The Prophet's Camel Bell

  Alf was a plain and practical man. He liked to see things done properly. Mostly, here, they were not done properly, and it was always hard to see whose fault it was. He had become saddened and discouraged by what he called the Somalis’ “obstructionism.” He wanted to show them how to look after machinery, how to build and repair roads. Why wouldn’t they let him? He did not know. He knew only that he had to keep on with his job and try not to let things get in too much of a mess. He was not bitter, only overworked and frequently mystified by the fact that the Somalis did not take the work as seriously as he did. But he was careful not to group Somalis together. When he spoke of his staff, he grew keen once more – Ali was a promising mechanic, and you wouldn’t find a better driver than Farah.

  But there were so many difficulties. Equipment was always breaking down, and the spares took months to arrive from England. There was never sufficient money in the department’s allocation to get enough new equipment. And there was always trouble with the gangs of labourers. Often it was impossible to see what their current grievance was, for everybody talked at once. The Somalis were the damnedest talkers, he said – they’d argue all night if they could find any one to listen.

  How to explain such a person? It is easy enough to label someone from a distance, but how could you possibly think of a man as an imperialist when he told you, sorrowfully and in perplexity, that he tried to start a football team but the Somalis didn’t seem to take to the game?

  Alf’s frayed moustache, his worried eyes and pale untidy hair became a familiar sight to us in the next few months, when we drove from Sheikh to Berbera to get supplies. Gradually I came to believe that if he had ever fully realized how difficult his job was, he would have given up. He had no gift for analysis, however, and perhaps that was just as well, for in trying to turn camel herders into truck drivers, desert tribesmen into town-dwelling mechanics, he was trying to construct a bridge that would cross centuries and oceans in a single span. He went on speaking to them in terms of one culture, and they continued to hear and interpret his words in terms of quite another. Small wonder he was at cross purposes with them half the time.

  His business was with solid tangible things, lorries and road-graders, and yet a host of intangibles plagued him like malarial mosquitoes. What did the road gang mean when they complained that the headman was like a hyena in the dry season? Was Jama telling the truth when he said the spanner got lost? Did Abdillahi really understand the gearshift on the new three-ton, or did he only claim to understand, thinking it best to be agreeable? Who was the weird old bearded geezer who had come along and talked non-stop for an hour yesterday, and why had he presented that petition on behalf of Omar, sacked three months ago? There were never any answers.

  In later months, we overheard a few of the young English administrators speaking with Alf. Good old Alf – the tone was jovial when they were asking him to give priority to the repair of their vehicles. But they did not invite him to their dinner parties.

  He became depressed sometimes, and would mutter irritably about both the Somalis and the administration. But he did not give up. The roads got repaired, ultimately. The lorries got serviced. The transport section often had an air of almost lunatic comedy about it – instructions wildly misunderstood, tools lost or broken, vehicles giving up the ghost – but it kept going somehow.

  Alf was not unique. He was not even unusual. In other years and other places, we met many other foremen like him, men who were not socially accepted by their better-educated fellow expatriates and who were regarded by Africans as impossibly finicky.

  I came at last to see a kind of heroic quality about the man, something which he would have denied utterly and with embarrassment. He was an ordinary bloke – he never pretended to be otherwise. The job was all right, in his opinion, better-paid than jobs at home, but he could never feel he was making much headway.

  There are roads that criss-cross Africa, not good roads but at least passable ones. There are trucks on the roads and a generation or two of Africans who know how to operate and maintain those trucks. A great many Europeans do not know and a great many Africans do not consider one aspect of this network, and it really matters very little that they do not. But sometimes I wonder if even Alf himself realizes who put the roads there and showed the village boys and the young camel-herders how to drive.

