Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  If you have the patience and use the slow, steady drip technique, keep your temper, stick to your points, and never let yourself be rushed, you can beat a Somali in argument. I have never known a Somali to admit he was wrong, once he has taken up his position, but I have managed to exhaust quite a few, when it mattered. And I have crawled away, completely worn out, after many a bout with the chiefs on the finer points of justice.

  You develop manias in the bush after a time, various manias which may last for some weeks on end. I once worked up a mania about rags being used as plugs in the ends of rifle barrels. I used to tell the askaris how this made the barrel ‘sweat’ and damaged the rifling, and how in other ways it was unsoldierly and dangerous, even if it did keep the desert dust out of the barrel. I went on about this until there was only one askari left in the unit who still sneaked a rag plug into his rifle muzzle when on the march. One day I sent a patrol out and this askari was one of the number. He was carried back a few days later with his right eye missing and a good deal of the bone of his right cheek as well. He must have been in terrible pain when I stood over him and had a look at the frightful wound. I knew what had done it but said nothing. It could wait, but the askari started on it right away.

  ‘You think it was a rag in the end of the rifle muzzle, don’t you, Effendi?’ he said. The other askaris standing round the bed smiled and looked at me to see what I would do with the possibilities in this piece of brazen nerve.

  ‘I didn’t say anything about any rag,’ I said innocently.

  ‘There was no rag in the rifle muzzle,’ the askari said sternly. ‘I don’t want you to think that. When I opened fire there was this explosion and now my eye is gone. It’s going to cost the army a lot of money.’

  ‘The bullet blew the bolt out into your eye, didn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t make the rifle or the bullet,’ he said. ‘It’s your rifle and I know nothing about what made it knock my eye out – ’ The corporal of the patrol came in then with the smashed rifle and showed me the split muzzle, the shattered breechwork, and it was quite obvious to all of us that there had been a plug in the muzzle, forgotten in excitement until the explosion and the tragic wounding. The corporal told me that the askari had already admitted he had had a plug in the muzzle when he had fired, but had said he was determined never to admit it to me.

  ‘Lies,’ the askari moaned on the bed. ‘Lies, lies.’ All the askaris laughed.

  ‘I’m sorry about your eye,’ I said. ‘We’ll get you down to Mogadishu as quickly as possible.’ He was a fine looking, healthy Mijertein tribesman but he was not in any way upset about the pain and disfigurement he had suffered, only about being right.

  He called me as the truck carrying him to Mogadishu crashed into gear, gripped my wrist and stared into my eyes with his one splendid eye.

  ‘Don’t believe the corporal or the others,’ he said to me. ‘They’re all against me in this. There was no plug in the rifle. You told me never to use one, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Haven’t I always been an obedient askari?’

  ‘Always,’ I said, ‘except for that plug in your rifle.’ He turned his face away, disgusted, weary of me and the whole effort of the miserable business. The other askaris, like hawks about the truck, listening to this final passage, looked sharply at each other as the truck drove away and left us there in the sand outside the fort.

  ‘You won there,’ the corporal said to me.

  ‘It’s not a question of winning,’ I said. ‘It’s a question of discipline.’ (A lie. It was a question of winning.)

  ‘No, but you won. You beat him. You got him right down there with that last bit. He thought you were going to give in. But you won.’

  ‘And he was a good liar too,’ an askari said, thoughtful and admiring.

  Chapter 20

  ALL DURING THE WALK through the town, and while Ali and I sat for the last fresh lime and water in front of the Croce del Sud, I had been watching for faces, for the face of Mohamed Saad, Ahamed Hussein, Hersi, Elmi, just in case they should happen to be in their capital, Hamar by the sea, but I did not see one face I recognised. And they did not belong here anyway, among the smells and the thieves and the town men who had forgotten their tribes, who did not know who they were anymore.

