In Praise of Savagery (13 page)

Although the word ‘primitive’, these days, is considered a bit problematic, and something you’re not really meant to say any more, because it might lead you to believe that living in a tiny mud-floored hut made of twigs plastered with animal-dung might be construed as being in some way ‘primitive’ in the sense of being less advanced or sophisticated than, say, living in a large brick-built house with electricity, hot and cold running water, electronically controlled gas-fired central heating and a big stainless-steel refrigerator in your kitchen with a special button on it that you can press to dispense ice-cubes of the size and consistency of your choosing directly into your glass.

Whereas … well, whatever.

But if we have these things, if we have televisions and microwave ovens, and if we have motor-cars and dishwashers and digital video-cameras and electric hair-straightening tongs, and if we have special mobile telephones that do more or less everything except make a cup of tea, then we pay for them.

We pay dearly for them with our lives and with our freedom.

And consequently we don’t tend to spend what little time we have left to us digging bloody great holes in the ground in the off-chance that we might or might not find something of interest at the bottom of them.

They could go no further.

Without Miriam Muhammad, and with the soldiers refusing to proceed, there could be no question of moving further up country on the way to Aussa. Instead, they made camp on the plain near Gewani, Miriam Muhammad’s home village, and there they stayed for four days and four nights.

During that time, there came into the camp a young chief by the name of Hamdo Ouga. Hamdo Ouga was a young man, about eighteen years old, and he was at this time rather pleased with himself, having recently overcome something of a shadow or a stain upon his reputation.

His father, a renowned warrior-chief, had died not long before, and Hamdo Ouga, being the eldest son, was, in theory, in line to succeed him. But to the discomfort of his entire village, he had only, in his entire life, killed one single man. This was considered really rather pitiful for someone wishing to call himself a chief. It would be like calling yourself an Aborigine, say, and being unable to get your boomerang to come back. There was, consequently, much talk in the shadows and much grumbling and muttering, and also much mention of other warriors with far more kills to their names who would, under
the circumstances, make a far better and more credible job of the chieftaincy.

Realising the way the wind was blowing, Hamdo Ouga decided to make amends for his tardiness, and with a group of friends he set off into the lands of the Issa tribe on a ‘big game hunting’ expedition.

He returned a few days later with the severed genitalia of four men.

As for the manner in which these four men met their deaths, it was not recorded; though it is known that as a rule the Asaimara preferred to take their quarry unawares.

Whatever the method and whatever the circumstances, Hamdo Ouga’s return was the occasion for much rejoicing, and his deeds were felt to have settled the matter of his fitness for the succession once and for all.

He came into Thesiger’s camp fresh from the celebrations, all smiling and proud, his hair dressed with ghee and sporting both a feather plume and a wooden comb, and he had, besides, five leather thongs hanging from the sheath of his dagger.

Along with him came his companions, all grinning from ear to ear—some of those ears being newly split to mark their achievements. One or two warriors carried rather messy wounds from the large lead bullets of the nineteenth-century French
fusil gras
rifles carried by the Issa; but these wounds, apparently, were nothing to worry about, being surprisingly quick to heal, they said, in their considerable experience. Except when they killed you, of course—in which case they tended, as a rule, not to heal at all.

But whatever the wounds of his companions, the young man was jubilant.

‘He struck me,’ said Thesiger, ‘as the Danakil equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket.’

In the camp he was offered firm handshakes and hearty congratu lations on his achievement, and everyone was happy.

Or rather, almost everyone was happy. The Issa, probably, were somewhat less than pleased about the whole affair, but their opinion didn’t count for much among the Asaimara.

Four days later, however, Hamdo Ouga came up with the bright idea of trying his luck again, this time against the Adoimara further up the river on the way to Aussa—the way, in fact, that Thesiger’s expedition would be heading if it ever got moving again. While he was at it, the young man hoped to recover from the Adoimara some cattle they had stolen.

They killed him, dead.

Then they took his accoutrements back with them to decorate their own trophy-cabinets.

Such was life, and such was death, among the tribes of those parts at that time.

‘None of that worried me,’ Thesiger was later to write. ‘I’m not a missionary and I don’t consider it’s my duty to go round finding fault with other people’s morals and behaviour. If they were living in Chelsea, I would say it was. I do have preferences but it’s not my business to enforce those preferences on other people.’

And for all that, the Asaimara were, as he put it in his diary at the time, ‘A cheerful, happy people despite the incessant killing, and certainly not afflicted by the boredom which weighs so heavily today on our own young urban civilisation.’

One of Hamdo Ouga’s last acts had been to sell Thesiger an old and half-blind pony for fifteen dollars. A short while later it escaped and made its way back home, taking its new tack and saddle with it. It had, it turned out, done this on numerous occasions before, and, indeed, was notorious for it. But no one had thought it polite to mention the fact at the time.

The expedition, meanwhile, was going nowhere.

Miriam Muhammad might have been able to help, even if he could not himself have been persuaded to go to Aussa. However, he had been called away to sit in judgment over an unfortunate case in which a warrior had speared an old madwoman who had laughed constantly in the night and so disturbed his sleep. The warrior’s defence was that it had all been a dreadful mistake: he had thought she was a hyena. A sort of two-legged, humanoid kind of hyena, dressed in human clothes, perhaps, and one looking suspiciously like an old madwoman. But it was dark, he said, and you can’t always see what’s what under such conditions. The woman’s relatives, though, were having none of it and were crying out for blood. Or at least, if not blood, then substantial compensation in the form of goods and livestock.

Back in camp, meanwhile, one of the Somali camel-men had been looking at the .410 rifle Thesiger had given him, and had shot it off by mistake, nearly killing one of his companions, who had been lying in the tent next to him.

