Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  ‘We do not want to work for the Italians anymore,’ the old man said.

  ‘You will actually be working for me,’ I told him, ‘just as the Italians will be working for the military government. The food must be grown somehow. Think it over for a day and then come and see me again and tell me what you have thought. I am not here to arrest you, or force you. I am asking you to find men among your tribes who will work on the plantation under new contracts which I will arrange.’

  ‘We will think over what you have said,’ the first old chief said to me. ‘We are glad you are giving us time to speak this matter out.’ He beckoned to a man nearby, who came over obediently, a tall youth with a shock of thick woolly hair. ‘Take off your cloth and show the officer your back,’ he said sharply. The young man slipped the cotton cloak off his shoulders and turned to show me the healed, shining, grey scars of whip strokes on his back.

  ‘That was done at the whipping post at Shalambot,’ the chief said to me. ‘My people wanted to kill the Italians when their army was retreating, but I would not let them. Are you going to kill the Italians or not?’ He stared into my eyes.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They are defeated. One cannot kill those who did not die in the battle. One gives them a chance to live another kind of life. Would you kill unarmed people after a battle?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t. We wanted to hear you speak on that subject. It was said that the new army would kill all the Italians. Do you now say that work and pay will be just?’

  ‘Yes. Discuss it and we will meet again tomorrow.’

  When men, Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, or those wearing their insignia, sit at desks in countries not their own, but borrowed by gunfire, or bribes, or handy accident, tell the inhabitants (the actual winners) what is going to happen to them tomorrow, they cannot help acting the strangers, as if they, and what they feel they represent, are going to last for centuries here, in this country which is not theirs, and may last for all eternity. They cannot help feeling that. They have to feel it, or go, resign, be court-martialled, cease to believe in what they only half believe anyway – that they have come here with a special message; in fact they must administer the accident they find themselves involved in. And it takes acting. Acting is important to kings, barristers, administrators, judges, officers, all who assume cousinship to God. And I felt it that hot, sweaty day beside the Webi Shabeli when I sat with six chiefs and listened to their decision.

  Of course they were going to send the labourers. They had numbered them off already. Of course they saw that the two white races had fought each other in Africa, in front of their eyes, one white race being downed, and of course they saw that this made no difference at all in who owned the plantations, and who slaved on them in the heat. The Italians owned the plantations, and would own them as long as the new conquerors backed them in their ownership (though the actual owners were sitting around me in the sun that day, and would never forget it), so they would supply the labourers. I told them I was very happy, for them, for me, for the government, for the Italians, and for the human race in general. Men must work with one another, tolerate each other, help each other, etcetera, and I meant it, though not quite for the reasons I gave at that time and in that situation. I began to understand politics, government lying.

  Yet there is something touching about being an administrator, and one can see how easily it can become a habit, and then a conviction, a way of life if carried on long enough with enough power behind to ensure its continuance. And it had been the history of the human race up to then, this taking of other people’s countries, the setting up of incomprehensible governments, the governing, the policing, the pensioning, the retirement, the memoirs detailing the failings of the governed (who yet might rise to civilisation).

  Even then, in 1941, 2 and 3, I sensed that just as it was about to die, the British Empire had almost risen above the cash and factory image which it had so long worked for, above even its stuffy racial prejudices sometimes, and it was too late then. But it was not till I got to the Fourteenth Army in Burma, with its many races, that I saw what the British Empire might have been, despite the fears felt by those upstairs in London about the servants downstairs. Too late after too much cant.

  It was the oldest of the chiefs who, when the first drafts of labourers for the plantations came in, said to me what I had always known I felt, but had never heard spoken by one of the subject races.

