I had left Valerie with the Afar community at the steam cairns and returned to Asayita where Ishmael had suggested I might like to go and meet some real Afar men. We had found the cowboys at a spot not far from Asayita, within 15 kilometres of the Djibouti border. I was standing at a triple junction of splits in the Earth’s surface, the point at which the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the African Rift Valley all meet in a geologically classic intersection with angles between arm pairs approaching 120°. The first two separate Africa from Arabia, great rips in the crust formed as Arabia moved to the northeast to collide with Eurasia along the Zagros Mountains of Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The third, the African Rift, is the early stages of a tear in the continental crust, the beginnings of a north-eastern African splinter that in millions of years from now will form a new continental fragment.
These gargantuan tectonic forces have wrenched the crust apart, stretching and splitting the very stuff of the planet. Great blocks of rock have bent and buckled under the pressures, thrown up along fault lines like deformed children’s building bricks strewn at random across the landscape. Molten magma, the blood of the Earth, has oozed up through the fractured gashes to form scabby lava flows and volcanoes.
The ‘hot springs’, as Ishmael called them, were scalding geysers, boiling pools of bubbling water heated by the restless Earth below. We had seen them from some distance, marked by billowing clouds of hot steam. Too large to enclose with a cairn, the resourceful Afar had dug a small channel from one of the pools, draining off a shallow stream of water. As it flowed away from the geyser, the water cooled enough to become drinkable.
They also used the geysers to cook in, and our boiled goat was sweet and succulent. We were joined for lunch by another warrior whose matted dreadlocks indicated that he was a camelboy. He walked up to us from out of nowhere, leant nonchalantly on his Kalashnikov, and asked if we’d seen any camels. He had lost his, apparently, and was looking for it. But he didn’t appear to be too concerned. No doubt because he was confident that eventually someone would tell him some news about a stray camel. Meanwhile, he certainly wasn’t going to say no to a bit of boiled goat.
Our cowboys weren’t particularly friendly towards the new arrival and I sensed an element of rivalry between cowboys and camelboys. But welcome or not, the camelboy stuck around all afternoon, mostly minding his own business.
Our afternoon’s activities took a bit of time to get off the ground. All of the warriors fancied a nap after lunch, so we lounged a bit more beneath the thorn trees, the warriors lying on their firearms, while I used my shoes as a pillow. I wasn’t complaining because it was 2 o’clock and fiercely hot.
After an hour or so, the two less co-operative cowboys decided they wanted to go and chase ostriches. ‘Is that some sort of initiation rite?’ I wondered.
‘No,’ said Ishmael. ‘They just want to get some of its feathers to put in their hair.’ They stalked off, bare-chested, with determined looks on their faces.
Hayu Yassin opened his eyes long enough to ask where they were going and then closed them again, mumbling something to Ishmael.
‘He says they won’t catch any. Ostriches run too fast.’
Half an hour later, the two warriors reappeared, their torsos glistening with sweat. They weren’t carrying any ostrich feathers.
First they said they would teach me how to shoot. We wandered out of the shade of the thorn trees and into the searing heat of the afternoon. We found a spot not far from one of the geysers, a couple of hundred metres from a huge long ridge which stuck up out of the otherwise very flat desert. ‘Aim for that big rock,’ Ishmael advised. Hayu Yassin released the safety catch on his AK-47 and handed the weapon to me. I knelt down and he pointed out the sights along the barrel of the gun.
The crack of the shot echoed loudly along the full length of the ridge. There was no indication of what I might have hit. After a couple more shots, neither of which appeared to have hit the big rock, I said thank you and handed the gun back to Hayu Yassin. He nodded, obviously unimpressed, and said something to Ishmael.
‘He says at 4 birr a bullet, you owe him 12 birr.’
Wrestling was next. One of the surly warriors stepped up, for the first time displaying his ability to smile. I could tell that he fancied his chances of putting me firmly in my place. That place being in the dirt at his feet.
