Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  – I got off a rusty little boat at a nowhere town called Abu Dom, all because I’d met a young Sudanese official on board who was connected with the NAO. That was the Native Administration Ordinance which the British had set up as a way of keeping the dozens of different tribes, with their conflicting migratory traditions and ancient rivalries, in some sort of harmony. In fact it was a scheme that worked quite well and depended on power being given back to local leaders such as nazirs and omdas. This fellow I met on the boat was some sort of policeman. He had been on an official mission downstream and was badly delayed in his home village by a wedding or a circumcision or other vital ceremony. So there he was, due back in Omdurman in ten days with getting on for seven hundred river miles to cover. At our rate of progress it would have taken him a month because the steamer’s boilers kept leaking. He proposed we went overland from Abu Dom to Omdurman, which would have been about a hundred and eighty miles because it cut off a great loop of river. Since he was hoping to arrange for us to travel with a caravan, and since he said we ought to do it in little more than a week, I volunteered to join him. He explained it was a route that was fairly frequently travelled, unlike most other desert routes, and we might even strike lucky and get a lift on a Citroën half-track or something like that.

  – Well, we didn’t, and retrospectively I’m glad we didn’t. We found ourselves with a group of Kababish – I forget now which tribe they were. Nurab? That rings a bell. They were taking camels to sell in Khartoum, about two hundred head. It was an astonishing journey and hellishly tough since I’d never sat on a camel before. Twelve hours’ slogging by day, riding or else walking when the going was too soft. I’d fancied until then that I was getting on reasonably well in Arabic, but I was floored by the dialect they were speaking. Not only was their accent peculiar but half their words referred to parts of camels or species of bush or qualities of sand. It certainly resembled no language that would get you by in the back streets of Suez.

  – The thirst was awful. Just when you thought you would die they stopped and brewed up scalding sweet tea and stuff called kisri that I’ve never forgotten. It was a kind of primitive polenta, but don’t confuse it with our polenta here. Ours is either maize flour or chestnut flour and liberally covered with ragú sauce. Theirs was made of millet, and I think it was rotten millet at that: rancid and bitter. If you were lucky they put a dab of goat butter on it. At night you slept on skins in the lee of the camels which hunkered down on their knees in the sand. It was mortally cold, so cold you couldn’t sleep properly. Besides, there were always people astir. They set watches and patrolled all the time because they were terrified of being caught asleep by camel rustlers from other tribes. I’m not sure the Kababish ever did go to sleep completely.

  – I can’t now remember exactly how many days it took us. It seemed to last for a period impossible to measure by ordinary means. I have always thought of it as being ten days and I expect that is about right. In all that time we passed one oasis with a village, if you could call it a village. Four or five cane huts with straw roofs. There was a well there and even an umbasha, a sort of police corporal, so it was practically a township. I saw into one of the huts and there was almost nothing in it. A carpet, a rope bed, some pots and hangings. Nothing that couldn’t be rolled up and loaded on to a camel in a matter of minutes for the next migration to pastureland. They didn’t want to settle, those people. Their whole culture was centred on nomadism and I had the impression they felt no sentimentality about places as such. All they cared for was wandering, and they paid the minutest attention to landscape and season and vegetation so as to know whether it was worth trekking a hundred miles to a particular pasture. Sometimes we met other travellers and the greetings seemed to go on for ever before they got down to the real gossip. Although to me the desert looked completely empty I gradually formed the idea that there were surprising numbers of people purposefully roaming it and swapping news so that the vast emptiness was to some extent knitted together by an efficient bush telegraph.

