The Prophet's Camel Bell (33 page)

He himself has no axe to grind. I believe he works for the work's sake, and because he loves Africa. Occasionally he has tried to settle down in England, but he never stays for long.

Perhaps for him, as for ourselves, Oxford Street is not entirely lacking in thorns after all.

The
Gu
rains were almost over when one day a tall thin grey-haired Englishman turned up at our bungalow and enquired politely if he might borrow Jack's Land-Rover and driver for a few days.

“My wife is at El Afweina,” he explained. “She's become ill, so I must go and fetch her. I can't take my car – I don't think it would get through.”

Jack readily agreed, and the Land-Rover set out with Abdi and the Englishman. Some days later, they returned. It had been a gruelling trip, through mud and
tugs
, over roads made non-existent by the rains. The Englishman was exhausted, but he thanked Jack courteously, and he answered our questions. Yes, his wife would be all right. He had taken her straight to the hospital and the doctor said she would soon be recovering nicely.

The man who had gone over the flooded desert to rescue his wife was the top administrative officer in the country, the Governor's second-in-command. His wife had been at El Afweina because she was working in the
miskiin
camp there.
Miskiin
means “destitute.” During the
Jilal
, the government had set up several of these camps in an effort to save some of the people who were dying of thirst and starvation. Allotments of water and jowari were sent to the camps, and after a while it was discovered that several of the Somali clerks who were in charge of distribution were selling the food and water instead of giving it to the
miskiin
. It was not easy to find government officers who could be spared from their jobs, so the Administrator's wife had gone to take charge of the El Afweina camp.

I could not think of any other Englishwoman in this country who could have or who would have done such a job. Most of the Englishwomen here, who had lived only in stations, did not even realize what it was that this woman had done. I realized it a little more clearly, perhaps, for I had lived out in the Haud during the
Jilal
. Even to meet these destitute ones face-to-face was an anguish and a horror which could not
be conveyed in words – the gaunt bodies, the exposed ribs, the hands like dry twigs, the eyes that had ceased to hope. But to work among them day after day, to portion out the careful rations to their clamouring desperation – this took courage. Such courage I knew I did not possess.

Towards the end of our tour, I was forced to settle down in Hargeisa. To my great joy, I became pregnant, but after a near-miscarriage I felt it would be too risky to remain in camp, so I stayed in our bungalow and Jack came home on weekends. I was still working on the Somali translations, but this was not enough now that I was alone for most of the time, so when an opportunity occurred for a job, I decided to take it. I went to work at the Secretariat, as the Administrator's secretary.

“Secretariat” is an important-sounding word, suggestive of marble halls and thick carpets. But the officers of government enjoyed no such grandeur here. The buildings were like small barracks, low and long and whitewashed. The offices were stifling, for the narrow windows with their thief-netting succeeded in keeping out every vestige of breeze. On the walls, the bulge-eyed geckos clung and stared. Outside, the pepper trees waved their feathery branches and the Somali messenger boys gathered in gossiping knots on the stoeps. The drowsy air was filled with a clacking of typewriters.

I had never before seen the inner workings of government. What the administration was doing now might be of future value, as a groundwork, or it might not. How could anyone really know? The Somalis might decide to take an entirely different course, and that would be up to them. But I could not see, in a general way, that the administration could do other than what they appeared to be trying to do at the moment, which was to prepare for the country's independence by a gradual transfer of power, beginning at the grassroots
level, through the local authority system and the councils of elders, and by the extension of education in the hope that a large enough group of Somali leaders might have the opportunity for some political experience before independence.

The Administrator wrote his meticulously phrased reports to the Colonial Office, conferred with delegations of sheikhs and elders, talked with district officers. He never appeared hurried or impatient. He had worked here for many years and had a wider knowledge of the Somalis, their way of life and their history, than almost any other Englishman. But he was very much unlike them. He did not have, in dealing with them, the quick advantage of any ready-made mutuality of temperament. They were emotional and dramatic. He was restrained. They spoke with a thousand intricacies and embroideries. He spoke with a plain lucidity. They were capable of guile, when it served them, and could shift their expressed viewpoint in a flash, for effect. He spoke consistently what he believed to be true, and would not dissemble.

Crises flowed in and out of his office like perpetual tides. Verbal attacks, flattery, gratitude, the pleas of real need and the petitions of hopeful skulduggery – he received all these from the Somalis, and had to steer his way among them.

What he felt in his heart, only he knew. To outward observation, he discounted both laurels and barbs. If he became the object of the Somalis' anger, for some action the government had taken, he was not moved from his course – he never tried to buy their approval cheaply, nor did he look for an easy refuge in speaking scornfully of them, as many English did. If, on the other hand, he received their praise for some other action, he took it with a grain of salt.

“One shouldn't be too quick either to love or to hate,” he said. “Both can be dangerous.”

