A Cure for Serpents Read online

  CONTENTS

  Illustrations

  Preface

  I A Doctor among the Jinns

  II A Cure for Serpents

  III Berber Country

  IV The Veiled People

  V The Solitary One

  VI The Shadow Merchant and the Empress

  VII The Road to Tripoli

  Glossary

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1 Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  2 The author with the Duke of Aosta

  3 The author with Mohamed ed Dernàwi and Aissa ben Jahia

  4 Mizda

  5 Mné

  6 An Abyssinian slave girl

  7 A Berber family at the Nàlut food cells

  8 Massawa

  9 Cunama fantasia: getting ready and the dance

  10 A peasant girl of Tigrinya descent

  11 A Dankali shepherd from Eritrea

  12 The end of the chase

  13 Neghesti

  14 Surrender of Tripoli: the author with General Montgomery

  Publisher’s Note

  The photographs used in the first edition are lost. The present reissue uses imperfect reproductions in the belief that readers will prefer them to none at all.

  PREFACE

  Sixty years ago King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy posted four men to Tripoli, to the remote coastal station of Buerat el Hsun on the Gulf of Sirte. The group was led by a very, very tall young man, a cousin of the King, later to become the Duke of Aosta. His medical officer was Alberto Denti, later to become the Duke of Pirajno. The first Duke of Pirajno had been created in 1642, by King Philip IV of Spain and Sicily, and Alberto Denti didn’t believe that ‘all men are equal’ – he only behaved towards them as if he did. This makes a nice change from some modern do-gooders who fervently preach Equality but quite often fail to act accordingly.

  A Cure for Serpents is about the ‘inestimable satisfactions known only to those who have lived in Africa’. It is a happy, uncomplicated, unpretentious book and the author comes through as unassuming, kindly, humorous. He valued what are now alarmingly known as ‘the old-fashioned virtues’ of courage, honesty and loyalty. He was apparently untroubled by inner doubts and conflicts about the role of the white man in Africa and he approvingly quotes Kipling’s reference to the sons of those who conquered India ‘possessing that territory by right of birth’. He goes on: ‘I would like on a humbler note to sing the praises of the unknown Italian women born and bred in our colonies. White or half-caste, they added savour to success when it smiled upon their men, and rallied their spirits when they were felled by adversity’.

  That allusion to ‘half-castes’ is revealing. It marks a fundamental difference between the Italians (or French or Portuguese) as colonisers and the British in that role. India’s large population of Anglo-Indians is witness to the fact that many British males allowed colour-prejudice to be cancelled out by more urgent emotions. But then, in relation to their offspring, master-race attitudes – convenient to justify one’s ‘civilizing’ mission – sternly reasserted themselves. Few British colonial administrators would have written in praise of India’s Eurasians as the Duke of Pirajno wrote of half-castes in the Italian colonies.

  The Duke spent several of his African years in Ethiopia, eventually becoming Chef de Cabinet to the Duke of Aosta when he was appointed Viceroy of what was then called Abyssinia. The Ethiopian chapters in this book are scarcely less hilarious than Evelyn Waugh’s recollections of that country, though they are much more tolerant and affectionate. In general, the Italians were not condescending to those they conquered. This must partly explain something which greatly surprised me when I trekked through Ethiopia’s highlands in 1967. Nowhere did I encounter the anti-Italian bitterness my reading had led me to expect. In Asmara – capital of the Italian colony of Eritrea, to which the Duke of Pirajno was posted in 1930 – there remained a few thousand Italians, most of whom had been born in the rather dreary Italian-built town. After the union of Eritrea with Haile Selassie’s Empire, in 1952, they had chosen to ‘stay on’ because to them Eritrea was home as nowhere else could be. Their relations with the Eritreans seemed to be excellent, and all the locals with whom I spoke declared emphatically that Italians were their favourite foreigners. Further south, in the town of Gondar – Ethiopia’s ancient capital – my Amhara host remarked that any Ethiopian government would have taken a century to build the roads and bridges and establish the telephone communications that were provided by the Italians in five years. People rarely referred to the Italians’ motives for this development of their country; having got rid of the occupying forces, the Ethiopians seemed to have amiably chosen to view the Italian era as an unmixed blessing.

