The tree was about eight feet high, dark strong-looking leaves thick on it, nothing very remarkable or sinister about it. Only its green health was strange in a land of starved grey tormented thorn brush and snarling spine-covered creepers.
The tree itself is called Wabai. The correct name for the poison got from it is Wabaio. Jama explained this and then said that a truly powerful tree was the one on which the birds would never sit, for it would kill them. On the other hand a tree with many dead birds under it, skeletons, feathers, or even freshly dead birds, was a tree to choose when you were going to make the poison. We went into this for a long time but got nowhere at all. In loyalty to the unmade Wabaio I decided that it was up to the birds, the difficult part being that there was not even a feather beneath the clump of Wabai trees before which we stood. Jama could not see anything curious in his description of a tree’s power and a bird’s choice of resting place, and a complete absence of bird-relics to back his lore. I felt depressed then. Perhaps the poison was only a legend.
In Kenya and Tanganyika the hunters brewed a thick stew of euphorbia juice, snake venom and bug-essence, which can kill meat or men efficiently. Somehow, after this lore about the birds and the Wabai tree, the Wandarobo of Kenya seemed much nearer to the mystic killers of fairytale than Jama with his calm contradictions about the strength of a Wabai tree.
‘Now I will begin,’ he said. He took the heavy matchet we had brought and began to dig into the harsh flinty soil at the base of the chosen tree. He dug for a long time until about a foot down he found a root which pleased him. Then he took a coloured cloth from his belt and wrapped it about his face so that his mouth was covered. Expertly he chopped long pieces of bark from the thick twisted root, placing each piece on a growing heap. There must have been two or three pounds of it when he had done and said he was satisfied.
He showed me the bark. It was hard, though bleeding a thin colourless sap where his matchet had cut it, and on the inner side of it it was a dark shining blue, like gun-metal, and it had a strange lethal glow. It gave off a sharp bitter scent and Jama drew it sharply away from my nose when I sniffed at it.
‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘Your skull will ache and you will go blind if you smell it like that.’
‘Is this all we need?’ I asked him. No, there were other things. A poor unlearned kind of man would be satisfied with this, he held up the pile of bark which he had wrapped in the coloured cloth, and would complain to God when the wounded beast went on and on across the country, its death delayed. Swift and sure death was the hunter’s ambition, and for that only a proper and careful making of the poison would do.
‘There are many kinds of men,’ he said. ‘Just as there are many kinds of Midgan. Our old father was the greatest hunter of all his family-group, because he had knowledge and he took care. He was beaten by his father when learning as we, his sons, were beaten. He taught us every wisdom there is about making Wabaio, for, as he said, “What is the use of the good bow-string and the right arrow and the patient waiting for the beast, if the poison on the arrow is made by a fool who does not know the secrets, or who, knowing, is too lazy to give care to the making of it?”’
When we got back to the hut the sun was sinking. A very old man with a loaded donkey was waiting. He saluted Jama and was as respectful to him as a young Somali would be to an old man. Jama spoke with him in their own tongue, which sounds like the hard, brittle Somali language, but is very different, their secret language. This was an old Midgan whom Jama had sent to cut a special wood called shillin. The old man, I found, had been waiting at Yillig for days on Hirad’s orders. God knows how the word goes out across these vast Somali wastes, how the old man had heard the order, who fed him, where he would go after this making of Wabaio. Jama brushed my questions away by saying, ‘He must obey my father’s group. He belongs to a kariya of the Omar Mohamed tribe and where he is told to go he goes. Pay him little, for he is old and they eat little.’
He treated the old man like a servant, ordering him to put the wood by the hut, and the old man obeyed with a deference that was touching, for he did not know, despite all his years, what the youth knew of the tribal lore.
‘Shillin wood is not always used for the fire on which we cook the Wabaio, Effendi,’ said Jama. ‘But it should be used. Its smoke makes the poison happy. The smoke of this wood when it is burning will blind a man. Always I use it, as my father said we should.’ The wood looked like ordinary dry, twisted thorn branches.