  ‘We are lending you the labourers,’ he told me. ‘But only because you are living with us here on the river, and because you have spoken well, and not because we recognise this new government which has replaced the Italians. We do not want to be ruled by any strangers anymore. They beat us with cannon, but every inch of this land is ours. Ours. It can never belong to any strangers. Men cannot live under strangers who have taken their lands. Never. If I had a spear and you had nothing and I came and took your house from you, and made you work in your own garden for me, you would not like that. That is what they have done, these governments. And it must come to an end now. You can tell them that, for that is what we all feel.’ There was a good opportunity for some cant here, to tell him about the docks, the roads, the harbours, and all the handout material about how good it was to be ruled by clever white men, but I let it go. I agreed with every word he had said, while looking grave, and enigmatic, and non-committal. These chiefs, when young, had fought against the Italian invaders, and this tribe had been difficult to subdue. All these people everywhere would have to be let free, left alone, lectured to no more, or this war would be as useless as the last one.

  Chapter 14

  ABOUT A THOUSAND MILES NORTH from this crowded street in which Ali and I were walking in the sunglare Humf lay buried. He was killed while I was in Burma, a friend I grieve over, and it was over there in that palm shaded house, its white stucco shabby and greying now, that I last met him, in 1943 when I was certain I either had cancer of the throat, or something like it.

  Fear is interesting in the way it can either drip in slowly, given time and circumstance, or blast in like a flash of flame in a millionth of a second. But I did not know that the body and mind can make their own arrangements for you by forcing buried fear into an actual lump, a rocklike lump in your throat, until Humf explained it to me.

  ‘It’s just strain,’ he told me laughing. ‘Strain caused by fear, and fear caused by the fear of going wrong, of balancing a situation too long, as you have been doing lately up country.’

  Humf was a marvellous doctor, and greatly interested in the effects of the wilderness on each of us. He knew the breakdown signs in the eyes immediately, and always fought to get leave for an officer when he saw these signs.

  ‘Isolation among the wolves,’ he used to say, ‘can bring about exactly the same effects as a good long drenching of shellfire. The body has to find some getout.’ He always referred to the desert tribes as ‘the wolves’, rather fondly.

  ‘But listen, Humf,’ I protested, ‘this is an actual lump. Here.’ I showed him. ‘I can’t swallow. I can actually feel it there. It hurts.’

  He shook his head patiently. ‘I’m telling you,’ he said, ‘it’s just strain. If you hadn’t ended the operations when you did, you’d have cracked up completely. This “lump” as you imagine it to be, is merely your body’s getout, its effort to help you crack up and get sick, and – ’ he grinned – ‘have the right to desert your post among the wolves, honourably. That’s all. Now do what I tell you. Go and get drunk with your friends. They’re in the bar now. Get drunk for a few nights. Talk all night. Go to a few parties. There’s no actual lump. It’s quite normal to get apparently ill, when you’re ready to have a rest and you can’t.’

  He was right. I woke up with a hangover about a day and a half later, the sun burning on me through the open window of the room, the bed soaked with sweat, and while in the shower clapped my hand to my throat and found that the lump, which had been hardening there for about two months, was gone. And I
sat down after drying myself and thought about how remarkable that was.

  What would have been the strange machinery of emotion which could have caused that actual lump in my throat, which had got worse, so that I had to make an effort to swallow towards the end of my term in that worst of all places from which I had just come, emptied, sickened, tired, and shattered after a truly demoniacal malaria? It was true that I had not enjoyed what I had had to do up there, nor had the others. That was why drink was good at night. You could feel the fourth drink slowly melting the iron tension in the head and body, and you could feel your frame sighing with relief. It was the third year that that lump had gone, and I had never had a nice soft job on the coast, in the gin belt, and had begun to want one, and to resent wanting one, preferring to belong up there with the friends who preferred it too, and who all wanted a nice soft job for a while on the coast.

  I did not like to think that my machinery could invent that psychological lump for me, preferring to believe that one was in full control of the emotional works all the time.

