Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (4 page)

With the French threat to India seen off, Britain was only looking for one thing at the far end of the Arabian Peninsula by the early 1800s -somewhere her speedy new steam ships could refuel on the long journey from Suez to Bombay, a coaling station.

A first plan to requisition the island of Soqotra, closer to Somalia on the Horn of Africa than to Yemen but always a Yemeni possession and now a valuable eco-reserve, had to be aborted in 1834 when its ancient blind ruler, most of whose territory was situated in the easternmost Mahra province of today’s Yemen, told the British naval officer charged with the task of acquiring it that he refused to sell so much as the distance between his thumb and his little finger. The island, he explained to Captain Stafford Bettesworth Haines of Britain’s Indian Navy, was ‘the gift of the Almighty to the Mahras’.
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A subsequent attempt to seize it failed, when much of the expeditionary force died of malarial fever.

The following year Captain Haines turned his attention to Aden, hoping for better luck. The situation was becoming urgent. Doing business in Mocha had become almost impossible thanks to newly independent America having developed such a taste for coffee it easily dominated all trade there. Still worse, as far as Lord Palmerston was concerned, was the news that the coffee business had excited the greed of Egypt’s Muhammad Ali, who after invading Tihama had seized Mocha and now had his sights trained on Aden. Accordingly, in 1835 Captain Haines was despatched to Aden with instructions to negotiate its swift purchase. Detached from the imams‘ dominions for almost a hundred years, Aden had decayed into ’a sort of international colony for Indian Ocean pirates’,
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but was still nominally a possession of the Abdali tribe. In 1835 the sheikh of the Abdalis, the self-styled Sultan of Lahej, was a tricky character whom Captain Haines at first judged ‘indolent, almost imbecile’. But Sultan Muhsin turned out to be motivated by a mixture of pride and greed, a potently unpredictable brew that played havoc with all Haines’ rational attempts to strike a deal. Haines was not discouraged. In an era in which the Great Powers of Europe considered it their bounden Christian duty to impose their values and mores on the rest of the world, Haines did not consider giving up.

If Britain was ever to get its coaling station, he and his superiors in Bombay and London decided, they would have to wait for an international incident of sufficient seriousness to warrant a forceful retaliation. In January 1837 just such an incident occurred. Spying the
Duria Dawla
, an Indian sailing ship flying British colours that had run aground a short distance to the east of Aden, Yemeni tribesmen had wasted no time in boarding her and plundering her valuable cargo, before mistreating her
haj-bound
passengers, fourteen of whom were drowned. Still more scandalously, they grossly dishonoured some wealthy Indian matrons by parading them naked on deck, like slaves in a market-place.

Almost a year passed before Captain Haines arrived back in Aden to avenge the insult. Although Sultan Muhsin strenuously denied any part in the episode, Haines soon spotted some of the plunder on sale in his warehouse, and bullishly demanded 12,000 Maria Theresa dollars
^d
by way of compensation. A compromise sum was reached and the old subject of the sale of Aden reopened. The moment favoured the British. Sultan Muhsin was well aware that if he did not sell Aden to Britain, Egypt’s greedy Muhammad Ali would come and grab it for nothing, so he wasted no time in signing and sealing a pledge to transfer Aden to the British for the sum of 8,700 Maria Theresa dollars a year. The business might have been smoothly concluded if a significant obstacle had not arisen, if Sultan Muhsin had not suddenly insisted that he must - as a matter of personal honour and dignity - retain responsibility for the port’s few hundred Arabs and Jews. Haines would not hear of it. In order to be able to guarantee the security of her coaling station, Britain had to exercise full control over all the inhabitants residing in the fifteen square miles of land she was purchasing -Arabs, Jews, Indians and British. Negotiations stalled. Sultan Muhsin’s hot-headed son, Hamid, gathered a tribal following that was adamantly opposed to any land sale, and hatched a plot to kidnap Haines. It was foiled. Downcast but still not defeated, Haines sailed away to consider his next move.

