Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  Before leaving I found a young girl of about sixteen sitting naked in a hut, looking ill and very frail, but beautiful. Her name, I was told, was Patience. I wanted to photograph her and asked the orderly if she could persuade the girl to cover the private parts of her body with her hands so that I could show her nakedness with as much dignity as possible. But the sight of her stripped me naked of any of the qualities I might have had as a human being. The whiplash of compassion and conscience never ceased to assail me in Biafra.

  We all suffer from the naive belief that our integrity is reason enough for being in any situation, but if you stand in front of dying people, something more is required. If you can’t help, you shouldn’t be there. Was I of any use at all to the Biafran people? Or was I simply aiding a war that was not in their interests, a secession generated by power-hungry zealots with no thought of the anguish and deprivation they left behind when they moved their weapons of destruction on?

  I was ravaged and confused by this war as never before, and could see not the smallest justification for it. Or for my presence here—unless it was to remind people, through my pictures, of the futility of all wars.

  Even the means of my being there, through the assistance of Markpress, made my position tenuous and dubious. This was a man-made famine—made by the secession and the response to it, made by the greed and foolishness on both sides and, most of all, by the dishonesty of the original conspirators who created the breakaway state.

  I never thought I had a great insight into politics. But it doesn’t matter when you see what I saw in that mission hospital that day. It does not require much political acumen to see what is so plain that it pushes itself down your throat.

  Richard West wrote a strongly pro-Biafran piece which appeared in the magazine with my pictures, though the pictures were not partisan. I would like to think these images brought help to the beleaguered hospitals with their dying children. I knew my pictures had a message, but what it was precisely I couldn’t have said—except, perhaps, that I wanted to break the hearts and spirits of secure people. All we knew at the time, though, was that neither words nor pictures could do anything to halt the advance of the Nigerian military machine.

  For once I resorted to a little direct political action of my own. One of my most tragic photographs was of a Biafran mother trying to feed her baby with withered breasts. This I converted into a poster after it had appeared in the magazine. Francis Wyndham put a suitable inflammatory caption on it—‘Biafra: the British Government Supports This War. You the Public Could Stop It’—and then we fanned out and fly-posted it around the city. My wife, Christine, and I paid special attention to our own area of Hampstead Garden Suburb where the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had his home.

  As the months went by and Biafra’s position became more desperate I was eager to get back, but there was a problem. The differences between the pro-Nigerian and pro-Biafran factions on the Sunday Times had become so bitter that they could not agree on a suitably neutral candidate to write about the war. Eventually, after much rancourous argument, they agreed to send the veteran Antony Terry. His qualification: he was the Central European correspondent, relatively innocent of African affairs.

  A twenty-four-year-old mother and child awaiting death, Biafra, 1968

  He was, however, a very quick judge of a bad situation. When we landed at Uli airstrip the officials there were trying to commandeer all the hard currency they could and issuing huge heaps of Biafran paper in exchange. As Tony came away from exchange control, stuffed with his load of worthless currency, he gave me a look and said, ‘They’ve had it here, haven’t they, this lot?’

  We went to the front. Terminal demoralisation, it was clear, had set in among the Biafran troops. General Ojukwu had already left, taking with him, among much else, his Mercedes limousine. Mountains of empty wine bottles outside the General Staff headquarters testified to the lifestyle the little echelon of top leaders had pursued at the expense of their people’s starvation. By now I knew them as opportunist spivs.

  I took some food and others things for the children of a man called Chinua Achebe, one of the genuine idealists on the Biafran side. He was a novelist, who wrote a book called Things Fall Apart. That was precisely what was happening now. He was a young man, an honourable man, a nice man. I remember the last time I saw him. He took the gifts without any emotion. He had cut off any feeling he may once have had for the one or two Westerners he thought really cared. I felt he was looking through me, as if I didn’t really exist. And I could see that the ruin of Ibo culture had made him feel exactly as I had when coming out of Hue—totally shell-shocked.

