In Praise of Savagery (16 page)

While he was gone, Ali explained that the stick the head
askari
carried was the silver baton of command, which gave the bearer the authority of the Sultan himself, and that no Danakil in or around Aussa, on pain of a crippling fine or worse, may refuse any request made by the bearer of the baton.

Sure enough, the
askaris
soon returned, bringing with them sheep and goats they had requisitioned from the elders of the village, which were then slaughtered and cooked.

In the morning the baboons had gone.

We packed up our camels and set off, soon leaving the shelter of the hills behind and heading out once more across a flat desert plain strewn with black volcanic rocks. On the far side, towards the horizon, we could see a shimmering expanse that appeared, at first, to be a trick of the light, but which remained, no matter how we looked at it, and which, as the day wore on, became clearer and clearer as a vast expanse of water, in the middle of the dry and empty land.

‘That,’ said Osman, ‘is Lake Turkana.’

It was a remarkable sight: so much water—so much.

We made our way across the plain towards a point on the lake’s shore, a settlement called Loyangalani, where, beside a stand of tall palm trees, we could see a great many huts of different styles and shapes. We walked purposefully and fast, drawn by the lure of water, and eventually reached the place around lunchtime, coming first, at its edge, to a metal pipe set in a concrete base, from which gushed pure, clear water the temperature of a warm bath, from which we drank until we were fit to burst, and with which I was able, at last, to wash my shorts.

The huts in Loyangalani were of all of the tribes and cultures in the area, the most common being igloo-shaped Turkana huts
made of straw matting and bound bundles of dry palm-leaves, but there were also thatched wattle-and-daub huts built around frames of wooden branches, as well as a number of small houses made of whitewashed stone with sloping tin roofs. Beyond these, we could see the larger shapes of a mission church and a school.

After drinking from the pipe we went to an eating-house owned by yet another of Apa’s relatives—his sister, this time—and there we had sweet tea made with ginger and bread made in a frying-pan. Pan-fried bread is something the Sioux Indians make, also, preparing a dough with flour, water and baking-powder and frying it on both sides in a hot pan. In that place, at that time, it tasted unimaginably wonderful.

Finally, Apa’s sister brought us cups of water which was cool, and which was beyond words to describe.

This water was made cool in a most miraculous way—which, apparently, is quite simple science, and the same process by which sweating cools you down or by which waterskins keep liquids from becoming too warm, but which, when you see it, still seems counterintuitive and magical.

What they do is they take a water-container—in this case, one of our jerry-cans—and they fill it with water and tie it inside a wet sack. Then they hang it in the hottest place they can find—in a tree in full sunlight, say—and then, when the sack is dry they pour out the water and it is cold, as if it had come from a refrigerator.

After this, Frazer, Andy and I walked to the lake with two little Turkana boys we met, and went swimming in the water there. Though we could not speak to each other, the language of jumping and splashing is a universal one, as is laughter.

I think that if there were to be a heaven, then it would feel something like this.

I do not know how long we were there for.

When we emerged, at last, a hot, dry wind had got up, and in places it swirled and twisted, calling up ‘dust-devils’ some twenty feet high on the plain.

Going back up to our camp we passed a group of fishermen from the Elmolo tribe on their way back home with their catch, and we bought two large Nile perch from them, to have that night as a change from goat.

We all spent most of the rest of the day resting, and trying—and failing—to get out of the oppressive heat of the burning wind, and also talking to our companions about our lives, and where we had come from. The two Rendille camel-men were particularly keen to learn about marriage customs in England, and were amazed to hear, as Osman translated our words for them, that we could have only one wife where we came from. This amazement turned to frank disbelief when the matter of bride-price arose.

‘So you are telling me,’ said Apa, ‘that in your country the father of a girl will just
give
her away?’

‘That’s right.’

‘For nothing?’

‘And to a stranger he hardly knows?’

‘It does happen.’

The two Rendille exchanged looks.

‘It is impossible!’

We assured them that it wasn’t, and that this really was the case, but they didn’t look convinced. I think they thought we were making a joke at their expense.

Wedding customs that seem perfectly normal in your own country often seem downright odd to people from other places. But they often say a lot about your nation.

The Danakil of the lands around Aussa had a set of customs governing marriage that would probably seem very queer indeed
to more or less anyone else. Being the kind of people that they were, these customs tended to revolve around various forms of ritual violence.

Among the Asaimara band, a man was expected to win his bride by organising a game rather like the one that small boys in England know as British Bulldog.

A young man wishing to marry would be expected to gather together eight of his friends and go to the house of the girl to ask her father for her hand in marriage. If the father agreed, then the girl would go out and gather together a similar number of her girlfriends and line them up some 200 or 300 yards from her house. Then the man would get his friends to line up halfway between them and the house—all apart from one, a man chosen by the groom, who, together with the girl, would stand by the house itself. Then the groom and the bride’s father would retire to the sidelines and a signal would be given, upon which the girl would set off at a run, with the ‘best man’ in pursuit, aiming to dodge or break through the line of men to reach her girlfriends on the other side. If she managed to do so without being caught, then the wedding was off and the man had to try again a year later. If, however, she was caught, she was carried to her father’s house and thrown roughly on the ground before it, and the wedding could take place. After the wedding, the couple was expected to live in the girl’s village for a year, following which the man could take her back to his own village.