  I brought a savage here once to this town, a fierce, impetuous youth whose parents had been killed near El Wak during the fighting; El Wak, a blinding sheet of white rock away up in the north where Kenya meets Somalia and Abyssinia. He had come quietly to the convoy in the warm darkness and stood over me where I lay on a blanket, smoking and watching for the moon. He had six bottles of Italian Aranciata, green conical bottles wrapped in a dirty cloth. He knelt down and showed me one.

  ‘You want that?’ he said in a low, urgent voice. Want it? I nearly tore his hand off grabbing it. I had the top off in a couple of seconds and poured the delicious cold fruit drink down my throat.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked him. It was magical, this production of cold fruit drinks in the middle of the wilderness after days of dazzling heat over those rocks. ‘More.’ He handed me another bottle. ‘You got it from an Italian army dump,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘This is the last of it,’ he said, coyly revealing the other four bottles. I gave him two shillings for the four bottles and he gripped the money in his narrow black fists and said, ‘I’ll work for you. Take me with you.’ He spoke good army-type Swahili.

  ‘Impossible. What is your tribe?’

  ‘I am a Garrei,’ he said, and he looked it, black face like a ferocious eagle, two enormous black eyes, and a shock of woolly black hair that you could have filled two cushions with. He was about fifteen. All he had on him was a piece of white cloth round his loins and a long dagger. He was ready to go anywhere, tomorrow, now.

  The Garrei are even harder, fiercer, more emotional than the Somalis (to whom they are related through the Hawiya tribal group), but this lad, Mohamed, was like a quivering black harp which burst into flames during emotional stress. He turned out to be the most savage, hysterical, loyal and dangerous human being I ever had with me in the bush. If he felt rage he acted upon it at once, with a knife, or with his nails and teeth; if he felt generous he gave everything away in sight, most of it yours. He stole, lied, made many enemies.

  I should not have taken him with me from his own hell-home of El Wak, and I refused to do so, though weakly after long argument with him, but he stowed away in the convoy before dawn and it was five hundred miles afterwards that he showed himself, with his big burning, serious eyes.

  ‘I have done it,’ he said. ‘I have come with you. Thank you. I will serve you. I have always wished to travel and now I am travelling.’

  ‘It will not be like you imagine,’ I said. ‘Your life with me. You think it will be in houses in towns, but it will be like your own life, safari, safari, safari, on rock and in thorns. You will be sorry you have come, but it will be too late. It is too late now. When will you see your home again?’ Among the Somalis he was like a Swede trying to be a Greek in Greece, and it was impossible.

  ‘Some day,’ he said. That was savage freedom, for a boy to jump on a truck and disappear, perhaps forever, without needing to run and ask his elders, without knowing where he was going, or how he would live, or even what he would earn. He just wanted to go and he had gone. The next day he stabbed an askari who upset him, and the askaris took hold of him and beat him until he fell down unconscious. Then he came to me to report, after the stabbed askari had shown me the knife wound through his shoulder.

  ‘Give me your knife,’ I said. He was shaking with anger, his big eyes devouring the askari’s face, as if he wanted to kill him right there. He hesitated about giving me the knife.

  ‘I must speak,’ he said. ‘I have a right to speak.’

  ‘You stabbed before you spoke. Give me that knife.’ He handed me the knife and I turned with it and threw it far and high and we watched it fall into
the thick grey thorn bush.

  ‘If I ever see you with a knife again, without my permission,’ I told him, ‘I’ll beat you myself, with a whip. Do you hear that? And then I’ll take you a hundred miles from wherever we are and I’ll drop you in the bush, naked. I’ll leave you with nothing. Have you heard that, and believed it? Do you still want to work with me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And remember about the knife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then finish. The shauri is finished. The askaris flogged you. Next time I will do it.’

  ‘He insulted me – ’ Mohamed began.

  ‘I don’t want to hear now what happened. You used your knife. That cancels all your case for me. No more talk. Finish.’

