The Prophet's Camel Bell Page 10

  So the Qoran gives suffering a meaning and refuses the finality of death. I saw the necessity of this belief, without which life for these people would be intolerable. I would have shared such a faith, if it had been a matter of choice, but I could not. To me, it seemed that these children died point-lessly, and vanished as though they had never been, like pebbles thrown into a dark and infinite well.

  ——

  The rains were not quite over yet. One evening a strong wind whirled up out of nowhere. The sky opened, and within minutes the entire camp was flooded. Everyone rushed around, trying to anchor things down. Under the pelting rain and wind, the big tent was on the point of collapse. Jack and Abdi hurriedly tied the guy-ropes from the tent to the LandRover, while Arabetto turned the Bedford truck around so that all our possessions would not get soaked. The camp was a shambles, six inches deep in water, like a big shallow balleh. Drenched to the skin, we ploughed through the water, gathering up ropes, buckets, shovels, before they could float away. Finally everything was more or less secure, and we all hastily took shelter in the big tent. The ferocity of the storm was something to behold – rain lashing like bursts of gunfire, the big wind beating at our canvas, the earth turned into a swamp, the flashes of sheet-lightning, the brooding sky.

  In the tent, waiting for the rain to ease, we experienced that sense of companionship which sometimes occurs during even a minor crisis. Ourselves, Hersi, Mohamed, Abdi, Arabetto, young Omar the survey helper, the other drivers and labourers – we all talked together easily and lightly.

  Could thunder ever kill a man, Mohamed wondered. Jack attempted to explain what thunder was, whereupon both Hersi and Arabetto maintained that they had known this all along. The exact same information, Hersi added with more piety than accuracy, was to be found in the Qoran.

  After the storm, Jack and I returned to our truck, and the Somalis sat around the fire until nearly morning. Hersi led the singing, chanting the verse of a long narrative poem, while the others joined in the chorus. For a long time we listened to these strong voices singing in the African night. They blended with the rustle of water as the streams poured across the desert and emptied into the tugs. Occasionally we could hear the shrilling of still-wakeful birds in the thorn trees, and the mournful cry of the night-flying ghelow. All this was good, in ways we could not explain, better than anything we had ever known before.

  Every day the Illaloes went through their drill. The corporal barked out orders, and I discovered that these bush police were trained in English. The drill commands were all the English that most of them knew. The words, therefore, had undergone a subtle transformation and were given a Somali intonation until they were scarcely recognizable to me.

  “Ra – toor!” shouted the corporal, and the men turned right.

  “Sho – hah!” And they shouldered arms.

  “Ki – mah!” They understood him perfectly, and commenced a quick march.

  They did not neglect their ancient skills, however. When they had time to spare, they practised spear throwing. One afternoon we had a spear-throwing contest, with the Somalis from our camp pitted against some visitors from a nearby rer. Our men won, much to their delight, although the local herdsmen appeared rather disgruntled at this unexpected reversal, for most of those in our camp were men of the magala, town-dwellers who were not reckoned to be as handy with a spear as the men of the desert. I waited until the visitors had gone, not wanting to embarrass our staff, and then I tried pitching a few spears myself. I did very poorly. The difficulty was not only one of strength – the chief skill to be mastered was balance. You must know exactly how to hold the spear and when to release it. A good spearman can kill a lion with what appears to be an exceedingly inadequate weapon to use against such a beast.

  Somali boys are taught how to throw spears from an early age, and begin practising with miniature ones. Even when they join the police or the army, and learn to use other weapons, it often remains second nature with them to trust their spears most of all. One evening we heard low growls and snarls outside our camp, and the terrified cry of a young camel which was being attacked by a hyena. The Illaloes immediately dashed out. The first man was practically on top of the hyena when he suddenly realized that in the heat of the moment he had instinctively thrown down his rifle and picked up his spear instead. He came back to the camp for his gun, looking very sheepish, and the others teased him for days.

