Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Read online

  Warriors

  Life and Death among the Somalis

  GERALD HANLEY

  With afterwords by

  Joseph Hone and Aidan Hartley

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Afterword to the 1993 edition

  Afterword to the 2004 edition

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  TRUE SOLITUDE is when the most restless part of a human being, his longing to forget where he is, born on earth in order to die, comes to rest and listens in a kind of agreed peace. In solitude, once the taste has settled, a man can think upon death with as much pleasure as upon life, and it is in solitude that one can best understand that there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here, that there is no losing and no winning, no real end to greed or lust, because the human appetite for novelty can only be fully satisfied by death.

  Thousands of days and nights spent in wildernesses taught me that a person can never truly know another, or be known by another, and that the pleasure of life is in the trying. A man can never convey fully what it is that so strangely disturbs him, the uneasy unrest in him that nothing material can properly satisfy. It is a fear of accepting this which makes a man fear what he thinks to be loneliness, a being alone, without other people. Acceptance of enforced solitude gradually dissolves this illusion. After long solitude when you sit and talk with others you realise that most of what we say to each other means very little at all. Perhaps that is why a Zen monk will give a silent sermon to a multitude, laughing without trace because he knows there is nothing to say which does not require emotional undertones to give it the appearance of credibility. Even so, one likes to go on talking rubbish with friends, while listening to oneself doing it. At least solitude teaches one to listen to oneself talking this rubbish, whereas before one thought one’s every word was golden with value. In the early months of isolation in a wilderness, particularly when burdened with responsibilities which may suddenly turn dangerous, among actively violent and savage people, a sort of hysteria develops in the character. Ferocity will be replied to ferociously, out of fear, and fear is hatred. One’s first sight of ferocity arouses hatred for the ferocious, and one is liable to respond with savagery. It is hard to describe the hatred and contempt one can feel for tribesmen who have slain the women of their enemies, or caused them to die of thirst. Later, when hysteria has been replaced by acceptance of isolation – the fact that one is hundreds of miles out of reach of ‘rescue’ should anything go wrong, one feels merely contempt for savagery. You do not hate the active savage anymore. You realise instead the size of the pitiful value he places on the need to kill, the need for revenge, the desire to humiliate his enemy (which includes you), especially when thousands of helpless people were being slain by bombs in European cities every night. One knew then that one was one with the savage, while not being so innocently honest about one’s savagery as the desert savage. Then despair tries to set in.

  There is nothing like isolation in an atmosphere of electric violence for bringing before one’s mind the understanding that the varnish of two thousand years is so thin as to be transparent. It is living in civilisation that keeps us civilised. It is very surprising, and alarming at first, how swiftly it vanishes when one is threatened by other men, men of almost mindless resolve. They know if you are frightened of them. They know too if you will kill as readily as they.

  But the fear does slowly seep in, if you are isolated for long enough among warriors who hate what you represent, a threat to their joyous wars.

  I once told a chief that I would kill him myself if he let his warriors go killing again (something he was planning to do). He liked that. He smiled, after studying my face. After all he could understand that far more easily than the kind of government he thought I represented. Yet he knew I meant it because I had come to hate him, as much as he hated me. Even so he started laughing, and I laughed with him at the absurdity of our situation in that wilderness.

  ‘What if I cannot stop the warriors?’ he said.

  ‘Do you want to stop them?’ I asked him. He laughed. ‘I will be honest,’ he said. ‘I do want them to kill their enemies. But I will try and stop them. You are not allowed by the government to kill me, are you?’ he asked me, serious and calm.

  ‘I’m not allowed to, but I will,’ I assured him. ‘All you have to do is to see that your warriors do no more killing.’

  That threat to the chief was a sign of fellow savagery, though I did not know it until years later. It was a sign of fear, fear of what might come if tribal killing started again. If one could kill the real cause of the blood feuds, this chief, then the cause of the trouble would be gone. It seemed simple, and the chief understood its simplicity.

  I had no desire to civilise these wild nomads, and told them so quite often. They could kill again after I had gone, but while I was there among them I wanted peace. This seemed very unreasonable and selfish, to the chiefs with whom I discussed it.

  ‘Then you do not care what happens to us?’ one of the chiefs said, with that ready playful wit one appreciated so much among the nomads.

  ‘If you chiefs could vanish,’ I told them, ‘your young men would have a chance to forget the feuds of the past. You are out of date now.’

  And that was true, and tragic too: the story of all the tribal cultures which have seen the cement mixers and the schoolmasters on the horizon, and feared them.

  The nomads were just as maddened by that huge glaring sun above as were we few white men thrown by chance among them.

  Yet it was the isolation more than anything which was hardest to bear, at first. Eventually one grew to love it, and those who knew long isolation in those Somali wastes and survived it, will miss it forever. It was the most valuable time of one’s life.

