In Praise of Savagery

by Warwick Cairns

  ‘They may be a murderously inclined race,’ he wrote, ‘but no one would call them inhospitable.’

  Shortly afterwards, on the edge of the wide and barren desert across which they must go to reach the further lake, Yaio announced that he needed, at last, to return to his home, and he handed the silver baton over to the senior of his headmen, and wished them all well.

  Thesiger presented him with a rifle and assured him once again that he would never do anything to harm the Sultan or his people.

  To which Yaio replied that he had realised this, as had the Sultan.

  That was why they had agreed to help, and it was why the expedition was where it was, and why Thesiger and his men were still alive, rather than laying hacked to pieces somewhere as might so easily have been the case under other circumstances.

  It was why, conversely, the previous expeditions had ended up as they had, having been acting as agents, largely, of outside powers, and having been concerned with military objectives, or with the mapping of borders not necessarily to Aussa’s advantage.

  With this he took his leave, and turned about and set off back to the land of forest and swamp beyond the mountains that was Aussa.

  For those who stayed, all that remained now was to reach the final lake.

  Or rather, all that remained now was to reach the final lake, and then to push on for however long it took and to make their way across however many miles of desert lay between them and the coast at Djibouti; and to trust that their water and their supplies held out for the duration—or else that they should be able to obtain more along the way. This was by no means certain.

  The Oasis

  The land became steadily greener as we walked.

  We came to a shallow river, trees on either bank, which we crossed at a ford. A small monkey, basking lazily by the water’s edge, scampered up into the branches of a tree at our approach.

  On the other side of the river the path led towards a stand of wide-spaced trees, and from these a huge herd of camels emerged, being driven by a group of Rendille.

  Big eyes, the young camels had, and a skittish manner about them as they came on their way. We stopped, our party and the Rendille party, and our own Rendille exchanged news with them. Relatives of Apa, no doubt: all the other Rendille we had met seemed to be, so I do not see why these should have been any exception. And we bought from them milk, camel’s milk, and drank it from the big gourd they held out to us for that purpose. It tasted very rich and full—though how much of that was due to the poverty of our diet in the days before I do not know—and also it had a taste of smoke to it, wood-smoke. This, I think, may have been from the gourd from which we drank it.

  When we had finished we bade the camel-herders goodbye and walked the short distance to the oasis-settlement of South Horr.

  Though all the land around is desert, South Horr is almost alpine—a green place, surrounded by green mountains, and the sound of cow-bells in the air all about.

  We went to the garden of an eating-house, which was also a slaughterhouse and a butcher’s shop, and there we ate a lunch of meat with boiled potatoes and flour chapattis at a table by the edge of a stream that flowed down from one of the mountains, from which we filled and refilled our cups with water, which tasted very good and very sweet.

  There were trees overhanging, and big yellow flowers upon them, and birds with plumed heads and long tails that sat and ate the flowers.

  The village in the oasis sat on the border between the lands of the Rendille and those of the Samburu and the people there, consequently, were of both tribes, with a few Somalis thrown in for good measure.

  Osman, who was Samburu, pointed to one of the mountains above the village, the one from which the clear stream flowed, and said that high on its slopes there lay a cave, called KosiKosi, which was home to a great spirit and which was sacred to his people. They believe, he said, that wherever in the country they may happen to be, KosiKosi sits always at the centre of their world.

  And, he said, beyond the mountain of the sacred cave there lay a desert valley where the Turkana believe that many devils live.

  We found a place on the edge of the village and made our camp, where we would wait for Kibiriti to arrive, and to take us then to the home of Wilfred Thesiger.

  Fulfilment’s Desolate Attic

  They came upon the lake much sooner than they expected.

  It was an evil-smelling place.

  A vast sheet of thick, soapy green water, the lake was; many miles wide, dotted with sheets of red algae, and surrounded all about by flats of unstable black mud, through which jutted white salt reefs and the salt-encrusted remains of dead trees. Great clouds of small, hard-bodied midges swarmed all around.

