Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  When the war was over I went back to Somalia but I never found Mohamed again, though I sent messages right through the Mudugh and the Nogal. He had vanished.

  I never found Ahamed Hussein again either, the brilliant linguist, expert corporal, all round mixer and subtle handler of varied problems. He too had vanished into the two hundred and fifty thousand square miles which had been our parish.

  Like all Somalis, Ahamed had had no feeling of inferiority, no complex about being black, no worry about proving anything to the white man. All Somalis stroll up to you to talk. They do not hesitate or straighten themselves, or look haunted by any doubt as they approach a white man. They treat you like a Muslim, a brother. The rest is with you.

  Ahamed was of a holy tribe called the Shekál. No one must ever attack or raid this holy tribe. There are two Shekál groups, one in the Ogaden, and one down south on the way to the Juba river. They are respected by even the most rapacious camel collectors.

  Superbly intelligent, witty, philosophic, Ahamed never moaned when we were in difficulties, say, marooned for a couple of days in a rare flood when the rains exploded up in Abyssinia’s foothills and sent brief raging rivers coursing down dried-out dongas far south in Somalia, or isolated for months in some God-forsaken litter of hot rocks and burning sand. Since his country’s independence I have always hoped to come across his name as a member of the Somali government, for that is where he should be. He had compassion, firmness, sensitivity, a marvellous character. How strong this character was I was able to understand in 1947 when the Somali Youth League was becoming a great and vital force all over Somalia.

  It was then astonishing to sit and listen to a Somali deny that he was a member of anything called a tribe, and to hear him acclaim that he was a Somali only, and that there was only one Somali race, and that there were no more tribes which had separated men and had made them enemies. While it made administration as we had known it, and still had to make it, impossible, it was wonderful to see this new movement among a race to whom tribalism had become a curse.

  It was a part of the great stirring of all the peoples of Asia and Africa, set in motion by Gandhi and hastened by the Japanese army. Nothing can stop it now, luckily, and I have always counted myself as lucky to live in a time which saw this tremendous revolution, when even the coolie decided it was time to see what he could do outside the shafts of his rickshaw.

  The Somalis wanted freedom too, and it was an Englishman who set the idea of the Somali Youth League in motion, and it was strange and exhilarating to see the speed with which the idea raced across the Somali wilderness, reaching the farthest primitive nomads behind their camels and giving the young men something to feel about beyond the length of their spears.

  The askaris were not supposed to take part in this feverish movement, but they did, quietly. They had to, but Ahamed Hussein would not join, much as he believed in the movement. He said he would join it as soon as he was out of his uniform. He would join then because he was ready to do so, on his own decision, but he would not do so now, in uniform, when he was being threatened if he refused. Askaris told me that ‘they’ would kill Ahamed Hussein if he went on refusing to join.

  We were in a lonely little town on the edge of the deserts, a straggle of white buildings strewn along the coast and dribbling into the warm, blue Indian Ocean.

  ‘They’ broke his jaw one night, while trying to kill him. They looked upon him as a person of importance and felt that his refusal to join the League would in some way discredit it.

  Ahamed used to sleep in a room on the edge of the barrack area. In those areas you sleep lightly, especially if you have slept for years under the stars in places where it pays to wake quickly, and Ahamed told me that something, he did not know what, caused him to turn quickly in his sleep and jump off the bed. He swore he had heard no noise. As he turned over and moved off the bed an iron bar smashed down and caught him on the edge of his jaw and neck. Had he not moved it would certainly have broken his skull. He went for the attackers in the darkness but they got away. I bound up his jaw and sent for ‘them’. ‘They’ in no way represented the best of the League, but were old men who were trying to cash in on the new movement which was taking the youth away from their old and bloody hands. I knew the old man behind this violent determination to enlist every askari into the League. But I could prove nothing, and Ahamed told him he would still not join the League.

