In Praise of Savagery

by Warwick Cairns

  The two young men, meanwhile, were off at full pelt, and for perhaps a quarter of a mile I could not gain on them, nor they on me, until all of a sudden, and simultaneously, we all seemed to hit a physical ‘wall’ and all slowed, coughing and panting, to a walking pace.

  But I gathered my breath, and put everything into one last sprint, catching up with them just as I was almost completely done for. One was smaller than me; the other bigger, and so I grabbed the smaller one around the neck and choked him, while telling the other one to use his mobile phone to call the third back, and the bike with him.

  He did not do so.

  There were, besides, two of them and only one of me; but because we had all exhausted ourselves in the running there followed something of a stand-off, in which none of us did anything for perhaps five or ten minutes.

  And then, all of a sudden, the bigger one came at me. I let the other one go—he ran off instantly—and the two of us grappled. I tried to grab him around the neck: he bit my hand, and so I grabbed his shirt with my other hand and then began punching him in the face as hard as I could.

  At this point some passers-by came and pulled us apart.

  ‘Break it up, you two,’ they said.

  ‘But he’s stolen my bike,’ I said, as my fingers were prised away from his shirt.

  ‘What bike?’ they said

  Exactly.

  Upon which the young man took to his heels and disappeared, and I never saw him or the bike again.

  But here’s a thing: there was, I found, an exhilaration in punching the young man, an intense pleasure in it, in the feeling of contact and recoil, in the repeated smack of my knuckles against his face, and in the joyful and sincere hope that I had broken his nose or at least loosened a couple of teeth.

  I feel it a compensation for my loss even now.

  I feel this far more so than if he had been caught by the police and cautioned or fined, or sentenced to a few hours’ community service, or else sent on some sort of course to ‘rehabilitate’ him.

  And I know that if I were ever to see him again, even now, all these years later, I would do everything within my power to put him in hospital.

  This is how I feel, and I would be a liar to pretend otherwise.

  A while back I was reading a book called Quartered Safe out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman books. The book is a memoir of his military service in the East, during the Second World War; and there comes a point, about halfway through, where he describes how he felt when, in fierce close combat around an enemy bunker, he shot and killed a man, shortly after one of his own comrades was himself shot down:

  I turned to see a Jap racing across in front of the bunker, a sword flourished above his head. He was going like Jesse Owens, screaming his head off, right across my front; I just had sense enough to take a split second, traversing my aim with him before I fired; he gave a convulsive leap, and I felt a jolt of delight—I’d hit the bastard!

  ‘A jolt of delight’: the phrase stops you dead in your tracks.

  He returns to the same incident again, a few pages on:

  Putting a grenade into a bunker had the satisfaction of doing grievous bodily harm to an enemy for whom I felt real hatred, and still do … but seeing Gale go down sparked something which I felt in the instant when I hung on my aim at the Jap with the sword, because I wanted to be sure. The joy of hitting him was the strongest emotion I felt that day.

  * * *

  There was once an extraordinarily prolific mass murderer, in England, by the name of Harold Shipman. This Shipman was a doctor, and it was his habit, and his pleasure, to kill off the elderly and vulnerable among his patients, for their inheritances and also for other reasons best known to himself. Over the years he managed to finish off well over 200 people. Eventually, he was caught; and when he was caught, this Doctor Shipman, he showed not the slightest concern or remorse. Instead, he showed peevish irritation at those who had caught him, and annoyance that they had the audacity to ask him to explain himself; and, frankly, he was having none of it. Eventually, when it became apparent to him that he was going to have to spend the rest of his life in prison, and that he would be expected to conform to all of the accompanying rules and regulations, he ripped up his bedsheets, tied one end to the bars of his cell window and hung himself, dead.

  And bloody good riddance to him, you might say; and a shame he didn’t do it sooner; and more of a shame still that the law didn’t do it for him, at a time and in a place set down by the court, whether he liked it or not.