  It took several days for the party to circumnavigate the lake, such was its size, and such the difficulty of the ground all around; but circumnavigate it they did, though they were plagued constantly by the midges. On one day they were assaulted by a violent sandstorm. On another they passed the spot where, the Danakil guides said, the Swiss mercenary Munzinger and his party had been massacred nearly sixty years before.

  There was no outlet to the waters of the lake.

  There was, instead, only a constant pouring-in of river-water and a constant evaporation into the hot air; a gradual accretion, year by year, of the salts and sediments borne down by the Awash on its journey from the highlands of Abyssinia.

  This place, and no other, was the river’s final destination.

  And that was it.

  ‘I had come far,’ wrote Thesiger, ‘and risked much to see this desolate scene.’

  There was nothing more to be done in that place.

  The next day they set off for the French post at Aseila on the Gobald plain, where they could expect to find food and drink and grazing for the camels, which, after four days by that lifeless lake and the journey across the hot desert to reach it, had now become worryingly weak.

  But it was not far, the guides said, no more than three hours away, at the most.

  Consequently they travelled light, carrying little water with them to make the going easier and faster for the animals.

  But they were wrong about the distance and wrong about the time it would take them to cover it.

  It took not three hours but three days, and before long the camels were in a very bad way indeed. To make it easier on them they took to resting up by day and travelling in the cool of the night, but by the second day things had reached the point where two of the animals had collapsed and lay slowly dying in the sand. In the end they had to be shot.

  This was painful for all of the party, and not least because all of their lives depended upon the creatures. For the handlers, meanwhile, who knew each of their animals individually by name and character and lineage, it was little short of a tragedy.

  On the third day they reached the French post, which was strongly fortified to fight off attacks from Adoimara, Asaimara and Issa, all of whom claimed the territory. There they were welcomed by a Corsican called Antoniali and his garrison of sixty Somalis. At this place, after eating, drinking and resting the night, Ali, Ahmado and the Sultan’s men all said their goodbyes, and, suitably rewarded, they set off back to Aussa.

  The remainder of the expedition stayed at the post for three days and three nights before setting off into the desert again, heading for the next French fort, at Dikil, which was even more strongly fortified, with glass-topped walls twenty feet high and two machine-gun towers, and which was commanded by the Commandant de Cercle, Captain Bernard, who lived there with his wife and child. Here the Abyssinian soldiers were paid off with a large gift of money and it was arranged for them to be sent by lorry to Alisabiet, from whence they would return by train to Abyssinia.

  Captain Bernard fed and housed the remaining members of the expedition for three days, and than arranged for his adjutant, Dongradi, and an escort of twelve soldiers, together with their own camels and a machine gun, to escort them over the desert on the last leg of th
eir journey.

  He was a kind man, Captain Bernard, though in the end he suffered for his kindness. Some eight months later he heard that a party of Issa were being threatened by a far larger band of Asaimara, 1,200 strong. He went out to help, but the Asaimara, having killed the Issa, then turned on him. He and his entire garrison—including his wife and child—were killed and their bodies horribly mutilated.

  The expedition and its escort of French Somali troops set off across the desert, aiming to make regular stops for water and grazing along the way. The weather, however, had been cruel there and in all of the places they expected to find water there was none; neither was there grazing of any kind. For five days and nights this continued, and again, and one by one, more camels began to falter and die.

  On the fifth day they came to a great salt-pan many miles across in a depression 500 feet below sea-level; and there, in the middle of it all, and in the midst of the fiercest heat any of them had known, was a wide blue lake. But when they approached the lake something about it did not seem quite right, for around it there were no signs of life of any kind: not a bird, not a lizard, not even a fly or any insect.

  The water was all salt and wholly undrinkable.

  At this point they began to unpack the camels, and to discard anything and everything in their equipment that they could do without.

  They walked on again, and as they walked, and as their situation worsened, they stopped and discarded more.