  Several times I had told Ahamed he should join the League, for soon Somalia would be free anyway, but he had always refused, and now he refused again, and refused the offer of a transfer to Mogadishu which I offered to arrange for him. Young members of the League came in to see me and to apologise for what had happened to Ahamed, swearing that they had had nothing to do with it. But they told me that the old men were trying to keep control of the League, old men who had sworn when the League first appeared that they would forbid it to function because it denied a man’s most precious possession, his tribe.

  ‘It will take years for men here to forget their knives and spears, Effendi,’ Ahamed told me. ‘They were stupid to want to kill me. They still think that killing changes things.’ He used to laugh at my perplexity caused by the impossibility of trying cases when the accused would not divulge their tribal status to me. The League almost brought administration of justice to a standstill. And it could be very funny too.

  I remember one old hardened bandit in his turban and loincloth, a man who could lift your clothes off without your knowing it, so able was he as a thief, laying his withered old claws on his chest in the court and saying cynically to me, ‘Tribe? My tribe? I have no tribe. I am a Somali.’ The whole court shook with laughter, for many could remember how those claws were often pressed against the lean chest when the old man had screamed the name of his tribe in pride, before the League came. The old man had to join in the laughter himself, unable to contain it. He went on refusing to name his tribe.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll put you down as a Rahanwein tribe,’ naming one of the ‘slave tribes’ of the river Juba, knowing this would incense him.

  ‘I am not of that tribe,’ he screeched across the court, again joining in the laughter. ‘I am not of a slave tribe.’

  ‘How do I know that?’ I said. ‘I’ve got to put you down as some tribe so it’s going to be one of the Rahanwein.’ Because of the nature of the case I had to have him declare his tribe. He lost his temper, forgot his plan, and screamed the name of the tribe across the court at me, and then stared round him as everybody in the room howled with laughter. I had to close the court for the day.

  Genuine members of the League I eventually allowed the right to refuse to give their tribe names. This rallying to the League in that great wilderness, among such tribally obsessed people, was one of the most wonderful things to witness (and yet, that sentimental reverence I had for tradition silently mourned).

  The League ran an administration of its own, preparing for self-government. It was touching to see the young men trying so hard to put an end to the tribal strife which had been their curse for so long. But I could not believe that that marvellous fervour could last, and the pride with which the three police askaris in Mogadishu twenty years later told me their tribes made me think that it must have been easier to stick to tribalism. The blood feuds of tribalism have been their curse, and the blood price, diyya, which must be paid in camels.

  When it was time for me to throw aside my uniform and leave Somalia behind, I asked Ahamed Hussein what he would do with his life. He said he would go back to his tribe and the camels. He spoke four languages fluently, could read and write them perfectly, and could have gone far in many a career away from his desert, but he was going back to that lonely life of the nomad. Perhaps this is a real strength in the Somali. He does not think there is anything discreditable in being a member of his primitive living group. They do not have the sad longing of the Bantu and the white men for a collar and tie and a desk, yet it will be the Bantu who will soften a
nd civilise Africa, because he longs for comfort and ease. The Somali never surrenders to the armchair or the big house. In fact, in the small Italian settlements in southern Somalia when the Italian army was collapsing in 1941, I noticed how the nomads who broke into the big cool Italian houses used to shit exactly in the centre of every room, and then leave. I have never come across this strange form of savage wit anywhere else. The Somalis swore that the Abyssinian deserters from Italian units were doing it, when I asked them the reason for this custom with its almost mathematical care for the placing of insult.

  I went after some of these marauding Abyssinians when hunting down a band of them who had broken into an Italian house where an Italian woman was alone with her children. They had thrown hand grenades into the lonely house, then broke in and had smashed in a beautiful little girl’s face so horribly that I had to go out to vomit after seeing her. One of them had done this with a club. The mother, whose husband was a prisoner-of-war, was out of her mind, holding the silent, stupefied child in her arms. Well armed, some of these Abyssinians liked to fight it out when they were tracked down in the bush. Italian East Africa was a place of turmoil during the time of the Italian defeat, and rough justice of all kinds was dealt out on all sides, and, much as one had an understanding for Abyssinian sentiments towards the Italians who had invaded their country, I found I did not wish to extend it to the animal who had destroyed the child’s face when we ran the raiders to earth one night in the bush.

