Many of the Nyasas fell, insanely sometimes, in love with the beautiful Somali women, and when they got them they worshipped them, to the amusement, and anger, of the Somali males who watched it all. Far more beautiful than the Bantu women so far away, the Somali girls first laughed at this worship, and then grew to like the strange experience of being precious to a man. Somali men knew how to love, but not with the hopeless tenderness which the Nyasa soldiers brought to it.
The Somalis never treated the Bantu as their equals, not even when they soldiered together in the same units. A slight warmth might be shown to a Bantu who proved that he was a Mohammedan, though even then there could still linger suspicion and hostility. A great deal of it had to do with looks, facial features, and the Somali, lean and handsome and hawknosed, felt himself to be more becoming than the Bantu African. In fact the Somalis resented being considered Africans at all, and they demanded different treatment in rations and uniform than that given to the Bantu. Bantu troops like discipline. Somalis resent it. Every individual Somali fights to stay himself, a person. The Bantu liked the certainty and safety of unit life, and functioned well as a receiver of orders. The Somali fumed under discipline and loved the irregular life, the scattered patrol and the lone effort which might bring him to individual notice, to recognition for what he might achieve on his own. The Bantu had patience. The Somali had to control himself, even when learning how to handle weapons, which he loved and cherished. I have seen a Somali tear a machine-gun out of the hands of an instructor and prove on the spot that he needed no more instruction, that he knew it all and could handle and strip and assemble the weapon after one lesson. He had resented the very implication that he needed the long dreary lessons which the instructor seemed resigned to giving him.
When the Somali battalion sailed for the Burma campaign they demanded Indian scale rations, and uniforms with collars on them, ‘like Indian troops’. They did not want to dress like the Bantu troops, who wore collarless khaki blouses. They all went into green jungle battledress anyway when they reached the front.
When the Somali battalion, after a shattering artillery bombardment from the Japanese guns, finally attacked with the bayonet, they went headlong and their officers could not keep up with them. One of them who was decorated for bravery in that battle, a Degodiya from the northern frontier of Somali Kenya, told me that he had enjoyed it, and that he admired the way the Japanese infantry liked to stand and fight it out. But he was not satisfied with the ghee ration they were getting. We had a long conversation about it, and it made me think of the ghee problems in Somalia, and the Somali askari could not understand what I was laughing about.
In the deserts of Somalia the Nyasa soldiers were all right for about six months, but after that, worn down by isolation and heat, insult and hostility from the Somalis, they deteriorated. They could not understand this continual challenge, this nomad machismo, or the sharp, impatient bloody-mindedness of the Somali.
Chapter 23
‘IT’S TIME FOR ME TO GO,’ I told Ali. We had one more fresh lime and water and then we got up and left the hotel.
I did not like all the memories that those hot streets had brought up for me about the world which lay behind Mogadishu. Many of the memories awakened I had suppressed, but they kept trying to break through and be inspected for what they were, mere memories of brutal things which quailed if looked at directly, like all evil memories of the silent area we call the past. There is no such thing as justice, only the effort towards it, and the effort is everything. One had tried to give justice, in impossible conditions, but I knew I was still lacerated inside by most of the life in that wilderness which I still loved, even though one had gone nearly insane in it at times, and had done insane things, and some good things by accident. Some people like to issue justice, to sit and judge and condemn, and to feel that smug certainty, so necessary when dealing with lies and half truths and imagined happenings, all of them grouped about a mystery. But when you have condemned a killer to death, even the most ferocious human animal, you never forget that terrible moment which shows you your puny little assumption, between meals, that you can know what has brought another human into the trap. It is the very imperfection, I suppose, the very shaky machinery behind the pomp and mystery put up – the wigs, maces, woolsacks, black caps and other claptrap, which makes one pity our condition which forces pretence upon us, the pretence at making the dirty thing great and grave. The world has been a jungle since it began, no doubt of it, and The Bomb may be the one thing which has brought it to an unwilling stop, for war was man’s only holiday from his poor effort at coping with the great mess which all our ancestors have left us, history which stinks of blood and lies and suffering and hunger, and which we have not even yet begun to face properly.
They may burn all the flags, the wigs, the thrones and robes and parchments and the paranoiac history books one day, may even teach real history – how one half of the human race sucked the life out of the other half and hid in stately homes, courts, gaols, barracks. August 15th may, in an ironic way, turn out to be the greatest day in history, and the burned thousands of Japan, the new heroes.
It is moving and splendid that man has at least reached a sense of nothingness, that the colossal mountain of petty certainties, smugnesses, and comic folklore about national greatnesses, and preciously protected myths, is melting away in the flood of life giving despair that we must swim in now and in which we must rescue each other, rescue all, regardless of height, colour of eyes, texture of hair, religion, skin. It is thrilling that we are faced with the choice of walking out of our history of muck and blood and lies, forever, and together, or of dragging down a flaming sky on top of us, a blazing blanket in which to wrap our ineradicable savagery, for it may prove ineradicable. After Somalia, human toughness and the rest of the claptrap meant very little to me, and what little it meant was swept away by the magnificent idiocy of the Japanese troops I saw die, for nothing, in the rain and muck of Burma. One poor woman bringing up a crippled child means more in human heroism than all the billions who must have died in battle for various reasons in the last few thousand years.
