Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Read online

  One important aspect of Britain’s more proactive inter-war style of securing the colony was the appointment of ‘political officers’ who were usually young single men posted up-country to live among the tribes in order to keep them out of the Imam’s clutches. While doing their best to ensure that the roads were kept open and safe and the occasions for intertribal fighting reduced, they tried to encourage a respect for the law and the spread of education. A member of one tribe’s ruling famly retains to this day his own less rosy memory of the role of a political officer: ‘They [political officers] were the real rulers - they kept saying “I advise you” and “If I were you, I would do such and such.” If we didn’t have to take their advice then, of course, we didn’t. But if we had to, then we had to.’

  The real reason why the deployment of British political officers in the Aden protectorates constituted a big stick was that, as early as 1928, a refusal to do the British bidding was liable to bring down the destructive wrath of an RAF bombing raid on their villages and crops. Resort to this controversial, if economical, means of control was one which successive administrators of Aden were always at pains to justify: ‘The Arabs are a proud race and rate personal bravery highly, as highly as they do prestige,’ explained a 1950s governor of Aden, ‘and frankly, that is far too high. They will not give in to an inferior force, but will shoot it out to the end. They are unlikely to give in to a slightly superior force, but they will give in to an overwhelming force and often be secretly glad to do so.’32 Owing to the fact that the raids were provoking outrage back in Westminster over thirty years later, in 1961, my father, the BBC correspondent in South Arabia at the time, accompanied one to the Lower Yafai Sultanate, and reported back in some detail, explaining how many advance warnings were given to move humans and livestock out of the area and how carefully pinpointed the targets were and concluding his despatch with: ‘This is a highly exacting task and the RAF rightly resents any suggestion that bombs are being scattered carelessly or lives endangered.’

  On occasion tribal custom served far better than a bombing raid to bring an end to an inter-tribal war over water or land rights. A political officer advising the Fadhlis in the early 1960s recalled accompanying the Fadhli sultan to one tribal battlefield where some10,000 tribesmen had been fighting all day, with only a short break for a lunch brought to them by their womenfolk because both sides had determined that only an even score, deadlock, would resolve the matter. Alarmed by the mounting death toll, the officer called in British armoured cars to shoot over the combatants’ heads and then Hawker Hunter planes to rocket the hillsides, but to no avail. At last, a religious leader of a neutral tribe arrived to lead his tribesmen in a formal procession down the middle of the battlefield, parting the combatants to either side. The gesture swiftly ended hostilities because tribal law dictated that no one would harm anyone of the neutral tribe for fear of setting off yet another cycle of vengeance. The injured were ferried by helicopter to hospitals in Aden, leaving each side with twelve deaths to mourn.

  It may be that an important reason why the British and southern Yemenis co-existed as well and for as long as they did in south Arabia was not just that the British conceded so much ground to the tribes by playing by many of their rules and forbearing from collecting any taxes, but that the two races shared an exuberantly boyish sense of humour and a love of derring-do. Recalling his years spent in the West Aden Protectorate,f one political officer wryly observed that ‘not many people have had the privilege of being paid to play cowboys and Indians when they were grown up’.33 The tone had been set before the First World War by mettlesome adventurers like George Wyman-Bury, alias Abdullah Mansur. On one occasion Wyman-Bury had ascended with a posse of soldiers to the mountain stronghold of a ‘miscreant sheikh’, boldly demanding that he descend to Aden to pay his respects to the Wali, the British Resident there. ‘It is not our custom to visit strangers until they call on us,’ the sheikh replied, to which Wyman-Bury retorted, ‘Does the lion seek the mountain fox? Will you call on the Wali as a chief of your house should, with safe conduct and respect, or will you visit him lashed to the back of a gun mule?‘ and pressed home his point with a wounding jibe, ’Is this your tribal hospitality?‘ Instantly, ’the tension relaxed at this allusion to a national virtue’.34

  The tribes of the protectorates and the British amused and greatly interested each other. A political officer posted to the Western Aden Protectorate in the late 1950s recalled a conversation with the son of a Yafai sultan: ‘I don’t understand,’ said the young man, ‘I’ve seen your country now. I’ve seen so many strange things that I could never have dreamed of, cities so big that one could spend one’s whole life without knowing all the people, full of cars and great houses. I have seen fields there, and the grass, and the many, many fine trees. I have seen that the cattle and the horses and sheep are fat and nearly double the size of ours. With all this, tell me, why do you come here to work? Here, where it is too hot…’35

