The Prophet's Camel Bell

  “Why didn’t you tell me it was there?” Jack demanded. “I could have put it some place where it wouldn’t have spilled.”

  Hersi shook his head. “No. Such thing is not possible. If Allah was intending me to eating that ghee, it would not getting spilled.”

  Hersi came of a distinguished family. Risaldar-Major Haji Musa Farah had been his uncle. During the wars against Sultan Mohamed Abdullah Hassan at the beginning of this century, Musa Farah fought with the British and was the highest-ranking Somali in the Camel Corps. His exploits had become legends. Hersi spoke of him with reverence.

  “He was a man. Such we are not having in these days.”

  Hersi himself toiled mightily, but he would never see himself in such a high position as that of Haji Musa Farah. He cherished his uncle’s fame, and envied it, and yet it was a burden to him, too, not only as a personal reproach but as a heritage of community suspicion. For among the most anti-British of the Somalis, Hersi’s tribal section, the Musa Arreh, was taunted for having long been too close to the government.

  “Musa Arreh,” they said, “Ingrese Arreh.”

  ——

  Hersi was the peacemaker of the camp, and he applied himself to this task with enthusiasm. The night-long discussions, the bizarre arguments, the complicated settlement of quarrels – these were meat and drink to him.

  Arabetto overstayed his leave and arrived back in camp several days late, and Abdi, who was always gunning for him, tried to persuade Jack to fire him. Jack refused, and Abdi and Arabetto had a long and heated disagreement. Hersi acted as mediator, and later made a report to us, in which his own role as counsellor was emphasized to the full.

  “I saying to him, ‘Abdi dear, you are my sections. We are same tribe. But you ask me to tell the sahib to give discharge to Arabetto. I can’t do it, Abdi dear, I can’t do it, my cousin.’ And I saying to him, ‘Are we Muslims?’ And he saying, ‘We are Muslims.’ And I saying to him, ‘All right. If we are Muslims, must be we cannot sucking the blood of other Muslim peoples. This man is Arabian. Doesn’t matter his mother was Midgertein. He is Arabian. But he is Muslim. Must be we cannot sucking his blood.’”

  Then he told us of the advice he had given to Abdi regarding Europeans.

  “I saying to him, ‘Abdi, my cousin, you must keep from getting so hot. I am understanding the conditions of the Europeans better than you. You must giving the sahib a sweet answer. It is in their character. You must not shouting and getting so tempered.’”

  This gave us something to ponder, we in whose character it lay to need a sweet answer.

  One day Hersi received the news that his wife had just given birth to their third child. He was completely downcast, for it was another girl. Three girls – such bad luck no one should have. Shortly afterwards, he brought his family to see us, his wife Saqa and the two younger children, Amiina who was six years old, and the new baby, whose name was Fadima. I had imagined his wife would be older and more shrewish than she was, considering Hersi’s woeful recounting of the demands made on his wages and the way in which his wife, as soon as she got to Hargeisa, always wanted to buy new clothes. Saqa, however, was only in her middle twenties, finely built and tall, with large dark eyes and long lashes. She was a magnificent woman, and possessed an extraordinary amount of poise. It seemed strange that she was married to a man as slight and nervous as Hersi.

  Hersi took his family that day and put them on a trade-truck bound for Awareh. As they were leaving, Saqa said to him, “Give my salaams to the white woman.” At this, the other passengers glared at both Saqa and Hersi, and several voices muttered the old mockery.

  “Musa Arreh – Ingrese Arreh.”

  Hersi was caught, partly by the past, the memories and handed-down sagas of Haji Musa Farah’s achievements, and partly by his own frail present-day. Only through jobs with the Ingrese could he utilize what accomplishments he had, those of reading and writing. Yet his education was so limited that his position could never be really secure. Nor was his education sufficient to enable him ever to break away from his tribe. He needed an established status in both worlds, but he achieved it in neither.

