Cobra in the Bath

by Miles Morland

  The Somalis, a warlike lot who have long thought of the more numerous and more powerful Ethiopians as their enemies, maintained the Ogaden belonged to them. If there was oil to be found there the Somalis regarded it as Somali oil, not Ethiopian oil. A century ago the Ethiopians incorporated the Ogaden into greater Ethiopia after Queen Victoria generously ceded it to the Emperor Menelik as a present. The Somalis like to point out that it wasn’t hers to give, but this trifle did not bother Her Majesty’s Colonial Office. It was as if the Somalis announced today that they were giving Scotland to Norway. From time to time the Somalis issued threats against Teddy’s company and anyone else considering drilling there, warning them they were stealing Somali national resources.

  Regardless of all this, we liked the idea of a board meeting in the Ogaden, so a date was set, visas were obtained and inoculations given against the exotic and fatal diseases which Western doctors believe are prevalent in the darker parts of Africa. Most of us had been to Ethiopia before; it is a country older than the United Kingdom with a rich culture and few diseases. We were looking forward to spending time there again and hanging out at the Sheba Bar of the Addis Hilton, one of the great liberation-era hotels of Africa. The Sheba Bar was where everyone met. There was a newer and more expensive hotel, a white wedding-cake Sheraton, but the Ethiopians couldn’t afford to go there so it was peopled only by UN and NGO workers spending aid and charity dollars.

  Ten days before we were due to leave for Ethiopia the board members received an email from Teddy. ‘Gentlemen,’ it said. ‘Bad news. I was in a plane crash yesterday. I was returning from Gambella in western Ethiopia to the capital. We were in a small Cessna. There were three of us: the pilot, Muhammad my friend and oil mentor who used to work for Petronas, and I. The engine failed fifteen kilometres short of Addis and we crashed in open country. Muhammad was killed outright, the pilot is on life support and I am unharmed.’ Teddy attached a photograph of the Cessna. It looked like a crumpled beer can and was in two halves. How Teddy had survived without injury was a mystery. ‘However,’ the email continued, ‘the show must go on. We will continue with our board meeting plans in the Ogaden in ten days’ time.’

  I sent Teddy an email in reply, copied to the board.

  Dear Teddy,

  Perhaps as the oldest guy on your board I can voice a few personal thoughts about this terrible happening. You are a brave and resolute man but don’t underestimate the shock you have suffered. You have had a double trauma: a near-death experience yourself and the death of a close friend and mentor. I suspect it will take time for the impact of these to be fully felt.

  Under the circumstances I would favour postponing our trip for a few months. We have all been looking forward to it but there is no pressing business need to do it now. Perhaps you should take some time out, go off with your wife, and let the impact of this sink in.

  You are right that the show must go on but I’m sure the board would be happy to have tickets for a later performance in a few months’ time. We could maybe have the April board meeting in London and then go to Ethiopia for the next meeting.

  Thinking of you,

  Miles

  Teddy replied to the board:

  Thanks, Miles, for your wise advice. I must admit, as we were going down, the first thing that flashed through my head was my young children and wife.

  I realise that the shock will take some time to subside, but I still feel like ploughing through. However, I have always believed in listening to people wiser and more experienced than myself such as my grandfather, now in his nineties, and you because you are almost as old as he. I will heed your advice. We will postpone the trip to Ethiopia.

  ‘There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will,’ Shakespeare.

  Warmest regards,

  Teddy

  So we postponed the meeting.

  Ten days later, when we had planned to be in the Ogaden for our meeting, 400 members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, Somalis armed by the Eritrean government, swept through our camp when everyone was asleep and murdered all sixty-five of our employees. None escaped. Two weeks later we learned from Ethiopia’s military intelligence service – people who have a way of finding out what needs to be found out – that the reason the ONLF had attacked our camp was that the Ogaden grapevine had told them that the board of the oil company would be there on that date. They had planned their attack with the intention of killing the chairman and five white directors of the company conducting oil exploration in the Ogaden. The sixty-five employees were incidental.

