Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  ‘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 finis
hed, 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 d
esert 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?’