  And so you—or at least I—might expect anyone of sound mind to say.

  So it was that the then-Home Secretary, a man by the name of David Blunkett, when asked for his response to the news of Shipman’s death, told journalists: ‘You wake up and you receive a phone call telling you that Shipman has topped himself … Then you have to think for a minute … is it too early to open a bottle?’

  A perfectly natural and uncontroversial point of view, you might think: but not a bit of it, apparently. Instead, Blunkett found himself at the centre of an absolute storm of condemnation, with pretty much the whole of the political and media establishment lining up to give him a good kicking for his ‘shameful irresponsibility’, for owning up to feeling anything other than concern at the death of a mass-murderer, and demanding that he resign forthwith.

  When it comes to retribution, some of us are Hamlet, endlessly agonising and debating over it, while some are more Laertes, driven viscerally towards it.

  I know which side I fall down on.

  ‘But let him come,’ says Laertes, ‘It warms the very sickness in my heart/ That I shall live and tell him to his teeth/ “Thus didest thou.”’

  I know how you feel: I understand.

  It’s the way I am. But it may not be the way you are.

  People are different, I think: innately so and perhaps unalterably so.

  I have read of research that says that identical twins are extraordinarily alike in just about any way you can measure, and that this is so whether they are raised together or apart, even when each is unaware of the other’s existence. And it says that unrelated children raised together as brothers and sisters turn out no more similar in personality tests than they would if they had never even met—no matter what kind of upbringing they had. Or so they say.

  They also say that you can tell a lot about a man’s character and intelligence by the kinds of music he listens to. According to a study at the California Institute of Technology, devotees of Beethoven and, surprisingly, Heavy Metal are right up there at the brainbox end of the spectrum, while the fans of R&B, chart dance music and someone called Lil Wayne, apparently, are way down at the other. Thesiger didn’t go in for music, much, as a rule, although he did tend to become rather cross at the idea of Michael Jackson. Me, on the other hand, I find myself greatly comforted by the moral wisdom of Country & Western ballads, and increasingly so as I become older. Songs like ‘Coward of the County’, for example, by Kenny Rogers, which teaches us that while, on the whole, it is a very bad thing to go around committing acts of violence for no particular reason, or for reasons base and dishonourable, and while it is a way of life that may see you ending your days in prison, leaving the care of your ten-year-old son, should you have one, to your brother, with the injunction that this child should never, at any cost, even think of doing the things you have done; yet nevertheless there are some offences so rank and gross that they cry out to heaven for vengeance, and in these instances the only right and proper course of action for the wronged party is to seek immediate physical redress, irrespective of the odds, and irrespective of the harm that may befall him in the process. ‘Sometimes,’ as the song sagely observes, ‘you got to fight to be a man.’

  But the goat, which the moran led towards us by the horns, had done me no wrong.

  Perhaps if, at some point, as I had bent to tie my shoelace, it had butted me up the backside, I might have felt differently.

 
Or perhaps if it had just bitten me a couple of times or something, or even just looked at me in an unpleasant way.

  But I doubt it, somehow.

  Apa and his cousin held the animal down.

  The moran pulled out a long double-bladed knife from his scabbard and drew it across the animal’s neck, severing its throat.

  Then they let it go, upon which it kicked and struggled to its feet for a few moments before collapsing to its knees.

  It tried to get up again, but fell again, this time landing heavily on its front knee and rolling over to one side, swinging its head back to reveal the full extent of the gaping wound.

  Once more it tried to get up, but could not do so, and instead lay kicking and writhing in the dust until, at last, the kicking gave way to a sporadic twitching and then, with one final shudder, it lay still.

  The creature was then swiftly skinned and butchered, and the liver, kidneys and stomach cooked over a fire and shared among us.

  I managed to get down my share of the liver and kidneys, which tasted somewhat better than the goat meat we had eaten thus far. But I think you must need special teeth or something for eating stomach, because try as I might I could not bite through it. It was like trying to eat pieces of car-tyre.

