The Prophet's Camel Bell (6 page)

“What interest could the English possibly have in poisoning your camels?” Jack parried.

Back and forth, back and forth – the talk was like a tennis ball. It seemed never to get anywhere. Indeed, this was probably the elders' intention. They might or might not have believed the rumours. All they were after, really, in this game of wits, was Jack's reaction – how did he argue, and what manner of man was he?

Finally, and surprisingly, as though upon an agreed signal, the elders nodded their heads. All right. The rumours were false, they conceded. But if this was so, why did the government not simply pay Somalis to dig their own
ballehs
?

“The
ballehs
will be made with machines,” Jack said. “No man could make a
balleh
of that size by hand.”

They appeared to be satisfied for the moment. They rose and ceremoniously bade us farewell.

“
Nabad gelyo
– may you enter peace.”

“
Nabad diino
,” we replied. “The peace of faith.”

But as they went out, we wondered for the first time if it really would be peace. The gist of Jack's words would be conveyed to nomads all across the Haud. How would they interpret what he had said? Would the meanings become distorted and lost? We had assumed that the Somalis would naturally be pleased at a scheme to provide watering places in the desert. Now we saw that they were by no means convinced that the project was designed to help them.

We both sensed that this same scene would be reenacted, in different places, time and again. It was not a cheerful prospect.

A stroke of luck. We met two people with whom we could discuss anything, freely, not worrying what we said. Jack was better than I, at simulating the English reserve, an extreme caution in speech, but it did not come naturally to either of us. Now we could occasionally shed it.

Guś (whose real name was Bogomil and whose nickname was pronounced “Goosh”) was Polish, a tall man with an expensive and almost oriental face, high cheekbones, faintly slanting eyes. He was a poet in his own language.

“Of course, it is useless,” he said with deep Slavonic
melancholy. “My poetry can't be published in Poland, and in England who is interested in publishing poems written in Polish?”

His moods would swing like a pendulum. Suddenly he would be laughing, regaling us with Somali jokes or his own brand of slightly macabre humour. He spoke Somali more fluently than any other European in the colony, for he was here to do research into the Somali language and its phonetics.

“Listen to this Somali joke about a Midgan. His wife had a miscarriage, and the man was very angry. When his friends asked him why he was so furious, he replied –
There! That will teach me not to pour anything into a vessel that's upside down!
”

Guś's wife, Sheila, was an attractive and capable English girl. She did everything with so little fuss that only gradually did it dawn on us that she was probably the only English woman in the colony who did her own cooking.

“I like cooking,” she said, “so why not?”

Guś ate compulsively but never gained any weight. During the war, when he was escaping from Poland, he was close to starvation many times. When he finally got to England, he joined the Free Polish Forces, and after the war he went to Oxford. Now Sheila cooked for him with a kind of tenderness, as though she hoped to make up for whatever hardships he had suffered once. She cooked everything on a tiny primus stove, and even ingeniously managed to make cookies, known to her as biscuits, by fixing up an oven of sorts with a saucepan.

“I don't really feel I was cut out to be a memsahib,” she admitted.

This was my exact feeling, too. We were heartened to have discovered one another.

Guś's Somali assistant was Musa, a thin and strikingly handsome man with a pirate-like moustache. He was something
of an orator, and was a well-known poet in the Somali language. He had a fine and subtle sense of dramatic irony that could overturn an adversary in an argument. In the evenings, we all used to gather and discuss Somali customs, language, poetry.

“Somali is a difficult and complicated language,” Guś told us, “but very expressive.”

A language well suited to poetry, I discovered, for so many of its words were of the portmanteau variety, containing a wealth of connotations. One word described a wind that blew across the desert, parching the skin and drying the membranes of the throat. Some words were particularly lyrical, some were acutely specific. A low bush with soft broad leaves and delicate purple flowers was called
wahharawallis
, which meant “that which makes the little goats jump.” There was a word for anything tasting sweet, even the fresh air. The word expressing a state of well-being meant literally “to have enough water in one's belly.” A risk or any dangerous situation was
saymo
, the net of God.

“
Marooro
is a plant,” Musa said, “that has an acid taste in the morning but tastes sweet in the evening.”

Sheila and I, sitting like acolytes, listening to his words, possibly in the hope of total enlightenment, had to question that one. So what? What was so expressive about that? Musa grinned wickedly.

“Well, you see, the Somalis often use the word as a nickname for a woman.”

One evening an idea came to me. Could some of the Somali poems be put into English?

“Absolutely not. Impossible.” Musa's deep decisive voice. He felt protective towards his own literature. No one could do justice to it. He did not want to see the poems mangled in
translation. He felt no English person could comprehend them, anyway. They would be wasted on the cold and unemotional English. As he was unacquainted with English poetry, he found it hard to believe that English people ever felt despair or exultance.

“But listen, Musa –”

Think of all the English here who had no idea that the Somalis had ever composed poems – think of showing them some of the epic
gabei
, the lyrical
belwo
. This was my line of persuasion. Guś saw the possibilities immediately. But Musa had to have time to consider.

“Well, I don't know –”

We dropped it then, not wanting to press the issue. But we would return to it. I knew that I had found what I would like to work at, here. But I could not do it alone. Would I be able to find people who would help me? I was certain that I would. As we walked home across the valley that night, I was filled with enthusiasm.

“Take it easy,” Jack said, wanting to protect me from disappointment. “It may not work out.”

“Oh, I know that.”

But I did not know. What I really knew was that it would work out. Incredibly, and much later than I would have thought, it actually did. What I did not at all suspect, however, was that it would be an “imperialist” who would make the publication of these translations possible.

