Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  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 serie
s 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.’