That night we broiled some of the oryx meat over a glowing ashbed of wild olive wood (the very best wood for a cooking fire in the bush) and Jama told me stories of the days of the ‘Mad Mullah’ which his father had told him, and he sang several Midgan songs. One was about the angarara, the black centipede which comes from the earth after the rains.
He told me how a Midgan could live (if he had listened to his father) when hungry and thirsty, without meat or water, in the wilderness.
I had seen hangeio, a smooth greyish creeper which grows in the crevices of rocks, and had been told it was eatable. Jama said it forms a satisfying pulp in the mouth when chewed, fills the stomach and sustains life ‘until you can reach other men and cry “Magan!”’ He laughed, saying, ‘And a Midgan cannot be Magan with a Somali. But he can cry for food.’
Magan is a word a warrior will cry to a man of another tribe, even an enemy, who, spear raised, is ready to kill, and the man cried to must protect and feed the crying one for a certain time. I had an askari who was Magan to a tribe which hated his, but he had satisfied them by claiming protection. It is not surrender so much as a temporary admittance of need, and it satisfies the one who is proud to accept the hostage.
Yoho is another plant which will yield enough moisture when chewed, to keep you this side of thirst-madness. It makes a wet sponge in the mouth, ‘and is paradise when you are dying’, as Jama put it. As he talked one had a look into the hopes and fears of the nomad, who did not know when he might die suddenly in the dark with a spear blade between his shoulders, or perish far from a waterhole with only the certainty that God will remember him, for that is what he must think as the sunglare fades on his dying stare. That is the law.
We ate meat and drank black tea until a thin wind rose in the dark desert and sighed in the thorn trees, making Jama restless and uneasy. He rolled his black eyes and smiled when I asked what worried him. He would not tell me. He said it was nothing for a white man, only for a Midgan. When I nagged him he rose and said he must go now. Before dawn he would be ready to start the cooking of the poison. He would wake me at the false dawn, and before he went to sleep he had one request. Would I ensure that no Somali would be present during the making of the poison? Yes, they pretended they were too proud to want to know any Midgan customs, but, secretly, they had a great wish to find out what they could. They liked to stand idly by and pretend not to watch. They were cunning men.
I promised that we would cook the poison on the stone floor of the broken down kitchen next to the hut and that no Somali would be allowed to see a single part of the proceedings.
‘Then that is good,’ he said. ‘They are jealous because you are interested, and angry because I know what they do not know.’ He was going into one of those passionate sermons about jealousies, hatreds, tribes and wisdoms, which the races marked down by the other races for conquest are always making to their friend, the agent of the conqueror, trying to help, to explain – sermons which become ‘Int.I. Tribal. Tensions’ in a file for some future day, which may never come. If there is oil there, of course, that day will come.
The sun was quivering in soft pink and green veils when Jama and I lit cigarettes. The dawn threw slow wings of brilliant light beyond the mountains until the soft flux of darkness and false light began to retreat and revealed the shabby desiccated world, and the jagged rocks stood out, flinging long shadows on to the surface of our particular barren world, the enormous silence undisturbed by a single cough, or by the first exciting religious cry of M
ohammed’s special world. Our cigarette smoke hung in the fierce gold light of the dawn as it climbed. Jama smoked like an Indian, sucking the smoke up through the closed fist, the cigarette hanging down from the base of his curled palm, like one who missed the hukkah and must make do with a cigarette.
‘All is ready,’ he said. Then he went into a detailed description of duk’neya (and habar-daar), which he had walked two miles before dawn to cut. Without duk’neya the poison would not kill. Duk’neya was the great killer, the real killer, not the killer who actually extinguished life’s delicate light, but the substance without which Wabaio could not come to sinister fruition. Daar is an aloe but the word habar interested me. It is the word for a curse, in Somali, but the names of the materials used for the arrow poison are Midgan.
‘Duk’neya,’ Jama said, ‘is like salt in the food we eat. It draws the strength of the good.’ He showed me the white sap melting from the thick, coarse green cuttings in his hands. This sap threw off a thin malevolent smell, acid and bitter, pointless until you knew what it was for, until you were a Midgan. It was like a part of a terrible salad which could be cut up with crisp fresh sounds, for it was innocent to see despite what Jama said.