  We packed up and prepared to move camp. A messy procedure, this, for we had had rain the night before and now everyone was slithering perilously through the mud. Our camp, usually in good order, now resembled a garbage dump. Tin charcoal burners, bedrolls, old vegetable peelings, boxes and tools – all were scattered about in wild disarray.

  “We may as well have a quick lunch before we go,” Jack said. “Tell Mohamed not to fuss – just a tin of beans.”

  The camp tables were already packed. We sat down to luke-warm baked beans with our plates balanced precariously on a baramile, a squarish metal water-container. We were a sorry looking sight, the pair of us. I was wearing canvas tennis shoes which were caked with wet mud, a pair of Jack’s socks, a wrinkled old cotton skirt and blouse, and a kerchief wound around my head turban-style. Jack was clad in mud-splattered khaki shorts, a filthy bush-shirt and a fedora which looked as though it had been handed down through countless generations.

  We heard the sound of a car approaching. Jack glanced up, stared and then gasped.

  “Do you see whose car that is?”

  Quickly I looked, and observed with horror the shiny black Humber. His Excellency the Governor of Somaliland had chosen this day to pay a visit to our camp.

  We had met the Governor under formal conditions at Government House, and had been startled by the shrewdness of his questioning about Jack’s work. He seemed to know all about everything – not a detail had escaped him. He had asked me, very directly, what I did with myself in camp. I had stammered over a reply, hesitating to tell him that I spent most of my time in attempting to translate Somali poems and folktales. Later I realized that I should have told him, for it was a subject which interested him.

  This morning in camp, however, we could think of only one thing – he was a man who placed considerable emphasis upon formality. Only a short time before, we had read in a book about Kenya a description of him in his days there, when he used to don full-dress uniform to go and inspect a distant post where only four African policemen were stationed. We rose, shuffled through the mud, faced the splendid car and the tall white-clad man.

  His Excellency remained calm and unperturbed. Never once did he refer to our disorganized state. He acted as though everything were in perfect order. He did not even lift an eyebrow in mild surprise.

  There were no repercussions from this visit. Only indirectly did we later learn that His Excellency had made enquiries at P.W.D. to make sure that we had been issued with the proper camping equipment.

  The night came when we saw the symbol of Islam plainly visible in the sky. The thin crescent moon, with the one star in startling symmetry above it, hung like a pendant of gold against the black throat of the sky. Ramadan had begun.

  “There is no God but God,” the muezzins called, and the People of the Book knelt in mosques of marble or mud, from Dakar to Kabul, from Ankara to Abadan, their faces turned towards the yearned-for city, receiver of pilgrims, holy Mecca.

  In that assembly of wealth and want, of kings and fellaheen, praying for strength in the month of fasting, the tribesmen in the Somali desert also knelt, unaware that they were among the least blessed of Allah’s subjects. Their worship was as bare and lacking in outward splendour as their lives. Their mosques were circles of brushwood, their ritual ablution waters the brackish dregs of mud pools or simply the sand, their religious relics the memory of graves abandoned in the desert. No minarets drew their eyes to the place of prayer. Across the Haud, only the red termite-mounds stood higher than a man, and the thorn trees where the vultures waited for the next Jilal. Th
e grandeur of Islam, the riches of Persia and Arabia – these were only fables, heard, like the hope of heaven, with a longing that could not conceive of its object. Yet poverty gave them its compensations. The fasts of Ramadan held no unaccustomed terrors. Hunger and thirst they knew as well as the faces of their kinsmen. They had no light but the ash-coated embers of their campfires to rob the luminous star and crescent of its gold, and no intrusive doubts to rob it of its meaning. Faith to them was as necessary as life, inevitable as death. They looked up and knew the Word had been made visible. The Lord of the Three Worlds, Creator of men and djinn, had given a sign and a symbol to His people.

