The Prophet's Camel Bell

by Margaret Laurence

  “Now I shall not die,” said he, “for life has turned marvellously prosperous. I will live until I am an old greybeard, and will grow more mighty and more rich every year.”

  But at that moment, a faint breeze came in through the window, and when Ahmed looked around, there stood an angel.

  “It is your time to die now,” the angel said, “and I have been sent for you.”

  “Ah, the unfairness of it!” Ahmed cried. “Where were you, I ask, when I wanted to die, and jumped off the precipice?”

  “Your time had not yet come,” the angel said.

  “And where were you,” Ahmed sobbed, “when I waded out into the sea, and the water would not come above my ankles, and when the executioner’s blade broke, and when the watch-dogs did not flick an eyelash as I entered the Sultan’s palace?”

  “I have told you,” the angel said patiently. “Your time of death was not then. But now it has arrived, and I am here to take you.”

  Then Ahmed stopped his weeping and moaning, and glanced up with a look of great craftiness.

  “If I must die, so be it,” he said. “But you would not have me die without saying my prayers once more?”

  “Why, no,” the angel said. “You are free to pray before you die.”

  “Then,” Ahmed said, “promise me you won’t touch me until I have been to the mosque once more.”

  The angel promised, and swore on the Qoran. Then Ahmed jumped up joyfully.

  “Aha!” he laughed. “I didn’t say when I would go to the mosque, and now, my good friend, I don’t intend to go just yet!”

  So the wicked Ahmed continued to live, and grew more wealthy, and enjoyed his wife, and had a fine house and many servants. But he never went inside the mosque.

  Then it happened that the chief priest of the mosque died, and the Sultan called Ahmed Hatab to him to discuss the appointment of a new imam.

  “You have been my faithful adviser,” the Sultan said, “and my son-in-law, and now I intend to appoint you as imam.”

  At first Ahmed refused politely, saying that such an honour was too great. But when the Sultan insisted, Ahmed grew more and more frightened, and began beating his forehead with a frenzied hand and blurting out his terror.

  “Are you the offspring of some devil,” the Sultan cried, “to fear the holy mosque? You shall go, and you shall go at once!”

  Ahmed protested and wept and struggled, but the Sultan’s guards picked him up and carried him off. As soon as he was inside the door of the mosque, Ahmed saw the angel again.

  “Mercy, I beg of you!” cried Ahmed, on his knees.

  “Allah is merciful,” the angel said. “Pray to Him.”

  So Ahmed Hatab, who had tried to cheat death, did not die without saying his final prayers. Then, as he finished praying, he slumped down where he knelt, and the soul departed from the wretched little body of Ahmed the wood-seller.

  So do men learn the futility of resisting the commands of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

  THE IMPERIALISTS

  Out of the tin trunks and the mothballs came the dress uniforms, brass-buttoned up to the chin. Out came the ladies’ broad-brimmed hats, the flowered chiffon frocks in shades of forget-me-not or muted primrose – nothing ostentatious, purchased at Harrod’s on the last leave and cherished like health. Medals and shoes were polished as never before, and in a score of bungalows the stewardboys brandished charcoal irons like battle-shields as the chosen garments were pressed and put in readiness. The great occasion was at hand, the English monarch’s official birthday celebrated in the outposts of empire with pomp and with tumult, with durbars and with flags.

  The morning was cool and fine. The sun by mid-day would draw the sweat of even the chilliest memsahibs, but for a while, for at least an hour or so, they were the daughters of Jerusalem, roses of Sharon and lilies of the valley, sweet-smelling and garbed in perfection, and their men were kingly as Solomons.

  Outside the town, at the parade grounds, we punctually gathered. Somali men and women thronged indecisively around the edges of the square, pointing and snickering. But they had not been able to resist the occasion, either. Their cotton robes were bright and stiff with newness. Here was the Qadi of Hargeisa, lean and hawk-nosed, resplendent in white burnoose and a black robe embroidered with spider-webs of gold. Here were the local elders with their beards freshly trimmed, arrayed in robes of scarlet, turquoise, royal blue. The meek-eyed wives of Indian merchants were wearing their best saris of apricot or fuchsia silk, and their silver bangles tinkled and clashed softly on their languid wrists. Their husbands were speckless in white linen suits, and they sported those small topees known as Bombay bowlers. Through and around the crowds the Somali children skipped and butted like hordes of young goats.