  Biafra finally surrendered on 15 January 1970, two days after my return. Despite all the hysteria, it is only fair to record that the Lagos authorities treated the defeated Ibos with decency. It was the only grace of that war.

  19. PEOPLE WHO EAT PEOPLE

  Though I have spent much of my life getting on and off aeroplanes I have never been at ease in them. Once the wheels touched the ground again I would feel in some way redeemed, as if I had been given a new lease of life. Each landing would be a kind of rebirth.

  It was this feeling, not the actual air travel, that I was hooked on. By my mid-thirties I had travelled, mainly by air, to over seventy countries; by the end of my career on the Sunday Times, to 120. Not all my travels involved wars. I also like exploring other countries for their own sake, though sometimes I got the feeling I might be safer in a war zone. This was especially the case when I teamed up with travel writer Eric Newby and his wife Wanda.

  They had met in the war, after Eric had been picked up treading water in the sea off Mussolini’s Italy. His Special Boat Section operation had gone awry, he had been taken prisoner and subsequently had escaped from prisoner-of-war camp near the Adriatic. Wanda was one of the Resistance workers who spirited him out. They spent months together in the Apennines before Eric was recaptured by the SS. Since the war their life together had been a more agreeable adventure.

  I had run into them first in Sardinia, when they were travelling slowly round the entire Mediterranean. I had gone to get pictures of the bandits who had held hostage and killed a British tourist and his wife. The assignment was not a success. I was chased from the bandit hill town of Orgosola, not by bandits, but by irate old ladies wielding pitchforks. The occasion however cemented a friendship between myself and the Newbys, which was to confirm my taste for travel.

  They took me to India, where they were planning a slow and hilarious 1,200-mile journey by boat down the Ganges. Early in the venture Eric went to interview Prime Minister Nehru, and took me along for the historic man’s photograph. In his book Slowly Down the Ganges, Eric recalled my bobbing up from a camera position behind the sofa and saying to the Indian premier, ‘You must find it difficult to control this rough old lot.’ My education still had some way to go.

  Later I accompanied the Newbys on a tiger hunt as guests of the Nawab of Paigah, Eric with a Holland rifle, me with my Pentax. Eighteen hours of waiting up a tree failed to flush out a tiger, but eventually brought Eric face to face with an outraged sloth bear. After dispatching one bear, Eric found himself confronted by its angry mate, with no cartridge left. For a moment he thought that he would have to ruin his expensive and beautiful rifle by using it as a club, but then the Nawab, whom everyone called Owly, stepped in and felled the attacking sloth with a shot that narrowly missed Eric’s ear.

  ‘Lucky,’ said the Nawab, ‘I had only that one shot left.’

  Afterwards, like someone in a fairy tale, Eric asked the Nawab if there was any favour he might do him, in return for the boon of saving his life.

  ‘What I’d really like,’ said Owly, the maharajah-who-already-had-everything, wistfully, ‘is the bumper Christmas edition of Dog World. You can’t get it here because of the currency restrictions.’

  I took away an abiding love of India. Kashmir—until the tourists
flocked in—remained my favourite place in the world. On its lotus-covered lakes, which reflected the Himalayas, you lived on large fretworked houseboats left behind by the Raj. They were like old Oxford college barges, where bearers still dished up sensational Mrs Beeton–type cheese soufflés.

  In the daytime Eric and I would drift round the lakes, among kingfishers and floating islands, some with Mughal gardens on them, in little boats called shikaras. Curtained and cushioned, they were a sort of cross between a gondola and an Edwardian punt. The whole place was a magic amalgam of Mughal and Anglo-Saxon civilisations, and it stayed in my mind through much rougher experiences as an image of how glorious life can be.

  I grew less fussy about food after India. I have even eaten rat, when pushed a bit, though I drew the line at dog, which I saw Taiwanese women hanging out to air-cure on washing lines. In Niger and Upper Volta I was able, after a dusty eighteen-hour drive across the desert, to countenance ostrich, washed down by warm goat’s milk. When people who have not enough to eat offer you a delicacy, and would be offended by your rejection, you accept. The Tuareg left an indelible impression on me of human dignity in an ancient way of life. There had been no rain for seven years, and they were forced to beg, surviving in the main on aid hand-outs. Their nomadic way of life will probably die in my lifetime.