  Muslim law forbids the taking of any liquid or food during the daylight hours in Ramadan, and even forbids the swallowing of saliva. In camp, only our meals were prepared during the day. At sundown everyone prayed as usual, and then they were allowed to break their fast. They had another meal at two a.m., and prayers and discussions went on during most of the night. It was therefore necessary for them to sleep in the afternoon, and this they did for as long as possible in order to lighten the fast, so the work was slowed down to a maddening degree. It was a trying time. Tempers became short; old grievances were brought forth; everyone went around spitting profusely.

  But in the evenings, after they had eaten, they had a sense of well-being and sometimes they would gather to listen to our small “saucepan” radio, so called because its round blue metal case resembled a cooking pot. Jack fiddled with the dial, and got dance music from Nairobi, sounding thin and far away and dreary. At times we managed to get a station in India, and listened to the high-pitched, nervous, syncopated music. Sometimes it was sensuous drum-filled music from Morocco, or snatches of melody from Ethiopia, a single flute with a high sweet sound, a rustling and rippling music like a mountain stream. One evening we achieved Radio Pakistan, and an argument arose between Hersi and Arabetto over what language was being spoken.

  “I am hearing very plainly,” Hersi said. “That is Arabic.”

  “No, Hersi, that’s not Arabic.” Arabetto, being half Arabian, had grown up speaking the language.

  “Yes, it is,” Hersi insisted. “You are not understanding it because it is grammatical Arabic.”

  Other issues arose in our evening sessions. Hersi explained to me about the “low” tribes, saying they used to be servants of the “higher” tribes.

  “You know – the same way the black people in some parts of Africa are being servants to the Europeans.”

  He excluded the Somalis from this classification. They were men doing a job because they chose to, not because they had to. They passionately believed this, and in a way it was true. All of them had a few camels in the interior plains, somewhere, and could return to their tribes if they wanted. None of the men in our camp, with the single exception of Arabetto, had cut themselves off from their tribes. This was a good thing at the present time, for it enabled them to maintain their identity under the impact of an outside culture. But I wondered about the future. When this country had self-government, what then? How long would it take them to overcome inter-tribal bickering, or could it ever be overcome as long as the economic reasons for it still existed, the shortages of water and grazing? The tribal system might be anachronistic in some parts of Africa now, but despite its drawbacks, could it ever really be done away with here, where membership in a tribe was a nomad’s only protection in a harsh environment? But against the likelihood or even inevitability of continued tribal disagreements must be set the very real advantages which the Somalis had in comparison with some other African countries. They had a common religion and a common language. With certain local variations they possessed a common culture. Somalis from Mogadisciou to Djibouti knew the stories of Arawailo the wicked queen, or the legends of Darod or Sheikh Ishaak. The Esa around Borama could speak with the Ogaden men, and be understood. The Habr Awal in the Guban and the Habr Yunis in the Haud spoke the same words when they prayed.

  Gradually we unearthed the presence of another irony, this time one which struck us as amusing. In Hargeisa and Berbera we had heard a number of sahibs and memsahibs holding forth on the insensitivity of the Somalis, whom they believed to be incapable of any emotion as subtle as tenderness or love. Now we discovered that the Somalis, for their part, believed precisely the same about the English, whom they regarded as utterly uninterested and indeed childishly uninformed in matters of love.

  Love was one of the two great subjects of Somali poetry, the other being war. Love between men and women did not here contain the dichotomy long ago imposed upon it in the western world by the church, that of separating it, as though it were oil and water, into elements labelled “spiritual” and “physical.” The Somalis recognized no such distinction. Furthermore, love – like tribal war, in their view – was not only a necessity and a pleasure, but a skill and an art. It was discussed interminably among those of the same sex, but men and women were not supposed to discuss love, even in the abstract, unless they were married or belonged to one another’s taboo group. The system of marriage was highly complex, and any blood relative, however distant, was taboo. So repugnant was the idea of incest, which would of course include any member of the taboo group, that talk could be relatively free within this group, for it was assumed that such talk would not under any circumstances lead to sexual contact. Within the “possible” group, however, all talk of love was banned, even between a boy of fourteen and a woman of eighty.

