‘I am learning things,’ he said to me. ‘New customs, and lies, and troubles, and I will not always be a boy.’
‘Do you want to go home?’ I asked him. ‘Would you like me to send you to your country again? I did not want you to come here. This is a hostile land where nothing much matters, and where you are a stranger. Do you want to return to El Wak?’
‘So you are finished with me? You have had enough of my work? You want me to go?’ He looked accusingly into my eyes. ‘Where is the fighting, the trouble? You said there would be fighting. Have you seen me fight? Have you?’ He challenged me to wait until I saw him fight.
‘I have seen you stabbing and making fights,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want that. You are a servant. Serve, or leave.’
‘I will serve,’ he said. ‘But you think I cannot fight?’
‘The askaris and I will do the fighting,’ I said. ‘That is our work. Yours is to clean and bring and make fires. When you are a man you can become an askari, if you like, but not now. Serve.’
‘I will never be an askari,’ he told me.
‘Why not?’
‘I would not allow a sergeant to call me the names your sergeant calls the askaris when he is angry. I would not put up with it. That is no life.’
‘It is only a custom,’ I said. ‘The askaris know it. It is something you do not understand unless you are a soldier. The askaris were not forced to be soldiers. They asked to be soldiers, and they know what it all means.’
‘I cannot understand any of it,’ Mohamed said, sullenly. ‘It is all madness, all of it.’ And he never said a truer word, though I shook my head, patient and sighing.
Three months after this, wildernesses away from the Webi Shabeli river, he stabbed my cook, a fat, cynical man who lived only for ghee, and who had a tongue like a knife. He gave Mohamed a public genealogy which sent Mohamed running screaming for a knife, which he got, and came back into the kitchen and drove the knife right through the fat arm of the genealogist who had gone too far. (‘Son of a sick hyena, grandson of a noseless thief, descendant of vultures, father to be of a hermaphrodite baboon, filth and refuse untouchable, animal without religion’ – and so on.)
I felt this was the end. It was over two thousand miles of nothing until you got to Mohamed’s country, but I was by then up to my neck in more serious troubles. Yet even so, I was tired enough of Mohamed to carry out my threat, to take him and dump him, yet I knew I could not do it, though he volunteered to be dumped.
‘Finish with me,’ he said bravely, defiantly, while the bandaged, enraged cook gave his screeched, emotional evidence over Mohamed’s thin shoulder. ‘Take me and throw me into the bush, as you said you would,’ Mohamed went on. ‘For it is right. I cannot put up with what these beasts and imbeciles say to me here. So I must go. Let it be so. There is no other way, for I cannot put up with this pig here – ’
‘Now he is calling me a pig,’ the cook screamed, wringing his fists in the air. ‘You heard him, this beast-child, this insolent little filthy boy. I cannot stay here. I cannot cook. My brain and my heart are aflame. My stomach is burning.’
‘Get out, both of you,’ I shouted. ‘I’ll think it over and do the punishing when I’ve thought. If either of you raise one finger I’ll kill you. Do you hear, I’ll kill you.’
‘Kill both of us,’ the cook yelled, ‘kill both of us.’ He was dragged off to his kitchen by the askaris, and the orderly corporal took Mohamed by the ear and led him to the lines.
‘And if I see either of you today in front of my eyes, anywhere,’ I yelled after them, from the doorway, ‘I’ll shoot you both, I swear before God. I swear it.’ A silence fell over the camp. Then I called in the manic chiefs for one more effort to make them give up the Italian rifles their tribe possessed.
It was the askaris who pleaded for Mohamed, the askaris who had goaded him and who had been threatened so many times by this savage from the rim of the Somali world, a nomad like themselves but who was so maddeningly and pointlessly proud of being a Garrei, when all knew that to be the chosen of God here was to be a Somali.