  In the camp, among the Somalis and Abyssinians he was a complete stranger, and they jeered and laughed at his strange efforts to talk their languages. A true savage has never had to control his angers and appreciations. He has never had to keep silent when in the wrong, never had to hold back when insulted, never had to behave in stages of childhood, boyhood, manhood. Mohamed was a headlong type, who screamed aloud with fury when upset, and the askaris goaded him, and it looked as if he might have to learn to control himself. But I cursed the night he came with that Aranciata and attached himself to my caravan.

  I stopped the convoy half a mile out of Mogadishu so as to wash and change into a clean bush shirt and shorts, and we could see the white flashing buildings below us on the edge of the Indian Ocean, glittering silver and blue water with a horizon flatter than even Mohamed had ever seen. He was standing, as if in fear, his head forward, staring in unbelief at the ocean and the buildings. And the askaris were watching him and laughing. He had never seen anything like it in his life before, and there was no doubt that it scared him, all of it.

  ‘The water is moving,’ he said to me, not taking his eyes off it. ‘It’s like milk boiling.’ He was watching the surf swell and burst on the rocks far off in snowy foam, and the surge of the ocean catching the golden sun, and to him it looked as if the whole safe universe was in motion.

  ‘Let’s take him down to see and feel the water,’ I said to the askaris. We piled into the trucks and drove hard until we came round Mogadishu and I stopped my truck not far from the waves. The sharp, salty, almost rotten, bitter stench of the Indian Ocean filled the nostrils, and when Mohamed got down off his truck he was paralysed, rooted there in the sand and trembling from head to foot as he watched and listened to the great tumult of the ocean rolling to him. He had never visualised anything like it and he could not speak. Even the askaris were silent as they watched him study it all with his rolling, worried eyes. It was a most solemn moment.

  ‘What’s the matter with it?’ he said to me. ‘What’s it for? Why does it smell like that? Where does it go to? Is it boiling?’ He could hardly speak with fear and wonder.

  ‘There’s a big fire under it and it’s boiling,’ one of the askaris said, and all the others laughed at Mohamed and took pleasure in their worldliness and knowledge, but for me it was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had, seeing a desert savage shivering in front of the ocean for the first time, as if expecting the ground to melt and swallow him up at any moment. We must all have been like that once, in a time of thunder or storm, a million years ago in innocence.

  He was silent for hours afterwards, looking almost crushed by the experience he had had. But that very evening he vanished into the town and I warned police patrols to watch out for him.

  They found him in a mosque arguing with an old man who was threatening to have him hanged unless he took his savage self off the premises. He had been chased there by a crowd of Somalis with whom he had begun a quarrel, God knows what about.

  As a Garrei, Mohamed thought of himself as the bravest, cleverest, noblest human being alive, and he took a great interest in fighting with the Somalis, whom he had said he hated.

  ‘It’ll be easier to handle in the bush, all this,’ I thought. Had there been a convoy travelling back the thousand miles to his home I would have put him on it, under guard, and yet I knew that in the bush, in trouble, he would be good, headlong, and perhaps might become tamed enough for him to enjoy his new life.

  I had to go after some raiders on the other side of the Webi Shabeli shortly after arriving in Mogadishu, and I was given a gogli, a guide and messenger who knew that country and all the elephant herds in it like he knew the back of his hard slender black hands. This was Ibrahim, a tall, grave man, the finest looking human being I have ever met, and the most fearless. He once brought me two killers through moving herds of elephants, in darkness, and laughed while we went over the incidents. He had had to run, the two murderers tied to his left wrist, between the screaming elephants whom he had disturbed, with the murderers trying to bite through their bonds as they stumbled in fear beside him.