  Marriages were usually arranged by the two families, with an eye to mutual financial advantage. Together with the tribal elders, the men in both families met to settle the essential questions, the sums to be paid by the young man for the bride-price (yarad), the token payment (gabbati) made at the time of betrothal, the percentage of the man’s estate (meher) to be made out to his wife upon marriage, and the dowry (dibad) given by the bride’s family.

  But the choice was not entirely out of the young man’s hands. His family would attempt to find a girl who pleased him, and he would usually make enquiries about the girl, through an aunt, and would ask all kinds of pertinent questions – what were her manners like, had she good legs and breasts, was she pleasant-tempered, had she wit and thrift? Standards of womanly beauty among Somalis were very specific. To be truly beautiful, a girl should be fairly tall, plump but not fat, with ample hips and breasts. A woman’s buttocks should be well rounded – so important was this aspect of female appearance that Somali women often arranged their robes in a kind of bustle, to pad out their rumps in much the same way as women in our breast-conscious society assist nature with padded brassieres. Somalis placed great value upon a graceful walk and a proud bearing in a woman. The most favoured shade of skin was a light copper colour. Another mark of beauty was a brown or pinkish line across the teeth, a fairly common sight here. In one song the lover compares his beloved’s teeth to a white vessel made of the pale inner bark of the galol tree and bound around with a string of pink Zeilah pearls – a reference to this beauty mark. Dark shining gums were also admired. In a well-known poem, in which the lover enumerates the features of his beloved, he places this one high on the list – “Her gums’ dark gloss is like blackest ink –”.

  A young man saw his betrothed alone only once before marriage, when by custom he was allowed to spend a night with her. On this occasion he could undress her and do anything he wanted with her, short of actual intercourse. Should she prove a disappointment, however, practical considerations made it difficult for him to change his mind at this point, for if he did so, he forfeited the bride-price he had paid. With what care he scrutinized her, therefore, on the night of dadabgal, which means “to go behind a screen,” and she, no doubt, scrutinized him with an equally sharp eye. True, he could divorce her easily by Muslim law, but this procedure would involve lengthy wrangling between his family and hers. He could also take three other wives besides her, but it was a rare man here who could afford more than one or two wives. Sometimes a woman would say that her meher was the penis of he
r husband, by which she meant that she received no legal portion of his estate, for he had agreed instead to take no other wife.

  Love was an intense and highly emotional state – it was not expected to endure. Indeed, so much was it at variance with the starkness of usual life that no wonder love in this sense did not often survive for long after marriage. After marriage, Somali women, especially those of the desert, led lives of continual heavy work and drudgery. They cooked, cared for the flocks and children, wove the baskets and mats, fashioned and set up the huts, dismantled the camp when the tribe moved, and packed the household goods on the burden camels. They led the burden camels across the plains – but if they never rode the camels, neither did the men, for camels were almost never ridden in Somaliland. Not surprisingly, most women lost their beauty within a few years. Not surprisingly, also, they frequently became irritable and nagging. This was the chief complaint Somali men made about their wives.

  “What a tongue she has, that woman – like flame.”

  But the status of women was low, according to both tribal and religious traditions, and a woman’s wits and her sharp tongue were often her only protection. A husband who was unusually considerate of his wife would be thought weak and would be mocked at by his fellow tribesmen. Sexual fidelity was demanded of her, but not of him.

  Like the flowering desert after the drought, love was of a season, not for ever. While it flourished, therefore, let the songs be made and the beauty of young girls remarked upon, for soon enough they would enter their own Jilal.

  Love as it appeared in Somali poetry was many things. It was the sensuous and lyrical belwo:

  He who has lain between her breasts,

  Can call his life fulfilled.

  Oh God, may I never be denied

  The well of happiness.