‘He is sitting at the edge of the camp, silent and without food,’ the deputation of askaris told me the next morning. ‘He will not speak to anyone. We have decided that we are sorry for this little fool, Effendi. We know now that he cannot understand anything. He should be sent away forever, but we have come to ask you not to send him away. There he is. Look.’ One of them went to the doorway of the company office and pointed into the whitish yellow glare. I went to look. Mohamed was sitting like a yogi, about two hundred yards off, about twenty yards beyond the line of white rocks which marked the boundary of the camp.
‘He has been there since first light, Effendi, and says he will stay there until the cook is punished. He is mad, this boy, Effendi, and God likes the mad. What will you do with him?’
‘So you accept him at last, do you?’ I asked.
I still do not know, and perhaps will never decide if what I did after that was the right thing, but that it was the right Somali thing, the right thing for the desert Muslim world of rough justice, I have no doubt. And it finished the feud between the poisonous-tongued cook and the ferocious Garrei youth.
I took them both into the stretch of hard shale we used for a parade ground, and when they saw the rhino-hide whip I had in my hand they both stared.
‘Justice,’ I told them, ‘is a kind of official revenge men can perform on each other, and you both need justice. Say nothing – ’ they were going to unload another million words about their case against each other. ‘You,’ I said to the cook, ‘called him vile names, after he had insulted you, and after you had insulted him, and so on. Say nothing! I will go on. And you,’ I said to Mohamed, ‘took a knife and stabbed the cook. So you have seriously wronged each other. Lie down,’ I said to the cook.
He pointed to his wound which the dresser had dealt with again that morning. ‘Lie down?’ he cried. ‘After I have been stabbed?’
‘This thing is being ended here and now,’ I said. ‘Lie down, or do you want the askaris to put you down?’
‘What happens after I lie down? Do you mean to beat me?’
‘No. Mohamed here will give you six lashes, and then he lies down and you give him six back. And after that, if I ever hear one word of quarrel, one single word, I’ll flog you both until you can’t walk. I have no gaol here, and no transport to send you away from here, but you will give each other justice instead. Now lie down.’
He lay down and I threw the whip to Mohamed, who seized it and shook it over the cook, who stared up at me and said, ‘I agree to this as long as there is no trick.’
‘There is no trick. You shall beat Mohamed as well.’
‘Remember that, beast,’ he shouted up at Mohamed. ‘Remember it. Now strike.’ Mohamed lashed him six times and the cook lay in silence with his face on his hands, stiffening as the whip came down each time. Then he got up and said, ‘Give me that whip now and lie down there, yiro, little impudent child.’
‘If I hear you utter one more insult from this moment,’ I told the cook, ‘I’ll beat you. Do you hear that?’
‘I hear,’ he said. Mohamed had hurt him, and Mohamed did not want to lie down now to get the other half of the justice we had set in motion here.
‘So that is the Garrei way,’ a corporal cried at him. ‘To punish and then to run when it is your turn. Lie down,’ and with burning eyes Mohamed lay down. The cook gave him six lashes which he took in enormous and powerful silence. Then he got up and the cook threw the whip down on the sand.
‘Are you satisfied that you have had and given justice, you two fools?’ I asked them.
‘I am satisfied,’ the cook said. He knew he had hurt Mohamed.
‘And you?’ I asked Mohamed.
‘He cannot walk properly,’ Mohamed said. ‘I hurt him more than he hurt me.’
‘No, I hurt you more than you hurt me,’ the cook said angrily.
‘It’s finished now,�
� I told them. ‘That’s an order. And remember if there is one more word between you I’ll flog you until you can’t walk. Now get back to work.’
They never spoke to each other again, though they worked together often, and I think it was the beginning of Mohamed’s first try at controlling himself. But some months later, in Mogadishu, he attacked an Italian in a repair shop, who gave him such a handling in return that Mohamed could not eat for three days. The Italian came to me and apologised, though puzzled by the sheer savagery of Mohamed’s attack.
‘Where is he from, this animal, Signor Capitano?’ he asked me. ‘From what tribe is he?’ I explained and the Italian said, ‘I am glad I never soldiered in that country, then, for this creature is of a kind quite new to me. Like a leopard. A leopard. I had to defend myself as if against a leopard.’
