In Praise of Savagery

by Warwick Cairns

  Or, to be technical about this for a moment, you get a lot of the sort of people who inherit genes for what neuroscientists call a ‘strong response inhibition mechanism in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex’, which is something that makes them better at being conscientious, organised, disciplined and self-controlled, and not so good at being spontaneous or acting on impulse. The sort of people, in fact, who at another time might be content to spend their whole lives sorting cheques into account-number order, or else training all hours to be good at a sport that they don’t actually enjoy, because it’s wrong to quit things.

  But apart from turning out the puritans and pedants of the future, one thing that settled farming did do very well indeed was to vastly increase the number of people that the land could support, and wherever farming took hold the population exploded. This meant that eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, the new people swallowed up the old and the new way of living replaced the old way altogether.

  And from there it was not such a big step to the cotton mills.

  That’s progress for you, though. And that’s civilisation.

  The Years In Between

  ‘I had no desire to go back to civilisation,’ he had said, ‘and wished I was just starting out from the Awash Station with the whole Awash River still before me to explore.’

  There are some that see life as a matter of departures—a process of moving on and leaving behind, of exploration and discovery.

  And there are others that see it all as one long, circuitous return-trip, the aim of which, always, is to get back home; and in so doing to regain what was lost and what left behind, and so to arrive, once more, at the place where you know that you belong, among the people whom you recognise, at last, as your own people, and there to become what you really are and always were.

  And I cannot for the life of me say which of the two it was that had the upper hand in the life of the man.

  There were departures, to be sure, and more departures than most.

  He was not long back in England. A while in The Milebrook, his mother’s home on the Welsh borders, and the village with its post office and its pub and its church and church hall, and the river that ran shallow on its stony bed through the green valley beside; and then it was down to London, by steam-train, and the lectures at the Royal Geographical Society, and the unfinished language-course at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

  Then he went to the Sudan, first as a colonial administrator, an Assistant District Commissioner in Darfur, and then as a junior officer, or Bimbashi, in the Defence Force.

  War followed and he left the Sudan to fight against the Italians in Abyssinia; then to Syria, to fight with the Druze Legion against the Vichy French; and from there to the Western Desert with the newly formed SAS, to fight the Germans, and rising there to the rank of major.

  In the years that followed the war, others returned to their homes, picked up the pieces of interrupted careers and marriages, re-entered, as best they could, the half-gone childhoods of children who had more than half-forgotten what they had ever looked like.

  But for him there were more departures still.

  To Arabia, there to live and travel with the Bedouin.

  To Iraq, there to spend some seven years, on and off, in the reed longhouses of the Marsh Arabs.

  And the books he wrote about those years and the photographs he took, and the acclaim that followed.

  And after, to Kurdistan, to Afghanistan, to the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, to Morocco. To more fighting, still, on the side of the Royalists and against the communists in the Yemeni civil war.

  Then four expeditions, through the borderlands of Uganda, the Sudan and Kenya. During which he made a crossing of the deserts of the Northern Frontier District, climbing Mount Kulal and exploring the shores of Lake Turkana.

  In all these places he saw, and recorded in his writings, the last days of ancient worlds and ways of life that were themselves in the process of departing from the world; and which, today, are mostly all gone. Long gone.

  These were, indeed, departures.

  And yet, running through them all like the waters of a river moving ever onwards through the changing landscape of his life there was also a constant longing for what had once been; a yearning to return to the life of ancient and savage nobility that he had once seen, in earlier days, in the sun-scorched land of his birth, and also, at another time, in pale moonlight glinting on spear-points in a clearing in a wood on the borders of the forbidden kingdom of Aussa.

  And now these times were all gone and he had washed up here, where I was, in the little town of Maralal, with his three adopted ‘sons’, and with their people; who, much of the time called him, simply, The Old Man, Up There.

  The Old Man, Up There

  We were sitting outside Mr Bhola’s garage in Maralal watching the world go by and drawing figures in the dirt with our sticks when we heard the roar of the engine and the grating of the gears and saw the Land Cruiser coming towards us. It came at speed, jolting and bumping over the potholes of the town street, and it sent up a cloud of dust in its wake, and scattered the people in its path; and there was a figure in the passenger-seat, turning to gesticulate at the driver and then looking towards where we sat and pointing; and then the car screeched to a halt before us and Wilfred Thesiger stepped out. Or rather, he half-stepped out, but he hadn’t yet done with what he was saying.

  ‘How often do I have to tell you, Kibiriti?’ he said, ‘How often?’

  Kibiriti grinned and shrugged and said nothing.

  ‘You’ll kill us all one day. You see if you don’t.’