It is splendid that at last the human race has run up against the wall, beyond which lies the end, a rain of ash and a silence. It is great that this tremendous revolution, so silent following the echoes of The Bombs on Japan, has poured into the works of the world like a terrifying mist, terrifying for the politicians and the generals, who no longer have their glorious way out, the battlefield and the medals and the cenotaphs.
And now Ali had a flag to die for too, a flag which would draw men’s eyes away from their little tribal killings, and give them something to die as one for, and one hoped it was too late for races like the Somalis to taste the putrid springs of military glory.
Ali had talked about The Bomb several times during our three hours in Mogadishu. He wanted me to help him imagine it, this thing which the human race had learned to speak about in a very peculiar way, as if talking about a key to hell.
I tried to explain to myself, while appearing to talk to Ali how never before in man’s time on earth had there been such a wish to have done with exploitation, hypocrisy, cant about justice, war, poisoned religion disguised as nationality, and never before had it been so difficult for man to understand what had happened to him and his world of habit since August 1945.
‘There is no solution,’ I told him. ‘None. But there is a will to work the permanent mess without war and without the old cause of it, human greed, and there is such a hatred growing everywhere of petty sovereign reasons for prolonging the old mess, that the established order everywhere, including Russia, is becoming quite frightened. The Bomb has been a godsend because for the first time it has held up the usage of the ancient way out, war for a dozen splendid reasons which are forgotten six months after the war has started. The Bomb can really be the finish, not only of your enemy, but of yourself, even after you have finished him; you die too, in the ruins. If it had not been
for The Bomb we would have had a world war ten years ago, for human freedom, democracy, world revolution, pick your slogan, any will do, but we would have had the war. Never before have the generals been proved quite redundant, and all their military colleges as well. The true problem is – who will begin to tear the old fabric of political and military lies to pieces? Who will take the risk? For it is a risk, in this jungle. Can a country like Russia, or Britain, or America, really trust the rest if it gives its generals a decent suit of civilian clothes each and bulldozes all the weapons, which cost so many billions of lives in the long pedigree of war, into the sea? Can it be risked? We are on the edge of either the greatest breakout from the human mess of centuries, or we are due for the end. The Bomb is up in the air, right over our heads while we’re speaking. It’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to the human race in all time. And naturally we’re all shaken.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But will there be war, or not?’
He was staring hard into my eyes as he asked this question, as if he thought someone from outside must know more than he knew, and it made one feel anger to think that the maniacs in Moscow and Washington and London, with their rockets and bombs, now had the whole human race in a state of fear. With the rapid spread of the radio set, and of literacy, the Alis of this world, who live on desert rims, can now wonder daily how long ‘they’ are going to give them to live.
As our conversation progressed it came out that he knew a lot about the gas ovens and the world-wide slaughter of the Second World War, and one could not forget that ‘they’ for him, ‘they’ who had made the two terrible world wars, were white, and that scientific war was a white occupation, and that another one, the last, now appeared to be ready for launching.
One could understand the hatred and frustration felt by the black, brown and yellow races when, poverty stricken and yet now in tiny sight of relief, they watched final war being prepared in which they would die without having had a word to say. The mystery for them, contained in the white race which could do splendid things for human welfare, was surely in the frightening violence with which each white race dealt with each other about power and loot called principles. And all the years of preaching about Christ must have been almost as mystifying to Ali as it had been to the Kikuyu of Kenya who had watched the dozens of Christian sects quarrelling about the ownership of Christ before they, the Kikuyu, took to the despair of Mau Mau. But the white man never took time off to see himself as Ali and company saw him, especially now that the mystery of the white man had vanished – and Ali had seen white armies fight each other in his own country – a tremendous shock to the Somalis and Abyssinians who saw it. The white man now, wherever he goes, stands only for himself and represents only his personal nature, no longer for the mystery of his vanished greatness, which for Ali and company seems to have turned out to be a lie based on guns and books.
I felt despair of comforting him, and anger with the culture which had so failed him after all the arrogance and the wars and the ceremonies, and most of all the enormous vanity which had supported the hopeless arrogance.
‘Let’s go back to the dock,’ I said. ‘It’s time for me to go aboard the ship.’ As we walked he asked me more questions about the international situation.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘if they know it will end us all, will destroy the world, why do they go on with it? Why will they not disarm? What is it that stops them?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Nobody knows.’
‘You don’t know?’ he said.
‘No. I don’t know.’
‘Don’t any white men know, the big men in the governments? Don’t they know?’
‘Since this great bomb has come to us,’ I told him, ‘the whole of history has changed, and everything in the past about war and power has become out of date. We have started a new kind of history, a new world, but not many men will accept the fact, yet. Everything is different now, but men do not want to believe it. They know it but they won’t believe it. We just have to hope.’
‘That is what a mullah from Cairo told us here,’ Ali said, nodding. ‘That the history of all men has now been changed. And you believe that too?’