  Drought and disaster are not the only threats faced by the ancient peoples of the world. The impact of Western civilisation is just as serious a matter. I was shown this graphically in Papua, where I went with Tony Clifton, one of the liveliest of the Aussie Sunday Times mafia, to record the gathering of the New Guinea warrior clans at Mount Hagen. It was an astonishing spectacle. To throbbing drum beats, 30,000 tribesmen were rioting around town in grass skirts in groups of about 200. They were decorated in every hue of ochre and bird of paradise feather. Where once a bone would do for an ornament, it was now fashionable to wear through the nose the most recherché object that could be found—ballpoint pens, plastic cocktail sticks, screwdrivers and bits of copper piping. One man wore across his forehead, to dramatic effect, a trouser zip. Someone had donated, as an added decorative luxury, a five-gallon drum of Mobil oil. The tribesmen were gratefully smearing it over themselves, an ochre substitute, as if it was sun cream.

  Life in New Guinea today is much more deeply contaminated by such modern influences as alcohol; then, in the Sixties, it was still a place where people ate people. We made a ten-day trek into the rain forest, to the edge of the country of the Porgaiga and the Hewa, both practising cannibal tribes. With us were sixty bearers of the Duma tribe, led by an Australian patrolman. We were taking supplies to the edge of the Porgaiga lands to establish a food dump for a later patrol that would chart the unknown Hewa country and take a census of its inhabitants. Like the warriors, all our bearers wore grass skirts. At night they used them to roof and shelter the temporary huts that they built. They still made fire with two pieces of wood.

  Don and tribesmen, New Guinea, 1969, photograph by Tony Clifton

  Their trekking capacities were daunting. They had wide feet for their size, which took them unerringly over the slippery logs that traversed the ravines. Tony, struggling to keep up, fell between two logs and was saved only by his gut. In revenge for my jokes about his waistline, he pointed to my furry chest when I was washing, saying, ‘Jeez, man, you look like a busted open settee.’

  Despite the jokes, things were decidedly reserved, spooky even, between us and the Duma. Though there was no record of their having eaten anybody recently, darkness brought on a certain nervous tension. One night I introduced a snake, a green rubber job I had bought in Singapore, and conjured it out of my nose. It cleared the camp in a second. After the Duma had come trooping sheepishly back, Tony and I found ourselves enjoying a new status, as miracle workers as well as laughter makers.

  Most of the laughs, it has to be said, were on us. We met some Porgaiga on the fourth day out, an experience which made Tony feel like a trout in a restaurant tank. They were small and muscular, with droopy Napoleon hat wigs made from human hair clippings and decorated with brilliant yellow button flowers. Dog’s teeth necklaces and G-strings threaded with shells and beads covered the rest. Their last known human repast had been two of their own tribe, eaten when they had run out of other food. Hunger was the main motive for cannibalism. It still happened, I was told, in remote villages when someone important died. The mourners would eat him to absorb his strength and intelligence, as Stone Age Britons are said to have done. Head-hunting for cannibal purposes, though rare, was still not unknown. The chief disincentive to the practice was a very nasty brain disease called kuru, in effect something close to dementia.

  One evening, at the furthest point of our travels, a member of our party shot a cassowary bird, which is the size of an emu, weighs about forty pounds, and which, for conservation reasons, should not be shot. The Duma tore out the feathers, then gutted it, split open the thighs with sharp bamboo, wrapped it in ferns and banana leaves and cooked it under hot stones. It tasted pleasant, rather like beef. We were told by a smiling Duma that you cooked a human being in the same way. I decided that, even if I had become less finicky about local food, I would always play safe with breakfast. I would go nowhere without my supply of Ready Brek instant porridge.

