now that the mystery of the white man had vanished – and Ali had seen white armies fight each other in his own country – a tremendous shock to the Somalis and Abyssinians who saw it. The white man now, wherever he goes, stands only for himself and represents only his personal nature, no longer for the mystery of his vanished greatness, which for Ali and company seems to have turned out to be a lie based on guns and books.

I felt despair of comforting him, and anger with the culture which had so failed him after all the arrogance and the wars and the ceremonies, and most of all the enormous vanity which had supported the hopeless arrogance.

‘Let’s go back to the dock,’ I said. ‘It’s time for me to go aboard the ship.’ As we walked he asked me more questions about the international situation.

‘Why,’ he said, ‘if they know it will end us all, will destroy the world, why do they go on with it? Why will they not disarm? What is it that stops them?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Nobody knows.’

‘You don’t know?’ he said.

‘No. I don’t know.’

‘Don’t any white men know, the big men in the governments? Don’t they know?’

‘Since this great bomb has come to us,’ I told him, ‘the whole of history has changed, and everything in the past about war and power has become out of date. We have started a new kind of history, a new world, but not many men will accept the fact, yet. Everything is different now, but men do not want to believe it. They know it but they won’t believe it. We just have to hope.’

‘That is what a mullah from Cairo told us here,’ Ali said, nodding. ‘That the history of all men has now been changed. And you believe that too?’

‘Yes.’

‘But does nobody in this world know what is going to happen? Nobody? Isn’t there anybody who can stop the war coming?’

Perhaps an assassination club could help, so that when the world is finally on the edge of the war which will annihilate it and the politicians and the generals and their scientists are about to take us all into that last manic plunge, the club assassinates a certain number of ‘great men’ in Moscow, London, New York, whichever of them are going through the old pathetic masculine routine of who’s toughest and strongest, and then issues an ultimatum. What are a few politicians, generals and scientists compared to the human race which is in their little, stupid hands today? We can always get a few more of them to start all over again and it might be that eventually we could get actual disarmament, a world without soldiers and their dead, useless traditions. But I did not mention these wild, nihilistic anti-nihilistic thoughts to Ali.

The club would have to be quite fair, in that when it had picked its politicians and generals, it assassinated them all on the same day, on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain. There must be no sovereignty or favouritism about it, just the main manic actors assassinated and then the suggestions that the new lot start negotiating again. It would need millionaires to finance it, rich men with no dividends from the arms industry, just financiers who rather like this world the way it is, ashless and non-radioactive.

The generals will never abdicate until they are sent, until the barracks and colleges are pulled down and they themselves are given their pensions and civil clothes. They have served well until now, all of them enjoying their careers under their various flags, and have fought for their little flags honestly and boyishly. When you think of the love which sprang up between some German and British officers in the Western Desert of World War Two (more and more it appears as if Rommel was the commanding officer for all, the beloved knight who represented all that any general could hope to be), you realise that all that is gone now, that fine chivalry and that schoolboy honour.

‘No,’ I told Ali. ‘Nobody in the world knows what will happen. We are stuck everywhere with the attitudes and habits of a world which vanished in 1945, and the problem is time in which to fully realise it. Goodbye.’ We were at the dock and the sun was blazing down, making one ache with its glaring weight.

‘Goodbye,’ Ali said. We shook hands, and he took the notes out of my hand with a smile and a nod.

‘Take five shillings back,’ he said, handing me one of the five shilling notes.

‘Why?’

‘I have enjoyed our talk,’ he told me, ‘and we are friends. This is enough.’ He waved the other notes. It was a very Somali gesture, handsome and proud, and not about money at all.

Chapter 24

THERE WAS A VERY THIN, waxen-pale Italian sailor standing in the motor boat, staring down with dark, angry eyes at the five Somali cargo workers who were lying asleep on the cases of wine, still not unloaded. He was about thirty, wearing a blue and white striped tee shirt, and sun-faded blue dungaree trousers. He had crew-cut black hair and he looked very ill.

‘Look at them,’ he said, ‘sleeping like pigs in the sun.’ He had a strong Neapolitan accent. He told me he was a seaman from one of the tramp ships in the bay. He had been dangerously ill and had just left the hospital. He was anxious to get back to his ship, ‘even though it is the very worst ship I have ever sailed in,’ he added. We sat down and he told me how unhappy he was with this ship he had so mistakenly sailed in six months before. Bad food, no fridges, cockroaches, the kind of ship which one had come to think had vanished from the seas. And they were sailing for the Persian Gulf. I pitied him. One of the Somalis woke up, yawned, stretched, looked at us.

‘When are you going to unload these cases?’ I asked him. ‘I am due back on board the ship.’

‘When we are told,’ he yawned, and went to sleep again.

‘Viva la libertà,’ the Neapolitan said bitterly, offering me a cigarette. Another Somali among the sleepers, an old man with grey bristles on his black face, opened one eye and called to me.

‘Do not worry, Effendi,’ he said. ‘The ship cannot leave without you. They cannot do it. They cannot. They know we are slow here.’ He closed his eyes again and dozed off in the soothing shade.

Raging, with that swift rage which the African heat and the African languor so swiftly awaken in white men who want to get things done quickly, I sat there and smoked and tried to feel glad that I had not the right any more to rouse them all up and drive them to the task until it was finished.

‘We could unload this lot in five minutes, you and me, due bianchi,’ the seaman said to me acidly, his eyes flashing. ‘One white man can do twenty times the work.’ Yes, but only for a little while, in that sun. It is the long, steady task of hours in the heat which makes the difference between African and white man in that climate. We sat on and waited until a Somali came staggering, yawning, his arms high in the ecstasy of his stretch, and stood staring broodily down at us from the dock. He screamed at the sleepers who opened their eyes and looked up at him, none of them moving. He was not exhorting, just cursing them, for they were part of his work, his work which he did not want to do. I had laboured in heat and I knew how he felt in that glare of sun, come out of the shade and his sleep to see these heavy cases waiting for him, this useless work which would occupy him until he died, in this backwater of Islam.

There was no shade in that big loaded barge and the Italian seaman and I sat there in the glare and sweated, hatless, the sun hitting us like a hammer as we smoked and exchanged fragments of thoughts about our various lives. The sun struck the water and flashed off it and into the brain, through the eyes, like a white, flaring sword.

