Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  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 Afri
ca, 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?