Pan-Islam

To do them justice, the Somalis fear their fauna very little and have more than once, when in attendance on a European sportsman, driven off a lion with spears and a resolute front after the white man had failed to stop the beast with both barrels.

Even a woman will face a leopard with a torch of dry grass to contest the ownership of a fat-tailed sheep which he has tried to filch from the zareba by night, fearing his snarling menace far less than the wrath of her lord and master if the marauder secures his prey.

As for the Midgan, that born hunter and nomadic outcast whom other Somalis look down upon, but who has more woodcraft in his touzled head than any of them, he will deliberately hunt the king of beasts, using some decrepit and almost valueless camel as a stalking-horse. He is armed with a bow having about as much apparent "give" in it as the bottom joint of a fishing rod, yet able to propel with surprising force a stumpy arrow cunningly poisoned with a wizard brew of viper venom and the root of the tall box tree. His procedure is to drive his camel slowly grazing toward some island of bush in which he has marked down a lion, he himself being perched a-straddle behind the hump and directing the animal's movements with kicks from one or other of his bare heels. From his lofty observation point he at once spots the crouching approach of the lion and slips off over the camel's rump to cover, whence he speeds one of his venomous little shafts at close range. The outraged monarch attacks the camel and the hunter keeps well aloof from the subsequent confusion until the poison works and the lion is seized with muscular convulsions, like those of tetanus, when he may safely approach to gloat over his quarry. What is really remarkable is that the camel is not invariably killed. I once met a Midgan on trek who showed me the unmistakable claw-marks of a lion on his camel's neck and shoulders and said he had used the animal on three such occasions; compared with these desperate encounters the exploits of our white shikaris armed with powerful modern rifles are insignificant.

One beast of prey, however, is feared and hated by every Somali man, woman or child – hunter, shepherd or townsman – and that is the great, spotted hyæna which slinks up by night to snap at face or breast of sleeping folk and bolts into the gloom at the agonised shriek of his mangled victim. The brute is cowardly enough to refuse encounter with an able-bodied man awake and on the alert unless rendered desperate by hunger, but his jaws are as strong as a lion's, and one snapping bite does the mischief. I once helped the P.M.O. at Berbera to tend some half-dozen poor wretches who had been frightfully mauled during the night on the outskirts of the town itself and probably by the same hyæna. The hot weather had induced many folk to sleep outside their stifling huts and they will not take the trouble to collect and build up a few thorny bushes to keep the brutes off.

The Somali is about as incapable of hard work as his "fat" camel, and the only time he may be seen digging is among the convict gangs who till, or used to till, the Government garden out at Dubar on the inland edge of the littoral plain, where the Berbera water supply bubbles out hot from under the low maritime hills and trickles through ten miles of surface pipe-line to supply the "Fort," which is supposed to protect the British cantonment straggling some distance outside Berbera town. He feels such work dreadfully, not only as an injury to his self-respect (and he has all the puerile pride of the negroid races), but as an irksome tax on his physical powers, which are quite unaccustomed to sustained and strenuous exertion. On the other hand, he will make long journeys on short commons and keep well and happy if allowed to punctuate his hardships at long intervals with debauches on meat and milk and fat. He excuses himself from tilling the ground on the plea that others might harvest the fruit of his labours, as there is no individual land-tenure or any definite divisions of land indicating ownership, but only tribal grazing rights over ill-defined areas and the parcel of land enclosed by his zareba fence, of which he is but the tenant, as it is free to anybody as soon as he leaves it to trek to other pastures. Therefore, vegetables are unattainable by him, and his cereals (rice, millet and coarse flour) reach him by sea and caravan or he does without. He appears immune from scurvy and is seldom sick or sorry unless he over-eats himself. He loves ghi (or clarified butter) and animal fat, which he swallows in large gulps when he can get it, also rubbing it in his frizzy hair and using it to sleek his black, spindly shanks and smear his spear-blades – on shikar he will "gorm" it all over your spare gun if you do not watch him. His favourite beverage is strong tea with lots of sugar in it (when procurable) otherwise he will not touch it, and he will drink water which a thirsty camel would sniff at suspiciously before imbibing. He dresses in a white sheet worn toga-wise and not without a certain dignity, and his head is usually bare except in towns or the partially civilised entourage of a white man, where he will wear anything on his head from a tarboosh to a topi as a mark of distinction, but seems to avoid a turban, which he has not the knack of tying properly.

