Delectations

It was strange for me to watch a few weeks ago, morning after morning on television, pictures of Aden with its streets barricaded and troops huddling prisoners into lorries. For so many years Aden had been for the Briton a symbol of eventless dreariness. Most ships bound for the Far East and East Africa halted there, or at Djibouti across the way, and it was questionable which was the drearier port of call. Djibouti, the gateway to Abyssinia, was a dusty reproduction of provincial France, with bourgeois Frenchmen in mushroom-shaped solar topees, sipping sticky liqueurs in sidewalk cafés beside their wives and families. In Aden, a coaling station, an important link in cable and wireless, a sentinel outpost of the Arab world, there was even less to see. Every passenger said the same thing on his return: “Never again.” Yet the residents unquestionably enjoyed themselves. I never met an official, a serving officer, a technician in Cable and Wireless who did not look back on it nostalgically. “Lucky fellow,” they would say of a colleague. “He has been posted to Aden.” My brother Evelyn spent two weeks there in 1931, after his first visit to Abyssinia. “Pure mischance,” he wrote, “brought me to Aden and I expected to dislike it, contrasting it angrily with the glamor and rich beauty I expected to find at Zanzibar. How wrong I was. Zanzibar and the Congo, names pregnant with romantic suggestion, gave me nothing; Aden was full of interest.” His “When the Going Was Good” contains an amusing account of the big evening of the week, the showing every Thursday of a film on the roof of the Seamen’s Institute. Dinner parties were given for it, as they would be in London before dances. The roof was covered with deep wicker chairs—the Resident’s party occupying the front row. The moment the film started, every member of the audience fell asleep, completely at peace until two hours later the national anthem called them to their feet, when “vivacious once more they adjourned to the club for beer, oysters and bridge.” Evelyn concluded that owing to the peculiar climate, it was in Aden “practically impossible to remain both immobile and conscious.” In 1955 I fulfilled a long-held resolve to spend three weeks in Aden and case the joint. There was a busy social life. The port was active, 24 million tons of shipping in a year compared with London’s fifty-two. Tourists, because of the duty-free cameras and watches, spent on an average $25 a head during a morning’s visit. An oil refinery had been built across the water. There was a brisk housing development, with the new bungalows painted in primary colors to give an air of variety to the parched treeless hillsides. Politically it had acquired a new importance because of the rise to power of the oil sheiks in the gulf of Oman. Some of the older residents complained that Aden had ceased to be itself. Too many people about. It had been much cozier when there had been just a few. I called upon the governor. He was blandly confident about the future; changes were on their way, of course, there was to be a new constitution with free elections. But the peasants and workmen were contented. The local notables were making money. No one had any reason for complaint. It all seemed as peaceful now as it had during Evelyn’s unplanned sojourn a quarter of a century before. The only vital issue, indeed, appeared to be the control of the Khat that was being flown in daily from Addis Ababa by a two-plane service. Khat is the branch of a kind of privet bush that the Adeni Arabs chew. It has a bitter taste but leaves the mouth clean as a glass of Fresca, Bitter Lemon or Campari soda does. Originally the Adenis got it from Yemen, but more and fresher branches were now available in Abyssinia and its regular supply was one of the most profitable sidelines of Ethiopian Airlines. It created a heightened euphoria in the addict. The Arabs are poetical and they would hold Khat parties at which they recited poems. Merchants would hurry out from the city whenever a plane was sighted, to get the freshest stocks. Branches only stay good for a day and a half. The first stocks fetched the highest prices. Small packages that looked like a birch were wrapped round with banana leaves, and then packed into a kind of pillowcase. Policemen guarded the supplier. Young Arabs in bright skirts and caps clamored for the early release of the bags. At this time $12,000 was changing hands daily —a source of considerable profit to the government. There was no doubt that Khat was a kind of drug, and certain puritan elements in the community were opposed to an official trade in it. But they were in the minority. The supporters argued that it did little if any harm. It was an anaphrodisiac so that its addicts did not get into mischief. It made you thirsty, you drank while you chewed, but as Moslems do not touch alcohol that had no bad results, and the Coca-Cola factory paid higher dividends. You also smoked so that the tobacconists did well. It impaired the digestive processes, so that the pharmacists conducted a brisk trade in laxatives. Everyone seemed thoroughly contented. If Aden had nothing more serious than Khat to worry over, its future, I thought, must surely be assumed. And that is only eleven and half years ago. What has happened to the Khat trade now? And what has happened to the Adenis who drew so much solace from it? They at least cannot be grateful to this particular gust of the capricious winds of change.