  There were more pathetic Abyssinians than these armed bandits, men who had been rounded up in Addis Ababa after the attempt there on Graziani’s life. Some of them were in terrible physical straits, many of them being unable to hold down food which was given to them, and these I looked after in a disused barracks for some weeks until I could get transport to start them on the first move of their long way home.

  I asked Ahamed what he thought of Abyssinians. ‘There are always too many flies about where Abyssinians camp,’ he said.

  The Abyssinians liked to hang strips of raw meat in their barrack rooms. They liked it high, and raw, and the flies swarmed. I recruited some of the healthy Abyssinians as askaris and fought a losing battle against the raw meat in the barrack rooms. In the bush it never mattered. When I armed them and lined them up in threes for their first march into a deserted Italian barracks the right hand man at the head of the marching unit broke ranks, ran a few paces ahead, raised his rifle and began to leap in the air and declaim in Amharic, and the troops answered him in fierce shouts. This was a custom allowed them in the Italian army and I was sorry when I had to forbid it as it seemed a sensible way of dealing with the boredom of long marches. The Italians seemed to me to have been very understanding in the way they tended to allow colonial troops to retain some colour in their lives. The British tend to flatten everything out into a disciplined sameness which gets on the nerves of exuberant peoples, though it pays off in action.

  ‘It is not fair,’ a Somali chief shouted at me when we made him and his raiders prisoner one night at a waterhole he was sure we would never reach. ‘It’s not right that officers like you should be running across country like this, and in ragged clothes too, standing to eat your meals out of a tin with a fork, and behaving like us instead of officers. The Italians never did this. It is not right and it isn’t fair. Why don’t you behave like officers, like the Italians used to?’

  This old chief spoke good Italian and had received a medal and a rank from the Italians for his loyalty during their war in Abyssinia, and he tried hard to convince me of the ungentlemanly and improper life we officers were living in Somalia. ‘We cannot have a proper respect for you,’ he said again and again, fretfully, querulously.

  He asked me what the whole war was about anyway, and I can remember sitting by the waterhole that night and wondering how it was that the war I had joined because it was against fascism had landed me in ragged shorts and shirts in a geography like the moon where fascism had vanished like a thin mist and the war had rolled far away into distant silences.

  It was an interesting conversation we had beside that waterhole, for I learned for the first time how world news penetrated to these nomads, and how much it interested them. They hungered for and cherished news from the outside world, and the best of it seemed to come from Arab dhow captains on the coast far away. They were very much interested in the future of Palestine, and the old chief liked to hark back to the days of the Turkish empire. The average Somali, I found, had more of an idea of the shape and extent of the world outside Africa than had the Bantu in the bush of Kenya. This may have been because they regarded themselves as a part of Islam, an ancient empire, whereas the Bantu remembered nothing equivalent, though they too had a long but now forgotten past.

  The old chief asked me to tell him about Hitler and Mussolini. His summing up on various white races was interesting. German and British rifles were excellent, finely and strongly made. Belgian rifles (from the old Ethiopian army), which could be found among the tribes where the Ogaden met Abyssinia were good too, but Italian rifles when compared with the others were cheap and poorly made. ‘As soon as I realised this,’ he told me, ‘I began to worry, for I knew that the Italians must lose, and my pension would go with them. What are you going to do about my pension, Signor Capitano?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, regretfully. ‘I am going to arrest you for raiding and stealing camels, for now. Years from now, when the war is over, you will be able to go into the matter of your pension. I will make a note of it on your papers when you are tried.’

