Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Read online

  This was far from the case. As usual in colonial outposts, social stratification was more pronounced than at home. Even the beaches were segregated to prevent officers, other ranks and civilians catching sight of each other’s flesh. Social streaming had always been a part of Aden life. In the 1930s, the British were the A Stream, notable Arabs, Parsees and other non-British VIPs the B Stream; the C Stream was the Rest. In the 1950s and 1960s it was no less rigorous. New accommodation for refinery staff in Little Aden was arranged in four grades, from detached through semis and terrace houses down to flats, the latter equipped with yards ‘for purdah ladies to take the air’. The roads were named after English counties.

  Aden’s emblem at this time might well have been the stuffed dugong, or sea cow, displayed to gullible ratings as a mermaid: it was a creature more of sea than land; it was beginning to come apart at the seams; it was monumentally ugly; and it was billed as something it was not. Despite the sun, the sea and the servants, Aden was a more a mixture of Gibraltar, Crewe and Hell with duty-free facilities.

  With the post-Suez influx of servicemen and camp-followers, the old Arabists and other enthusiasts were being squeezed out. For them Aden, the Eye of Yemen, had always been its eyesore, a place to be left as quickly as possible for bracing trips into the Protectorate; now they were seeing the Colony inundated by tens of thousands of outsiders. Khur Maksar became a bungalow jungle, and Arabic ‘Adan’ was transformed into Anglo-Saxon, adenoidal ‘Eighden’, a phonetic semblance of some Kentish village. For the majority of Britons during Aden’s final colonial decade the Arabs existed, if at all, on the periphery, insulated from them by a social Bombay mix of banyans and baboos. Ships’ passengers were invited to go and look at the cargo coolie they would find taking a nap on deck. ‘You’ll see a little brown man (probably he won’t come up to your shoulder) … Often he is quite surprisingly handsome … His habitual expression is, I should say, one of sardonic resignation.’ The point of contact was tangential, if that.

  Increasingly, too, even those who lived and worked in South Arabia and spoke the language kept themselves largely at a remove. Harold Ingrams, an exception to the never-the-twain style of administration, attributes this distancing to the influx of scores of colonial officials from Africa who were used to a totally different social system. Ingrams’s belief that the British could penetrate Arabian society and thought was attacked by the Governor of Aden, Sir Charles Johnston: ‘I could never follow him in his view that the Englishman in Arabia must try to think as an Arab. It is, I believe, an impossible undertaking, and those who have attempted it usually end up in an esoteric faith based on the incomprehensibility of Arabia and the inherent hopelessness of any Western attempt to influence its development … the attitude [is] … half rational, half mystical, and wholly oracular.’ A photograph in Sir Charles’s book, The View from Steamer Point (the title is in itself significant), shows him taking tea with the Qu’ayti Sultan in al-Mukalla. The atmosphere in the Delhi-Edwardian sultanic saloon is distinctly uncomfortable: the Sultan, in a curious winged turban, looks like an eisteddfod bard; the Governor frowns into his cup as though he’s found a scorpion in the tea-leaves.

  Aden is sui generis, and in their last decade there the position of the British was in itself increasingly bizarre. Yet Aden is conceptually the closest they and other Westerners of a certain age can get to Yemen. It was surely the Adenis of the 1960s to whom Margaret Thatcher was referring when she advised a British couple about to leave for a posting in San’a: ‘You’ll have to watch the Yemenis. They’re very fly, you know.’

  Still, early in 1963 something of a calm prevailed. Even if the mercury was rising in the political thermometer, sang remained froid. The armed forces had not had to exert themselves, except for the aptly named Flight-Lieutenant R. Sweatman who had, for unexplained reasons, made a forty-mile route march across the desert in eighteen hours with only five pints of water; the only violence reported was an attack on a group of RAF men, out climbing in the Western Protectorate, by eight four-foot baboons.

  Back in my days as a teacher of English, I often knew how the Queen must feel at Buckingham Palace garden parties. Nasir the engineer was number fifteen. For two months, I’d been teaching him the difference between ‘How do you do?’ and ‘What do you do?’; but it was the end-of-course oral test so I had to ask him yet again. ‘And what do you do, Nasir?’

  ‘I am an engineer.’

