Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  It was not to be. In the last twenty years of his life, after the publication of Warriors and Strangers in 1971, he was to publish only one other book, the fine novel Noble Descents, set in a small princely state in India just after partition – a novel which includes something of a self-portrait of Gerry (and possibly a reflection of his relationship with his mother) in the character of Croon, a film-script writer, out in India to research an epic story. This was very much Gerry’s will-o’-the-wisp in his latter years – the idea that he would make a killing in the movies, pay all debts, and thereafter sit down to write great books.

  He had talked of these endless financial difficulties for a writer with his close friend Paul Scott (of the Raj Quartet), met in 1951, who handled all his work at David Higham, with whom he shared an army and Indian background, and whom he took under his wing in creative literary matters, encouraging him to take the plunge as a full-time writer – reassuring him, in a series of letters (and during a mammoth pub crawl through Dublin in 1957) about the inevitable financial ‘jitters’ of a writer’s life, especially for those outside the English literary establishment.

  I met him quite often during this latter period of his life. They were very happy personal years, in one vital way at least, these last twenty, since they were spent with Kate Carney, a younger Dublin woman, who filled that ideal feminine bill for him in being both vivacious and sensible – a woman who, with her love and practical attention, certainly prolonged his life, especially after his cancer operation four years before he died. They never married, for Gerry was still married in the eyes of the church, and never actually set up house and lived together. But in every other way they were man and wife. He couldn’t have been luckier than with Kate.

  Gerry was getting white-haired now, with sinking features and a more portly solidity. But he still had nimble air and the blue eyes never lost their bright and kindly sheen – amused, ironic. We met in pubs in Bray and further out in Delgany, Co Wicklow, where he lived in rooms above a butcher’s shop; though again I was never to meet him on his home ground. He was usually just off to, or had just returned from, some outlandish place – to visit John Huston or a trip to China where he was to do a script on – what was it? – possibly Mao and the Long March in full Technicolor and costing $40 million.

  Shortage of money wasn’t the only block to producing books. Gerry felt a strong need to maintain an active, peripatetic life. The lone ranger mode was his almost to the end. This restless temperament made it particularly difficult for him to sit down for long stretches. So he postponed things, proposing to me instead all sorts of ideas for books, all of which, quite justifiably, would get him away from his desk. There was a History of Islam in Africa, which would take him the length and breadth of the continent – to research, naturally – and another book doing the same in a Greyhound bus across America. Even more than most authors, he feared the blank page, and so tended to ambush it in 48-hour binges of work, or saying that he had to go away and see more of the raw material before even starting to ambush the page. In any case the books never appeared.

  I wonder if the real reason for this was that he felt he’d said it all – all that he could well say on his particular theme of empire and its dissolution, the madness of its ethos, but the often marvellous strengths and bizarreries of the characters who administered it – people who had lived, loved and lost in every hard and soft place, from Happy Valley to the Shores of Mandalay. He had depicted these people so completely, with such vigour, irony and understanding, that it was difficult, in the end impossible, for him to engage with any new and equally heartfelt subject matter.

  We should not complain. A writer has only so many heartfelt books in him. And these are what we need, not new books which would have been written at half-steam. And we have all these full-steam books from Gerry, most notably in Warriors, a book with a ring of absolute authenticity, of conflicts reconciled, a true philosophy gained through the most testing, harshly lived experience imaginable. No need to ask for more.

  JOSEPH HONE, 1993

  Gerald Hanley

  Afterword to the 2004 edition

  AS SOMALIA SPIRALLED into war and insanity following the overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in January 1991, I met a man named Mohamoud Afrah down a dusty Mogadishu alley strewn with donkey turds and wrecked cars. I was a Reuters correspondent at the time and Mohamoud was our local ‘stringer’. He told me he regarded himself to be a Somali, as opposed to a man from such-and-such a clan, who loved the city culture of Mogadishu. He knew all about his nation’s history, yet he had no language to describe the present phenomenon of Somalia’s collapse. One day he said the militias had parked a tank outside his house with the barrel pointing at him. He paid them money to leave him alone and before they left he chided them, ‘There are too many Hitlers in Somalia today.’