  Ibrahim was the only person I ever knew to frighten Mohamed, who challenged Ibrahim to fight after the older man had rebuked him for impudence. He seized Mohamed, lifted him high in the air, and hurled him into a clump of thorns, and then went after him and seizing him again, dragged him through the thorns by his ankles. Mohamed, bleeding and humiliated, got up to fight again, with his nails and teeth, but Ibrahim flung him back into the thorns. I heard the high shouts of rage and the threatening cries from my camp under some thorn trees, and Ibrahim came, dragging Mohamed through the sand by one foot. He left him at my feet, saying, ‘Unless this one can be restrained, Effendi, a man will kill him outright. He has the tongue of a snake. I have not met one like him before. I have had to be hard with him. I would kill a man for less than this snake said to me, but he is your servant and I merely chastised him, for his sake and ours. I have presumed, I know, but I could not help it.’

  ‘What have you to say, Mohamed?’ I asked the lad, who was glowering at the whole world and wiping his body which was criss-crossed by long white and bleeding scratches.

  ‘I was wrong,’ he said. ‘And then he was wrong. He has threatened to kill me. What do you think of that? Would you let him kill me?’ It was his admission to being wrong which astonished me. I had never expected to hear that from him.

  ‘So you were wrong, were you? You admit you were wrong?’

  ‘I could not help being wrong. These people want to treat me like a slave. I am no slave. I am of a fighting race. I am a Garrei. I cannot be expected to put up with the insults I am treated to by all these people.’

  ‘But you admit you were in the wrong this time? That is good, to say that.’

  ‘I say it because I know this man will kill me unless I say it. He said so. He will stab me in the back some night. I know these people.’

  ‘Don’t you know Ibrahim is an official, a man of learning and years of experience who cannot be expected to stand by and listen to a boy insult him? I tell you you will get killed here if you go on like this, and I want you to live, and to learn. You must control your temper, or you will be killed.’

  ‘I will try again,’ Mohamed said, scowling at Ibrahim. ‘I will shut my mouth, even when I am insulted, if that is what you want.’

  ‘The shauri is finished,’ I said.

  Then Mohamed went down with malaria, the shattering illness which the Webi Shabeli gives generously to all who linger by its brown flood and its gloomy thickets. All the askaris rallied to save the savage, their goad, their whipping boy. It looked as if Mohamed would die at one time, for he had the shakes so badly that you could feel the heat coming off his wet skin in waves. On the morning he came out of his delirium and was lying in that post-malaria state when you feel like a twisted, wrung-out steaming towel, light in the head and quite careless about dying (in fact it would be a pleasure), Mohamed sent for me.

  ‘I have not died,’ he said when I sat down on the floor beside the straw mat on which he lay.

  ‘No, you are alive,’ I said. ‘Wallahi.’

  ‘Ibrahim brought fruit to me.’ He peered into my eyes as he went on, ‘Is that a good thing, to br
ing fruit to your enemy? I do not understand that kind of thing. What am I to make of it? What is the meaning of it?’

  ‘It means,’ I said, ‘that Ibrahim has accepted other customs than the old ones, of killing and revenge, and never forgiving or forgetting. When I am angry with you I am angry with you, and then it is finished. I do not go on punishing or shouting, do I? The anger is only for that time, for that particular time when you have caused some trouble through losing your head. The anger is not for always. It is finished, forgotten. We begin again immediately afterwards. That is what Ibrahim has done. He is a man, a man who could kill, but does not. Open your thick skull, Mohamed, and understand. Let your akili, your intelligence, show you what is simple. You have no enemy if you refuse to have one, and Ibrahim is like that. He is a true man. Have you understood that?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I understand your angers when I have been foolish, and your forgetting of them, because you are a white man and have no time for remembering these things. You have the rations, the drill, the patrols, the bundles of papers to write on, the looking after of the askaris and the remembering of all the things that have to be done, with the corporals and the sergeant listening to you. But I cannot understand my enemy, a black man like myself, coming with fruit when we have made enemies of each other. I would not eat his fruit. I gave it to the old woman who sweeps the camp.’ He sat up, his teeth bared, ‘And I will never eat his fruit, or the fruit of any man like him. That is my custom.’

  ‘You are only a boy, and a stupid boy,’ I told him sternly, trying not to laugh aloud. ‘But God will give you wisdom one day and you will look for friends and not enemies.’