Saturday, February 28, 2015

Warriors: Life and Death Among the Somalis Kindle Highlights

Below are my highlights from a selection from my 2014 Reading List selection.




I read Warriors: Life and Death Among the Somalis on the recommendation of Aiden Hartley (who wrote one of the best books on Africa out there).  It's not the easiest read but offers great insight into the Somali psyche. 



Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis by Gerald Hanley, Aidan Hartley, Joseph Hone
You have 68 highlighted passages
Last annotated on October 23, 2013

Thousands of days and nights spent in wildernesses taught me that a person can never truly know another, or be known by another, and that the pleasure of life is in the trying.
Read more at location 29


I once told a chief that I would kill him myself if he let his warriors go killing again (something he was planning to do). He liked that. He smiled, after studying my face. After all he could understand that far more easily than the kind of government he thought I represented.
Read more at location 49


‘When all your machines, and ships, and aircraft, and all those things you make, when they are all finished, our Arab dhows will still be sailing the seas, and we Arabs will hold together the world that we made, from India and farther East too, to here and to Europe. We are not finished yet, even though we are beggars now.’
Read more at location 76


But of all the races of Africa 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.
Read more at location 305


He did not go far beyond the towns of British Somaliland, a fairly quiet little area, never entered the real desolation, but his report said that nearly every officer was slightly to violently unbalanced.
Read more at location 355


New-born camel was the best meat I ever ate in Somalia.
Read more at location 419


the Midgan hunters for a couple of months and collect all their lore before it vanishes forever.
Read more at location 594


What these Mijertein people meant was that up there you got the finest camel milk, and for the nomads there is no greater praise of a howling wilderness than that.
Read more at location 682


There cannot be anywhere in Africa such ready and hungry people, with such swift minds, waiting to read their way out of a thousand years of dependence on the camel, and the spears that had ensured its possession.
Read more at location 687


Ali thought that God had handed the Somali race the most barren piece of Africa, and it was all I could do not to ask him if he had ever heard that the original fathers of the Somali race were cast out of Arabia into Africa because one of them had stolen the Prophet’s slippers. I have never been able to trace the origin of this tale which so used to enrage the Somalis whenever anyone threw it at them during an argument.
Read more at location 807


The bought safari must be infinitely more rewarding as ‘adventure’ than the
Read more at location 843


Primitivism is a very much overrated way of life, and is merely pitiful in essence, no matter how fascinating the carvings and the masks and the quiet zoomorphic ravings on stone and wood, those endless circles in which the tribe has wandered and lost itself, waiting for the stranger to come with the message, even when it leads to the atom bomb.
Read more at location 912


They were as appalled as the rest of us by the scenes in Germany, but they had an extra reason for puzzlement, and perhaps they knew that until the white man could manage his own anthropoid passions he should stop feeling superior to blacks merely because he was a white man.
Read more at location 923


Despite this I have never subscribed to the school of worship of the African primitive, or any other primitive, Nazi or Stalinist. The whole world, it seemed to me during those long nights on the sand under the thorn trees, was in need of rescue, as one world of people. I have never believed that any race of people is better than another race. They are all splendid when allowed to be, and brutes too when the chains break, and they need a government now, and in about a century or two they will have it, if they can resist the longing to smash it all up when boredom sets in. For men will be bored without war for some time to come, that oldest way out and pastime of all, an historic habit.
Read more at location 930


‘What do you want most?’ I once asked an old Somali. ‘To be well governed, but to be left alone,’ he told me. I often thought of that and found that I agreed with it, but how to get it?
Read more at location 934


You come across these old men in all countries with long, unbroken race memories and tradition, some of them holding the remains of cultures in their illiterate heads, in those marvellous memories unimpaired by reading, knowledge which waited too long for the new popular interest in archaeology, folklore and anthropology to come and rescue it and give it the dignity which would make it respected by the youth who despise the old men. You can find these old men in Ireland, India, Africa, the remains of the ancient world which was defeated and cast aside for the worship of money and machinery during the time of the alien imperial power which had smashed their world so pitilessly.
Read more at location 982


It is no use trying to be exactly right. We have no control of the future, only of what we have let happen to us.’
Read more at location 1039