  The English were apart. They sat primly at one side, ourselves among them, behind a fence. Gloved and straw-hatted mothers hissed at their giggling young – Behave yourself! We all had to behave ourselves. It was a solemn event, sedately joyful. The top officials emerged in the white uniform of the Colonial Service, and all the military men of any rank had medals sprouting like corsages from their out-puffed chests.

  His Excellency the Governor arrived. People leapt respectfully to their feet, but none of us was sure when to sit down again. Everyone looked enquiringly at everyone else. Finally we were settled, and the inspection of the troops began. The Somaliland Scouts and the police, long ranks of tall rangy Somalis, marched past in admirable precision. His Excellency wore a snowy uniform and the colonial governor’s hat, which was the most distinctive piece of headgear I had ever seen. It resembled a London policeman’s helmet, except that it was white, and from the top of it there flourished animatedly a great many red and white ostrich plumes. His Excellency was well over six feet, and was a fine-looking man, so he carried the uniform and the hat with ease and splendour. We had been told that all colonial governors were over six feet tall. This height, supposedly, was insisted upon in order to impress local populations. Personally, I did not believe this was the reason at all. It seemed to me that the British would simply be too sporting to ask a short man to wear those lofty plumes.

  The Somali bandsmen bleeped out a tune that was recognizable as God Save The Queen, although there was about it a weird melancholy strongly suggestive of Arabic music. They played it five times, and each time the Royal Standard was run up, then down again, while the troops presented arms. The occasions were when the Governor arrived, when the monarch (symbolically) arrived, when the Royal Salute was given, when the monarch (symbolically) departed, and when His Excellency departed. What with the national anthem, the raising and lowering of flags, and the troops slapping rifles up and down, the spectators of all races found themselves confused. The English enclosure in particular was a scene of well-intentioned but uncoordinated action. People sat down hopefully, then bobbed up again when they noticed that no one else was sitting down. Men fumbled in weary desperation with hats which seemed never to be in the right position at the right time.

  The Somalis, watching from a slight distance, did not appear surprised. They had always known that the Ingrese were demented.

  And of course, a good many of them really were demented, and not in the harmless and rather touching musical-comedy manner of the Birthday Parade, either. I found the sahib-type English so detestable that I always imagined that if I ever wrote a book about Somaliland, it would give me tremendous joy to deliver a withering blast of invective in their direction. Strangely, I now find I cannot do so. What holds me back is not pity for them, although they were certainly pitiable, but rather the feeling that in thoroughly exposing such of their sores as I saw, there would be something obscene and pointless, like mutilating a corpse. For these people are dead, actually, although some of them will continue to lumber around Africa for a few more years, like lost dinosaurs. They bear no relation to most parts of Africa today, and however much Africans may have suffered at their hands, it is to be hoped that one day Africans may be able
to see them for what they really were – not people who were motivated by a brutally strong belief in their own superiority, but people who were so desperately uncertain of their own worth and their ability to cope within their own societies that they were forced to seek some kind of mastery in a place where all the cards were stacked in their favour and where they could live in a self-generated glory by transferring all evils, all weaknesses, on to another people. As long as they could be scornful or fearful of Africa or Africans, they could avoid the possibility of being scornful or fearful of anything within themselves.

