Abdi began to clash with Mohamed. He resented Mohamed’s position in the camp, for he felt that Mohamed had too much influence with us, too great a tendency to cast aspersions on others. If anyone influenced our opinions, Abdi would have preferred it to be himself. Also, he felt that Mohamed was questioning his honour by telling him not to borrow our spoons, for the implication was that he might steal them. On several occasions he became almost berserk, raving and shouting against Mohamed until the fire had burned itself out.
We were caught between the two. All we wanted to do was keep the peace. We could not see why either of them should be making so much fuss about so little. We came to see something of Mohamed’s outlook, but Abdi’s was more difficult to see, for it was more deeply hidden. To us, the old warrior appeared to be two men. One was gentle, compassionate, courageous, the man who stopped the car rather than run over a bird, the man who sorrowed for his destitute people, the man who would walk calmly up to a poisonous snake. The other was fierce, violent, raging, the man who struck again and again at the dead animal, the man whose anger had to run its course before it faded. The two men seemed in direct opposition. But were they?
When his fury had passed, he was at peace for a while, and then he came to the brushwood hut and talked to me, telling me about a strange bird, the ghelow. I had seen this bird only once. It was sleek and mottled brown, with a long neck and a little darting head like a snake’s.
“If some man die,” Abdi said, “always, we hear ghelow – crying, crying – all night.”
If there had been no moonlight for fifteen nights, or if any bad trouble was threatening the area, the bird sang its dirge until morning. An occult bird, a bird of magical powers.
The old warrior had recently heard the ghelow. He spoke sadly, with resignation, as though the coming evil could not be averted. And so it proved.
Abdi made it plain to Jack that he disapproved of my chatting with Arabetto and Mohamed. Sahib and memsahib we were, and must remain so. The rules must be maintained, or chaos might descend upon everyone. He did not accept change of any sort.
“Young men no good,” he told Jack frequently, speaking not only of Mohamed and Arabetto, but of all the young men whose changing views threatened his own.
Sometimes he asked us for things, and sometimes we gave him things he had not asked for. He asked Jack to go on his behalf to P.W.D. and get his pay raised, and Jack did so, for the old man worked hard and did his job well. I gave him old shirts of Jack’s, to take to his numerous grown sons. He asked about getting some of his relatives hired on the balleh staff, and if the man in question seemed all right, Jack agreed. Three of the labourers and one driver were close relatives of Abdi’s. Jack’s outlook was that if Abdi’s relatives in these cases were as good as anyone else, he might as well hire them rather than strangers. Unfortunately, as it turned out, this was not Abdi’s interpretation at all.
Arabetto was the next object of Abdi’s wrath. Arabetto’s casual manner and his easy laughter seemed to infuriate the old man. When he was angry, he accused Arabetto of everything from theft to laziness, calling him a useless Arab, a diseased cur, and other even less acceptable names. Arabetto became, understandably, fed up with being nagged at and insulted all the time, and so he told Jack he would like to get a transfer to another job. Jack did not want to lose either man. He asked Arabetto to wait until the end of the month. We knew now that the crisis was coming, but we could not bring ourselves to face it yet.
Then Jack had to fire one of the labourers, who had proven no good on the job. It transpired that the man was one of Abdi’s relatives.
“We will take that man back,” Abdi said to Jack.
“Oh no, we damn well won’t,” Jack replied angrily.
We were disappointed in him. We felt he had let us down, in behaving so unreasonably, in not being what we thought he was. Oddly, his demands on us grew rapidly from this point on. There seemed to be no end to his requests, and we began to feel preyed upon. He asked to have more relatives hired, and Jack refused. He went to visit his tribe, and Jack allowed him to take the Land-Rover and half a drum of water. When Abdi was about to depart, he told Jack he intended to take a full drum of water. Jack told him he must not do so, for we did not have enough water to spare. Abdi said nothing, but later we learned he had told a great many people that the sahib was a shaitan, a devil, and an exceedingly stingy one at that.
We had admired and trusted him. We had believed that he liked and trusted us. What was happening now was so painful to us that we tried not to think of it. But it could not be ignored much longer. We received constant complaints from the others, for Abdi seemed to be growing suspicious of everyone and to imagine that all men’s hands were against him. Hersi reported a night-long meeting.
“I tell him, ‘Nothing is contained in bloody this place. Only suspicion. Nothing else. Who wanting to hurt you? Nobody. Abdi, dear cousin, you must not trying to run this camp.’ For three hours, absolutely, he talking then, and no one understanding a word.”