  Aden’s efforts to wean the tribes away from their weapons and wars by educating the sons of sultans remained an uphill struggle. Thirty-six sons of sheikhs and sultans, ‘political pupils’ funded out of the British Resident’s entertainment allowance, had begun to attend school in the colony in 1928, but the arrangement had soon proved impracticable. First, the education was not perceived to be a special training in the art of ruling, so that only six of the thirty-six had been sons of sultans. Second, there had been no suitable boarding facilities so that boys were mixing ‘with undesirable persons in the town’; two, aged fourteen and eight, had had to be expelled for contracting venereal diseases. A boarding school, the ‘Aden Protectorate College for the Sons of Chiefs’, was opened in 1935 but Aden’s colonial masters were disappointed by the number of chiefs who deigned to contribute ‘even a few rupees from their stipend’ towards its running costs. A signed portrait of King George VI hanging in the hallway and the claim that the Emperor was taking a ‘personal interest in the college’, did little to remedy the lack of enthusiasm; the college boasted ten staff but only seven pupils when it opened.36

  Aden’s twin civilising strategy of educating the sons of the sultans and backing up the efforts of political officers with punitive RAF bombing raids could be said to have worked best in the East Aden Protectorate. But that had a good deal to do with the fact that the Wadi Hadhramaut, a deep and fertile canyon carved into a high, barren plateau known as the jol, happened to have a dominant non-tribal elite of Sunni merchant sayyids with whom the British found it easy to do business.

  The wadi’s fabled inaccessibility meant that it was almost terra incognita as far as the western world was concerned until the early twentieth century. In 1918 the British in Aden had been ‘protecting’ Hadhramaut for over thirty years, but only a handful of explorers and not a single British official had taken the trouble to venture beyond the coast. The traffic was all the other way. Since as early as the tenth century sayyid Hadhramis had been descending from their wadis to the port of Mukalla on the coast to travel east to south-east Asia as well as west across the Red Sea to East Africa to spread their distinctively Sufi brand of Sunni Islam. Generally welcomed on account of their sayyid claim to be descendants of the Prophet and their great learning, they soon settled among the higher echelons of their Muslim host societies and prospered.

  Where sayyid Hadhramis led, non-sayyid Hadhramis followed, to trade and do business and make fortunes. In British times, Hadhrami boys as young as twelve and of all classes migrated to join whichever of their relatives had blazed the most lucrative trail, to learn a trade from the ground up, goaded into money-making by sayings like ‘Be as industrious as an ant and you’ll eat sugar’ and ‘If there is a benefit to you in the arse of a donkey, stick your hand in it up to the waist.’37 By the end of the nineteenth century there were thriving communities of migrant merchant Hadhramis scattered over much of the southern hemisphere. Often, they remained in al-mahjar [place of emigration] for decades and intermarried with the
natives, sometimes maintaining a wife and establishment back in Hadhramaut as well. Mixed-race Hadhramis are still a common sight because they always sent their foreign-born sons home to al-Balad, as they called it, at the age of seven to imbibe the moral purity of their beloved ancestral homeland.

  Just as it is hard to imagine a people with a narrower and more parochial tradition than the northern highland tribes of Yemen, so it is hard to imagine a people with a broader outlook and more experience of the world than the Hadhramis. Their hard-headed thriftiness and an exclusivity that was often interpreted as arrogance gradually superseded their earlier reputation for holiness and learning, earning them a reputation not unlike that of the Jews in pre-Second World War Europe. Hadhramis are often referred to as the Jews of the Arab world, and a still popular joke against them goes, ‘If a Hadhrami had a place in Heaven he would rent it out and go and live in Hell.’

