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.
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 6