I stared along the barren coastline beyond the aching white town, and I knew I had never wanted to return here, and would never return again. I was glad I could not see Galkayu again, or Bosaso, Hafun, Filtu, Dagamedu, Golwein or Sinadogo, those aching place-names. Of all the Africas this yellow waste was a place to ‘adventure’ in, for there was nothing there except the sand and the nomads.

Once, in the red sand ocean of the Ogaden I had come upon a tall carved tablet of stone among the thorns. The sunglare had lit up the carved words on it, words commemorating the long road through the bush hacked out by the Sicilian labour battalion attached to an Italian division which had invaded Abyssinia in 1935. The hot wind was scattering sand against it. The men, their tents, their empty cigarette packets, were all gone, and there was no trace of them. The Italian empire had vanished and the wilderness belonged, as it had always belonged, and will always belong, to the nomads and their camels. Forbidding and desolate, the huge desert with its towering rocks which shake in the sun, waits to turn everything into sand again, men, buildings, camels, even the white ants which send up their enormous towers of mystery in which they teem while they live out their imitation of the universe. I think most of all it was that realisation which the four years’ wanderings in the interior had allowed to seep into me, that though he wrote it magnificently, Donne had it wrong. Every man is an island, in the desert or the city, and I can remember coming to feel certain of this one night on a high rock in fierce moonlight, looking out across Africa which stretched forever in the luminous silence. When you mingle again with people you get the impression once more that Donne is right, but it is only an impression. The longing and the effort to diminish the islandhood is everything, but it can never be dissolved.

Among our buildings we get the necessary impression that we have some kind of permanence here, but a single month in a desert, alone, is enough to allow in the echo of doubt, and it stays. Isolation in the wastes taught me to value civilisation, and to get some idea of what this world owes to all the civilisers, whatever their race, or place, or time. Every time we go to a doctor it is probably in the subconscious hope that he will tell us we are going to live forever. Other people die but we don’t. When we build, it is forever. Isolation makes you think of the fact of death, too much, and the city makes you think only about life, too much. And there is no in-between area, and we contain it all within ourselves after we have tasted from both wells.

Any lingering ideas I had had about some races, religions, colours, or what have you, being better than others, vanished after a year in those wastes. Excellence and the lack of it are everywhere, and I knew nomads with qualities of natural intelligence and vitality far greater than hordes of white men I had known. And I have seen a white man perform acts of savagery as terrible as that performed by any tribesman. All the rules had vanished, the rules about what was supposed to be what, crumbled away by the billion thoughts sieved out in prolonged isolation, and I no longer believed in the sovereign state, the white message, or the inherent goodness, or evil, of man. For long periods I had forgotten that I was a white man at all, and had been merely a man, another flea on the desert with the nomads, and it was an experience which could not be left behind with the desert. I carried it with me, and I find when I meet friends who drank long enough at those bitter waterholes, that they too can no longer contribute to those ancient myths about the premiership of this that or the other if it has a white skin covering it. This is not to say that one did not discover how handily valuable it is to have been born with a white skin, how it helps one to share in the undeniable excellence and superiority of what Europe has defined as civilisation, having clutched tightly the rope thrown out of darkness by Asia long ago.

And what did I think now, sitting in that sunglare in the barge, about Africa, I wondered. About Africa which had stirred in its long tropical sleep and was standing up and screaming for various things lying behind a word called freedom.

No matter how much a man may try and think in the terms of the civilisation to which he belongs, and thinks with its attitudes or without them, it is from his own particular heritage of myth and fact that he must stare at the scene. And I found that I, as a maverick person, was glad, but not smugly, that my ancestors had not been involved in the selling of millions of African slaves to the Americas, or in having to prove that what had been done in and to Africa had been right because my ancestors had done it. For my own ancestors had been losers too, and had been enslaved by the same force, a force which invented a mission to cover the normal human greed of the winners. And let us accept right away that the winners deserved the power, because they had won. They had conquered everywhere, the British. They had smashed Ireland first, a sort of long and obsessional battle course for the struggle to come for the ownership of Asia and Africa one day, and had then gone on to conquer all the oceans. Who can blame Englishmen for being proud of their victory in that jungle of the world in the past? It was a dangerous jungle and the British won the long, bloody day with their ships, their guns, and their money, and with their particular gift of long and carefully cherished civic patience. And now it was over.

The monarchy, the lords, the knights, the whole feudal English society, had now had to turn in on itself, following the loss of its world power and empire, and invent full employment. It was interesting to see how Gandhi had been right, how as soon as Britain lost its empire the English working class had to be given work and wages and new freedoms. Gandhi was the friend of the English working class. In freeing India he freed them too. He knew too, and said it, that once India had freed herself nothing could stop the freedom of Africa, which is why the whole European fabric of government in Africa crumbled so swiftly after 1947. Only the French went on dive-bombing and fighting, from Damascus to Madagascar and from Indo-China to Algeria. The British knew better than that, and went, quietly, proving that they still had the skill which had made their empire in the first place. Yet the struggle would go on in all kinds of ways, because money and power will never give justice until it is forced to. There is no escape from the nausea one feels as one surveys the world. Communism was a godsend because it so frightened the rich and the powerful all over the earth, but that is its only virtue for me. Its presence is all, its end negative.

‘I would have gone to America, if I could have got in,’ the Italian seaman was saying to me. We were the same kind of people, uneducated, and hopeful, only I had had more luck than he. That means that you do not belong fully to any particular society, and can sign on in a Norwegian, Greek or Italian ship, become an American, or an Australian, and grow gradually into what appears to be your own product, instead of belonging to some strong segment with its tradition of safety and standard of achievement to look to. There is an enormous difference between the man who emerges from a safely ensconced segment of society, and the one who is flung into a world in which the shovel is waiting for him. I recommend the latter to all as a far more exciting world to be thrown into. The working class are far luckier than the monied classes, if they have a little yeast in their skulls to start with. Like the Italian beside me in the barge. He was a true man in that while he described the present misery of his condition, he did not whine about it and accuse the world of owing him a living. He still knew that he had to win the living, and enjoyed the possibilities.

It was a hell ship he was to sail in again, one of those rusting steel slums which still crawl the seas.

‘You owned all that a couple of years ago,’ I said, nodding at the harsh, jagged coast of Somalia, ‘and now you’ve lost it. Does it break your heart?’

