Raiders of the Dressing-up Box
When we walked out, the three of us, into the sunlight of Nairobi’s crowded streets, dressed in our outfits, one could only begin to imagine how impressed the locals were at the sight of us.
I had gone for the ‘Old-Style Boy Scout Meets British Explorer’ look: khaki shirt with epaulettes and pleated breast-pockets, slightly-too-large khaki shorts, broad belt with a knife at my waist—the sort of thing, in fact, that Thesiger might himself have worn some half a century before; the sort of thing that his uncle, Lord Chelmsford, would have seen his men wearing, further ago still, if he’d paid an unexpected visit to a British Army hill station somewhere near Poona during his years as Viceroy of India. Although I did, also, have a black-and-white Arab headscarf worn around my neck as a sort of cravat, and also as a sort of sartorial homage to Lawrence of Arabia.
My brother had taken a similar approach.
Andy, meanwhile, had gone for more of an Indiana Jones effect, topped off with a broad-brimmed olive-green felt hat.
It lasted for about five minutes, the hat, until a small boy darted out from among the crowds, snatched the thing off his head and shot off again, weaving in and out of the passers-by like a greased piglet.
Runner that he was, Andy set off after the boy, though he was encumbered by a large and bulky rucksack.
We caught up with Andy about ten minutes later, standing by the side of the road catching his breath.
‘Did you see that?’ he said. ‘The little …’
He sought for the most appropriate word, but before it could come to him he broke into a grin.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘whatever. He could run, though, couldn’t he?’
No hat. And no Mohican hairstyle any more, either; he’d shaved it off for the trip. I’d asked him to.
‘Andy,’ I’d said, ‘he’s a very proper sort of man. He wouldn’t appreciate it, you know; not unless it was part of your traditional costume or something.’
Which, in the wilds of south London, it is not.
‘O wad some pow’r the giftie gie’ us,’ as Robert Burns said, ‘to see oursels as others see us.’
And I’m sure we would all three of us have been suitably impressed, had it been.
The Danakil, murderous and treacherous though they were, nevertheless set great store by their appearance, and had an elaborate code of traditional bodily adornments and modifications. A curved dagger worn across the stomach, bearing a row of brass-bound thongs; an ostrich-feather plume, worn Native American-style; slit earlobes; a coloured loincloth; these were all signifiers, in their world. What they signified—them being Danakil and all—was death, and each decoration recorded the number and kind of victims killed, and the manner of death given them.
But as for the Danakil and his death-tokens, so too for the City banker and his pinstripes; for the High Court judge and his wig and gown; for the medicine man and his feathered bonnet and the witchdoctor and his carved mask. And also the graduate and is mortar-board; the bride and her wedding-dress and the Queen and her crown and robes of state. The costume is the outward form and signifier of how we see ourselves and of how we want others to see us. Or rather it’s more than that, or it’s other than that; and the act of wearing it makes you somehow more than you are, and other than you are; and for a while you become the living form of something bigger than you are, and more than you are, and which existed long before you were born and which will go on long after you are dust. Or something.
There was a British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who in his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, would turn up at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet wearing what was variously described by his aides as ‘working dress’ and as ‘a business suit’. All the other guests, meanwhile, arrived in formal white tie and tails, as the dress-code required. In doing this, Brown succeeded in wearing the most ostentatious costume in the room, a costume which said—depending on your point of view—‘progressive, modern reformer’, or ‘dour, miserable killjoy puritan’, or else, in the words of the journalist Simon Heffer, ‘simply bloody rude’.
In the town where I now live, my wife and I once saw a party of schoolgirls looking very smart and striking, all dressed in long scarlet cloaks and wearing broad straw hats. A few years later, we took our eldest daughter, Alice—ten years old at the time—to the school to be interviewed by the headmistress, who had taken up her post at more or less the same time that we had first seen the girls. As we entered her office, Alice was wearing the winter uniform of her own primary school, a dark blue pinafore with a woollen coat and a felt hat.
‘My word!’ exclaimed the headmistress. ‘How very quaint!’
She crouched down to speak to Alice on her level.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you won’t have to worry about that sort of thing here, you know: we got rid of our hats years ago!’
And at about the same time, a man by the name of Mr Philip Collins, the director of something called the Social Market Foundation, published a pamphlet calling for an end to costumes and all other ‘outdated flummery’ in public life:
It is time we had an honours system that does not satirise itself … the whole bizarre panoply of OBEs, MBEs, CBEs, DCVOs, MVOs, GCBs, CHs, MNOGs and Yeomen Bed Goers should be put on the bonfire along with the vanity of those who care for such distinctions. We should abolish the titles of Sir and Dame into the bargain. Instead of all this nonsense we should establish a single award, the Order of Merit … awarded at a new democratic ceremony, performed at the House of Commons by the Speaker, dressed in clothes he would be happy to wear on public transport.
So, a bus driver’s uniform, then.
And perhaps the honours themselves might be dispensed from a form of ticket-machine which the Speaker wears on a strap about his neck.
