Watch boys

[Centurion]

The memories of expatriats make for interesting reads.

 

 

------------------

 

Africa will teach it to you, that God and the Devil are one, not two uncreated, but one. The Somali neither confounded the person nor divided the substance." - Isak Dinesen

 

Mogadishu is an old slave port on the Indian Ocean, under the Horn of Africa, a pocket in the billiard table that is a rising coastline of coral rock, a place of contact with the other world, a port without a harbor. It is there because the Shebelle River is but a day's walk away, and the river is a highway that comes down from the Mendebo Mountains of Ethiopia, bringing the meanest commerce on the tracks beside its banks, before it peters out in the sand. Ibn Battuta, the first recorded tourist, visited Mogadishu in the 14th Century, and left in tears.

 

There one finds the genes that traders left behind, genes of the Turks and Egyptians, of the Arabs, the Persians, the Italians, the British, the Galla, and the Amhar, products of history not written but breathed, speaking the trade languages left behind by the Persians and Arabs, Cimini and Swaheli. There in a city out of time the illegitimate little half-brothers of the Arabs have business to do with the Somali proper, those impetuous, quarrelsome, abstinent, greedy, zealous, faithful, warlike, violent sons of noble and ignoble tribes of nomads. Somali dervishes fought against the British under the Mad Mullah, Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan of the ****** clan, who tried to expel the missionaries. The Saliyah religious order in rebellion had the example of the Mahdi, who killed Gordon of Khartoum, to follow in hating the Western intruders.

 

An old map of Italian Somalia has the legend: Che Multi Elefanti Qua. That map includes Addis Ababa, Asmera, Jigjiga, Harer, Dire Dawa, and Djibouti, the French Territory of the Afars and Issas in the Danakil Desert, across the Bab el Mandeb from the victualizing and coaling station of Aden, where Britishers on their way to India used to look down from the decks of passenger ships to see the Fuzzy Wuzzies.

 

The Somali are the only people in Africa sharing a native language and living all over their own country and in contiguous countries. Ninety-eight percent of the people there being ethnic Somali, there is one language that everyone speaks. They do not have to use a lingua franca like English or French or Arabic in order to get along with each other. The land of the Somali was not formerly as small as it is today. The British, French, and Italians took parts of it away so that the five points on the Somali flag stand for the five nations of the Somali, who were formerly or are presently told what to do by the British, French, Italians, Kenyans, and Ethiopians. To the Somali, everyone seems to be against them. And they have no center, no unifying economy or tradition, except religion and language and pride in lineage, clan, and tribe.

 

They earn their living competing for grazing land, following the monsoon rains and the grass it brings, killing and stealing in a regulating system of rights and obligations. Blood money is paid and received according to ancient traditions of agnate kinsmen. A man's life is worth one hundred camels. The ***, ****, Hawiya, and ***** families, the proper Somali, have precedence in all tribal matters, which are, by necessity, basically commercial. In order to survive in such a hard world, one must be fit and strong and able to run and protect the beasts that comprise the precious herds of camels and cows and sheep and goats. So Somali men are handsome, wiry and tall, as fit as marathon runners, full of pride, quite self-contained, having no need of you. They are tall because of natural selection; tall people see trouble in the bush coming sooner. Their beautiful maiden sisters, crowned with tonsures of black ringlets, are the infibulated property of their fathers.

 

In the middle 1960s several American families lived in the savannah bush among one hundred or so young Somali men, clustered around the only mosque ever built, surreptitiously for sure, by the American government, an extra-legal but necessary, indeed required, addition to the classroom buildings and monkish cells of the students at the little college, a high school for a few of the prescient Somali who saw the West coming. The National Teacher Education Center provided basic adult education for them through contact with us, the American teachers. There was electricity sometimes in the evenings, if there was diesel fuel for the generator, if the foreman remembered to turn it on.

 

We went regularly into the capital city, Mogadishu, to pick up supplies at the commissary, to buy fresh meat and bread, to watch an old movie making the rounds of American consular offices projected onto a whitewashed wall at the side of a tennis court. I recall son John, age three, sitting on my lap, peeing in fright, as John Carradine turned into the vampire in the film 'Dracula Meets Billy the Kid'.