  And then he turned towards where we stood, lined up like an honour-guard, having hastily jumped to our feet and wiped the dust from our hands on our shorts.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you survived.’

  He had on the same tweed jacket that he had worn when I had met him in Tite Street, despite the heat, and a green canvas hat with a soft brim, of the kind worn by fishermen; and he carried a carved walking-stick of dark wood.

  We rose to our feet and shook hands with him, awkwardly, formally.

  Andy had a battered paperback copy of Arabian Sands in his left hand when he stepped forward, and Thesiger spotted it.

  ‘Well, what do you think of it?’ he said, nodding towards the book.

  And Andy, overawed, stammered something about it having been excellent, although he hadn’t quite finished it yet; at which Thesiger grunted with satisfaction.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, what about a drink?’

  And without waiting for an answer he strode purposefully across the road towards a tin-roofed shack with a tin Coca-Cola sign outside, and we scuttled along after him.

  The shop-owner spotted him just before he crossed the threshold, and hastily switched off the transistor radio, from which a Michael Jackson tune had been blaring.

  ‘Here,’ said Thesiger, putting both hands on the counter before him and springing up upon it so that he was sitting facing us, ‘three bottles of Coca-Cola for my young guests.’

  He looked down at us, kicking the heels of his stout brown shoes against the wood as he counted out the coins into the palm of his hand and placed them down on the counter by his side.

  ‘They say that I shouldn’t do this sort of thing at my age. But I tell them: I’m eighty years old and if I can’t do it now, then when can I ever? You tell me that, I say, you just tell me.’

  We drank our drinks then and there, in the shop; being forbidden by the shop-owner to take our drinks outside, on account of there being a refundable deposit with the wholesaler on the bottles.

  He had us tell him about our journey, as we drank, and he laughed when we told him about our meal of swollen fish, and again at our confusion over sheep and goats. Although, he said, he did not generally do so, as he was well known to have no sense of humour.

  ‘Twice in one day is more than enough. They’ll think I’m ill or something. But do you know how you tell the differ
ence, eh? Between a sheep and a goat? Shall I tell you? Well, if the tail goes up, then it’s a goat. And if it goes down, it’s a sheep. That’s how you tell. That’s how I’ve always done it, and it works every time.’

  We told him also about our constant thirst, and our endless discussions, while we walked, about lemonade, and what else we would drink, one day.

  ‘Here’s a trick for you,’ he said. ‘It’s something the Bedu taught me. If you have no water, and no prospect of getting any, then you should put a little salt in the palm of your hand, like so, and then you lick it. That will help keep the thirst away.’

  He caught sight of the camera slung around my neck.

  ‘That’s not one of those automatic things, is it?’

  It was a rather large and clunky East German device, with a shutter that had a recoil to it which, I swear, was almost like a rifle.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s manual. Or else if you want you can have it half-automatic—see this dial here: you can set the aperture and it will do the shutter-speed for you.’

  ‘Hmm … well, it’s good you can use your own settings. I can’t bear those fully automatic ones, the ones that do everything for you. You may as well not be there if you’re going to do that. Put the thing on a rock and come back later when it’s taken the pictures for you, you may as well. What film are you using, by the way?’

  ‘A mixture. But I’ve got black and white in it now. Ilford 100ASA.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘I’ve always preferred black and white to colour. It gives room to the imagination. It’s the same with painting—I’d have a sketch over an oil-painting any day.’

  He quizzed Andy on Arabian Sands again, and then asked Frazer and myself about our own reading. Frazer had been reading A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby—who, as it happened, had come across Thesiger on his travels in the 1950s, and who, with his companion, had been castigated by him for sleeping on an air-bed instead of on the rocky ground. ‘God,’ he’d said, ‘you must be a couple of pansies.’

  I said that I’d been reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  ‘Who?’ he said.

  ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ I said. ‘You know. By Mark Twain.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ he said.

  Nor was he particularly interested in hearing about him.

  He was not a great admirer of the Americans, he said.

  He never had been, not even at the best of times. But it was Suez, I think, that put the tin lid on it.

  It was in the Fifties. He was in Arabia at the time, just across the way, as it were, when the Egyptians decided to flex their muscles by taking control of the Suez Canal.

  This caused havoc with the cargo ships passing between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and so the old colonial powers, Britain and France, joined together with Israel to invade and set the waterway free, and they looked to America to back them up.

  America had its own fish to fry, though, and was busy with the Cold War, and consequently was having none of it. More than this, the Americans pressured the European allies into a humiliating climbdown.

  This loss of territory and loss of face to a former colony marked the beginning of the final winding-down of the British Empire, and kicked off four decades of flag-lowering to the sounds of bugles playing the ‘Last Post’, which culminated in the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese.