He laughed. ‘What a tragedy,’ he said, and laughed so loud that he woke the old Somali who had slept on among his labouring companions in the fore-peak of the barge.

In scathing and ironic Italian he described the Italian empire as a dream in Mussolini’s head, for which the Italian people had paid with their blood.

‘It is good that it is finished,’ he said. ‘What did it mean to me? Nothing. I still look for bread and peace.’

Empires were a hobby of a bored and energetic owning class, and empires made them rich, very rich, and the denizens of the empires poor, and it was good to have lived to see the end of all that. What was his dream? Everyone has a dream. His was to own a small restaurant in Naples one day – ‘probably when I’m about fifty, if things work out,’ he said doubtfully, and then he looked across the blinding sheet of sea to the tramp ship. She was very low in the water, laden with arms and ammunition, now being unloaded, as were the other two tramps swinging at anchor nearby.

‘Now I see that brute again,’ he said, staring with bitter eyes at the rusty, ancient ship, ‘I wish I’d died in hospital.’ She was sailing next for the Persian Gulf, a suburb of hell where she would lie in the furnace heat for weeks awaiting a cargo. No fans, no ice, no cold beer. And food? Herrings, pasta and potatoes.

Another Italian appeared above us on the jetty and waved his hand at us, one of the last of the Italians in Mogadishu. He appeared to be made of leather, thin, dark brown skin shining from a lifetime of sun, a true vecchio coloniale. He began to curse the Somalis in slow, gentle Italo-Somali, insulting and friendly words, so that they all laughed. Then he jumped down into the barge and offered us cigarettes, sat down beside me and asked me if I was sailing in the liner. Yes. Ah, how he envied me. But it would not be long now before he sailed himself, for good. I laughed.

‘You’ll never get over Africa, though, will you?’ I said. He looked at me sharply, smiled. He shook his head and looked out across the barge at the coastline.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s true. You hate her but you love her. You the same?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah.’ He knew it had nothing to do with being the big white chief, loving Africa, but had to do with the immense size and freedom of the continent, and the longing to wander from one end of it to the other. But he had stayed too long, he knew it now. It’s true that there is a secret in knowing when to go, in feeling when a certain time of life somewhere is over. And yet …

His drinking company recently has been that of a Russian, one of the horde of Russians and Chinese who had arrived in the new Somali republic.

‘He started by trying to convert me to communism,’ the old Italian grinned, ‘but I’ve just about converted him instead. “Capitalism?” I said to him. “But that’s what I want to be. A capitalist. All my life I’ve tried to be a capitalist, and soon, in Italy I shall be one. I’ve saved up and I’m ready to invade Italy, for capitalism.” I’ve been slowly educating him, poor fellow, and now he knows something about the world at last. He knew nothing. A real fanatic from the bookshelves. Comes along every night for a few drinks and a few more lessons in true world history. They’re good fellows, these Russians, but they’ve never been allowed to have any freedom, or even any real conversation. This fellow laps it up, loves it, actually talking with a capitalist foreigner.’

‘With a fascist beast,’ I suggested.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, laughing. ‘I forgot that. I’m a fascist beast, or was.’ He pointed to the stack of wooden cases now piling up on the jetty, the last of which was being swung up out of our barge. ‘Drink from Italy,’ he said. ‘The best. For the Russians, the Chinese, and – ’ he placed his forefinger on the side of his nose and winked – ‘for some of the Somalis, Allah and the Prophet notwithstanding.’

Soon we were wallowing across the bay towards the rusty tramp, aboard which the old Italian was going to repair some electrical machinery.

‘You’ll get no beer aboard this scow,’ the seaman told him as we came alongside the Jacob’s ladder.

‘No beer, no repairs,’ the old man told him. He went up the Jacob’s ladder, swiftly, the seaman following him. As we cast off they waved to me.

‘Ciao. And drink a cold Americano for me aboard,’ the old man shouted.

Africa is full of these old timers, men of many European races, and when they have gone they will be missed, when the machinery breaks down. They could fix anything. I once saw one of them, an old Sicilian diesel driver, fix a diesel engine with two pieces of tin when we were marooned hundreds of miles from any help. Another, an old South African, taught me to shoot, to skin a big beast quickly, to make rawhide ropes (a fast-dying art when he taught me), and how to seal up a leak in the radiator of a box body Model T Ford with a raw egg and a handful of maize meal. There is no better value in the world than an all night session under a thorn tree with an old timer in Africa, with a case of beer between you and a few hundred cigarettes around the place. We had one of them die on us suddenly one night in Somalia. He was too old for the game, but would not give up and had gone into that final haven, the desert locust control, and he drove three hundred miles with a case of gin for his final all night session. He had it, and sat up very suddenly about three in the morning, and died, in the right kind of country too, sun-blasted, thick with hyenas, just the place he would have chosen, or perhaps chose.

Bwana Mzee, Old One, your time has gone now, for the cement mixers are massing on the horizon, and the game is finished.

Chapter 25

SWINGING HIGH UP over the ship again in the big canvas bag I could see Mogadishu below me, like a small blinding-white wedding cake on the burned brown sand, the blue ocean lapping at its edges. I could see Wardiglei barracks where I had trained four hundred infantry and a company of medium machine-gunners; the Lighthouse flats, the officers’ club, and the thirteenth-century mosque in which Ibn Battuta had prayed. I felt nothing for Mogadishu, no nostalgia, and I tried to feel it for the wilderness I could see stretching beyond the city, but I could feel none for that either. It was finished, and because it was finished there was an irrational sense of loss, of something unrecapturable, and of the comedy which time makes of one’s solemn youth. But if I knew anything about men I had learned it out there beyond the heat haze, and what I knew about myself I had learned to learn there too, in silence. I felt a kind of gratitude to the deserts and to the nomads, or at least to life for having diced me into that world for a time.

A free Somali race will be good for Africa. Their bright intelligence, their courage and their confidence will be of value to the new Africa shaping now, if only because they never for a moment felt inferior to any white man, and were never tiresome about being black, or about you being white. They would like Emperor Haile Selassie to give them back the camel wilderness of the Ogaden, which by its very bitterness belongs to the Somali people and to their famished camels. Even if he does find oil in the Ogaden, Haile Selassie should find a way of giving that red desert back to the Somali nomads. They would feel gratitude to him, as they would to Jomo Kenyatta, if, despite his immense difficulties, he could find a way to let the Somali tribes of Kenya’s northern frontier break out of the pencil lines drawn on the map years ago by careless white men, and become part of the greater free Somalia.

