Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (17 page)

Welcome back, my dear! You are home!

All Ahmad al-Fadhli knew when I called him from my hotel in Aden was that I was a friend of a friend, born there over forty years ago when it was still a British Crown Colony. But he had sounded as warm as if we had known each other for years so I happily accepted his kind invitation to travel a short way up the coast to spend a day with him at his banana farm.

He would send his driver and car to collect me, he said, but I must be sure to remember to bring my passport for presentation at check-points. All these security measures are an awful bore, aren’t they? Ruddy bin Laden and ruddy War on Terror! Ahmad chuckled, while I swiftly calculated that if that was his attitude he was obviously not on speaking terms with his cousin, Tariq al-Fadhli, an old friend of Osama bin Laden s. I felt a twinge of disappointment; much as I was looking forward to meeting Ahmad and seeing his farm, I had also been hoping for a chance to sound him out on the subjects of both jihadism in Yemen and Tariq’s relations with bin Laden. Never mind, I reasoned, the al-Fadhli clan had doubtless cut their Tariq off just as most of the bin Ladens had disowned their Osama. I made a mental note not to embarrass Ahmad by so much as mentioning Tariq the next day.

While it was still cool, at around eight the following morning, I climbed aboard a Toyota Land Cruiser. Ahmad’s driver, wearing the southern Yemeni tribesman’s uniform of prettily striped
fiita
^a
and faded checked turban, politely produced one of his employer’s cards to remove any anxiety I might have been feeling about being kidnapped and then we were on our way, easily clearing the checkpoint on the edge of town with a simple mention of the al-Fadhli name.

I found it hard to imagine a Yemeni banana farm. As far as my eye could see, there was no vegetation, just dust and stone on the one hand and a sandy beach and glittering Arabian Sea on the other. A light winter breeze was blowing a smoke of white sand from right to left, up the deserted shore, across the empty strip of asphalt we were speeding along, towards the baked and barren expanse reaching inland to a ridge of bare russet mountains. Shortly before we reached Zinjibar, the old Fadhli tribal capital, the view changed to more promisingly green plantations however, and soon we were hurtling off the road, along ever narrowing dusty tracks, past clusters of poor huts and ragged children, and a camel or two, and a brand new white mosque and on, plunging between rows of low banana trees straight to the middle of Ahmad’s farm, to stop at last by a scruffy caravan. A few yards away, at a rusty folding table set under a single generously spreading eucalyptus tree, sat Ahmad. Bearded and beaming, he was dressed Saudi style in a long, pristine white
thowb
and red-and-white checked headcloth, with a mobile phone, a walking stick and a glass of Mecca’s ZamZam water to hand.

‘Marvellous stuff! Cures absolutely everything!’ he exclaimed.

In a Queen’s English hardly heard since the 1950s he chatted on charmingly. I discovered why he preferred to live in a caravan rather than at either his Aden or Sanaa or even his Saudi residence. He was never happier than when on his ancestral tribal land, he told me, but he was clearly also very fond of reminiscing about a childhood spent as a member of the ruling family of the Fadhli tribe, under colonial British ‘protection’ until 1967 when he and his family had been chased off their beloved land by Marxist insurgents to a sad exile in Saudi Arabia.

In 1947, aged only six, he told me, he had been kitted out with a white cotton blazer complete with school badge, a khaki
futa
, shirt and turban, and sent to the colony’s College for the Sons of Emirs and Chiefs. Despite its Spartan regime, it had failed to curb his Yemeni tribesman’s rebellious streak and Aden’s British masters had packed him off to Britain to a minor Gloucestershire public school, for a life of ‘potatoes and frostbite and feeling hungry’. Ever the resourceful tribesman, Ahmad had set traps for rabbits and squirrels with the aid of a few horse hairs purloined from the school’s stables and barbecued whatever he caught, until he was caught himself one day by worried firemen who had spotted a plume of smoke.

