That night we camped on top of the windswept plateau beside an extraordinary gorge full of deep, dark pools which descended in tiers like steps between steep and rocky walls. Scrambling down, we came suddenly to a sheer drop of at least a thousand feet into an empty valley. All was silent and deserted; of man there was no sign. These black pools, the craggy rocks enfolding them, the brooding silence, the seeming absence of any form of life – all this was chillingly sinister. These pools must surely be haunted; not by ghosts of humans but by monstrous shapes or phantoms rising from the black waters, to sink back into them again. Karanja felt the same. It was cold at nightfall; he had wrapped himself in an old army greatcoat and looked uneasy. His light skin, more coffee-coloured than black, his slender build and something in his posture, a way of speaking with his head half-tilted back, betrayed the Maasai genes carried by so many Kikuyu. In some indefinable way he looked aristocratic. He shivered in his coat and said: ‘shetani’ – evil spirits. But the topmost pool, near our camp, had hippos splashing in it; elephants came to drink at dusk, and we heard lions grunting round about, which sounded companionable.
So, next day, home to Njoro, limping along at fifteen miles an hour because our car’s front springs had snapped in two; three punctures on the way and frequent stops to fill the radiator made our pace even slower. But the old Ford, gallant to the last, made it up the farm track, between the twin umbrella thorns that stood like guardians, and so to the creepered little bungalow, a lamp on the table, a fire crackling in the hearth, and a cacophony of dachshund voices.
CHAPTER 12
Tales of the Northern Frontier
The first pony I ever had – not mine really, but allocated to me – was called Moyale. That was the name of the place he had come from. He was a scraggy little grey, tough as gristle, and covered with scars denoting who knows what adventures and cruelties, for Somalis are not kind and gentle to their animals, nor is life kind and gentle to them. I grew very fond of Moyale, and he kindled in my mind a great desire to see his place of origin, which lay far to the north beyond the desert, on the Abyssinian border.
I never did achieve my aim, but I did get to Wajir, lying on those great dry scorching plains that stretch towards the Juba river. Wajir had an aura of romance about it, created partly by the white crenellated walls of its fort, guarded night and day by smart askaris of the King’s African Rifles; by its tall arched doorways; by its slender white minaret; by bugle calls at dawn and sunset; and by tall Somalis in chequered kikois (short wrapover skirts), finely woven shawls, and turbans in bright tomato-red and gentian-blue – lean men with clever boney faces stamped by pride and authority. Lines of camels roped nose to tail converged on the wells outside the fort’s perimeter, uttering half-roaring, half-moaning cries as they awaited their turn. The constant clattering of their wooden bells was the signature tune of the North.
These wells seem inexplicable. Suddenly a group of deep caverns, with never-failing water at the bottom, appears in the midst of a desert whose rainfall may be two or three inches in a year, or none at all in some years, and seldom more than ten inches. They are fed by rain falling on the Abyssinian mountains, more than two hundred miles away, that travels underground until arrested by an outcrop of limestone rock. These wells, 126 in number, are said to have been dug by a race of giants called the Madhanleh. Whether these people are mythical or really existed is a matter for argument. A quasi-magical explanation of puzzling objects or events (for instance, eclipses) is common among almost all unsophisticated peoples; on the other hand some evidence in favour of the second hypothesis is suggested by certain burial mounds, not long since discovered, said to contain bones of exceptionally tall men and women. Tall or not, the diggers must have been exceptionally strong.
The drawing of water went on all round the clock, as it still does. A chain of Somali camel-men passed buckets made of calf-hide, or of the hides of giraffes, from hand to hand up the sides of the wells, which are fifty or sixty feet deep, and poured the water into troughs to which the camels came in batches. After each batch had had a turn, the camels were driven some distance away to moan and wait until another turn came round. The men chanted and sang as they passed up the buckets while the women, tall and graceful with eyes ringed by kohl, came with pitchers to draw water like Rebecca of old.