  In a borrowed and bone-rattling truck, we made our way across the scorched plains of the Guban to Hargeisa on our second day in the country. Only a few wizened and prickly bushes grew in that expanse of desert, and sometimes one could see a murky waterhole or a dried-up river bed. The land was incredibly empty, the sky open from one side of the horizon to the other. The light brown sand glistened with mica and slid down into long ribbed dunes. It seemed to be no place for any living thing. Even the thorny bushes, digging their roots in and finding nourishment in that inhospitable soil, appeared to have a precarious hold on life, as though at any moment they might relax their grip, dry up entirely and be blown clean away.

  But the land was not empty. A figure appeared, standing against the sky, a Somali herdsman, very straight and calm, looking at us with a haughty detachment. He wore a brownish orange robe, cotton that once might have been white but had taken on the colour of the muddy water from the wells where the camels drank. He carried his spear across one shoulder. Around him his sheep clustered, spindly legged creatures, white with ebony heads and no wool at all, only short hair like a deer’s hide. He did not move or turn his head as we jolted dustily past him. To him, we might have been as ephemeral as dust-devils, the columns of wind and sand that swirled across the desert and then disappeared without a trace.

  The landmark of Hargeisa is the pair of hills called by the Somalis Nasa Hablod, the girl’s breasts. As we drew into the town I realized the meaning of oasis – after the interminable rock and sand, after the barren places where no water could be found and no trees grew, the sudden sight of greenery and the walls of human dwellings.

  The Hargeisa Club actually meant the English Club, for no Somalis and very few Italians were ever invited in. It stood, like the European bungalows, at a considerable distance from the magala or Somali town, and was a low rambling building surrounded by feathery pepper trees and flat-topped acacias. In the front garden, the staunch zinnias grew, the only familiar flower one can be certain will take root in alien soil, although even these plants had been altered here, their colours faded or diluted into an assortment of muted pinks and muddy yellows.

  When we wakened in the early morning we heard a harsh squabble of bird voices, and looking out we saw birds whose wings of peacock blue and breastfeathers of gold seemed out of place in the dull-toned land.

  “Morning tea, sahib.” Mohamed knocked at the door and entered with the imposing tray, and once again we had to explain that we did not like tea in the morning.

  “I think you no be same as other sahibs,” he said in a puzzled voice.

  It was a remark he was to make often. Sometimes he meant it as a compliment. More often, it denoted a kind of confusion. In the relationships of servants and employers here, the patterns of behaviour were formal, clearly laid down. If one broke with the traditional patterns, how could anyone know what to do or how to respond? It was not easy for us to become accustomed to colonial life, and it was not easy for Mohamed to get used to our departures from it. Ultimately he discovered a satisfactory explanation. We were neither Ingrese (English) nor Italiano. We came from another and unknown tribe.

  “Canadian peoples different,” he would say, and this covered a multitude of lapses.

  Jack spent several days making plans for the commencement of his work. I, in the meantime, was introduced to the European community through that time-honoured institution, the morning tea party. At these gatherings, some of the English women of the station were kind enough to impart to me various pieces of advice. My only trouble was in knowing which to follow, for there was a marked lack of unanimity. The adages ran something like this:

/>   Always lock the storeroom door, or you will be robbed blind by your servants.

  Never lock the storeroom door, or your resentful servants will find other ways to pilfer food.

  On no account be so foolish as to advance pay to your cook or houseboy, for it encourages them in financial carelessness.

  It is quite acceptable to advance pay, provided they understand clearly how much is to be paid back each month.

  Never eat curry puffs made in the town, or you will get enteric dysentry.

  Curry puffs are perfectly safe, for the curry acts as a preservative.

  Never buy Kenya bacon; it is too expensive and will probably give you trichinosis.

  By all means purchase Kenya bacon; it is excellent and reasonably priced.

  Never hire a Somali ayah to care for children; such girls all have loose morals – otherwise, as Muslim women, they would not take employment.

  Always employ an ayah; children are in deadly peril from snakes and scorpions and must be watched over constantly.

  I told them I had no children yet, but that if I had I would certainly not entrust them to the care of anyone else, not even a trained English nanny.

