Jama wanted to stab the goat and then insert Wabaio deep into the wound, ‘like an arrow would’. I said it was needlessly cruel, and anyway was not a fair test.
‘Cruel?’ he said. ‘Why is it cruel? It is a part of the thing we are doing about the Wabaio, is it not?’
I fell back on the fact that it was not a fair way of testing the poison. The blood carried the poison to the animal’s heart. It was not necessary to put the poison deep into the animal ‘as an arrow would’. The poison smeared on a cut would do, if the poison was any good. It would be the best test of the Wabaio I had so long waited to see made.
This perplexed Jama, and he did not like it. ‘It will not work then,’ he complained. ‘When it does not work that way you will laugh and say the Wabaio is no good. Then you will tell the Somalis, and they will be glad. No, it is not a proper way of doing it.’ He held the bilau, the long sharp Somali dagger in his right hand while the goat, seeing the knife, and knowing its purpose, struggled in the crook of Jama’s left arm.
‘No,’ I said. ‘The Wabaio is good. It killed the dove. I want to see if it will kill the goat in the way I have suggested.’
With a razor-blade we shaved the coarse hair from a square inch of skin on the goat’s shoulder, made a small incision which bled, and Jama then pressed as much of the tarry Wabaio as would cover a teardrop on to the wound. While doing this, he told me of the curious way in which a hunter will test Wabaio made by another. He makes a cut on his inner arm, lets the blood stream down to his wrist, places the tip of the arrow-head, which is freshly poisoned, in the blood at the wrist, and if the poison is good it will race up through the trail of blood (‘you can see it go’) and as it travels ‘it burns up the blood’ until it reaches the cut, across which the hunter has pressed his finger. After such a test the hunter will use it. Bad Wabaio will not race up the blood. It will do nothing.
The goat stiffened, ran backwards, its eyes closed, beat its forefeet on the stone floor for a few seconds, sat on its hindquarters, and then opened its eyes to stare with a sort of sad amazement at us and then fell over dead on its side. From the time Jama had applied the Wabaio it had lived one minute and forty seconds, and Jama was disappointed, while torn by gladness that anyway the Wabaio had worked.
‘It is much swifter than that when it is done as the arrow does it.’
‘But if it will kill an animal when it is smeared on a cut doesn’t that show you it is even stronger than you knew?’
This time it was Jama, and not the white man, who was worried about ‘how long’. I told him that the blood moved like a river and that it had carried the Wabaio to the goat’s heart because of that, but he was unable to decide whether he was relieved because the Wabaio he had made had worked for the sceptical white man, or whether he had not had a real chance to show what it could do ‘as the arrow does it’.
So there it was. A root out of the earth contained a toxin powerful enough to stop an animal’s heart in one minute and forty seconds after it was laid on a small cut made in the animal’s skin. How much stronger is it, I wondered, than the curare of the South American Indians? If that curare could be used as a medicine, why not Wabaio?
I like to believe what Jama told me, that I am the only white man who had seen Wabaio made. But am I? Surely some Italian officer, bored in those wastes, had been invited by the Midgan to see Wabaio made. The Somalis liked the Italians, even if they did not like their rule (a very important distinction about ‘empires’ and ‘occupations’, not always appreciated by the white man up on the hill, who thinks he represents some abstract mystique and not just himself), and there is no reason why the Midgan should not have shown an Italian this curious ritual.
When they heard that the Wabaio was good and that it had killed their goat, the Somalis in the kariya refused to come out, not being willing to be amazed, or discomfited, or convinced. They stayed quietly sullen in the shade and we left them to it, for after all it was their country, and the Midgan were their parasites and their problem, and in some way I had disturbed an accepted fact, unwillingly, but I had done it out of a curiosity awakened by Burton, long dead, while reading one of his books in a troopship.
I never saw Hersi again, that subtle, warm-hearted uncrowned chief of the Midgan. When I next saw the fort of El Lagodei, surrounded by its tatty sun-beaten slum of crumbling huts, he had gone – ‘into politics, Effendi’. What politics? I hoped he would become the leader of his ancient tribe.