To meet him and his family on trek is to glimpse an epitome of his life. First comes the able-bodied though elderly sire carrying a few light throwing-spears and a knobkerry or a gim-crack stabbing-spear, and close behind him are the adult males of his house similarly armed or with a rifle or two supplied by a benevolent Government for protection against the Mullah, to whom these children of nature frequently offer them for sale at very reasonable prices. After these come the women-folk in order of precedence, carrying loads in inverse ratio thereto. The young, favourite wife walks first, carrying her latest addition to the family in a cotton shawl at her hip; she is followed by other wives of less social standing, carrying household utensils, with the smaller children at foot, and at the tail of the procession stagger the old crones under heavy burdens of pots, pans, pitchers and unsavoury goat-hair rugs. A camel or two bring up the rear with the conglomeration of sticks and hides and matting which makes the home and looks like an untidy bird's nest. On the flanks and in the rear skirmish the elder children, girls and boys, with flocks and herds which graze as they go. The big piebald sheep with their black heads and indecently fat tails are not allowed to range far afield, where lynx or leopard might stalk them under covert, as they are valuable, succulent and very foolish. They carry no wool – their coat feels just like a fox-terrier's – but they have more meat on them than three average goats, and the huge pendulous flap of fat which does duty as a tail is a delicacy to make a Somali mouth water or a European gorge rise.

The only serious occupation a buck Somali will permit himself is to sit under a tree and watch his grazing flocks. He is fond of conversation, chiefly of a recriminative character, and gives vent to his joie de vivre by prancing and singing on two or three simple notes to the accompaniment of his clapping hands and the thud of his horny heels. His chief woe is drought and lack of grazing, because he then has to get up off his butt-end and take long treks to pastures new. His ideas of earthly Paradise centre round the cafés of Aden, where his countrymen are numerous and where wages are so high that six grown Somalis can batten in well-fed ease on the earnings of a seventh, who keeps on till he wants a holiday and then "goes sick" and sends another of the syndicate to replace him. Qualifications do not matter, as they all have sufficient to fumble through their jobs and no more. If he lacks the capital to start cab-driving and finds boat-rowing or punkah-pulling too strenuous for him, he sets himself to learn a little English and gets a job as servant with some new-fledged British subaltern at a minimum rate of £2 a month, which is fixed by his union, for that is one civilised device he really can handle. He is the slackest oarsman, the laziest punkawala and the worst whip east of Suez. His idea of driving is to sit with knees drawn up toward his chin while he lugs at the reins as if they were a punkah-cord, urging his staunch little screw along with in effectual flaps of his whip and noises like the paroxysms of sea sickness.

He will ruin any saddle-camel for fast work if allowed to ride one regularly, such animals not being raised in his country, but he breeds a small, hardy type of pony which he loves to gallop in wild dashes, with flapping legs and sawing hands, reining the poor little beast up short on a bit like a rat-trap to witch beholders with his horsemanship.

As a combatant you never know how to take him. He may put up a hefty fight or he may outrun the antelope in his precipitate retreat. I was much impressed by the defences in barbed wire and thorn trees considered necessary to ward off the onslaught of dervishes by men who knew them better than I did.

He is a cheery, irresponsible soul and has been called the Irishman of the East. Missionaries rather like him, because he is very teachable up to a certain point, fond of learning new tricks if not too difficult, and without that habit of logical and consecutive thought which makes the real Arab so difficult to tackle in argument.

No remarks on Somaliland would be complete without some mention of the Mullah. That astute personage has often been alluded to as "Mad," but has proved himself far saner than the Government he was up against. In the early 'nineties he kept the Arabi Pasha coffee-house opposite the cab-stand in the native town at Aden, where he dispensed tea and husk-coffee in little bowls of green-glazed earthenware, also raspberryade and other bright-coloured "minerals" in bottles, with a small lump of ice thrown in. His establishment was patronised almost entirely by Somalis and largely by the ghari-walas themselves. At the same time, he was obliging enough to spare the servant of a neighbouring sahib like myself a pound or two of ice from his "cold box" on occasional application to meet an emergency.