The Somalis, were, and are, Muslims, but among nomads the rigid observances of the faith could not but become attenuated. There was no purdah, nor did women wear the bui-bui, that voluminous black garment with only slits for eyes to peep through, the uniform of Muslim women at the Coast. Even schools had to be nomadic. They consisted of wandering, solitary, bearded teachers, each of whom carried a piece of wood shaped something like a cricket bat on which phrases from the Koran were inscribed. The teacher sat down under a thorn tree near a Somali encampment and the children gathered round to recite after him the holy phrases until they had them by heart. That was all the formal education, if it could be described as formal, that most of these Somali children got. This did not impair their intelligence, and it strengthened their memories. Somali men – I do not think that this applied to women – could recite the names of their ancestors and collaterals back through generation after generation until they reached the founder of their clan, probably a relative of the Prophet Mohamed.
Doves came in great flocks to these wells, flew in, settled near the troughs, sipped and flew off again. At evening sand-grouse came, providing sport for the officers. All night long you could hear the moaning of the camels and the clatter-clatter-clatter of the bells. It was extremely hot at Wajir, and, for Europeans, lonely. Before the Second World War the basic European establishment consisted of a couple of KAR officers, a DC with one or two juniors, a policeman and a doctor, all of whom expected to spend more than half their time away from the station.
‘Glenday looks upon the NFD as something he has made and guards it jealously as his own preserve,’ wrote a young cadet who kept a diary. ‘He is very outspoken – he says, among ourselves in the North we speak freely, but down country we are the silent North.’1 He was a stimulating talker, wrote this diarist, and immensely knowledgeable – he understood ecology before the word was invented – but by 1937, when the diarist was posted to Wajir, he had had twenty-five years’ service on the frontier with many bouts of malaria, and was inclined to mumble and doze off after the evening meal.
Glenday expected his officers, while at their posts, to be celibate. Married men were seldom posted to the NFD, and had to leave their wives behind if they were. One young bride who did manage to wriggle through the anti-feminist net as far as Marsabit wrote that she was more frightened of Glenday than of the buffaloes that browsed around the boma; when she actually encountered him, however, he was mild as milk.2 Her husband, Gerald Reece, was to succeed him as boss of the NFD.
The district officers were young, fit and virile, and Somali women, in youth so handsome and seductive, offered a temptation one might have thought impossible to resist. But Glenday opposed Somali mistresses as firmly as he forbade wives. For one thing syphilis, he believed, would be the almost certain price of a liaison, and, for another, the young man would find himself drawn into complicated feuds and intrigues that would compromise his impartiality, as had happened in the case of Long Lew. ‘In former days,’ ran a rather wistful entry in our young cadet’s diary, ‘most KAR officers had native mistresses. Some were so long-standing that they were almost called on! They knew every secret too.’
Even Glenday could not keep all his officers up to the mark all the time. There was a middle-aged DC called Denis Wickham who was fond of his comforts, inclined to stoutness, widely read, and one of the founders of the Wajir Yacht Club. (Needless to say, the yachts were imaginary.) He took his Somali mistress into retirement at Lamu and left her £30,000 in his will, together with his mother’s jewellery. She went through the lot, aided by an Italian lover; married a corporal in the Foreign Legion; and committed suicide in Djibuti by jumping out of a third-floor
window.
What of Glenday’s own amours, if any? His reputation as a strong, silent man of the North, combined with his bachelor status, naturally fluttered various dovecots when he visited Nairobi. With Loresho as his base on these occasions, it was inevitable that his name should have been linked with Glady Delamere’s. These rumours were scotched by one of the country’s most incorrigible gossips. ‘Just good friends,’ he said. ‘Glady assures me that V. G. is a bull virgin.’ Glenday himself put an end to speculation in 1938 by marrying a young widow, daughter of a former Chief Justice. Then he left his kingdom to govern British Somaliland, and in due course begat three sons, served as British Resident in Zanzibar, and retired first to a small farm in Kenya and finally to Natal, where he died in his eightieth year in 1970.