  It helped me to understand the crackups, that lump, and the suicides. It became obvious to me that when you were done, and ready to bend, you would not know what you were doing, and would do it. It was obvious that you could not live in violence and threat for overlong periods and not be diverted into those side lanes of fear and doubt. It was all too personal, too close, too tiring to one’s reverence for charity, and pity. It was having to live like a savage for too long, becoming casual about brutality, revenge, blood lust, which set up intense inner struggle, disgust, while all the time you had to stay the wary, watchful, confident white stranger who revelled, apparently, in this warrior world where the standards of fighting spirit had been set by the ‘Mad Mullah’ twenty-odd years before. Many of one’s opponents, proud to be known as Dub-Ad, had been in his ranks. For a time it was feared that another ‘Mad Mullah’ might arise, but those of us close to the Somalis knew it was unlikely.

  ‘Well, how’s the cancer tonight?’ Humf asked me in the bar that evening.

  ‘Gone,’ I told him. We laughed.

  ‘But of course, it’s not funny,’ Humf said. ‘I’ve asked for a psychologist to make a report on the officers up country. It’s not just the general tension of living among “the wolves”, it’s the long stretches, a year and more, you’re having to do up there without proper food, without civilisation in fact. You’d be surprised what other forms of “lump” in the throat I’ve dealt with during the past couple of years. Symptoms, that’s all, of used-upness. But there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  I told Humf that I actually enjoyed living among ‘the wolves’, while hating it too, that when I was away on my annual twenty-eight days leave I longed to go back again. He nodded.

  ‘That’s because you’re a romantic,’ he said, ‘like your friends. You’ve learned a common unit feeling, living a life that only a few of you live. It can get so bad that officers have to be ordered to go on leave. In other words, if you’ve got to live rough, then live the roughest, with your friends. That’s romanticism, and highly necessary in an army, of course.’

  He then explained to me some of the forms of mania he had glanced at in some of the other officers who had consulted him. These manias and tensions were dissolved quite often by action or leave, but it was usually responsibility involving the possibility of a wrong decision at any moment, especially among a volatile and violent people, which found the hidden cracks in one. A decision, no matter how many hours, weeks, months, it has been coming up, or considered, takes a moment only, and there is usually no going back, and probably fear comes from the fear of making the wrong decision, and a wrong decision could mean a disaster too far away from base to be, well let’s say it, safe. So it probably came down to a rationalisation about personal fear in the end. However you try and shape it, personal fear, of disgrace or death, must lie behind this kind of neurosis. The root of the erosion, though, lay in the fact that one sought so hard to keep peace among tribes who despised it, while one often waited, through frustration and anger, stoked by climate and living conditions, to have it out with them in the way they wanted it, through violence. One swung between pity and rage, while slowly one eroded. When the violence came, however, one hated it, and one came to know how it damaged one’s slightly phoney ideals about how Man longed only for goodness and peace, whereas, actually, he loved fighting and knew he shouldn’t. Hypocrisy is the keystone of civilisation and should be cherished.

  Greater than your own petty anxieties and fears, though, was the sense of desolation when you saw the nomads dying or dead on the hot bitter rock of their prison, the wilderness; and made worse by the realisation that they did not resent it, did not want a washing machine or to live forever, and that they despised pain and death, perhaps the true nihilists, these famished wanderers of the wastes come to their bloody rest by treachery. Their scorn of death was both depressing and exalting, as your civilised and primitive selves tried to be truthful.

  They always made me feel, those nomad dead, as if they announced to the world that there was no purpose after all behind life, and that it was all like this beneath the tapestry, loneliness and vengeance and waste. I think that that was what I hated most about their wilderness; that it showed you how the world had once been, everywhere, and could be again if the compassionate will of civilised men was ever finally defeated by the spirit of death, which the scientists have packaged at last, and who know, far better than the warrior generals, that there can be no next war, only the last one.

  Chapter 15

  IRECOGNISED FINN’S HOUSE across the busy sandy street, the lattice-work still faded green, the yellow walls still cracked and scabrous, the palms as wilted and as dusty as ever, and I wondered where he was now, tall, lean, patient, hospitable Finn in his dark glasses and big upturned moustache. The sun beat down hard on his house, and if I knew Finn, at all, he was now in some African wilderness, stroking his moustache and listening to a tribesman explain some finer points about a murder (known as ‘a killing’ to the tribesman).

