Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  I stared along the barren coastline beyond the aching white town, and I knew I had never wanted to return here, and would never return again. I was glad I could not see Galkayu again, or Bosaso, Hafun, Filtu, Dagamedu, Golwein or Sinadogo, those aching place-names. Of all the Africas this yellow waste was a place to ‘adventure’ in, for there was nothing there except the sand and the nomads.

  Once, in the red sand ocean of the Ogaden I had come upon a tall carved tablet of stone among the thorns. The sunglare had lit up the carved words on it, words commemorating the long road through the bush hacked out by the Sicilian labour battalion attached to an Italian division which had invaded Abyssinia in 1935. The hot wind was scattering sand against it. The men, their tents, their empty cigarette packets, were all gone, and there was no trace of them. The Italian empire had vanished and the wilderness belonged, as it had always belonged, and will always belong, to the nomads and their camels. Forbidding and desolate, the huge desert with its towering rocks which shake in the sun, waits to turn everything into sand again, men, buildings, camels, even the white ants which send up their enormous towers of mystery in which they teem while they live out their imitation of the universe. I think most of all it was that realisation which the four years’ wanderings in the interior had allowed to seep into me, that though he wrote it magnificently, Donne had it wrong. Every man is an island, in the desert or the city, and I can remember coming to feel certain of this one night on a high rock in fierce moonlight, looking out across Africa which stretched forever in the luminous silence. When you mingle again with people you get the impression once more that Donne is right, but it is only an impression. The longing and the effort to diminish the islandhood is everything, but it can never be dissolved.

  Among our buildings we get the necessary impression that we have some kind of permanence here, but a single month in a desert, alone, is enough to allow in the echo of doubt, and it stays. Isolation in the wastes taught me to value civilisation, and to get some idea of what this world owes to all the civilisers, whatever their race, or place, or time. Every time we go to a doctor it is probably in the subconscious hope that he will tell us we are going to live forever. Other people die but we don’t. When we build, it is forever. Isolation makes you think of the fact of death, too much, and the city makes you think only about life, too much. And there is no in-between area, and we contain it all within ourselves after we have tasted from both wells.

  Any lingering ideas I had had about some races, religions, colours, or what have you, being better than others, vanished after a year in those wastes. Excellence and the lack of it are everywhere, and I knew nomads with qualities of natural intelligence and vitality far greater than hordes of white men I had known. And I have seen a white man perform acts of savagery as terrible as that performed by any tribesman. All the rules had vanished, the rules about what was supposed to be what, crumbled away by the billion thoughts sieved out in prolonged isolation, and I no longer believed in the sovereign state, the white message, or the inherent goodness, or evil, of man. For long periods I had forgotten that I was a white man at all, and had been merely a man, another flea on the desert with the nomads, and it was an experience which could not be left behind with the desert. I carried it with me, and I find when I meet friends who drank long enough at those bitter waterholes, that they too can no longer contribute to those ancient myths about the premiership of this that or the other if it has a white skin covering it. This is not to say that one did not discover how handily valuable it is to have been born with a white skin, how it helps one to share in the undeniable excellence and superiority of what Europe has defined as civilisation, having clutched tightly the rope thrown out of darkness by Asia long ago.

  And what did I think now, sitting in that sunglare in the barge, about Africa, I wondered. About Africa which had stirred in its long tropical sleep and was standing up and screaming for various things lying behind a word called freedom.

  No matter how much a man may try and think in the terms of the civilisation to which he belongs, and thinks with its attitudes or without them, it is from his own particular heritage of myth and fact that he must stare at the scene. And I found that I, as a maverick person, was glad, but not smugly, that my ancestors had not been involved in the selling of millions of African slaves to the Americas, or in having to prove that what had been done in and to Africa had been right because my ancestors had done it. For my own ancestors had been losers too, and had been enslaved by the same force, a force which invented a mission to cover the normal human greed of the winners. And let us accept right away that the winners deserved the power, because they had won. They had conquered everywhere, the British. They had smashed Ireland first, a sort of long and obsessional battle course for the struggle to come for the ownership of Asia and Africa one day, and had then gone on to conquer all the oceans. Who can blame Englishmen for being proud of their victory in that jungle of the world in the past? It was a dangerous jungle and the British won the long, bloody day with their ships, their guns, and their money, and with their particular gift of long and carefully cherished civic patience. And now it was over.