We set to. I have some very minor experience of wrestling, having done a bit at school and suffered a few bouts against Mongolians, who are amongst the world’s best. I could tell there was not much point in asking about rules, so I just looked at my opponent and we took hold of each other. Although the cowboy was obviously younger and fitter than me, and better accustomed to the staggering temperatures, I did have one thing on my side: my stature. I am quite short and squat, and a low centre of gravity is a great advantage in wrestling. This cowboy was probably 6 foot 5, although the five was mostly hair. Nevertheless, he was built like a string bean.
After my poor display at the shooting, he was also overconfident. We struggled for a while, and my opponent lost his self-satisfied smile. I think I could have put him down, but I didn’t want to in front of his comrades because I thought he might take the loss of face rather badly. We agreed to a draw. Hayu Yassin slapped me on the back and the other two looked reluctantly impressed. I had clearly gone up a notch in their estimation.
When I had asked the warriors the previous day about manhood and how they proved themselves, they hadn’t mentioned shooting or wrestling at all to begin with. I think this was because the true sense of my question had somehow got lost in translation. The initial response that came was about cow racing.
Each cowboy picks about ten of his best cows and drives them towards a line. Whoever crosses the line first is the winner, but it is the cow that gets the prize rather than the cowboy. The winning cow gets special treatment thereafter. She is treated like royalty: never being milked and always offered the best of the fodder.
After the confidence gained from our lengthy conversation about hairdos, I rephrased my question more boldly. ‘I understand that in times past, a man’s ability as a warrior was rated according to the number of men he killed,’ I started, adding quickly, ‘but this is not how it is today.’ I held my breath until they all nodded.
‘How, then, does a man prove himself nowadays?’
After a bit of thought, they all agreed on one thing: Kor’so. Then one of them added wrestling, which was often part of the Kor’so, and finally shooting.
‘They don’t shoot each other,’ Ishmael explained. ‘Guns are carried here because of the danger of Issa raiding parties. The Issa are the Afar’s traditional ethnic rivals.’
‘What is Kor’so?’
This appeared to be a difficult question for Ishmael to answer. ‘It’s an Afar game,’ he said finally, ‘perhaps like your football.’ He paused. ‘But actually nothing like football.’
That made things much clearer.
I was still none the wiser after my Kor’so training. I had tried in vain to ascertain some of the rules from Ishmael, but he just said that the rules were different in his day. It wasn’t the same since they had changed them, he added. I got him to ask the warriors, but they just wanted to get on with training me. ‘What’s the point of the game?’ I asked finally. ‘In football you score goals. What’s the equivalent in Kor’so?’
No one appeared to be able to answer that question either.
My training consisted of the three of us running up and down, using an orange for a ball. The warriors started to squabble over who should be holding the orange, but eventually Hayu Yassin took charge. He grabbed me by the wrist and led me off on a trot. After a few paces, Hayu Yassin did a little skip and leapt into the air, flailing his arms as if he was trying to take off. I tried to do the same and we trotted on. Then Hayu Yassin started to wave his arms furiously as he leapt still higher into the air and flung the orange down towards his feet with some force. The orange was instantly pulverised on the
volcanic lava beneath our feet.
Hayu Yassin was smiling broadly and was clearly pretty pleased with his performance. He wandered back towards Ishmael.
‘Is that it?’ I shouted, sweat now pouring off my body as if I’d been standing under a hot shower.
‘Now you must run away,’ said Ishmael, ‘as far as you can.’
After a few minutes rest, when it seemed that my training was at an end, I suggested we try the running away bit. Over 50 metres, I’m pretty fast, and none of the warriors could get close. I think my prowess improved a bit further in their eyes, because they asked if I wanted to take part in a real game of Kor’so.
Being still none the wiser as to how to play, I said yes.