Mohamed’s explanation of the affair was, ‘He is your enemy, an Italian, who insulted me, so I would not take it, from your enemy.’
‘This is the finish,’ I told Mohamed.
‘I will try again. I will try to be good,’ he said. ‘I will.’
‘No, it is the finish this time,’ I assured him. ‘I am sending you to El Wak.’
‘I don’t want to go back there,’ he said. ‘I will try again.’
‘I want you to go back,’ I said. ‘More than anything I want you to go back.’
‘What about my work? It is good work. You have said so.’
‘It is splendid work,’ I agreed. ‘But you are mad. Mad. And one day you will kill somebody and hang for it, or somebody will kill you first. And I am weary of this situation now. I have other things to worry about. Many other things.’
But I did not get rid of him. He appeared again after I had arranged his transport to Mandera, near El Wak, and in despair, and fury, I took him on again.
He disappeared in the Ogaden one night, and at that time I felt certain that the local tribe had taken him and killed him. He just vanished, after being in trouble with the local headman, in an area where it did not pay to have trouble with local headmen. I think they must have killed him, that quivering savage whose knife hand moved faster than his brain, for it was a very long way from El Wak, and in a country where you can get your death, free, at any time, especially if you are a stranger. None of my enquiries for him came to anything. I was silent and let the time slide and pile over him, but I never forgot him, or those moving moments when he stood transfixed by the sight of the heaving blue Indian Ocean. All over a bottle of Aranciata brought one night to a white man lying smoking beside a convoy where Kenya, Somalia and Abyssinia meet on the map.
Chapter 21
THE TWO BEST SOMALIS I ever knew, and I mean men who can take the city for what it is, a pleasant experience for a time, and be at home in the wilderness again, after missing it, were Mohamed Saad and Ahamed Hussein. With these two I weathered all kinds of situations all over Somalia, and I would give a lot to meet them again. I put out feelers during my few hours in Mogadishu with Ali, but nobody had ever heard of them. The wastes had swallowed them up again.
Mohamed Saad was one of the best friends I ever made in the bush, or anywhere else for that matter.
He had fought with the Italian army as a member of the irregulars called the Dubat (Quinto Gruppo), and what was good about the Dubat was that they were not drilled and broken down into infantry, but were allowed to stay Somali, operating like raider bands, living frugally and never dependent on truck loads of ghee, flour, and the usual mass of requirements required for the usual infantry troops. We more or less continued the tradition of the Dubat in those wastes, from necessity, turning to camel and goat for food as soon as the rations ran out. The Dubat irregulars were very proud of themselves and their traditions, and cherished the memory of their Italian commanders, particularly of Colonnello Bechis, and Maggiore Cimarutta, of whom they often spoke to me. I recruited as many ex-Dubat as I could find, and the word went round in the bush that if you were ex-Dubat you could always get a job with me.
I first came across Mohamed Saad at about three o’clock in the morning when about to leave on a raid with a section of askaris. I wanted to be at a certain waterhole far into the bush at sunrise so as to surprise some armed raiders who would be watering their camels there before moving north.
One of my askaris brought Mohamed Saad to us as we were sitting in the warm moonlight oiling weapons under a tree. The askari told me that this man knew the waterhole as well as the fastest way to it. I told him to sit down and he squatted down in front of me on the thick red sand.
You cannot mistake human goodness in a face when you see it. You can be mistaken about all kinds of other things but never about real goodness in a human face, and Mohamed Saad was good, I knew, as soon as I saw him. He was a lean, well dried-out bush type, about thirty, with steady, honest eyes.
‘I need work,’ he said. ‘I am starving since my tribal section was raided and all the camels taken. If I take you fast to the waterhole will you give me work? I am a good tracker and used to weapons. I will serve you well. Maybe you could use me as a servant.’
He had fought in two battles, the last of them on the Abyssinian border a year before when the Italian army was collapsing. After that he had been captured and had spent some months in a prison camp. When he was released he made his way back to the Mudugh country to find his tribe being raided and looted by more powerful tribes around, the tribes we were then trying to disarm and subdue.