  I forced a smile of encouragement, then the prescribed ‘Oh, really? What sort of engineer?’ He told me he was in cement, which I also knew. I asked about his father; Nasir said he was dead. The past tense was uncharted ground. ‘And what did your father do?’

  Nasir looked out of the window at the San’a night. Was he struggling with some painful memory? Or with an irregular verb form? Then his eyes turned back to me, their corners creased, and his face broke into a wide grin.

  ‘My father killed the British!’

  Nasir’s father, Qahtan al-Sha’bi, waged a four-year war against the colonial authorities. His National Liberation Front (NLF) had its first success in Radfan, a mountainous area north of Aden near the border with the fledgeling Yemen Arab Republic. The place is now commemorated in a brand of cigarette; the date, 14 October 1963, remembered as the start of the Revolution in the south. In Radfan snipers tied down two British battalions for six months while the armed uprising spread to Aden, where the hand grenade became the NLF’s preferred weapon; in December 1963 they nearly succeeded in assassinating the High Commissioner, Sir Kennedy Trevaskis. A state of emergency was proclaimed which lasted until the British left and Qahtan, recognized as president, shed his futah and battledress tunic in favour of the former oppressors’ suit. He was the only member of the NLF leadership over forty.

  Over these four years the British found themselves under siege: from the NLF; from the unions, who also took up arms and metamorphosed into FLOSY, the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen; from Arab nationalism in general; and from the UN, which was calling for a proper constitutional state. They had their backs to the Federal wall, and even the wall was to go against them.

  A century earlier, in his Account of the British Settlement of Aden in Arabia, Captain Hunter had warned that ‘long residence [in Aden] impairs the faculties and undermines the constitution of Europeans’. Perhaps, though, it was a siege mentality that caused the final policy meltdown. Under attack from the guerrillas, the British reacted first by firing back at them, then attempting to infiltrate them (using an ‘undercover’ team led by a gigantic Fijian, Sergeant Labalaba of the SAS), and finally wooing them. Lord Shackleton was dispatched to Aden in April 1967 with the request, ‘Would you kindly refrain from shooting us? Then we can talk.’ ‘Impossible,’ the NLF retorted. ‘We must be seen to be driving you out.’

  And drive us out they did. For the military, such a loss of face was unbearable. Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mitchell of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders put it thus: ‘Well, you know, purely as a soldier … the whole prestige of the Army depended on going back in, obviously. You know, we were thrown out, if the truth be known, and we had to go back in.’

  Mitchell was speaking to the television cameras in early July 1967. In the UK he became known as ‘Mad Mitch’, something of a folk hero. Eyes glinting beneath his glengarry, his clipped Sandhurst syllables hardly concealed a note of triumph. The Argylls, pipes skirling and kilts frou-frouing in the land of the checked futah, had retaken Crater after a thirteen-day rebellion by the previously loyal Armed Police. They had even – an important consideration – saved money by not using the Carl-Gustav antitank missile with which they had planned to open the doors of the Chartered Bank, their intended HQ. Someone had the bright idea of ringing the bell, and the caretaker let them in.

  ‘We’re a very mean lot,’ Mad Mitch went on. ‘We’re very fair, you know, but if anyone starts any trouble they’ll just get their heads blown orf. They’ll get the message in time, you know.’ Time, however, had run ou
t. Senior officers put the lid on Mitch, who went on to become a Conservative MP.

  The NLF and FLOSY were fighting the British; they were also fighting each other. The third element, the Federation sultans, had at first been backed by a Labour government in Whitehall under pressure from Washington (once in office, Harold Wilson had dropped his lookalike, al-Asnaj); but when in 1966 Whitehall realized how much the place was costing, the decision was made to drop Aden itself, Federation, sultans and all. Bombay had complained in the 1870s of the heavy burden of Aden’s cost, £150,000 a year; by 1965 the most conservative estimate of its annual drain on the Whitehall budget was £60 million. The Foreign Secretary George Brown summed things up in September 1967 when he said, ‘we want to be out of the whole Middle East as far and as fast as we possibly can’.

  We shall never know whether, given more time, the Federation would have collapsed anyway once its ties were cut, or whether it could have survived, Pinocchio-like, without its puppet-master. In the event most of the sultans went on to a life of comfortable ennui in Saudi Arabia; many of their supporters were killed. Whitehall, like a twitchy gambler who loses his nerve and backs a sure winner when the odds are lowest, finally threw in its lot with the NLF. The first UK-NLF talks began on 21 November 1967 at the Geneva YWCA; later that month it was rumoured that RAF planes were being sent to attack FLOSY positions.