He had a good deal of property in flocks and herds over in British Somaliland, which he visited from time to time. In the late 'nineties he got involved in some suit or other and the local authorities mulcted him of many camels. He very much resented this decision and raised some friends and sympathisers to resist its execution by the police. An inadequate force was sent and sustained a reverse, after which his following grew enormously. Early in this century, when I again had news of him, he had craftily cut in between the Italian, Abyssinian and British converging columns and annihilated Colonel Plunkett's gallant little band at Gumburu, but sustained a severe defeat at Jidballi, where his red flannel dressing-gown was sighted in early and headlong retirement as his dervishes recoiled from the embattled square.

All the same, he was still going strong long after the South African War was over, and we had more leisure to attend to him. When the British frontier was drawn in to enable the statement to be made in Parliament that "the Mullah's troops were no longer within protectorate limits," he took advantage of it to deal ruthlessly with those tribes which had refused to join him on the solemn and definite promise that Government would protect them from his vengeance. The unhappy Dolbahuntas were almost wiped out as a tribal unit; their zarebas and flimsy villages were surrounded by the Mullah's men and fired, leaving the occupants – men, women and children – the choice of a dreadful end among blazing thorns or red death on the spears of their fellow-countrymen and co-religionists. A prominent Nationalist has alluded to the Mullah and his dervishes as "brave men striving to be free."

In 1910 British prestige had shed its last rag in Somaliland: we had withdrawn to the coast and the Mullah's horsemen actually rode through Berbera bazar on one of their raids and withdrew unscathed. In 1912 it was found necessary to form a company of Somali police on camels to keep the peace between "friendlies" who, to allay a certain amount of indignation at home, had been armed with rifles to protect themselves against the Mullah's people, but were using these weapons, in their light-hearted way, to argue questions of grazing as they arose. Early in 1913 "a small dervish outpost" was reported to be preventing our friendlies from grazing in the Ain valley south of Burao at a time when no other pasturage was locally available, and the Somali camel-corps, about a hundred strong with three white officers, was sent to occupy Burao as its base and from there to afford moral and material support enabling the friendlies to graze unmolested in the threatened area. This cheery opportunism was the Government's wobbling attempt at equilibrium between the barefaced desertion of our protected tribes and its avowed policy of non-intervention unless on the cheap. It was done too much on the cheap; that little force was attacked by an overwhelming force of dervishes while out on the grazing grounds affording moral and material support. The Maxim was put out of action by an unlucky bullet, and the friendlies skedaddled with their Government rifles at the first shot, but returned later to loot the dead. The half-trained Somali camelry suffered severely and were most unsteady, but the two white officers surviving managed to extricate the remnant with difficulty, the gallant commandant having died for his trust early in the fight. He was blamed posthumously for having exceeded his orders; whether he ought to have exercised his moral and material support at a safe distance from the place where it was needed or have led his command in headlong flight was not made clear, and they were the only two military alternatives to the action he did take. At all events the incident shamed the Government into taking more adequate measures to protect its friendlies in spite of bitter Nationalist opposition.

Missionaries point to our long and fruitless struggle in Somaliland as an illustration of the force of fanaticism. It is nothing of the sort; the Mullah was a man with a grievance who was driven into outlawry by the sequence of events, and the movement was entirely political. Having once tasted the sweets of temporal power, he wanted to expand it, and used his spiritual and material influence to that end, not hesitating to order the wholesale massacre of other equally orthodox Moslems when it seemed to him politically expedient. He owed his success to his ruthless treatment of his compatriots, the difficult and scantily watered terrain, our lack of co-ordination with the Italians and Abyssinians, but above all to our parsimonious method of cadging and scraping a little money together for an expedition and stopping when the funds gave out, like a small boy with fireworks. Somaliland, with its insignificant caravan trade, its wide, waterless tracts and its sparse population of shiftless, unproductive semi-nomads, is a bad business proposition, and no Government can be blamed for hesitating to spend money on it; but if half the expenditure had been concentrated on one scheme at one time instead of being frittered away on several divergent schemes over a lengthy period the Mullah would have been brought to book and the resources of the country developed considerably.