 

In Mogadishu, we always went to lunch or dinner at an 'Italian' restaurant, The Capucetto Nero, a restaurant out of the Middle Ages situated on the Viale Garibaldi, its main room touching the sidewalk, separated from it only by a wall of perforated blocks so that air could waft away the mildew and cooking odors.

 

Parking our ancient, dusty Volkswagen nearby, there being no traffic except driven animals, because there were few cars, we always had to engage, that is, to hire two watch boys to guard the car against watch boys. It was their primary source of income, the extortion racket of the crippled boys who patrolled the streets looking for business. If you did not pay two boys to watch your car, when you returned to it you found toothpicks broken off in the door locks, and the tires deflated, a model of that insurance industry we call a protection racket among Western criminals and victims.

 

Watch boys wore rags. They scuttled about on their hands, dragging their twisted and emaciated lower limbs behind them, living a miniature version, a dumb show after the play, of life on the savannah, making a profit with few resources, like their sound of limb herdsman brothers.

 

The watch boys were children of nomads who had been carried to the city after they were stricken by malaria, tuberculosis and yaws, and crippled by infantile paralysis. Those few nomads would not kill their worthless sons, but there were no crippled girls in the city. The boys scuttled about in the dust, begging and extorting money. Many of them were beautiful, with clear almond skin, large, dark eyes, noble noses and aquiline features that distinguish the noblest Somali from other, lesser people. Many were leprous. Of them there were dozens, of us few. They knew us by name; we were called "Johnny" after the blue-eyed baby I carried everywhere on my right hip. We knew one watch boy by name. Juma was special in that he never begged aloud like the others, but sat smiling on his withered haunches, watching the other boys. I always hired him to protect our car, and was never disappointed. Once I gave him an outgrown boy's shirt. Then wherever I went in the city, all the watch boys demanded that I give each of them a shirt too.

 

True princes of that land, they were there in the dirt, scrounging for bread. For it was better to be alive than dead, and there was no way that any one of them could have grown up to become a warrior, to carry a spear most days all day, to tease his hair into a giant black ball to show that he wants a wife, to lope forty miles just to say hello to a friend, to keep his cattle safe, to take others' cattle for fun and profit, to drink blood borrowed from the shoulder or butt of his beasts for breakfast with tea and sugar, to grow tall and hard and proud, with the force and knowledge of generations keeping his life the way it had always been.

 

The first lesson a Somali boy learns is basic spearsmanship. How will you live if you do not know how to kill an attacking leopard? Leopards enter the camps, jumping over the thorn fence, the zariba, even into the houses, the grass aqal, and steal babies and eat them. They always try to take our young animals. There are ways to defend oneself, Doctor, although these ways are not apparent to the ignorant. The best is to cause the leopard to impale itself on your spear. In fact, that is exercise number one in the Book of Spear: impalement. It simplifies everything. No motion is wasted. There are no real problems with this method, so they say. You must first get the damned creature to throw itself toward you. You kneel down, your right hand at your right heel, holding the butt of the spear in your right hand. Your left hand directs the spear point. At first contact, you roll in the direction that seems clear. Then you get up and run, fast, hoping that the animal is dead or at least wounded. If it is wounded, run and get help. Bravery is a story that women tell.

 

Throwing a spear is good for frightening people away, or for killing small animals, little else. One cannot be serious about the throwing of a spear; it is too easy to miss the target. There are better ways of killing when you are the attacker, using the spear as a long knife, for example. One sees adolescent boys throwing spears at rolling hoops. That is good practice for killing running birds, but not for serious business. The life of the nomad is our own life. We tend our flocks. We kill when we must, and we do it in very subtle ways. However, it is against all our ways to do it directly by throwing a long spear. It is better to let the leopard jump, and then meet him with cold steel.

 

Of greater utility is the stick, which every Somali man wields with great dexterity. Withes of the acacia tree, hard wood saplings cut well before the monsoon rains in March, are dried and stretched in the sun, much as one makes a walking stick from the penis of a hippopotamus, by tying a weight, a block of wood, to the end and suspending it from a tree limb. The resulting flexible stick the length of the height of a man, two meters or so, and a centimeter in diameter is swung and flicked with deadly accuracy. The spear is usually left behind where you sleep unless predators are known to be, or suspected to be, near the herd of animals. If one suspects the presence of hyena, jackal, dog, leopard, or lion, he carries the spear that day. Otherwise he must use the ever-present stick, with which he can remove an eye from an aggressor, cut a snake, a mamba, a cobra, or a krait in two, or break a bird's neck. The marabou stork stands two meters tall, and loves to eat baby goats. Skill with the stick is highly prized, cultivated, and taught. It is also the shepherd's staff.