  The Federation, in the words of its Foreign Minister Muhammad Farid al-Awlaqi, felt ‘completely betrayed’ by Britain’s dishonourable action; for the ‘Fidaralis’, the phrase wa’d injlizi, an Englishman’s word, took on a new meaning. According to David Ledger, a political officer in Aden at the time, one of the Federation rulers went further: ‘It is far better to be Britain’s enemy than Britain’s friend. If you are the former there is a possibility of being bought. If you are the latter there is a certainty of being sold.’ The British weren’t just paranoid – in South Arabia everyone really was against them.

  It was three in the afternoon on 30 November 1967. A windmill looked on motionless as the last helicopter clattered into the air. The sun was past its height and heading for the sea behind Little Aden, but a fierce light still glared off the Khur Maksar salt pans. The British had left, in the words of Brigadier Lunt, like thieves in the night.

  Publicly, and with masterly understatement, George Brown declared that ‘some things which the United Kingdom expected to settle before independence may be left pending’. The last High Commissioner, Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, admitted that ‘our period of occupation did the country little permanent good’. Richard Crossman, in the privacy of his diary, confided: ‘Chaos will rule after we’ve gone and there’ll be one major commitment out – thank God.’

  ‘The problem is the coffins,’ said Abdullah the sexton. ‘The water rotted them and they collapsed.’

  We were drinking clove-flavoured tea in the Christian cemetery of al-Ma’alla. Many of the graves had become gaping holes, as though their occupants had jumped the Doomsday gun and burst out. Aden had just suffered one of its rare but disastrous floods, and even the dead were affected. The surface of the ground was littered with bleached shells and bits of coral – at first I took them for bones, transformed by some sea-change, but then realized that they had been used to decorate the graves. Some of the monuments had been defaced recently. Abdullah shook his head sadly. ‘Those who did it are not Muslims,’ he said.

  In this place of toings and froings, here were the ones who had stayed on. Soldier and civilian, tommy and toff lay side by side; the younger sons of county families shared the earth with Greek and Chinese merchants, Italian submariners, a solitary French Baha’i – one of the small number of post-independence interments – and Henry Martin Sandbach, who died at sea in December 1896 ‘as a result of wounds received attempting to save the life of his shikari whilst on a lion hunt in Somaliland’. A good number of the graveyard’s occupants had expired, their headstones said, ‘on entering Aden’.

  The British left much behind beside their dead. Right-hand-drive Humbers, Rileys and Morris Minor 1,000s chug around the streets; across from the Sailors’ Club a long-stationary Bedford van sells fish and chips, wrapped these days in the Straits Times. Pillar boxes are still in use, but with the royal cypher chiselled off. A driver is a draywal, a screwdriver – by some obscure semantic quirk – dismis. An old man stopped me on the street and recited ‘One, two, buckle my shoe …’ Queen Victoria used to sit in the garden next to the Crescent Hotel; she now lives in the National Museum’s back yard.

  Time has picked clean much of what was left by the duty-free vultures of a generation ago, but the signs are still up at Steamer Point: shipping companies, chandlers, Stop-and-Shop, the Seamen Store, the Lax Stores (motto: ‘Try us before COMMITTING yourself’). The latter carries an eclectic stock – stopwatches, bedpans, defunct petrol lighters, bits of diving gear and so on; but the main line is in lacquered and mounted sea creatures. A faint whiff of putrefaction spills out on to the street.

  ‘They never buy anything,’ sighed the man behind the counter as a group of Russian ratings loped out of the shop. ‘Well, maybe a lobster now and then.’ He fumbled in the dust under the glass counter and pressed a pair of cufflinks into my hand. ‘Baltic amber.’

  ‘How much are they?’

  ‘Nothing. I like to give my best customers a little present.’ It was my first visit and I hadn’t bought anything. ‘Where did you say you were from? Germany? France? Italy? Belgium?’

  Belgium. We were here for 128 years, for heaven’s sake. We were the ones who understood the Arabs. We gave them pillar boxes, and Coventry. ‘I’m British.’