  The distinction between my travel stories and my war assignments was not always precise. I went to Guatemala to do a story about the culture and kept overtaking the civil war. In Eritrea, where I was sent for a story about the revolutionary struggle, I ended up doing nothing but travel, very, very painfully.

  The rebel camps were over 100 miles into the trackless Sahara, and our only method of approach (after effecting illegal entry into the country via Khartoum) was by camel. My desert companions were Colin Smith of the Observer, and Charlie Glass, a very pleasant American who later became celebrated both for his coverage of Beirut and for escaping from kidnappers who held him hostage there.

  Camels are unattractive beasts, arrogant, disdainful of man, and totally against doing what they’re told. They move in a sort of tidal wave, heave and slump motion. If they gallop unexpectedly, you feel they will heave and slump you over their heads.

  I was prepared to put up with my camel only because I had become more than a little addicted to deserts. The dry heat evaporates all the stickiness and sweat off your body, so you can travel for weeks without a bath, but, as the Desert Fathers and T.E. Lawrence claimed, the desert also cleans your mind. It triggers the mind, liberating a kind of psychic energy, and making space for you to realise things about yourself. It really does produce a touch of mysticism, a sort of spiritual voice.

  That is, if your camel is behaving properly. Colin’s was not. Even flogging it (the standard nomad recourse in these circumstances) didn’t have the effect of getting it to move. The beast just started frothing at the mouth in a most alarming way, like a washing machine gone crazy. Colin had to get off and walk. We never got to the Eritrean front. After we jolted our way deep into the desert, there was nothing for it but to turn round and jolt all the way back.

  I found myself in the desert again—this time with writer James Fox—to cover the war in Chad, where my brother Michael had his posting with the Foreign Legion. It was years since I had seen him. The French Foreign Legion does not encourage contact with the outside world. I didn’t know if he was being ‘Faithful unto Death’, as the Legion’s motto has it, or if he was simply stuck with it. I had caught one glimpse of him in Paris, on a Bastille Day, where infantryman McCullin, in all the gear—epaulettes, kepi blanc, and white breeches—was marching with the Legion down the Champs-Elysées. They were performing their uncanny slow march with a fixed stare, to a stomach-turning low chant. They looked like dead men on parade.

  Michael, at twenty-seven, was now promoted sergeant, and his unit was fighting rebels in the great land-locked country in the heart of Africa, bounded by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, Niger, Nigeria and the evil empire o
f Bokassa (the Central African Republic) to the south. It was 2,000 miles further into the Sahara than Timbuktu. Chad was so unstable that no fewer than twelve armies could be marching on its capital, N’Djamena, better known as Fort-Lamy. The French had once colonised it. Now they had sent in their Foreign Legion and French troops to back up President Tombalbaye in his struggle against insurgents. He claimed 95 per cent of the popular vote while half the population was in revolt against him. The activities of tax officials had ignited spontaneous uprisings among people who earned, on average, £12 a year. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, eager to extend his own revolution, backed the rebels, who were mounting a spirited resistance. Short of weapons—sharing one gun among ten—they sported impromptu home-made devices such as barbed spears made from motor car springs, with which they had already killed five Legionnaires.

  When James and I arrived in Fort-Lamy, we found events taking us away from Sergeant McCullin. His post, with 2nd para, near Mongo in the south of Chad, had been under heavy pressure. Political exiles from the capital had combined with local chiefs to form a National Liberation Front. The idea was to capture Mongo, the administrative capital of the region, and five other towns. Had it been successful, it would have split Chad in two. My brother’s outfit, with the support of the French and Chadian security troops, had fought the rebels off, and the situation had eased.

  The immediate attack was now to the north, in the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti region, near the border with Libya, an underpopulated wasteland of desert and mountain ranges where nomads had declared themselves in revolt against the administration. We flew to Faya-Largeau, the largest town in the north, in a French Transal troop-carrier full of young and nervous-looking Berets Rouges and a tough Foreign Legion padre with thirty parachute jumps to his credit. He was not a comforting sight.