Hakim came for tea. How handsome he was, hawk-nosed and deep-eyed, wearing his Somali robe and an embroidered cap like a white
tarboosh
. With him came Nuur, dressed with scrupulous neatness in khaki trousers and white shirt, and carrying a folder which contained some of his paintings, birds
and twisting trees and flowers that looked as though they had been delicately transplanted from some Persian tapestry.

I felt I must discover everything about Somali beliefs, customs, traditions. I assumed that these young men, who were teachers, would be delighted to tell me. What did the Somali bride-price actually involve? Did men love their wives or merely regard them as possessions? Could a woman divorce her husband for infidelity? Did Somalis believe in magic? Did the clitoridec-tomy make it impossible for Somali women to enjoy sex? When a man was enjoined by the Qoran to marry his deceased brother's wife, how did he feel about that? Hakim and Nuur smiled and said they did not know. All at once the brash tone of my voice was conveyed to my own ears, and I was appalled.

Hakim told me about
faal
, the way in which the future could be foretold by the counting of beads of the
tusbahh
, the Muslim rosary. It never occurred to me to attempt to glimpse the future myself, in another way, by asking Hakim what he hoped would happen here in his lifetime. Independence seemed a long way off then, but longer away to me, probably, than to Hakim. He implied as much when he offered to teach me a few verses of
Somaliyey Tosey
, the song of the Somali Youth League, which was becoming a popular national song.

The tribes were at constant loggerheads with one another, but they were unanimous in their resentment at being governed by infidels. When independence came, it would be men like Hakim who would be the leaders. There were not many educated Somalis in the Protectorate, men who had some knowledge of the world outside their own land. When Hakim set foot on that path, it would not be a straight nor an easy one, for he was divided between two ways of thought. One day we chanced to talk with him about insanity. A common Somali belief, he told us, was that insanity is caused by the possession of a person by evil djinn.

“Sometimes,” he said with a smile, “a mad person is told by an elder to slaughter a white sheep and wash in its blood, to drive forth the bad djinn.”

I, too, smiled, and was astounded when the young Somali turned to Jack with a slightly puzzled frown.

“Can you tell me,” Hakim asked, “what does science think of these djinn?”

But the events of the future, like the drought in the Guban and the Haud, were still only far-off murmurs to me. The reality was the peace I felt at Sheikh, and the interest in all things new and strange, customs and costumes and the country itself with its weird candelabra trees or the lizard I saw sunning itself on a rock, its head a piercing yellow, its body an iridescent teal-blue, its legs a greenish gold.

Minor adventures provided just enough excitement. We drove to Berbera to get petrol. When we returned, the hills were black and tigerish, crouched above the plain. We wound our way through Sheikh Pass, and as we looked at the narrow road and the sheer drop, we felt apprehensive, for behind the Land-Rover was hooked a trailer loaded with drums of petrol. The fifty miles seemed five hundred. As we climbed and
twisted, our old driver Abdi smiled sardonically and told us gruesome tales of the lorries that had gone over the edge.

“Were many people killed?” we asked, as he related the most recent calamity, for the trade-trucks were always covered with people who swarmed all over the top like ants on a sugar-bowl.

“Oh no,” Abdi replied, surprised. “Nobody get kill. They jump.”

They became accomplished jumpers, it seemed. The trade-truck drivers had a gay recklessness about them, more verve than mechanical know-how. If their lorries broke down, they always managed to fix them up with a bit of string or a piece of wire. At the top of Sheikh Pass we crawled past a truck which was plastered at the front with handfuls of ripe dates to plug a leaky radiator, and Jack, who had a feeling for machinery, at first stared in cold disapproval and then burst into incredulous laughter.

The sweeping out of houses was not done by Somalis. This menial work was carried out by Midgans, an outcast tribe. They had a separate language, and long ago they were the hunters of the country, using their poisoned arrows on the elephants that used to roam here, much in the same way as the pygmies further south still did. The Midgans did most of the leatherwork, sandal making and suchlike, and were often attached to Somali
rers
, or tribal groups, as servants. Once they were slaves of the Somalis. They were still looked upon disdainfully and regarded as inferior, despite the fact that the Midgans had always been more skilled in crafts than the Somalis. The supposedly dim-witted Midgan was a favourite figure in Somali jokes.

One of these Midgan jokes concerned a family who
journeyed out at night to fill their water vessels at a well. With them they carried a baby. When the vessels were filled, they discovered they could not possibly carry the baby and the heavy water jars at the same time. They decided to leave the child and return for him later. But where, in all that unvarying desert country, could they leave him in a place sufficiently well marked for them to be sure of finding it again? Finally they thought of a wonderful idea, and went off happily, having left the baby right underneath the moon.

Another outcast tribe was the Yibir, who were magicians and sorcerers. These were an ancient people, tracing their ancestry far back into pre-Islamic times. When a Somali child was born, the parents gave a gift to the local Yibir, for if they did not, the child would be followed by bad luck all his days. After receiving the gift, the Yibir in return would give an amulet to the child, which was worn always, a protection against the evils that are seen and the evils that are unseen.

The Qoran, usually referred to by Somalis simply as the
Kitab
– The Book, warned against sorcery and against “the mischief of women who blow on knots” to make magic spells. Somalis, I discovered, were reluctant to speak of such matters. Mohamed and Hersi, our quick-thinking and stutter-tongued interpreter, denied all knowledge of anything pertaining to the black arts.

Would a man go to a Yibir to have him make
faal
to predict the future? Mohamed's face assumed a total blankness at my question.

“I never no hear such thing, memsahib, never at all.” Apparently shocked to the marrow, he raised both hands to heaven as though seeking divine confirmation for his words. “Only Allah know what will happen. Man, he don't know.”

Hersi's answers, on the other hand, were always lengthy
and ornate. He spoke slowly and with great emphasis, making every speech sound like a sermon.