In Praise of Savagery (11 page)

Then the men, next the women and finally the children of all the Asaimara clans crowded around to pour yet more ghee all over him.

The ceremony being complete, a hundred sheep were killed and eaten in celebration, and much milk was drunk, while the skins of the sacrificial bulls and goats were taken away to be dried
for the Hangadaala to sleep on—all apart from the skins of the legs, which were given to the bearers of the throne.

In consequence of all this, Miriam Muhammad had the power, it was believed, and the responsibility, to bring rain to Bahdu, even on a clear and cloudless day.

And he was also believed, in certain official quarters, to have the power and responsibility, by the fact of his captivity in the capital, to hold his tribe back from outright rebellion. Although this power did not seem to be working particularly well at that time.

But two things happened, at last, to bring something of a change in the situation. One was that Thesiger wrote and signed a letter, drafted by Barton, absolving the Abyssinian authorities of all responsibility for the safety of his expedition and accepting all costs, consequences and eventualities upon himself.

The second thing that happened was that a suggestion was made that Miriam Muhammad be released to accompany Thesiger into Bahdu, as a gesture of goodwill from the provincial authorities to the Asaimara—and on the understanding that the Asaimara would reciprocate by paying, once more, the tribute demanded of them.

So it was that on 8th February 1934, Wilfred Thesiger once more set off from Awash Station, with his camels and his Somali camel-men and with a freshly picked but equally reluctant escort of fifteen Abyssinian soldiers. Four days later, accompanied by Omar the headman and Miriam Muhammad, he made his way once more through the narrow pass into the territory of Bahdu and made his camp there by the river’s edge.

It is to my eternal shame that I say this, but I lasted for three hours.

I do not know how it can come to be that a young man in his twenties, in good health and carrying no baggage other than a small waterbottle, can walk for no more than three hours before feeling weak and dizzy, and before having an overpowering urge to sit down, but that is how I felt and I am not proud of it.

Andy—now, he had the build and the look of the people of those parts: tall and lean and high cheek-boned, and with his head shaved as well. Put him in local dress and you’d be hard-pushed to tell him from a Kenyan, apart from a slightly paler skin—but that was darkening anyway, the longer he was out in the sun. You might say that he had it in his genes, that he was built for the country, and perhaps some of his ancestors came from that part of the world, or somewhere similar. But that does not explain my brother, who looks pretty much as I do, in size and build and complexion; and after walking for three hours he seemed exactly as you would expect for someone who had walked that far: he’d worked up something of an appetite, as I recall.

Me, I felt faint, and strange, and off-balance, and not altogether there.

My brother offered me a mouthful of water, which I took, thirstily, and then promptly vomited back up.

For the next half an hour I lay on the ground beneath a small thorn bush, moving my head only to take occasional tiny sips of water—I could not hold more than a mouthful down; and then, after a while, some hot, sweet tea, which the others made for me.

I walked on afterwards, but very feebly, a step at a time and leaning upon a walking-stick as I went, stopping every hour to rest for some ten minutes. For people used to walking steadily all day, as Osman and our Rendille were, and with a commission to lead us for the next 200-odd miles over land that was to become hotter and drier still, this must have seemed a poor start indeed; but I could do no other, and so the day went on, slowly, slowly, until the sun went down over the horizon, when all of a sudden I felt a great hunger and a tremendous burst of the most manic energy.

The change that came over me then, with the setting of the sun, was such that I swear I almost checked my neck for puncture-marks and my canine teeth for signs of unusual elongation.

That night we ate a stew of dried goat and
ugali
, which is boiled maize-flour, together with some potatoes and vegetables. We shared these things with an old Rendille woman and her daughter who had appeared at our camp, dressed all in skins. Later, Apa cut a walking-stick from a thorn bush for Andy, who lacked one, and straightened and hardened it over the fire. They seemed to have a name for Andy, the Rendille; or some words they seemed to use when they were talking about him. I asked Osman what they called him, and he just smiled.