When his schoolboy derring-do stories ran out Ahmad spoke about his farm, explaining that he hoped banana-growing would keep his youngest son, Haidara, out of trouble and away from the Fadhli tribal calling to bear arms. ‘You see, the trouble with us is that we like fighting much better than anything else,’ he confided. ‘Pay a Fadhli to build a house and it will be a slow business, pay him to fight and he’s there with his gun in an instant!’ We laughed together over how much trouble his ancestors had given Aden’s British rulers in the mid-nineteenth century, about how one only had to consult the tribe’s founding myth which featured an illegitimate Turkish baby washed up on the nearby shore in the sixteenth century to know that the Fadhlis had, in his words, ‘always been bastards’. Then he suggested that if I was so interested in Fadhli tribal history I might like to meet his octogenarian Uncle Nasir, the Fadhlis‘ last sultan who, just like Ahmad, had been exiled in Saudi Arabia but had recently returned to live out his days among his own people. ’After that,’ Ahmad suggested, patting his ample stomach, ‘we might drop in on Nasir’s son, my cousin Tariq, in time for a nice lunch. You’ve heard of him, have you? Well, he’s the big sheikh here now - no one uses the title sultan any more - so he’s got plenty of money from the government and a big new house, just there on that first roundabout into Zinjibar, you would have passed it…’

Evidently, my delicate scruples about not about embarrassing my host by mentioning Tariq were wasted, but what on earth was any friend of Osama bin Laden doing at large rather than safely behind bars, and being paid by the government in Sanaa to live with high status and in some luxury? It was baffling given President Ali Abdullah Salih’s pledge to side with the West in President George W Bush’s global ‘War on Terror’. Furthermore, why would Tariq al-Fadhli dream of inviting an infidel Englishwoman into his home for a ‘nice lunch’?

I wondered if Ahmad could be all he seemed, if his nostalgia for his British schooldays was all an elaborate act designed to lull me into a false sense of security. After all, the al-Fadhlis had every reason to be nursing a special old grudge against the British who had built them up as local rulers of this land, called them sultans and flattered them with rich gifts and gun salutes for over a century before abandoning them to the Marxists. As I climbed back into Ahmad’s car a terrifying thought crossed my mind: might the plan be to kidnap and deliver me to Tariq al-Fadhli for a video-recorded beheading?

Driving back through the farm and the tatty centre of Zinjibar and on north-east along the coast road, we turned inland, at a place called Shuqra - ‘the first capital of the Fadhlis, where my ancestors used to plunder ships from and what have you,’ Ahmad explained. It was Fadhli tribesmen, he proudly reminded me, who had given the British their perfect excuse to invade Aden back in 1839, by plundering the Indian
Duria Dawla
and parading her women passengers naked on the deck. Bouncing along a rough desert track, we seemed to be making for the distant shape of a tall edifice. Eventually we drew close enough for me to identify it as a mud brick fort, some four storeys high. Alone in its humble glory in that flat dun expanse, unshaded by any trees, with only a dusty chicken coop for company, it was hardly more appealing than Ahmad’s caravan.

A wizened old man squatting in some rubble against a wall of the fort, with a dusty red car safety-belt circling his knees,
^b
did not bother to register our arrival by looking up from the hubbly-bubbly pipe he was puffing on. Naturally assuming that we would find the venerable Fadhli patriarch lounging comfortably on cushions in the fort’s cool interior, I took the old smoker for an ancient family retainer, until Ahmad presented him to me as ‘Sultan Nasir of the Fadhlis’. Rising from his dusty corner, the man whom the British had honoured with gun salutes and stipends and rifles and even appointed justice minister of their still-born Federation of South Arabia, greeted me kindly and shepherded us into a reception room which was situated to one side of the main building. More like a car port than any reception room I had ever seen, dusty but comfortably open-ended to let a breeze tunnel through, it was furnished with low mattress seating scattered with bright silk cushions.

Between fretting and fiddling with a succession of malfunctioning pipes he had made himself, old Sultan Nasir made fascinating conversation. He and Ahmad squabbled amicably about how many times he had been married. Ahmad insisted it was forty-seven times. Nasir could not believe it, but knew he had only really loved his second wife, who had died half a century earlier. Neither he nor Ahmad could be bothered to calculate how many children he had fathered. What they could agree on was that since returning home from his Saudi exile in 1995 Nasir had been married five times, but only the last union, to a girl of eighteen by whom he had sired three children in the past six years, had been happy. ‘The proof is in the pudding,’ laughed Ahmad, pointing out that Nasir had treated this latest wife to a generator, a television and even a washing machine. I glimpsed her briefly inside the mud fort. Wearing a pair of fluorescent pink plastic sandals, a tomato-red silk dress with a solid gold belt and a lumpy brown henna face-mask, she was reclining in a darkened upstairs room with a low ceiling and packed-earth floor, watching television with her children, little more than a child herself, while her prized washing machine went about its noisy business, but without the help of piped water. Nasir clearly loved his young family. ‘That Haroun!’ he said, shaking his head and chuckling over his five-year-old son, ‘he’s always threatening to stone me if I refuse to give him money to buy more pet rabbits!’ ‘Have you changed your mind yet about sending them to school?’ interjected Ahmad, who had confided to me in the car his growing anxiety that his youngest cousins would never learn to read and write, let alone understand computers or English. ‘Pah!’ was old Nasir’s only reply.

