‘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 h
ad 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.
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 11