  One had years of wilderness in which to brood on the reasons why men kill each other, in wilderness in which killing a man was only an act of pleasure, though disguised as a tribal duty. One had years to discover that one’s longing for mail, newspapers, radio, could slowly diminish. After Somalia nowhere would ever be lonely, or isolated, again. The silence of wilderness eventually seeps in and makes an area which will always long for that kind of silence again.

  To wake up at first light, a flea on a prairie of rock and sand, each morning, is to realise that one’s own importance is something one highly overrates. It also teaches one to love life, and to try and not kick too hard when death slips in and it is time to go.

  One was mad, all right, after a year of it. One sees that now, looking back.

  Chapter 2

  PASSING DOWN the long coastline of Somalia in an Italian ship the other week I saw again the scorched, burned, dried-out rock and hot sand on which I used to sit with Hashim at night and talk. I have never forgotten one particular thing he said to me.

  ‘When all your machines, and ships, and aircraft, and all those things you make
, when they are all finished, our Arab dhows will still be sailing the seas, and we Arabs will hold together the world that we made, from India and farther East too, to here and to Europe. We are not finished yet, even though we are beggars now.’

  Even if he had not confided that thought to me one could never forget Hashim; his gentleness, his fine presence, his dignity, his quiet, sardonic humour, and most important of all I can never forget how he helped Chas and myself to keep mutinous troops (and they had a right to be mutinous) from shooting us out of hand.

  Kalanka. Hordio. Those two names for me will always summon up memories of swirling sandstorms, heat, and billions and billions of flies, and a threat of coming madness, and of Hashim, the merchant, the calm, knowing, patient, friendly Arab who was isolated with us in that wilderness of burning winds and hot rock.

  Staring at the Somali coast, five miles off, I wondered if Hashim was still there, back in the trade which the war had destroyed for him, or if he had gone to Hadramaut or Yemen.

  He used to wear a striped turban, a loose jacket of white cotton, and a long lungi reaching to his sandals. He had a face like an Andalusian Spaniard; long, sallow, grave, a handsome face with calm, watchful black eyes. He was about forty.

  ‘I have nothing left to give you,’ Hashim said to me the first time I sent for him. It was the end of 1941 and I had been a few months in that wilderness, a thousand miles or so from base.

  ‘What have you ever given me?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve never even met you before.’

  ‘I mean your army,’ he said. ‘I have lost my trade and my money because of this war, and when your army arrived here they took my camera and my pistol.’ He smiled. ‘I have nothing left to hand over to you. I am not dangerous any more.’ He spoke good Italian, and good Swahili.

  ‘I want to borrow some money from you,’ I told him.

  ‘Ah!’ He eyed me sardonically. ‘Money? The army wishes to borrow money from Hashim? Why? And what money? I haven’t any money.’

  ‘But you have more money than I have,’ I told him. ‘I have nothing. And I must find something to pay the troops with.’

  ‘I have loaned what I could afford to the other officer,’ Hashim told me. ‘A few hundred lire.’

  ‘You know the state of things here, Hashim,’ I said. ‘We are cut off, an enormous distance from base. No trucks come. We have no news. We are isolated here. We have had no money to pay our troops. I want you to help again.’ He laughed, and I laughed with him. Then Chas came in and he was laughing too, two conquerors trying to borrow money from an impoverished Arab so as to pay the troops, who were all recruited from ex-Italian askaris.

  ‘It is an interesting situation,’ Hashim said.

  The pay department never did solve the mess that it made of the pay situation up in that wilderness.

  Chas and I used to have conversations that went something like this: ‘Tension’s mounting among the askaris again. They’ve been sulking all morning.’

  ‘How long is it now since they were last paid?’

  ‘Five and a half months, except for that six hundred lire I borrowed from Hashim and gave them. But what’s the bloody use of that, about ninepence halfpenny. I don’t know why they don’t shoot us.’

  ‘How many times have they mutinied now?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘They can’t get hold of any ammo, can they?’

  ‘No. But those bayonets look a bit longer than usual today.’

  ‘It’s certainly marvellous how they put up with it. But they know we’re living like pigs too, that we’ve had no mail for months, no pay, no booze, and anyway if I see any goat meat again on my plate I’ll kill the cook. I told him so last night too.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Yes. Again.’

  We gave an order that in future the askaris could only mutiny on Fridays. They took it seriously, the sergeant explaining to me later that the troops could not understand why the conquerors had no money, sent no trucks up here, still had the troops using Italian weapons and equipment. Where was the conquest?

  ‘We’re still fighting in Abyssinia,’ we told the sergeant. ‘Every truck is needed. And even if we had trucks to spare they probably couldn’t be spared to come a thousand miles up here, yet. Patience.’

  Alone Chas and I cursed the transport people and the pay department, wanting the transport officers, who were drinking gin in Mogadishu, marooned in a stifling wilderness, as we were, so as to learn, etcetera …

  As if to dominate the troops, as if to show iron will, we drilled and trained them in the hot sand each day, and then drilled the raw NCOs, breaking them all from their Italian drill, and they began to respond, even forgetting their legitimate grievances for an hour or two. They were beginning to feel the approach of that mass surrender in drill on the square, when a unit begins to feel as one person in the steady, unragged crash of perfected arms drill. I used to watch their faces, their eyes.