The Somali race, the most interesting, the most proud, the most courageous and intelligent, and the most ‘difficult’ of the races of Africa, has gone into politics, for if they don’t others will, in this age of turmoil, and if by some strange chance Hersi should read this (he was always in touch with ‘the West’) I would be happy to have contact with him again.
We put the Wabaio into a special container, and Jama sewed it into a piece of khaki drill (‘a soldier’s colour which Wabaio would like’) and then he stitched about the neck of the receptacle all the gayest colours in wool he could find (plucked from the bright pompoms worn by the Banda of the Italian colonial soldiers, who had taken Wal-Wal for Mussolini when he decided that ancient Rome was right about empires). These colours would keep the Wabaio contented, wherever I might take it in my travels. When it was sewn up in its khaki and decked in its black, yellow and red woollen collar, Jama burned the wood of two different thorn trees, mixed the grey ashes and then, after placing the gay Wabaio container in one of those English cigarette tins which hold fifty cigarettes, packed the mixed ashes tightly about it. Why? Because if one ever carried the Wabaio to territories near the ocean, the poison would ‘turn to water’, melt and be useless. The ashes held a peculiar magic which would prevent that. My white mind guessed that the ashes would absorb the great moisture of the Indian Ocean which washes Somalia’s coast, the great water known to Jama, but who knows? Who knows what magic really is?
When leaving London for India in 1950, I was over-burdened with baggage. So I buried the Wabaio, with nostalgic thoughts for Somalia, three feet deep, in a garden in London, where it now lies, ‘happy’ in its khaki and colours.
Chapter 19
‘ONE MORE FRESH LIME AND WATER before I go back to the ship,’ I suggested to Ali. He agreed and we walked through the crowds back to the Croce del Sud. Perhaps it was the old taste of the swift violent spirit of this land, of the threat of melancholy coming over me, which made me want to leave Mogadishu now. Perhaps it was the memory of the seven suicides I had known personally (there were many more suicides than that), and how many cases of madness and breakdown I had counted up in memory as I had walked these streets with Ali. Fifteen or sixteen of them. People who, if they had never been tried out in that restless threatening country, would be alive today, or would never have cracked in the loneliness that was too much for them. For every one of us there is a situation, a crisis, a place, a commotion, which will force us into what we cannot do, will find us out as lacking, or unable, and most of us spend our whole lives without being trapped in that particular set of circumstances which will break us. You do the wrong uninspired thing, rushed and fearful, a moment’s decision, as the tangle of mess piles up, until there is a moment after which nothing can go right again.
Some of us have been mad without knowing it until later, much later, though the mask may not slip off completely. There may be only a little odd behaviour which hints at the turmoil, the shaking of reason behind. It used to be after the sixth month, on bully beef and biscuits, with tea in which the condensed milk would not dissolve but floated about in sickening lumps, because of the well water; after long and varied threats by the chiefs, strings of killings, the situation aching more angrily every day in the heat, with the possibility of massacre (and your own little, enormous death as well), that the loneliness fell like a wolf on a will here and there. One fine officer, cut off, surrounded by thousands of the warriors of two tribes who were about to fall on each other (and he with his few askaris in the way), tried every
thing he could think of to bring the two sides together, coaxed, pleaded, reasoned, and the two murderous chiefs, knowing that here was an honest, trusting, gentle person who thought only of their good, put on the pressure, each for his own side, and watched the young officer slowly lose his way among their threats. They finally broke him, for he became so obsessed with the need to bring them to peace (without the violence they loved to use, and feared if you used it on them), that he forgot that he was in a jungle full of splendid animals who understood emotion better than reason. The real panic-bringer is to remember that you are absolutely alone, and that you are not sure even that your askaris, if they are of the tribes you are tangled with, will stand by you. But it is the all-out gambling gesture that often saves the day (which is so often your life disguised as duty), the feeling handed out by the gesture that the gesturer will follow his threat or his order right to the end, no matter what it costs.
