The Prophet's Camel Bell

by Margaret Laurence

  Aldo, short and stocky, never stopped shouting. To hear him discuss the slightest thing, you would think he was going to burst a blood vessel. Banditto was given his nickname because he looked like a Sicilian bandit – a slit-eyed and devious look, combined with a jazzy manner, a swarthy skin, black and slicked-down hair. Dolpho was slim, with a sharply handsome face, and eyes that gave the impression of knowing a great deal more than he ever said. Jobless in the thirties, he had gone out to Ethiopia and got into the trucking business, at first driving for someone else and then managing to buy his own truck. He lost everything, of course, in the war. He spoke to us of wars in general.

  “We are the people who always lose – the people like us in every country. The leaders – they don’t fight. Some of them make money, most of them lose nothing. But we always lose, no matter which side wins.”

  Between the Italians and the Somalis there was an uneasy truce. They did not really like each other, and yet there was a kind of understanding between them, for in some ways they were similar. Both were emotional; neither comprehended the British restraint. To the Somalis, the Italians were more recognizably human than the English, for at least they openly acknowledged the need of men for women.

  Feruccio was the barber. He carried on his business in his bungalow, which he shared with Umberto. Jack went one Saturday afternoon for a haircut, and found Umberto on the stoep, sipping a mixture of Chianti and bottled lemonade. Sit down, sit down, Umberto urged hospitably. Perhaps the signor would not mind waiting? Would he have some vino? Very refreshing with lemonade – a drink to make you sweat properly. Feruccio could not give a haircut for a few minutes.

  “He ees focking. Soon he finish.”

  Jack and Umberto sat on the stoep in the sunlight, amicably passing the time of day, and after a while a Somali girl stepped out of the bungalow and walked quietly away, and then Feruccio emerged briskly, with scissors and clippers in his hand. “So – okay. Now we get to work.”

  The others always referred to il Capitano by his now nonexistent rank, for he had been in the Italian army before the Ethiopian war, before the days of the Duce. He was the old style of Army officer, a gentleman adventurer, but one would never have guessed it from his appearance. He was in his fifties, I suppose, a slender and dapper man who now worked as an accountant in P.W.D. Stores. He looked like a scholar and spoke like an aristocrat. Meeting him, one would have imagined he had spent his life in libraries and drawingrooms. But not so.

  Il Capitano, who had learned surveying in Kenya many years ago, had been the first man to do a general survey of the Danakil country, a remote portion of Ethiopia, and the seventh white man who had crossed that territory and emerged alive. A number of explorers had met their deaths there. The Danakil country was a fabled place, still inhabited by warrior tribesmen who had long had a reputation for ferocity and hostility to strangers, and who collected as souvenirs the genitals of their dead enemies.

  Shortly after the Italian administration began in Ethiopia, the government had decided that the Danakil country should be surveyed. Understandably, no one wanted the job. When the Captain said he would do it, he was unable to find Ethiopians who would go with him. The government in Addis Ababa told him they would find staff for him. And they did. They opened the Addis jail and released every political prisoner, every thief, murderer and cut-throat. These were the men who were to accompany il Capitano on his trek into the Danakil country. He was given twenty-four hours to get his uncertain army out of town, and in the meantime all the citizens of Addis, European and African alike, firmly barred their doors.

  So out he went. With him he carried a whole year’s pay for his entire crew. He had only one man whom he felt he might possibly be able to trust, but with that amount of money, he could not really be sure of anyone.

  “That first night,” he told us with a faint smile, “I did not sleep so well.”

  But the straggling brigade proceeded, and the Captain began to train and drill them, for he had the feeling that his only hope lay in welding them into some sort of organized company. There were fights and conspiracies and stabbings, but he persisted and gradually his strange corps took on a kind of unit. They succeeded in surveying the area, and they even managed to recruit a few wild Danakil into their ranks. When they returned to Addis, more than a year later, they were a vastly different force from the one that had started out.

  The Danakil knew some remarkable things, il Capitano told us. They made use of a certain plant to drug poisonous snakes, which the tribesmen could then handle. They were fond of leaving these snakes around in unexpected places. Once an Italian truck driver, going near Danakil country, rashly parked his vehicle at night and went to sleep inside. When he wakened, he sensed something wrong. Looking down he saw, perched on one of his feet, a snake curled up on a puff of local cotton fibre. The snake, a small and deadly one, was beginning to waken from its drugged sleep. The driver did not have much choice. Quietly he drew his revolver and shot the snake, shooting his own foot off as well.

  The Captain’s greatest treasure was his pet cheetah. The beast was kept chained outside his bungalow, but when he returned in the evening he would unchain it and wrestle playfully with it. Quite a sight, this – the man so delicate in appearance, and the huge tawny spotted cat. He had acquired this cheetah when it was a small cub, so it had never had to hunt for its food. The result was that it had grown to a much larger size than any cheetah we ever saw in the Haud. It was the most graceful animal I have ever seen, with the possible exception of the desert gazelle, the gerenuk. But I would not have trusted it one inch. Il Capitano trusted it completely and had no fear of it.