  The Somali are imaginative and experienced people when it comes to killing. If Teddy had not had his plane crash, I and my fellow directors would probably have watched our entrails being barbecued in front of us as we died slow and imaginative deaths.

  I am happy to say that today things are much better. The oil company and the Ogadenis have made peace, and the company has embarked on a successful programme of school- and clinic-building for the locals. Meanwhile the ONLF is a spent force, and, just in case, there are units of the fearsome Ethiopian army making sure that nothing nasty happens.

  27

  Return from the Madagascan Tomb

  Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith have spent thirty years taking photographs of the ceremonies, dress and customs in Africa that they fear will not be around much longer. Their African Ceremonies books and companion volumes are a unique archive. Today Africans are casting off traditional robes and putting on baseball caps, and in forty years’ time their children will want to look at what they have abandoned. Angela and Carol’s photographs will be the best record of what they will have lost.

  They go off unsupported and by themselves into places where white people are seen less often than eclipses of the sun. Carol, in an attempt to get some close-ups, once spent two years as the second, or it may have been third, wife of a Ouadabi chief in Niger. Their work involves going to places where things that sensible travellers like me regard as the essentials of adventurous African travelling, such as air conditioning, ice-cold Martinis and beds, are unknown.

  They had asked me along as their baggage carrier on a trip to photograph the Betsileo tribe’s grave-wrapping ceremonies in the Madagascan highlands. Traditional Betsileo families take the corpses out of the family tomb every few years, lay them down in the sun, drink litres of cane spirit, tell them the news, introduce grandfather, dead and wrapped in silk, to grandson, and then pop them back in the tomb with a new wrapping of white silk.

  Madagascar is a unique country. The encyclopedias may say it is part of Africa, but it isn’t really as it split away about 150 million years ago along with India when they parted from the supercontinent of Gondwana. Part-way across what is now the Indian Ocean the Indian land mass dropped Madagascar in the sea behind it like a large turd four times the size of England. India of course kept on moving until it hit China and gave us the Himalayas. Madagascar, on the other hand, remained stationary and uninhabited by anything other than baobab trees, forty-three species of lemur and some strange bats, until a bunch of enterprising Indonesians, whose cousins were busy colonising the South Seas from Tahiti to New Zealand, turned the wrong way out of Sumatra. Consequently the native people are Asian in origin and speak an Asian language which involves words having uncountable syllables all but one or two of which are swallowed. Antanananarivo, the capital, is Tana, and Ambositra, where the Betsileo live, is Mbusht.

  After a few delays and an expedition to the port of Antsiranana, formerly Diego-Suarez, where thousands of Vichy French died in an attempt to prevent the island falling to the British in 1942, we returned to Tana and left the next day in a four-by-four with Herry, our dashing chain-smoking driver, and Ramillisson, a diminutive retired university anthropologist Angela and Carol appeared to have kidnapped and taken along in the mistaken belief that he could explain what was happening. In the event Ramillisson sat in the car putting on anoraks and complaining of the cold while Herry the driver filled our ea
rs with tales of famous famadihanas he had seen. We had a six-hour drive through red-earth mountains rising behind rivers threaded with paddy fields to Ambositra.

  We arrived exhausted at 10 p.m. to find that le Motel des Violettes had sold our carefully booked rooms to a higher bidder. Our confirming fax was denounced as a forgery. The best hotel in town, the Mania, where I longed to stay if only for the name, was also tout complet. Herry finally found us a Malagasy B & B with squeaky-clean rooms and ventilation provided by the wind sighing gently up through the floorboards.

  Next morning was the grave-wrapping. We went first to meet the main members of the family. Our invitation had come through Martine, a Belgian woman who had been married to a Betsileo. Her husband’s body would be one of those to be brought out and rewrapped, although Martine herself was not able to be there. The husband’s sister met us at their little red-brick village house, where twenty family members had already gathered. Before setting off there was food to be eaten, permissions to be sought from the ancestors and cane spirit to be drunk.