‘What did you find to do ashore in that dump of sand, signore?’ a grizzled Italian seaman asked me as I stepped out of the canvas bag on to the deck of the liner.

‘It was a nostalgia,’ I told him. ‘I knew it once.’

‘And how went it?’

‘It was gone.’

He laughed, nodding. ‘Yes. It is like when you see a woman you loved years ago. The fever has gone and you can look at her without trouble. Was it like that?’

‘Yes. It was like that.’

‘Then celebrate it, signore. The bar is open.’ He jerked his thumb at his open mouth and laughed.

The ship’s engines were throbbing and she began to swing slowly on the blue silken water, and as I watched Mogadishu disappear behind the slowly swinging prow of the ship I felt sure I would never see it again, and felt no pang, no regret.

I went in off the roasting heat of the deck into the air-conditioned bar and felt the immediate response of gratitude from the tortured skin and eyes as the fresh, cool air enveloped me.

‘How are you, signore?’ the barman asked me.

‘Madly in love with civilisation,’ I told him, ‘especially airconditioned civilisation. Long live engineering and science.’

He laughed. ‘I told you not to go ashore,’ he said.

‘But I’m glad I went,’ I told him.

‘Why?’ he asked while he mixed the Campari and the crushed ice and lemon.

‘Because I had experienced so many things in that country,’ I said, ‘important things that greatly affected me, I had a moment this morning when I decided not to go ashore at all. I felt I should remember it as it was, years ago, which was ridiculous, so I went.’

‘And what did you feel, seeing it all again?’

‘Older.’

We laughed and he handed me the drink, and it tasted good after the sweat I had shed during the morning.

The South African passengers were gathering in the bar now, all healthy, well heeled, well travelled, many of them with over a hundred years of family behind them in that lush paradise of gold and diamonds in the far south. All about their comfortable world a new muscular Africa was gathering in what might become a vengeful freedom if these white men did not change things in South Africa.

They had been on holiday in Europe, some of them for pleasure and others for business, and now they were going home, to a country for which they might have to fight one of these days. I met no fireeaters among them. They were solemn when they talked about the problem facing them. ‘We let it go by, day by day, and hope for the best,’ one of them told me. ‘Whatever that may be.’ The Dutchmen among them were bitter about the British South Africans, who, they claimed, liked apartheid and hid behind it, while professing to feel more liberal about it all than the Dutch, etcetera.

Racing through those warm tropic seas in the darkness, the ship shuddering softly with her own power, I could see the lightning exploding again over the dark hulk of Africa on our beam. She did not look threatening in the livid light breaking across her vastness, and she never has threatened anybody yet. She has been sold, underpaid, used, but always loved by those strangers who have got to know her.

I could see the lights of the tiny town of Merca far across the rustling sea speeding past us. Now I knew a fellow there once who …

A portrait of Gerald Hanley, drawn in the 1970s
by the film maker John Huston

Afterword to the 1993 edition

‘THE SUN WAS QUIVERING in soft pink and green veils when Jama and I lit cigarettes. The dawn threw slow wings of brilliant light beyond the mountains until the soft flux of darkness and false light began to retreat and reveal the shabby desiccated world, and the jagged rocks stood out, flinging long shadows on to the surface of our particular barren world, the enormous silence undisturbed by a single cough.’

Every good writer has a special ‘signature’ in his style – a very recognisable trademark, a warrant of excellence. Gerald Hanley’s style is at once taut, muscular, masculine – but tender, always sensuous, especially in his descriptions of the harshest places. And the style is very much the man.

But how did the man come to be the style? What was he like? What can be usefully said of his personal life which may annotate or illuminate the work? What was the raw material of the man which he refined, so very reticently, into those tough-tender words? How did Gerry, as we always knew him, come across to me, one friend among many? He had more than a gift for friendship: he was someone who, once met, and at every meeting, altered your angle to the world, redirected you with the lightest, usually most ironic touches of his vast experience, knowledge and quiet authority, giving you a heightened awareness of the possibilities, a truer compass bearing in the foggy journeys.

I saw this happy manna in Gerry soon after we first met, quite by chance one evening, at the bar of the George next to Broadcasting House in 1963, after he’d made a quick-footed unobtrusive passage through the crowd of BBC writers and producers (of whom I was one) – shackled men, noisy or morose as a result, bibulously rattling their chains. Here was a newcomer, yet someone who obviously knew many in this crowd from the old Features and Drama departments, knew them but was not of them, someone clearly unshackled.

I had no idea who he was, this nimble footed, solid looking man with wary, very blue, slightly protuberant eyes, dressed (as he nearly always was) in a navy blue windcheater and polo-necked jumper, dark slacks and rubber-soled shoes. He had something of the air of a welterweight boxer, tough and a little raffish, in his late forties, half out in clover, but still retained by the fairground, well able to deal with any challenger. He had the lightly tanned and roughened skin, the sunswept eyes, of someone who has lived most of his life outdoors, who had seen much and lived with danger – those quick eyes swinging round now, alert to every move and nuance in the bar – of someone who would rather have had his back to the wall then, and not to the door.

Yes, the boxer. Or perhaps (much more appropriately as I confirmed later) here was the mysterious lone ranger, horse and saddle out in the livery stable behind the saloon, suddenly arrived in town after months living rough under the stars out on the plains.

He took a half pint, lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply. He was clearly waiting for someone, a little tense, on edge. Was there to be a showdown of some sort? A shoot out, with the sheriff or the baddie? Something to do with the papers under his arm?

I too had some papers under my arm – a draft film script developed from an idea which John Gibson, a BBC producer from Belfast, had given me: a story set during the earlier Irish ‘Troubles’. So that when the stranger asked the barman if John Gibson had been in yet, I piped up ‘No, but he’s due any moment.’ Since we had this mutual friend we introduced ourselves and started talking. ‘That’s funny,’ Gerry said, ‘I’ve got a script for Johnny, too.’ After some further talk, all was revealed. John Gibson had given us both the same idea to develop, which we’d both been slaving over for several weeks – Gerry with some payment, me with none.