Although educated to university level himself in British-ruled Sudan, Nasir was no fan of learning or, for that matter, much else about the modern world. Nor did he think much of Yemeni unification. Like so many southerners, he resented the new order as ‘an occupation’ by the northern tribal ascendancy in Sanaa. On the other hand, he did respect President Ali Abdullah Salih personally. Determined to eradicate any last trace of Marxism from the south by fostering a revival of the old tribal order, the president was paying Nasir an annual stipend equivalent to a government minister’s salary and even dropped by to see him from time to time. Nasir had responded by astutely allying his family to the regime, marrying one of his daughters into Salih’s northern high-lander tribe, to the man generally reckoned to be the second power in the land, the military commander of the north-west district of the country which included Sanaa, Brigadier-General Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar. Nasir recounted how, shortly before the 2003 parliamentary elections, the president had dropped in to have a publicity shot taken of himself in friendly conversation with Nasir as he squatted there cross-legged in the dust as usual, puffing on his pipes. Plastered all over Sanaa, the resulting campaign poster had soon been spotted by one of Nasir’s grandsons, a student in the capital, who instantly recognised his grandfather but failed to notice that his
fiita
had fallen open. It had been a friend who exclaimed, ‘Who on earth is that old man with his balls on display?’ Uncle and nephew roared with laughter at the memory.

Nasir’s lack of self-importance and his remarkable good health, which he demonstrated by mock-challenging his stout nephew to a quick sprint, were impressive. Asked for the secret of his contented longevity, he slyly joked, ‘I did not have very much sexual intercourse when I was younger - you see, I never had the permitted four wives, only ever one at a time.’ A simple Muslim piety, frequent recourse to the well-thumbed paperback Koran he kept in the breast pocket of his shirt, seemed to be his mainstay. His ribald recreation of the Muslim holy book’s version of the birth of Jesus - particularly his demonstration of the way Jesus had rocketed out of Mary’s womb while she lay resting under a date tree - had us all laughing again, but the performance was cut short by the appearance of one of his seventeen sons, not Tariq the jihadist but a handsome and neatly dressed young captain in the local police. Young Mustafa al-Fadhli said he needed his father’s advice: should he or should he not take a second wife? Both Nasir and Ahmad impatiently urged him to do no such thing. Wives were expensive and they did not always see eye to eye, they said. He should not follow the example set by his older brother Tariq, with whom, Ahmad reminded me, we would shortly be lunching.

Born three months before the British withdrew from Aden, Tariq had been a helpless babe in arms in 1967 when the Marxist NLF declared the Fadhli sultanate overthrown and its capital Zinjibar their new headquarters. Shaking their heads over the painful memory, Ahmad and Nasir recalled how, shocked by that British betrayal of the old treaties of friendship and both in London at the time, they had requested a meeting with Lord Shackleton
^c
at the House of Lords and been dismayed to hear that in his, as it turned out extraordinarily prescient, opinion, it would not be a couple of months but possibly as much as twenty-five years before they saw their home again. After hastily withdrawing a large sum of cash from his London and Zurich banks and spending a few months in Beirut, Nasir and his extended family had had little choice but to resettle in Saudi Arabia, living off the generous monthly stipends the Saudi royals paid to all the ousted former rulers of the Aden protectorates. ‘Which, by the way, we are still being paid now we’ve moved back here,’ Ahmad said, as we drove back up the dusty, rocky track towards the main road again.

Soon we were approaching a British-era roundabout on the far side of town. There, on its edge stood another fort-like structure, a still unfinished grey concrete three-storey edifice surrounded by a high wall: Tariq’s new residence.
^d