The Kor’so match took place in a village not far from the Awash River. It was meant to start at 7.30 in the morning, European time, but it was past 10 o’clock when the cowboys finally showed up. They were riding a red pickup truck, along with a dozen or so of their cowboy friends. I could tell they were all cowboys because of their Afro hairdos. The surly one who had challenged me to the wrestling wore an ostrich feather stuck in his. It had probably taken him the last three hours getting the jaunty angle just right.
After my training session in the desert two days before, my cowboy friends had stung me for expenses, and now I saw what they’d spent their money on. Each one of them wore a brand new pair of patterned socks. Hayu Yassin came over and shook my hand when he clambered off the back of the pickup, but the other two studiously ignored me. The village had been out in force since I’d arrived three hours before, and I’d weathered the delighted shouts of ‘Farang, farang’ from a small army of boys who had then settled down in a huge semi-circle to observe the farang wait and swat the occasional fly. Now that the warriors had appeared, there was a fresh atmosphere of excitement in the air, and many of the boys reassembled around the pickup. The cowboys strutted about in front of them with their Kalashnikovs over their shoulders.
Within a few minutes, two other pickups, also laden with warriors, drove on to the scene. Some of these new arrivals were camelboys, and I assumed that they were the other side, but when they all gathered round in a huge circle and began singing, I decided perhaps not.
‘The opposition are on the other side of the fields,’ Ishmael told me, pointing across a dozen fields, their maize plants now just a collection of straw-coloured stumps. Far off in the distance, I could make out another huge crowd of people.
The two teams were from different clans. It was the Kadabuda clan versus the Diramo. I was on the Kadabuda side. I pushed my way through the swarm of small boys and joined my teammates in the pre-match singing. We were stomping our feet in the dust and clapping to the beat of the song. As the pace quickened, we began jumping up and down on the spot. All around us, the boys were doing likewise with their sticks under their arms.
This continued for nearly an hour, and I had to retire from the warm-up because I could see that if I did it properly I’d be totally exhausted before the match even started.
At some invisible signal, my team’s warm-up took on a different stance. The Kadabudas began to line up at the edge of the adjacent field facing the distant opposition. They were an awesome sight. Each man wore a brilliant white wrap around his shoulders, a brightly coloured diamond-patterned sarong, and, in most cases, fancy socks (Argyle was the most popular style) inside their plastic sandals. A huge jile was at every hip, and a Kalashnikov was held at shoulder-height in every man’s right hand. They were still stomping their feet in an on-the-spot march.
‘You should join them,’ Ishmael whispered in my ear as I sat surveying the scene from the shade of a spreading thorn tree. ‘I’ll find you a gun.’ He turned to an aged man beside him, one of the village elders, and asked him a question. The elder turned, grabbed the barrel of a Kalashnikov from the shoulder of a young man standing beside him, and handed it to me. The young man, who looked as if he had probably only just earned the right to carry a gun, stood open-mouthed. The elder cut him off with a few well-chosen words, and I joined the end of the Kadabuda line with the gun in my hand. There was a buzz of excitement in the crowd, all men and boys, since women were not allowed to watch a Kor’so match.
Gradually, our line started a very slow, rhythmic march across the fields. We kept our formation, a long, winding snake of warriors, with me bringing up the rear, led by none other than Hayu Yassin. One or two of our number let forth high-pitched shrieks as we snaked our way across the maize fields towards the Diramo team that had proceeded to do the same in the distance. Little by little, the two tribes meandered their ways closer together, until there must have been about 100 warriors, 50 or so on each side, doing their slow-motion marching almost side-by-side.
The combination of blood-curdling shrieks and the hypnotic rhythm of the marching lent the scene a sinister, almost supernatural quality. After losing my fear of the Afar, having witnessed at first hand their obsession with hairdressing and patterned socks, doubts were beginning to resurface in my mind. Maybe it was just the baking sun, but I began to understand what Thesiger and Nesbitt had meant about this wild and untamed country, inhabited by fearsome bloodthirsty tribes. I’d never seen so many lethal weapons all in one place. There were enough to start a small war.