  ‘Who’s Hitler?’ replied one of the armed youths.

  Soon after our first day together a tank returned to Mohamoud’s house and blew it to bits with his son in front of it. The Reuters man buried his boy at the doorstep. Then he fled into exile, joining the millions of Somali refugees who have scattered the earth to escape famine and war. Mohamoud now lives in Toronto, where he ekes out a living as a translator and spends his winter evenings huddled next to the heater. ‘If the heater goes down I sit in front of the oven,’ he wrote to me in early 2004. ‘Oh, how I miss peacetime Mog, when we used to play soccer barefoot at the Lido Beach and later share a watermelon and cups of cappuccino.’

  This is one man’s story of what happened to Somalia three decades after Gerald Hanley expressed such hopes for the future of a free and independent Africa in Warriors – so long as the liberated peoples resisted the ‘longing to smash it all up when boredom sets in’. Hanley’s optimism, so characteristic of the time, appears misplaced today, while his caution, rooted in real experience, seems prophetic.

  The infant democracies born across the continent in the 1960s were quickly strangled when power went to their leaders’ heads. In Somalia, this process accelerated when an elected president was assassinated in 1969 and military chief General Siad Barre stepped into power.

  The events of the 1970s onwards tell a hopeless, bloody tale. Somalia’s strategic position at the mouth of the Red Sea attracted the interest of the big powers. Africa’s Horn became a cockpit of the Cold War, with guns supplied in quantities enough to exterminate several generations of local people. First the Communists aided Siad and later, after the Marxist revolution in Addis Ababa in 1974, the United States bankrolled his misrule.

  Arbitrary colonial frontiers had divided the Somali peoples and Hanley was among many who supported their right to be united into a single nation. But it was exactly this policy adopted by governments in Mogadishu that became Somalia’s nemesis. The shifta war to claim Kenya’s north-east failed in the 1960s, and then the defeat of Siad Barre’s forces in the Ogaden by the Cuban-backed Ethiopian military in the following decade led to gradual collapse at home. By the 1980s Somalia was bankrupt and political scientists began to speculate on whether it could even function as a modern state. Yet President Ronald Reagan kept on pouring in the weapons, while the United Nations subsidised the dictatorship by turning a blind eye to the massive plunder of humanitarian food deliveries. After the Berlin Wall came down Somalia became what one diplomat described to me as ‘devalued real estate’ and soon enough, the regime imploded.

  My mother gave me a tattered old copy of Warriors and Strangers, as it was published in its original form, on the eve of my time in Somalia. Hanley became the prism through which I and the tiny group of foreign journalists and aid workers working in that forgotten country in the early days tried to understand the ‘atmosphere of electric violence … and blood feuds whose origins cannot be remembered, only honoured in the stabbing’.

  Since Eland republished the Somalia section Warriors in 1993, I must have given out or had stolen from me at least fifty copies – always the proof of a good book. The truth is that
I don’t believe any Somalis I know have read Warriors, or even The Consul at Sunset, Hanley’s masterful novel set in colonial British Somaliland. Perhaps Somalis in the diaspora are reading it now, and they should, because it is among the best three or four books written by foreigners about the country. What Hanley recalls from his times as a young British officer out in the ‘desiccated, bitter, cruel, sun-beaten’ wilderness in the 1940s captures an essence of the people in ways that hold true today like no other account. But it may be that he appeals most to outsiders who find themselves in this most perplexing, alien and dangerous of places. One may recoil in disgust from the Somalis for the cruelty and suffering they inflict upon each other and the catastrophes they bring upon themselves, yet tend to blame on others. At the very same time, you may grow to admire them, as Hanley did, as ‘the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest …’ of people.

  At times, his writing reaches a sublime, almost mystical level, whether or not you have set foot in Somalia. The opening riff of Warriors gives me goose pimples to this day: ‘True solitude is when the most restless part of a human being, his longing to forget where he is, born on earth in order to die, comes to rest and listens in a kind of agreed peace …’ A recurring theme of Hanley’s writing is that, in the wilderness, much more dangerous than the violence of the Somalis was the battle a man must wage with his own mind in solitude. Hanley personally knew seven comrades who blew their own brains out. ‘Died on Active Service’, he jokingly called it. After years of Somalia, I finally grew to understand Hanley’s confession that ‘on the whole the years I spent on that silent burning moon did me more harm than good.’ It is important to remember that Hanley spent fourteen months at his post until he was given his first leave. The handful of United Nations staff deployed on the ground in Somalia in 2004 are pulled out for ‘R and R’ after no more than a month.