  The monarchy, the lords, the knights, the whole feudal English society, had now had to turn in on itself, following the loss of its world power and empire, and invent full employment. It was interesting to see how Gandhi had been right, how as soon as Britain lost its empire the English working class had to be given work and wages and new freedoms. Gandhi was the friend of the English working class. In freeing India he freed them too. He knew too, and said it, that once India had freed herself nothing could stop the freedom of Africa, which is why the whole European fabric of government in Africa crumbled so swiftly after 1947. Only the French went on dive-bombing and fighting, from Damascus to Madagascar and from Indo-China to Algeria. The British knew better than that, and went, quietly, proving that they still had the skill which had made their empire in the first place. Yet the struggle would go on in all kinds of ways, because money and power will never give justice until it is forced to. There is no escape from the nausea one feels as one surveys the world. Communism was a godsend because it so frightened the rich and the powerful all over the earth, but that is its only virtue for me. Its presence is all, its end negative.

  ‘I would have gone to America, if I could have got in,’ the Italian seaman was saying to me. We were the same kind of people, uneducated, and hopeful, only I had had more luck than he. That means that you do not belong fully to any particular society, and can sign on in a Norwegian, Greek or Italian ship, become an American, or an Australian, and grow gradually into what appears to be your own product, instead of belonging to some strong segment with its tradition of safety and standard of achievement to look to. There is an enormous difference between the man who emerges from a safely ensconced segment of society, and the one who is flung into a world in which the shovel is waiting for him. I recommend the latter to all as a far more exciting world to be thrown into. The working class are far luckier than the monied classes, if they have a little yeast in their skulls to start with. Like the Italian beside me in the barge. He was a true man in that while he described the present misery of his condition, he did not whine about it and accuse the world of owing him a living. He still knew that he had to win the living, and enjoyed the possibilities.

  It was a hell ship he was to sail in again, one of those rusting steel slums which still crawl the seas.

  ‘You owned all that a couple of years ago,’ I said, nodding at the harsh, jagged coast of Somalia, ‘and now you’ve lost it. Does it break your heart?’

  He laughed. ‘What a tragedy,’ he said, and laughed so loud that he woke the old Somali who had slept on among his labouring companions in the fore-peak of the barge.

  In scathing and ironic Italian he described the Italian empire as a dream in Mussolini’s head, for which the Italian people had paid with their blood.

  ‘It is good that it is finished,’ he said. ‘What did it mean to m
e? Nothing. I still look for bread and peace.’

  Empires were a hobby of a bored and energetic owning class, and empires made them rich, very rich, and the denizens of the empires poor, and it was good to have lived to see the end of all that. What was his dream? Everyone has a dream. His was to own a small restaurant in Naples one day – ‘probably when I’m about fifty, if things work out,’ he said doubtfully, and then he looked across the blinding sheet of sea to the tramp ship. She was very low in the water, laden with arms and ammunition, now being unloaded, as were the other two tramps swinging at anchor nearby.

  ‘Now I see that brute again,’ he said, staring with bitter eyes at the rusty, ancient ship, ‘I wish I’d died in hospital.’ She was sailing next for the Persian Gulf, a suburb of hell where she would lie in the furnace heat for weeks awaiting a cargo. No fans, no ice, no cold beer. And food? Herrings, pasta and potatoes.

  Another Italian appeared above us on the jetty and waved his hand at us, one of the last of the Italians in Mogadishu. He appeared to be made of leather, thin, dark brown skin shining from a lifetime of sun, a true vecchio coloniale. He began to curse the Somalis in slow, gentle Italo-Somali, insulting and friendly words, so that they all laughed. Then he jumped down into the barge and offered us cigarettes, sat down beside me and asked me if I was sailing in the liner. Yes. Ah, how he envied me. But it would not be long now before he sailed himself, for good. I laughed.