A combative letter from young Hamid greeted him on his return to Aden in October 1838 and thereafter negotiations were carried on in an increasingly angry style. ‘You write of the British Government as if you were speaking of some petty Shaikhdom,’ wrote Haines. ‘Undeceive yourself - they are powerful and will not be trifled with. Would you play with a lion, as with a cat?’ Bullied by his son, old Sultan Muhsin gamely blustered back that Haines dreamed of becoming ‘Sultan of Aden’ but never would be, ‘until the sword is at our throats’.
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Haines held his nerve and insisted on the legal validity of the original agreement they had made, until Hamid’s Abdali tribesmen fatally upped the ante by firing their matchlocks at a British vessel. Haines and his immediate superiors in Bombay, exasperated by months of dealing with ‘such a tone of arrogant superiority followed by such a series of uncalled for violence’,
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concluded that the time for force had arrived at last. A small, heavily armed army of some five hundred mostly Indian sepoy troops were loaded aboard four ships that set sail from Bombay in December 1838 and arrived at Aden a month later.

It took a mere two hours - from 9.30 until 11.30 on the morning of 19 January 1839 - to disable the mostly Ottoman-era guns on what was then Sira Island but is now a part of the mainland and to deal with some brave but chaotic tribal resistance. The order was then given to storm the beach nearest the town and plant the British flag. Advancing from the beach up into the tiny town, to the huddle of dwellings clustered in the crater of an extinct volcano, the invaders encountered no resistance because its inhabitants had all taken refuge in the mosque. A Muslim cleric greeted the invaders, and was told that no one would be harmed, that everyone should stay in the mosque, and that all weapons were to be collected. The last order resulted in some desperate rearguard action; heinously dishonoured by the confiscation of their
jambiyahs
, some tribesmen revolted and stabbed a Serjeant Major of Artillery. In the ensuing mêlée twelve Arabs were killed: ‘Had it not been for this unfortunate occurrence, so deeply to be regretted,’ wrote one of the officers, ‘the loss of life would have been very trifling.’
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The British counted a total of fifteen either killed or wounded, the Arabs at least 139.
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Three captured guns were despatched back to Britain as a gift for Queen Victoria. One of them, a Turkish bronze cannon dating back to the mid-sixteenth century, still graces the river front outside the Tower of London.

As the new territory’s Political Resident, Haines set about controlling what happened in and around Aden by building up an efficient intelligence network of Yemeni Jews. He guessed that while the merchants of Aden - mostly Jews and Indians - were more than happy to be ruled by mercantile Britain, the surrounding tribesmen would not be so easily reconciled to the loss of the port, so he ordered its fortifications swiftly rebuilt and had his troops keep a round the clock watch for attacks. He also guessed that if he cancelled the debt still owed him as compensation for the plunder of the
Duria Dawla
and paid Sultan Muhsin the agreed price for the purchase of Aden, if he graciously let bygones be bygones and even paid the tribes surrounding Aden regular stipends in exchange for their recognition of Britain’s right to rule the port, all would soon be very well. But he was too optimistic, and had made a serious mistake. Perhaps too accustomed to Indians to understand quite how different Arabs were, Haines did not understand the extent to which the traditional role of sheikh or sultan or imam in southern Arabia differed from that of rulers whom the British had so efficiently co-opted into the smooth running of their Indian possessions. Sheikhs were not absolute rulers, able or willing to take full responsibility for their tribes; off the field of battle they were little more than wise conciliators, fountains of trickle-down wealth and trusted authorities. Haines did not see trouble up ahead when old Sultan Muhsin, hoping to trap the British into guaranteeing his continued hold on power, pleaded, ‘Will you treat me and my children as you do many of your Indian rajahs?’
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Arabists have pointed out an important clue in the Arabic translation of the western concepts of ‘ruler’ and ‘government’: the Arab idea of rule is contained in the stem word
hukm
, which suggests wisdom, arbitration and justice. The Arabic words for governance, government, court house, ruler and even referee are all derived from this single stem which conveys no hint of absolute power, whether divinely, dynastically or democratically granted. A British officer who saw fifteen years‘ service in Aden before and during the Second World War learned that Yemeni tribesmen ’didn’t appear to understand the word “rule”‘. They were in fact shy of ruling. When one talked of strengthening their power they made excuses, changed the subject or looked the other way, as if one had said something indecent.’
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A former British colonial officer posted to Aden in the last years of British rule believes the early and persistent failure of the British to discern the true character of sheikhly authority first hampered and then fatally blighted Britain’s achievements in southern Arabia. By treating the petty sultans as absolute monarchs in their territories, by reinforcing their dynasties and propping them up in power according to how willing the individual was to toe the British line, rather than according to how just and wise and skilled at arbitration they were, Britain alienated the rank and file.

