‘No,’ he was definite about it. ‘We have never before shown any Galka how Wabaio is made. It is secret. I would not bring it to you here because the Somalis would find some way of making trouble about it. And anyway the root would die if I brought it down here to cook. It is best cooked on the hills where it is cool, near its home. It is happy there, and when it is made and brought down here on to the desert it must still be kept happy. We have a thing for that.’
I did not argue. I did not want to look this gift-horse in the mouth, something Burton, who saw so many rare things, would no doubt have given a lot to see made. I also felt a very young white man’s pride in being chosen as the recipient of such a secret. I trembled lest I spoilt it and seal off this gateway by some stupid move.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘When I can come to Yillig, you will be ready?’
‘That is Hersi’s order,’ he said. ‘I will be ready when you are ready.’
It was four years before I got to Yillig, for not long after meeting Hirad I was transferred to another piece of wilderness hundreds of miles away on the south-eastern Abyssinian border, and then, after long and involved effort, to the Burma campaign. In India in October 1945 I had a letter, a splendid surprise out of the Somali wilderness, from Hersi. He had taken great trouble to trace me and had even found the number of the infantry division I was with. The letter was full of news of trade. His business was happy. Now that the war was over was I going to come back and study the Midgan and write it all down on paper? If I were to come back he was there to help. May God protect and look after me (he was, of course, a devout Mohammedan) always. Peace had come again to the world and men could again turn their hands to trade. ‘Non sabbiamo la futura di nostra Baese. (He, like most Somalis, always used the letter b for p in Italian.) Gli Nazione Unite sanno, sberiamo.’
A few months later I found myself again in the eye-searing glare of the Somali desert. ‘This time,’ I told myself, ‘I will fill in this small gap left by Burton. I will see Wabaio made if I have to walk all the way to Yillig.’ If there is anyone I would like to have known, travelled with, learned from, especially of his enormous knowledge of the lore of Islam, it is Burton.
In early 1947 I was at Bosaso, the place of the winds, on the Gulf of Aden, and one day while I was drinking a melancholy gin on a verandah overlooking the shabby huddle of skin huts and rickety houses which dribbled wearily to the sea’s edge, Hirad appeared, dressed for the wilderness, lungi, sandals, and dagger. He gave me his lean dry hand, laughing, and said, ‘I have arrived.’
He had come on a trade-truck from a fort over four hundred miles to the south. Hersi sent greetings. He was well, and more prosperous than ever.
Was I ready now to go to Yillig? We were nearer now than ever before. A day in a truck. A walk up a mountain. Burton had passed near Bosaso. Had he known he was that close to the Wabaio which interested him? But he had no truck in those days, and he was in great personal danger.
‘Yes. We will go,’ I said. ‘In a week from now.’ Then I said something which I had nursed in my mind for a long time. Now it was so close, could Wabaio really be so powerful a poison?
‘This poison,’ I said, ‘it cannot be as powerful as they say. Will I be seeing the real and true poison?’ Surely such a secret must be lost by now. Like many things in Africa might it not be exaggerated? I was afraid of disappointment.
Hirad shook his head gravely and cracked his fingers in disapproval. ‘I will show you,’ he said. ‘It is true Wabaio, stronger than anything you have ever seen. Even tribes beyond Kismayu buy it if we will send it to them.’ Kismayu is on the Kenya border, many days’ journey south by truck from Bosaso. ‘You will see, Effendi,’ he said, ‘and believe’.
Hirad wanted to make his way among the buildings of Bosaso, the only ‘city’ he had ever seen. Bosaso is a crumbling sun-beaten village to which the dhows come from Aden and Mukalla, taking away hides and incense, the luban which the Somalis chew like an aromatic cud, and over which whole families fight, generation after generation, not being able to decide about the rights and title. (And I had to decide it; another sad story.)