  – Certainly I came to admire the people I was with. They weren’t at all friendly, actually, especially towards a foreigner like me. I was too ignorant of all the things which to them made a man and was not even worthy of their contempt. I had no animals of my own, no wife, not even a single slave. I knew nothing about camels, couldn’t make a hobble for one, didn’t know how to make a gazelle trap, didn’t know what to do if a simun blew up, couldn’t navigate by the stars … You name it and I couldn’t do it, apart from knowing how to use a typewriter and a wireless and find my way around the London underground system and all the other things that to them counted for nothing. Mine was a world so far beyond their universe it didn’t exist at all. It literally meant nothing to them that I was English and therefore represented the ruling power in the Sudan. It meant something to my policeman, which is why he was so friendly, but not to the Kababish. To them Khartoum was the terrifying outer fringe of another world in which they had no part. ‘Sudan’ itself was just a name they’d heard in the mouths of travellers. I was nothing more than baggage on that journey. No, worse than baggage because neither was I useful nor could I be sold at the end. Really, being surrounded by hostility and contempt, especially in conjunction with the hardships of the trip, ought to have made it a miserable experience.

  – Yet I loved it. It was like casting off an old skin and acquiring a flexible new guise. When you’re just nineteen and on the loose in the world you notice everything and love most of it. You notice the way you can smell camels in the desert before you can see them. You notice the metallic centipedes that look as if they’re made of chromium. You are astounded by a landscape that in certain lights and conditions can surround people with golden dust, so when they lead a goat or squat to relieve themselves they seem to move in their own private aureoles. Or else at dusk a plain of volcanic pebbles can take on surreal tints as if they were a broken pavement of emerald or malachite. And because these wastes demanded such specialised survival skills I could feel my own ignorance stretching to the tips of my fingers and the ends of my toes. The nomads’ ability to read any tracks we encountered finally gave me proof of the belief I’d formulated at Eltham College: that it ought to be possible to negotiate the world via an entirely different set of senses and a completely alien body of knowledge. We would come upon a jumble of animal and human footprints in the sand and the Kababish would dismount and look at them and within seconds they could not only say exactly how many animals had made them but which tribe they belonged to and how long ago they had passed. My policeman acted as interpreter for me and said they were always right. What was more, they could recognise the tracks of individual beasts and people. Each camel had its own name and its owner could tell its tracks from a hundred others, often even years after he had sold it. Good trackers could tell a male from a female by its footprints and even say whether the female was pregnant and by how many months. One evening we caught up with another group and I saw with my own eyes that, as had been predicted hours earlier, there were indeed thirty-seven camels, three of them bulls in rut, belonging to the Awlad Fahal or whichever tribe it was, one of whom was old Ibrahim the brother of Whatsit with his bales of ostrich feathers. They could do it with people, too. They could tell so much from a person’s tracks, down to essentials of his character, that I became ashamed of my own footprints because of what they might be revealing. You’ve no idea how vulnerable and inferior that can make you feel, knowing that your every step gives you away. I felt thoroughly transparent to those opaque people.

  – We eventually reached Omdurman and the Kababish left us without a wave or a handshake. They were the toughest people I have ever met anywhere. By then I had experienced enough of the hardship of their lives to admire them immensely and I’d seen enough of the desert to have been bitten by the bug. It’s obvious from your books, James, that with you it was more the sea that got into your bloodstream. But with me it was sand. If ever I yearn to undo my life and return to a t
ime and a place it is to 1937 on the fringes of Northern Kordofan. As it happened it was only a few months before Wilfred Thesiger, who was then in the Sudan Political Service, visited almost exactly the same area to hunt Barbary sheep.

  – Having said which, though, one needs to be a bit accurate about this famous desert bug. Ever since all those Doughtys and T. E. Lawrences the myth of the desert’s lure for certain kinds of romantics grew to the point where there was practically a recognisable British Foreign Office sort who devoted his life to Arabic studies and rough journeys, to say nothing of some quite rough sex. I once heard them referred to as ‘sitah’ types, which stood for ‘sand in the arse hole’ as well as meaning ‘buttocks’ in Arabic. That, at any rate, was not the bug that bit me. As soon I reached Omdurman, in feet, it became clear that the Sudanese there looked down on the Kababish as feckless vagrants who would cut your throat as soon as look at you. As far as they were concerned nomads were unlettered barbarians rather than noble savages. And later on I noticed that Cairenes and Alexandrians felt pretty much the same way about the Bedouin who came into town to sell their sheep and whatnot. To city-dwellers these were shiftless swindlers who didn’t wash enough. Someone once remarked on the way the writings of travellers like Doughty, Thomas, Lawrence and even Thesiger helped create a myth of the romance of desert folk and went on to draw a parallel with the way Sir Walter Scott’s novels had created a similar romance about Scottish Highlanders, generally viewed by Lowlanders as a lot of unkempt barbarians who would be the better for a job of work instead of a life of drunken banditry.

