In Praise of Savagery

by Warwick Cairns

  Wedding customs change. Where I come from, weddings mostly took place in the bride’s parish church, and at the culmination of the ceremony the groom would place a gold ring upon her finger. Increasingly, these days, there is a second gold ring involved, which the bride then places on the groom’s finger. People still do get married in the bride’s parish church, but a lot of people now get married elsewhere. It is becoming more common for a couple to go to another country, and to get married there in a ceremony of their choice or devising, and often in strange or unusual circumstances. They may, for example, get married in a chapel in Las Vegas by a man dressed in imitation of Elvis Presley; or on a beach, or parachuting from an aeroplane, or under the sea wearing aqualungs.

  It has also become possible, in my country, for a man to marry another man and for a woman to marry another woman; or at least, for them to go through a ceremony which is a marriage in all but name. It is not permitted, however, for a man to marry his dog, or for his dog to marry his cat or anything of that kind, athough in some other countries where same-sex weddings between humans are unheard of, marriages between humans and animals and between animals and animals are nevertheless not unknown.

  Children in parts of rural India are sometimes married off to animals, to protect them from the attentions of evil spirits. And I read recently about a case in the Sudan where a man married a goat. Marriage was not his original intention, apparently. However, one night, in a drunken state, he took advantage of the animal, perhaps having mistaken her for a sheep. He was not quiet about it; and hearing the noises of it, the enraged owner came out of his house and caught him at it, and pinned him down and tied him up, and hauled him next day before a council of tribal elders, who sat in judgment upon him and announced that he should do the decent thing by the goat, all things considered; and that he should also pay the owner a dowry of 15,000 dinars into the bargain.

  They were pronounced man and goat shortly afterwards.

  The former owner, interviewed by a newspaper some months later, said ‘As far as I know they are still together.’

  Sometimes in new kinds of marriage, remnants of ancient and long-dead customs may be found, such as in the use of decorated wooden spoons or old shoes as wedding-gifts or as adornments for the wedding-car or carriage after the ceremony. These were once given by the family of the bride to the groom, as representations of the father’s authority to discipline his daughter and its handing-over over to her new husband.

  There are customs also concerning childbirth, as for all significant milestones in life and in death, and these change also. There is, for example, now a custom in which, when a woman gives birth, her husband—or the man known as her partner if they are unmarried—stands in the hospital delivery-room dressed in a surgical gown and watches the proceedings. In many cases he will record the event with a video-camera.

  The orthodoxy of one’s own time and place, and the customs and rituals that go with it, always tend to seem much more natural and sensible than those of others. It takes, sometimes, something of a mental shift to see them otherwise.

  In 1956, an anthropologist called Horace Miner wrote and published a paper called ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema’, about the strange ways of a little-known tribe living in North America, in a territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Among these people, he said, there was a powerful belief that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease; and that consequently they must devote themselves to frequent ritual and ceremonial purifications, carried out in private and in secret in special household shrines devoted to the purpose. Such was the importance of these rituals to the Nacirema that the powerful and important individuals would often possess several such shrines, and the opulence of a house would often be referred to in terms of the number of them that it possessed. Inside, each shrine would contain a box or chest built into the wall, inside which there would be many charms and magical potions obtained from medicine men and herbalists, and without which the natives believed they could not live. Beneath the charm-box there would be a small font, and each day every member of the family, in succession, would enter the shrine room, bow his head before the charm-box, mingle different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceed with a rite of ablution.

  The joke being, of course, that ‘Nacirema’ is American spelt backwards, and what Miner was describing was the obsessive cleanliness of his own people.

  That evening we ate fish.

  I say we ate fish, but by this I mean that Frazer, Andy, the two Samburu from Maralal and I ate it. The Rendille, on the other hand, did not. Not only did they not eat it but they were horrified and revolted at the very idea of it. They would not touch it, nor even anything that it had touched, and they insisted that the pot used to cook it in and the plates used to eat it from should be kept separate from then onwards.

  Because they would not eat it, we had more than we needed for that day and so we only cooked one of the two fish, which we ate while the Rendille sat tucking into their goat and ugali and looking at us in disbelief.

  The other fish we cleaned that night and decided to keep for the next evening. We considered different ways of storing it, and in the end went for Andy’s suggestion of putting it in a plastic carrier-bag, and hanging it in the branches of a tree.

  ‘It’ll keep the insects off,’ he said.

  The Sultan’s Vizier

  Thesiger’s expedition pressed on for five days after the meeting with the askaris, passing through increasingly rocky and desolate country, between two chains of hills, along the sides of which many strong fortifications had been built. On the fifth day they left the hills behind them and crossed a vast open plain, on the far side of which was a ridge of black rock, beyond which there was grazing for the camels, where they made their camp, although it was yet only mid-afternoon.