Haines also reckoned without a variety of native thinking that the foremost historian of the capture of Aden, Gordon Waterfield, calls ‘the eternal surge of Arab optimism’.
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For the seven years until his death in 1847, Sultan Muhsin surfed that ‘surge’, never abandoning hope of recapturing Aden and expelling the infidel. Not all the tribes were so persistent. The Yafai tribe, for example, took its stipend and kept its promise to be peaceful, as did the Aulaqi tribe. But, by buying the support of the Fadhli tribe whose lands lay east up the coast from Aden, Sultan Muhsin and his Abdalis were able to launch a full-scale attack on the British in November 1839.

Well aware that if all the tribes had made common cause their 15,000 to 20,000-strong force would have overwhelmed his garrison, Haines counted himself lucky. Thanks to his intelligence service, he was forewarned of a revenge attack plotted for the following month, and evaded assassination in the spring of the following year. While the Sultan of the Fadhlis proclaimed jihad against the European infidel, declaring that any who fell in battle would be ‘rewarded by our Prophet Muhammad in the next world’,
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Haines‘ superiors in the Bombay government refused his pleas for reinforcements and began to have doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise, telling him that ’if Aden cannot be made a valuable acquisition without entering into aggressive warfare with the Arab chiefs of the interior, the sooner the place is abandoned or surrendered for a consideration, the better’.
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In May 1840 an alliance of Abdalis and Fadhlis made a second attempt on the port and two months later yet another, and a year later Fadhlis murdered one of the British army interpreters. Every incident resulted in numerous Arab casualties and stopped stipends. Again and again, pledges of good behaviour were made, the payment of stipends restored, and promises broken again. Eventually Haines so shamed Sultan Muhsin with examples of his lies that the old man agreed to Haines taking two of his sons hostage and unbuckled his
jambiyah
in the traditional tribal gesture of utter submission. ‘Now kill me or forgive me!’ he declared, but he never handed over his sons and the plotting did not stop. In 1851, in the same month as another attempt on Haines‘ life, a British officer, a guest of Sultan Muhsin’s successor on a bustard-hunting expedition, was killed while asleep in his tent. The Fadhli sultan gave the murderer sanctuary and, when challenged over his ’scurvy conduct‘, defiantly reiterated his objection to the presence of ’Franks’ in his country.
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References to these incidents and others, including one which culminated in the corpse of a tribesman being hung in chains from a post
pour decourager les autres
, appear in the journal of a Scottish officer who spent 1851 and 1852 in Aden. Marvelling at ‘the aspect of desolation which pervades the place’, he described a hellishly noisy Aden -the armies of ‘Herculean Africans’ shovelling at the ‘immense heaps of coal’ for the steam ships, ‘the Babel’ that accompanied newcomers from the port to the new Prince of Wales Hotel, ‘the howling of wild dogs and the shrill note of the little Arab cocks which crow at all hours of the day and night’. The broiling, clammy heat was at least as irksome: ‘I cannot attempt to describe the misery of the nights in camp during the hot weather,’ he wrote. Soldiers slept outside, on their parade ground, and woke sweating to head straight into the sea to cool off. Their lives were miserable. Although they had a library and even a theatre of sorts, sand ruled out their ‘favourite pastimes’ and all were prey to ‘lowness of spirits, loss of memory and loss of appetite’, not to mention ‘prickly heat and indolent boils’.

The sort of action they saw was demoralising too - sporadic and inglorious. There were frequent false alarms of tribal attacks and the frustration felt by any military facing a guerrilla campaign, of knowing ‘we could have held Aden against any Army they [the tribes] could muster, but the knowledge that your life was in danger from lurking vagabonds was very unpleasant’. The knowledge that ‘according to their creed [Islam], any of them who can prove that he has taken the life of an unbeliever is ever after honoured, and looked on as an especial saint’ was at least as bad.
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Aden was never a prestige posting. A Viceroy of India at the turn of the twentieth century, Lord Curzon, used it as a punishment station for regiments that disgraced themselves. As late as the inter-war period, the army was sending any officers ‘who had got themselves into matrimonial difficulties’
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to Aden.