  ‘Who lives in that house?’ I asked Ali.

  ‘A merchant,’ he said. ‘Do you like that house?’

  ‘Yes. It is very attractive,’ I told him. It had been two o’clock in the morning when I had gone to that house for the last time, invited there by a telephone call from Finn. He had wanted me to interrogate an Italian who had been found wandering in the desert, a kettle in his hand, by an askari patrol.

  Finn was in one of his very stiffly starched and pressed khaki drill uniforms, buttons glittering, thick dark hair brushed back, great moustache sharp against his haggard, big-boned handsome face, tall and massively shouldered, the living embodiment of the linen-shirted Gaelic warriors who had met the English with a crash on many an Irish field, warriors and strangers, until time had melted down their race memory into Tom Moore’s honeyed songs for drawing rooms.

  ‘He’s in there,’ Finn said, pointing to his living room. ‘He’s round the bend, poor fella. A kettle, mind you, that was his kit for the desert. Let’s give him a drink and you can question him. He’s in a hell of a state.’

  The Italian was even bigger than Finn, a man of about six feet three inches in height, grey haired, tragic-eyed, sitting at a table and staring at the wall with tears in his eyes. He looked at us accusingly and when I greeted him in Italian and asked him how he was he shook his head wearily.

  ‘I must go home,’ he said. ‘I must.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Give me my kettle and let me go home. I will bother nobody. Nobody, signore. I will walk it and bother nobody. But I must go.’

  Finn poured a shot of O.B., Cioffi’s local brandy, and handed it to the Italian who held it in a trembling hand, and when Finn and I had a drink we both sat down, and the Italian sat down too and stared at the wall again.

  ‘Where is home?’ I asked the Italian.

  ‘Italy,’ he said.

  ‘And you were walking there?’

  ‘I am walking the
re,’ he said, nodding sadly. ‘It is the only sensible thing to do. I cannot rot here any longer in this hell. My family are bombed, Italy is being destroyed, and I am here in this hell in misery. I must go home. I must. I will bother nobody.’

  ‘You are not bothering anybody,’ I told him. ‘We will do anything we can to help you.’ He jumped to his feet, smiling, his hands held out to take ours in friendship, a sad smile on his lean, red face.

  ‘Then let me go,’ he said. ‘Just let me go. I had left this hellish town and was in the desert with my kettle when your soldiers arrested me. Give me a pass and let me walk home. I cannot stay here while Italy is being destroyed. Please give me the pass and I will go.’

  ‘Finish your drink first,’ I told him. ‘We have plenty of time yet. Sit down and finish your drink. What were you going to do with the kettle? Had you nothing else but your kettle?’

  He sat down again, sighing, staring at the wall, thinking. ‘The kettle,’ he said, ‘was for condensing the sea water. That’s all you need, a kettle and a small tin. The askaris took my small tin.’

  ‘You were going to walk along the sea coast right up to Egypt, and then sail across to Italy?’ I said.

  ‘That’s my plan,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way.’

  I asked him if he had ever seen these wild, burning coasts, and if he knew of the thousands of miles of it peopled by dangerous tribes all the way to Egypt. He looked me in the eye and laughed.

  ‘Such things are nothing to a determined man when he is walking home,’ he assured me. He was trembling and sweat had broken out all over his face and hands. I opened one of those round tropicalised tins of fifty cigarettes and offered him one. He could hardly hold it in his hand he was trembling so violently. ‘This war,’ he cried, ‘this useless stupid war, what can it ever achieve for anybody in the world except suffering and death? Why have they started this war, these generals and politicians with their lies? What about my wife and my children?’ Finn went to telephone the Italian hospital for a doctor while I tried to soothe the weeping grey-haired giant who had had enough of this savage coast, of separation from his horn and family, and who had gone insane with despair.