 

Every February stick fights between village teams are held among the sedentary Digil and Rahanwein people of the river valleys. These bloody contests are attended by everyone, including medical teams in Red Crescent ambulances to succor the wounded, of which there are hundreds. After the contests and the dressing of wounds, there is held a grand fertility dance that lasts all the night, with stick-fight heroes preferred for copulating in the bushes. That way the farmers make sure that it will rain in March.

 

The Capucetto Nero was the best restaurant in Mogadishu, or Mogadiscio as the Italians spell it. There were few other restaurants where Europeans would dare to eat. The food at the two hotels was suspect and original, having no known provenance. The one Chinese restaurant, Smiley's, served barely passable Cantonese food without Chinese vegetables. So we were drawn to the Black Helmet regularly, with simple tables, walls of coral stone blocks, the diners sitting next to the sidewalk where the watch boys congregated to receive the bits of food that the children passed to them through the perforated blocks of the wall. Inside, the Italian patrone sat at his dais with the cash box, surrounded by desserts in trays - especially zuppa inglese, a gooey cake soaked in rum that we all loved. In the back at one side was the kitchen where big black Negro men in white aprons attended a huge wood-burning range. Our own special waiter Damisi, an old gray puttering fellow, always greeted us warmly in anticipation of the big tip he would receive for his incompetent service. He seldom got more than half of the orders right, but we were six, and he was one who could barely speak six languages. Since all the dishes were good, it made little difference what he brought. We never sent any food back. When he saw that he had made mistakes, as usual, he would slap his forehead in penance and cry "Perdonne mi. Mi scuzi. Idioto!" And we would reassure him "Tutti va bene. Non che problema. Mangiamo, Damisi!"

 

We ate lots of pasta and zuppa asciuta, and sometimes a real soup with tortellini. Then we regaled ourselves with steak and eggs cooked on the cast-iron wood stove, a roast chicken, or veal fried and served in a butter sauce with tomatoes, or fresh tuna steaks, or pizza ala vongole, frutti di mare, the sea with its rich Somali Current only a few meters away.

 

Of course the steak was always a thin slice of some less tough part of the animal, there being no refrigeration, or ageing of beef. The animals from which our food came were driven by boys carrying sticks to the municipal slaughterhouse each morning, an abattoir on a cliff over the crashing waves of the Indian Ocean. The animals were led into the open stone building, their hind feet bound, and a man hit them between the eyes with a sledge hammer. They were then hoisted, gutted, skinned, and quartered. The effluvium of wastes was washed with seawater through stone troughs into the sea below, where thousands of sharks fought for the bloody guts. It was a popular entertainment to watch the roiling of huge fish eating the lights and each other, while fishermen stood below the abattoir, trying to catch them from the rocks.

 

These many dishes we ate with common red wine from Italy, shipped to East Africa in big twenty-liter fiaschi covered for protection with woven straw. The wine was served in tall water glasses, always with a few drops of oil on the surface, as it had been sealed in its fiasco with cooking oil.

 

So many good, hearty meals we consumed, sitting in the glare of fluorescent lights at the big front table of the Capucetto Nero, the watch boys watching us eat our fill! Through the perforated coral stones of the front wall the large eyes of the wretched cripples told us that they were always there, squatting and lying on the sidewalk outside in the dust just inches from our chairs, hoping for morsels that our children passed to them through the holes. While we were eating, as each course arrived, carried by the obsequious, smiling Damisi, the little boys on the cleaner side of the wall passed morsels of food to the dirtier side of the wall, to waiting, grasping hands. Small loaves of bread, panini, pieces of cheese, joints of chicken from the hands of four well-scrubbed, healthy, inoculated and vitamined, safari-suited, Aryan, blond American boys, princes of the world, to whom all was owed and given, God and the Devil one.

[Castro]

So Somali men are handsome, wiry and tall, as fit as marathon runners, full of pride, quite self-contained, having no need of you. They are tall because of natural selection; tall people see trouble in the bush coming sooner. Their beautiful maiden sisters, crowned with tonsures of black ringlets, are the infibulated property of their fathers.

Talk, dark, lovely and stup!d.