The Prophet's Camel Bell

by Margaret Laurence

  We waver between the desire for a society, quite different from our own, in which the attachments will be preserved with the maximum of emotional comfort and stability, and the desire for complete individuation where the individual is radically independent and relies wholly on his courage, technical skill and inventive powers. When the child suffers because he feels that the ties between himself and his parents are threatened and at the same time feels guilty because after all it is he who wants to break them, he reacts to the situation by dreaming of a world which is entirely his and into which he can project the images of his unconscious, to which he is attached in the way which is to him the most satisfying. Now, it is this imaginary world which is, strictly speaking, the only ‘primitive’ world. … It is this ‘primitive’ image of the world which we have in mind when we become explorers, ethnographers, or colonials and go amongst societies which seem to us to be less real than our own.4

  This was something of an irony for me, to have started out in righteous disapproval of the empire-builders, and to have been forced at last to recognize that I, too, had been of that company. For we had all been imperialists, in a sense, but the empire we unknowingly sought was that of Prester John, a mythical kingdom and a private world. I recall how apt I considered Hersi’s description of the Haud – this island place – more apt, even, than I realized at the time.

  Yet something of the real world did impinge upon our consciousness, and portions of the secret empire of the heart had to be discarded, one by one. In the Haud people died of thirst, people as actual as ourselves and with as much will to live. The magic potion of a five-grain aspirin very quickly proved inadequate, and the game of healer had to be abandoned. The unreal relationship with Abdi as a faithful retainer was shattered by the reality of him as a man – a man with outlooks far different from our own, but valid for him. Jack discovered the real world in his work, finding that an attempt had to be made, however imperfectly, to see the Somalis in terms of themselves and their own inheritance, not ours. How many other things there may have been which we perceived not as they were but as we wanted them to be – this we have no means of knowing.

  Undoubtedly many Europeans have recognized or sensed in themselves the need for a fine and private place this side of the grave, and have sought to control it, to prevent it from distorting the outer world. Certain words return to me – do I merely read meanings into them, or do they in fact express such a recognition? One should not be too quick either to love or to hate. You don’t expect miracles – you just do what you can. If only Europeans could work here without an axe to grind. It seems to me that these men went to Africa, as we all do, partly out of an inner need, but they managed to come to terms with it. They went on to do what work they could, not as crusaders in a desperate darkness and not as godlings in a solitary Eden, but as people in a world of people both different and similar to themselves.

  To Africans, their land has never been “the Africa of the Victorian atlas,” and they will not willingly allow it to be so to us now, either. Those who cannot bring themselves to relinquish the desert islands, the separate worlds fashioned to their own pattern and inhabited by creatures of their own design, must seek them elsewhere now, for they are no longer to be found in Africa.

  1J.A. Hunter and Daniel P. Mannix, Tales of the African Frontier, Harper, 1954, p. 158.

  2Graham Greene, In Search of a Character. Two African Journals, The Bodley Head, 1961, p. 123.

  3O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: A Study of the Psychology of Colonisation, Methuen, 1956, p. 108.

  4Ibid., p. 207.

  NABAD GELYO

  No construction job could ever be simple and straightforward in Somaliland – the people were too unpredictable and the land itself too full of unexpected snags. As the second Jilal went on, however, work on the ballehs did take on some kind of pattern. Each balleh took roughly four weeks to build, so Jack had to move camp only once a month. He drove in to Hargeisa most week-ends, and then I would get news of the week’s work.

  “You should see Isman Shirreh now. He’s the best Cat operator I’ve got – he’s certainly come a long way. Arabetto wants to learn how to drive a Cat, but I can’t spare him all that often from the Bedford. I let him take Omar’s shift this week, though, and he managed fine. Omar was off for a day – his wife just had a son. We had meat yesterday. The Illalo corporal shot a gerenuk, God knows how – I haven’t seen any game around for weeks. The soil’s like rock where we are now. The ripper teeth are wearing out again – I’ve got to go to P.W.D. today and see what can be done. Still, we’ll have this balleh finished almost a week sooner than the last one.”