I gave him some rations and cigarettes and he led us through the bush in the darkness at such a pace that my shirt was ripped to pieces on the thorns and my bare legs lacerated, but I could not complain. It was I who had pressed for haste. We took three prisoners who gladly and proudly admitted that they had taken part in the big killings of a couple of months ago. I signed Mohamed on as my servant and he taught me the construction of all the tribal groups in the Mudugh, as well as teaching me the camel brands used by every tribe. Hour after hour we would sit over the dying camp-fire and talk, askaris of every tribe telling of their service as Italian soldiers against the Abyssinians and the British, recalling the failures or virtues of this and that officer, a loot, of good eating times after a victory, and of bitter retreat with thirst and wounds. And then, like all men of action, they would begin to argue as to who had suffered most, endured more, outdone other men, except Mohamed Saad who smiled and listened. He was wise, and he had compassion for men, while possessing the vanity which made him tough and tireless.
‘Do you like this life?’ I asked him one night when we were marching behind the camels. The wastes rolled and glittered all about us in the fierce moonlight and the only sounds were the scuff of the askaris’ sandals and the clink of rifle barrels. You felt you could see to the ends of the earth, so far off were the jagged moonlit horizons around us.
‘There is no other life, Effendi,’ Mohamed said, smiling. ‘What more can a man ask than to be young and to have health and to be free? When the sun comes up we will drink fresh camel milk and then we will sleep, and then we will get up again and pray and eat, and then we will walk on. I am contented.’
He would check all my possessions, my web equipment, pistol and ammunition, grenades, sub-machine-gun, clean and oil them all. He would examine my shirts, sew on buttons, launder them with the foaming root called gasangas, a fine replacement for soap but liable to leave painful splinters behind in cloth, and high up in the hills on the old Abyssinian frontier, where it was very cold at night, he would lay out my bedroll on the scorching earth at four in the afternoon, so that when I crawled into it at night it was like entering an oven. He sewed and repaired sandals, trimmed the frayed edges of puttees, and then, one day, revealed casually that he could repair truck engines. He was a good shot with a rifle, and he could cover amazing distances with messages at a tireless, steady lope.
Imagine the trust a servant placed in his wandering employer in the great spaces of Asia and Africa, the total commitment involved in travelling enormous distances, sometimes thousa
nds of miles from his tribal home, to some outpost, malarial or parched, where he may be thrown out of his employment by his master. They have done this for centuries for men of all colours and creeds, and asked very little in return. In a way they place their whole life in the hands of the stranger, who may be cruel, or mean, or thoughtless. They never know. These servants were the true adventurers, the men who gambled all, took all kinds of chances, survived all sorts of dangers, forgave and were forgiven, and usually possessed little more when they were finished with their master than they had set out with. In the chaos of the worlds in which they were born and raised they found a kind of safety, a kind of anchor, with the man they went to work for. They knew far more about their masters than even the women their masters returned to one day. They had no trade unions, no fixed hours, no scales of wages. They pilfered, drank, used their masters’ position to raise small loans in far off places, often enough, but in many ways were far better people than their masters.
Mohamed Saad stayed with me for two years and when I was transferred to the Burma campaign I smuggled him into Kenya with me, hoping to take him with me to Burma which he wanted. He was a subject of the Italian empire and should not have been in Nairobi at all, which was ridiculous, as he was a Somali and had as much right to be anywhere in Eastern Africa as any other Somali, and more right than all the white men. But I could not get him into military service, or even take him with me to Burma as a signed up batman, though I knew one officer who had managed to get an Italian Somali to Burma with him. So we said goodbye over a coffee in an Indian duka down River Road one morning.
‘If ever you come back, Effendi,’ he said, ‘to Somalia, just send for me. I’m going back to my tribe.’ He did not like the green jungle battledress I was wearing. He said it would not iron well. I told him that ironing had not been going on in Burma since 1941. ‘Uniforms should be ironed,’ he insisted. ‘We are in a city, remember.’
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 17