One of his achievements in the NFD was to build up a powerful esprit de corps which sustained his officers in the loneliness, austerity and dangers of their daily lives. A simple ceremony held every evening at sunset when the Union Jack was hauled down did much to foster this spirit. This ritual has been well described by a young district officer, Robert Tatton-Brown:
The night guard of the police was mounted; they turned out and presented arms as the flag was lowered and the police bugler sounded the Retreat. It was a moving little ceremony which harked back to the honours paid to the Roman eagles. We servants of the Government – administration, police, Goan clerks, syces, agricultural instructors, prison warders, hospital dressers – all were bound to something greater than ourselves symbolised by this flag, with a head in the shape of the King to whom some of us had sworn allegiance. This symbolism inspired not only Europeans but also Goans and Africans who took pride in uniform and medals, and did their duty honourably with a certain panache that gave colour to these out-of-the-way places. It was the rule that everyone within sight of the flagstaff stood rigidly to attention …3
The official rule book stated that this upright posture was obligatory only within three hundred yards of the flagstaff. A renegade sergeant-major used to pace out the distance and settle himself just beyond the pole to enjoy his beer at ease. After the flag-lowering came another short ceremony, called timamu, when the senior policeman presented to the DC a tally of the manpower, arms and ammunition and prisoners, if any; then the head syce enumerated the number of horses, camels and barramils of water;4 finally the head station hand reported on such matters as the availability of firewood. Then all could adjourn to their evening’s relaxation.
‘No shadow of coming events,’ wrote Tatton-Brown, ‘had dimmed the Roman certitude with which we were endowed.’
It was in the NFD that that useful Kenyan institution the goat-bag was born. In the days of its conception, tax was paid in goats instead of money. Most of the goats were fed to KAR askaris. Every one had to be accounted for to the Treasury in Nairobi. But that department’s officials overlooked the fact that in any given flock of goats, births as well as deaths will occur. The district officer who started the first goat-bag did not overlook it, and gradually built up a flock that had no official existence, and that could be converted into cash by selling the animals. He also discovered that by drying and marketing the skins, his unofficial fund could be augmented. Every DC in the country was continually being confronted by a need for cash to meet unexpected demands unlikely to be sanctioned by the Treasury. The goat-bag proved to be the answer. It was not long before every DC in the country had latched on to the idea. Each commissioner kept a meticulous account of how the money was spent, which he locked away in his confidential safe, so that when the auditors came round on their annual examination of the station’s accounts, the secrets of the goat-bag were concealed from their eyes.
Every DC could give examples of the uses of the goat-bag; here is a single one.5 On the road between the Tanganyikan border and Nairobi, some unknown person halted his car to fire at a zebra standing on the skyline, missed, and drove on. The bullet proceeded on its way until it dropped through the roof of a hut and into the head of a young Maasai girl, killing her stone-dead. Her family, according to custom, demanded blood-money: but who was to pay? In the Maasai view there was no doubt: the Government. The Treasury disclaimed all responsibility. The elders came angrily to the DC at Kajiado, who feared serious trouble should the claim not be met. The Treasury remained adamant. Luckily, the goat-bag at Kajiado was a fat one. The DC handed over twelve head of cattle and the crisis passed.
At Wajir the north-bound road, such as it was, forked. To the right you could bump across rocky flats and over dry luggas fringed by doum-palms to El Wak, the wells of God, and on to Mandera, where Abyssinia, Italian Somaliland and Kenya met. To the left you could drive almost due north through rough country pale as ashes, swept by fine white dust and peppered with termite mounds, some over twenty feet high, until you reached the foot of the Abyssinian massif and the frontier at Moyale, sited on tumbled hills just above the plain. There were two Moyales, one British, one Abyssinian, a few miles apart. A barbed-wire entanglement protected the British one, which had a fort, large conical huts with thatched roofs steeply pitched, and the usual police lines, dukas and offices. Philip Zaphiro’s old house had become a hospital of sorts, rickety, bug-ridden and not very clean. These crude little field hospitals at out-stations had no qualified doctors but were run by sub-assistant-surgeons, almost all Indians, who had received a rudimentary training. Taught to carry out only such routine tasks as inoculations, dressings and the giving out of basic medicines, they had often to cope as best they could with terrible injuries, and did so with considerable resourcefulness and skill. But they could not operate or give anaesthetics. No flying doctors then.
