The Prophet's Camel Bell (26 page)

Mohamed was the first person I saw in Somaliland, and he was the last. When we climbed on the plane he came with us and handed us a packet of sandwiches he had made. We had misinterpreted one another very often, Mohamed and ourselves, and if we had been staying on here, we still would do so. But we had come to know something of him, and he of us. We had been present during a significant couple of years in one another's lives. This must mean something, surely. We found it hard to say goodbye to him, and it seemed to us that he felt the same way.

A year or so later, when we were in West Africa, we heard from Mohamed. Through a local scribe, he wrote to tell us that Shugri had borne him a son, and he sent us a small pair of Somali sandals for our daughter. We heard one more thing about him. An English friend in Somaliland wrote to say that Mohamed was working now in a different field – he had become a union organizer for a newly formed domestic servants' union.

Mohamed was compelled to seek the elders' blessing, but it is too late for him ever to return completely to the old tribe. And yet he will never be entirely free of his need for it. I wonder if he may have found, at last, a new tribe now?

When Arabetto was a child, his father once took him on a visit to Rome. One of the great regrets of his life was that he had been too young at the time to sample the Roman night life. What a terrible waste. Now he would probably never get to Rome again, for how could a truck driver ever save that much money? If he had his choice, though, he thought he might rather go to Paris.

“The Italians say
Paris
–
paradiso
.”

His father, an Arab merchant, had owned a shop in Mogadisciou and had wanted Arabetto, the youngest son, to get an education. Time and again, Arabetto was sent to school, but he kept running away. He much preferred the life of the markets and docks. Finally his father gave up and let him do as he pleased. What his mother's attitude had been, he never said, for although he talked often about his father, he never once mentioned the Midgertein woman who was his mother. In any event, he had followed his own inclinations and had grown up on the streets. Now he was sorry for the chances thrown away.

“What I got, this time? Nothing. I don' know to read, I don' know to write. I know only my lorry.”

This was something of an exaggeration. He knew a few other things as well, for he spoke Somali, Arabic, English, Italian and Swahili. He was a good mechanic, and although he was an incurably fast driver, he looked after the Bedford three-ton and handled it with care.

“He's got more feeling for machinery than the others,” Jack said of him. “He's more at home with it.”

Arabetto's father had died just before the war, and the shop and several trade-trucks were left to the older brothers in the family. Arabetto drove one of the trucks for a while, but his eldest brother never gave him enough spending money. Perhaps his brother was concerned about the jazzy kid who liked to go dancing every evening at the
Albergo
. They quarrelled, and Arabetto left home for good. He had worked as a driver in many different places – Jigjigga, Addis, Awareh, Borama, and now out in the Haud with us.

Arabetto was not actually handsome, being rather pockmarked on the face and having a deep scar on one cheek, but he gave the impression of being good looking. He was heavier in build than most Somalis, for he had never gone hungry as most of them had. His real name was Ahmed, but he was always known by his nickname, and the word itself signified his apartness from the others. There must have been, in places like Mogadisciou, many like Arabetto, but here he was unusual. Although he was half Somali, he was never accepted as one of them. He resented very much that they regarded him as an outsider, a foreigner, but in fact he was just that, for there was a vast gulf between the others and himself. The chief difference was that he had no tribe. He was the only one in the camp who had grown up entirely without any tribal connections. He was what the Somalis called
nin magala-di
, a man of the town, and in a way that even Mohamed, who had lived
most of his life in a town, was not. For Arabetto did not appear to miss the tribal affiliations, or to need them. He neither gave advice nor asked for it. He went his own way. He had an air of tough and worldly humour, quite unlike any of the others in the camp, and he talked more freely than they did. His first week in camp he did something none of the others would ever do. Talking with us one evening, he lit a cigarette – and offered one to us, casually, hardly noticing that he was doing it. He spoke politely to Jack, always, but he called him “Mr. Laurence” or “sir.” “Sahib” was a word Arabetto never used.