  The food was being cooked in huge iron cauldrons on open fires when we arrived. We, honoured foreign guests, were fed first. Two tin plates, one of rice and one of well boiled chunks of pig fat, were given to each of us while twenty hungry faces looked on waiting for us to eat so they could start on their own pig fat. Carol and I were already suffering from dysentery brought on either by prawns (Carol’s theory) or the dirty fingers of the chap pawing the sliced tomatoes as he formed a pattern on top of our morning fried eggs (mine). With convincing vehemence I was able to say, ‘C’est formidable, mais j’ai un terrible mal à l’estomac.’ Carol then passed out, and it was left to Angela to tuck into three huge globs of poached pig fat on behalf of the foreign delegation. But then she is Australian.

  Ramillisson took off his anorak and spooned several helpings of pig fat into his tiny body, as did Herry. The speechmaster, who had already made five or six ten-minute speeches of welcome to us in a language which later turned out to be French, then made an even longer speech to the ancestors, who seemed to be inhabiting the upper left-hand corner of the room.

  I was meanwhile sitting on the edge of the bed of the chief, a man so old and infirm that he could not even eat pig fat. I thought it an even bet that he would be an ancestor before nightfall. Finally, when les ancêtres had given permission, a litre bottle of near-toxic cane spirit was passed round. Despite mal à l’estomac I managed to choke down enough of this to make my eyes run.

  Then off to the forest, our party and the speechmaker in Herry’s four-by-four, the rest of the family, now some 150 strong, on foot. It took us twice as long to get there in the car, and when we arrived there was a group already on the roof of the tomb hammering and chiselling. The tomb door was sealed closed, and to open it you had to remove a keystone from the roof. We were told to keep our distance. For us to be there before the opening would be fady. Fady is Malagasy for taboo. Just about everything is fady somewhere some time on Madagascar. The mood of the famadihana was unlike that at any Western memorial service or funeral, the grown-ups laughing and joking, the children larking around. No solemn faces, counted minutes of silence or hushed reverence in the face of death.

  Finally the keystone was removed, and two people lowered themselves into the tomb. A minute later the door was opened and we were summoned but told to walk around the tomb and enter from behind. To approach it from the front was fady. I did not know what to expect. My contact with dead bodies has been limited and personal. I’m extremely squeamish, and the thought of confronting a platoon of wrapped corpses that had been maturing in tropical heat for the four years since the last rewrapping was not one I was relishing.

  Carol, Angela and I were invited to go in first. Everyone was excited at the prospect of the two world-famous photographers immortalising the family famadihana in the next volume of African Ceremonies. The girls crept into the tomb, their necks bent under Nikons and foot-long lenses, while I trotted behind trying to make my tiny Ixus look important.

  The tomb was carved out of limestone and sunk two storeys into the earth. Inside the air was as cool and odourless as a cloister. On three sides were chambers each containing two to six white-wrapped corpses of different branches of the family. They were surprisingly thin, but it was easy to make out the human shapes within, the heads and the feet and the crossed arms. I assumed that the bodies had been embalmed.

  Photographs taken, we backed up the steps out of the tomb and joined the 150-strong semicircle outside. The master of ceremonies then read out the contents of an important-looking piece of stamped paper. Herry informed me that this was the municipal permission to open the tomb. And then, as everyone burst into what sounded like a Malagasy version of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, two people appeared carrying the first corpse. Straw mats had been laid in front of the tomb. The body was put down at the far end of the mats and they went back down for another. Close family members knelt by the wrapped body and stroked it and talked to it. They moved aside as the next one was laid down. Everyone was laughing and joking and telling stories.