South of Somaliland in British, and what was once German, East Africa the missionary has comparative freedom of movement, whereas in Somaliland no white man has ever been allowed to travel without the sanction of the local authorities. He, however, complains that he is not encouraged by the Administration in either colony, and certainly makes no headway against Islam, which has a very strong hold, especially in British East Africa, with the Swahilis. Still, he can point to the inland kingdom of Uganda as one of his successes, and it would be more so if the various Christian sects would refrain from wrangling among themselves.

We have now reached the southern limit of Moslem activity in Africa, for we are getting among native races who do not take kindly to asceticism in any form, and beyond them are the sturdy white Christians of South Africa. Curiously enough, there is a flourishing little colony of Moslems at Salt River, the railway suburb of Cape Town, where imported East Indian and Arab mechanics have settled. They muster about 7,000 souls and have founded a school to educate their children. An unbiassed English resident states that they are far better citizens than native Christians of the same class, owing to their temperate habits. Drink is the undoubted curse of the non-Moslem African. In South Africa no native in white employ can get alcoholic drink without the written authority of his employer, but there are many illicit sources of supply. South African colonists insist that the native Christians are the worst – this should not be set down to Christianity, but to the civilisation which goes with it, and, in place of Kaffir beer and such like home-fermented brews of comparatively mild exhilarant character, introduces the undisciplined native mind to the furious joys of trade fire-water.

Africa is the main battle-ground between Moslem and missionary, for it is in that continent that the forces of Islam and Christianity are most nearly balanced. The American Protestant Mission, which is, as we have seen, one of the principal belligerents, complains loudly on behalf of Christendom that in Africa especially our colonial administrations do not give the support to Christian missions that Christian Governments should.

Apart from the fact that we administer these countries in trust for their indigenous population and have no right to thrust our own creed upon them to the exclusion of any other with a sound system of ethics, it can most cogently be urged that Islam is the only religion which insists on total abstinence, and that seems to be the only way in which the native African can avoid alcoholic excess.

I have in front of me a letter written by an American of Boston, Mass., to the Spectator of February 15th, 1919. In it he alludes to a report of the Committee for preventing the demoralisation of native races by the liquor traffic which is said to be "making Africa a cesspool of alcohol, and statistics show that in this devil's work Holland with her gin and, I regret to say, the United States with its trade rum have been the conspicuously worst offenders." The writer goes on to say that the native races are morally and intellectually children, and that has been recognised in the States where it is a penal offence to introduce alcoholic drink within the Indian reservations.

This being so, the attitude of American Protestants in attacking the only teetotal creed which is working among natives in a continent where total abstinence is unanimously declared to be essential to native welfare indicates loose thinking. It is still more extraordinary when we remember that the teetotal party in the United States have moved heaven and earth and every device, legitimate or otherwise, to secure national prohibition, about which, to put it mildly, there appear to be two opinions among American citizens. We are told that the South adopted prohibition as a measure of protection against the negro. Apart from the safety of white colonists in Africa, is the welfare of African negroes beneath the consideration of a free-born American? If so, why does he (or she) subscribe so liberally to support missions in Africa? Such an attitude is incongruous, even if we adopt the preposterous view that Christianity alone can make a sober man of a negro. Imagine a municipality which allowed a gang of hooligans to scatter incendiary bombs broadcast and encouraged its inadequate fire brigade to fight a rival organisation tooth and nail. Its avowed intention of prohibiting the use of matches on its own premises would not be considered a satisfactory amende.

I lay no more stress on American Protestant activities against Islam than is their due. There may be some opinions among Europeans that their evangelising fervour might find a mission field nearer home in South America or even in Mexico. Such a criticism is not only ungrateful but unreasonable. American missions have done much for humanity in the East, while as regards their own sub-continent the Catholic Church has held that field for centuries, and no reasonable being wants to see the two great divisions of Christianity sparring with each other about the spiritual education of greasers.

The Monroe Doctrine does not apply to missionaries, but I would point out to them that in wrestling against Islam they are fanning the fires of fanaticism and causing much material trouble, and the net spiritual result is to lessen their own power for good and embitter Islam for ill while widening the breach between Christian and Moslem.

This chapter is an attempt to give an impartial glimpse at the relations between Moslem and missionary throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. With regard to their activities, it is neither a detailed account nor an apology. No sincere religious effort requires an apology, and if it is not sincere no apology suffices.