  Yet more camels died.

  Eventually they reached a water-hole; but by this time only four of the original nineteen camels with which they had left Awash Station were left

  ‘It was heartbreaking,’ wrote Thesiger, ‘for I knew them all so well; among others little Farur, Elmi, Hansiya and great-hearted Nagadras, who always led the caravan.’

  On the next day they saw, in the distance, the desert’s edge; and beyond it, far off, the blue of the sea.

  A day later they reached the coast, at Tajura.

  It was now six full months since the expedition began.

  Then things happened quickly. There was a meeting with the Sultan of Tajura, and feasting and dancing, and a tour of the Sultan’s palace with a viewing of the modern refrigerator newly installed in its kitchens.

  There was a crossing by dhow to Djibouti, and a rather less enthusiastic welcome from the French Commandant, Chapon Baisac, a ‘corpulent, pompous and short-tempered little man’ who demanded to know on whose authority, precisely, the Englishman had had the effrontery to bring armed Abyssinian soldiers into French territory.

  And then there was the purchase a single one-way ticket for a third-class cabin on a Messageries Maritimes boat bound for Marseilles.

  Omar walked with Thesiger to the docks and accompanied him on board, where they shook hands and said goodbye; and the headman then made his way back down the gangplank, past the passengers still embarking with their suitcases and their sunhats, and disappeared into the crowds milling on the quay. They never saw each other again.

  From Marseilles Thesiger took the sleeper-train to Paris, and from there a further train to Calais, and then a ferry to Dover.

  And a chapter of his life closed behind him, never to open again.

  Back to Maralal

  What else do I remember of the oasis-settlement of South Horr?

  A boy with fever brought before us, and him shivering so much that we could hear the chattering of his teeth, and us giving the man who brought him to us our remaining packets of malaria tablets.

  And the food, again, and being overcharged horribly for it.

  And saying goodbye to our Rendille camel-men, who left to return to their homes and their people.

  And Kibiriti coming late in the morning, having spent the night before in Baragoi, and driving us back to Maralal.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘Wilfred will be here. But before that, we will have much goat!’

  ‘Actually,’ said Andy, ‘if it’s all the same with you, we’ll give the goat a miss. Just for today.’

  Civilisation

  The seed of a mesquite tree took root, once, in the desert by the shores of Lake Turkana. Sensing water deep beneath the sand and rocks, it sent down its long tap-root low into the ground to where, a hundred feet or more below, this water was to be found. Slowly, slowly, over the years, the tree began to grow; not tall, for this was not a place for tall trees, but it sent up its branches towards the sky and it spread down its roots all around. And as it grew, and as its roots forced their way further into the earth, so they turned over and turned up some of the things that lay beneath. And presently there appeared, at the base of the tree’s trunk, some small splinters of bone, too old and too dry for the scavengers to pay any attention to; and so they lay there, for day after day, for month after month and for year after year, until, one day, a man found them and picked them up. They were odd, these bones, and hard and stone-like, and not at all like the bones of any animal that he had seen.

  And it happened that these bones, eventually, found their way into the hands of an anthropologist.

  Four years later, after an extraordinarily protracted and painstaking excavation, this anthroplogist and his companions managed to recover and to reconstruct, from the ground beneath the mesquite tree, the skeleton of an 11- or 12-year-old boy, almost entire. He was five foot three, this boy, when he died, and was likely to have reached six feet or thereabouts had he lived, or so they calculated. And he had died one and a half million years before.

  A decade later, in the Samburu Hills just outside Maralal, twenty fossil fragments were discovered—mainly scraps and shards of teeth and jawbones, they were, but they were older by far than the Lake Turkana boy, and were the remains, perhaps, of mankind’s oldest and most distant ancestors.

  And over the years we scattered and spread far and wide over the face of the earth.

  Ten thousand years ago, when the ice-sheets retreated, we left our caves made a life for ourselves as hunters and foragers in the plains and the forests. And that suited us just fine: it suited us fine for a long while. But little by little, over time, things began to change.