One day, during operations in the Haud and Ogaden, a subaltern, Steve, promised me that he would outpace the raiders and get round them, driving them down to me about fifty miles south-west of him. He was tougher than his Somalis, for after three days of the forced march in that glare and rock, thirteen of his platoon, the only askaris with him at that time, mutinied, backed off with their rifles and stood in a line fifty yards from him. He had a .303 rifle in his hands, the magazine full but with nothing up the spout. The thirteen askaris, he knew, had full magazines, but with nothing up the spout, and they threatened to shoot him if he did not give in to their demand for a day’s rest. The argument became angry. One of the askaris pulled back the bolt of his rifle (the emotional storms which come down on the desert Somalis are total, blinding, frantic), and this officer held up his hand and they listened.
‘You’ve seen me shoot,’ he said. ‘I’m good, and you know it. I’ll kill five of you before you get me. Five. And I’ve chosen the five. I’m ready. Put down your rifles, or open fire. Take your pick.’ He was a very good shot. It was one of those moments when no mistake can be made, and they knew he was willing to die, but that he would kill five of them before they finished him. The storm of rage collapsed, the moment was gone, and they sought to bargain, but he refused. ‘Ground arms,’ he ordered them, and they grounded arms. With their rage finished they knew they were out of these operations now, anyway, and under arrest. They said they would soldier on if he would forgive them, but he refused their offer. This officer was a gentle, sensitive person, but with a will which nothing could break; no isolation, crises, threats, ever climbed over his cool ability. The Somalis admired him, but it was when it looked to the ringleader of the mutineers that the officer was, unintentionally, tougher than themselves (and the Somali is vain of his staying powers) that they mutinied. That was the only time I ever knew a white man to outlast Somalis in their own geographical hell.
I knew a cynical old Irishman who tried everything he knew with five raving bloodthirsty chiefs (they shake their fists, scream, threaten, if you once let them start), and these chiefs, at loggerheads with each other over the waterholes, were ready to send their tribes against each other. And they had come in to the old officer to frighten him, and each other, and to work up to the point where the meeting would end in hatred and rage. Then they would rush off to their tribes, who were waiting to kill. The five chieftains shouted each other down and then looked at the old Irishman, and he knew he had tried everything and found no solution to the problem of the waterholes, and to the generations of quarrel which had gone before him. He said the first thing that came into his head, gravely, ponderously, and perhaps it was his white hair and his age which gave it the poetic and sagacious weight it had for them.
‘Remember,’ he said, looking into all their eyes in the pause, ‘remember that it is the elephant asleep in the long grass which defeats the greatest men.’ He had no idea what he meant (though he used to invent wonderful, idiotic tribal proverbs), and told me he had said it cynically, out of weariness, exhausted anger, but the chiefs stared at him, exchanged glances with each other, and nodded, went on nodding, and sat down, saying, ‘Let us thrash this matter out again. That is a splendid thing you have said.’
Finn of the big moustache and the dark glasses, in a crumbling fort in the Ogaden one hot, tense night, had talked two chiefs, who hated each other, into signing an agreement not to fight, and their powerful tribes were armed, ready, and he had the paper on the table there in front of them, the purple ink pad beside it ready for the two hard right thumbs of the chiefs to sign their agreement to the peace. He had wooed and coaxed them for hours, sometimes telling them of the millions of troops who were waiting to swarm to the attack, from far south, if their tribes went to war; sometimes reminding them of their age, responsibility, religion, better natures. Then, in the fort behind him, a single pistol shot exploded across his soft voice. The officer representing the ‘millions of troops’ who could be called up into these wastes had just shot himself. The wilderness had used him up at last.
‘Just here,’ said Finn, pointing to the paper, taking the thumb of each staring chief in his big hand and pressing it on the bottom of the agreement. ‘That’ll do for tonight.’ He dismissed them and went back into the fort. The officer was alive, with a bullet hole through his head. He had fired the round from his .38 through his forehead, but he was alive, and talking, from where he lay back on his bed. He told Finn that he had just crashed his truck and was injured, badly injured. ‘Got to get him right out of here,’ Finn decided, ‘for two reasons, to try and save his life, and to keep any of the Somalis from knowing what has happened.’ He drove all night with him across the wilderness towards a fort where he knew there was a doctor, but just before dawn the officer died.
