In Praise of Savagery (6 page)

And then there followed one single joke, which was dragged out for about half an hour. The joke was this: the Cheapdeals holidaymakers were herded onto the plane with electric cattleprods by boot-faced Russian shotputter-types and served cold gruel and whatever as their in-flight meal, while the Bennytours people, up at the front of the same plane but tantalisingly visible beyond a flimsy curtain, got velvet chaises longues and champagne, and
grapes individually peeled by beautiful air hostesses in barely covered underwear. And then you got endless variations on the same joke over and over again in the hotel, at the pool, at dinner, on the way home. At the age of eight I found it all hilarious.

But when I saw it on the television, back then, what I thought was that it was comedy, and I thought that it was something that someone, probably Benny Hill himself, had made up.

It wasn’t until I chose an Aeroflot flight to Nairobi in preference to one with Saudi Air—for the sake of saving £5—that I realised it was actually a closely observed documentary. Except that with Aeroflot the experience lasted for eighteen hours each way, and the joke, if ever there was one, wore thin considerably sooner.

It was not so much the length of the flight, although it was, all in all, more than twice as long as you might have expected, given the distance. This was down to all the stops—stops which included several hours in Larnaka airport; followed by eight very long hours sitting on the floor in Moscow airport, there not being enough chairs there for all who wanted them; followed then by several hours in the sweltering airport in Aden, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, which at that time had rows of bullet-holes in the windows from the recent coup attempt.

Nor was it the extreme poverty and paucity of the food and drink we were served—that’s what you expect when you pay as little as you possibly can for your flight. And we were, in fact, given complimentary refreshments in Yemen. The refreshments consisted of half a plastic cup of flat-looking cherryade. Which would have been delicious, I am sure, had I not put mine down on the bar for a moment, upon which the barman took it away and gave it to someone else. I did ask for another, but the barman, being unable to speak English, called in the assistance of a man in sunglasses carrying a sub-machine gun. This man couldn’t speak
English, either, but by gesticulating at me with his gun he was better able to communicate to me the fact that I should have drunk my drink when I was given it, and that I should now stop being a nuisance and forget all about it, if I knew what was good for me.

But to be fair to Aeroflot, they had at least arranged for their passengers to have in-flight entertainment. This entertainment came in the form of a battered magazine—one copy per row of seats—in which could be found all manner of tempting advertisements for combine harvesters and industrial machinery—should we feel the urge to splash out and treat ourselves to one, just for the hell of it. It also contained a full-page picture of a rather beefy young lady in a bikini standing by the edge of a particularly icy-looking sea, beneath a slate-grey sky, with the words ‘Come to Sunny Crimea’ printed above her head. This alone was enough, almost, to make the even most hardened Western imperialist-capitalist lackey want to defect instantly to the Soviet Workers’ Paradise. Which, I am sure, was the intention.

It was none of these things that made the flight so unpleasant.

Instead, it was the sheer grim, unrelenting joylessness with which every aspect of the entire journey was conducted, from beginning to end.

If any of the stewardesses smiled, even momentarily, at any point throughout the entire eighteen hours, then I did not see it.

When we walked out, the three of us, into the sunlight of Nairobi’s crowded streets, dressed in our outfits, one could only begin to imagine how impressed the locals were at the sight of us.

I had gone for the ‘Old-Style Boy Scout Meets British Explorer’ look: khaki shirt with epaulettes and pleated breast-pockets, slightly-too-large khaki shorts, broad belt with a knife at my waist—the sort of thing, in fact, that Thesiger might himself have worn some half a century before; the sort of thing that his uncle, Lord Chelmsford, would have seen his men wearing, further ago still, if he’d paid an unexpected visit to a British Army hill station somewhere near Poona during his years as Viceroy of India. Although I did, also, have a black-and-white Arab headscarf worn around my neck as a sort of cravat, and also as a sort of sartorial homage to Lawrence of Arabia.

My brother had taken a similar approach.