‘What’ll we do with him, when he comes?’ Gerry asked with nice malice, in that ever husky, cigarette deepened voice of his. ‘Hit him?’ I suggested, seeing how Gerry, if not I, clearly had the strength. ‘No, we’ll do the script together. And get you some money, too.’ Which we did, though the film was never made.

It was a happy beginning to a friendship that always worked well. Professionally, Gerry did reviews for the book programme I ran at the BBC then. Later, as an editor with Hamish Hamilton, I brought Warriors to the firm – or Warriors and Strangers as it was originally called, when it included a second part, in quite a different tone, dealing with Kenya. Personally, it was splendid talking, eating, and drinking together, in one of the then happy watering holes which surrounded Broadcasting House. And it was into such places that Gerry, in his lone ranger mode, would suddenly arrive out of some far distant blue, from India or Africa, in his usual all weather, all eventualities garb, staying at the YMCA or the NCOs’ Club off the Edgware Road, or with his friend Richard Attenborough out in Richmond.

Gerry, who was then living in the Wicklow mountains (where he was suffering the attentions of the Irish Revenue Commissioners), came to London on ‘business’, of some not always mentioned or clearly defined sort. (Though I learnt later that, as a result of these fiscal attentions, he often came to London simply to pick up ‘cash-in-hand’ from his agent David Higham.) In fact throughout the 1960s he was largely engaged in writing film scripts, for The Blue Max and doing all the early drafts for Attenborough’s Gandhi. In these pubs and clubs and Indian restaurants we talked of everything under the sun; in particular of an interest which, as Irishmen, we might not have been expected to have at all – the British Empire, its manners and mores, its decline and fall.

This is a central theme in most of Gerry’s books – as it was in many of the BBC feature programmes I was doing then, on India, Egypt, and East Africa. We shared an obsession to record and dissect the nature of this colonialism, to talk, write books and do programmes about it, fascinated by the mechanics, human and political, of a system that had not only done so much to ruin our own country for more than seven hundred years but had taken a quarter of the globe along the same uncomfortable path.

Yes – though from opposite sides of the Irish track, Gerry as a Catholic from a Liverpool-Irish family, me as a Protestant from a mercantile Dublin family – we were both Empire buffs. I think it was a case of our both hating the narrowness of Irish life, and both finding happy niches (in the British army and the BBC) which involved much travel about the old empire, so that we came to this fascination as treasure seekers, sensing crocks of gold in far distant climes, grist for our fictional and BBC mills. And the treasure we found lay in the people of empire, the rulers and ruled, not the rule.

Gerry’s knowledge of all this was much deeper than mine. In harsh romantic places he had done all the Boys Own Paper things that I had longed to do as a boy, inspired by my reading of Henty, Percy Westerman and other Empire glorying writers. Gerry was a living exemplar of all this type of Edwardian derring-do. Only a few years before he had actually fought with a Service Webley at his hip, at the head of a platoon of askaris, pursuing and subduing other assegaicarrying natives, who were getting restless …

But despite the many topics we covered, in long chats over tandoori chicken and cold lagers, Gerry, as far as the personal was concerned, remained the mysterious lone ranger. In all the years I knew him he never spoke of his childhood, his parents, his wife or wives, or any of his family. He never mentioned them and I never asked him. This was strange. I was aware of it at the time – this lacuna in our relationship. I put it down to a very reticent temperament and perhaps to a residual stiff-upper-lippery in an ex-army officer.

It was only in hearing and garnering over the years odd bits of information about him from BBC and other friends we had in common that I saw there might well be another reason for his reticence. His marital and familial life appeared not only very complex but one which, for an Irish Catholic, must have been agonising.

There was a first wife, Diana Fittall, met in Kenya and married there soon after the war. A child was born before Gerry came back with her to London in the late 1940s to work for the BBC Overseas Service in Bush House. Here he met Asha, a beautiful Kashmiri girl, who worked in the Indian section there. It was a head-over-heels affair. He divorced Diana, married Asha and went off to live with her in the Kashmiri hills for several years, where they had two children. But tiring of her and returning to Kenya he had met Diana there again. Gerry spent days agonising about what he should do, while staying in Eldoret at the house of his great friend Antony Dean (who has generously helped me complete the difficult jigsaw of Gerry’s life). He realised how badly he had treated Diana. And so, officially still married, they took up again as man and wife. Seven more children were born, until, at some time in the mid-1960s, he and Diana separated again. Of all these many children, from two wives, one drowned aged two and a half and another was left permanently brain damaged after a motor-cycle accident. It was clear that Gerry – the lone ranger, the canny pathfinder through the bush – had followed equally dangerous, tortuous trails through places in the heart: facing bloody battles there and terrible choices, abandoning wives, children and his faith, perhaps, in the course of it all. Not, indeed, a topic for casual pub talk.

Gerry’s love life, I feel, was driven by a very high current of emotion, involving no more than three or four women in his life (for he was no womaniser), women for whom he probably felt a correspondingly over-rich emotion, asking or offering too much; or an emotion which foundered on the common dilemma – exacerbated in a novelist by his usually jittery financial/psychological circumstances, his trade in fantasy – of looking for both workaday security and exotic vivacity in the same person.

Does such personal knowledge of a writer, and surmise about his close relationships, annotate or illuminate the work? Well, up to a point – the point being with Gerry that only in his novel Without Love did he ever get to serious grips with the major conflicts, emotional and religious, which I think he faced with women. And to know a little of his private life is to get a better understanding of his work: the problems he faced, his strengths and weaknesses there, what he left out and why – and why what he put in was so male orientated.

Apart from Without Love the feminine portraits in his other novels lack the passionately felt quandaries which Gerry must have experienced with women in his life. This crucial personal dimension is absent in most of his fictional women, so that they lack conviction. His depiction of men, however, of the vital dependency and camaraderie between them, be they black, yellow or white, is not only convincing, but comprehensive and highly charged – so sensual in description that I have heard a reader (who must have judged only by the books) ask whether Gerry was homosexual.

Just the opposite. I feel on the one hand he was overly concerned with women, and on the other was plagued by his Irish Catholic upbringing and the hell-fire versions of the faith which Irish priests had dunned into him. He was ‘unmanned’ to a certain extent by the doubts he had inherited from all this, by the strict prohibitions which this faith imposed on his serial relationships and marriages. So that in the end both God and the women drew the short straw. Gerry could never entirely resolve this conflict in his life or in his books, so that he depicted women partially, with suspicion or through rose-tinted glasses – while running an even more partial, suspicious, on and off, love-hate relationship with God.