  Only once, while he was working for us, did he gain a kind of fame, the recognition he yearned for. But the price he paid was a high one. At Balleh Gehli, the Balleh of the Camels, Hersi one day caught a ride on the back of a scraper, although everyone had been warned to stay away from the machinery when it was in operation. The driver, unaware that Hersi was there, let down the scraper apron and the heavy steel thudded back and jammed Hersi’s hand. The drivers brought him back to camp. He was suffering with shock and was only half conscious. Three fingers had been crushed down to the middle joint, and were flat and limp like the fingers on a rag doll. On one, the bone was sticking out through the pulpy flesh.

  For a moment we were all stunned, for this was the first serious accident on the job. Then everyone moved rapidly. Mohamed brought a bowl of camel milk – the Somalis’ first remedy for all ills – and held it to Hersi’s mouth. I put a temporary and loose dressing on the hand. Jack scribbled a note to the doctor. Abdi and Arabetto, who had warred so often, forgot their differences for the time being. Between them, they managed to get Hersi propped up in the Land-Rover, and then they drove him in to Hargeisa, two painful hours distant.

  “It would have to be Hersi,” Jack said morosely. “He always has such damn bad luck.”

  Slight consolation as it might be to Hersi, Jack decided to call the next balleh after him. When it was completed, it became Balleh Hersi Jama. Ultimately the name was announced over Radio Somali, and when Hersi went to visit his family at Awareh, he discovered that people there had heard of it, and he had become quite a personage.

  But he would never have back the use of his hand.

  Hersi really came into his own as a story-teller. When we first went out to camp, I realized he had this ability, for in the evenings we often heard his voice, chanting the gabei or rising excitedly in a lengthy recitation. But it took many months before he trusted me enough to tell me any tales at all. For a long time, whenever I mentioned the subject, he looked vague and pretended not to know what I was talking about. Stories? What on earth were those?

  “We are not having such things presently times,” he would murmur evasively.

  I respected his reticence and was careful not to press the matter. After I had obtained literal translations of some belwo and gabei from Guś and Musa, together with a few folk-tales, I decided to try again with Hersi. I had heard an interesting story the other day, I told him. Perhaps he might know it.

  “Oh?” he said distantly. “What is it?”

  It happened to be one of the best-loved of Somali tales, the adventures of the outrageous ’Igaal Bowkahh. When Hersi discovered who had told it to me (for Musa was very highly regarded as a poet), he looked extremely thoughtful for a moment. Then he struck his forehead as though in utter astonishment.

  “Why you are never telling me you wishing to hear such things?” he cried. “Stories – if we are speaking of stories, who is knowing more of these considerations than I? I know ten thousand!”

  I told him I was sorry – it had certainly been remiss of me not to have brought up the question before.

  From that day, we never looked back. Hersi not only told me the stories he knew himself – he also went to considerable trouble to gather tales from various elders in the town and in nearby camps in the Haud. He edited, of course, and would only tell me such tales as he considered suitable for my ears, but I realized that I could not expect the impossible, and I was grateful for whatever stories he could bring himself to tell me.

  Every afternoon, when he was not needed at the work site, Hersi came to the brushwood hut. He told the stories to me in English, with an admixture of Somali and Arabic, for such English words as “saint” and “angel” were unknown to him, but I knew the Somali or Arabic equivalent. Although most of the labourers and drivers did not speak much English, there was always an audience. T
hey drifted into the hut quietly, those who were off duty, and listened. They did not understand many of the words, but they recognized the familiar tales by the way in which Hersi acted them out.

  For me, also, his acting had tremendous value. It compensated to some extent for the fact that I was not hearing the stories in Somali, in which he would have been able to express them with better style. Hersi belonged to that ancient brotherhood of born story-tellers. He played by turns the different roles in the tale, transforming himself by some alchemy of expression or stance into whatever he chose – a saint or a sultan, a thief craftily plotting how to outwit a naïve tribesman. He told me the story of the three wise counsellors – three hashish addicts whom a disgruntled sultan called in when his regular counsellors had all failed him. And for this moment, Hersi became the hashish addicts, dreamily twirling in their narcotic dance. When he told me of Arawailo, he made me see the barbaric splendour and the cruelty of that fabled queen. He told me of Deg-Der, the cannibal woman, and I could visualize her horrible countenance and her donkey’s ear. He was not himself at these times. He was so carried away by his stories that he lived them, taking on the characters like cloaks. His timing was always exact – he never once spoiled a story by giving away the ending before the proper moment. When he finished, he would be exhausted and would have to be revived with a mug of strong spiced tea, for he was an artist and he gave to each performance the very best of which he was capable.