  – This was not the sort of mythmaking I was caught up in. I admired the Kababish, I was humbled by their survival techniques, but I can’t pretend I liked them any more than they liked me. I neither wanted to be them nor to join them. I would have been happy to know that I should never again in my life have to sit on a camel or eat kisri at dawn with frozen fingers. No, all I meant was that I found the desert extraordinarily beautiful, a particular landscape that happened to become woven into the sappiest period of my life when my nerve-endings were buzzing with new sense-impressions and my bloodstream fizzing with hormones. It’s a matter of simple association, really, rather than any deep affinity between me and deserts. –

  Jayjay’s passing mention of my books, hinting at the way the sea washes through me and my own nomadic past, suggested a contributory reason why he should have chosen me to write his life. Here and there I had written of my own youthful travels, which began as soon as I had broken out of my education’s golden cage. He had no need to tell me how it had felt to roam the world at a time when the going was very much less convenient and a necessary hardiness was its own reward. (Those hot awnings beneath which one found oneself sharing food with incomprehensible strangers! The improvised bivouacs in high stony passes! The close, fronded nights where one understood nothing of political intentions and lay in sleepless dread of attack. The eggshell mornings when the sun levered itself above the sea’s rim to reveal passionate scuff-marks in the sand next to where one had been lying. The huge, brawling diversity and strangeness of it all was intensely thrilling. Greedily one partook of as much as one could bear and then broke off for a while to walk monkishly alone, silent, sleeping beneath unfamiliar constellations and waking on beaches where all the footprints were one’s own. Still, it does not do to overlook the longueurs: the listless weeks spent hanging around, bored and morose, detesting the people, their primitive stupidity, even the sun itself with its mindless habit of following one blinding day with another, each indistinguishable. What am I doing here? The traveller’s inner cry spurts bitterly up, involuntary. And there is no clear answer; not until, maybe as much as thirty years later, it writes itself as a book.)

  So I can see that Jayjay, with his stated concern for spending a life well and an awareness of how formative his own early travels had been, perhaps found something in my history that we held in common.

  – This German anthropologist I had come to visit in the Sudan, old August, was a strange fellow. Very tanned and pale-eyed, thinnish beard with Struwwelpeter hair. We met as arranged in Khartoum where he gave me a vivid description of the village in which he’d been living for the last two years. He told me he had a hut to himself made of stakes with a conical reed roof. I visualised it as being at one end of a dismal village that sort of lay and panted in the shade of some palms and acacias. I also had the impression that everything there seemed to be composed of dust, twigs or skin. I say ‘old’ August but he wasn’t old at all – late twenties, I should think. He only seemed slightly elderly to me because he had very punctilious, old-fashioned manners. His family was good Prussian military stock and I never did discover how he’d made his getaway into academia. He told me how much his parents disliked Hitler: ‘Jumped-up little Austrian guttersnipe’ sort of thing. But this was 1937 and even the Prussians in the Wehrmacht were willing to give Hitler a chance because he’d pushed so many goodies their way in the shape of nice new uniforms, good pay, and first-rate new weapons and equipment. Plus, of course, bags of swank.