The ghelow’s voice had certainly been heard. Now, when we drove with Abdi in the Land-Rover, he no longer said “God give you a son.” He was silent, and his face was sullen. In a profound disillusionment, I felt he must have despised us all along. In my notebooks I tried to express it, perhaps in order to remove its sting. “You come to a country, and you think that if you regard people as people, everything will be all right. Not so. With the Somalis, the attitude towards the British goes too deep to be broken casually. I feel now that Abdi’s sweet talk to us was in the main a method for achieving favours. I think he has always hated us, simply because we are Ingrese, and that he could never feel any differently. He judges Europeans on what is given. He would rather be treated shamefully, and left in peace to hate us, as long as he is periodically given handouts of money and clothes, than he would be treated as a man and not given so much. The Somalis are proud, not grovelling, and in their own eyes they are aristocrats and warriors. But they are also terribly poor, their lives hounded by drought and disease. Many of them cannot treat Europeans as people. If we are sahib and memsahib, Abdi can do his job, and be polite, and try with a clear conscience to get as much as possible from us, secure in his basic hatred of us. Why should we be surprised? But we are. And hurt – for we trusted and in a way loved him. We can see now why he dislikes Mohamed and Arabetto so much. They are not so set in the mould. He considers them traitors. Jack cannot reason with him any more. He can only say – if you lose your temper, you lose your job. How strange it is to have to say things like that.”
Abdi’s suspicions were ultimately directed against Hersi, who, as interpreter, had Jack’s ear, or so Abdi believed. Jack was presented with a petition written by a town scribe at the direction of some of the tractor drivers, and signed by them, thumb-prints from those who could not write, and signatures in Arabic from the others, for none were literate in English.
“Circumstances uprising from grounds of helplessness,” the petition said, “compelled us to place our grievances before your honour for necessary remedy. Originally, there existed One fire which was burning inside the whole Camp, but it is regretted to point out that the fire in question has become widespread all over the Camp and the Staff. Such fire can only be distinguished from the Top, or the Head, and the Head is the Head of the Department. The cause of that fire which rendered everybody helpless is ignited by the present interpreter, Hersi –”
Abdi’s name did not appear on the petition. Jack made extensive enquiries, and the whole camp for several nights was loud with the sounds of argument. The meetings went on until dawn. It finally emerged that Abdi had persuaded the drivers to write the petition. His own relatives, naturally, had supported him, as they were all fearful of losing their jobs, and he had managed to convince the other drivers that they would all be fired unless Hersi was ousted.
So it had come at last. Now there was no way of avoiding it. Jack fired Abdi, and the old man left the camp. We saw him in Hargeisa s
everal times after that, but he turned the other way and would not even look at us.
If there had been a fire in the camp, it was certainly Abdi, for after his departure the tensions eased immediately. Suspicions dwindled, and the Somalis were more relaxed, not only towards us but among themselves as well. Now it was songs that we heard around the fires at night, not the previous interminable bickering.
But it could not end here for us. Why had events moved so inexorably in this way? Could they have been dealt with in any other way? We did not know. All we knew was that we could not forget the man who drove through the blinding rain that night when we were lost on the desert, the man who was always the first to start work when we set up camp and whose work songs got the others going, the man who had wished us the blessing of a son. Trying, by writing it out, to unearth something of his meaning, I put in my notebook – “He is an exaggeration of all the qualities he possesses. He is courage and pride and anger writ large. Perhaps his is the face of Africa – inscrutable to the last.” My feeling at this time was that I would never understand.
Probably I never will. But I no longer think it was a simple matter of his having hated us all along, as I thought in my first bitterness, although he certainly came to hate us eventually. He did have a deep resentment against the English, whose lives must have seemed so easy to him, but this readily understandable resentment was only one factor in the situation, and perhaps not even the determining factor at that. After a number of years, things do not look quite the same. I recognize now, as I did not dare to do then, how eagerly I listened to what I felt to be his admiration, but it was not merely a question of flattery falling upon ready ears, either. A possible clue to the puzzle was provided not long ago by Mannoni’s description of the dependence complex in The Psychology of Colonisation, a book which I read with the shock of recognition one sometimes feels when another’s words have a specific significance in terms of one’s own experiences. Seen from a distance, the details in my notebooks begin to take on a new meaning.
We felt that Abdi had let us down, but now I think that he must have felt, equally strongly, that we had let him down. I do not think his demands upon us were made callously or contemptuously, as I thought once, but with a feeling that it was his right to demand of us whatever he needed. Perhaps it all began with the night on the Wadda Gumerad. That event had significance for him, but not the same as it had for us. We cannot know with certainty how he thought of it, but my guess is that he felt a bond had indeed taken shape between us, but not the bond of friendship as it seemed to us. We acknowledged some bond, however, by our gratitude and by the gift. We even asked him what he would like, saying we would give him anything he wanted, within reason. Did we, then, in his eyes, agree to become his power at court? Did Jack, in firing one of Abdi’s relatives, appear to negate a tacit agreement to act as a kind of protector to him and his family? I think so. We ourselves had established the bond. He was not to know that we did not see it in the same way as he did. His later and increased demands, which seemed so outrageous then, seem in retrospect to have been a frantic effort to prove that the bond still existed.