  In the open lands, in Africa, the hunters of wild sheep and goats gradually became herders and pastoralists, as the Samburu and Rendille are today, and went from following their quarry’s migrations between their seasonal pastures to leading them there and protecting them from other predators with their spears and bows, and increasing the size of their flocks.

  Further north, a wave of settlers from the Near East crossed the sea and landed on the Greek coast. These people were not hunters and gatherers; nor were they pastoralists and herders. They were the first farmers, and they brought with them tools and techniques for clearing and transforming the land, and for the sowing and reaping of crops.

  They lived a hard life, these farmers, and one of constant, grinding labour, in which they would work for months on end with little immediate reward; and their manner of living was unenvied by the indigenous hunters, and mostly ignored, for nigh on a thousand years.

  Little by little, however, the farmers’ settlements began to spread northwards and westwards across Europe’s plains and the river-valleys, and so successful were they that their methods, in time, came to be imitated by my ancestors and by Wilfred Thesiger’s, and perhaps by yours; and they all, in time, came to spend their days tilling the land with stone hoes.

  In return for giving up a life of comparative leisure for one of hard manual work, the settled farmers were both rewarded and penalised.

  They were rewarded, on the one hand, by conditions that led, in time, to civilisation, to the world’s great empires, and, ultimately, to the Industrial Revolution and to the world we live in today.

  And on the other hand, and more immediately and tangibly, they were penalised with a decline in both the quality and quantity of their lives over those of their hunting ancestors by every observable measure.

  For the average person, the shift to settled farming brought with it a lo
wer material income, a dramatic loss of leisure-time and a marked reduction in physical health, compared with their hunter-gatherer and pastoralist cousins, as measured both through stature and through life-expectancy. And this was not just for a transitional period of a few years or a few hundred or even a few thousand, but for more or less the whole of recorded history, right up until the dawn of the nineteenth century.

  In 1800, the daily wage of an English farm-labourer would buy eleven pounds of wheat. He probably would have had other things to spend it on, mind; but if it was wheat that he wanted, then that was how much of it he would have got. But in ancient Babylon, in 1800 BCE, the daily wage of a farm-labourer would have bought fifteen pounds of wheat. And in classical Athens it would have bought twice as much. The English farm-labourer would have eaten other things besides wheat, though. With the wages from his ten-hours-a-day, 300-days-a-year job, he would have been able to afford, in a typical day, some hunks of bread and a little cheese to go with it, with perhaps some bacon-fat as well, and he would have washed it all down with some cups of weak tea, and also some beer. All of this, put together, would have given him about 1,500 calories-worth of nourishment. Whereas the daily food intake of the average hunter-gatherer, working just three hours a day, both then and now, and in all the tens of thousands of years before the first farmers arrived in Europe, was and is around 2,300 calories, and it is far more varied and far richer in protein besides.

  So by farming the land instead of foraging and hunting in it or leading their herds across it to their seasonal pastures, people became poorer in terms of what they could afford to feed themselves, and this despite them working so much harder and so much longer.

  And besides this, the new manner of living changed both the culture and the composition of the people. Because the qualities and attitudes that make you good and successful at lounging about for days painting yourself with war-paint, and then seeing off a leopard that’s prowling around your camp or grabbing your spear and launching yourself off after a wild pig at half a second’s notice, and then feasting until you’re too fat to move, are not at all the same as the qualities and attitudes that make you good and successful at ploughing a field with a stick and scattering the good seed on the land, and then feeding and watering and weeding it day after day, and keeping the birds off, and weeding some more, all in anticipation of a harvest that could be half a year away or more—if the weather holds and if the rains don’t fail. In that sort of life, the farming life, you tend to get a higher proportion of serious, duty-driven individuals with a strong work-ethic, who go in for deferred gratification and who are well suited to performing simple, repetitive tasks for hours, days, weeks and months on end.