Some characters are made for wilderness and strain and privation, come to their happiest in that dry, sterile loneliness. It is a fact that barren wilderness grows on you far more mysteriously than can any lusher landscape. Often, staring at the rocky horizons far off, at sunset, sitting under a thorn tree while the camels fed and the askaris brewed their tea, I wondered what it was that fascinated one, that captured one in this threatening loneliness. I loved the soft, thin whistle of the evening breeze in the black ant-hollowed bulbs of the thorn trees, the almost friendly groans and howls of the hyenas sneaking round the camp, the monotonous low-voiced arguments of the askaris squatting over the glowing fire, and, despite my weariness of their bloody feuds, I understood the mindless happiness of the Somalis who had known and would know no other life than moving like ants across these wastes. I liked to squat with them and drink the cold salty camel milk, their eager eyes watching to see if you enjoyed this particular milk (for camel milk has a thousand tastes for these desert experts), and to listen to them tell me the histories of their tribes. I enjoyed sitting back and hearing them argue a point, about divorce, about punishment, about the abilities of one kind of camel against another, about the true, severe shariat law of ancient Muslim times compared with the milk and water law which was allowed now.
Frightened of nothing on earth, willing to try anything anywhere, the Somali is never over-impressed by what he sees in the West, and they are great travellers. If he sees New York, or London, or Paris, the sight of these places with their superb machinery in no way diminishes his love of his desert home. He will go back there one day and wander with camels again. Once, in as blasted, dried-out and stark a piece of scenery as I ever sighted in Somalia I met a tall lean Somali who spoke to me in American. He had lived in America, after sailing the world as a stoker, and had been a cocktail barman in Baltimore for some years. He spoke of it casually, even contemptuously, as just something that had happened to happen to him. This was Jibreel, Willie Ritchie’s interpreter. He was glad to be back here, with nothing except a piece of cloth round his loins, a knife and some camels. Like the two stowaways at Bosaso, who had survived the sharks on the plank so thoughtfully thrown after them into the sea, this Somali who had shaken cocktails in Baltimore, who had seen all the things so many millions s
igh for in the West, saw it all as mere happenings, mere pictures walked through and seen with the eyes. As avaricious as can be, about camels and money, the Somali is never blinded, like the Bantu, by the big show, the white man’s ‘magic’ and power. And they are obsessed about their rights, and about justice. Anyone who has commanded Somali troops, and lived with them for a long time in the field, sieved and shredded thousands of complaints brought to him by Somalis, dealt with their delicate prides and vanities wounded by some feather of unintended injustice, can put up with almost anything afterwards, even himself. But they only fret and nag for kit or equipment, or some luxury like sweet pepper, if they know it is there somewhere, to be had, within arguable reach. If they know it is unobtainable they will wait until they are near it and it is gettable, and then cry for justice.
I could never hear the word ‘ghee’ (subuk) for years after Somalia without a tightening up of the whole nervous system. They used to cook their food in ghee, clarified butter, and when the ration ran out in the bush and I knew we would get no more, perhaps for months, I used to drag the rags of my will together and get ready for months of anguish about ghee. Like white troops without cigarettes, they talked about the ghee all day and night, but unlike white troops, held conferences about it, drew up statements, compiled measurements of the ghee they had not had, and must expect from me when the time of ghee came again, and some of them would come trembling with fury to me about the ghee, after having worked each other up over the camp-fire.
‘There is no ghee here, or for hundreds of miles,’ I screamed one night at them, a deputation who had not even got a word out of their mouths before my scream, and they were convulsed with laughter, and I laughed with them, and it passed off in further laughter. But the next day they came again, the corporal sternly holding up his hand to silence any scream from me before they had said their piece, about the ghee. I once threw a ghee party after some operations in the Nogal, throwing the ghee about with a wild carelessness, having crookedly managed to get far more than I was entitled to on the ration scale, and the askaris ran about with their huge ghee issues in four gallon petrol tins in such a state of childish delight it was almost pitiful.
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 15