Not surprisingly, he was more politically minded than the others appeared to be. He sang for me dozens of verses of
Somaliyey Tosey
(Somalia, Awake) and he spoke of the future with certainty and openness.

“The Somali Youth League is saying ten more years and then independence.”

This goal seemed impossible to me, considering the limited number of educated leaders. To him, it seemed not only possible but inevitable, a foregone conclusion. And time proved him right.

Arabetto felt closer to the Arabic culture than to the Somali, which he regarded as old-fashioned and unsophisticated. He told me many Arabic stories, the old tales he had heard as a child, but even these, although they were preferable to the Somali tales, did not appeal to him much. He was somewhat amused by my interest in them. For himself, he preferred the modern Egyptian films which he used to see in Mogadisciou. These films were in Arabic, of course, and from his descriptions of them they must have been highly exciting, full of intrigues and fights and unrequited love.

One film concerned a young Egyptian girl who fell in
love with an American soldier. Her brother commanded her to give the man up, saying that the g.i. was a Christian and she was a Muslim and such an alliance could never work. The girl refused, vowing that nothing in this world would part her from her lover. Her brother therefore took her for a ride in his car and drove straight into the Nile, drowning both of them.

“
Wallahi!
” Arabetto said. “What a film!”

The best film he ever saw was about a girl named Naduka, who had been lost as a child in the interior of the Sudan and had grown up as a “wild girl,” protected and befriended by a band of gorillas. A good kind handsome cousin ultimately discovered her and fell in love with her, but a wicked old uncle simultaneously found her and attempted to poison her in order to get the money left to her by her father.

“But it is all right,” Arabetto said. “This one gorilla, he find this uncle. Cri-i-ick! He break that man's neck, very easy. Naduka, she marry the young man, and everything is very nice.”

Arabetto's favourite song, which he had on a record, came from a film about a man who had been separated from his bride since the hour of their marriage, through the vile scheming of an older woman who wanted him for herself. Having finally escaped from the siren's clutches, he leaped into his little donkey cart and dashed away to his love. He sang to the donkey, pleading with it to go faster. Arabetto translated the Arabic words.

The others in camp were scornful of Arabetto's music, but he paid no attention to their sarcasm. He would take his
gramophone to the edge of the camp and sit there, cranking it and playing this one song over and over, clapping his hands to the rhythm, humming the tune.

But if Mohamed and Hersi and the rest did not appreciate his records, at least they laughed at his jokes. Someone was always telling me his latest. Once when a Midgan came along and offered to supply the camp with girls, for a substantial fee, Arabetto agreed immediately.

“Sure, you do that,” he told the Midgan, “and I'll give you that little machine over there.”

And he jerked a thumb towards the Land-Rover. Whether the Midgan fell for the offer or not, I was not informed.

The two hills outside Hargeisa, known as
Nasa Hablod
, the girl's breasts, called forth a good pun from Arabetto, whose surname was Nasir.
Nasa Hablod sidii Nasir hablod
– like Nasir's girl. He was married to an Arabian girl whose name was Safia Abdul.

“If I was Christian, she would be Mrs. Arabetto – what a name!”

He did not have a high opinion of Somali girls. They were beautiful, he admitted, but they tended to be spiteful and selfish. A Somali wife would rarely ask her husband how he was feeling or how his work was getting along. Of course, the men had only themselves to blame, for they treated their wives badly. It was all right for a man to hit his wife on the backside or the hands, but some Somalis would hit their wives on the face with a stick. That, Arabetto said, was not the right thing to do. He asked me curiously – did my husband ever beat me? When I said no, he shrugged cynically – never to beat a wife at all, that was carrying consideration too far.

One afternoon in Hargeisa, I went to Arabetto's house
in the
magala
to meet his wife. Safia was an extremely lovely girl, with light olive skin and almost Semitic features. She wore a small gold ornament in the side of her nose, and a maroon silk robe with blue and white flowers printed on it. Her shawl was a thin and gauzy silk with gold embroidery, and she had a gold necklace and gold earrings. Arabetto, who never wore a Somali robe, had changed today from his usual khaki shorts and shirt to a cream linen suit.