  He had recently come back, he told us, from his first leave in Italy in nearly twenty years. He was glad to be back in Africa. Things had changed too much at home, and he had been away too long.

  There will be no niche for his kind in the new Africa, and that is probably as it should be. But I will always hope that this gallant and enigmatic man has not been forced to go back and live in a crowded European city, for he was a man of Africa, as much as any Somali or any Danakil.

 

  Gino was the Italian we knew best, for he became the foreman on the balleh job. He had come out to Ethiopia seventeen years before, to farm. He had worked his land until the war came, and then he lost everything he thought he owned, including a good many of his teeth, for when the Italians began to lose the war, the Ethiopians attacked Gino’s farm, and himself, and yanked out with pliers any teeth that had gold fillings.

  He had only been home to Italy a few times in all these years. He had a son and a daughter, grown up now. He showed us a picture of his wife when she was young and pretty. She was growing old now, as he was, and they had been together very little.

  Gino was a thickset bull-necked man, colossally strong. He was acknowledged as the finest mechanic in the country. He had done much of the work on Alfie, the giant diesel truck made out of scraps. When Jack needed a plough to make furrows at the sides of the ballehs in order to widen the catchment area, he discovered there was no proper plough in the whole country, so Gino made one for him, dredging the design from memory and the parts from old armoured cars.

  Gino talked sparingly, even among the Italians, and with us hardly at all, for he spoke practically no English. Out in camp, he and Jack communicated in a curious way. When general subjects were discussed, language was a real difficulty, but when they were speaking about the work and the machinery, each spoke in his own tongue and somehow they understood one another – how they managed to do so was a mystery, even to themselves.

  In the evenings in camp, Gino would come over from his caravan and sit in our brushwood hut for an hour or so. We used to pass around the Italian-English phrasebook, but it was not much help to us, for it consisted of such phrases as Where is the key to my watch? We wondered how many centuries had gone by since the book was revised. Jack and Gino tinkered with our “saucepan” radio, and Gino always tried to get music. A
ny kind of music was preferable to talk. As soon as he heard a spoken voice, he would switch to another station.

  “Troppo propaganda,” he said. He had had quite enough of that. Music was not so misleading.

  He got along with the Somalis better than most Italians did. Even Abdi, who for no apparent reason said of Ugo “Wa fulley – he is a coward,” never made this comment about Gino. Arabetto, who grew up in Italian Somaliland and could speak Italian, was the one who most often helped Gino at the forge.

  Gino had fashioned this forge himself, so he could repair machinery on the spot.

  The role of blacksmith always seemed a fitting one for Gino, for there was a massive quality about the man. But his powerful hands were made to forge ploughshares, not swords.

  Only gradually did we come to realize how difficult was the Italians’ position here, and how remarkable was their capacity for laughter. The government could scarcely have managed without them now – they were the reliable artisans, the men who repaired the machinery and kept the lorries in running order. And yet, apart from a few P.W.D. English who appreciated their work, they were given no recognition. In one sense, the administration could not be blamed – the fact was that there were hardly any Englishmen here who had sufficient knowledge of machinery to recognize how much the Italians were doing. Socially, they were non-existent as far as most English were concerned. They were not invited to English homes; they never appeared at the drinks parties. They were committed to Africa, and deeply. They did not want to risk losing their jobs. But always their jobs depended upon the whim of the English. They had to be deferential – they had to touch the forelock, in effect, and doff the cap to the lord of the manor. Sometimes the English whose goodwill they had to cultivate were men who were much less competent than themselves.

  “How it must gall them,” Jack said blackly. “I’ve never known more efficient mechanics anywhere, and yet they can’t afford to argue with an Englishman, even if they know damn well they’re in the right. The Somalis are more free, in a way – if they get really fed up, they can always go back to their camels. But the Italians have to be agreeable, no matter how they feel.”

  Probably one should not ever make generalizations about people, but we will always be disposed to like Italians because of these men in Somaliland, living out their isolated lives and refusing to mourn. Where have they gone now, with the country independent? I do not know. It is unlikely that most of them would stay on – the Somalis would not have the money to employ them, and they probably would not want to stay anyway, for the bitterness between themselves and the Somalis will not easily be eradicated. Some of them may have gone to Eritrea, perhaps, or Djibouti. Some may have gone back to Italy, to the families who are now strangers to them. And this may be the worst of all – after so many years, to find they are once again exiles, this time in their own land.

  A TELLER OF TALES

  Allah, who ordered all things and wrote each man’s fate indelibly in the book of life, had not been generous to Hersi. In a land where a man was still judged on his capacities as a warrior, Hersi was small, punily muscled, almost flimsy. His wits were his protection, but Allah had been ironic even here, for although He had given Hersi the power to conjure up words and to conceive orations, He had also given him an impediment in his speech. The cruel nickname applied to him among his own people was Hersi Half-tongue. But he met the name spiritedly.

  “I may have only half a tongue, but I swear by the Prophet that I am a whole man in the most important way.”

