In Praise of Savagery

by Warwick Cairns

  Sensing that things were likely to get worse rather than better, Thesiger and Omar returned to the men and instructed them to unpack the camels and to make camp, in the open and with a clear field of fire all around, taking care to build a perimeter wall around it using packs and equipment. As they did so, warriors began to gather around to watch, and upon hearing the camel-men talk, some began to poke them and prod them, and to accuse them of belonging to the Issa, a Somali-speaking tribe with whom they were perpetually at war. As, indeed, they were perpetually at war with most other tribes in the vicinity, and with many more besides.

  Upon which it struck Thesiger as a good idea to take down his empty rifle-case and to refer to it, loudly and pointedly, as ‘the machine gun’. This was something that others among his party quickly picked up on, in their various languages.

  It appeared to have some effect, at least in the short term, in that it caused a number of the warriors to draw back a little way, muttering among themselves and pointing, and muttering again, and generally giving serious consideration to the possibility of all being mown down.

  Some, however, were overheard saying that if they did not kill the entire party now, then they would most certainly come back and do so after nightfall.

  The headman Omar, meanwhile, sensing the way things were going, set off through the hostile crowd, frantically trying to find someone in authority with whom he could negotiate.

  He first found an Asaimara headman, but the man was belligerent and accusatory, and he got nowhere with him.

  At length, though, he located some elders, and persuaded them to talk, and over many cups of tea he managed to persuade them that Thesiger was, in fact, an English traveller, merely passing through under the protection of the Emperor, and not a Government employee of any kind.

  The elders decided that Omar and Thesiger should be taken to see their chief the next day to explain themselves, and that in the meantime they should retire to their camp for the night, and sleep. Or not, as the case might be. Or pace the perimeter, rifles in hand, shining battery-powered torches out into the darkness, hearts beating faster at every movement and each sound out there in the night.

  But the next morning came, in the end, and the two men were taken a little way down the river, to a small village on the one dry patch of ground in a foul and malarious swamp, presided over by an ancient and mostly deaf chief by the name of Afleodham, who, it was said, was related to the Sultan of Aussa.

  The meeting lasted throughout the day, not least because Afleodham could not hear the half of what was being said, most of the time, and had to have it repeated to him, several times over, which meant translating and retranslating in three languages; and all the while they were beset by great clouds of black flies from the swamp. It was not a wholesome sort of place to be.

  Eventually, the chief pronounced himself satisfied with what he had heard, and agreed that Thesiger’s party should be allowed to pass through his lands to Aussa, accompanied by an escort of Asaimara warriors.

  Elated, Thesiger retired to his tent, and stayed there until just before sunset, when the letter from the regional government office arrived.

  A Letter

  The letter had been passed from village to village and from chief to chief, and was addressed not to Thesiger but to the head of his military escort.

  It informed him that the Englishman, Wilfred Thesiger, was required to return immediately to Addis Ababa. He was under no circumstances to attempt to enter Bahdu or the land of Aussa that lay beyond. Should he refuse, the soldiers were to return without him, bringing all of their rifles and ammunition, and after first announcing to the Danakil that the authorities took no further responsibility for his safety.

  And that, pretty much, was that.

  Officialdom had taken its revenge good and proper, and, through a combination of conscious design and fortuitous circumstances, had served it up in exactly the way and at exactly the time most certain to destroy Thesiger’s hopes, just at the moment when the possibility of eventual success had seemed to be within reach.

  Such are the consequences of upsetting those in positions of authority.

  So it was that the party set off on the return trip—this time to Afdam Station, which was nearer than Awash. The soldiers, it must be said, were really rather pleased, and Thesiger was somewhat less so—though determined, more than ever, to find a way to return and to enter Aussa.

  The trip to the station took them four days. On the second day they arrived at a well in the dry bed of the Mullu River, a tributary of the Awash, by the side of which lay the charred remains of an Adoimara village, the bones of its inhabitants scattered around where the jackals had dragged them; and on the fourth day, when they arrived at the station, they heard, from local tribesmen, the story of what had happened there.

  To the North

  After an hour or so of walking another bus pulled up beside us, loud African music blaring from within. It was already packed to overflowing; packed both with its own passengers and with stragglers from our bus it had picked up on the way. Some people hung from the doors, some sat on others’ laps. Some chickens sat on other chickens’ laps, such was the press within.

  And yet, somehow, we managed to climb on board.

  We spent the night at a cheap hotel by Thompson’s Falls, sleeping on the bare floorboards of a single room, which though it lacked the luxury of a working light-bulb, was nevertheless clean and well kept. And cheap.

  Then we took breakfast at the big old colonial-era hotel nearby, eating toast and scrambled eggs and fresh fruit, all delicious and plentiful, and served up to us by attentive uniformed waiters. This also was remarkably cheap, and much to be recommended.

  Greatly refreshed, we climbed down to the bottom of the falls and explored the dense forest by the river’s edge, seeing the footprints of a big cat of some kind, before joining our next bus around lunchtime, bound for Thesiger’s home town of Maralal, in the north.