  ‘Will the Italians come back here when you have gone from here?’ he asked me.

  ‘If you want them back they’ll come back,’ I told him. ‘There is a thing called the United Nations, and one day you will all be able to tell them your story. The world will be rearranged, shaken up. All will be changed everywhere.’

  ‘I have seen it all change before,’ the old chief said to me bitterly. ‘You are too young to have seen anything change yet. Change is not always for the good.’

  ‘It depends on who and what you are,’ I told him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It does, and it does not pay to lose, either. I had honour under the Italians, and now I am a prisoner. That is what change has done to me. And you still haven’t explained to me why the white men are all fighting.’

  ‘That,’ I said, ‘goes back for about two thousand years. È un abitudine adesso.’

  ‘War is all right,’ this old embittered warrior said. ‘But it is good to know what the war is for. White men do not seem to know why they fight. We Somalis fight for camels, and here you are chasing us about and annoying us for doing it, while you, the white men are fighting all over the world. Do you expect us to understand that kind of thing?’

  ‘No,’ I told him.

  ‘Men fight for power and honour,’ he said. ‘That is why they fight, no matter what they say. You win or you lose. Do they feed you well in a prison?’

  ‘Quite well.’

  He got up and brushed the red dust off his lungi. ‘Remember what I have said, Signor Capitano,’ he finished. ‘Dress like an officer, and behave like one. Stop this running about in the bush. I cannot respect you for this kind of behaviour. May I sleep now or are you going to start walking back to your fort at this hour of the night?’

  I had many conversations with this chief while he was a prisoner. He finally admitted to me that he was tired of tribal fighting and only wished there could be a Somalia in which old men could live in peace. I hope he has it now.

  Chapter 22

  ‘WHEN THE EUROPEANS go from Kenya,’ Ali said, ‘what will happen to the Somalis who live there? They will not live under Kikuyu, rule. They will refuse.’

  I told him I did not know what would happen to all the Somalis in Kenya, but I agreed with him that it was unlikely they would be willing to live under what he called ‘Kikuyu rule’.

  Africa is like an enormous Europe, full of people of one colour, but who differ like Swedes and Sp
aniards, Greeks and French, Czechs and Italians.

  The Somalis, whether they live in the place still called French Somaliland, or what was British and Italian Somaliland, and in the Ogaden which is now ruled by Ethiopia, and in the Somali country of northern Kenya, are all one race with one language and one religion and one way of life, and eventually they must all unite as the pencil lines drawn by European powers on the African map a century or so ago blur and vanish.

  I had once tried hard to get the Somalis to give up their contempt for Bantu people, at a time when we had Nyasa soldiers in the scattered garrisons of the Somali moonscape. But they broke the hearts of the softer Bantu soldiers.

  ‘We cannot obey slaves,’ Somalis told me. ‘It is impossible for us to live under slave people even when they are in uniform and have arms.’

  ‘We cannot go on living here among these people,’ a Nyasa askari had cried hysterically at me. He was charged with causing a riot in a coffee shop in one of the more sun-blasted of the desert outposts. ‘They despise us, they sneer at us, they hate us,’ the Nyasa told me. I knew all this but could not change the Somali feeling of superiority over these chunky black people from the lush south, nor wipe out the memory they had of a time when these Bantu people were slave material for the Muslim world to the north. That was the trouble, the curse of race, looks, noses, lips, eyes, legends. Colour has little to do with it.

  They liked to taunt the Bantu askaris, and the Bantu innocence had little chance against the sharp, splintered wit of the nomad Somalis. Fights were frequent, and the unhappy Nyasas pined for home. They also had the misfortune not to be able to go long without water compared with Somali askaris, and the Somalis used to enjoy baiting them about this, especially on long patrols in the fierce heat.

  But the average Nyasa soldier had a staunchness of personality which took a lot to bend and break it, and the Somalis, and their wilderness, were able to do it in the end.