  Hadhramaut remained a well-kept secret in the outside world until, at some point in the 1910s, a fabulously wealthy Hadhrami, the founder of a property empire in British-ruled Singapore, imported the first motor-car to the Wadi Hadhramaut, undeterred by the fact that there was not a single road in the region. Once disembarked at Mukalla, the precious vehicle had to be carefully dismantled and loaded piecemeal on the backs of camels to be ferried the 200 miles up from the coast, up to and across the baking jol plateau and down the precipice of the wadi wall. Lovingly reassembled in the city of Tarim, it was set to work every Friday for almost the next thirty years, ferrying its owner along the region’s single, tiny stretch of road he had constructed between his home and the mosque. Only in 1932 did Aden get around to endowing its future East Aden Protectorate with a few landing-strips, one of which proved useful the following year when the romantic dream of retracing Arabia’s ancient frankincense route tempted the British explorer and travel writer Freya Stark to brave Hadhramaut’s pulverising heat, insanitary conditions and lack of roads. The effort almost cost her life. After weathering the long donkey ride across the bleak jol and reaching the sweltering lushness of the Wadi Doan she was felled by an attack of measles and dysentery. At death’s door, she had to summon the RAF to airlift her from Shibam back to Aden.

  In the early 1930s Abubakr al-Kaff, a member of the same family that had imported the first car, invested over a million pounds of his own money in a first road up and out of the wadi, onto and across the jol, all the way back down to the coast. Without any surveys, its builders relied on ancient camel tracks to indicate how wide and steep the hair-pin bends up the wadi wall should be. With the magnate’s money, the builders paid off the tribes through whose land the road passed. It was almost finished by the time Freya Stark visited. As soon as it was, the camel drivers who had been plodding the eight-day-long route for centuries realised that it spelt doom for their livelihoods. They wasted little time in obstructing it, forcing the British to broker a compromise between the old and the new; some goods were restricted to carriage by camel, others by lorry.

  Difficulty of access was one excuse, but the British had had other good reasons not to investigate Hadhramaut too closely. The region’s tribes were as restive and quarrelsome as those of the West Aden Protectorate but, thankfully, sufficiently distant not to threaten Aden. It was shortly after Freya Stark’s ill-starred expedition and Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 that Aden turned her attention to Hadhramaut. Once it had been ascertained that its two rulers, the Qaiti and the Kathiri sultans, were incapable of ordering their lands and securing the trade routes, a British colonial official named Harold Ingrams was despatched to the region to introduce it to the benefits of a Pax Britannica.

  Energetic, ambitious and deeply committed to the task in hand, Ingrams succeeded in persuading an impressive total of 1,400 different tribal leaders to sign up to an agreement that put a stop to the warfare which had even been impeding work in the Wadi Hadhramaut’s date groves and fields. At least three factors seemed to have secured what is still remembered in Hadhramaut today as al-sulh Ingrams - ‘The Ingrams Truce’. First, Ingrams was backed by the inexorable force of the RAF whose bombing raids he called in reluctantly but effectively, and with some approval from the natives. ‘What do a few lives matter if we’re all gong to have peace?’ one wealthy migrant Hadhrami reassured him, ‘And anyway it is nothing to do with you - it is from God.’38 Secondly, and more importantly, because he and his at least equally impressive wife Doreen both held enlightened views about how to treat with Arabs, they went as native as they possibly could. Taking up residence in Hadhramaut, they learned Arabic, dressed in the local style and did not begrudge hours, days and months spent cajoling and reasoning and arguing with Hadhramis, she with the women, who proved largely receptive to the message of peace, he with the men who were more distrustful. Instead of behaving like a typical British colonial officer, Ingrams strove to conduct himself among the Hadhramis in the manner of the wisest of native sheikhs but the strain of the job must have told on him; while staying with the couple in Mukalla in 1937, Freya Stark noted how, with his mop of fair hair and pale blue eyes, Ingrams looked ‘like an angel whose temper has been tried rather often’.39

  In the end, Ingrams’ mission to Hadhramaut succeeded where those of his fellow political officers in the Western Aden Protectorate failed for two reasons. The Hadhrami custom of migrating in search of work and wealth to places as far-flung as British-ruled Singapore or Malaya and Dutch-ruled Indonesia had given enough of the natives, essentially those of the educated sayyid class, a cosmopolitan and even western outlook. Quite apart from developing a taste for European cars and bicycles and gardens and telephones, for both Indonesian and British Raj architecture, they had thrived under colonial rule abroad and seen at first hand how peace and order might promote prosperity in their own land.

