- Gerald Hanley
A Somali always felt himself to be twice as good as any white man, or
any other kind of man at all, and still does, even when he is wrong.
Whic is NeverIslam does wonders for the self respect of non-white people and
Christianity is right to worry about the spread of Islam in Africa, and
must honestly face the question of why it has happened - "
"Of all the desiccated, bitter, cruel, sunbeaten wildernesses which
starve and thirst beyond the edges of Africa's luscious, jungled centre,
there cannot be one more Christless than the one which begins at the
northern foot of Mount Kenya and stretches to the foothills of Abyssinia,
and from there to the dried-out glittering tip of Cape Gardafui where the
hot karif winds blow in from where the long sharks race under the thin
blue skin of the ocean. You can never think of those wildernesses without
thinking of daggers and spears, rolling fierce eyes under mops of dusty
black crinkly hair, of mad stubborn camels, rocks too hot to touch, and
blood feuds whose origins cannot be remembered, only honoured in the
stabbing. 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."
. The Prophet has no more fervent, and ignorant, followers, but that
is not their fault that they are ignorant.Their natural intelligence is
second to none and when the education factories start work among them
they should surprise Africa, and themselves."
"I never saw a Somali who showed any fear of death, which, impressive
though it sounds, carries within it the chill of pitilessness and
ferocity as well. If you have no fear of death you have none for anybody
else's either, but that fearlessness has always been essential to the
Somalis who have had to try and survive hunger, disease and thirst while
prepared to fight and die against their enemies, their fellow Somalis for
pleasure in the blood feud, or the Ethiopians who would like to rule
them, or the white men who got in the way for a while."
"Wandering in The Shag (desert) were Somalis with some of the sharpest
intelligences in the continent, nomads who had been forced into being
parasites of the camel, for centuries, and could anyone ever find a way
of using all that courage and intelligence?"
"There is no one alive as tough as the Somali nomad. No one.
An askari wounded in a fight in the Haud country walked 14 miles holding
his guts in his hand, was sewn up and lived to soldier again. And the
women are as spiritually strong as their men."
"....You get into that way of thinking in the Somali waste. You think
that way because the Somalis bitterly resent the white man, and struggle
continually, and admirably, by lies and intrigue, to fight off his
influence which spells the end of their peculiar world. 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 official
anger. They are a race to be admired, if hard to love."