‘It is the salt,’ he told me. ‘It is what draws out the final poison. Without this the poison is useless.’
He used an iron pot for cooking. When he unwrapped the necessary parts for the mystery the scene had a kind of tawdry grandeur, the grandeur given to it by Jama’s quiet gravity. The iron pot was black, bent, pitted, yet scrubbed and shining inside, like a rifle barrel after a gauze. A few large, heavy, yellow sea-shells, a long peeled dry twig, some rags of multi-coloured cotton which he tied to a string and hung round his neck. There was something subdued about him. He was nervous. He was afraid, possibly that the poison was no good. I was only a white man, but I had been promised.
The whole bitter-smelling mass of Wabai root he poured from a sack on to the black stone floor. He took a large flat stone which he laid between his crossed legs. In his right he held a piece of jagged rock, the pestle. He laid the pestle beside the Wabai root and then, taking a thick black and yellow striped cummerbund in his hands (a waistband of an Italian army colonial battalion) he said, ‘Cover up your mouth and nose now, Effendi. I am going to crush the Wabai root, and if you breathe it in you will be in great pain.’
I was tense and nervous now, wondering if the Wabaio would work. I wanted it to work because I so admired the Midgan. I believed that the Midgan had once made it, and that it was as powerful as Burton had been told. But I did not believe that this wisdom had survived into 1947, for so many tractors had been driven across so many folk-wisdoms.
Jama wound the striped scarf tightly about his mouth, binding it above his eyes so that he was staring through a slit. He was about to begin pounding the coarse bitter-smelling pieces of Wabai when he looked sharply at me. He put down the pounding-stone, loosened the scarf and said, ‘Effendi, wrap up your mouth and nose while I am crushing the Wabai. You will have pain otherwise. I tell you you will have pain.’
You couldn’t make a white man do anything if you were black, in Africa. You suggested. Then you left it when you got the reply I gave.
‘I’m all right,’ I told him. ‘You carry on with the Wabai.’ I did not believe the pounding of the Wabai root would affect me.
Jama beat each piece of Wabai into a heap of trash which sent off a sharp, wet, acid stench. The iron pot was boiling on the fire now, the spring water in it rippling and bubbling. When all the Wabai was crushed Jama put it into the pot, handful after handful. A thick stifling steam poured from the pot while he pushed the mass of poisonous bark below the surface of the boiling water.
He then chopped the duk’neya into pieces with his dagger. He lifted the dagger which was now smeared with the thick white sap.
‘That sap would blind you,’ he said. ‘One drop in your eyes and you are like the very old, begging for alms.’
Now he stuffed the pieces of shillin wood under the pot, and as they caught fire and crackled they began to send off clouds of thick bluegrey smoke. My eyes filled with tears and began to burn and Jama laughed.
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘Let us go until it has burnt down. You can blind a man with shillin.’ Covering his eyes with the scarf he put all the chopped duk’neya into the pot, placed the lid on it and then came with me into the hot fresh air.
‘Do you know about dunkál?’ he asked when we had lit cigarettes. When I said I had never heard of it, he shook his head and said, ‘It is a wonderful poison. One of the best there is. No good for the hunter, but for killing a man peacefully you cannot find anything better than dunkál. You can kill a man with it hours after he has drunk milk or tea with you. You give it to him in his drink, and if you have measured it properly, he goes into his final sleep several hours later. He longs for death, he is so tired. No one can keep him awake, or alive, for he must sleep. Yes, that is dunkál. They say it is an Arab poison, though the Arabs deny that, as they deny everything until they know why you have asked them about it. Ju’us is theirs too. You know Ju’us? It will give strength where there is none. That is an Arab thing too.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Always in our stories the Arabs are the cunning ones, but are they as cunning as we Somalis and Midgan? No. They cannot be.’
Occasionally we looked at the simmering poison in the pot. It was thickening to a brown bubbling soup and giving off strong rank acid fumes. The smoke of the shillin wood had thinned now but could still bring a rush of tears to the eyes.