  Sometimes during these drill sessions, which were held on the hard open sand arena in front of the sun-dried barrack huts, Hashim would come and watch from the shade. I used to wonder what he thought of the sharp, savage cries of command and the intense crashing responses of hands, rifles and feet from the troops. Did he, I wondered, begin to understand that it was this machinery of drill and discipline which had torn his world, and other worlds like his, to pieces? His expressionless, handsome face, his steady stare as the drill progressed, his folded arms, his whole patient and perhaps contemptuous gravity as he watched the stamping, wheeling soldiers who came from so many tribes, noble and base, caused me for the first time in my life to see that what is most stirring and martial in our civilisation is also often the most ridiculous, if stared at long enough. One simply could not imagine Hashim ever allowing himself to be in the position in which he would have to cavort like these soldiers, a rifle on his shoulder, listening tensely for yells of command from someone like myself, for pay and rations.

  The troops were getting no pay, and their rations were deteriorating as time went on and our isolation lengthened. Bully beef was finished, and now they had biscuits and dates and a cigarette issue, while we slew a ghostly, scraggy camel or a few famished goats for all of us as often as we could. We signed chits for these animals and handed them to the owners. One day everyone was going to be paid. I used to swear it to them, and they said they believed me, though I knew that a general rage and anxiety was growing on all sides. Hysteria came at times and we would compose long, bitter, sarcastic letters to command headquarters, which might have been on Venus or Mars, for we had no way of sending these cries of anger.

  There was a signal station, an old Italian military relic, the equipment in it so dangerous, due to electrical shortings, that the Italian soldier who looked after it used to pray before he used it. We had sent many pleading signals to headquarters a thousand miles away, until finally warned to stop. We had been told for the last time that help was on the way. So we were silent after that, and waited.

  How strange it was in 1962 to be sailing past that blazing yellow coast on which one had thirsted and yearned, and dreamed of onions and salad and bread and beer, and even of drinkable, living water. One would be going down to lunch soon, to the air-conditioned dining-room, to every kind of food, and with a bottle of wine to go with it.

  One remembered the bully beef and the problem of halal, discovered by the Mohammedan troops only when reminded of it by a holy man who had stormed at them. They had eaten that bully beef gladly until the holy men came and told them that this imprisoned beef in the small cans had never been killed according to Islamic rite, was haran – unclean, and not halal, fit for eating after the beast had had its throat cut by a sheikh. And yet it disappeared if one left it around.

  One remembered those nights at Gardo when one sat up and watched the fast-moving shadows of askaris moving across the sand to pick up the cans of bully beef one had thrown there in daylight, making sure in that daylight that one was seen throwing it away. It was good bee
f, and if even you wanted to commit suicide after months of it for every meal, it was still good beef, and very eatable, and they ate it, in darkness. Then the authorities, the Staff intellectuals, thousands of miles away, got a sheikh to kill some cattle, and after that a label appeared on the cans of beef saying in Arabic, Swahili and English that this beef was halal and had been killed by a saint, and was fit for all Mohammedans to eat. And one respected the holy men for making this struggle, even though one could have killed them in that wilderness, tortured as one was by a thousand insoluble problems, the biggest of which was oneself, while nodding understandingly as one saw those askaris gliding in darkness like hyenas to snatch up so silently the unclean, eatable bully beef.

  How fast our date supply went once we had discovered how to make liquor with it, and what was the name of that brilliant, ragged, haggard Italian prisoner who had made the liquor for us? It was better than arrack, and then he had made liquore di datteri, a sticky, oily date liquor. The three of us had got drunk on it at two o’clock in the morning and then went for a swim in the ocean.

  When the date problem became acute there was only one man to turn to, Hashim. He brought a dhow full of dates in to Kalanka six weeks later, how, we never discovered. He had his contacts. We doubled the date ration to the askaris, and drank more date liquor ourselves. And then one day, when the atmosphere among the troops was at its most delicate and worrying worst, a message came through on the dangerous sputtering radio to say that a convoy had left base and would reach us in about eleven days. There was money aboard, silver money. We rushed out and called the troops on parade, and I can remember that my voice was trembling with excitement as I told them that the long promised money was on its way. Carried away, Chas and I gave them an extra ration of the musty cigarettes, and the rest of the day off. Then we went back and started a date-liquor party. A few days after this Chas went down with dysentery again, and this time he nearly died. And thinking of Chas and that third attack of dysentery made me think of Carlo, the brilliant, lovable doctor of the Italian army who became our companion and friend as Chas sank under the ravage of that dysentery. How Carlo had fought to save him, with no drugs, and had saved him, and how he was repaid by the base wallahs two thousand miles away when they got their hands on him at Mombasa.