Bosaso lies stunned most of the day in the blinding sun, and the only really active people are the whores and their pimps who make great play with one like Hirad come out of the desert full of wilderness and with a longing to be a sophisticate for a few hours. Arabs stride through the narrow sandy alleys, throwing alms to the herds of starving Somali orphans if the voyage from Mukalla has been profitable, a few coins, a kind of sop to the Prophet who said that we must never forget the poor, the Maskin who forgather near the mosque, and whom I had failed to save from poverty by my petty effort at millet growing.
In the morning Hirad came, smelling of charcoal-brazier smoke and Arab perfume, a ring on his finger, the nails of his right hand varnished with scarlet paint. He was to tell me about the Sa’ab group.
He claimed that they were the original inhabitants of the Somalilands who had lost the great and final battle near Hargeisha and were then taken into slavery until they became Mohammedans. After that they were Mohammedan slaves instead of mere slaves. They became metal-workers, carpenters, herbalists, hunters, leather workers.
Every Somali woman, when she was ready to bear her child, liked to have a Midgan woman present. Weddings and dances were not complete without Midgan dressed in their gay colours and bringing luck to the nobles.
Hirad came of a family of hunters. He and his younger brother, who had come with him and was in Bosaso, had been taught the skills of the chase by their father. In Somalia more skill is needed to hunt and kill meat than in Kenya and Tanganyika, where, even now after years of slaughter the game is still plentiful, and stupid and lazy compared with the rare game of Somalia’s deserts. Even the lion in Somalia is smaller and thinner compared with those of Kenya. The plains leopard of Somalia is a yellowish, haggard creature compared with that of Bantu Africa. Everything in Somalia is thinner, more nervous, sharper minded, than in the fat lands of grassy Kenya and Tanganyika.
‘He has taught us nearly everything,’ said Hirad, speaking of his father. ‘He teaches us more and more as he grows older and slower.’
The old man would not give all his wisdom until he was too slow to use it. In that way he would keep some power, some respect and mystery. He was a hard master, said Hirad, and if a boy made a mistake he would beat him severely so that he should never forget. ‘He once beat me as one would beat a woman,’ Hirad explained. ‘And he did that until I was a man, when he knew I could kill as well as he.’ Kill what? A man, a wild beast? Probably both. I did not ask.
‘He taught us how to stand still, without even blinking in the sharpest sun. For you must stand until you are ready and the shot is ready, then you bring up the bow, drawing the string as you do so, in one movement, with no mistake.’ The Wabaio did the rest.
Not like Kenya, where in the rains the panting hunter, who has run his fat eland to a standstill in the heavy mud, stabs him to death. Here in Somalia the game is moving away before you have got within riflerange. For the bowman it must be a work of art, of great patience and with a thrilling reward for a hungry belly. These nomads live in a state of continual hunger. They can get drunk on camel milk and poetry, the declamations of some genealogically demented elder who will stand up and cry the glory of this tribe’s particular genes, perhaps the Midgan standing by, listening, older genealogically on this bitter sand and rock, but now without a chieftain.
The nearest approach to the Midgan are the Wandarobo of Kenya, the hunters, though they are forest dwellers and not nearly as tough and resourceful as the Midgan. They too brew an arrow poison, but they will use the Wabaio of the Midgan in preference, when they can get it.
We left a few days later, before dawn, heading the truck for Karin, an old and deserted Italian post, but Hirad was not in the truck. His brother had come instead. A long and mysterious story had not cleared up the reason of why Hirad could not come. He just could not. Certain things were
not right. No, he could not tell me. It was a matter of deep shame, he said. He could not explain. But I must believe in his brother, Jama, who knew everything about Wabaio.
I had waited by the truck in the first light, smoking many cigarettes, and no sign of Hirad. The youth who came, carrying a bundle wrapped in a dirty white cloth, said, ‘I am Hirad’s brother. Hirad cannot come.’
‘They’ve got at him,’ I thought. ‘The Somalis have fixed something.’
‘Where is Hirad?’
‘He is ill,’ Jama said. ‘I am to show you how to make the poison.’
‘You are too young, Jama,’ I said. ‘You can’t know as much as Hirad.’
He was not annoyed. He smiled and shook his head. ‘I know more than Hirad,’ he told me solemnly. ‘I am my father’s best son. I have killed more in one day than Hirad has ever done. My father has said that I am his best son.’