  So it was that I hit upon what seemed at the time to be a perfect way to dispose of this stomach without looking like a squeamish Westerner who couldn’t handle the food: I flicked it behind me when I thought no one was looking.

  It would have worked, too—were it not for the huge vultures that swooped down, landing screeching and squabbling right behind where I sat, fighting it out among themselves, at full volume, for the meat I had discarded. That, I think, might have been a bit of a giveaway.

  Once we had eaten, we loaded up the camels and headed out into the scrubland that bordered the desert proper.

  Kibiriti waved us off.

  ‘I will meet you in South Horr,’ he said.

  A Question of Responsibility

  It was, on many levels, the question of responsibility that was the sticking-point.

  Responsibility, and who had it.

  The Emperor was away, for one thing. This put the responsibility squarely upon the shoulders of the Governor, who was faced then, on the one hand, with the possibility of the violent death or otherwise of the Englishman and his Abyssinian escort, and its accompanying implications for the politics of Aussa and the balance of power within his province. And on the other hand there was Sir Sidney Barton and his incessant lawyerly insinuations regarding liability, and whether Bahdu should have been declared closed to the expedition right from the start, before arrangements were made and costs incurred.

  And in all the weeks that these deliberations were in process there lived, in captivity, in another part of Addis Ababa, a man called Miriam Muhammad. Miriam Muhammad was the Hangadaala, the spiritual leader of the Asaimara Danakil of Bahdu. He was a Muslim, this Hangadaala, but his remit went some way beyond the strictures of his holy book. He was responsible, among other things, for bringing rain to the lands of his people, using powers obtained in the ceremony of his investiture.

  In this ceremony, which had been handed down for generation after generation since way back before the memory of his people, he was woken at dawn and given a red cloth and a white cloth, in which he was dressed, and then he was smeared in ghee and lifted into a special throne. Four men then picked up the throne, each carrying his own assigned corner, which—like the role of the givers of the red cloth and the white—was hereditary. These four men then carried the Hangadaala some 200 yards from his home and set him down facing the rising sun, and then brought him back again, where his throne was placed on a bed before his house. In this position, crowds gathered round, among them representatives of all the clans of the Asaimara, and watched as earth from the top of Mount Ayelu was rubbed on his hands, clay from the bottom of the Awash River rubbed on his forehead and earth from under a big shoal tree was rubbed on his feet.

  Quantities of ghee were then poured over him and his clothes, which was the signal for the assembled crowd to gather round and jostle and tussle for the privilege of touching him.

  This being done, there were led into his presence four beasts: a red goat and a white one, and a red bull and a white one. The red bull first was lifted up over the Hangadaala’s head and its throat cut, so that the animal’s dying blood gushed out and ran down over him. Then the red goat followed. The Hangadaala’s nearest relative then cut the throats of the white bull and the white goat, and the people of his clan rubbed themselves with the blood.

  Then the men, next the women and finally the children of all the Asaimara clans crowded around to pour yet more ghee all over him.

  The ceremony being complete, a hundred sheep were killed and eaten in celebration, and much milk was drunk, while the skins of the sacrificial bulls and goats were taken away to be dried for the Hangadaala to sleep on—all apart from the skins of the legs, which were given to the bearers of the throne.

  In consequence of all this, Miriam Muhammad had the power, it was believed, and the responsibility, to bring rain to Bahdu, even on a clear and cloudless day.

  And he was also believed, in certain official quarters, to have the power and responsibility, by the fact of his captivity in the capital, to hold his tribe back from outright rebellion. Although this power did not seem to be working particularly well at that time.

  But two things happened, at last, to bring something of a change in the situation. One was that Thesiger wrote and signed a letter, drafted by Barton, absolving the Abyssinian authorities of all responsibility for the safety of his expedition and accepting all costs, consequences and eventualities upon himself.