Their house was one room, a mud-brick hut with earthen floors and cracked walls and no window. But Safia had fixed it up and made it clean and comfortable. There were two beds, in the Muslim manner, one large and high, a rope-webbing platform on stilts, the husband's bed, and the other much smaller and lower. Both were draped with embroidered coverlets. Safia had done all the needlework herself. The corpulent pillows, too, were covered with embroidered leaves and branches, birds and flowers, all done in rich colours, yellows and vivid reds and blues. In the midst of the traditional designs were two streamlined cars.

Whenever I think of Arabetto, I recall those embroidered cars, and the quick and syncopated song he played so often on the tinny old gramophone out in the desert.

I
n the days when the Somali riding camel was renowned throughout the East for its speed and endurance, the days when an English officer's advice to a newly arrived subaltern was that camel milk heavily laced with brandy formed a satisfactory and sustaining diet if one found oneself out in the Haud with the food supplies exhausted – in those distant days, Abdi was a young marksman in that now-legendary company, the Somaliland Camel Corps.

Men were warriors then. But those battles were over now, and many years had passed. Abdi must have been nearly sixty, but he carried himself as straight as a young man, and when he took a rifle into his hands, it became a part of him, his second self.

He had been a driver in government service for eighteen years. He liked to keep the same vehicle, and had driven one lorry until it was condemned to the scrap heap. This loss coincided with our arrival in the country, and so he was assigned to our Land-Rover. He was not pleased. Such a small vehicle – much too light – no good for anything. But after he had been driving it for a while, he admitted reluctantly that it had
its points. Finally he became attached to it, and regarded it as his own.

In the beginning, when we drove with him, he was taciturn and uncommunicative. He answered our questions politely, but he did not make conversation. He seemed to feel it was not his place to do so. But he was not humble. On the contrary, he was extremely proud. Or – no. How to express such a combination of opposites? He was both humble and proud. He said “yes, sahib” and “no, sahib” with a meekness, almost a servility, that bothered us. And yet he carried himself haughtily, and would never admit there were gadgets on the Land-Rover that were unfamiliar to him. When he went out hunting with the rifle he would go on and on trying, even when game was scarce or the dusk was gathering, for he cherished his marksman's skill above all things and he hated to admit defeat by returning without meat.

Abdi never ran over a bird. A blue starling with an orange breast would saunter in front of the Land-Rover. Abdi would slow down and stop, and the bird like a tiny bright rajah would strut slowly off the road.

His life had been work and pain and little else. Some of his children had died in the seasons of drought. He had kept, always, a close tie with his tribe. His family lived in the Haud with the tribe and kept his sheep and camels. Most of his stock he had lost in the previous dry season. Now, this
Jilal
, as we drove across the desert and saw children in rags, begging for water, Abdi's face grew sombre and grim, and he lifted one hand towards heaven as though to say
Behold, O God, thy people
. In his tribal section, twenty-one people had already died this season. He said it was the worst year he remembered. Perhaps each year was the worst they all remembered. As he looked at the herdsmen struggling on with their camels to
reach the wells, his eyes narrowed and his hands knotted – each tribesman was Abdi himself. Bitterness swelled in him, but he could not speak of it.

“Somali – very hard life.” The few tense words were his only comment, and the hand lifted towards the sky. He was a devout Muslim. Could a man presume to question God? When I saw him this way, I always thought of a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Abdi once brought his youngest son Adan to our camp for a few days. The boy was five years old, a slender good-looking child with large alert eyes and long lashes. I talked with him in my broken Somali, and by the time Abdi got back from his hunting expedition that day, Adan had lost his shyness and was admiring the machinery in the camp. The Bedford truck caught his eye particularly – so big, such bright yellow paint. Abdi said he hoped Adan had not been a nuisance. I assured him that I liked talking with Adan, and said Abdi was fortunate to have such a son. Abdi nodded.