The Prophet's Camel Bell (14 page)

Marriages were usually arranged by the two families, with an eye to mutual financial advantage. Together with the tribal elders, the men in both families met to settle the essential questions, the sums to be paid by the young man for the bride-price (
yarad
), the token payment (
gabbati
) made at the time of betrothal, the percentage of the man's estate (
meher
) to
be made out to his wife upon marriage, and the dowry (
dibad
) given by the bride's family.

But the choice was not entirely out of the young man's hands. His family would attempt to find a girl who pleased him, and he would usually make enquiries about the girl, through an aunt, and would ask all kinds of pertinent questions – what were her manners like, had she good legs and breasts, was she pleasant-tempered, had she wit and thrift? Standards of womanly beauty among Somalis were very specific. To be truly beautiful, a girl should be fairly tall, plump but not fat, with ample hips and breasts. A woman's buttocks should be well rounded – so important was this aspect of female appearance that Somali women often arranged their robes in a kind of bustle, to pad out their rumps in much the same way as women in our breast-conscious society assist nature with padded brassieres. Somalis placed great value upon a graceful walk and a proud bearing in a woman. The most favoured shade of skin was a light copper colour. Another mark of beauty was a brown or pinkish line across the teeth, a fairly common sight here. In one song the lover compares his beloved's teeth to a white vessel made of the pale inner bark of the
galol
tree and bound around with a string of pink Zeilah pearls – a reference to this beauty mark. Dark shining gums were also admired. In a well-known poem, in which the lover enumerates the features of his beloved, he places this one high on the list – “Her gums' dark gloss is like blackest ink –”.

A young man saw his betrothed alone only once before marriage, when by custom he was allowed to spend a night with her. On this occasion he could undress her and do anything he wanted with her, short of actual intercourse. Should she prove a disappointment, however, practical considerations
made it difficult for him to change his mind at this point, for if he did so, he forfeited the bride-price he had paid. With what care he scrutinized her, therefore, on the night of
dadabgal
, which means “to go behind a screen,” and she, no doubt, scrutinized him with an equally sharp eye. True, he could divorce her easily by Muslim law, but this procedure would involve lengthy wrangling between his family and hers. He could also take three other wives besides her, but it was a rare man here who could afford more than one or two wives. Sometimes a woman would say that her
meher
was the penis of her husband, by which she meant that she received no legal portion of his estate, for he had agreed instead to take no other wife.

Love was an intense and highly emotional state – it was not expected to endure. Indeed, so much was it at variance with the starkness of usual life that no wonder love in this sense did not often survive for long after marriage. After marriage, Somali women, especially those of the desert, led lives of continual heavy work and drudgery. They cooked, cared for the flocks and children, wove the baskets and mats, fashioned and set up the huts, dismantled the camp when the tribe moved, and packed the household goods on the burden camels. They led the burden camels across the plains – but if they never rode the camels, neither did the men, for camels were almost never ridden in Somaliland. Not surprisingly, most women lost their beauty within a few years. Not surprisingly, also, they frequently became irritable and nagging. This was the chief complaint Somali men made about their wives.

“What a tongue she has, that woman – like flame.”

But the status of women was low, according to both tribal and religious traditions, and a woman's wits and her sharp tongue were often her only protection. A husband who was unusually considerate of his wife would be thought weak
and would be mocked at by his fellow tribesmen. Sexual fidelity was demanded of her, but not of him.

Like the flowering desert after the drought, love was of a season, not for ever. While it flourished, therefore, let the songs be made and the beauty of young girls remarked upon, for soon enough they would enter their own
Jilal
.

Love as it appeared in Somali poetry was many things. It was the sensuous and lyrical
belwo
:

It was the sombre, almost macabre sense of mortality that ran through so many Somali love poems – take what today offers, for who can tell if there will be a tomorrow?

Or,

Some of the figures of speech in Somali love poetry might appear odd and even ludicrous to a European, for it was
quite common for a poet to compare himself to a sick camel, when he was suffering from an unreturned love, or to boast that he was like the finest camel in his herd – strong, lithe, swift. But in order to appreciate what such comparisons meant to a Somali, it was necessary to understand what his camels meant to him. Camels were the mainstay of Somali life. They provided the tribesman with meat and milk, his staple foods, and they packed his goods across the desert. Their endurance in the drought was what saved him. Without his camels he would have been lost. They were not simply anonymous domestic animals to him. They were his livelihood, his wealth, his pride. He always knew each of his animals by name and could discern the footprints of each in the sand. He tended his camels not only with care but with affection. There were dozens of words in Somali to describe every kind and condition of camel. It was no wonder that camels figured so largely in Somali poetry, even in love poetry, for they were as close to the Somali's heart as his own family.

When a poet expressed his love in this way, one could be quite certain that, in North American parlance, he had been hit where he lived.

Another face of love was found in Elmi Bonderii's famous poem
Qaraami
(Passionate), in which he described not only Baar's beauty but her domestic accomplishments as well, and ended with these lines:

Elmi Bonderii (Elmi the Borderman) was said to have died of love. He fell in love with a young girl named Hodan Abdillahi, but as he was not wealthy, she was married instead to Mohamed Shabel (Mohamed the Leopard). Elmi cherished his hopeless affection for five years.

“Then,” Hersi said, “he died of love. Absolutely nothing else.”