It’s an Irish Catholic version, this, of the ‘romantic agony’. And Gerry, as the army doctor Humf tells him in Warriors, was a romantic par excellence. Gerry’s tenderness, in his fiction and his emotions, would always be at risk with women; a risk of terrible hurts, confusions and ensnarements there, of ‘messing’ in the apt Irish use of that word, which would not be the case in his real or fictional dealings with men.

In this and other ways, both as man and writer, Gerry resembles Hemingway, whom he worshipped long before Hemingway described him as ‘the foremost writer of his generation’. They were both primarily men of action, which the writing flowed from as a secondary bonus. They took their subject matter only from what they had directly experienced; often violent subject matter, of killings, woundings (both literal and psychological), suicides and sexual/emotional failure. They share – in Gerry’s case because he was surely influenced here – the same sort of crisp, vivid narrative style, the very clear and thus marvellously evocative focus on action, the choice of the most relevant detail, the minutiae of an event as it actually happens, so that you are entirely ‘there’ later, in the reading of it.

They both have the dramatist’s technique of taut, allusive, understated dialogue, so to emphasise what is not there in the words, the looming, more important sub-text. Above all (and this came from Gerry’s nature, not from any influence) they both subscribed to a heroic code of behaviour, of the absolute necessity for honesty, courage, compassion and good manners in life; of hanging on, stoically, in face of the worst life has to offer, as it will; of getting through it decently and honourably, with no bleating or excuses, with little fuss, and leaving as little mess as possible behind. It’s a code which Gerry sums up well on the first page of this book: ‘… there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here.’

These similarities Gerry shared much more with the earlier Hemingway, as man and writer, than with the declining, bombastic ‘Papa’ he met in Nairobi in 1953, where Hemingway had come to recuperate after his two near fatal air crashes in Uganda. They were in Nairobi for several weeks together, meeting on the café terrace of the New Stanley Hotel every morning with mutual friends, big game hunters, film people, other writers. These were unsullied times until one day Hemingway said to Gerry, ‘Kid, come upstairs. I want to talk seriously.’ In his bedroom he made Gerry kneel down, while they intoned the Litany to the Virgin Mary together, with Hemingway substituting the word ‘fuck’ for ‘bless’ on every occasion. Gerry emerged quite shattered. He was a cradle Catholic, who could never dabble in or seriously mock the faith, as his mentor did.

Even if Warriors carefully avoids the really private, it offers instead the fullest account of what I think was the central and most formative factor in Gerry’s life: his experiences in and love of wilderness, ‘the Shag’ as he called it; his trials and tribulations, his growing to true knowledge there in face of that punishing solitude – comradeship with his askaris and with their ‘enemies’, the happily warring tribes, in those sun-blasted, rock tortured desert spaces of Somalia. This absolute zero of wilderness, where most white men, as he so painfully describes, either went mad or killed themselves – this was the making of Gerry. He survived it all. And to do so was to survive the worst that life could throw at him afterwards.

And in Warriors Gerry looks back on this Somali wilderness by clearly proposing the love/hate conflict – and then resolving it. He gives a fair bill of his quandaries. ‘The years I spent on that silent moon did me more harm than good.’ But ‘Some characters are made for wilderness … come to their happiest in that dry, sterile loneliness.’ And ‘I knew I was still lacerated inside by the wilderness, which I still loved.’ And then the very moving ending to it all, in the words of the Italian sailor, on Gerry’s return to the liner after his three hours in Mogadishu, ‘What was it like? … Like when you see a woman you loved years ago. The fever has gone and you can look at her without trouble. Was it like that?’ ‘Yes, it was like that.’

And here, surely, in this apt simile from the Italian sailor, is the nub of Gerry’s character: the wilderness was his real woman – loved, hated and learned from, having been nearly driven mad and killed by her. Wilderness was what he really gave his soul and lost his heart to. Nothing and no one else in his life was to mark him so forcibly. And it’s here in Warriors that he most completely resolves his conflicts, between faith, thought and action, between the muscular and the tender: all given to that wilderness, which in return, in his mastering it, gave him an inviolate strength, fulfilling every disparate need in him.

Warriors, if we add this little about his personal life, becomes Gerry’s most self-revealing book. And it is an irony therefore that it was very nearly never published at all. He wrote it in Kenya in the mid-sixties, in Antony Dean’s house – Antony being one of Gerry’s closest and most helpful friends, an ex-army officer too, wounded at Tobruk and invalided down to Nairobi where Gerry met him just after the war. Gerry sent Warriors and Strangers to his publisher Billy Collins with particularly high hopes. Collins was passionately interested in East Africa – at least in its more colourful aspects. He had a house in Kenya and had made a fortune from books set in the area, such as Joy Adamson’s Born Free.

But Collins was also an imperialist at heart. He hated Gerry’s book for its criticisms of British colonialism in East Africa, and for its description of the arrogance and deceitfulness of most of its administrators, who had the cheek to claim they represented a higher civilisation than the tribes whom they degraded and betrayed.

Collins wouldn’t publish the book. Gerry, hurt and furious, put it away in a very bottom drawer. It wasn’t until I joined Hamish Hamilton in 1970 and suggested to him that he go back to East Africa and do a ‘Return to the Old Places’ type of book, that he told me he had done just that, six years before, giving me the typescript of Warriors and Strangers. I loved it and showed it to Roger Machell, then chief editor. He wrote a memo almost by return. ‘I think this is marvellous stuff. Some of the most enthrallingly interesting writing about Africa that I’ve ever come across. Every bit as good as Thesiger’s “Marsh Arabs”. Collins must have been crazy to turn it down.’ Indeed … And it seemed then that Gerry was all set for a new and splendid career as an author with Hamish Hamilton.

It was not to be. In the last twenty years of his life, after the publication of Warriors and Strangers in 1971, he was to publish only one other book, the fine novel Noble Descents, set in a small princely state in India just after partition – a novel which includes something of a self-portrait of Gerry (and possibly a reflection of his relationship with his mother) in the character of Croon, a film-script writer, out in India to research an epic story. This was very much Gerry’s will-o’-the-wisp in his latter years – the idea that he would make a killing in the movies, pay all debts, and thereafter sit down to write great books.