They represented the real Africa, the Africa which has invented a thousand more new religions since the several hundred versions of Christianity began to puzzle them, the continent of the enormous brown rivers and of packed trees and alligator men, leopard and lion men, rainmakers and cursers and poisoners, and these haunting yet menacing drums were the pulse of it, brought out into the temporary streets, as if to show that not very much had happened to Africa yet.
Read more at location 1053


That evening in Mogadishu when I had watched the goat-masked Malablei dancers has always stayed in my memory as an unexpected manifestation among the buildings, of an Africa which may never completely disappear, which lived on through centuries while to the north Greece and Rome rose and fell. They never came down here, those conquerors in helmets. They went to cold Gaul and Britain instead. Those Malablei and their brother tribes along the hot river were still part of the forest, of its spirit, and they looked it as they danced through the Somalis who knew nothing of their secrets, their magic, their black mystery.
Read more at location 1064


yet they wanted their country back for themselves, while enjoying the ‘peace of the grave’, as Pandit Nehru once called it, in which they now toiled under aliens.
Read more at location 1083


We do not want to be ruled by any strangers anymore. They beat us with cannon, but every inch of this land is ours. Ours. It can never belong to any strangers. Men cannot live under strangers who have taken their lands. Never. If I had a spear and you had nothing and I came and took your house from you, and made you work in your own garden for me, you would not like that. That is what they have done, these governments. And it must come to an end now. You can tell them that, for that is what we all feel.’
Read more at location 1148


‘That’s because you’re a romantic,’ he said, ‘like your friends. You’ve learned a common unit feeling, living a life that only a few of you live. It can get so bad that officers have to be ordered to go on leave. In other words, if you’ve got to live rough, then live the roughest, with your friends. That’s romanticism, and highly necessary in an army, of course.’
Read more at location 1195


They always made me feel, those nomad dead, as if they announced to the world that there was no purpose after all behind life, and that it was all like this beneath the tapestry, loneliness and vengeance and waste. I think that that was what I hated most about their wilderness; that it showed you how the world had once been, everywhere, and could be again if the compassionate will of civilised men was ever finally defeated by the spirit of death, which the scientists have packaged at last, and who know, far better than the warrior generals, that there can be no next war, only the last one.
Read more at location 1212


the vecchi coloniali liked to say, ‘Un anno in Somalia è come cinque anni in Italia,’ so cruel was the climate, and it was worse in defeat before the Somalis. Nevertheless the Somalis liked the Italians, when all was taken into account; most people did when they got to know them.
Read more at location 1278


There is no one alive as tough as the Somali nomad. No one.
Read more at location 1310


We’ve got to have the poor so that we can give charity. I was a starving maskin myself when I was a child, and they threw coin to me now and then at the mosque. What harm has it done me? Leave the maskin alone, Effendi. They’re necessary for charity. It is the religious law that we give charity to the poor. If you abolish the poor you attack religion.’
Read more at location 1364


AFRICAN MAGIC IS REAL, quite often, and at other times it is the application of practical human psychology by the medicine-men or druids.
Read more at location 1406


How could they go on with this lashing of each other, their senses acute enough to do it to rhythm, and they laughed as they did it. This dance is called Kurbash, the Whip Dance.
Read more at location 1462


Until I lived on the Webi Shabeli I had thought that the ‘talking drums’ were purely West African, never having come across them in Eastern Africa myself, but they were there on the River of Leopards among the small black forest people.
Read more at location 1493


Down the river and near the southern Juba there is a dance tradition called Sarlugéd. You, the guest, sit watching as the tribesmen dance with their spears about twenty yards from you, dancing to and for you to the drums. They advance slowly in the dance until they are only a few yards from you; they then spin and charge, plunging the spears at you in one determined thrust, the points resting, halted, on your chest, and you are not supposed to flinch, even at the savage exultant shout that goes up from all the throats around
Read more at location 1508


All through my wanderings there I had sought to find someone who would show me how the powerful arrow poison, called Wabaio, of the small Sa’ab tribal group was made. It became a goal for me but I noticed early on in my enquiries that the Somalis themselves, the conquerors of the Sa’ab group who claimed to be the original inhabitants of Somalia, did not want me to take an interest in these people.
Read more at location 1542


The Midgan belonged to a group, he told me, called Sa’ab. The Sa’ab are a sort of outcast people made up of four groups called Midgan, Tomal, Yibir, and Yaha. ‘We,’ he said, stabbing a long finger against his bare glistening black chest, ‘we, the Midgan, are the most important of the Sa’ab. Without us there could be no Somalis.’ Then he burst out laughing to think of it, like all conquered races when they consider the proud masters who are frightened of them.
Read more at location 1585


