Life And Death Among The Somalis

Frontier Partisan Traven Torsvan offered up a lengthy quote from Gerald Hanley on the Rule .303 and ‘The Crimes of SEAL Team 6’ post. I  cannot tell you how much I appreciate the thoughtful contributions y’all make on this blog.  I also cannot tell you how many times y’all have blown my reading plans and book budget sky high. Anyway, this deserves full play… and I want more…

I recently started Gerald Hanley’s “Warriors” about his experiences in Somalia during the second world war. I think this quote from the beginning really sums up what you were getting at in your post.

“In the early months of isolation in a wilderness, particularly when burdened with responsibilities which may suddenly turn dangerous, among actively violent and savage people, a sort of hysteria develops in the character. Ferocity will be replied to ferociously, out of fear, and fear is hatred.

One’s first sight of ferocity arouses hatred for the ferocious, and one is liable to respond with savagery. It is hard to describe the hatred and contempt one can feel for tribesmen who have slain the women of their enemies, or caused them to die of thirst.

Later, when hysteria has been replaced by acceptance of isolation – the fact that one is hundreds of miles out of reach of ‘rescue’ should anything go wrong, one feels merely contempt for savagery. You do not hate the active savage anymore. You realise instead the size of the pitiful value he places on the need to kill, the need for revenge, the desire to humiliate his enemy (which includes you), especially when thousands of helpless people were being slain by bombs in European cities every night. One knew then that one was one with the savage, while not being so innocently honest about one’s savagery as the desert savage.

Then despair tries to set in. There is nothing like isolation in an atmosphere of electric violence for bringing before one’s mind the understanding that the varnish of two thousand years is so thin as to be transparent. It is living in civilisation that keeps us civilised. It is very surprising, and alarming at first, how swiftly it vanishes when one is threatened by other men, men of almost mindless resolve. They know if you are frightened of them. They know too if you will kill as readily as they. But the fear does slowly seep in, if you are isolated for long enough among warriors who hate what you represent, a threat to their joyous wars.”

Wow.

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I had never heard of Hanley. Why? No idea. A prolific British novelist and travel writer, he wrote a lot about Africa and India and Burma. From his Wiki:

Admired by Hemingway and compared to Conrad, Gerald Hanley, overshadowed by both Paul Scott and, to a lesser degree, his brother James Hanley, failed to achieve any lasting fame.

I’ll be purchasing Warriors for the Kindle. This is wheelhouse stuff:

Somalia is one of the world’s most desolate, sun-scorched lands, inhabited by fierce and independent-minded tribesmen. It was here that Gerald Hanley spent the Second World War, charged with preventing bloodshed between feuding tribes at a remote outstation. Rations were scarce, pay infrequent and his detachment of native soldiers near-mutinous. In these extreme conditions seven British officers committed suicide, but Hanley describes the period as the ‘most valuable time’ of his life. With intense curiosity and open-mindedness, he explores the effects of loneliness. He comes to understand the Somalis’ love of fighting and to admire their contempt for death.

“Of all the races of Africa,” he says, “there cannot be one better to live among than the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest: the Somalis.”