  They had not been there for long when they saw a party of warriors, some thirty strong, advancing towards them from a distance. The warriors were all clad in spotless white loincloths and shammas, or togas, and all carrying rifles, and at their head rode a white-clad elder on a mule, while boys followed behind, driving a number of animals.

  This was clearly an important party, and Thesiger quickly chivvied his soldiers to smarten up and look alert. They, also, sensing the importance of the imminent arrivals, put on a good show of it, so that in a matter of moments they had formed a guard of honour, ready to receive whoever might arrive.

  They visitors halted at the edge of the camp, and two men stepped forward and helped the elder down from his mule. The warriors’ front teeth, Thesiger noticed, were all filed down into points.

  The elder, it transpired, was the Sultan’s vizier, Kenyazmatch Yaio, the second-most important man in Aussa.

  Thesiger greeted him with tea, and the vizier responded by signalling to the boys, who led out three magnificent bulls and six sheep.

  ‘A gift from my master, the Sultan,’ he said.

  Thesiger and Ali inspected the beasts and commented on how fine they were, and thanked the vizier profusely; and he, having taken his tea and accepted their gratitude, informed them that the Sultan would shortly make his will known, and then departed with his retinue to a nearby village to spend the night.

  That night, for some reason, the camp was surrounded by large numbers of hyenas, which howled and cackled without cease.

  Some among the party considered it to be an omen.

  A Magnificent Bearded Loon

  That there should be sultans in the world; that there should be viziers and silver batons of command; that there should be Hangadaalas and men destined from birth to be the hereditary bearers of the various specified legs of Hangadaalas’ chairs: these things say something about human nature, I think. And also that there should be people in the world who think it all so much stuff and nonsense and wish it all swept away.

  You’re either on one side or t’other here, I find, and the s
ide you’re on says much about the sort of person that you are, in all sorts of ways.

  In the country where I come from there was a big to-do, a while back, about the House of Lords.

  The government of the day was one that liked to think of itself as a rather modern, progressive sort of government, composed of the sorts of people who, if they’d ever had a silver baton of command, wouldn’t have, because they’d have done away with it. They’d have melted it down, or else sold it off and used the money for some worthy project or other, with the aim of reducing social exclusion, in a very real sense, among the socially excluded, or some such stuff.

  At this time, Britain was alone in the industrialised world in having one of its two Houses of Parliament composed largely of hereditary noblemen and noblewomen.

  This wasn’t thought to be a very modern or progressive thing at all.

  Consequently, it was decided to turf as many of them out as was possible. Originally it was going to be the whole lot, but to smooth the process of the bill through Parliament it was proposed, in the end, that 700 of them should go, while the remaining ninety-two would be allowed to stay on for the time being.

  This was agreed by the House of Commons.

  But for the bill to become law, it also had to be agreed by the Lords themselves; many of whom, as you can imagine, were rather less than thrilled at the prospect.

  Nevertheless, by a combination of political pressure and an alliance of appointed, or ‘life’, peers, the government managed to get the bill into a position where it was sure to be passed.

  This was in 1999; and at the time of the vote, which took place in the October of that year, the chamber of the Lords was packed, both by the peers themselves and also by their eldest sons, who, as tradition dictated, were allowed to sit at the edge of the chamber on the steps to the throne, though not, under any circumstances, to take part in the debate. Passions, however, were running high.

  So it happened that in the middle of the debate, and before the vote, one of these eldest sons stepped forward.

  He was a striking figure, a magnificent bearded loon by the name of Charles Francis Topham de Vere Beauclerk, Earl of Burford and heir apparent to the Duke of St Albans, the Hereditary Grand Falconer of all England. Hitherto, Burford had been known only as the vigorous sponsor of the somewhat unconventional theory that the works of William Shakespeare were not, in fact, written by William Shakespeare, but by his own ancestor, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Yo u might have thought that the name ‘William Shakespeare’ printed on the title-pages of the plays and poems might have given a sharp-eyed literary scholar a bit of a clue to the author’s identity, but that’s all by the bye here, for this Earl of Burford rushed out onto the floor of the chamber, forcing the Lords’ Deputy Speaker, Lord Boston of Faversham, to jump out of his way, and he climbed up onto the Woolsack, which is a large red cushion on the floor of the house that symbolises the source of England’s wealth in the Middle Ages.

  ‘My lords!’ he shouted, waving his order-paper. ‘This bill, drafted in Brussels, is treason!’

  The Serjeant at Arms, General Sir Edward Jones, also known as Black Rod, moved to pull Burford down, but he resisted and continued to yell.

  ‘What we are witnessing,’ he shouted, ‘is the abolition of Britain! Before us lies the wasteland, no Queen, no culture, no sovereignty, no freedom. Stand up for your Queen and country—vote this treason down.’

  It was, it must be said, faintly ridiculous.

  Some might say that it was more than faintly so: that it was wholly and utterly ridiculous. The newspapers certainly seemed to think it so.