In the lands of the Somali you need quicksilver in your mind in order to keep pace with a Somali plan for greatness, money, revenge, in which your aid is sought with steady, subtle and admirable patience. Things might be at stake which are of the greatest importance to the Somali, tribal position and pride, rights to a waterhole, camels (the greatest single possession of a man in this world) or the removal of an insipid chief. The longing to kill in the terrific excitement of a raid, the protracted and fascinating negotiations
Read more at location 1603


afterwards about blood money, these are real and important things.
Read more at location 1607


camels and water and honour, the dreary trinity of the Mijertein desert.
Read more at location 1637


You cannot beat them. They have no inferiority complexes, no wide-eyed worship of the white man’s ways, and no fear of him, of his guns or of his
Read more at location 1732


The tree itself is called Wabai. The correct name for the poison got from it is Wabaio. Jama explained this and then said that a truly powerful tree was the one on which the birds would never sit, for it would kill them.
Read more at location 1797


When leaving London for India in 1950, I was over-burdened with baggage. So I buried the Wabaio, with nostalgic thoughts for Somalia, three feet deep, in a garden in London, where it now lies, ‘happy’ in its khaki and colours.
Read more at location 1979


‘Remember,’ he said, looking into all their eyes in the pause, ‘remember that it is the elephant asleep in the long grass which defeats the greatest men.’ He had no idea what he meant (though he used to invent wonderful, idiotic tribal proverbs),
Read more at location 2024


Frightened of nothing on earth, willing to try anything anywhere, the Somali is never over-impressed by what he sees in the West, and they are great travellers. If he sees New York, or London, or Paris, the sight of these places with their superb machinery in no way diminishes his love of his desert home. He will go back there one day and wander with camels again. Once, in as blasted, dried-out and stark a piece of scenery as I ever sighted in Somalia
Read more at location 2049


If you have the patience and use the slow, steady drip technique, keep your temper, stick to your points, and never let yourself be rushed, you can beat a Somali in argument.
Read more at location 2073


but for me it was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had, seeing a desert savage shivering in front of the ocean for the first time, as if expecting the ground to melt and swallow him up at any moment. We must all have been like that once, in
Read more at location 2158


He is mad, this boy, Effendi, and God likes the mad.
Read more at location 2244


I was silent and let the time slide and pile over him, but I never forgot him, or those moving moments when he stood transfixed by the sight of the heaving blue Indian Ocean. All over a bottle of Aranciata brought one night to a white man lying smoking beside a convoy where Kenya, Somalia and Abyssinia meet on the map.
Read more at location 2285


Imagine the trust a servant placed in his wandering employer in the great spaces of Asia and Africa, the total commitment involved in travelling enormous distances, sometimes thousands of miles from his tribal home, to some outpost, malarial or parched, where he may be thrown out of his employment by his master. They have done this for centuries for men of all colours and creeds, and asked very little in return. In a way they place their whole life in the hands of the stranger, who may be cruel, or mean, or thoughtless. They never know. These servants were the true adventurers, the men who gambled all, took all kinds of chances, survived all sorts of dangers, forgave and were forgiven, and usually possessed little more when they were finished with their master than they had set out with.
Read more at location 2328


He spoke four languages fluently, could read and write them perfectly, and could have gone far in many a career away from his desert, but he was going back to that lonely life of the nomad. Perhaps this is a real strength in the Somali. He does not think there is anything discreditable in being a member of his primitive living group. They do not have the sad longing of the Bantu and the white men for a collar and tie and a desk, yet it will be the Bantu who will soften and civilise Africa, because he longs for comfort and ease. The Somali never surrenders to the armchair or the big house.
Read more at location 2401


embittered warrior said. ‘But it is good to know what the war is for. White men do not seem to know why they fight. We Somalis fight for camels, and here you are chasing us about and annoying us for
Read more at location 2453


doing it, while you, the white men are fighting all over the world.
Read more at location 2454


me. I knew all this but could not change the Somali feeling of superiority over these chunky black people from the lush south, nor wipe out the memory they had of a time when these Bantu people were slave material for the Muslim world to the north. That was the trouble, the curse of race, looks, noses, lips, eyes, legends. Colour has little to do with it. They liked
Read more at location 2474