  Many recently reprinted travel books have heightened our awareness of the pace of change – political, technological, ecological – during the past fifteen or twenty years. The Ethiopia I knew in 1967 had scarcely changed since the Duke of Pirajno travelled by mule ‘in caravans with hoardes of Gallas and packs of negroes, sleeping very often under the stars with a pack-saddle for a pillow’. It was not then a poor country, as the Indian subcontinent is poor. The peasants were indeed exploited in many areas by the land-owning Coptic Church, but they were adequately clothed and fed. I shared their diet for months and it was sustaining, though monotonous. Yet already, because of deforestation and erosion, there were identifiable ‘starvation danger zones’ along my route through Tigre, Begemdir, Gojjam and Wollo provinces. I wrote at the time – ‘All over Addis Ababa, extravagant, meaningless new buildings rise at random from amidst a huddle of mud shacks, to offend both the eye and the reason of the beholder … Evidently these architectural frolics are inspired by a desire to create an impression of imminent prosperity. Much suffering might have been avoided by the spending of this money in drought areas. Addis is used as a screen behind which the Ethiopians themselves hide from the facts of their national life. In the 1960s the simplest way to gratify the old Amharic blind pride is by building a spectacular capital: to lessen trachoma or forestall famine in remote areas would be unobtrusive achievements, giving no impression of Instant Progress.. The formidable communication problem presented by the highland terrain is sometimes given as an excuse for this governmental flight from reality. Yet, unlike many other undeveloped countries, Northern Ethiopia is fortunate in having a uniquely healthy climate and a generally self-sufficient population … An energetic and responsible government could bring prosperity to most parts of the region’. But already, though I didn’t realise it, disaster was too close to be averted. Within seven years a Marxist military régime had replaced the Emperor and had attempted land-reform, following the famine of the early 1970s. They seemed however to lack the will, the resources and the know-how to cope with the combined effects of erosion and recurrent drought. It may be some small comfort to the Pirajno ghost that without the roads built by his countrymen the situation now would be even worse than it is.

  One of the Duke of Pirajno’s most attractive characteristics was his skill at vaulting cultural barriers and finding a friend on the other side – or a tribal ideal with which he could enthusiastically identify. He rejoiced to discover that the aristocratic louse-infested warriors of the Azdjer Tuaregs were ‘blood brothers to that Roland who, at Roncevalles, overpowered by the Moors and with the icy hand of death already gripping his heart, refused to retreat by so much as a step’.

  The Duke himself was frequently louse-infested; being superbly adaptable, he didn’t find it necessary to travel with a posse of servants bearing home-comforts. He relished his many opportunities to share in the hardships of his patients’ daily lives – in nomad desert encampment
s, on rugged mountainsides, in remote oases. He was less happy when called upon to serve in large towns, but his years in Asmara were redeemed by a pet lioness, reared from a tiny cub. The story of Neghesti records what must be one of the most remarkable leonine–human relationships ever to have developed.

  Being Dr Alberto Denti, as well as Duke of Pirajno, our hero had uncommon opportunities for entering harems. And being an Italian he had few inhibitions about recalling, vividly but decorously, what was revealed when some of his women patients disrobed. He frankly enjoyed describing the bodies of naked tribeswomen, paying special tribute to their breasts. These descriptions are neither scientific nor salacious. The Duke appreciated beauty: beautiful carpets, beautiful landscapes, beautiful buildings, beautiful women. Modern readers, coarsened by years of exposure to the vulgar exploitation of sex, will find these passages bland – almost coy. Yet when A Cure for Serpents was first published, in 1955 – just before the hectic dawn of the Permissive Society – it shocked some of the author’s British contemporaries. Certain retired pillars of the Raj, then in their seventies, thought it both unseemly and unprofessional – ‘No better than that Burton fella!’