  He made this remark to Guś, who was able to speak with him in Somali. He would never have said such a thing to me. Some deep sense of decorum or taboo forbade it. In fact, so careful was he in this respect that once when he and Guś were discussing Somali marriage customs, he became immediately silent as Sheila and I appeared. He had been speaking about dowry, we later learned, and had been quoting the proverb – The daughter of a poor man has no vagina. He looked at us with embarrassment.

  “It’s all right,” Guś told him. “They can’t understand. They don’t speak that much Somali.”

  “You never know,” said Hersi, and refused to say another word.

  Unfortunately, he had picked up a number of English four-letter words, the meaning of which he did not appear to know, and even when he was talking with me, he sprinkled his conversation gaily and liberally with these.

  “I believe he’d pass out,” Jack said, “if he knew what he was saying.”

  We were careful never to let him know. But generally his half-tongue served him well. As our interpreter, he invested even the most trivial comment or request with an air of importance, and he made pronouncements like an oracle.

  “It is growing dark,” his voice could not have been more solemn if he had been announcing the end of the world, not merely the end of day, “and we cannot succeeding in shooting any game in bloody this place. Therefore I think we must returning to camp presently times.”

  His English had a grotesque lyricism about it. He specialized in high-flown phrases – absolutely excellent – all our considerations – which he scattered like hopefully sown wheat. His education in English had been brief, only a year at the government school, after which he had been forced to leave and get a job for his family’s sake. But he practised reading and writing continually. Sometimes I would see him beside the camp fire at night, squinting, holding the book up close so he could see in the smoky orange light, or filling the pages of a scribbler with his laborious scrawl. He was neither educated nor uneducated, and so he was sensitive about his errors. Criticism and correction were hard for him to take, for he was aware of his vulnerability. He scoffed at the Sheikh schoolboys, their youth and inexperience, perhaps knowing that they with their firmer grasp of English would one day make it impossible for such as himself to hold an interpreter’s job.

  He had attended Qoranic school for a while, and he was able to read and write Arabic. But his true talent was with his own language. It was a regret to me that I could not follow him when he spoke Somali, for he was not only an orator but a poet. In his youth he had composed many love-songs, some of which were well known throughout the country. His feeling for poetry was strong. Once at Sheikh when Musa was reciting some of his own love poetry, Hersi came up to him afterwards.

  “You have opened a wound that had healed,” he said.

  Hersi’s mode of expression was unfailingly dramatic. Once when he and Jack and Abdi were driving past Mandeira, in the hills, Hersi pointed to the high rocks and the cliffs.

  “There is the capital of the lions. When you are hearing their voice in the night, you will be shook.”

  He always called the Haud “this island place.” It seemed to us that he intended to say “this isolated place,” but his phrase was better. The Haud was an island place, so seemingly remote that one almost doubted the existence of the rest of the world.

  Each day in camp, Hersi taught Somali to me for an hour, and when the lesson was over, we sat in the brushwood hut and chatted. Our favourite topic was religion. Hersi was a mullah, a kind of lay-priest, and he had read the Qoran four times. After I had read the Qoran in English, we were able to converse better, for the Kitab, The Book, was Hersi’s constant frame of reference. It held, he believed, all truth, all the answers for everything. He was in this sense a fundamentalist, for he took the words of the Kitab literally at every point. And yet some of the Prophet’s furious cries against the infidel seemed to have passed him by, for his tolerant outlook towards other religions was not commonly found among Muslims any more than it was among Christians.

  “If a man is saying he is religious,” Hersi maintained, “and is not having highly respects for all the mighty prophets, then I say that man is without religion.”

  And in the sand he drew a peak, an inverted V.

  “This side here, it is the way of Esa,” he said, using the Arabic name for Jesus, “and this side here, it is the way of Mohamed. Both paths leading to God.”

  I recall
ed a letter I had seen not long before in an English newspaper. It was from a Christian clergyman, who said that Jacob Epstein’s statue of Christ made Him look as though He were a Syrian or an Arab or some other foreigner.

  Squatting in the desert dust, wrapped in his faded pink and black robe, and wearing his squashed and grimy old felt hat, Hersi elaborated on his beliefs.

  “Each land must following their own prophet, but showing greatly considerations for other prophets, too, for all prophets being sent by God.”

  In the realm of politics he was on less certain ground.

  “I wishing to ask you something,” he said to Jack one day. “White-skin people – these I know. Black-skin people – these I know. I even am hearing of yellow-skin people. But these ‘Reds’ which Radio Somali mentioning – can you tell me is such people truly having red skin?”

  He spoke of his wife and children, who lived with his tribe. He had, alas, only daughters. If a girl was not beautiful, she would have difficulty in finding a husband, and if she did find one, you could be sure he would not be a man who owned many camels. To be beautiful, a woman should be tall and have copper-coloured skin. Both Hersi’s daughters were still quite young, but he had begun to worry already.

  “One is very shiny,” he said, “but the other is small and black.”

  He knew, however, that there was no use in his worrying about anything, for all things were in the hands of Allah. His fatalism was total. Once when we were in Hargeisa to get supplies, Hersi bought a small bottle of ghee, the liquid butter that was eaten on rice and was regarded as a delicacy. He shoved the bottle in the back of the Land-Rover, and on the return trip to camp, it was joggled and the ghee was spilled.