Somali men knew how to love, but not with the hopeless tenderness which the Nyasa soldiers brought to it.
Read more at location 2483


A great deal of it had to do with looks, facial features, and the Somali, lean and handsome and hawknosed, felt himself to be more becoming than the Bantu African. In fact the Somalis resented being considered Africans at all, and they demanded different treatment in rations and uniform than that given to the Bantu. Bantu troops like discipline. Somalis resent it. Every individual Somali fights to stay himself, a person. The Bantu liked the certainty and safety of unit life, and functioned well as a receiver of orders. The Somali fumed under discipline and loved the irregular life, the scattered patrol and the lone effort which might bring him to individual notice, to recognition for what he might achieve on his own. The Bantu had patience. The Somali had to control himself, even when learning how to handle weapons, which he loved and cherished. I have seen a Somali tear a machine-gun out of the hands of an instructor and prove on the spot that he needed no more instruction, that he knew it all and could handle and strip and assemble the weapon after one lesson. He had resented the very implication that he needed the long dreary lessons which the instructor seemed resigned to giving him.
Read more at location 2486


In the deserts of Somalia the Nyasa soldiers were all right for about six months, but after that, worn down by isolation and heat, insult and hostility from the Somalis, they deteriorated. They could not understand this continual challenge, this nomad machismo, or the sharp, impatient bloody-mindedness of the Somali.
Read more at location 2500


the pretence at making the dirty thing great and grave. The world has been a jungle since it began, no doubt of it, and The Bomb may be the one thing which has brought it to an unwilling stop, for war was man’s only holiday from his poor effort at coping with the great mess which all our ancestors have left us, history which stinks of blood and lies and suffering and hunger,
Read more at location 2515


and which we have not even yet begun to face properly. They may burn all the flags, the wigs, the thrones and robes and parchments and the paranoiac history books one day, may even teach real history – how one half of the human race sucked the life out of the other half and hid in stately homes, courts, gaols, barracks. August 15th may, in an ironic way, turn out to be the greatest day in history, and the burned thousands of Japan, the new heroes.
Read more at location 2518


The Bomb has been a godsend because for the first time it has held up the usage of the ancient way out, war for a dozen splendid reasons which are forgotten six months after the war has started.
Read more at location 2540


Nobody? Isn’t there anybody who can stop the war coming?’ Perhaps an assassination club could help, so that when the world is finally on the edge of the war which will annihilate it and the politicians and the generals and their scientists are about to take us all into that last manic plunge, the club assassinates a certain number of ‘great men’ in Moscow, London, New York, whichever of them are going through the old pathetic masculine routine of who’s toughest and strongest, and then issues an ultimatum. What are a few politicians, generals and scientists compared to the human race which is in their little, stupid hands today? We can always get a few more of them to start all over again and it might be that eventually we could get actual disarmament, a world without soldiers and their dead, useless traditions. But I did not mention these wild, nihilistic anti-nihilistic thoughts to Ali.
Read more at location 2574


‘Goodbye,’ Ali said. We shook hands, and he took the notes out of my hand with a smile and a nod. ‘Take five shillings back,’ he said, handing me one of the five shilling notes. ‘Why?’ ‘I have enjoyed our talk,’ he told me, ‘and we are friends. This is enough.’ He waved the other notes. It was a very Somali gesture, handsome and proud, and not about money at all.
Read more at location 2591


There was no shade in that big loaded barge and the Italian seaman and I sat there in the glare and sweated, hatless, the sun hitting us like a hammer as we smoked and exchanged fragments of thoughts about our various lives. The sun struck the water and flashed off it and into the brain, through the eyes, like a white, flaring sword.
Read more at location 2616


The Italian empire had vanished and the wilderness belonged, as it had always belonged, and will always belong, to the nomads and their camels.
Read more at location 2624


Donne had it wrong. Every man is an island, in the desert or the city, and I can remember coming to feel certain of this one night on a high rock in fierce moonlight, looking out across Africa which stretched forever in the luminous silence.Read more at location 2628


It was interesting to see how Gandhi had been right, how as soon as Britain lost its empire the English working class had to be given work and wages and new freedoms. Gandhi was the friend of the English working class. In freeing India he freed them too. He knew too, and said it, that once India had freed herself nothing
Read more at location 2658