  It was only when the fifth body came up that the corpse’s widow threw herself on it and went into a fit of sobbing and keening. I expected her to be comforted by other family members. Not at all. Some women pulled her almost roughly off the corpse as the next body was put down alongside and took her over to sit under a nearby thorn tree, where she was left keening by herself until such time as she could come back and have a good laugh. In the course of twenty-seven bodies coming out of the tomb, only she and one other woman showed any signs of grief, and their doing so was clearly not appreciated by the rest of the family.

  From what we were told, the Malagasy make little distinction between life and death. Dead people are thought of as being in the next room, and I suppose that taking them out of it for a chat every few years underlines the lack of a barrier between death and life. The ancestors are involved in everything. To do things without the ancestors’ permission is to court trouble.

  It was an afternoon like no other I have ever had. While the last bodies were being brought out, the first were being rewrapped in fresh sheets of white silk. The women did the wrapping. Sheets were tightly bound around the corpse and the ends tucked in neatly, following which silk cords were tied around the neck and the ankles to keep everything in place. One woman to whom I had been chatting in pidgin French said, ‘Photographe, photographe,’ and knelt down beside her husband’s freshly wrapped corpse, put on a big grin and gave the body a hug while we snapped her with her man. The fact that he was now an ex-man was irrelevant. Her smile would have been exactly the same if he had been alive standing next to her rather than lying wrapped in a shroud.

  At the best traditional famadihanas after the bodies have been brought out they are walked seven times round the tomb with, said Herry, a shot of cane spirit being consumed by the walkers on each circuit. Dancing then takes place with the corpses balanced uneasily on people’s shoulders. After each circuit everyone gets more and more incapable, and by the end corpses are flying all over the place. Sadly, our family was a sober lot. As Herry told me, ‘Bah, they are too Christian.’ Once the rewrapping had taken place, the bodies were hoisted aloft one by one and gently marched back into the tomb, face down if they had been face up and vice versa, to give them a different view for the next four or five years.

  I suddenly found myself much moved, the more so because everything was so happy and full of joy. The Betsileo seem to have found a way of making humour, fun and laughter transcend dying.

  28

  Georgie’s Last Adventure

  The visit to the tomb in Madagascar stirred and moved me. Death is such a final and miserable business in the West while to the Betsileo it is but a hiccup on a longer journey. I was deeply affected by the way that the living Betsileo would chat to their dead loved ones and tell them the news.

  There are two people I would particularly like to do that with. One is my mother. She had a life
full of interest and adventure and I like to think she would want to know about mine.

  The other is my daughter Georgie. She was the real adventurer of our family. She spread laughter and light around her but could never quite light up the dark place in her own soul. She took her own life when she was twenty-seven. I wrote a letter to her godparents telling them how we, Tasha, Guislaine, and I, went to Los Angeles where she had been living for the previous five years to say goodbye to her.

  July 2004

  Dear Godparents,

  Georgia would like you, as her godparents, to know how her friends in Los Angeles said goodbye to her. She had a great sense of occasion. The four days we spent in Los Angeles taking our leave of her were days like no other, imbued with her special spirit.

  She died in the early morning of Wednesday July 21st. Her funeral was three days later in the chapel at Pierce Brothers. Pierce is a patch of lawns and palms and funny Californian trees with red and orange blossoms hidden amongst the glass and granite of Century City. Marilyn Monroe’s grave is here. Georgie had had a thing about Marilyn Monroe from the time she was six years old. Perhaps she sensed what they had in common, the electric, sudden, smile, the grace, the natural ability to please and, behind that smile, the inner darkness that made life so difficult for both of them. Georgie would have liked the thought of saying her last goodbye next to Marilyn Monroe.

  I had arranged the funeral by telephone from London at a day’s notice and, because of that, had thought it would just be us, Guislaine, Tasha and I, together with a few close friends. I had had quite a battle with Pierce Brothers to arrange the funeral at such short notice. When we arrived there, Georgie was lying in the chapel.