  In Jack’s engineering phrase, everything was proceeding according to plan. But this relative harmony within the balleh job did not mean that all was harmonious as far as the Haud tribesmen were concerned. The poisoned water rumours had passed away, to be replaced by other rumours. One in particular worried Jack.

  “There’s something I’ve heard too often lately, and from too many tribesmen – it can’t be only idle talk. They’re saying in the Haud that Sultan Shabel Esa plans to raise a force and take over the ballehs once they’re finished. He wouldn’t withhold the water – he’d just sell it. That would be a hell of a situation, wouldn’t it? I think I’d better talk it over with Matthew. It looks as though the ballehs will have to be patrolled by Illaloes. Sultan Shabel’s absolutely unscrupulous, or so I hear, and he’s said to be smuggling in rifles from Ethiopia. But the other tribes won’t take it lying down.”

  As usual, it was not the technical problems that proved the most difficult, but the human ones. In a country where water was so scarce, the presence of new watering places could easily trigger a tribal war. Jack conferred with Matthew and other administrative officers, and it was agreed that the ballehs would indeed have to be patrolled, at first by government Illaloes and later, it was hoped, by some system of local authorities to be set up by the various tribes concerned.

  I missed the life in camp, but I was managing quite well in Hargeisa. Alone in the bungalow, I found I could deal successfully with any scorpions that put in an appearance in the evenings, by the simple method of impaling them upon the spear which had belonged to the thieves of Selahleh. These scorpions were large but they were not swift. Generally, they obligingly stood still, and I became an expert scorpion-spearer.

  Domestically, life was quiet but never dull. Mohamed was determined that I would have fresh milk to drink during my pregnancy, but the obtaining of milk during the Jilal was almost impossible. He searched the Somali town, and one day came back carrying an old beer bottle filled with foamy white liquid.

  “This one woman, she my tribe, she say every day she sell milk for you, small-small. I think I get lucky, for finding she. Must be you drink it now.”

  I took a mouthful and immediately spat it out. It tasted like chalk, saccharine and woodsmoke.

  “Mohamed, for heaven’s sake what kind of milk is it?”

  “You drink it,” he said, hurt. “It is good milk.”

  It was, I learned, a mixture of camel milk, sheep milk and goat milk, and it had been smoked, in the traditional way, for Somalis maintain that if milk is smoked it will not go sour so quickly. For a week I choked it down, with Mohamed standing beside me to make certain I did not cheat and pour it down the sink. Then I decided I could endure it no longer, and to Mohamed’s disgust I went on to powdered milk, which he did not believe was real milk at all.

  Several girls from Mohamed’s tribe used to drop in sometimes in the afternoons and have tea with me, and occasionally, if I could get a lift to the Somali town, I visited their aqals there. Dahab was tall and rather heavy-boned. She was quiet and slightly withdrawn, always aware, I think, that her girl friend was more beautiful than she. Fadima was truly beautiful, slim and very vivacious, with dark expressive eyes. Neither girl was married yet. My grasp of Somali was not good, but it was good enough now to enable me to talk with them without the inhibiting presence of an in
terpreter. Mohamed used to serve tea, then tactfully disappear, although probably to listen from the kitchen.

  “Your husband must be very glad you are having a child at last,” Fadima said feelingly, one day.

  “Yes, of course he is. I’m very glad, too.”

  “Ah yes,” sighed Fadima, “but your husband – he must be really glad. You have been married five years – a long time. If you did not bear him a child soon, he would have had to divorce you.”

  She glanced at me smilingly. She never hesitated to ask any kind of question, but she did so with innate courtesy, always.

  “How old are you?”

  Twenty-five, I told her, almost twenty-six. She gasped a little, then turned away so I would not see the amused astonishment in her face.