  To this group belonged the sahib who referred to Somalis as “black bastards” except when he facetiously called them “our black brethren;” the memsahib who twittered interminably about the appalling cheekiness of the Somalis; the thin pallid lady who was haunted by the fear (or perhaps hope) that all Somali men over the age of twelve were constantly eyeing her with extreme lewdness; the timid memsahib who lived within the four walls of her bungalow as within a tissue-paper fortress which the slightest breath of Africa might cause to crumple around her. To this group, also, belonged the memsahib who one morning at the Hargeisa Club gave the steward a tongue-lashing that would have done credit to a termagant of Hogarth’s day, because he had placed a salt shaker on the table instead of a salt cellar – “Don’t you know that no lady ever sprinkles salt over her food?” Another of this ilk was the sahib who, when he was presiding over a district court once, shrilled at each Somali witness in turn – “You’re lying!” – as perhaps they were, but whether they were or not, they could not risk replying in a tone like his. To this clan belonged the sahib who once ordered the Somali steward at the Hargeisa Club to bring back the magazine which the sahib had been reading and which the steward had put away while the Englishman was out at the bar; the Somali could not read and did not know one magazine from another, but the sahib would not walk across the room and find his own magazine – the steward was made to trot back and forth until by a process of elimination the right publication was fetched. To this sad company belonged the memsahibs who told gruesome stories over the mid-morning tea – the Englishwoman whose husband was away on trek and who was wakened one night by an invading shadow which proved to be an African bent on raping her; managing to reach under her pillow, she drew out the revolver she kept there and shot him – he staggered off into the night, and when the servants searched the compound, the man turned out to be the trusted night-watchman whom the family had employed for years. I had no reason to disbelieve this tale at the time, but some years later the identical story was told to me in West Africa as having happened there. Dark myths germinated and flourished in the stagnant pool of boredom that was the greatest threat to the memsahibs.

  Every last one of these people purported to hate Africa, and yet they all clung to an exile that was infinitely preferable to its alternative – nonentity in England. I have never in my life felt such antipathy towards people anywhere as I felt towards these pompous or whining sahibs and memsahibs, and yet I do not feel the same anger now. Their distortions have been presented in detail often enough, both fictionally and journalistically, in almost every tale of colonial life. As I see it, whatever incurable illness they may have had, they are archaic now and at least in the countries where they no longer have power they ought to be permitted to pass into history without too much further commentary. R.I.P.

  But there were others for whom I was quite unprepared when I stepped ashore at Berbera, expecting all the English abroad to be fullblown imperialists, whatever I fancied that word meant. If I had ever read about them, it had been with scepticism. I had not really believed such people existed. Yet here they were, confounding every preconceived notion of old colonials or pukka sahibs, and defying any neat labelling. Each was unique, utterly unlike anyone else, and yet they had this in common – they were all intensely concerned with this land and with the work they were doing here, and they were all drawn to Africa, or some place far from home, deeply and irresistibly.

  Who could ever forget Libahh, The Lion? This was the name given to him by the Somalis, but to the English he was known as The Baron. He was a major in the Somaliland Scouts, a short broad man with a balloon belly and a cheerful scarlet face. His eyes were large and keen, and when you looked beyond the rolls of fat around them, you saw that these eyes did not miss a thing. He played his role exactly as he wanted it; he was what he chose to be. In one eye he wore a monocle. His moustache curved ornately along both cheeks and tapered off towards his ears in a long fringe of wiry grey-black hair.

  On the night of the Queen’s Birthday dance at Government House, the Baron told me how he once shot crocodile with a twenty-two.

  “Nothing to it,” he said. “You simply aim for their eyes.”

  Now the time-honoured tales came out, the tales of the African bush and veld, the tales every old Africa hand keeps stowed away like treasured amulets, to bring out sometimes and touch – the elephants and buffalo tracked and slain, the Masai warriors who twisted the tail of a charging lion, the black leopards that used to live in the Sheikh hills. I would have believed anything this man told me, not because it was necessarily true, but for the same reason that one believes in first-rate fiction – within the framework of words, the story is absolutely convincing. Perhaps this was one reason the Baron got along so well with the Somalis. He could spin as good a tale as any of them.

  He spoke boomingly, in a voice rich with underlying laughter. Only once did his mood turn serious, when he told of a gift some tribesmen had given him not long ago.