  The wealthy sayyid al-Kaffs, who had made their fortune in Singaporeg by the end of the nineteenth century, were sufficiently influential by the time Ingrams arrived in Hadhramaut for a German explorer to dub them ‘the Medicis of the Hadhramaut’40 and Freya Stark noted that, ‘they run the Sultans, the schools, the trade, the army - in fact, all that there is to run’.41 Without Sayyid Abubakr al-Kaff’s enthusiastic support and active co-operation, without the large amounts of his money needed to sweeten the pill of compliance with the truce, Ingrams’ efforts would certainly have been in vain. Although much impoverished by the Japanese capture of Singapore during the Second World War, Sayyid Abubakr al-Kaff proudly accepted a knighthood for his services to the British Empire from a girlish Queen Elizabeth II on a visit to Aden in 1954, but only once a special dispensation had been granted him. On the grounds that a Muslim was forbidden to abase himself before anyone but God, he had refused to kneel before Her Majesty.

  By the early 1960s, however, when my journalist father visited the Wadi Hadhramaut, to stay at Sayyid al-Kaff’s comfortable palace with its grown English garden and swimming pool, al-Kaff was disillusioned with the British. Like the Dutch explorer of the Hadhramaut, Daniel van der Meulen, who discovered that ‘the thorny subject of the Palestinian troubles’ was familiar ‘even in the remotest corner of Arabia’,42 my father was treated to a bitter tirade against Britain’s sponsorship of Israel. Like many Hadhramis at the time, the old sayyid also resented Britain’s failure to capitalise on the famous truce with more investment in the region. The sad fact was that the ravages of a mid-1940s famine had undone much of his good work. Hideous privation had helped to turn many against the colonial power that had proved incapable of alleviating their suffering and the names of both Ingrams and al-Kaff had become tarnished in the process.

  But Hadhramaut, labouring under the yoke of sayyid supremacy as well as that of British rule, had long been showing signs of blazing a trail that would eventually, by many twists and turns, lead to them casting off both these burdens. Restricted by sayyids and British rule and yet more exposed than Yemenis of any other region to different ways of thinking and being, it was logical that the first stirrings of a movement for politi
cal reform and independence in the region should have sprouted among émigré Hadhramis, even before the First World War. Irritated by the stranglehold that the more established sayyid Hadhramis were exerting over economic opportunities, non-sayyid Hadhrami émigrés in the Dutch East Indies were the first Yemenis to organise themselves into a political movement, Irshad. A bitter contest between sayyids and non-sayyids erupted into violence on Java in 1933 when a crowd of sayyids barged their way to the front of a mosque, asserting their inalienable God-given right to occupy pride of place; the resulting clash left two sayyids and six members of Irshad dead, and the mosque scattered with knives and stones and sticks. By the time Freya Stark was roaming Hadhramaut, the émigré schism was being powerfully felt back home. The sayyids she encountered were voicing their distrust of Irshad, and successfully misrepresenting the movement to the British in Aden as a dangerous Bolshevik threat to Aden and the British Empire.

  In time, the British realised that they were being manipulated by Hadhramaut’s sayyids, that treating Irshad members’ calls for improved access to education and equal opportunities as criminal offences was unfair and counter-productive.

  FALSE FRIENDS

  In the dimming light of her declining empire and shrinking resources, Britain would be forced into a good many more about-turns in South Arabia.

  Reluctant she may have been to acquire the protectorates, but Aden itself was an entirely different matter. Strategically situated from the point of view of British oil interests in the Gulf, with its Khormaksar airfield soon handling more traffic than any other RAF base in the world and its harbour receiving more ships than any other except New York and Liverpool, Aden remained a valuable jewel in the British crown, one worth making concessions to keep.

  Accordingly, the colony acquired a parliament, the Legislative Council, in 1947, although not until 1955 was permission granted for four of its eighteen members to be elected. Permission to establish trade unions had been granted in 1942, but unions which crucially emphasised their members‘ group identity first as industrial workers and then as Yemenis (whether guest-workers from the north of the country or local Adenis), rather than as members of a particular tribe, did not appear until the early 1950s. The first to organise were employees at Britain’s gigantic joint forces base in Aden. Aden Airways workers, led by the softly spoken Abdullah Majid al-Asnag, soon followed suit. Al-Asnag’s first meeting with Aden Airways’ British management did not go well, as he recalled: ‘We were all scared to death as we sat, numbed and silent, opposite the management. For three minutes, we were too terrified to speak but glanced from one to the other, waiting for someone to pluck up the courage and break the silence. Finally, the Labour Commissioner rose to his feet and said: “You called this meeting, Why don’t you get up and speak?”’