  “Oh well,” they said, eyebrows lifting only slightly, “in that case –”

  Their explanation of me was in essence the same as Mohamed’s. I was from another country. They shrugged and smiled, a trifle stiffly, perhaps, but politely. Later, it seemed to me that in those early days of our tour quite a few mem-sahibs must have looked upon me with a greater generosity than I afforded them. At the time, I saw only the distance which they put between themselves and the Somalis, whom they tended to regard either patronizingly or with outright scorn. I did not appreciate then the really desperate boredom of some of these women, the sense of life being lived pointlessly and in a vacuum. Nor did I perceive the need many of them felt to create a small replica of England here in the desert and the enormous effort they put into a task that must inevitably fail.

  In only two pieces of their advice was a general and immediate agreement evident. I decided it would be prudent to follow these two.

  Boil all drinking water.

  Take an anti-malarial pill every day.

  ——

  The Hargeisa magala looked best at night, when the milky moonlight was spilled over the town, blanching its stained daytime countenance. The festering gutters, the leprous white-wash of the mosque, the jaundiced mud walls of the tea shops that squatted around the market-place – by moonlight the sores of all these places were made to appear sound. The Somali dwellings, hive-shaped huts of coarse woven grass steeped in smoke and brown-splattered by past rains, were mellowed then, and even the cloth-merchants’ shops, stony hags whose angularity showed through their purdah of grey shutters, seemed softer and more benign.

  In the hard glare of the sun it was another matter. Soon after our arrival, I decided I would go to the town and look through the shops. I had no transport, so I walked, for it was only about a mile. Mohamed accompanied me. At first he had been reluctant.

  “You no go there, memsahib.”

  But when I asked why not, he would not say. He hinted at unspecified danger.

  “May be some small trouble –”

  I could not take his warnings seriously. With a shrug he resigned himself and shuffled with some embarrassment beside me along the dusty road.

  By day the town was a vivid and shabby conglomeration of people, a tumult of voices. In the marketplace, shrivelled old men and women sat, gossiping under the thorn trees. Hordes of children, quick and nimble as geckos, darted among the crowds. Camels plodded and sneered. Men from the interior plains of the Haud stacked up the piles of dried sheepskins they had brought in to sell. Somali labourers chanted a high-pitched song as they worked to repair the road. An Indian merchant, dark and plump as a damson plum, sipped spiced tea in the shade. Somali girls walked enticingly in their scarlet or green robes, flicking their eyelashes at the young men. Some of them affected purdah, never worn by the desert women but only by women in the town, and these would coyly hold their gauzy veils just above the bridge of their noses, leaving only their eyes to be seen by passers-by. But so expressive were the eyes that the girls seemed to have no trouble in making their meaning plain to the grinning boys who lolled in the doorways.

  “Baksheesh! Baksheesh! ”

  The eternal appeal for alm. All at once I was aware of them, the ranks of beggars whining their monotonous plea outside the shops. The old and withered among them smiled with senile serenity, forever hoping for the miracle forever denied, the grace of Allah forever withheld. Their tattered remnants of robes fluttered like ancient prayer flags from a mosque, and the claws that held the wooden bowls were separated from skeleton only by skin as crinkled and brittle as charred paper. One dragged himself along with two blocks of wood strapped to his hands, because he had no legs.

  Many of the begging throng were children, the marks of their profession plain upon them – running sores on twig-like bodies, a twisted shoulder, a stunted stump of a leg dragged heavily, patiently, through the dust. They were the misshapen ones, the weak in a land where life came hard even to the strong. Muslims, traditionally alms-givers, look after their poor and afflicted where they can. Here they could not.

  “Baksheesh,” the children chirped, “baksheesh.”

  What does a person do? I gave them money. The blessings of Allah were placed upon my head, and I was mercifully released, enabled to get away. I could not deceive myself that the giving of alms did anything except momentarily soothe the conscience of the giver, permit him to leave and turn his eyes away. What happened to those who did not receive even these occasional coppers? What happened when there was no money? If they could not live, they died.