  ‘You’ll never get over Africa, though, will you?’ I said. He looked at me sharply, smiled. He shook his head and looked out across the barge at the coastline.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s true. You hate her but you love her. You the same?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah.’ He knew it had nothing to do with being the big white chief, loving Africa, but had to do with the immense size and freedom of the continent, and the longing to wander from one end of it to the other. But he had stayed too long, he knew it now. It’s true that there is a secret in knowing when to go, in feeling when a certain time of life somewhere is over. And yet …

  His drinking company recently has been that of a Russian, one of the horde of Russians and Chinese who had arrived in the new Somali republic.

  ‘He started by trying to convert me to communism,’ the old Italian grinned, ‘but I’ve just about converted him instead. “Capitalism?” I said to him. “But that’s what I want to be. A capitalist. All my life I’ve tried to be a capitalist, and soon, in Italy I shall be one. I’ve saved up and I’m ready to invade Italy, for capitalism.” I’ve been slowly educating him, poor fellow, and now he knows something about the world at last. He knew nothing. A real fanatic from the bookshelves. Comes along every night for a few drinks and a few more lessons in true world history. They’re good fellows, these Russians, but they’ve never been allowed to have any freedom, or even any real conversation. This fellow laps it up, loves it, actually talking with a capitalist foreigner.’

  ‘With a fascist beast,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, laughing. ‘I forgot that. I’m a fascist beast, or was.’ He pointed to the stack of wooden cases now piling up on the jetty, the last of which was being swung up out of our barge. ‘Drink from Italy,’ he said. ‘The best. For the Russians, the Chinese, and – ’ he placed his forefinger on the side of his nose and winked – ‘for some of the Somalis, Allah and the Prophet notwithstanding.’

  Soon we were wallowing across the bay towards the rusty tramp, aboard which the old Italian was going to repair some electrical machinery.

  ‘You’ll get no beer aboard this scow,’ the seaman told him as we came alongside the Jacob’s ladder.

  ‘No beer, no repairs,’ the old man told him. He went up the Jacob’s ladder, swiftly, the seaman following him. As we cast off they waved to me.

  ‘Ciao. And drink a cold Americano for me aboard,’ the old man shouted.

  Africa is full of these old timers, men of many European races, and when they have gone they will be missed, when the machinery breaks down. They could fix anything. I once saw one of them, an old Sicilian diesel driver, fix a diesel engine with two pieces of tin when we were marooned hundreds of miles from any help. Another, an old South African, taught me to shoot, to skin a big beast quickly, to make rawhide ropes (a fast-dying art when he taught me), and how to seal up a leak in the radiator of a box body Model T Ford with a raw egg and a handful of maize meal. There is no better value in the world than an all night session under a thorn tree with an old timer in Africa, with a case of beer between you and a few hundred cigarettes around the place. We had one of them die on us suddenly one night in Somalia. He was too old for the game, but would not give up and had gone into that final haven, the desert locust control, and he drove three hundred miles with a case of gin for his final all night session. He had it, and sat up very suddenly about three in the morning, and died, in the right kind of country too, sun-blasted, thick with hyenas, just the place he would have chosen, or perhaps chose.

  Bwana Mzee, Old One, your time has gone now, for the cement mixers are massing on the horizon, and the game is finished.