On which note, we met up with our bus at the allotted place, in a bus garage in the middle of a shanty-town on the edge of the city, where we were welcomed on board by a bus driver who, though he lacked an official uniform, did have a ticket-machine—an old aluminium London bus conductor’s one, slung across his shoulder on a strap made of knotted string—and who was a model driver in almost every other way. Smiling broadly, he loaded our rucksacks into the baggage hold and showed us to our seats, while helping old ladies to stow baskets of live chickens in the overhead racks and collecting money and handing out tickets, laughing and bantering all the while. He was, as I say—uniform aside—the perfect driver in almost every respect. The only respect, in fact, in which he fell in any way short, was in his total inability to actually drive a bus. As we were soon to discover.
You Can Run But You Can’t Hide
The telephone call to the provincial governor’s office was in Amharic. Probably.
Either way, there exists no transcript of it.
But if you had been there, if you had been listening in—in the next office, say—and if you’d understood the language, then I imagine that what you would have heard would have sounded something like this:
‘He said what, you say?’
‘Oh, did he, now? He’s having a laugh, isn’t he? And then what?’
‘Nothing? What d’you mean, nothing?’
‘Not answering the telephone? How can they not be answering the telephone? They’ve got a telephone operator. That’s what he does. He operates the bloody telephone. That’s what he’s paid to do.’
‘Oh, really? Has he, now? Well, we need to have words with that operator. Strong words. And this Englishman, he’s done what, now? Gone? Gone where? I don’t believe it!’
‘Yes, well you make sure that you bloody well do.’
The sound of a phone being slammed back down in its cradle.
‘Right, young fellow-me-lad—I’m going to put a stop to your little game. Yo u see if I don’t!’
And meanwhile, out in the wild lands, the little party was making its way slowly onwards across a semi-desert plain of dust and scrub. They walked well into the night, there being a full moon, and Thesiger anx
ious to put as much distance as he could between himself and the provincial authorities. All in all there were thirty-nine of them: Thesiger himself, the fifteen conscripted soldiers, twenty-two Somali bearers and camel-men and one Danakil from the Awash Station, who was there in the dual role of guide and hostage, and whose main duty, apart from showing the way, was to call out into the wilderness in his language at regular intervals throughout the day and night, saying that they were armed to the teeth, and that whoever came near would be shot.
That night, however, the guide—or hostage—tried to bolt, but was caught. After that, he was escorted everywhere he went by two armed guards.
The next morning they set off early, and soon entered the territory of the Adoimara band of the Danakil tribe, where they came across a village, in which a great feast was taking place.
They sent an armed party down to the village to make contact, and to see what was happening. It was, they discovered, a funeral feast for a party of men ambushed and killed by their Asaimara rivals at a spot not 200 yards from where the expedition had camped the previous night.
The villagers were expecting a further raid by the Asaimara at any time. This was fortunate for Thesiger, because it meant that he and his armed party were welcomed as potential allies.
They were invited to share in the feast, and were also taken out to see the bloodstained rocks where the attack had taken place. They also learnt that it was here that the party of Greeks had been killed by Asaimara warriors some years previously; and that an Adoimara headman called Omar from their village had found the sole survivor and taken him to safety, in order to obtain a reward from the Government.
This Omar, they said, was a man well known for his skills in dealing with outsiders, whether they be Government officials or rival tribesmen, or even half-dead Greeks. Which suggested a way of easing the progress of the expedition.
After much negotiation, and after the payment of large numbers of goods and animals to both Omar himself and to more or less his entire extended family, it was agreed that the headman would be their guide on the next stage of the journey—which would take them through the foothills of Mount Ayelu and into Bahdu on the other side, through which the river flowed on its way to Aussa, and where the Asaimara lived in great numbers.
So it was that they set off the next morning, walking throughout the day as the ground became steadily higher and more rugged as they approached Mount Ayelu, and at length they found themselves at the entrance to a narrow pass in the hills, beyond which lay Bahdu. At this point Omar called for the party to halt, and urged them all, before they pressed on, to beware, to keep their wits about them, and above all to stay close together and not to straggle, as the less-than-willing soldiers had a tendency to do, for they were now at a place, he said, where ambushes were known to happen.
This they did, and they made their way through the pass without incident, although from time to time men saw—or thought they saw—movements in the rocks above; but when they pointed the sites of these movements out to others, there was always nothing to be seen.
Upon reaching the other side they found themselves on the edge of a broad, surprisingly fertile plain, dotted with trees and mat-covered huts and about a mile wide, through which the Awash wound its way slowly on. And as they moved across this plain they saw some distance ahead of them, by the water’s edge, squatting in groups beneath the shade of those trees, sharpening their daggers and their spear-tips, tamping down the powder in their antique muskets, a great host of Asaimara warriors, already some 200 strong; and many more hurrying to join them from every side.
An Interrupted Journey
Outside, the bus smelt of diesel. Inside, it also smelt of diesel, but more so.