  “Why are you surprised?” I asked.

  “Oh –” momentarily, she was covered with confusion, “you see – I had thought you were young.”

  It was through Fadima that I met Said the Midgan. Fadima, whose father was fairly well-off, possessed a wonderful collection of leather sandals – cheetah skin, camel hide finely tooled with intricate patterns, red leather set with glass gems. Every time I saw her, she wore a different pair. I asked her, finally, where she got them, for I had not seen such sandals in the marketplace. Said the Midgan made them, she told me. She promised to ask him if he would come to my bungalow. He was the best sandal-maker in Hargeisa, but he was somewhat temperamental and worked only when he felt like it. He did not need to work all the time, for his wife was such a good basket-weaver that she could support the family.

  Said turned up one day, a short wiry man with an unruly crop of untrimmed hair and a ferocious moustache. All right, he agreed, as though bored by the whole thing, he would make some sandals for me, but he would not promise to have them done by any definite time. Nevertheless, they were completed a week later. They were made out of cheetah skin, yellow and brown, and they fitted perfectly. After that, Said made many pairs of sandals for me, and sometimes he would sit and talk under the galol tree in our yard, telling me about the old days when the Midgan people used to hunt with packs of dogs and how skilled the Midgans still were with their bows and poisoned arrows. One afternoon he brought around a Midgan bow and let me examine it.

  “Look – I show you –” he snatched up the bow and an arrow, and whirling around, he aimed straight at Mohamed, who was standing some distance away, fortunately not looking in Said’s direction. For a second I stood paralysed.

  “Said! For God’s sake, be careful!”

  Zing! The arrow landed in a tree trunk, not more than an inch or so from Mohamed’s head, just as Said had known it would. Mohamed leapt and let out a roar of rage and terror, and Said threw the bow down and bent double with laughter.

  I made new acquaintances among English people as well as Somalis. I was asked to help out with a group of Somali girls who were learning to make crocheted table-mats and lace edging with the idea that this skill could develop into some sort of cottage industry. I did not know a crochet hook from a knitting needle, but I agreed to help sort out the girls’ work and iron the finished mats. When the first of these sessions was over, I began to talk with the Englishwoman who was in charge of the class. To my surprise, I found that she, too, was a writer and, like myself, she was extremely interested in the translation of African poetry and folk-tales and had done this kind of work herself some years ago when she was living in Kenya. I had long ago given up the hope of ever talking to anyone here about writing in general, and even the Europeans who were interested in Somali literature were exceedingly few and far between. I was delighted to have discovered one other person who shared my interests, and when we had been talking enthusiastically for an hour or so, I was about to suggest that she drop over to my bungalow the following day for a beer and a continuation of the discussion. I recalled in time, however, that this was not possible. One does not ask the Governor’s wife to drop over for a beer. This kind of formality, which prevents people from talking with one another, seemed idiotic to me then, and it still does.

  Towards the end of our tour, it became obvious that all the ballehs would not be finished by the time we were due to go on leave. Jack was in a quandary – to return or not? The scheme was going well now, the remaining sites had been selected, the staff was trained. The rest of the ballehs would be essentially a repetition of those that had been already done. Furthermore, the first Somali to graduate in engineering had recently returned from England, and could take over the project. Jack wanted to see the scheme finished; and yet he was reluctant to stay when he felt he really was not needed here any more. In many ways, it would be just as well if the scheme were completed by a Somali engineer. The tribesmen might accept it better that way. He finally decided not to come back. But even after the decision had been made, he felt torn two ways.

  “Ali can handle the rest of the work just as well as I can – I know that. But I’d like to have seen the ballehs after the rains. I’d like to know if they’re really going to work all right.”

  If the Jilal went on much longer, or the Gu rains failed, we would have to leave the country without ever seeing the ballehs filled with water.

  “In sha’ Allah,” the Somalis said, and we echoed the words.