  – Old August was a million miles removed from all that. It was the first time in my life I’d been obliged to wonder about field anthropology, and I’m still not completely satisfied. I mean, what is it really doing, one culture studying another? Compared with anthropology, even a missionary’s job is clear-cut. That’s just religious imperialism, still somehow hanging on in an age that otherwise claims to have renounced imperialism and all its works. But field anthropologists are supposed to be neutral observers. They’re supposed to record intimate details of customs and practices in a society not their own, and all without participating, so as not to produce that famous quantum effect of the observer changing the thing observed. Tricky, that. And one does also wonder about their private motives. Why there? I mean. Why them? In August’s case one did well to suspect some fairly intimate reasons. Since I don’t read German I never read the weighty tome he was just finishing and in any case it sounded far too academic for me. But at the same time as he was writing that, he was keeping a studio in Cairo supplied with films and photographs which were by no means academic. He also turned out to be writing an equally risqué memoir or possibly novel that eventually found its way into print via some small German publisher before it was seized and burned by the Nazis.† These days copies must be exceedingly rare if they exist at all, but I gathered in Cairo during the war that at least one had escaped and clandestinely done the rounds there before the rest of the edition was destroyed in Germany. It was rumoured to be very strange and interesting, which of course meant obscene, and had to do with lenses, the difference between being an observer and a voyeur and so on, all mixed in with some pretty confessional stuff. I don’t think anyone was surprised that the Nazis burnt it, but we were all shocked when we heard of poor August’s death in Omdurman. He had been interned by the British at the start of the war but later allowed to go back to his village. None of us had the least doubt that he’d been assassinated.

  – But that’s to jump ahead a few years. When I first met him in Khartoum, August proved to be most amiable. He was quite open about his photographs once I’d dropped a few names and revealed I was familiar with the business. He made no bones about it meaning more to him than just a hobby that paid for itself. It was a heart-and-soul matter for him, equally academic and erotic. He showed me a lot of his stuff. He did have some pretty horrid footage, like the films he’d shot of local circumcision rituals, both female and male. I couldn’t watch those, not my sort of thing at all, but I had to admit they were expertly made. And here’s a curious fact that maybe says something about the ambivalence of a certain kind of anthropology. Even as those films were treated by scholars as valuable archive material, pirated copies were selling briskly in Egypt as pornography and I’m told stills from them even crop up today in Scandinavian porn mags. Furthermore, those very films were used by the CIA in the fifties and sixties for the induction of new recruits. Young potential agents were made to
sit in a darkened theatre and watch August’s circumcision footage. The ones who threw up or left in a hurry were simply thanked, given their fare home and scratched from the list. It was officially reckoned that if you fell at the Moll-Ziemcke hurdle you were probably too squeamish ever to make a good field agent. No hard feelings.

  – But the bulk of August’s photographs had scant pretensions to be considered as anthropology although after sixty years I expect they contain some valuable details. I have to say I think he was a first-rate photographer, especially given that he was working in the back of beyond, and this must have extended beyond mere technical ability. He must have had considerable charm or something because none of the people in his pictures ever looked terrorised or drugged or haunted. Quite the reverse. They seemed to me relaxed and reasonably intent on what they were doing – people screwing, kids tossing off, the usual sort of thing. Nothing gross, as the Americans would say. And to this day I don’t know how he achieved that because I presume his subjects were mainly drawn from the people he was living amongst and I can’t see how he could have done that without compromising himself and becoming notorious. Perhaps he became a sort of Kurtz figure, living in his Nubian fiefdom. But that doesn’t seem likely in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which was rather well administered. Even less does it accord with what August told me about the prevailing sexual mores of that region. On my journey with the Kababish I had occasionally wondered what they did for erotic fun and August was able to enlighten me. The answer was, precious little. Forget recreation: it was procreation or nothing. Men coupled with their wives in a matter of seconds. Not a stitch of clothing was removed and the woman was anyway circumcised. Anything in the way of foreplay was thought effeminate. It’s true that August’s people were Nubians of sorts rather than Kababish, but I shouldn’t have thought sexual practice on one bank of the Nile would be vastly different from that on the other.