We snaked our way off the fields and suddenly all my teammates disappeared. Ishmael came to my rescue and relieved me of my weapon. ‘There is a problem,’ he told me. ‘The Diramo team have made a complaint. They want to know why the Kadabuda have a white man on their side.’ I could see the elders going into a huddle beside one of the village huts.
Time passed. I had taken a temperature reading at 8 o’clock. It was 43ºC (109ºF). I didn’t know what it was now, but after the slow-motion route march in the full sun I was feeling decidedly groggy. I sat down beneath a tree to wait for the outcome of the stewards’ enquiry and was immediately surrounded by a seething mass of small boys seemingly fascinated by the way I drank water from a bottle.
Ishmael and another man tried to clear them with the aid of sticks, and succeeded in pushing them back a metre or two.
‘They will sort it out,’ Ishmael said, referring to the elders. But I have to say that I didn’t really care. In fact, if they’d called the whole thing off, or declared that I was ineligible to play, I’d have been quite relieved. I’d been reduced to exhaustion just by the warm-up. Then Ishmael said something that snapped me out of my daze.
‘Retribution is not allowed for injuries or deaths during a Kor’so match.’
I don’t know what prompted him to say it, but all of a sudden my grogginess disappeared and my mind became crystal clear.
‘Injuries? Deaths! People die playing this game?’
‘Only rarely is someone killed. Usually it is just minor damage, like broken arms or legs. But when incurred during a Kor’so game, the injured party must wait until the next game for revenge.’
I just sat there with my mouth open. I closed it just in time to prevent a fly crawling in. It tried to creep up my nose instead. I brushed it away. The kids around us sensed some excitement, and were edging in again. Ishmael wielded his stick and they fell back once more.
‘You did say “killed”, didn’t you, Ishmael?’
‘Don’t worry yourself. It is very rare.’ Ishmael gave me what he seemed to think was a reassuring smile.
‘Suddenly, I don’t think I want to play.’
‘I promise you, actual deaths are very rare nowadays.’
I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. I thought back to my training session, a seemingly innocuous little outing in the sun where the only casualty had been an orange. I couldn’t understand how jumping up in the air and flapping your arms about could result in fatalities. But then I became suspicious when I remembered everyone’s inability to tell me either the rules or the aim of the game. Perhaps inability was the wrong word. Maybe it had been reluctance.
‘How are people killed playing Kor’so?’
‘When yo
u run away, maybe they all will catch you. When that happens, it can be quite dangerous.’
Then a quite horrific thought hit me. ‘Do the players wear their knives on the pitch?’
‘Oh no.’
‘What about guns?’
‘No.’
‘So it’s just when they catch you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Oh yes, quite sure.’
I decided then and there to play, if the elders let me, but I’d be very careful to run the other way whenever anyone looked like they might be caught.
The elders did let me play. By the time they did so, it must have been noon. The sun was so incredibly hot that I was afraid my brain was frying. I couldn’t wear my hat for obvious reasons. Needless to say, I didn’t last the whole game. Nothing like it, because it went on for more than two hours.
It was total chaos. The Kadabuda and Diramo teams appeared from nowhere, each man stripped down to just his sarong. Most of them were barefoot, but some had kept their socks on. Each team jogged out on to the maize fields and did a few warm-up dashes. I’m not sure when the game proper began, because it was never clear to me how the game was played. I couldn’t work out who had the ball half the time, or even whether there was more than one ball. But I did see Hayu Yassin attempt to fly several times and launch the yellow tennis ball down towards his feet, which appeared to be the signal for everyone to run at great speed. Whenever this happened, I made sure I ran in the opposite direction.
Some players sprinted large distances, plunging across the drainage ditches that lined the edges of the fields, followed by 100 warriors charging at full pelt. On occasion, a man would thrust his hand up towards the sky, a salute met by a volley of Kalashnikov fire. I decided that perhaps this indicated a score, but I still wasn’t sure just how they had done so.
Going to Extremes Page 17