It was deemed to be full when it became physically impossible to cram into it any more people, chickens, bags and boxes than filled the seats, aisles and overhead luggage-racks, even by pushing; and so the driver climbed into his seat, inserted and turned his key, and with a great shudder and a cloud of black smoke, the engine burst into life. Then it promptly shut down again. A second attempt brought nothing but a dry whirring. On the third go the thing got up and running; and so, with an audible crunch, the driver jammed the engine into gear and the bus jerked suddenly forward, sending bystanders scattering and bags tumbling from the racks onto the heads of passengers.
It headed out of the garage and—without first stopping to see if anything was coming—lurched out into the street. Thankfully, many of the oncoming vehicles had brakes in various degrees of working order, and so it was that the bus managed to take the corner and make its way into the flow of traffic, and without any deaths or serious injuries, as far as I could see.
The driver turned around and gave a great beaming smile at his passengers—for a worrying length of time, in my estimation, given that we were moving at a fair lick by now; and then he turned his face back to the front and slammed his foot down on the accelerator, pinning us into the backs of our seats, just in time to cross a traffic-light which had recently turned an attractive shade of red; and just in time to give a cheery wave to the driver of the car that had been crossing the junction at the time, and which, by some miracle, managed to swerve out of the way.
And on we went; and at some point in the journey, the driver seemed to have noticed—perhaps for the first time—that the bus was fitted with a sort of stick thing just below the steering-wheel, and that by moving it about into different positions it was possible to cause the engine to make all manner of entertaining noises, from high-pitched metallic shrieks to low, shuddering growls; and that, moreover, these sounds were all accompanied by actions of various kinds, including judders and lurches, near-stops and starts, and sudden, mad accelerations just as someone was about to cross the road in front of him. And given that it was going to be rather a long journey, he took the opportunity to make full use of all of these possibilities, more or less constantly, all the way through the city and out into the land beyond.
The passengers, meanwhile, or most of them, seemed to see what was happening as perfectly normal, as par for the course, as golfers say, and as part and parcel of taking a bus; and they sat back and chatted to each other, or looked out of the windows smiling to themselves, even as chickens and metal cooking-pots fell about their heads.
The journey was scheduled to take some eight hours to cover the hundred miles north to Thompson’s Falls, where we were to meet a second bus; but after we had been driving for about an hour we became aware of a strange metallic wailing noise from beneath the floor, and the bus began to shudder and slow down, and the driver pulled over to the side of the road, climbed down from his seat and opened a large hatch in the aisle between the seats, revealing the grease-encrusted engine, within which was a tube from which a brown liquid spurted directly upwards, as from a punctured artery.
Having satisfied himself that he had discovered the source of the problem, the driver closed the hatch on it, started the engine up again and drove on. We managed to get almost another hour out of the bus before the noise and the shuddering became markedly worse, and we made a second roadside stop.
This time, it was apparent that something was seriously amiss; but the driver was onto it. Rummaging around in his glove-compartment, he pulled out a plastic bag, which he wrapped around the tube. This made an immediate difference. No sooner had he done it than the brown liquid instantly stopped spurting upwards. Instead, it spurted sideways. Or at least, it spurted sideways for a few moments until the bag melted, and then it started to spurt upwards again. But at least something had been done, and that was the important thing, and so we were ready—once the hatch was closed—to set off again.
We drove on, climbing painfully slowly as the land around us rose, the engine shrieking fit to burst, and as we did so we left behind the dust and dirt of the city and its surrounding plains and entered lush farmland where coffee and tea grew. At length, though, we spluttered to a halt, by an iron water-tank on the edge of a village called Nyeri, a place
of tin-roofed breeze-block huts. From a church in the village, some fifty yards from where we sat, came the sounds of drumming and singing.
The driver got out and came back with a man with a spanner, who removed the tube and took it away.
There we remained for two hours, while a steadily growing crowd of small children gathered around to watch.
Eventually the man came back with the driver, and together they tinkered with the engine until both seemed satisfied, and then they closed the hatch and loaded us all on board, and after three or four false starts got the engine going again, the cloud of smoke sending the children running; and we set off once more on the road to the north.
As we drove on, the land became flatter and drier, with breeze-block and mud-hut villages surrounded by banana trees and fields of tea and coffee bushes becoming fewer and farther between and giving way, at last, to broad savannah. And once we were truly out, at last, way, way out in the middle of nowhere and away from all settlement, then the bus took its one big chance to do the thing for which it had been rehearsing the whole journey long: it stopped, dead, and packed up for good, and no amount of opening and closing of hatches or wrapping and unwrapping of plastic bags could do anything to coax even the faintest flicker of life from it. That was it, finished.
All there was left for us to do was to get off, pick up our bags and walk.
The driver stood in the doorway of his bus as we all set off with our rucksacks and our parcels and our pots and our chickens, and waved us off with one last cheery smile.
The River-Plain of Bahdu
The small party carried on across the plain; and when it drew near to where the warriors had gathered it halted, and two men—Thesiger and Omar the Adoimara headman—stepped out alone and approached them, calling out greetings and salutations. Which were not returned; or rather, which were returned with a sullen and belligerent silence, by spitting upon the ground, by the drawing of knives and the cocking of muskets, and each man pointedly turning his back on the two outsiders as they approached, in deliberate insult.
In Praise of Savagery Page 5