She did not look threatening in the livid light breaking across her vastness, and she never has threatened anybody yet. She has been sold, underpaid, used, but always loved by those strangers who have got to know her.
Read more at location 2754


Professionally, Gerry did reviews for the book programme I ran at the BBC then. Later, as an editor with Hamish Hamilton, I brought Warriors to the firm – or Warriors and Strangers as it was originally called, when it included a second part,
Read more at location 2791


being with Gerry that only in his novel Without Love did
Read more at location 2833


In this and other ways, both as man and writer, Gerry resembles Hemingway, whom he worshipped long before Hemingway described him as ‘the foremost writer of his generation’.
Read more at location 2848


there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here.’
Read more at location 2858


Gerry’s return to the liner after his three hours in Mogadishu, ‘What was it like? … Like when you see a woman you loved years ago. The fever has gone and you can look at her without trouble. Was it like that?’ ‘Yes, it was like that.’
Read more at location 2874


We should not complain. A writer has only so many heartfelt books in him. And these are what we need, not new books which would have been written at half-steam.
Read more at location 2920


Beaches of Fort Dauphin and other weird french words

Fort Dauphin is a town of surprises:
  • It has the smoothest roads we've even seen in Madagascar (with shoulders!--unheard of in Mada) thanks to QMM (aka Rio Tinto).
  • It's also one of the more undeveloped and quaint towns (and it is a town--not a city by any stretch of the imagination) as far as Madagascar tourist destinations go.
  • For the uninitiated, the word 'dauphin' is french for both 'dolphin' and 'heir apparent.' In this case it was named after then-heir apparent to the throne of France (Louis XIV) back in the 17th century.  
But the reason we came to Fort Dauphin is to quench our thirst for one of our great loves--the sea. The beaches here were lovely and the water warm.   Fair warning, though, the tides and currents here are strong--you need me pay attention to your little ones here.   There are three main beaches (at least that we explored):

  • Talinjoo Beach (down some very steep rickety stone pathway)
  • Libanona (walking distance from the Talinjoo)--strong waves but great sand.  KEEP AN EYE on your bags--LOTS of beggars.  We had one young girl who was inexplicably standing three feet from where we were ensconced just starting at as until I (politely-ish) asked her to leave--very uncomfortable.
  • Ankoba Beach (a 10 minute cab from Talinjoo)--while there grab lunch and drinks at Chez Marcelline.  There's also a surf school there.  


We came here in January--it's always a gamble traveling during the rainy season but Fort Dauphin is probably one of the best bets during that time of year.

We stayed at the Talinjoo during our stay and I'll post more on all that here.
Libanona Beach


Talinjoo Beach aka Coronado Beach on Google Maps





















































The path down to Libanona from Talinjoo

What shoulders in Madagascar?!!



Other Fort Dauphin Links: 
Beaches of Fort Dauphin and other weird french words

Friday, February 27, 2015

The Fault in Our Stars Kindle Notes

Below are my highlights from my 2014 Reading List.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
You have 22 highlighted passages
Last annotated on November 4, 2013

“Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said. Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?”



“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”


“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.


and even though I was in bed and he was in his basement, it really felt like we were back in that uncreated third space, which was a place I really liked visiting with him.


You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”


glass eye turned inward,’” Augustus began. As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.


although I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.


“We age slower when we move quickly versus standing still. So right now time is passing slower for us than for people on the ground.”


“I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.” “Augustus,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn’t say it back. I couldn’t say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.


“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”


“Do you know,” he asked in a delicious accent, “what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?” “No?” I said. “He called out to his fellow monks, ‘Come quickly: I am tasting the stars.’ Welcome to Amsterdam.


“People always get used to beauty, though.”


do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendos, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.’”


“That’s what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it—or my observation of it—is temporary?”


It seemed like forever ago, like we’d had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.


want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. 


The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.


I posted it and waited for someone to reply, refreshing over and over again. Nothing. My comment got lost in the blizzard of new posts. Everyone was going to miss him so much. Everyone was praying for his family. I remembered Van Houten’s letter: Writing does not resurrect. It buries.


“It’s total bullshit,” he said. “The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he’s in the twenty percent? Bullshit. He was such a bright kid. It’s bullshit. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?” I nodded into his shirt. “Gives you an idea how I feel about you,” he said. My old man. He always knew just what to say.


Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”


My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.)


You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.