While Jama was telling me of how, wearing a donkey’s head to which oryx-horns had been strapped, he had sat for hours near oryx, waiting for them to approach, my head began to ache. It was no ordinary headache. My gums and teeth felt enormous and full of dull, heavy pain, as if swollen after a beating, and pain grew in my jaws until I could no longer feel my teeth when I simulated chewing. The pain in the skull was terrific and when Jama saw me holding my jaws and in obvious pain, he said, ‘I told you, Effendi, to cover your mouth and nose. Now you are hurt because you did not do it. The Wabai dust is poisonous.’
‘Well, what is the cure for it? There must be a cure.’
‘There is no cure. It will go away after a time.’
The headache stayed with me all day.
Yes, Jama would sit wearing his donkey-head, poisoned-arrow ready in the bow-string until an oryx came near enough for a safe shot. Then the twang of the bow-string, the soft thud of the arrow striking, the rush of the oryx while the fire of the Wabaio hissed in his blood, then heart failure, a stumbling and a shivering as the oryx died. How long before it died?
‘Well, there is no rule, Effendi. It depends on how old the poison is, how big the oryx. It depends on many things.’
‘So you can’t say how long?’
‘I could, Effendi, but only for this or that oryx. It differs.’
‘Well, roughly how long?’
He would not say. The hunter was not worried about ‘how long’, but was satisfied to follow the animal until he fell. ‘How long’ was a typical white man’s question. ‘How sure?’ was a Midgan’s question, and once that Wabaio-smeared arrow had gone into the beast he was as good as dead. After death the poison all came back to the wound. The hunter cut that portion of the meat out and the rest of the beast was safe to eat. How explain that? Jama could not say, but it was so.
‘If the game is afraid and will not come near the hunter, no matter how clever and patient he may be, then we have another way of killing him with Wabaio,’ said Jama. ‘There is a plant which the game like to eat. We scoop out the centre of the plant and put Wabaio paste into it. Some time after a buck has eaten it he will die. But it takes much longer than an arrow-wound.’
When the pot had been bubbling for about four hours, Jama took one of the big sea-shells, called dalla, and decanted enough of the thick dark brown soup from the pot to fill the shell. He placed the brimming shell on the hot coals and when it sizzled and boiled he
stirred it gently with a peeled twig. As it boiled the liquid turned to a thick blackish gum. It looked like hot tar and it now gave off a heavily sour perfume.
‘It is time for the first test.’ Jama went to the doorway of the hut and called the old withered man who had been so ready with the shillin wood. I heard Jama use the word ‘shimbir’ (a bird) and when the old man went hobbling off to Jama’s sleeping place, I asked, ‘Why shimbir? What shimbir?’
He said the hunter always used the new poison on a bird first. It must be tried on a bird. That was the tradition. The old man brought a dove in a small cage made of twigs. ‘Must it be this bird?’ The dove was so peaceful, so harmless, I was wanting to be coaxed.
‘Always it must be this bird.’ Jama looked steadily into my eyes, as if he knew the great sentimental complication of the white man who would spare a bird and massacre a city full of men and women (from the air preferably, for then he does not know what he is doing! The ‘savage’ has known all about this for a long time. Will the white man forgive him for knowing?).
‘We are ready?’ he said. He opened the dove’s beak and inserted a drop of the Wabaio. The dove closed its beak, sat still, obediently, and then fruffed all his feathers so that he resembled a ball of grey-lilac fluff. He closed his eyes, shivered, and in a few seconds fell dead on Jama’s hard pinkish-yellow palm.
‘There,’ he said. ‘The Wabaio works.’ He stared triumphantly at the bird. ‘Now for the goat.’
The desert goat is tough and could live on a diet of sandpaper and thorns if necessary. When even the camel is desperate for a meal the goat will find sustenance. He helped to make the desert and the desert can support him. To see a goat chewing a mouthful of grey sharp thorns is always a surprise, and they thrive on it. I once watched a goat eat a packet of cigarettes, remembering from my farming days that nicotine is splendid for wireworm and for other parasites. The desert goat will eat anything, staring ahead with those strangely beautiful insane eyes, tougher by far than the camel.
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 14