  Chapter 25

  SWINGING HIGH UP over the ship again in the big canvas bag I could see Mogadishu below me, like a small blinding-white wedding cake on the burned brown sand, the blue ocean lapping at its edges. I could see Wardiglei barracks where I had trained four hundred infantry and a company of medium machine-gunners; the Lighthouse flats, the officers’ club, and the thirteenth-century mosque in which Ibn Battuta had prayed. I felt nothing for Mogadishu, no nostalgia, and I tried to feel it for the wilderness I could see stretching beyond the city, but I could feel none for that either. It was finished, and because it was finished there was an irrational sense of loss, of something unrecapturable, and of the comedy which time makes of one’s solemn youth. But if I knew anything about men I had learned it out there beyond the heat haze, and what I knew about myself I had learned to learn there too, in silence. I felt a kind of gratitude to the deserts and to the nomads, or at least to life for having diced me into that world for a time.

  A free Somali race will be good for Africa. Their bright intelligence, their courage and their confidence will be of value to the new Africa shaping now, if only because they never for a moment felt inferior to any white man, and were never tiresome about being black, or about you being white. They would like Emperor Haile Selassie to give them back the camel wilderness of the Ogaden, which by its very bitterness belongs to the Somali people and to their famished camels. Even if he does find oil in the Ogaden, Haile Selassie should find a way of giving that red desert back to the Somali nomads. They would feel gratitude to him, as they would to Jomo Kenyatta, if, despite his immense difficulties, he could find a way to let the Somali tribes of Kenya’s northern frontier break out of the pencil lines drawn on the map years ago by careless white men, and become part of the greater free Somalia.

  ‘What did you find to do ashore in that dump of sand, signore?’ a grizzled Italian seaman asked me as I stepped out of the canvas bag on to the deck of the liner.

  ‘It was a nostalgia,’ I told him. ‘I knew it once.’

  ‘And how went it?’

  ‘It was gone.’

  He laughed, nodding. ‘Yes. It is like when you see a woman you loved years ago. The fever has gone and you can look at her without trouble. Was it like that?’

  ‘Yes. It was like that.’

  ‘Then celebrate it, signore. The bar is open.’ He jerked his thumb at his open mouth and laughed.

  The ship’s engines were throbbing and she began to swing slowly on the blue silken water, and as I watched Mogadishu disappear behind the slowly swinging prow of the ship I felt sure I would never see it again, and felt no pang, no regret.

  I went in off the roasting heat of the deck into the air-conditioned bar and felt the immediate response of gratitude from the tortured skin and eyes as the fresh, cool air enveloped me.

  ‘How are you, signore?’ the barman asked me.

/>   ‘Madly in love with civilisation,’ I told him, ‘especially airconditioned civilisation. Long live engineering and science.’

  He laughed. ‘I told you not to go ashore,’ he said.

  ‘But I’m glad I went,’ I told him.

  ‘Why?’ he asked while he mixed the Campari and the crushed ice and lemon.

  ‘Because I had experienced so many things in that country,’ I said, ‘important things that greatly affected me, I had a moment this morning when I decided not to go ashore at all. I felt I should remember it as it was, years ago, which was ridiculous, so I went.’

  ‘And what did you feel, seeing it all again?’

  ‘Older.’

  We laughed and he handed me the drink, and it tasted good after the sweat I had shed during the morning.

  The South African passengers were gathering in the bar now, all healthy, well heeled, well travelled, many of them with over a hundred years of family behind them in that lush paradise of gold and diamonds in the far south. All about their comfortable world a new muscular Africa was gathering in what might become a vengeful freedom if these white men did not change things in South Africa.

  They had been on holiday in Europe, some of them for pleasure and others for business, and now they were going home, to a country for which they might have to fight one of these days. I met no fireeaters among them. They were solemn when they talked about the problem facing them. ‘We let it go by, day by day, and hope for the best,’ one of them told me. ‘Whatever that may be.’ The Dutchmen among them were bitter about the British South Africans, who, they claimed, liked apartheid and hid behind it, while professing to feel more liberal about it all than the Dutch, etcetera.

  Racing through those warm tropic seas in the darkness, the ship shuddering softly with her own power, I could see the lightning exploding again over the dark hulk of Africa on our beam. She did not look threatening in the livid light breaking across her vastness, and she never has threatened anybody yet. She has been sold, underpaid, used, but always loved by those strangers who have got to know her.