  For most of this journey we sat on the roof-rack of the bus, among the luggage, with the hot wind blowing in our faces, and we watched as the land spread out around us became ever flatter and more arid. There came a point at which the tarmac roads gave way to packed dirt. At this point also the appearance and manner of the people changed altogether, as if we had crossed a border and entered another country, where lived a different race. It was, this place, one of traditional people, of picture-book people: of women in bead collars; young girls in mother-of-pearl headdresses; spear-carrying young men in bright red togas with ochred hair. And also the bearing of them, we noticed, the posture and the stance of them: very upright and very tall, and a look about them as if all they surveyed belonged to them and them alone.

  We saw giraffes and herds of zebra, also; and at one point we had to stop while the driver got out and flapped his arms at two elephants, which were sitting in the road. On being approached, the beasts heaved themselves to their feet and lurched away, flapping their ears and casting looks over their shoulders as they went.

  Maralal means ‘glittering’.

  It was so called because of the corrugated-iron roofs of the buildings in its single street, when they were built, of which no one in the area had ever seen the like before; and how they sparkled and glittered in the sun.

  Crowds of children had gathered to watch the bus arrive. No sooner had we climbed down than we were surrounded by small boys in shorts, the uniform of the local mission school, wanting to know whether we had anything to give them—sweets, money or the like. Across the street, at a roadside trough, Samburu girls in traditional costume threw water at each other and ran and dodged to escape retaliation, shrieking with laughter.

  After some time the crowds began to disperse, and a young Turkana man in Western dress approached us.

  ‘I am Kibiriti,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘You are Wilfred’s guests, yes?’

  We said that we were indeed.

  ‘That is good,’ he said. ‘That is very good. We have been e
xpecting you. Wilfred has been delayed, but he has made arrangements for you. He will be here to see you soon. But for now, you come to my house.’

  Kibiriti

  In Maralal, Wilfred Thesiger had three sons, Lawi, Laputa and Kibiriti.

  They were not his sons in the biological sense, Thesiger never having married, but they were his sons in every other sense, since he had taken them up, as young orphans, and cared for them, and paid for their clothing and education. When they came to adulthood, he had set them up with homes and with cattle with which to buy wives, as was the custom of their tribes.

  Kibiriti’s house was a wattle-and-daub hut, iron-roofed, and it sat within a gated picket-fence, in the middle of a garden in which grew flowers and vegetables—the only garden of its kind in all of Maralal, he told us, proudly. He had got the idea from pictures of English houses shown to him by his adoptive father. The house was cool and surprisingly spacious inside, though simply furnished, and the walls of dried red mud were decorated all over with a pattern of white clay spots, and with framed black-and-white photographs of Thesiger.

  We sat and drank tea, hot and sweet, and talked about our lives; and then Kibiriti prepared for us a huge and hugely filling meal. It had something of a theme to it: the theme was goat.

  First came a plate of dried goat-meat nibbles, followed by a great bowl of goat with boiled rice. This was followed in turn by an even bigger platter of roasted goat meat.

  It would have been very bad form, I think, and rude and ungrateful in the extreme, to mention the fact that back then I was—and still am, I ought to say—a vegetarian. That I was the sort of vegetarian who hadn’t eaten meat or fish of any kind for many years; who would, as a matter of course, go out of his way to avoid stepping on an insect; who would never dream of wearing a leather jacket; just the sort of irritating, holier-than-thou vegetarian you would find it an absolute chore to cater for at a dinner-party. And a non-drinker, too. A bundle of fun, in fact.

  I ate what I was given, though, fighting back the instinct to gag at the surprisingly gristly toughness of it—which was not at all how I remember the meat I ate as a child; and when I had finished I smiled and rubbed my stomach, and heaped the cook with praise.

  I think I must have succeeded, to some extent, because when we finished Kibiriti smiled and winked at my companions and said, ‘He likes his meat, this one—well, we will have a treat for him tomorrow!’

  Upon the Etiquette of Massacre

  In February 1692, a party of 120 soldiers of the first and second companies of the Earl of Argyll’s Regiment of Foot, under the command of Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, marched out from Fort William on the shores of Loch Linnhe, through the bleak winter landscape. There was snow on the mountainsides and an icy wind blowing.

  They crossed the water by boat at Ballachulish and then headed along the shores of Loch Leven for some sixteen miles, until they saw thin streams of smoke spiralling upwards in the bleak winter sky from the stone-hut village of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, which lay by the shore of the River Coe, beneath the mountainous ridge of Aonach Eagach, to the north, and, to the South, the twin peaks of Buachaille Etive Mor and Buachaille Etive Beag, the great and little shepherds of Etive.

  They made their way to the house of the chief of that clan, whose name was MacIain, and there they were met by his sons, who came out to greet them.

  The eldest son spoke out.

  ‘Greetings, Robert Campbell,’ he said, holding up his hand towards them. ‘Do you come in war or in peace?’

  ‘In peace,’ said Campbell, ‘from Fort William.’

  ‘What brings you here to our village?’

