The Brigadier Smith Method of Dealing with Somali Looters
Brigadier R. H. Smith was a dashing British army officer who was posted to disorderly Somalia to take command of the British armed forces in Somalia in the aftermath of WW II when the entire Somali peninsula, from Gardafui in what is today known as Puntland to the borders of Kenya, came under British tenure (1941-48). Smith was charged to restore law and order to lawless Somalia and stop the internecine killings in clannish feuds and vendettas and, above all, to halt the relentless camel rustling among the clans. In this wild environment of murder and mayhem, the beleaguered British officer, according to native testimony,(16) came close to a nervous breakdown. Then one day, in a manner of speaking, he was struck by a sudden epiphany. Fortunately, he did not leap out of his ramshackle Mogadishu office to fall on an innocent pedestrian but realized, to his great enlightenment, that the Western concept of individual guilt and individual innocence was alien to the Somali weltanschauung. Instead, he began to appreciate that in Somali customary law and legal sanctions, the principle of collective punishment was paramount. For example, if a man from a certain lineage is murdered by a member of another lineage, the murderer's guilt was instantaneously transmitted to his entire lineage. Members of the whole lineage collectively became fair game as targets of a flying spear of vendetta. So was their livestock liable to seizure. The aggrieved party was free to mete revenge to any member of his clan.
At once Smith began to apply collective punishment to the kin of recidivist trouble-makers, especially camel rustlers. He arrested kindred elders of offending individuals, and captured their camels. The seizure of the camels and then corralling them, sometimes to the point of starvation (camels on which the nomads' livelihood depended) though brutal, had Smith's desired effect. In other words, the method of collective punishment worked. Clan after clan laid down their spears and arrows. And he had the peninsula pacified, according to indigenous oral sources,(17) in twelve short months, making his name legendary in the land. He became the only European, to my knowledge, whose name was so seared into Somali consciousness that it was immortalized in Somali classical poetry, poetry being, in B. W. Andrzewski and I. M. Lewis's informed judgement, the Somalis' "principal cultural achievement."(18)
Thus, the great Dervish poet-warrior Ismaa'iil Mire riffed on in a tone of contrastive ironies:
1. Isma oga Ismiir iyo ninkii, ayro foofsadaye
2. Isma oga arbaha weerka iyo, ariga goosmaaye
3. Isma oga waraabaha amliyo, awr la laayacaye
4. Isma oga atoor qadow bartiyo, uubta loo qodaye
5. Isma oga nin urugaysan iyo, eelka kii dhigaye
6. Isma oga dhillada uunsatiyo, awga taaibaye
7. Isma oga aqoon-xume dhargiyo, malag arsaa'iile
8. Isma oga agoon iyo ninkii, aabihis dilaye
9. Isma oga askari qooqan iyo, nimaan afbuux siine
10. Isma oga abeer qalabliyo, inanka doonaaye
11. Isma oga ugaar iyo libaax, adamiyaystaaye
12. Waxba gabaygu yuu ila ordine, waxaan ku soo ooday
13. La illow nin aakhira tegoo, iilka hoos maraye(19)
1. Two know not each other: the camel seizing Smith and he who carelessly
grazes his herd near him;
2. Two know not each other: the prowling striped hyena and a flock of straying
goats;
3. Two know not each other: the lean hungry stripeless hyena and the he-camel
not protected by its owner;
4. Two know not each other: the dikdik used to nibbling fallen seeds under the
acacia tree and the trap thereof set for it;
5. Two know not each other: the grievously embittered man and he who is the
cause of his grief;
6. Two know not each other: the over-perfumed prostitute and the pious ascetic
who has renounced the world;
7. Two know not each other: the over-satiated fool and the avenging angel of
death;
8. Two know not each other: the revenge-seeking orphan and the murderer of his
father;
9. Two know not each other: the armed, over-arrogant rogue cop and the
aggrieved civilian who maintains his silence;
10. Two know not each other: the camel with a chattering bell and the young man
who is looking for it by following the sound of the bell;
11. Two know not each other: the stalking hungry lion and the unsuspecting game
lazily grazing nearby;
12. Now let not these lines of poetry bolt away with me: here is my conclusion:
13. He who is dispatched by death to the other world is easily forgotten.
The effort of trying to translate a Somali classical poem into English surely constitutes a daunting task; for the poetic sense and sensibility of the two languages, as well as their physical structural scheme of versifying, are so alien the one from the other. Still, I hope I've managed to bring out in this imperfect English rendition something of the scent of the Somali original. The one thing that becomes obvious from a content analysis of the Somali version relates to the fact that a line is missing from each of the tenth and twelfth stanzas; for Ismaa’iil Mire, the great general--who played a central role in the cataclysmic social upheavals that shook the Somali peninsula (1900-20) as a result of the liberation war waged by the Somali nationalist Dervish movement (20) and the colonial efforts to put it down--characteristically composes in triplet stanzas, like his master, Sayyid M. A. Hasan, the poet-mystic warrior who led the anti-colonial struggle. However, the fact of the missing two lines does not matter insofar as this piece is concerned. The essential point revolves around the first line of the poem that enshrines the British officer's name in the corpus of Somali pastoral verse.
The pacification of large swaths of dour Somalia must have been Smith's crowning achievement. Bizarrely enough, years later he, to borrow an anthropological jargon, went native, setting up shop in Somalia whence he married a beauty of the Ali Geri clan-family. Still years later, in keeping with the long memory of Somali clannish feud and vendetta, he was gunned down by a descendant of an elder whose herds had been seized by the ill-fated Smith. In July 1977, I met Smith's beer-swilling assassin, one Mahammad 'Eegaag, in a Rome bar. In between burps and puffs, he boastfully claimed to have been the trigger man. Said he, "Smith went ashen blue when he sighted the revolver in my hand." He said, half defiantly and half pleadingly, "Are you going to kill me?" I said, "Yes, with pleasure, and shot him twice." Thus ended Brigadier Smith's eventful career in Somalia.
Below is the link to the original post made by X.Playa:
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