  It marked the end of Thesiger’s time in Arabia, too: in the shifting political climate he was forced to leave; and he wasn’t overly happy about that.

  It marked something of a crisis in my own family, besides, though I had not yet been born. My father had not long left the army. He and my mother were living in my grandmother’s rented two-bedroom bungalow, along with his uncle, and he was called up again and shipped out; and then, when it all went wrong, he was sent back home again. One of the first things he did when he got back was to go to the council offices to see how his longstanding application for a home of his own was doing.

  ‘Now,’ said the clerk, consulting his ledger, ‘you were nearly at the top of the list, weren’t you? Last time you came in.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But it says here that you left the borough.’

  ‘I was called up. For Suez.’

  ‘Which means, when you look at it, that you’ve been living elsewhere.’

  ‘Well, yes …’

  ‘And if you’ve been living elsewhere, then what that means is you’ve got to start at the bottom of the list again.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you can’t just come back in now, can you? In front of all the people who’ve been waiting here all along.’

  ‘I was called up to risk my life for people like you.’

  ‘Well,’ said the clerk, ‘there it is.’

  How much the novels of Mark Twain have to do with any of this I don’t know. Not a lot, I should imagine.

  We changed the subject.

  We spent much of that day together, talking about travel—or rather listening to him telling us about his travels, or else we sat outside Mr Bhola’s garage watching the people of Maralal.

  I took a photograph of him sitting there, leaning on his stick, with Frazer and Andy sitting on either side of him.

  A party of Samburu moran with spears and ochred hair stopped a little way from where we sat.

  ‘These Samburu,’ he said, pointing with his stick, ‘and all the other tribes of their kind—the Turkana, the Rendille, the Masai—they’re Nilotic, the word is.’ He told us how, it is believed, these tribes all made their way down the Nile centuries ago—or maybe even millennia; and how the language they speak comes from a family you can still hear today in some parts of Egypt. Over to the west there were the Luo and the Dinka, and they were Nilotic, too. And incidentally, he said, the Turkana: those clay-covered caps they wear on the back of their heads contain not only their own hair drawn back into a bun, but also the hair of their fathers, grandfathers and ancestors as well.

  And suchlike things.

  He stayed with us for much of the day.

  He was glad of our company, he said.

  And besides, he said, there was no one at home.

  There was, he said, no great pleasure to be had in sitting alone in an empty room at his age.

  Life

  Lawi Leboyare was the eldest of Thesiger’s ‘sons’.

  He was a man of some importance in Maralal, and had a house which had electricity in it; and which, in addition to electricity, had both a television and a video-recorder. He also owned a smart motor-car, despite Kibirit’s best efforts to wreck it; and he had a great many cattle, and people to look after them, as well as a number of wives from the more sought-after and fashionable parts of the region.

  Behind them all, in no little part, was the same generosity that had once brought me my cheque for 300 pounds and my injunction not to tell others.

  It was to his house that we were invited for dinner on the night before our departure. Kibiriti and Laputa, his ‘brothers’, were invited, too, and Thesiger was there both as guest of honour and, in a manner of speaking, as the evening’s entertainment; for after a large and hearty meal of goat stew, served up with boiled vegetables and chapattis, the lights were turned off, the television tuned on and a video-cassette removed from its box and placed into the slot of the machine. Then, to the strains of Vivaldi’s Flute Concerto and over a background of spear-carrying Samburu moran running in slow-motion, the opening titles rolled, and there began The Last Explorer, a documentary, recorded from British television, about Thesiger’s life and times.

  I do not know who had recorded it or who brought it out to this place.

  It was a strange experience, that evening.

  Partly it was strange on account of having the real thing in the room with us, commenting loudly on the commentary while it was commenting on him (‘Nonsense! I never said that. You’ll vouch for me, won’t you, Lawi?’).

  It was also strange on a
ccount of the television authorities in the UK having just decided to allow the advertising of sanitary towels and tampons, as a result of which the entire industry seemed to have collectively come to the decision that the best way to exercise their new freedom and show all their product-demonstration shots of blue liquid being poured from laboratory flasks and then absorbed and locked in with a special new double action, was to blow the whole year’s budget in one go and show them all, repeatedly, in every single ad-break in the Wilfred Thesiger documentary.

  Or so it seemed.

  Later that night, when the evening was over and we were about to make our way back to our hut for the last time, we parted with handshakes and with many thanks for the great kindness that had been shown to us.

  ‘You will come again?’ he said. ‘Next time you can take donkeys and go to the forest.’

  We never did.

  I don’t know why.

  I always intended to, and, looking back on it now, and given my time again, I would have.