Two names are principally associated in my mind with Moyale: the great Glenday, and the less great in achievement, but scarcely so in character, Tich Miles. They were as different from each other as beefsteak is from a soufflé, but shared a dedication to their task and an ability to deal with such touchy, proud, dangerous and difficult peoples as the Amharic-speaking Abyssinians and the Somalis. Tich, as his name implies, was tiny, and incredibly thin: a medical examination made in 1930 gave his weight at 6 stone 8½ lbs – just 92½ lbs. He was a bundle of energy, of laughter and high spirits when not racked by pain and fits of vomiting that left him limp as a dish-rag. Then he would bounce back and carry on with whatever he was doing as if nothing had happened. Enthusiasm, or sometimes detestation, would bubble up in him like a hot spring. He deeply loved his family, his many friends and those he considered to be the salt of the earth, and despised no less deeply those he believed to be its scum. His was a simple code, black and white, no half measures. He came of a family of soldiers – Miles, Latin for soldier: genes have a long life.6
Tich had arrived in East Africa in 1910 at the age of nineteen to seek his fortune, having absolutely none of his own, and had been taken on by a man called Isaacson who was promoting rubber-growing among the Nandi. For a salary of £8 a month he worked in a duka at Kabsabet from six a.m. to six p.m., six days a week, selling trade goods and buying latex. His companions were a dog (taken by a leopard), a mule, a monkey (killed by a Nandi) and a lion cub which, to his grief, he had to shoot after it had sprung upon a goat.
War relieved him of this drudgery. He joined the KAR and fought throughout the East African campaign, winning a DSO and an MC, as well as a Belgian decoration and a mention in despatches. After the war he stayed on for two and a half years in the KAR, mainly in the wilds of Jubaland, where letters posted in Nairobi took two months to reach him. Ever since the Aulihan Somali had sacked a British post at Serenli in 1916, killing the commanding officer, warfare between the Somali tribes and sub-tribes in this region had continued virtually unchecked. In 1920 a small section of the KAR mutinied and killed their officer, and Tich was sent to bring the situation under control. A particularly militant section of the Aulihan Somali raided the local Gurreh tribe, killing eight of them and carrying off two hundred head of cattle. Tich set off in hot pursuit at the head of his detachment of mounted infa
ntry, overtook the raiders, killed seventeen and recovered all the cattle.7 During this period of his life he survived not one but two attacks of blackwater fever. Then, in 1923, he successfully applied for the job of British Consul in Southern Abyssinia. His headquarters were at Mega and his salary £800 a year, plus £50 ‘horse allowance’.
Mega was three days’ march (eighty miles) from Moyale up in the Abyssinian mountains, and here Tich had what he chose to call his palace, with his mules and their syces, his servants, a bodyguard of Abyssinian ruffians armed with antiquated rifles, and no companions save his dachshunds, in particular one called Honey Bees who travelled on his long safaris in a box strapped to a mule’s back.
Since time immemorial, tribesmen ruled by the Emperor’s Amharic officials had been going down from the mountains and over the Kenya border to raid for cattle, slaughtering in the process a great many tribesmen ruled by the British King’s officials. Many of these Abyssinian tribesmen were armed with rifles of a sort, whereas the British forbade the carrying of firearms; it was a case of guns versus spears. The British strove to put an end to these raids, but a company or so of the KAR strung out along a frontier more than four hundred miles long was powerless to bring this about. Part of the task of the British Consul at Mega was to persuade the Amharic provincial governors to control their savage subjects, an underaking for which those governors lacked enthusiasm to say the least.
There was also the matter of the wells, and their failure in the long dry season and in times of drought. Most of the permanent wells lay on the Abyssinian side of the frontier, but custom had long sanctioned their use by Kenya’s cattle-men when their own wells dried up. This right had been enshrined in a treaty between the Emperor Menelik II and the British Government signed in 1907, which delineated the boundary between the two countries. Tribesmen on the Abyssinian side often ignored this custom and this treaty, and denied their wells to Kenya’s cattle owners. So another part of Tich’s job was to persuade the Abyssinian governors to prevent their subjects from closing the wells. These tasks were very far from easy. Tich had no force at his command to back up his words. The Amharic officials, besides being proud and touchy, were suspicious, and in command of retinues of trigger-happy men.
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