  In his opening chapter, the Duke of Pirajno describes the Duke of Aosta as ‘grave or gay as his mood or the occasion demanded … his humanity caused him to be interested in everything and everyone … he was intolerant only of complacency, meanness and pomposity’. By the end of this book, readers will have recognised that these two dukes had many virtues in common.

  Dervla Murphy 1985

  Chapter One

  A DOCTOR AMONG THE JINNS

  ONCE upon a time there was a King.

  When I was presented to him I felt sorry for him; he seemed to me to be a prisoner of the surroundings into which he was born, to be humiliated by the tallness of his guards, resigned to the rascality of his servants and wearied by the vanity of his court.

  Those admitted to his inner circle knew him as a man of keen intelligence and wide culture, a natural sceptic with a pungent sense of humour tinged with pessimism.

  He was very short – but he had some extremely tall cousins.

  One of them – even taller than the rest – would have filled the role of a demigod had he lived in pagan times; in the heroic Christian era he would have been a crusader or a knight errant. But in this greedy age, when knights are no longer brave, when cowardice mocks at valour, when ideals perish, done to death by ignoble expediency, and the ambitious frog puffs itself up but acquires none of the attributes of the ox except its presumptuous and stubborn obtuseness, this goodly young man was out of place.

  He had an extraordinary quality – a radiance seemed to emanate from him and he had the gift of infusing into those around him something of the vitality of his own happy nature, which expanded in the glow of warm, human contacts and withered in the shadow of conventionality and compromise. He was grave or gay as his mood or the occasion demanded, and his humanity caused him to be interested in everything and everyone; he was sensitive to both the joys and sorrows of others, intolerant only of complacency, meanness and pomposity – which last he knew how to deflate with a single biting remark.

  One such remark was repeated to the King.

  Probably His Majesty – who was King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy – had no desire to become angry with the cousin he loved, but he lacked the energy to resist the zeal of some of his more realistic courtiers.

  Perhaps, too, he thought that the punishment would be acceptable rather than otherwise to this Tall Young Man – who later became the Duke of Aosta – and who was always ready to engage enthusiastically in activities in distant lands. Or perhaps it was merely that at that particular moment the King found it impossible to forgive him his enormous height.

  Whatever the reason, the cousin was posted to Tripoli, and on an August day which now seems fabulously remote he found himself in exile at Buerat el Hsun, in the Gulf of Sirte, with three officers, one of whom was a physician.

  Thus it was that in Buerat el Hsun I opened my first African dispensary.

  * * *

  The time was 1924. In those days our colonies were interesting places – either because Rome had not yet made any attempt to regulate the lives of those who lived in them, or because, seeing that there were no prospects of easy and rapid enrichment, the Italians who went there were few, and endowed with unusual qualities and singular defects.

  There were few colonial civil servants, for bureaucratic inflation had not yet extended to the colonial service. In general, officials were drawn from other departments and from the armed forces, and to a large extent they were men of undeniable worth and of an unimpeachable honesty which today would be regarded as quixotic.

  The younger officials were trained in the school of men to whom honesty was as the breath of life, who took their responsibilities seriously and were imbued with a high sense of duty which nowadays seems to belong to the realm of make-believe. Labouring as they did for an ungrateful country, which at that time seemed to have a definite aversion for those who served her with loyalty and enthusiasm in places where everything was hostile, they found their recompense in those inward and inestimable satisfactions known only to those who have lived in Africa.

  During the last war most civil servants in the African colonies were withdrawn to the towns, but many remained in the outlying districts, and many lost their lives there. In Tripoli, after the Italian and German troops had retreated into Tunisia, all the civilian officials remained at their posts pending the arrival of the British. These officials, with the help of a quantitatively negligible but qualitatively invaluable police force, succeeded in maintaining order and preventing outbreaks of violence even in those areas where the withdrawing military authorities light-heartedly abandoned shops and stores bursting with food, equipment, arms and ammunition.

