Free In Praise of Savagery by Warwick Cairns Page B

later, as an old man, this same soldier passed through Glencoe once more on his way to conduct some business in Fort William. It was late and he was tired, and he stopped at the new inn in the rebuilt village, which is, as I say, a little way down from where the old one stood; and there he fell to drinking, and to thinking about what had gone before and what he had taken part in; and feeling burdened by the shame and guilt of it, he told his story to the innkeeper. Now, this man listened carefully, all the way through, and when at last the old soldier reached the end of his story he said nothing. Instead, he simply held up his hand, to reveal his missing finger.
    I do not know if this is true or not; but that is the story as I heard it.
    The story that Wilfred Thesiger heard of the events at the ruined Adoimara village by the Mullu River on his arrival Afdam Station was, in some ways, a remarkably similar one to the story of the MacDonalds of Glencoe; and yet, at the same time, it was very different indeed, and it revealed much about the culture of the Danakil peoples.
    There had been trouble, as ever, between the Adoimara and the Asaimara, and at this particular time there had been a dispute over pasture rights on the plain by the river, and there had been fighting and people killed. It had gone on for some time, this dispute, and the casualties were mounting; and so in an effort to calm things somewhat, the Asaimara sent a deputation of seven old men to negotiate a truce with the elders of their rivals.
    These old men were received with courtesy and with feasting, and were each given a bed in the homes of Adoimara elders.
    And then, one night, upon a pre-arranged signal, the Adoimara hosts rose up, dragged their elderly guests from their beds and set about hacking them to death. They killed six of them, horribly. The seventh managed to escape, despite a shattered arm and deep wounds all over his body, and was able to reach his people and tell them what had happened.
    A few days later the Asaimara descended on the village in force and in fury, laying waste to it and killing every single inhabitant—sixty-one men, women and children—and not sparing even the youngest baby among them.
    The moral of the story being, presumably, you don’t mess with the Asaimara.
    The day after hearing the story, Thesiger took the train up to Addis Ababa, to see if anything could be done to save his expedition.

Preparations

    We spent the night in a hut next to Kibiriti’s, lying on our backs within the red mud walls listening to the sounds of girls and women singing long into the darkness.
    It was the wedding season, after the rains.
    One pays for a bride in livestock, Kibiriti had explained to us. Most brides are ‘booked’ many years before their wedding, when they are still very young; and in the years between, the men who are to be their husbands buy them as many bead necklaces as they can afford, to make their girls more beautiful than all the other girls.
    Samburu girls from Maralal, he said, were notoriously expensive. He himself had just two brides. Due to the prohibitive cost of local girls, though, he had been forced to obtain them from other towns.
    The next morning, Kibiriti collected us from our hut and took us into town.
    ‘There is much to do,’ he said.
    The streets of Maralal were full of
moran
, young warriors with ochred hair, who loitered in groups, leaning on their spears.
    The things that there were to do, he said, were to do with the arrangements that had been made for us to go out and see the countryside, while waiting for Wilfred to arrive.
    Thus it was that we found ourselves standing in front of Mr Bhola’s garage-cum-hardware store in Maralal.
    ‘Rope,’ said Kibiriti, ‘you will need rope. And sacks. Many sacks.’
    We couldn’t see how or why we might need these things, but he seemed to know what he was doing and so we let him get on with it.
    ‘And you will need water-containers.’
    ‘Ahem …’