At first, he seemed to be a very cold man. I imagined he was able to act dispassionately towards the Somalis because his own feelings were not involved – it was a job to him, no more. But I discovered one day that this was not true at all. Another aspect of him was revealed through the Somali translations. I showed the manuscript to him, and he decided it should be published by the government. Discussing it, all at once he pointed to one page and spoke with an unexpected intensity.

“It would be worth while for this one passage in your introduction,” he said, “even if there were nothing else in the book.”

The passage was a description of the Somali tribesmen's harrowing and precarious life in the dry
Jilal
. I realized then how deep was his attachment to this land and these people, and how carefully he must keep his own feelings in check, if he was to do his work at all. As I talked about the country with him, I also realized how little I knew of it, how impossible it was to blow in from the sea and size up a land's centuries in a few months.

When the time came for us to leave Somaliland, the manuscript was left with the Administrator. He was trying to get an allocation of money from the government for the purpose of publication. Several years later, when we were in West Africa, I received one day a parcel and a letter.

“It took us a while,” the Administrator's note said, “but we have managed it at last.”

And here was the book. I was well aware that it would never be read by many people. Nevertheless, it was the first collection of Somali poems and folk-tales to appear in English. For me, the doing of it was a labour of love, and I could not help feeling that for the Administrator, taking the time and trouble to get it published, it had been much the same sort of thing.

We saw him and his wife once more, when we were on leave from West Africa. They had retired to England by this time, and we went to visit them for a day. They had a big and pleasantly rambling house in the country, and they were content to be there, they said. But they missed Somaliland. They would always miss it – it had been home for a long time.

When we left, the Administrator drove us to the station. He was not, of course, the Administrator any more. For the first time I was seeing him only as himself. And yet he was just the same. He was not altered or diminished now by the lack of an official title, for what he had been before did not depend upon titles. Looking at him as he sat behind the wheel of his little Austin, in his trench-coat and old felt hat, I knew somehow that I would not be seeing him again and I wished that at this last moment I could tell him how greatly I valued him. But I could not. Perhaps he knew – I hope so.

Opposite me, on the way back to London, Jack sat reading. Beside him, our daughter bent her marigold head over a picture book, in three-year-old imitation of her father. Next to me on the train seat, our small son slept in his Karri-Kot. Everything was all right. But I looked out the window at the countryside, a grey-brown winter colour in the rain, and I felt that nothing was all right. I was thinking of all the people I had known who had loved Africa and now must leave it.

The plane journey back to Ghana was filled with discomforts and delays. After a sleepless night, we finally got the children settled. Jack beckoned me to the window.

“Look – we're coming over the desert. We're just in time to see the dawn.”

Above the Sahara, the night flowed away like water over the precipice of the horizon. The faint and early light was changing the sky to a milky gold. Far below, the ripples of the great
dunes were gilded and shone like the golden coffins of the pharaohs. Then the sun mounted the sky and blazed in pure fire. And then I saw that my sadness had been partly for myself, and my fascination with the reasons for others being drawn to Africa had been in some way a veiled attempt to discover my own. It seemed to me that my feeling of regret arose from unwisely loving a land where I must always remain a stranger. But it was also possible that my real reason for loving it was simply because I was an outsider here. One can never be a stranger in one's own land – it is precisely this fact which makes it so difficult to live there.

James Thomson, the famous explorer who journeyed so widely in East Africa, was subject to moods of intense depression, and in one of them, looking into himself, he wrote: “I am not an empire builder, I am not a missionary, I am not truly a scientist. I merely want to return to Africa and continue my wanderings.”

In a book about the early and legendary white settlers in Kenya, the white hunter John Hunter, himself a legend, says in explanation of some of these pioneers: “Deep within every man is the desire to get away from it all – to drop everything and go and live on a desert island where the manifold complications of civilization can be forgotten.”
1

To Graham Greene, “Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.”
2

Among the most perceptive and undeniable insights are those of Mannoni, in whose study of the psychology of colonization every European who has ever lived in Africa cannot fail to see something of himself, often much more than he would prefer to see.

Here, clearly, is the sahib who seeks a facile superiority in racialism. But here, too, in different degree, perhaps, and in different form, are many of those who believe they feel only sympathy towards the people of another land, and whose
“sympathy” may lead them to see these people not as they really are but as the beholder feels they ought to be. Whether it is Ariel or Caliban who is chosen to populate Prospero's world, there is no basic difference, for both are equally unreal. What sort of world is it, then, Prospero's?

This was something of an irony for me, to have started out in righteous disapproval of the empire-builders, and to have been forced at last to recognize that I, too, had been of that company. For we had all been imperialists, in a sense, but
the empire we unknowingly sought was that of Prester John, a mythical kingdom and a private world. I recall how apt I considered Hersi's description of the Haud –
this island place
– more apt, even, than I realized at the time.