  Many of those whom the regular civil servants and the Army called ‘civilians’ were at that time pioneers in the real sense of the word. Later, owing to the undue multiplication of this category, the term ‘pioneer’ was used ironically, but those early adventurers were pioneers indeed – concessionaires, professional men, tradesmen, artisans, who succeeded in making a life for themselves on the desert shores of Libya and formed the nucleus of the Italian population. There was also, of course, the usual proportion of disappointed men who, impelled by native restlessness or by life’s delusions, sought to forget the past and to build themselves a new life under a strange sky.

  All these types were represented in microcosm at Buerat el Hsun.

  There was the camel corps officer – a horseman of European fame who, fascinated by the desert, renounced the future international triumphs which certainly awaited him; there was the young second-lieutenant who ‘disembarked with joy and exultation’ in the hope of passing into the regulars, the seasoned and taciturn colonial veteran, the unfrocked monk who made a living as a photographer, the centurion with the immortal wife. This last likeable and unhappy youngster had surprised his wife in flagrante delicto and had riddled her with bullets, one of which entered the nape of her neck and emerged through her mouth after splitting her tongue. Three months later this imperishable lady, completely recovered, gave evidence in court without the slightest impediment in her speech.

  Buerat el Hsun was a coastal station, caught between deserts of sea and sand. There was no local population and the nearest Bedouin tents were about eighty miles away. But although we were isolated we were certainly not lonely.

  Along the shore stretched the tents of the married quarters of a desert unit; a hundred Blackshirts and a company of Eritrean Askaris constituted the military garrison. Occasionally a troop of sawārī in transit halted for a while; less often, the ‘Gina’, an ancient little steamer and relic of the Ottoman Navy, dropped anchor off shore, bringing us provisions, letters from Italy and gossip from Tripoli.

  In Arabic, Buerat el Hsun means the ‘wells of the Hsun’, but no one knew who these Hsun were, and all trace of them had long since
vanished. Our little world which for a time had its being in that remote corner of the Sirte has also disappeared and gone the way of the Hsun. The Very Tall Young Man died a prisoner in the hands of the British; the intrepid horseman who commanded the camel corps was treacherously struck down in an ambush; the centurion preceded his tenacious consort into the next world; the second-lieutenant sleeps beneath the cross planted by his comrades – and even the photographer-monk is lost among the shadows of a monastery which offered peace and forgiveness to a repentant sinner.

  When the few survivors meet and talk of those far-off days and of that little world which has vanished, they are perpetually astonished to discover that it was not all a dream.

  * * *

  So there we were, in the family encampment stretched out along the shore. There was no lack of patients, and the various aspects of native life provided me with ample material for study. I was, moreover, forced to learn Arabic, and an old, half-paralysed non-commissioned officer named Dimadima initiated me, with the aid of a rapidly disintegrating spelling book, into the art of writing from right to left.

  The camp was composed of people from every corner of Libya – for the most part women and children. They lived in the camp as in a large village, under the supervision of an old shumbāshī whose many wounds entitled him to a period of rest while the unit was away in the south, on the edge of still unoccupied territory, endeavouring to cut off the caravans which supplied the rebels. The women sighed and said resignedly that it would be a long war, unconscious of how much may be condensed into the words: a long war, a soft-hearted government, a wily rebel.

  Practically the whole gamut of tropical pathology was represented in the camp, and the work was intensely interesting because of the very diverse origins of the subjects. All the various forms of malaria were present; the whole range of intestinal parasitology was covered; tuberculosis, very prevalent among people transferred from the desert or from the mountains to the coast, was rife; we had all the endemic ophthalmias of the East, venereal disease in all its most florid manifestations, and children’s and women’s complaints in plenty.