  ——

  I do not know what has become of Hersi in the years since we last saw him. It is unlikely that he will ever find what he seeks. He is no longer a tribesman, but there is no real place for him in the realm of clerks and book-keepers, either, where he would so much have liked to establish himself.

  But at least in Africa a good story-teller is never entirely without honour. Out in the Haud, when the tales are told around the fires, perhaps the thin unimpressive figure still rises and begins, with his flawed speech, to build in words the caliph’s palace and the enchanter’s tower, while around him the listeners sit, pulling their robes close against the chill of the night, and urging him on.

  “What happened next? What did they do then?”

  He warms, as always, to his audience. “It was like this – listen, and I will tell you –”

  And he becomes the people in the tales, the great Wiil Waal who drove the last of the Galla kings from Jigjigga, or Ahmed the miserable woodseller who – wondrously – married a sultan’s daughter.

  MOHAMED

  “Helleyoy, helleyoy –”

  Mohamed was always singing belwo. He was fond of voice tricks – the song would rise weirdly to falsetto and plummet to bass within the space of a few notes, and the yerki, the small boy who was cook’s helper, would applaud with a wooden spoon on a saucepan. Mohamed was not the quiet sort. He liked noise; he liked to make his presence known to the world. Whether he was preparing dinner for six, in town, or opening a tin of spaghetti in the Haud, he did it with dash and verve. He dressed vividly, favouring robes of royal purple, and when he visited the town for an evening, he put on his shoes of oxblood leather, tossed an embroidered kashmir shawl across one shoulder and tucked a small cane, like a swagger stick, under an elbow. He felt I was making a ridiculous fuss about nothing when I strongly objected to my brightly patterned linen tea-towels being used as turbans.

  One might have imagined – as we did at first – that he was always like this, jaunty and cheerful, skimming on the surface of life like a beetle on a rain pool. But not so. He had times of melancholy, when some incommunicable despair took hold of him, and then he would sink into a silence so complete that he seemed to have gone elsewhere, to have vacated his shell which somehow moved around and worked without his being in it. Then some slight thing, some absurdity – the yerki chasing a chicken, to slaughter it, and being outdistanced by the ruffled and squawking bundle of feathers – would bring him back, and he would be garrulous and laughing once more. Mohamed had never herded camels, but this was not to say that life had been less hard for him than for the desert men. It had been quite hard enough, but in a different way. He had been born in Berbera and had lived there all his life until he came with us to Sheikh and Hargeisa and the Haud. He had worked as a servant since he was ten, beginning as cook’s helper and going on to become houseboy. He considered that he had been fortunate.

  “I get lucky. Only few times I no get job –”

  Now, at eighteen, he was a cook, and this appeared to be as far as he could go. He was quick-witted, intelligent, energetic – and illiterate. Easy enough to say, as many Ingrese did, that what a man has never known he cannot miss. But Mohamed had lived by his wits long enough to know that he had wits. He had a friend at Sheikh school, a boy whom he had known since childhood. Abdillahi’s father had been in the army and was killed in the war; the government was paying for the boy’s education. Mohamed brought Abdillahi over one day to meet us. Abdillahi, whose English was excellent, began to discuss the Gezira Scheme in the Sudan, a project about which he had been reading. Mohamed, who could not follow the conversation at all, and who had never heard of the Gezira Scheme, stood very much apart, his face vacant as sand. He never brought Abdillahi to see us again.

  Mohamed’s father, like a good many Somalis, had once been a seaman.

  “He was going to Italy, and England, and – oh, many places, many many places.”