  “Enormous great lion pelt with a black mane. Not many lion about, you know, these days. Thought it was jolly decent of them to give it to me. I’ve got it pegged up on my wall.”

  Abruptly, he swung back to his public self, his character of Baron. We chatted about the Parade that day, and he commented on the Governor’s uniform and headgear.

  “If he put these feathers on his bum,” the Baron said, “he could fly.”

  Nearby, I heard the fluttering voice of a memsahib.

  “He’s so vulgar, that man – oh dear, he’s so terribly common!”

  The Baron might have been called many things, but common was certainly not one of them. He was one of the most uncommon men I had ever met. Suddenly he glared at me from behind his monocle and called me “bloody colonial.” I told him there was only one thing worse than calling a Canadian an American, and that was to call one a colonial.

  “No difference,” snorted the Baron. “American came up to me once in a bar, and I said ‘Who’re you – a Yankee?’ And he said, ‘Suh, I’m a rebel.’ So I told him, ‘Hell, that’s nothing – you’re all bloody rebels to me!’”

  The next morning we saw him at the Club. The waiter approached softly with the coffee, and the Baron let loose with a leonine roar.

  “What’s the matter, man? Quit stamping around like that, can’t you?”

  Then he grinned at us and at the Somali, who was well aware that Libahh did not mean to be taken seriously.

  “Can’t take my monocle out this morning,” he said. “Need it to hold my eye in.”

  So he passed out of our life, and we heard no more about him until many years later, when we chanced to see a newspaper story from Auckland.

  New Zealand’s first television star has quit, and in doing so has shown up pitfalls in government operation of the service. Nicknamed the Baron in many out-of-the-way parts of the world, he was a natural as a t.v. personality, with his handlebar moustache, monocle and embroidered waistcoats. He has spent most of his life as a soldier, and has served in such legendary forces as the Arab legion, the King’s African Rifles, and the Somaliland Scouts. But throughout his service as an announcer, he was classified as a class six clerk in the public service, on a salary less than some typists in his office were getting. “I loved the work,” he said, “but I just couldn’t afford it.” The major has left to try his luck in Australia.

  Godspeed him, wherever he may be, for there are few e
nough embroidered waistcoats in this world. But I have the feeling that however much his garb and manner may impress others, the Baron himself may value more a black-maned lion pelt that hangs upon his wall.

  Chuck was a Canadian, the only fellow countryman we encountered in Somaliland, and the only unsponsored individual, for this was not tourist country and outsiders were normally here only as employees of some agency or government. Chuck lived in Ethiopia, and was visiting Hargeisa when we ran into him at the j.m.j. Hotel, a bizarre little place owned by one of the few Christian Somali families, the initials in the name standing for Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Chuck was in his thirties, almost bald, a toughly humorous man.

  “I had some cash saved up after the war,” he told us, “so I thought I’d come out to Africa. I’d always wanted to go biggame hunting. Just my luck, though – all my kit was lost on the way out. Guns, everything, all gone. Well, there I was, stuck in Ethiopia – I had to do something.”

  He soon noticed that the Juba River was full of crocodiles. He could not shoot them himself, having no equipment, but he saw dozens of rifle-carrying Ethiopian soldiers standing around doing nothing in particular. So he made a deal. They would shoot and skin the crocs, and he would make all the arrangements for selling the valuable skins.

  “There’s not as much useful skin on a croc as you might think. Only the underbelly is any good. But these soldiers were damn fine shots. We got dozens. It worked dandy for a while. The soldiers were happy to make a few extra bucks, and I was earning a tidy living. But – boy, I’ve really got problems now. The Ethiopian government has started bitching about it.”

  He had recently travelled from Harar, where he lived, to Addis Ababa, in the hope of placating Ethiopian officialdom, but he did not feel optimistic.

  “Too many wheels within wheels,” he said. “Too many rival factions. If you’re friendly with one, you’re liable to get yourself bumped off by another. I don’t see why they had to go and kick up such a fuss. All I wanted to do was shoot a few lousy crocodiles.”