Hargeisa: the city of nomads and British soldiers' encampment
'Home" was a compound surrounded by a very high; you couldn't look over it, thornbush fence, the Zariba. There was an entrance to the zariba wide enough for a truck to come through.
At sundown each evening two Askari (African Soldiers) would stand guard at this entrance all night. We were told this was necessary to keep the wild animals and thieves out.. It was thought the Somali people resented the British Army of Occupation but we never experienced any hostility and roamed the countryside with complete safety.
We were very fond of our Somali servants particularly our cook, Ali. We would spend a lot of time with him in the kitchen watching him make chapattis. The 'kitchen' was a corrugated iron hut away from the main house and near the zariba entrance. You had to bend the head to enter it. His 'stove' was three stones on which he balanced his saucepans. His 'oven' was a kerosene tin which was also balanced on the three stones, from which he produced cakes, meringues, and pies. He was a devout Muslim, and let us watch him pray on his mat which he would roll out on the ground on the same spot each time. We were told later that he arranged it to face Mecca. He had a small hut for sleeping in at the back of the kitchen.
To the west of the kitchen was the duck pen where we kept Muscovy Ducks. We fed them tins of Army Soya Links, an American concoction only suitable to humans in extremis! The ducks loved it and laid well on it. To the west of the ducks was our pit latrine located behind the only tree in the compound.
We built a platform in the tree and made a Dhow sail and imagined we were sailing up and down the East African Coast. On the southern side of the tree was where my brother, Anthony and I slept. Our 'bedroom' was a large Army tent set on a concrete slab surrounded by a low mud-brick wall. We had two camp beds and mosquito nets and couldn't be happier with it. A little to the East of us was the main house. The entrance was in the middle which included the dining room. To the right was the living room and to the left, my parents bedroom. It was probably made of mud-brick covered with a lime render. The roof was corrugated asbestos. The circle is completed by crossing the vegie garden and then to entrance to the zariba.
Scarcity of fresh food and water shortage
There was very little fresh food, only a few scrawny chickens and the smallest of eggs. We did have a small vegie garden on one side of the compound. but what the squirrels didn't eat was cleaned up by a periodic plague of locusts. In any case water was in short supply so there was not much to put on the garden. Each day the Army water truck would come and top up two 44 gallon drums with rather dirty looking water. For drinking, it was boiled then put through a ceramic filter. We never got sick from it. There were times when we augmented our food supplies by shooting game which was quite plentiful. We would go out bush in the smaller fifteen hundredweight trucks and chase down wild deer. If possible the animal was shot in the neck so, although fatally wounded, it was still alive when our Somali staff reached it and killed it by ritually cutting its throat. Ali would keep parts of the deer for our use and the rest was given to the staff.
Every so often we would go to a place called NAAFI which was a sort of universal provider run by the Army. This is where we collected rations and bought extras to add comfort to what we thought was an already very comfortable life. Some of the highlights from the Naafi were American tinned Guavas and Australian fruit cake. It is fair to say that the weekly truck convoys from Nairobi were necessary to keep the Army side of Hargeisa going.
The Tog, floods and watering wells
Hargeisa was built on either side of a dry river bed known as the Tug which I presume is the Somali word for dry river bed. The Army built a stone causeway across it, which was ritually washed away every time the Tug came down. Maybe three times during our stay, heavy rains fell in the hills and produced a flood in the river. A wall of water would rush down the river bed demolishing everything in its way. The flow would continue for some hours and the abruptly stop. It gave the Army Engineers something to do. On the South side was Army Headquarters, with the Naafi, Soldiers bivouac, Officer's Club, workshops, parade ground etc. To the east of this was the Somali settlement. The main street had a row of shops on each side. We were particularly fascinated by the metalworkers who conducted their craft in the front of their shops for all to see. The ceremonial dagger makers particularly held our attention; I would have loved to have had one.
At this time most Somalis were nomads who followed their flocks of Fat-tailed Sheep and Camels from pasture to pasture. They lived in dome shaped huts made from saplings covered with camel skins. These are light and easily transportable. They can be quickly erected and struck and loaded onto a camel. The population ebbed and flowed with the seasons and the only permanent buildings were the row of shops of course, as there were no toilets, the South side of the valley was a huge open air toilet.. The men went on the right, the women on the left. The women wore voluminous skirts so were able to answer the call of nature with some modesty. The men were not so concerned. It was quite a sight each morning to see the hill-side dotted with people sitting quietly at modest intervals from each other.
Further up the hill was what seemed to be an old quarry which contained some rather green looking water which I understood was where the Army water truck filled up each day. Further up the ridge a long flat area had been bulldozed into a landing strip. There were no great buildings I remember, just a long open space. My Father had requested some aerial photos and two RAF Mosquitoes arrived from Aden to get them. We were taken up there to have a look. What planes!!! To us they were from another planet. Hugely powerful, with a Rolls Royce Merlin engine on each side of the cockpit. They made an awesome racket taking off and frightened the living daylights out of us when the 'dive bombed' us on their way back to Aden. These were the days before air-travel so they were the first and last planes I saw till about 1950. My Mother writes that there was a weekly plane from Aden which brought mail, but I was not aware of it.
There seemed to be only sparse settlement on the northern side of the tug. The land was fairly flat but sloping gently towards the Tug. Vegetation was sparse consisting mainly of small trees and shrubs with very little grass. The earth was stony, a sort of white flint. Quite often we would pick up flint arrowheads which must have been very ancient as bows and arrows were not used by the current population. There seems to be much evidence of past lost civilisations throughout Somaliland.
I think it was when visiting Barao we hired some mules and went up into the hills to what was left of lost city. The buildings, though ruined and covered in vegetation, had been made of stone and were quite evident. My brother, Anthony, found a silver coin with Arabic markings on it.
The North side of the tug is where we had our house. Behind us and some 200 metres away was a house occupied by a single Officer who had two horses. Closer to the Tug, Government House was situated, Occupied by the Governor, Brigadier Jerome, and his wife Ruth, Fisher.
We were fascinated by the Tug. Its dry bed snaked its way through the town, each side of islands it had made. It was a wonderful place to gallop a horse Its main importance was the subterranean water that flowed year round. Quite shallow wells provided drinking water..Water out in the desert was in short supply and the wells were often very deep. We watched, fascinated at one well, where a man scooped a cone shaped tightly woven basket through a small puddle of water and toss it to a man above him, who, in turn, tossed it to the next man and so on up to the surface where it was poured into a drinking trough for the camels. Empty baskets were tossed down the chain of men in an unending rhythm. We always carried two 44 gallon drums of water in the back of the truck, and many times we were stopped by Nomadic Somalis suffering from thirst, the first few water baskets were consumed on the spot and then filled up again to carry back the their camp.
…to be continued
Contact: Bashir Goth, EMAIL: bsogoth@yahoo.com, we will provide Hugh Milne's email with the last part.
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