  ‘Building-work,’ said Campbell, ‘and the movement of men at the Fort.’

  MacIain’s son inclined his head for Campbell to continue.

  ‘There have been new units admitted,’ he said, ‘and the old barracks are full. The new barracks are not yet ready, and we have been sent to quarter in Glencoe with your people.’

  ‘You are welcome here,’ said MacIain’s son, though there was no love lost between the men, but Campbell had requested hospitality, and it was the custom in those parts that such requests could not be refused.

  There had been much blood shed between the Campbells of Glenlyon and the MacDonalds of Glencoe over the years. Mostly it had been over questions of cattle theft and ownership of land and grazing rights. Not four years before, a party of Glencoe MacDonalds, together with their Glengarry cousins, had raided Robert Campbell’s lands and stolen his livestock, putting him into debt and necessitating, incidentally, his decision to join the army for the wage it offered; but at this time they found themselves on opposite sides of something much bigger—something that was, in all respects, a civil war over the throne of Scotland.

  With the ascendancy of William of Orange, all the Highland chiefs were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown; and it had been judged that MacIain had been unduly slow and reluctant in doing so, and his loyalty was considered suspect, if not downright false.

  With this in mind, Captain Campbell was dispatched to Glencoe with a very particular and most secret set of orders.

  The MacDonalds welcomed Campbell’s men into their homes as guests; and though Campbell himself was what he was, and who he was, and of the clan from which he came, he was also related to the MacDonald chief through marriage; and so he was given a bed in one of MacIain’s own houses.

  The soldiers were fed, housed and entertained for some two weeks, until the night of the twelfth. That night, Campbell spent the evening playing cards with his hosts, before wishing them goodnight and accepting an invitation to dine with them the following night.

  But later, in the early hours of the following morning, a single shot rang out. It was a signal for which the soldiers had been waiting, dressed and armed; and upon the sound of it they turned upon their hosts, dragging them from their beds and slaughtering them in front of their homes.

  In all, thirty-eight MacDonalds were killed by the soldiers. Another forty, mostly women and children, died of exposure in the snow after fleeing from their burning houses.

  The number of deaths would have been higher still, were it not that the idea of killing one’s host—of murder under trust—was considered deeply shameful in Highland culture. No matter how much you might happen to loathe a man, and no matter that, if you were to come across him in other circumstances, you would happily slit his throat as soon as look at him, it was just not the done thing to kill him while a guest under his roof.

  For this reason, not all of the soldiers were wholly enthusiastic about their task, nor were they wholly diligent in carrying it out.

  Some found ways of warning their hosts beforehand, saying things like ‘If I were a sheep, I think I would head up to the hills tonight’, while giving their hosts the kind of meaningful looks that either persuaded them that they had lost their marbles altogether, or else that they had some urgent message of the utmost importance to impart. Two lieutenants, Francis Farquhar and Gilbert Kennedy, went so far as to break their swords rather than carry out their orders, and for this were subsequently imprisoned for their disobedience—though they were pardoned at a later date.

  The ruins of MacIain’s house can still be seen to this day, in a wood not far from the present-day village of Glencoe, overgrown with heather and bracken.

  More than 300 years later, people in those parts still sing of the massacre in ballads:

  Some died in their beds at the hand o’ the foe

  Some fled in the night and were lost in the snow

  Some lived tae accuse him wha’ struck the first blow

  But gone was the house of MacDonald.

  And there is a story, also, of a soldier in Campbell’s regiment who was sent down to search beneath the bridge of the River Coe, where it was believed that a number of the MacDonalds might be hiding. Sure enough, he found a small group of women and children huddled down there; but rather than kill them all, he drew his sword an
d, taking hold of the arm of one among them, a young boy, he cut off one of the boy’s fingers, smearing the blood along the length of his blade, before returning to his unit to report his ‘success’.

  It is also told how many years later, as an old man, this same soldier passed through Glencoe once more on his way to conduct some business in Fort William. It was late and he was tired, and he stopped at the new inn in the rebuilt village, which is, as I say, a little way down from where the old one stood; and there he fell to drinking, and to thinking about what had gone before and what he had taken part in; and feeling burdened by the shame and guilt of it, he told his story to the innkeeper. Now, this man listened carefully, all the way through, and when at last the old soldier reached the end of his story he said nothing. Instead, he simply held up his hand, to reveal his missing finger.

  I do not know if this is true or not; but that is the story as I heard it.

  The story that Wilfred Thesiger heard of the events at the ruined Adoimara village by the Mullu River on his arrival Afdam Station was, in some ways, a remarkably similar one to the story of the MacDonalds of Glencoe; and yet, at the same time, it was very different indeed, and it revealed much about the culture of the Danakil peoples.

  There had been trouble, as ever, between the Adoimara and the Asaimara, and at this particular time there had been a dispute over pasture rights on the plain by the river, and there had been fighting and people killed. It had gone on for some time, this dispute, and the casualties were mounting; and so in an effort to calm things somewhat, the Asaimara sent a deputation of seven old men to negotiate a truce with the elders of their rivals.