Andy, meanwhile, had gone for more of an Indiana Jones effect, topped off with a broad-brimmed olive-green felt hat.

It lasted for about five minutes, the hat, until a small boy darted out from among the crowds, snatched the thing off his head and shot off again, weaving in and out of the passers-by like a greased piglet.

Runner that he was, Andy set off after the boy, though he was encumbered by a large and bulky rucksack.

We caught up with Andy about ten minutes later, standing by the side of the road catching his breath.

‘Did you see that?’ he said. ‘The little …’

He sought for the most appropriate word, but before it could come to him he broke into a grin.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘whatever. He could run, though, couldn’t he?’

No hat. And no Mohican hairstyle any more, either; he’d shaved it off for the trip. I’d asked him to.

‘Andy,’ I’d said, ‘he’s a very proper sort of man. He wouldn’t appreciate it, you know; not unless it was part of your traditional costume or something.’

Which, in the wilds of south London, it is not.

‘O wad some pow’r the giftie gie’ us,’ as Robert Burns said, ‘to see oursels as others see us.’

And I’m sure we would all three of us have been suitably impressed, had it been.

The Danakil, murderous and treacherous though they were, nevertheless set great store by their appearance, and had an elaborate code of traditional bodily adornments and modifications. A curved dagger worn across the stomach, bearing a row of brass-bound thongs; an ostrich-feather plume, worn Native American-style; slit earlobes; a coloured loincloth; these were all signifiers, in their world. What they signified—them being Danakil and all—was death, and each decoration recorded the number and kind of victims killed, and the manner of death given them.

But as for the Danakil and his death-tokens, so too for the City banker and his pinstripes; for the High Court judge and his wig and gown; for the medicine man and his feathered bonnet and the witchdoctor and his carved mask. And also the graduate and is
mortar-board; the bride and her wedding-dress and the Queen and her crown and robes of state. The costume is the outward form and signifier of how we see ourselves and of how we want others to see us. Or rather it’s more than that, or it’s other than that; and the act of wearing it makes you somehow more than you are, and other than you are; and for a while you become the living form of something bigger than you are, and more than you are, and which existed long before you were born and which will go on long after you are dust. Or something.

There was a British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who in his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, would turn up at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet wearing what was variously described by his aides as ‘working dress’ and as ‘a business suit’. All the other guests, meanwhile, arrived in formal white tie and tails, as the dress-code required. In doing this, Brown succeeded in wearing the most ostentatious costume in the room, a costume which said—depending on your point of view—‘progressive, modern reformer’, or ‘dour, miserable killjoy puritan’, or else, in the words of the journalist Simon Heffer, ‘simply bloody rude’.

In the town where I now live, my wife and I once saw a party of schoolgirls looking very smart and striking, all dressed in long scarlet cloaks and wearing broad straw hats. A few years later, we took our eldest daughter, Alice—ten years old at the time—to the school to be interviewed by the headmistress, who had taken up her post at more or less the same time that we had first seen the girls. As we entered her office, Alice was wearing the winter uniform of her own primary school, a dark blue pinafore with a woollen coat and a felt hat.

‘My word!’ exclaimed the headmistress. ‘How very quaint!’

She crouched down to speak to Alice on her level.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you won’t have to worry about that sort of thing here, you know: we got rid of our hats years ago!’

And at about the same time, a man by the name of Mr Philip Collins, the director of something called the Social Market Foundation, published a pamphlet calling for an end to costumes and all other ‘outdated flummery’ in public life:

It is time we had an honours system that does not satirise itself … the whole bizarre panoply of OBEs, MBEs, CBEs, DCVOs, MVOs, GCBs, CHs, MNOGs and Yeomen Bed Goers should be put on the bonfire along with the vanity of those who care for such distinctions. We should abolish the titles of Sir and Dame into the bargain. Instead of all this nonsense we should establish a single award, the Order of Merit … awarded at a new democratic ceremony, performed at the House of Commons by the Speaker,
dressed in clothes he would be happy to wear on public transport
.