He had talked of these endless financial difficulties for a writer with his close friend Paul Scott (of the Raj Quartet), met in 1951, who handled all his work at David Higham, with whom he shared an army and Indian background, and whom he took under his wing in creative literary matters, encouraging him to take the plunge as a full-time writer – reassuring him, in a series of letters (and during a mammoth pub crawl through Dublin in 1957) about the inevitable financial ‘jitters’ of a writer’s life, especially for those outside the English literary establishment.

I met him quite often during this latter period of his life. They were very happy personal years, in one vital way at least, these last twenty, since they were spent with Kate Carney, a younger Dublin woman, who filled that ideal feminine bill for him in being both vivacious and sensible – a woman who, with her love and practical attention, certainly prolonged his life, especially after his cancer operation four years before he died. They never married, for Gerry was still married in the eyes of the church, and never actually set up house and lived together. But in every other way they were man and wife. He couldn’t have been luckier than with Kate.

Gerry was getting white-haired now, with sinking features and a more portly solidity. But he still had nimble air and the blue eyes never lost their bright and kindly sheen – amused, ironic. We met in pubs in Bray and further out in Delgany, Co Wicklow, where he lived in rooms above a butcher’s shop; though again I was never to meet him on his home ground. He was usually just off to, or had just returned from, some outlandish place – to visit John Huston or a trip to China where he was to do a script on – what was it? – possibly Mao and the Long March in full Technicolor and costing $40 million.

Shortage of money wasn’t the only block to producing books. Gerry felt a strong need to maintain an active, peripatetic life. The lone ranger mode was his almost to the end. This restless temperament made it particularly difficult for him to sit down for long stretches. So he postponed things, proposing to me instead all sorts of ideas for books, all of which, quite justifiably, would get him away from his desk. There was a History of Islam in Africa, which would take him the length and breadth of the continent – to research, naturally – and another book doing the same in a Greyhound bus across America. Even more than most authors, he feared the blank page, and so tended to ambush it in 48-hour binges of work, or saying that he had to go away and see more of the raw material before even starting to ambush the page. In any case the books never appeared.

I wonder if the real reason for this was that he felt he’d said it all – all that he could well say on his particular theme of empire and its dissolution, the madness of its ethos, but the often marvellous strengths and bizarreries of the characters who administered it – people who had lived, loved and lost in every hard and soft place, from Happy Valley to the Shores of Mandalay. He had depicted these people so completely, with such vigour, irony and understanding, that it was difficult, in the end impossible, for him to engage with any new and equally heartfelt subject matter.

We should not complain. A writer has only so many heartfelt books in him. And these are what we need, not new books which would have been written at half-steam. And we have all these full-steam books from Gerry, most notably in Warriors, a book with a ring of absolute authenticity, of conflicts reconciled, a true philosophy gained through the most testing, harshly lived experience imaginable. No need to ask for more.

JOSEPH HONE, 1993

Gerald Hanley

Afterword to the 2004 edition

AS SOMALIA SPIRALLED into war and insanity following the overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in January 1991, I met a man named Mohamoud Afrah down a dusty Mogadishu alley strewn with donkey turds and wrecked cars. I was a Reuters correspondent at the time and Mohamoud was our local ‘stringer’. He told me he regarded himself to be a Somali, as opposed to a man from such-and-such a clan, who loved the city culture of Mogadishu. He knew all about his nation’s history, yet he had no language to describe the present phenomenon of Somalia’s collapse. One day he said the militias had parked a tank outside his house with the barrel pointing at him. He paid them money to leave him alone and before they left he chided them, ‘There are too many Hitlers in Somalia today.’

‘Who’s Hitler?’ replied one of the armed youths.

Soon after our first day together a tank returned to Mohamoud’s house and blew it to bits with his son in front of it. The Reuters man buried his boy at the doorstep. Then he fled into exile, joining the millions of Somali refugees who have scattered the earth to escape famine and war. Mohamoud now lives in Toronto, where he ekes out a living as a translator and spends his winter evenings huddled next to the heater. ‘If the heater goes down I sit in front of the oven,’ he wrote to me in early 2004. ‘Oh, how I miss peacetime Mog, when we used to play soccer barefoot at the Lido Beach and later share a watermelon and cups of cappuccino.’

This is one man’s story of what happened to Somalia three decades after Gerald Hanley expressed such hopes for the future of a free and independent Africa in Warriors – so long as the liberated peoples resisted the ‘longing to smash it all up when boredom sets in’. Hanley’s optimism, so characteristic of the time, appears misplaced today, while his caution, rooted in real experience, seems prophetic.

The infant democracies born across the continent in the 1960s were quickly strangled when power went to their leaders’ heads. In Somalia, this process accelerated when an elected president was assassinated in 1969 and military chief General Siad Barre stepped into power.

The events of the 1970s onwards tell a hopeless, bloody tale. Somalia’s strategic position at the mouth of the Red Sea attracted the interest of the big powers. Africa’s Horn became a cockpit of the Cold War, with guns supplied in quantities enough to exterminate several generations of local people. First the Communists aided Siad and later, after the Marxist revolution in Addis Ababa in 1974, the United States bankrolled his misrule.

Arbitrary colonial frontiers had divided the Somali peoples and Hanley was among many who supported their right to be united into a single nation. But it was exactly this policy adopted by governments in Mogadishu that became Somalia’s nemesis. The shifta war to claim Kenya’s north-east failed in the 1960s, and then the defeat of Siad Barre’s forces in the Ogaden by the Cuban-backed Ethiopian military in the following decade led to gradual collapse at home. By the 1980s Somalia was bankrupt and political scientists began to speculate on whether it could even function as a modern state. Yet President Ronald Reagan kept on pouring in the weapons, while the United Nations subsidised the dictatorship by turning a blind eye to the massive plunder of humanitarian food deliveries. After the Berlin Wall came down Somalia became what one diplomat described to me as ‘devalued real estate’ and soon enough, the regime imploded.

My mother gave me a tattered old copy of Warriors and Strangers, as it was published in its original form, on the eve of my time in Somalia. Hanley became the prism through which I and the tiny group of foreign journalists and aid workers working in that forgotten country in the early days tried to understand the ‘atmosphere of electric violence … and blood feuds whose origins cannot be remembered, only honoured in the stabbing’.