I made him take me to see Hirad. He was lying on a heap of palmleaves in the corner of an old hut near the market where the butchers sold their fly-wrapped goat meat. He looked like a malaria case, sweating and racked, though very far from delirious. He had been taken ill in the night. He swore that Jama was as clever as himself. I could not believe that the noble race had not in some way reached out a hand to spoil this opportunity to see the making of this famed and mysterious poison. You get into that way of thinking in the Somali waste. You think that way because the Somalis bitterly resent the white man, and struggle continually, and admirably, by lies and intrigue, to fight off his influence which spells the end of their peculiar world. You cannot beat them. They have no inferiority complexes, no wide-eyed worship of the white man’s ways, and no fear of him, of his guns or of his official anger. They are a race to be admired, if hard to love.
From Karin we drove into the rough, stony hills towards the borders of British Somaliland, the country moonlike in tumbled rock and grey bushless loneliness, not a beast or a man for hundreds of miles. We were topping a rise when Jama pressed his hand on my arm and said, ‘Meat.’ His eyes were staring into the grey distance. I stopped the truck and it was some time before I saw the oryx bull standing beside an enormous boulder about two hundred yards away, greyish-yellow, lonely-looking, perfectly camouflaged, and, as far as Jama and I were concerned, doomed. Fresh venison after the starved leathery goat meat brought up in me as much of the ancient wish to kill as ever Jama knew.
‘Will you let me shoot it, Effendi?’ Jama asked.
‘Are you good with a rifle?’
‘I am an expert, Effendi,’ he said. ‘I will show you.’
He did not want the sporting-model I had with me. He preferred the Italian army rifle as carried by the two Somali askaris accompanying us. Grudgingly, one of the askaris handed over his rifle to this inferior man whom the white man was favouring and spoiling.
‘These people cannot shoot, Effendi,’ they complained, pointing at Jama. ‘They lie. They boast. It is waste of ammunition.’
Jama ran forward then, for the oryx was moving, bulky and fast, his long tapering curved horns set back, and a thin trail of dust at his feet. Jama did not aim or use the sights at all. He simply swung the rifle up, moving it left as he did so, firing as the butt came into his shoulder. The oryx slithered forward and fell in a heap on to his chest, rolling then in that slow upward lift of hooves which the heavy antelopes often favour when mortally wounded.
He was stone dead when we reached him, the small red hole glowing in his dusty shoulder. Jama cut its throat with his sharp knife, the ‘halal’ for the Prophet’s sake, a deceitful ‘halal’, for the beast was dead, but good enough, just as sand is good enough for a ritual wash before prayer in the desert where water is scarce.
‘Now, we will have to lift this fellow’s kill for him,’ the askaris said to each other, angry with admiration and jealousy.
‘Where did you learn to shoot like that?’ I asked Jama.
‘We have a rifle at home,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But I swear to you we have never fired it at a man or taken part in any raiding.’
We paunched the oryx and loaded it into the truck and drove on to the mountain of Yillig.
I was full of excited anticipation now, wishing Sir Richard Burton was alive, so that tomorrow I could write him a letter saying, ‘I have seen them making Wabaio.’ Surely he would have been interested. Solitude causes such wishes, just as once I had sat down to write to Gogol after an all night sitting reading Dead Souls near Isiolo before the war, twenty years old, before remembering with a deep regret that he was long, long dead. If you read Gogol’s foreword to that novel (in which he asks for letters) in a really lonely part of Africa, after you have finished Dead Souls, you will definitely want to sit down at once and write your gratitude to Gogol.