  When I returned to the Hargeisa Club, I discovered that I had unwittingly caused a scandal. European women did not go to the Somali town alone, and no European ever went on foot. It simply wasn’t done. Many European women, I was told, were afraid to visit the Somali town at all, and never did so. I asked why. Well, stones might be thrown, names called. The Somalis could be very awkward. It transpired that someone had reported me to the police, and all afternoon I had been unobtrusively trailed by two Somali policemen. I was amused and angry. “Perhaps it is the sight of poverty that the memsahibs shrink from,” I wrote in my diary. And of the police, “much ado about nothing.”

  I did not then know how much the Somalis resented the Christian conquerors, or if I suspected it, I felt somehow that I would be immune from their bitterness, for did I not feel friendly towards them? Surely they would see it.

  But they looked at me from their own eyes, not mine. Later, when I had seen the thronging beggars again and again, and the half-starved men of the desert who brought their lean camels to drink at the town’s shrunken wells, I wondered if all the well-fed ones of this earth, of whom I was one, did not have reason to fear the dusty streets of the crowded town. The hands would not always be stretched out in blessing over the giving of the easily spared coin that made life possible today but tomorrow.

  HOUSE IN THE CLOUDS

  At the topmost part of that world, in the hills that jutted blue-brown and jagged out of the flat hot plain, Sheikh stood, a few dwellings scattered along the slopes and across the valley where the grey twisted fig trees were nested in by green pigeons. The settlement took its name from a revered sheikh who lived here long ago. On holy days the devout walked out and said prayers at the white tomb.

  Once Sheikh was the administrative capital during the hot season, in the days when Berbera was the government headquarters, but now the old Government House was rarely used. Its garden was a tangle of purple bougainvillaea, and in the dried pond where once the goldfish glinted, now only the sleek striped lizards slid and hid themselves under the fallen flowers.

  We were based in Sheikh, and lived in a small dark-green house on a ridge away from the main settlement – the bungalows of the few English schoolmasters and their wives, and the So
mali boys’ school, the country’s largest. Our house had sandbags on top of it so the roof would not be blown away during the kharif wind. These imparted a look of patchiness to it, like a child’s house fashioned of coloured blocks and daubed with plasticine. The floors were gritty concrete, inadequately covered by our one thin cotton carpet, purchased in Aden, patterned with oriental flowers in blue and magenta, and labelled Made in Amsterdam. The stone fireplace, wonderful in appearance, did not draw. Our house was lighted with paraffin pressure lamps that puffed and spluttered, and our scanty water ration was kept in galvanized buckets. To my eyes, however, this house was perfect, for it was the first we had ever had. Always before we had lived in apartments or bed-sittingrooms.

  I rushed around, re-arranging the plain furniture, hanging our few pictures, swiftly sewing curtains from cheap flimsy cotton, making cushions for the chairs and embroidering them with giant snails in olive and yellow wool because this was the only design I could draw and the thick mending strands made the shape appear quickly. I had flair, but no patience. Everything had to be done right away, this minute. Mohamed watched and shook his head, impressed and distressed by my fever to be settled.

  I stopped my buzzing after a while and looked around, and then I noticed that everything was calm. The land was not aware of me. I might enter its quietness or not, just as I chose. Hesitantly at first, because it had been my pride to be as perpetually busy as an escalator, I entered. Then I realized how much I had needed Sheikh, how I had been moving towards it through the years of pavements, of doom-shrieking newspapers and the jittery voices of radios.

  At night we went to sleep to the shushing sound of the wind, and in the morning it was the only sound we heard when we wakened. I rose and looked out the window – the whole valley was filled with clouds. The dawn light was still wavering and uncertain, and the sun had not yet climbed Sheikh Pass. We walked out to explore our territory, and found that the early clouds swept so low that we were actually walking through them. They billowed around us like cloaks or gusts of smoke, and I was amazed that such a thing was possible, to walk in the clouds.