  The civil war of 1991 led to a famine in which 300,000 people are believed to have perished. This occurred because the world did nothing to pull Somalia back from the abyss. Most of the victims were children under five, almost an entire generation of infants across the worst affected areas of south and central Somalia. The situation became so appalling that in the town of Baidoa during the summer months of 1992 we witnessed 400 people being buried daily. The gravediggers were themselves so weak that they were unable to excavate holes deep enough to lay the corpses.

  Finally, after ignoring Somalia’s plight, American-led United Nations forces came ashore in Mogadishu in December 1992. They brought bags of food aid, though most of the vulnerable populations had already died, and then the United Nations declared that they had arrived to bring civilisation. If only the development mandarins had read Hanley. Somalia taught him that ‘the varnish of two thousand years is so thin as to be transparent … It is very surprising, and alarming at first, how swiftly it vanishes when threatened by other men.’ International forces swiftly picked a fight with one of the Mogadishu warlords, Mohamed Farah Aydiid, and the development goals were all swept away in a bloody feud that led to the mission’s failure. And so it was that the United Nations peacekeepers, instead of building schools and overseeing democratic elections as they had promised, ended up machine-gunning civilians from helicopters within seven months of their arrival.

  Hanley’s criticisms of colonialism hold true today in the age of development politics and ‘nation-building’ – the effort to fix the failed states of the post-Cold War world. I find it highly ironic that Hanley put his greatest confidence in the United Nations. ‘The world will be rearranged, shaken up,’ he tells a fractious old nomad complaining about the vagaries of colonial rule. ‘All will be changed everywhere.’ And the old man replies: ‘I have seen it all change before … You are too young to have seen anything change yet. Change is not always for the good.’ In Africa even today we are still too young, perhaps, to see what changes will bring about good.

  For now we must look back at a decade of further international neglect of Somalia since the United Nations mission collapsed and troops evacuated from the very Mogadishu beaches where they had landed eighteen months previously. A few charities and UN staff cling on in various parts of the country, starved of resources from Western governments, much I suppose as the British military administration had to do in the years following the defeat of the Italians. Nearly fourteen years after its collapse Somalia still has no proper government or state institutions, though it has been carved into several unrecognised mini-states. Faction leaders have held fourteen peace initiatives since 1991 yet none of them have introduced a lasting peace. The warlords and their clan militias still hold sway. Business thrives, much of it in contraband, while there are scant signs of ‘progress’. The environment is in critical collapse, there is a total absence of human rights, elder women still infibulate their infant girls, the only hospitals exist thanks to foreign charities and few, if any schools are open other than the madrasas financed by radical Islamist groups. Somalis often express the belief that what has happened to them is a punishment for being bad Muslims. Liberal democracy, I’m afraid, is unlikely to take root any time soon. If pressed, many Somalis will confess that they would like to see the restoration of a strong dictator like Siad Barre – so long as he was from their own clan. And if they could not have such a strongman, then they think perhaps the current controlled chaos is the best solution for their fiercely individualistic outlook on life and constant pursuit of personal ‘justice’. One wonders what Hanley would think of it all. Though I imagine he would be saddened, I don’t believe he would be greatly surprised.

  AIDAN HARTLEY

  Kenya, 2004

  61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL

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  Eland was started in 1982 to revive great travel books which had fallen out of print. Although the list soon diversified into biography and fiction, all the titles are chosen for their interest in spirit of place.

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  Copyright

  First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1971

  First published by Eland Publishing Limited

  61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 1993

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Estate of Gerald Hanley 1971

  Afterword 1993 © Joseph Hone

  Afterword 2004 © Aidan Hartley

  The right of Gerald Hanley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–906011–93–2

  Cover Image: The Camel Corps of the King’s African Rifles © MirrorPrintStore 2008

  death among the Somalis