Among the Adoimara band, a man wishing to marry had to visit the girl’s father on an allotted day and pay him three dollars, upon which he would be told that the girl was out grazing goats in such-and-such a place, and that he had leave to go and take her. The girl, meanwhile, would have chosen a high place with a good lookout to graze her goats, and would have with her an escort of girlfriends. Between them they would have collected a
substantial arsenal of rocks, stones and sticks, and when they saw the man approaching they would attempt to drive him off, throwing the rocks and stones and beating him with the sticks. Depending on the willingness of the girl to marry the particular suitor, he could find the resistance rather easy to overcome, or else he could be seriously injured. This was frequently the case, apparently. On occasion men were even killed.

If captured, the girl would be taken back to her father, who would order the man to go away and come back with a he-camel. The girl, dressed in her finest clothes, would be tied to the camel’s back and led three times around her father’s house, watched by the entire village, while the beast, which would be very wild, bucked and kicked, and generally shook the girl all over the place. This done, the girl was lifted down and laid upon one of the best sleeping mats, and then swung backwards and forwards by four singing women.

Wedding customs change. Where I come from, weddings mostly took place in the bride’s parish church, and at the culmination of the ceremony the groom would place a gold ring upon her finger. Increasingly, these days, there is a second gold ring involved, which the bride then places on the groom’s finger. People still do get married in the bride’s parish church, but a lot of people now get married elsewhere. It is becoming more common for a couple to go to another country, and to get married there in a ceremony of their choice or devising, and often in strange or unusual circumstances. They may, for example, get married in a chapel in Las Vegas by a man dressed in imitation of Elvis Presley; or on a beach, or parachuting from an aeroplane, or under the sea wearing aqualungs.

It has also become possible, in my country, for a man to marry another man and for a woman to marry another woman; or at least, for them to go through a ceremony which is a marriage in
all but name. It is not permitted, however, for a man to marry his dog, or for his dog to marry his cat or anything of that kind, athough in some other countries where same-sex weddings between humans are unheard of, marriages between humans and animals and between animals and animals are nevertheless not unknown.

Children in parts of rural India are sometimes married off to animals, to protect them from the attentions of evil spirits. And I read recently about a case in the Sudan where a man married a goat. Marriage was not his original intention, apparently. However, one night, in a drunken state, he took advantage of the animal, perhaps having mistaken her for a sheep. He was not quiet about it; and hearing the noises of it, the enraged owner came out of his house and caught him at it, and pinned him down and tied him up, and hauled him next day before a council of tribal elders, who sat in judgment upon him and announced that he should do the decent thing by the goat, all things considered; and that he should also pay the owner a dowry of 15,000 dinars into the bargain.

They were pronounced man and goat shortly afterwards.

The former owner, interviewed by a newspaper some months later, said ‘As far as I know they are still together.’

Sometimes in new kinds of marriage, remnants of ancient and long-dead customs may be found, such as in the use of decorated wooden spoons or old shoes as wedding-gifts or as adornments for the wedding-car or carriage after the ceremony. These were once given by the family of the bride to the groom, as representations of the father’s authority to discipline his daughter and its handing-over over to her new husband.

There are customs also concerning childbirth, as for all significant milestones in life and in death, and these change also. There is, for example, now a custom in which, when a woman gives birth, her husband—or the man known as her
partner
if they are
unmarried—stands in the hospital delivery-room dressed in a surgical gown and watches the proceedings. In many cases he will record the event with a video-camera.

The orthodoxy of one’s own time and place, and the customs and rituals that go with it, always tend to seem much more natural and sensible than those of others. It takes, sometimes, something of a mental shift to see them otherwise.

In 1956, an anthropologist called Horace Miner wrote and published a paper called ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema’, about the strange ways of a little-known tribe living in North America, in a territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Among these people, he said, there was a powerful belief that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease; and that consequently they must devote themselves to frequent ritual and ceremonial purifications, carried out in private and in secret in special household shrines devoted to the purpose. Such was the importance of these rituals to the Nacirema that the powerful and important individuals would often possess several such shrines, and the opulence of a house would often be referred to in terms of the number of them that it possessed. Inside, each shrine would contain a box or chest built into the wall, inside which there would be many charms and magical potions obtained from medicine men and herbalists, and without which the natives believed they could not live. Beneath the charm-box there would be a small font, and each day every member of the family, in succession, would enter the shrine room, bow his head before the charm-box, mingle different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceed with a rite of ablution.

The joke being, of course, that ‘Nacirema’ is American spelt backwards, and what Miner was describing was the obsessive cleanliness of his own people.

That evening we ate fish.

I say we ate fish, but by this I mean that Frazer, Andy, the two Samburu from Maralal and I ate it. The Rendille, on the other hand, did not. Not only did they not eat it but they were horrified and revolted at the very idea of it. They would not touch it, nor even anything that it had touched, and they insisted that the pot used to cook it in and the plates used to eat it from should be kept separate from then onwards.

Because they would not eat it, we had more than we needed for that day and so we only cooked one of the two fish, which we ate while the Rendille sat tucking into their goat and
ugali
and looking at us in disbelief.

The other fish we cleaned that night and decided to keep for the next evening. We considered different ways of storing it, and in the end went for Andy’s suggestion of putting it in a plastic carrier-bag, and hanging it in the branches of a tree.

‘It’ll keep the insects off,’ he said.

Thesiger’s expedition pressed on for five days after the meeting with the
askaris
, passing through increasingly rocky and desolate country, between two chains of hills, along the sides of which many strong fortifications had been built. On the fifth day they left the hills behind them and crossed a vast open plain, on the far side of which was a ridge of black rock, beyond which there was grazing for the camels, where they made their camp, although it was yet only mid-afternoon.