The Prophet's Camel Bell: A Memoir of Somaliland by Margaret Laurence

Author:Margaret Laurence [Laurence, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

The evenings were cold. After dinner we sat in the brushwood hut, shivering in our sweaters and jackets, and listening to the squeaky trembling voice that issued from Arabetto’s old gramophone. He had a few well-worn Italian records, and he and Gino would listen nostalgically to Santa Lucia, one of them remembering Mogadisciou and the other remembering Milan. Arabetto was the only Somali who had a taste for this foreign music – the others pronounced it an abomination to the ears. Arabetto told us with amusement about the reaction of one of the labourers to the gramophone.

“He never see such thing before. He say – is it some devil, or is some small man inside?”

Another evening entertainment, if it could be called that, was watching the insects grimly battling. The large black crickets, noisy as a calypso steel band, emerged at sundown from the ground. We saw them digging their way up – plop! plop! – and there they were, hundreds of them crawling around at our feet. Then the sausage flies began buzzing through the air, their plump bodies clumsy and hardly able to fly, looking exactly like miniature sausages. An English sahib of local legend was reputed to enjoy eating these creatures – at parties, he would pluck them from the air and pop them in his mouth, and all the ladies would bleat and shriek to see him chewing. It struck me that there must surely be easier ways to establish one’s reputation as a character.

The next insects to put in an appearance at the evening battlefield were the killers, the black jinna or stink-ants, with their voracious jaws. When a sausage fly dropped bumbling to the ground, or a cricket faltered, the jinna would be upon it instantly, and within seconds it would have been devoured. We tried to avoid stepping on the jinna, for when we did, they gave off the most rank odour imaginable.

The Somalis had an enigmatic tale about the stink-ant. They said that if you went to the jinna and asked him why he was so thin in the waist, he would explain – “It is a result of riding a great deal on a fine horse. Anyone knows that riding draws in the waist.” And if you asked him why he had such a foul stench, he would answer, “Because I once visited a woman who had a stinking birth.” And if you asked him why his jaws were open so wide, he would reply, “Because I used to go with a group of boys from village to village, dancing, and I was the one who went in front, shouting that we did not come to beg food or money, but only came to dance.” I do not pretend to understand this story, but the Somalis considered it uproariously funny.

The brushwood hut in the evening was a place of contentment. In the navy-coloured sky, the white clouds scudded silently across the moon. Outside the thorn-bough fence that enclosed our camp, we heard the low sullen moan of a hyena or the yapping of foxes.

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