  He could not be more specific, for outside his own country, these two were the only ones whose names he knew. When his father returned to Somaliland, Mohamed told us, he bought camels with his savings. But most of them died one year during a severe drought. The ones that remained were taken, after the father’s death, by Mohamed’s older halfbrother, who still kept them in the Guban.

  “Seven belong for me,” he said. “Seven camels, mine.”

  Perhaps some day he would be able to claim them, but it would not be easy, for the half-brother was determined not to give them up. This brother was Mohamed’s only close relative. He did not remember his mother, for she died when he was very young. He clung to the thought of his elusive inheritance, the camels which were rightfully his. Unlike most Somalis, who could bring themselves to slaughter or sell one of their camels only under conditions of desperate need, Mohamed would have liked to raise what cash he could from his small herd. His ambition was that of a town-dweller – to buy one of the mud-and-wattle tea shops.

  When the war came, Mohamed was thrown on his own resources and lived in any way he could, by thievery or begging – he was careful never to relate precisely how. When the Italians invaded Somaliland, the British retreat was attended by considerable confusion. Arms and equipment were left scattered and abandoned. In Berbera the Somalis foraged, gleaning what they could. On one occasion, some Somali families out in the Guban became alarmed when they received the news that heavily armed persons were approaching their camp. The tribesmen quickly gathered to meet these invaders, expecting a band of rival tribesmen, bent on attack. Instead, they saw a small boy who staggered as he walked, for he was weighted down with the three rifles he was carrying. Relating it, Mohamed rocked with laughter.

  “I find them some place,” he said. “I think maybe I can sell them.”

  Was he fortunate, to be able to laugh, or was his laughter a screen, a necessary protection? I do not know. All I know is that he was eight years old at the time, and he was alone. Those who grow up within a tribe are never alone, but Mohamed’s father in becoming a seaman began the process of breaking away, and while Mohamed still prudently maintained some associations with his tribe, he had not lived within his clan for many years and he seemed uncertain how much they would stand beside him in time of need.

  Shortly after he came to work for us, he asked us to leave the house unlocked when we went out in the evenings. Locking the bungalow was a reflection upon him, a seeming doubt of his capacity to guard our goods against outside thieves or his own temptation. He used small quantities of our tea and sugar, for this was one of the
perquisites of a cook’s job, but no one else was allowed to touch our possessions. We agreed to leave the house in his care, for we took his request as an indication of his sense of responsibility and also of his personal liking for us. This came as no surprise to us, for unconsciously we had fully expected ourselves to be more likeable as employers than the majority of English, known to us as “the sahib types.” Were we not more democratic? What a good thing that Mohamed appreciated this quality.

  In fact, of course, whatever we may or may not have been had nothing to do with the case. But only slowly did we come to see that Mohamed’s identification of his own interests with those of his employer would have taken place whoever the employer happened to be. He acted not in response to what we were, but to what he himself was. But for a time we managed to ignore any indications to the contrary, and saw him mainly as happy and joking, self-reliant and responsible, because that was the way we wanted him to be.

  We were all the more easily misled, however, because he was misleading, although he did not mean to be. He appeared so confident, so much his own master. He scorned to ask, when he did not know something. He would never admit ignorance. At Sheikh, once, we were given a cucumber – a rarity here, and not to be treated lightly. I told Mohamed we would have it for lunch, but it never occurred to me to tell him how to serve it.

  “Fine,” he said. “I fix it.”

  His manner indicated that he was completely familiar with this type of vegetable. Nobody could have guessed that he had never seen one before. And so the precious cucumber was duly served for lunch – boiled.

  He was always at his best in times of crisis. The night of the big storm in camp, when everything was soaked and muddy, and the desert had become a lake, I went over to the cook-tent after the rain to tell Mohamed not to bother trying to cook anything. A tin of beans would be sufficient for dinner. To my astonishment, I discovered Mohamed calmly preparing dinner on several charcoal burners which the yerki was holding down so they would not float away. Mohamed himself, wading around in six inches of water, was not only unperturbed – he was positively triumphant. He appeared to be enjoying himself greatly.