  Miraculously, the Gu rains fell early that year, and we were elated. We waited impatiently in Hargeisa, for the Haud was impassable during the weeks of downpour. Finally, when the rains had dwindled and were almost over, we went out with Hersi and Arabetto to Balleh Gehli, the Balleh of the Camels. It would be our last trip out into the Haud.

  And there, among the thorn trees, in the place we knew so well, was the balleh. It looked enormous now, like a brown lake in the middle of the desert. Jack examined it minutely, and nodded, speaking almost brusquely in order not to show how pleased he was.

  “Seems satisfactory. The wing walls have held, thank God. Not too much scouring, either. It’s drained as large an area as I’d hoped, apparently – it’s completely filled, anyway. Well, I expected it would be, but it’s good to see it. I wonder what the Somalis think of it, now that it’s full of water?”

  We knew the tribesmen too well now to expect any great manifestations of joy from them. All we hoped was that there would not be too much disagreement over the use of the water, and that their suspicions about the ballehs would not arise once more.

  At the far side of Balleh Gehli, sitting on the embankment with their rifles beside them, were half a dozen Illaloes. They were here to ensure that the water was used by anyone who needed it, and not sold to the ignorant or fearful by any bold and unscrupulous strongman who might see in the watering places an opportunity for himself.

  Around the edges of the balleh, the camels milled and drank, led by tribesmen whose faces expressed nothing except the desire to get their beasts watered and back to the encampment. Somali women and girls hitched up their robes around their knees and waded into the balleh to fill their water vessels, which they then placed upon their heads and sauntered off with barely a glance in our direction.

  Hersi, snorting with angry laughter, came back from a consultation with a group of the tribesmen. He threw up his hands in mock despair.

  “I am not knowing what kind of people these bush people. They saying – what is these Ingrese doing here, beside our balleh?”

  It was their balleh now. They had assimilated it; it belonged here. Jack grinned.

  “It’s okay. Tell them we’re going now, and we won’t be coming back.”

  As we climbed into the Land-Rover, an old Somali with a face seamed and hardened by the sun of many Jilals, passed by with his string of camels.

  “Ma nabad ba?” he spoke the traditional greeting. “Is it peace?”

  “Wa nabad,” we replied. “It is peace.”

  And then we drove away.

  When the time came, we packed everything in our bungalow, the few possessions we brought here and the things we had accumulated, the skin of the cheetah that Abdi shot, the magical
ostrich egg, the spear that the thieves had dropped, the camel bell that Ahmed Abdillahi gave to us. We had accumulated a great many other things as well, but these took up no space in our luggage, for they were memories – of Sheikh, of the Haud, of Zeilah and Hargeisa, of all the people we had known here.

  Outside the small stone bungalow, a flock of birds with golden breastfeathers and electric-blue wings had gathered in the thorn tree. I had never known what their proper name was, but I thought of them as firebirds, for they always screeched distinctly the Somali word for fire – Dab – dab – dab. Their raucous voices followed us as we left.

  Past the pepper trees waving sedately outside the Club, down the dusty thorn-fringed road, through the streets swarming with children and camels. Past the strolling Somali girls with their silk headscarves, past women in ragged brown robes, past the hobbling beggars with their outstretched hands. Past the mudbrick tea shops where young men in white shirts and bright robes were having tea and politics in the shade. Finally the airport, and then goodbye. Almost before we knew it, we were flying over the Gulf of Aden, and although we could not quite believe it, Somaliland was already in the past.

  And yet the voyage which began when we set out for Somaliland could never really be over, for it had turned out to be so much more than a geographical journey.

  Whenever we think of Somaliland, we think of the line of watering places that stretches out across the Haud, and we think of the songs and tales that have been for generations a shelter to nomads on the dry red plateau and on the burnt plains of the coast, for these were the things through which we briefly touched the country and it, too, touched our lives, altering them in some way forever.