The Italians had left a grass-roofed stone hut on the mountain near Yillig. A group of Somalis was camped nearby in tents made of grass mats, the kariya of the small family group, young warriors carrying spears, a couple of tired wives, hags already at thirty or so, for the nomad life in that climate quickly takes away the bloom of these most beautiful women in Africa. The family were naturally suspicious of me, apprehensive about a white man in that isolated spot they had chosen for their camp. A white man means orders, questions, or some unknown governmental plan for the eventual ruination of the nomad’s life. There must be some particular reason for this particular white man coming to their camp, and I was the only white man in hundreds of square miles. So why was I here? The young men stared sullenly at us, exchanged tribal names with the two askaris, found they were as noble as they looked and then began their questions. When the askaris told them that I had come to watch a Midgan make poison, an elderly withered man with a wall-eye came forward and said to me in Italian, ‘I am of the Omar Suleiman. We are magicians. We know more than the Midgan. We are the wisest. Men are frightened of us. And we will never show anybody our secrets, because they are powerful. Why then is a Midgan ready to show you his poison? I will tell you. For money. You will pay him for a lying trick. That is all.’ The rest nodded in satisfaction. The two askaris were respectful and without argument. I told the old man that I was very impressed by what he had said, but even so I had my own wishes to consider.
It was Jama, the Midgan who was angry. He went up to the elder of the Omar Suleiman and said, ‘We will see about the poison. You believe I am lying to the white man? In the morning you will see the poison. Give us a goat and I will show you. I will use the poison on the goat.’
They did not like that. They talked in low voices for a long time among themselves, Jama standing by, watching them proudly and contemptuously. Why did he not fear their curse? He laughed when I asked him later. ‘It is I who can curse,’ he said dramatically.
‘So you want to trick us as well as the white man?’ one of the warriors said when they had finished their low-voiced conference. ‘And you want a goat into the bargain?’
‘Yes,’ said Jama. ‘If my poison is no good why should you fear for your goat? If it does not die under the poison you can have it back, sound and safe.’
He laughed pitilessly while they considered this, for he had hurt their pride. They began to shout among themselves, arguing angrily as to whether such a risk was worthwhile.
‘You see them,’ Jama said to me. ‘They are like children.’ Then he goaded them and the elder said with heat that he would give a goat. When was the poison to be made?
Jama said that only the white man would be allowed to see the poison made. It would be made at dawn.
‘And you will not show us?’
‘No.’
‘Will you not show the askaris?’
‘No.’
A long bitter argument began and I left them, preferring to watch the plains from the hut doorway while sipping a gin. They enjoyed the wrangle for about a quarter of an hour and then Jama came to say that he was ready to go to the poison-trees. There was something, he said, he must now tell me about why Hirad had not been able to come. Hirad had gonorrhoea.
‘But nearly everybody in the towns of Somalia has gonorrhoea,’ I said. ‘What is important about gonorrhoea and Wabaio?’
‘No one who has gonorrhoea or syphilis must go near the Wabaio tree, or be present while the poison is being cooked,’ he replied. ‘And Hirad is very unhappy to have got the disease. He got it at El Lagodei from a girl when we were coming up on the trade-truck. “Lucky it was that I brought you,” he said to me. “God did it. Otherwise between the angers of the white man and Hersi, our rich King, what would I do?” That, Effendi, is why it is I and not Hirad who has come here to show you the cooking of Wabaio.’
It said a lot for Hirad’s beliefs that he should stay away because he had contracted this disease, for he would have to confess it to Hersi eventually. He would have to confess that a youth, though his own brother, still a youth, had replaced him in the exhibition of wisdom for the white man who was so interested in Midgan things, a white man who had nagged for so long about this Wabaio.
‘This disease would kill the poison, Effendi,’ Jama told me. ‘A man with this disease in the presence of the tree I will take the bark from, or nearby when the poison is made, would kill the power of the Wabaio at once. So Hirad is sad.’ He smiled. ‘And Hersi will shout at him when he hears of it. A man must be clean when he makes the poison.’
There were many things which could destroy the poison, he explained. Some of these things he could not tell me. They were magic, and he would have permission from his father to tell me about them.
So the making of Wabaio itself was not magic. But there was a great deal of magic built about it for its protection.
The Somali, like many throughout the Muslim world, will drink the ink washed from certain Koranic writings to get strength, to empower his dagger-hand, or to win a potency for a time, but I never found what the Midgan’s own magic is made of, though he too will drink a Koranic potion in a pinch, just in case.
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 13