  ‘Ah. Then I’ve got a special present for you …’ He reached down into the lowest shelf of the counter, found whatever it was and added, as he blew the dust off it, ‘something we forgot to give you before.’ He resurfaced and held out the object.

  It was a hand grenade.

  ‘There’s nothing in it now,’ he said, smiling. The grenade was empty. It would make a fine cigarette lighter. I thanked the shopkeeper and left, still without buying anything.

  The eponymous proprietor of Aziz’s Bookshop is a better businessman. He knows the value of the period piece, his period being the early 1960s. High glass-fronted bookshelves contain copies of Billy Fury and Z-Cars fanzines, ‘9 Views of Aden – Coloured Real Photographs’, and greetings cards from the saucy Barbara Windsor blonde to the beatnik (‘Hey, I got so hepped-up about your birthday … like I almost combed my hair!’).

  Aziz exists in a perpetual autumn of disintegrating ephemera; to me, his shop smelt of childhood attics. As he listens to the BBC English Service, his days measured out by Just a Minute and The Vintage Chart Show, he must be aware that he didn’t get his turnover right. Still, he isn’t the first: Aden shopkeepers in the days of the Periplus, the later Rasulids, the Turks, all suffered from slumps caused by the vagaries of geopolitics. Small comfort.

  The history of Aden’s earliest trade is a matter of guesswork, but by the tenth century we have a clear picture of the port’s position at the hub of international commerce. The Cairo-based Fatimid dynasty had begun to outshine Abbasid Baghdad, and Aden became the entrepôt for its oriental supplies. Al-Muqaddasi, writing at the time, calls it ‘the entrance-hall of China and the warehouse of the West’; contemporary sherds of high-quality celadon ware have been found in the region, and the Far Eastern connection lasted – an early fourteenth-century inscribed stone discovered recently in Canton records the building there of a mosque gate and wall by a trader from Abyan, the area immediately east of Aden.

  The most detailed account of Aden’s medieval trade is provided by Ibn al-Mujawir, who lists the products brought to Aden from India, Sind, Ethiopia and Egypt, together with the duties paid on them. Detailed ledgers were kept, and on one occasion this caused friction between port officials and merchants. A party of Hadrami cloth traders arrived and were asked for their names. ‘Ba Arse, Ba Shit, Ba Slit, Ba Silent Fart, Ba Pubic Hair,’ they answered.*
The outraged customs officer refused to let the Hadramis through, so they were left waiting while their merchandise was trampled underfoot. By chance the Sultan was passing and asked what was wrong.

  ‘Sire,’ said the customs man, ‘their names are, … unmentionable.’

  ‘Well,’ answered the Sultan, ‘if you cannot bring yourself to mention their names, how can I take duty from them? I absolve them from all payment!’

  Security at the port was rigorous. Men were frisked everywhere, including ‘between the buttocks’; a crone was employed to examine every crevice of the female arrivals. In the slave market girls were stripped, perfumed and submitted to no less probing an examination.

  ‘Al-Hasan ibn Ali Hazawwar al-Firuzkuhi told me,’ Ibn al-Mujawir recorded, ‘ “I sold an Indian slave-girl to an Alexandrian at Aden. He kept her for seven days, and when he tired of her he alleged that she was defective and had a writ served on me on the grounds of selling poor-quality merchandise. The judge asked, ‘What is her defect?’ and the buyer said, ‘Her vagina is loose and flabby.’ So I retorted, ‘If your prick is so small that you can’t do your best to fill her up, then what use to you is her sleek, white, plucked and scented pussy?’ On hearing this the judge cried to those present, ‘OUT WITH THEM!’ So out we went. I returned to my work, the girl stayed with the Alexandrian, and I don’t know what became of either of them.” ’

  The medieval period was the high point of Aden’s trade until 1850, when it was transformed by its new Free Port status. Commerce rose again sharply with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and goods brought to Aden and listed by Hunter in 1877 include feathers, fireworks, fish fins and maws, shells and cowries, tortoiseshell, umbrellas and opium. The drug trade was legal but controlled: opium was not sold to Europeans ‘except under a pass’, and hashish had to cost at least Rs.100 a maund (about £10 for 28lbs) ‘in order to prevent abuse’. Trade was not only seaborne – around a quarter of a million camel-loads arrived from the interior annually.