‘It is nothing,’ he said, ‘it is just some words in their language.’

‘But meaning what?’

Osman thought about it for a moment.

‘They call him the black white man,’ he said.

I went to Mumbai, once, on business, with two British-born Indians, a man and a woman. The man was a regular visitor and he came from a wealthy family with property there, and servants and a driver. The woman had never been before. She was brought up speaking only English, and she spoke it with a broad West Yorkshire accent. Bradford, or thereabouts. She had been educated at an English university, up North, and had become something in marketing, and had moved down to London. She had two brothers and a sister, two doctors and a corporate lawyer, and her parents, second-generation immigrants born of Indian villagers who came to England in the last days of the Empire, had kept a corner-shop and had worked all hours to give their children the best start in life. She had cousins still in India, she said, but could hardly remember the last time she met them. She had been a small child when they had visited, and had been unable to speak their language or they to speak hers.

It was the end of the monsoon when we went, and we travelled the city in a motor-rickshaw, passing streets where women hitched up their saris and men their trousers, shoes tied together at the laces and hung around their necks to wade through water up to their knees, and still the rain came down, slantwise. Past sodden roadside shanties of cardboard and tarpaulin we went, weaving and swerving on the potholed tarmac, in and out of the heavy traffic when we could move, though for much of the time we were stuck in jams, eye-level with grease-encrusted lorry axles, and shuddering corroded exhaust-pipes that pumped black diesel-smoke into our faces, while beggars thrust mottled fingerless hands through the window-flaps at us.

We drove down roads of huge walled houses where the rich lived, outside which teams of Untouchable women swept dirt from the gutters with palm-fronds; and on through business districts and a street where the flow of suited men on their way to work
parted to avoid a naked and skeletal sadhu rolling over and over on his side. Incense and prayer wafted from temples to many-limbed gods and goddesses, and music blared from the rickshaw-driver’s transistor radio.

The size and scale and strangeness of the place took the woman’s breath away as much as they did mine.

‘But,’ she said, pronouncing the word Yorkshire-style, ‘but when I’m here, the world suddenly makes sense to me. That’s the only way I can describe it. It just makes sense.’

‘How’s that?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve never lived here. I couldn’t live here. But when I walk down the street and everyone looks like me, it just feels … well, as I say, it feels like the world makes sense.’

Thesiger never thought of himself as anything but an Englishman, though he had no great love of the place itself.

‘I find the English countryside dull,’ he said, ‘and uninteresting. I mean, you’re not exactly going to come face-to-face with a rhinoceros there, are you?’

I would have asked Andy then what it felt like to be a ‘black white man’ from South London among black black men from Africa. Or rather, I don’t know if I would have asked him, but I wonder now how I would have felt in his position. Would the world have made sense to me, at last?

Or were they as foreign to him as they were to me?

I wonder how deep the ancestral ties go. I wonder what it means to arrive, for the first time in your life, in a place where the people all look the way you look.

We slept the night by the cooking-fire, with a cool breeze blowing across our faces and the camels bedded down in a thorn-bush kraal.

The next day we rose just before dawn. In the cool of the early morning, while the camels were being loaded, Frazer and I set off together to make up for time lost the previous day.

‘Let’s go now,’ he said, as we got out of our sleeping-bags. ‘Get going before the sun’s properly up. That way if it hits you like it did yesterday, we’ll have covered a lot of distance before it does.’

‘Good idea,’ I said.

And it was.

Brothers.

Magnetic fields of relationship shifting and readjusting.

Me, I’m the eldest.

Frazer, he’s good at competitive sports.

I do non-competitive ones, mostly. I’ve always tended to lose, and lose quite badly, whenever I’ve tried the other sort.

‘We need to cover the miles,’ he said.

As we left, the old Rendille woman rushed out from her camp, which was a little way from ours, and took our hands, holding them up and spitting on each of our open palms in turn.