No one found this surprising at all. Love was a serious matter, a delight which could turn to disaster. But no Englishman ever died of love – of this fact the Somalis were quite positive. It seemed doubtful to them that the
Ingrese
had much need of love at all. Most Englishmen here were physically heavier than Somalis, owing to a better diet, and had greater muscular strength, although not as much endurance, for few Englishmen could have survived the hardships of the
Jilal
. This greater physical strength the Somalis attributed to sexual abstinence. Also, most English families had only one or two children, or else appeared to have none at all, for their school-age children were in England. Many Somalis therefore believed that sex was something practised only infrequently by the English, who were indifferent where love was concerned, and probably inept as well.

We were very much entertained by the discovery of this widespread belief, until we found that it was also, perforce, applied to ourselves. This revelation placed it in a slightly different light. When finally Hersi agreed to recite some of his own
belwo
, he told us he would not do so before because he did not think we would be capable of understanding or appreciating love poems.

“You
Ingrese
,” he said delicately, “are not so highly acknowledgements as us in these considerations.”

The month of Ramadan was not yet over when the
kharif
began. The summer monsoon came up from the south-west, over the Ethiopian mountains and across the plains of Somaliland, gathering heat as it travelled. The wind blew cool at night in the Haud, but by the time it reached the coast, the sands and the rocks would have imparted to it something of their heat and its breath would be like fire day and night.

The
kharif
would blow until autumn, filling the days with dust-devils and the nights with its moaning. On the great plains, the camel herders' eyes would be sore with blown sand. In the stations, tarpaulins would be whisked from lorries and secret files from office desks. Officers on trek, having a sundowner outside their tents, would find their glasses of gin and lime blown off the camp table. Young Englishmen in outstations would wonder why they had not gone into commerce in London, as they lay awake at night listening to a wind whose sound was like the distracted wailing of hysterical women. In the stifling town of Berbera, wooden shutters on the old government houses would clatter all night, and hot wind would rush in to half-strangle the angrily wakeful occupants. On the Gulf of Aden the dhow traffic would slacken off, and the dhow men who ventured out would pray mightily to Allah to spare their fragile craft. The wind would be everywhere. It would ring in the ears, clog the nostrils, drive breath from the throat. When it had spent itself it would suddenly collapse, leaving the country to the hot season.

The
kharif
battered all night against our truck, making the canvas roof sound like the beating of giant wings. One night I imagined I had been wakened by the thudding of the
canvas, until I glanced up and saw that it was something else that had roused me from sleep. There, outlined against the net at the end of the truck, was a large dark shape. I was frightened, but not unduly so, for I was groggy and not fully awake. I nudged Jack and told him that something was trying to get into our caravan. He heard me only dimly through his sleep and thought I meant my old enemy, the black moth.

“Shine your torch on it,” he mumbled, “and it'll go away.”

I groped for my flashlight, but by the time I had switched it on, the shape had disappeared. I turned over and went back to sleep. In the morning I was wakened by Jack's shocked yell.

“My God! Everything's been taken!”

Thieves had ransacked our truck-home, taking the typewriter, Jack's theodolite, the briefcase containing all his papers, the drawing instruments, slide-rule, our radio and innumerable smaller objects. It was not only the value of the haul that distressed us. Many of Jack's instruments could not be replaced in a hurry, and he could not work without them.

One of the thieves had dropped his spear, possibly when I wakened and shouted, and the Somalis in our camp picked it up and examined it with great interest. Mohamed, Hersi, Abdi, Arabetto and others – all lamented loudly.

“Never in my life I seeing such bloody thieving as contained in bloody this place –”

“Oh-oh – too bad, sahib, too too bad!”

Underneath, they were actually delighted with the excitement of the event. They darted hither and yon like swallows, gabbling at the top of their voices. I, too, could not help feeling the same secret excitement. The Somalis had hopes of tracing the thieves by the dropped spear, the shaft of which
was splintered at the end – enough, they said, to make it clearly recognizable.

Jack, Abdi and Hersi set off in the Land-Rover for Selahleh, the nearest Somali settlement. At camp the rest of us waited nervously, unable to settle down to any work. The slow hours passed. At last in the distance we heard the furious honking of the Land-Rover horn – Abdi's invariable signal of a successful hunt. They roared into camp like three triumphant generals after a battle. With them they carried the typewriter, theodolite, briefcase and all the rest of the loot.

What happened? What happened? We could not wait to hear. Everyone shouted at once. Finally, piecemeal, the story emerged. They drove, they told us, to the tea shop at Selahleh and asked if anyone could identify the spear. The tea-shop owner disclaimed any knowledge of the weapon and refused to discuss the matter. At that moment a young Eidagalla man came into the tea shop. He took one look at the spear and nodded his head.

“Every man around here knows the owner of that spear,” he said.

Where were the thieves, then? The tea-shop owner maintained a stubborn silence. At this point Hersi and Abdi applied their strongest methods. Glorying in the situation, they threatened the tea-shop man and the entire village of Selahleh with annihilation if the culprits were not yielded up. Abdi paced the room, waving the rifle and glaring in his fiercest manner while Hersi gesticulated, shrilled and bellowed, outlining in vivid detail the fate that awaited the inhabitants of this unfortunate settlement. The whole Army would descend, Hersi cried passionately, and would raze Selahleh to the ground. Camels would be looted. Huts would be burned. Nothing would remain. The desert would cover their
dwelling-places and the hyenas would gnaw their bones.

His English version of it, to me, was only a pale imitation. In Somali, it would have been magnificent. He must have made it sound like the destruction of Sennacherib. The teashop owner began to have second thoughts, and finally his resolve to protect his fellow tribesmen, or perhaps to share in their haul, crumbled completely. He shrugged and signalled to his waiting kinsmen, who trooped out and returned a few minutes later with one of the thieves.