‘Yes.’
‘But does nobody in this world know what is going to happen? Nobody? Isn’t there anybody who can stop the war coming?’
Perhaps an assassination club could help, so that when the world is finally on the edge of the war which will annihilate it and the politicians and the generals and their scientists are about to take us all into that last manic plunge, the club assassinates a certain number of ‘great men’ in Moscow, London, New York, whichever of them are going through the old pathetic masculine routine of who’s toughest and strongest, and then issues an ultimatum. What are a few politicians, generals and scientists compared to the human race which is in their little, stupid hands today? We can always get a few more of them to start all over again and it might be that eventually we could get actual disarmament, a world without soldiers and their dead, useless traditions. But I did not mention these wild, nihilistic anti-nihilistic thoughts to Ali.
The club would have to be quite fair, in that when it had picked its politicians and generals, it assassinated them all on the same day, on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain. There must be no sovereignty or favouritism about it, just the main manic actors assassinated and then the suggestions that the new lot start negotiating again. It would need millionaires to finance it, rich men with no dividends from the arms industry, just financiers who rather like this world the way it is, ashless and non-radioactive.
The generals will never abdicate until they are sent, until the barracks and colleges are pulled down and they themselves are given their pensions and civil clothes. They have served well until now, all of them enjoying their careers under their various flags, and have fought for their little flags honestly and boyishly. When you think of the love which sprang up between some German and British officers in the Western Desert of World War Two (more and more it appears as if Rommel was the commanding officer for all, the beloved knight who represented all that any general could hope to be), you realise that all that is gone now, that fine chivalry and that schoolboy honour.
‘No,’ I told Ali. ‘Nobody in the world knows what will happen. We are stuck everywhere with the attitudes and habits of a world which vanished in 1945, and the problem is time in which to fully realise it. Goodbye.’ We were at the dock and the sun was blazing down, making one ache with its glaring weight.
‘Goodbye,’ Ali said. We shook hands, and he took the notes out of my hand with a smile and a nod.
‘Take five shillings back,’ he said, handing me one of the five shilling notes.
‘Why?’
‘I have enjoyed our talk,’ he told me, ‘and we are friends. This is enough.’ He waved the other notes. It was a very Somali gesture, handsome and proud, and not about money at all.
Chapter 24
THERE WAS A VERY THIN, waxen-pale Italian sailor standing in the motor boat, staring down with dark, angry eyes at the five Somali cargo workers who were lying asleep on the cases of wine, still not unloaded. He was about thirty, wearing a blue and white striped tee shirt, and sun-faded blue dungaree trousers. He had crew-cut black hair and he looked very ill.
‘Look at them,’ he said, ‘sleeping like pigs in the sun.’ He had a strong Neapolitan accent. He told me he was a seaman from one of the tramp ships in the bay. He had been dangerously ill and had just left the hospital. He was anxious to get back to his ship, ‘even though it is the very worst ship I have ever sailed in,’ he added. We sat down and he told me how unhappy he was with this ship he had so mistakenly sailed in six months before. Bad food, no fridges, cockroaches, the kind of ship which one had come to think had vanished from the seas. And they were sailing for the Persian Gulf. I pitied him. One of the Somalis woke up, yawned, stretched, looked at us.
‘When are you going to unload these cases?’ I asked him. ‘I am due back on bo
ard the ship.’
‘When we are told,’ he yawned, and went to sleep again.
‘Viva la libertà,’ the Neapolitan said bitterly, offering me a cigarette. Another Somali among the sleepers, an old man with grey bristles on his black face, opened one eye and called to me.
‘Do not worry, Effendi,’ he said. ‘The ship cannot leave without you. They cannot do it. They cannot. They know we are slow here.’ He closed his eyes again and dozed off in the soothing shade.
Raging, with that swift rage which the African heat and the African languor so swiftly awaken in white men who want to get things done quickly, I sat there and smoked and tried to feel glad that I had not the right any more to rouse them all up and drive them to the task until it was finished.
‘We could unload this lot in five minutes, you and me, due bianchi,’ the seaman said to me acidly, his eyes flashing. ‘One white man can do twenty times the work.’ Yes, but only for a little while, in that sun. It is the long, steady task of hours in the heat which makes the difference between African and white man in that climate. We sat on and waited until a Somali came staggering, yawning, his arms high in the ecstasy of his stretch, and stood staring broodily down at us from the dock. He screamed at the sleepers who opened their eyes and looked up at him, none of them moving. He was not exhorting, just cursing them, for they were part of his work, his work which he did not want to do. I had laboured in heat and I knew how he felt in that glare of sun, come out of the shade and his sleep to see these heavy cases waiting for him, this useless work which would occupy him until he died, in this backwater of Islam.
There was no shade in that big loaded barge and the Italian seaman and I sat there in the glare and sweated, hatless, the sun hitting us like a hammer as we smoked and exchanged fragments of thoughts about our various lives. The sun struck the water and flashed off it and into the brain, through the eyes, like a white, flaring sword.
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 19