Since Eland republished the Somalia section Warriors in 1993, I must have given out or had stolen from me at least fifty copies – always the proof of a good book. The truth is that I don’t believe any Somalis I know have read Warriors, or even The Consul at Sunset, Hanley’s masterful novel set in colonial British Somaliland. Perhaps Somalis in the diaspora are reading it now, and they should, because it is among the best three or four books written by foreigners about the country. What Hanley recalls from his times as a young British officer out in the ‘desiccated, bitter, cruel, sun-beaten’ wilderness in the 1940s captures an essence of the people in ways that hold true today like no other account. But it may be that he appeals most to outsiders who find themselves in this most perplexing, alien and dangerous of places. One may recoil in disgust from the Somalis for the cruelty and suffering they inflict upon each other and the catastrophes they bring upon themselves, yet tend to blame on others. At the very same time, you may grow to admire them, as Hanley did, as ‘the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest …’ of people.

At times, his writing reaches a sublime, almost mystical level, whether or not you have set foot in Somalia. The opening riff of Warriors gives me goose pimples to this day: ‘True solitude is when the most restless part of a human being, his longing to forget where he is, born on earth in order to die, comes to rest and listens in a kind of agreed peace …’ A recurring theme of Hanley’s writing is that, in the wilderness, much more dangerous than the violence of the Somalis was the battle a man must wage with his own mind in solitude. Hanley personally knew seven comrades who blew their own brains out. ‘Died on Active Service’, he jokingly called it. After years of Somalia, I finally grew to understand Hanley’s confession that ‘on the whole the years I spent on that silent burning moon did me more harm than good.’ It is important to remember that Hanley spent fourteen months at his post until he was given his first leave. The handful of United Nations staff deployed on the ground in Somalia in 2004 are pulled out for ‘R and R’ after no more than a month.

The civil war of 1991 led to a famine in which 300,000 people are believed to have perished. This occurred because the world did nothing to pull Somalia back from the abyss. Most of the victims were children under five, almost an entire generation of infants across the worst affected areas of south and central Somalia. The situation became so appalling that in the town of Baidoa during the summer months of 1992 we witnessed 400 people being buried daily. The gravediggers were themselves so weak that they were unable to excavate holes deep enough to lay the corpses.

Finally, after ignoring Somalia’s plight, American-led United Nations forces came ashore in Mogadishu in December 1992. They brought bags of food aid, though most of the vulnerable populations had already died, and then the United Nations declared that they had arrived to bring civilisation. If only the development mandarins had read Hanley. Somalia taught him that ‘the varnish of two thousand years is so thin as to be transparent … It is very surprising, and alarming at first, how swiftly it vanishes when threatened by other men.’ International forces swiftly picked a fight with one of the Mogadishu warlords, Mohamed Farah Aydiid, and the development goals were all swept away in a bloody feud that led to the mission’s failure. And so it was that the United Nations peacekeepers, instead of building schools and overseeing democratic elections as they had promised, ended up machine-gunning civilians from helicopters within seven months of their arrival.

Hanley’s criticisms of colonialism hold true today in the age of development politics and ‘nation-building’ – the effort to fix the failed states of the post-Cold War world. I find it highly ironic that Hanley put his greatest confidence in the United Nations. ‘The world will be rearranged, shaken up,’ he tells a fractious old nomad complaining about the vagaries of colonial rule. ‘All will be changed everywhere.’ And the old man replies: ‘I have seen it all change before … You are too young to have seen anything change yet. Change is not always for the good.’ In Africa even today we are still too young, perhaps, to see what changes will bring about good.

For now we must look back at a decade of further international neglect of Somalia since the United Nations mission collapsed and troops evacuated from the very Mogadishu beaches where they had landed eighteen months previously. A few charities and UN staff cling on in various parts of the country, starved of resources from Western governments, much I suppose as the British military administration had to do in the years following the defeat of the Italians. Nearly fourteen years after its collapse Somalia still has no proper government or state institutions, though it has been carved into several unrecognised mini-states. Faction leaders have held fourteen peace initiatives since 1991 yet none of them have introduced a lasting peace. The warlords and their clan militias still hold sway. Business thrives, much of it in contraband, while there are scant signs of ‘progress’. The environment is in critical collapse, there is a total absence of human rights, elder women still infibulate their infant girls, the only hospitals exist thanks to foreign charities and few, if any schools are open other than the madrasas financed by radical Islamist groups. Somalis often express the belief that what has happened to them is a punishment for being bad Muslims. Liberal democracy, I’m afraid, is unlikely to take root any time soon. If pressed, many Somalis will confess that they would like to see the restoration of a strong dictator like Siad Barre – so long as he was from their own clan. And if they could not have such a strongman, then they think perhaps the current controlled chaos is the best solution for their fiercely individualistic outlook on life and constant pursuit of personal ‘justice’. One wonders what Hanley would think of it all. Though I imagine he would be saddened, I don’t believe he would be greatly surprised.

AIDAN HARTLEY
Kenya, 2004

61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL
Email: info@travelbooks.co.uk

Eland was started in 1982 to revive great travel books which had fallen out of print. Although the list soon diversified into biography and fiction, all the titles are chosen for their interest in spirit of place.

One of our readers explained that for him reading an Eland was like listening to an experienced anthropologist at the bar – she’s let her hair down and is telling all the stories that were just too good to go into the textbook. These are books for travellers, and for those who are content to travel in their own minds. They open out our understanding of other cultures, interpret the unknown and reveal different environments as well as celebrating the humour and occasional horrors of travel. We take immense trouble to select only the most readable books and many readers collect the entire series.

Extracts from each and every one of our books can be read on our website, at www.travelbooks.co.uk. If you would like a free copy of our catalogue, please order it from the website, email us or send a postcard.

Copyright

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1971
First published by Eland Publishing Limited
61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 1993
This ebook edition first published in 2012

All rights reserved

Copyright © Estate of Gerald Hanley 1971
Afterword 1993 © Joseph Hone
Afterword 2004 © Aidan Hartley

The right of Gerald Hanley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–1–906011–93–2

Cover Image: The Camel Corps of the King’s African Rifles © MirrorPrintStore 2008