In the end, two things happened to break the deadlock.

The first was Thesiger’s threat to remain exactly where he was for as long as it took, and to send all the soldiers back by train to explain why they had abandoned their mission.

The second was that Miriam Muhammad’s nephew Ali agreed to take his uncle’s place and to go with the expedition into Aussa, together with a chief called Ahmado to whom Thesiger took an instant dislike. Ali’s presence, in particular, was sold to the soldiers as a major coup for the expedition and as the very next-best thing to having the Hangadaala himself with them: perhaps even better, since he was a fit young man who would not slow the expedition down in the way that his uncle would have.

It was thought prudent not to mention the fact that Ali had a number of enemies both further along the river and among his
own people, who, rumour had it, considered him to be an arrogant loudmouth in need of taking down a peg or two.

Ahmado, as it turned out, also had a number of ‘issues’. Particularly in relation to the people of Aussa. But these did not emerge until some time later.

If you could look down on the world, and see everything that takes place upon the face of it, and if you were to pull your attention back from the small party camped by the course of the Awash River, further and further back, high above the tangle of trees at the water’s edge and the desert land spreading wide on either side, and if you were to pull back high into the sky, and if you were then to look over to the west, across the land and across the deep and churning ocean beyond, and the boats like toys in the heaving swell, and if you were then to cast your eyes up to the north, to England, then as your glance passed upwards you would see, in time, a thin-soiled land of bare, broad hills, where sheep graze in stone-walled fields by thorn trees bent double by the wind. And in a wide valley in the midst of this land, you would see a great industrial town, with 360 huge brick-built cotton mills—one for each day of the year, more or less—and all working both day and night; and all surrounded by row upon row and street upon street of smoke-blackened slate-roofed red-brick terraces with drying washing hung upon the lines strung across the cobbled yards and alleys between them.

It is spring. It is morning. The sudden rain, having passed, has given way to blue skies and wisps of white cloud, though the
cobbles are still wet. And if you listen well, on this day, you will not hear the sound of machinery, as you might on any other day; and you will see, if you look closer, that the mills are still and shut; and you will see also that the streets of the town round about are not as you might expect them to be, and that the walls and the houses and the black iron lamp-posts are decked with boughs and flowers. Here, the white froth of blackthorn, there, the heavy scented hawthorn-blossom; and over the low house-doors you will see birch-branches wedged or fastened there, their rain-shower leaves trembling in the gentle breeze.

Though by the clock the working day has long since started, the streets are thronged with people; and by the gates of this mill here before you, a crowd of mill-girls has gathered, in their thin cotton frocks and their rough, home-knitted cardigans and their heavy lace-up clogs. And they have flowers in their hair: they wear daisy-chains.

And one of these girls is my grandmother.

And somewhere in the crowds is a little boy of three years old in hand-me-down shorts two sizes too big for him: my father.

And they have set up a maypole in the street, and set a sapling on top of it, and they have hung it about with boughs and garlands.

And there will be dancing in the streets of the town.

And, just for now, the machines will be silent and in their place the town will move to a different pace, and the rhythm of the seasons and the rhythm of the land and the rhythm of those long since dead will once more assert itself.

For the most part, though, life is the mill and the mill is life.

Ten-hour shifts, 300 days a year, each girl constantly pacing the floor between the machines, checking her assigned set of spindles for breaks in the thread, to be pieced together by twisting; for depleted bobbins of unspun cotton on the racks or creels, to be
replaced; and for the build-up of loose cotton fibres on the machinery to be cleaned.

Three tasks, endlessly repeated for all your waking hours.

We are all on a journey here, you and I, and have been all down the generations. We’ve been on this journey ever since we put aside our feathers and our flint-tipped arrows and left our homes in the dappled shade of the forests to follow the grassland herds, or else to clear the land and till the fields; and we have been on this journey still in the years since we left those fields for the towns and the cities, and made our lives in the mills, like my grandmother, or in the factories, like my father, or in a suit and tie sorting cheques in the upstairs machine-room office of provincial high-street banks, like me. And where we are is where we are, and it’s where we’ve ended up.

And most of the time we do not stop to calculate the profit and the loss, or to look back at the way we have come and ask ourselves whether that was the right way, or whether the distance has been too far or not far enough, or whether it is too late to go back and pick up some of the things we have lost or left behind along the way.

But it concerns us nevertheless.

We set off early and walked without stopping for six hours, after which we reached the lower slopes of Mount Kulal.

We began to climb, and as we did so the ground became rocky, more thickly vegetated with dense dry grass, cactus and low thorn bushes. This bothered the camels, and they became fractious and picky about where they would place their feet, and they snorted and grumbled. At times they refused to move at all. It reached the point where we had to scout out the ground in front of them and guide their feet, in order to make any progress.

We climbed higher and higher, and as we climbed we could see before us spectacular views of a deep gorge in the mountain, and behind us spread out the vast expanse of the desert we had crossed thus far; and far in the distance, just on the horizon, we could see the blue silhouette of the hills by the wells at Ilaut, from which we had started.

It was hot again, despite the altitude, and the water we carried with us was, as ever, barely sufficient and carefully rationed out to make it last, but I had by now recovered fully from the effects of the heat of the early days. Acclimatisation, I suppose, was a big part of it. Also an old traveller’s trick, which I shall share with
you here and now, in case you should ever find yourself in a similar position to the one in which I found myself.

If you ever find yourself walking across a burning desert, oppressed by the heat of the sun to the extent that it makes you fall over and vomit, and then to behave like a complete and utter wet blanket for several days thereafter, then it may help you to look about your person or in your baggage for some form of headgear. You may, for example, have an Arab headscarf; or, if not, then you may have some piece of cloth or clothing with which you may fashion one for yourself.