This, Osman told us later, is considered a blessing among the Rendille.

We walked for an hour at a time, heading for a distant line of low trees that Osman had pointed out to us, pausing for ten minutes or so every hour to take a little water from our bottles; and in this way we covered a lot of ground before the real heat of the day.

Andy caught up with us after a couple of hours and we walked together, seeing a pair of giraffes and numerous antelope.

Antelope
, by the way, is the plural form of ‘antelope’.

And, indeed, the singular. It just is. Some words are like that.

I used to think it was
anteloe
.

‘Home, home on the range,’ was what it sounded like, in the song, ‘where the deer and the anteloe play.’ And also, from the same song, I learnt that the word ‘seldom’, when spoken in that particular place, had a uniquely discouraging effect. ‘Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,’

I didn’t actually know, at that time, what ‘seldom’ meant. Or discouraging, either. But I understood the currents of relationship between them, at least.

Or at least I thought that I did.

I wonder sometimes how much of what I know is like that.

Wrongly intuited, I think the expression is.

And how much of what I believe.

The answer is, I just don’t know.

I don’t think any of us do; except, perhaps in retrospect.

Except, perhaps, in wonderment at what we see as the monumental wrongheadedness of the unspoken assumptions of previous generations. How could they have believed such things? Done such things? What were they
thinking of
?

And even then, perhaps we only think we know.

‘The truth is great,’ as Coventry Patmore’s poem goes, ‘and shall prevail, When none cares whether it prevail or not,’

And I picture the wash of water against stones at the water’s edge, beneath the overarching sky. Absence and emptiness.

Just before midday we reached the trees, which marked the edge of a dry river-bed. The leaves were green and gave shade, and we waited beneath them for the camels to join us.

When they reached us we ate a lunch of dried goat, and sat drinking sweet tea while the camels grazed. By ‘sweet’ I mean sweet as in a bag containing about a pound of sugar being emptied into the saucepan and stirred around to make a kind of viscously delicious syrup—that kind of sweet, rather than ‘actually, I take two teaspoons’ which passes for sweet among normal people where I live, or ‘would you mind putting five in mine, missus?’ which passes for sweet among builders.

After lunch we set off again, but all together this time—not least because the grass and bushes around the river-bed were a known haunt of lions. Or lion.

I think that the jury is out on the correct plural form of the word; but for Wilfred Thesiger it was always
lion
. Except that he pronounced it
laahn
.

Upon leaving this place, we crossed into land that became rapidly and markedly hotter, drier and more sparsely vegetated as we went.

The next water, we were told, was several days away, at a camp used by various tribes and their herds.

Several days further on, they made their camp beneath two trees by the edge of a low river-cliff on the plain by the side of the Awash River, where crocodiles basked in great numbers in the water below. There the Asaimara found them, and came in large numbers to welcome Miriam Muhammad back to his country and his people.

They brought and killed two oxen, and Thesiger’s party caught a dozen large catfish, and a great spread was set out in the Hangadaala’s honour, while some twenty men formed a circle, shoulder to shoulder, and performed a
janili
dance, clapping their hands and chanting to a varying rhythm, and invoking the powers of the
janili
, a man renowned as a soothsayer. This man rose to his feet and entered the circle, where he stood on a sheepskin laid out for him and he covered his mouth and eyes with his
shamma,
or shawl. The chanting grew louder and the clapping faster, but none moved their feet, although all the dancers bent further and further forward. Then, quite suddenly, the
janili
began to speak, out loud, in a voice quite unlike his own; and at this the clapping and the chanting instantly stopped.

Slowly, very slowly, he raised his right arm, a finger outstretched, and pointed directly to where Thesiger sat.

All eyes turned to the Englishman.

‘God speaks to me of this man,’ said the
janili
.

‘God speaks to me of this man,’ chanted the dancers.