  And yet it was, at the exact same time, desperately sad.

  Or maybe it’s just me.

  A Fish Supper

  We spent the whole of the next day in Loyangalani while the camels were thoroughly fed and watered.

  We swam again, and explored the small grove of palm-trees by the town. It had a distinctive smell, this grove. This was because there was, in the midst of the trees, a clearing, and in this clearing the ground was dotted with the results of people using the place as a public lavatory.

  We found a milestone on the edge of the dirt track leading off down the lakeside; it said ‘South Horr 77km’, which is about fifty miles, by which we calculated that we could reach the place, the oasis which was our final destination, in maybe two days, if we made good speed, and if the going was on packed dirt roads all the way.

  In the evening we took down from the tree the bag in which we had hung our remaining fish. Part of the reason we had hung it there was to keep the insects off, but we had reckoned without the ingenuity of ants: a colony of them had found it out somehow, and a big army of them had spent the best part of the day making their way up the trunk, along the branch and down into the bag. By the time we discovered this, the fish was swarming with them. More than this, it had been affected by the heat, and had swollen up to the extent that its eyes had popped out.

  We were, however, hungry.

  I was still losing weight, and my ribs were beginning to stick out.

  So what we did was to boil it for a bit longer than the previous day’s fish.

  It tasted vile, I remember, like eating a bar of soap.

  We ate it anyway.

  Andy had seconds.

  The Still Point of the Turning World

  There is, in this life, only one destination. We all get there, sooner or later.

  I am stepping out of time here, for a moment, and jumping ahead of myself; but there came a time, some days later, when we were in a car, with Kibiriti driving, and Thesiger in the passenger seat, and we were going fast, far too fast, and Thesiger said, ‘Kibiriti, what are you going to do with the time you’ve saved, when you get there?’

  And when you get there, in the end, then there is nothing more to be done, and you either don’t have what you want, or else, if you have, then it goes away again.

  It is not, I think, in the destination where life is, but rather it is in the journey itself.

  To step back, once more, into the flow of the narrative, and into fate of the small party of men and beasts making their way along the course of the Awash, all that time ago, then to this journey there was a destination, to be sure, and as they made camp at a place known as Gerumudli, on the edge of the forest that lay by a bend in the river in the shadow of the Magenta Mountains, they knew that their destination lay somewhere beyond, somewhere in the untracked deserts on the other side, past the furthest borders of the land of Aussa. But that night all of life, and all of time, were soon to become manifest then and there in the hush of a forest clearing lit by the moon’s pale shine.

  A messenger came first into the camp late in the afternoon, alone and on foot, saying that the Sultan himself was on his way, and that they should prepare themselves to greet him. This they did, and the camp was laid out as they would wish it to be seen, and boots and buckles polished, and the ground swept, and the soldiers lined up to greet their honoured guest.

  Just before sunset the messenger came again.

  Unfortunately, he said, there had been a change of plan.

  The Sultan, regrettably, had with him far too many men to fit comfortably into the travellers’ camp, and instead he had asked that they should come out to meet him where he was, which was in the forest close by.

  So it was that they set off, dressed in their best clothes and carrying their rifles, and with the soldiers leading the way, into the dense forest, along narrow paths overgrown with creepers and through clearings covered ankle-deep with a bean-like clover that gave off a strange heavy smell when they walked upon it, while on all sides, through the foliage, they could see the watching eyes of warriors beyond number and the glint of spears and rifle-barrels, and they could hear the constant footsteps of runners arriving and departing.

  Deeper and deeper they went, and still the woods around them were alive with watchers, until they came at last to a wide open clearing, encircled on all sides by tal
l trees. Before them, at the far side, stood some 400 warriors arranged into two great lines, all dressed in white and with filed teeth, and all carrying rifles and full belts of cartridges, and with long curved knives strapped across their stomachs.

  And in the centre of these two lines, in a heavy carved wooden throne, sat the Sultan, surprisingly small in physical stature but grave and bearded in countenance, fine-boned and oval-faced, and dressed in finely woven robes of pure white, and wearing an ancient silver-hilted dagger. His hand rested on the handle of a silver-topped black stick, and behind his throne stood a band of slaves, all carrying rifles in red silk covers.

  The Sultan rose, and with a wave of his hand he dismissed all his men except for an interpreter. Thesiger did the same, stepping forward across the clearing towards the throne and taking only Omar with him.

  The moon had risen in the sky by this time, climbing high above the treetops and illuminating the scene below with the cold light reflected through space from its empty mountains and valleys.

  This was it, and all in all.

  ‘As I looked around the clearing,’ wrote Thesiger,

  At the ranks of squatting warriors and the small isolated group of my own men, I knew that this moonlight meeting in unknown Africa with a savage potentate who hated Europeans was the realisation of my boyhood dreams. I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying.

  ‘You may begin,’ said the Sultan, ‘by telling me of your travels so far.’