  The second thing that happened was that a suggestion was made that Miriam Muhammad be released to accompany Thesiger into Bahdu, as a gesture of goodwill from the provincial authorities to the Asaimara—and on the understanding that the Asaimara would reciprocate by paying, once more, the tribute demanded of them.

  So it was that on 8th February 1934, Wilfred Thesiger once more set off from Awash Station, with his camels and his Somali camel-men and with a freshly picked but equally reluctant escort of fifteen Abyssinian soldiers. Four days later, accompanied by Omar the headman and Miriam Muhammad, he made his way once more through the narrow pass into the territory of Bahdu and made his camp there by the river’s edge.

  The Great Explorer

  It is to my eternal shame that I say this, but I lasted for three hours.

  I do not know how it can come to be that a young man in his twenties, in good health and carrying no baggage other than a small waterbottle, can walk for no more than three hours before feeling weak and dizzy, and before having an overpowering urge to sit down, but that is how I felt and I am not proud of it.

  Andy—now, he had the build and the look of the people of those parts: tall and lean and high cheek-boned, and with his head shaved as well. Put him in local dress and you’d be hard-pushed to tell him from a Kenyan, apart from a slightly paler skin—but that was darkening anyway, the longer he was out in the sun. You might say that he had it in his genes, that he was built for the country, and perhaps some of his ancestors came from that part of the world, or somewhere similar. But that does not explain my brother, who looks pretty much as I do, in size and build and complexion; and after walking for three hours he seemed exactly as you would expect for someone who had walked that far: he’d worked up something of an appetite, as I recall.

  Me, I felt faint, and strange, and off-balance, and not altogether there.

  My brother offered me a mouthful of water, which I took, thirstily, and then promptly vomited back up.

  For the next half an hour I lay on the ground beneath a small thorn bush, moving my head only to take occasional tiny sips of water—I could not hold more than a mouthful down; and then, after a while, some hot, sweet tea, which the others made for me.

  I walked on afterwards, but very feebly, a step at a time and leaning upon
a walking-stick as I went, stopping every hour to rest for some ten minutes. For people used to walking steadily all day, as Osman and our Rendille were, and with a commission to lead us for the next 200-odd miles over land that was to become hotter and drier still, this must have seemed a poor start indeed; but I could do no other, and so the day went on, slowly, slowly, until the sun went down over the horizon, when all of a sudden I felt a great hunger and a tremendous burst of the most manic energy.

  The change that came over me then, with the setting of the sun, was such that I swear I almost checked my neck for puncture-marks and my canine teeth for signs of unusual elongation.

  That night we ate a stew of dried goat and ugali, which is boiled maize-flour, together with some potatoes and vegetables. We shared these things with an old Rendille woman and her daughter who had appeared at our camp, dressed all in skins. Later, Apa cut a walking-stick from a thorn bush for Andy, who lacked one, and straightened and hardened it over the fire. They seemed to have a name for Andy, the Rendille; or some words they seemed to use when they were talking about him. I asked Osman what they called him, and he just smiled.

  ‘It is nothing,’ he said, ‘it is just some words in their language.’

  ‘But meaning what?’

  Osman thought about it for a moment.

  ‘They call him the black white man,’ he said.

  I went to Mumbai, once, on business, with two British-born Indians, a man and a woman. The man was a regular visitor and he came from a wealthy family with property there, and servants and a driver. The woman had never been before. She was brought up speaking only English, and she spoke it with a broad West Yorkshire accent. Bradford, or thereabouts. She had been educated at an English university, up North, and had become something in marketing, and had moved down to London. She had two brothers and a sister, two doctors and a corporate lawyer, and her parents, second-generation immigrants born of Indian villagers who came to England in the last days of the Empire, had kept a corner-shop and had worked all hours to give their children the best start in life. She had cousins still in India, she said, but could hardly remember the last time she met them. She had been a small child when they had visited, and had been unable to speak their language or they to speak hers.