Abdi was a man of integrity, but in his own terms, not ours. He was also a man filled with rage against fate. But he was a faithful son of Islam and so he could not curse his fate, for that would be blasphemy against God. He fought, instead, where he could. He was a warrior, trained as a fighter both with the spear and with the rifle, and his heritage was that of a warrior. He was a Somali, and in his arid land life is uncertain and impoverished, and a man seeks help wherever he can find it. He was a tribal man, to whom the idea of gaining the support and aid of a sultan came naturally – and if not a sultan or a governor, then the closest ally at court that could be found, and the strongest. Even the words which we at first took as compliments and then as unscrupulous flattery, now seem to have been neither, to have been in fact almost totally unrelated to us as individuals. You are a king. You are a queen. If a man must seek a power at court, must he not also seek to reassure himself that the chosen official is indeed a strong one, capable of giving protection?
Everything moved inevitably to the conclusion. We did not comprehend his outlook, and he did not comprehend ours. He could not have acted in any way other than he did, and we could not have, either. And yet now I think that we would all have wished it otherwise.
In Paradise, the Qoran says, there are gardens where the fountains flow eternally and where the faithful may recline on divans and be attended by lovely women for ever and ever. A desert dweller’s heaven, the heaven of Islam. But for some of the sons of the desert, I do not think this heaven will be quite enough. If I believed, I would wish there to be battles somewhere in Paradise, for an old warrior who never knew – and who probably could not have borne to know – that his truest and most terrible battle, like all men’s, was with himself.
A TREE FOR POVERTY
On the plain Ban-Aul there is a tree
For poverty to shelter under.
This part of a Somali gabei always seemed to me to express Somali literature as a whole, which in its way was also a tree for poverty to shelter under, and so, when I had completed the translations, I took a title from these lines. Ultimately, the collection was published by the Somaliland government. It was the product of many people’s work besides my own – Guś Andrzejewski and Musa Galaal, who gave me the literal translations of the poems, Hersi and Arabetto who told me the stories, and all those who talked with me about the subject. The following are excerpts from the introduction to this collection.
“Although they have no written language, the Somalis are a nation of poets. In the evenings, around the camp fires, the men sing and tell stories far into the night. And in the magala, or town, they gather in the tea shops and often several gabei poets will spend hours chanting their own poetry, listened to by a large audience. This country is lacking in almost all materials needed for painting or sculpture, and in any event the Somalis, being Muslims, are not in favour of making ‘images’. But stories and poems require no special materials other than the talent of the person concerned. Folk literature is easily portable and costs nothing. Although the life of the Somali camel-herder is drab and harsh, in their poetry and stories one finds sensitivity, intelligence, earthy humour, and a delight in lovely clothes and lovely women.
“There are about ten different types of Somali poems, although some of these are not commonly used. The belwo, a fairly recent form, is a short lyric love-poem, and is easily recognizable both by its length and by the distinct tunes to which it is sung. The literal meaning of belwo is ‘a trifle’ or ‘a bauble’. The same tune fits nearly any belwo. The verses are strung together, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty, to make one long song, but the individual verses are not necessarily related.
“The composing of belwo is considered to be the normal literary activity of young men, and the general opinion seems to be that belwo-making is a relatively unskilled craft. The older men always hope that the young belwo poet will, as he grows older, desire to learn the vocabulary and style of the more complex gabei. The older men scorn the belwo, not because of its subject, love, but because of its shortness and ‘lack of style’. They say it is frivolous and immature.
“The Somali gabei is considered to be the highest literary form. Gabei may be on any topic, but the rules of gabei-making are strict and difficult. A gabei poet must not only have an extensive vocabulary and an ability to express himself fluently, alliteratively and in terms of figures of speech. He must also possess considerable knowledge of the country, its geography and plant-life, Somali medicine and animal husbandry. The good gabei poet must know something about Muslim theology and religious history, for these subjects are often used in poetry.
“Love and war are among the most favoured themes for gabei. With the war gabei, the poetic form reaches considerable heights of drama and emotion. The Somali is a warrior by tradition and inclination as well as by necessity, and in the gabei, tribal war is
painted as a man’s proper occupation. The war gabei are composed with great spirit and with that feeling of recklessness and bravery that characterizes the Somali in tribal battles.
“Literary Somali is a superstructure erected on the foundation of everyday speech. A vast number of words are never used except in poetry, and these have a subtle and precise meaning. Often an amazing amount of information is compressed into one word.
“In the Somali gabei there is a wealth of material for future research. Many hundreds of gabei, of varying literary merit, exist in this country. At their best the gabei offer not only an interesting study of a highly disciplined and developed poetry, but also a great deal of information about Somaliland and the way of life of its people.
“A number of the stories found in Somaliland are Arabic in origin, and some of them must have come to this country many years ago. Arabia is the centre of the Muslim religion, and also has racial and cultural ties for the Somalis. The legendary founders of the Somali race – Darod and Ishaak – came from Arabia, and the majority of the Somali people still trace their ancestry back to these Arabian aristocrats.