So, a bus driver’s uniform, then.

And perhaps the honours themselves might be dispensed from a form of ticket-machine which the Speaker wears on a strap about his neck.

On which note, we met up with our bus at the allotted place, in a bus garage in the middle of a shanty-town on the edge of the city, where we were welcomed on board by a bus driver who, though he lacked an official uniform, did have a ticket-machine—an old aluminium London bus conductor’s one, slung across his shoulder on a strap made of knotted string—and who was a model driver in almost every other way. Smiling broadly, he loaded our rucksacks into the baggage hold and showed us to our seats, while helping old ladies to stow baskets of live chickens in the overhead racks and collecting money and handing out tickets, laughing and bantering all the while. He was, as I
say—uniform aside—the perfect driver in almost every respect. The only respect, in fact, in which he fell in any way short, was in his total inability to actually drive a bus. As we were soon to discover.

The telephone call to the provincial governor’s office was in Amharic. Probably.

Either way, there exists no transcript of it.

But if you had been there, if you had been listening in—in the next office, say—and if you’d understood the language, then I imagine that what you would have heard would have sounded something like this:

‘He said
what
, you say?’

‘Oh, did he, now? He’s having a laugh, isn’t he? And then what?’

‘Nothing? What d’you mean,
nothing
?’

‘Not answering the telephone? How can they not be answering the telephone? They’ve got a telephone operator. That’s what he does. He operates the bloody telephone. That’s what he’s paid to do.’

‘Oh, really? Has he, now? Well, we need to have words with that operator. Strong words. And this Englishman, he’s done
what,
now? Gone? Gone where? I don’t believe it!’

‘Yes, well you make sure that you bloody well do.’

The sound of a phone being slammed back down in its cradle.

‘Right, young fellow-me-lad—I’m going to put a stop to your little game. Yo u see if I don’t!’

And meanwhile, out in the wild lands, the little party was making its way slowly onwards across a semi-desert plain of dust and scrub. They walked well into the night, there being a full moon, and Thesiger anxious to put as much distance as he could between himself and the provincial authorities. All in all there were thirty-nine of them: Thesiger himself, the fifteen conscripted soldiers, twenty-two Somali bearers and camel-men and one Danakil from the Awash Station, who was there in the dual role of guide and hostage, and whose main duty, apart from showing the way, was to call out into the wilderness in his language at regular intervals throughout the day and night, saying that they were armed to the teeth, and that whoever came near would be shot.

That night, however, the guide—or hostage—tried to bolt, but was caught. After that, he was escorted everywhere he went by two armed guards.

The next morning they set off early, and soon entered the territory of the Adoimara band of the Danakil tribe, where they came across a village, in which a great feast was taking place.

They sent an armed party down to the village to make contact, and to see what was happening. It was, they discovered, a funeral feast for a party of men ambushed and killed by their Asaimara rivals at a spot not 200 yards from where the expedition had camped the previous night.

The villagers were expecting a further raid by the Asaimara at any time. This was fortunate for Thesiger, because it meant that he and his armed party were welcomed as potential allies.

They were invited to share in the feast, and were also taken out to see the bloodstained rocks where the attack had taken place. They also learnt that it was here that the party of Greeks had been killed by Asaimara warriors some years previously; and that an Adoimara headman called Omar from their village had found the
sole survivor and taken him to safety, in order to obtain a reward from the Government.

This Omar, they said, was a man well known for his skills in dealing with outsiders, whether they be Government officials or rival tribesmen, or even half-dead Greeks. Which suggested a way of easing the progress of the expedition.

After much negotiation, and after the payment of large numbers of goods and animals to both Omar himself and to more or less his entire extended family, it was agreed that the headman would be their guide on the next stage of the journey—which would take them through the foothills of Mount Ayelu and into Bahdu on the other side, through which the river flowed on its way to Aussa, and where the Asaimara lived in great numbers.