AW

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Alec Waugh

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It was strange for me to watch a few weeks ago, morning after morning on television, pictures of Aden with its streets barricaded and troops huddling prisoners into lorries. For so many years Aden had been for the Briton a symbol of eventless dreariness. Most ships bound for the Far East and East Africa halted there, or at Djibouti across the way, and it was questionable which was the drearier port of call. Djibouti, the gateway to Abyssinia, was a dusty reproduction of provincial France, with bourgeois Frenchmen in mushroom-shaped solar topees, sipping sticky liqueurs in sidewalk cafés beside their wives and families. In Aden, a coaling station, an important link in cable and wireless, a sentinel outpost of the Arab world, there was even less to see. Every passenger said the same thing on his return: “Never again.” Yet the residents unquestionably enjoyed themselves. I never met an official, a serving officer, a technician in Cable and Wireless who did not look back on it nostalgically. “Lucky fellow,” they would say of a colleague. “He has been posted to Aden.” My brother Evelyn spent two weeks there in 1931, after his first visit to Abyssinia. “Pure mischance,” he wrote, “brought me to Aden and I expected to dislike it, contrasting it angrily with the glamor and rich beauty I expected to find at Zanzibar. How wrong I was. Zanzibar and the Congo, names pregnant with romantic suggestion, gave me nothing; Aden was full of interest.” His “When the Going Was Good” contains an amusing account of the big evening of the week, the showing every Thursday of a film on the roof of the Seamen’s Institute. Dinner parties were given for it, as they would be in London before dances. The roof was covered with deep wicker chairs—the Resident’s party occupying the front row. The moment the film started, every member of the audience fell asleep, completely at peace until two hours later the national anthem called them to their feet, when “vivacious once more they adjourned to the club for beer, oysters and bridge.” Evelyn concluded that owing to the peculiar climate, it was in Aden “practically impossible to remain both immobile and conscious.” In 1955 I fulfilled a long-held resolve to spend three weeks in Aden and case the joint. There was a busy social life. The port was active, 24 million tons of shipping in a year compared with London’s fifty-two. Tourists, because of the duty-free cameras and watches, spent on an average $25 a head during a morning’s visit. An oil refinery had been built across the water. There was a brisk housing development, with the new bungalows painted in primary colors to give an air of variety to the parched treeless hillsides. Politically it had acquired a new importance because of the rise to power of the oil sheiks in the gulf of Oman. Some of the older residents complained that Aden had ceased to be itself. Too many people about. It had been much cozier when there had been just a few. I called upon the governor. He was blandly confident about the future; changes were on their way, of course, there was to be a new constitution with free elections. But the peasants and workmen were contented. The local notables were making money. No one had any reason for complaint. It all seemed as peaceful now as it had during Evelyn’s unplanned sojourn a quarter of a century before. The only vital issue, indeed, appeared to be the control of the Khat that was being flown in daily from Addis Ababa by a two-plane service. Khat is the branch of a kind of privet bush that the Adeni Arabs chew. It has a bitter taste but leaves the mouth clean as a glass of Fresca, Bitter Lemon or Campari soda does. Originally the Adenis got it from Yemen, but more and fresher branches were now available in Abyssinia and its regular supply was one of the most profitable sidelines of Ethiopian Airlines. It created a heightened euphoria in the addict. The Arabs are poetical and they would hold Khat parties at which they recited poems. Merchants would hurry out from the city whenever a plane was sighted, to get the freshest stocks. Branches only stay good for a day and a half. The first stocks fetched the highest prices. Small packages that looked like a birch were wrapped round with banana leaves, and then packed into a kind of pillowcase. Policemen guarded the supplier. Young Arabs in bright skirts and caps clamored for the early release of the bags. At this time $12,000 was changing hands daily —a source of considerable profit to the government. There was no doubt that Khat was a kind of drug, and certain puritan elements in the community were opposed to an official trade in it. But they were in the minority. The supporters argued that it did little if any harm. It was an anaphrodisiac so that its addicts did not get into mischief. It made you thirsty, you drank while you chewed, but as Moslems do not touch alcohol that had no bad results, and the Coca-Cola factory paid higher dividends. You also smoked so that the tobacconists did well. It impaired the digestive processes, so that the pharmacists conducted a brisk trade in laxatives. Everyone seemed thoroughly contented. If Aden had nothing more serious than Khat to worry over, its future, I thought, must surely be assumed. And that is only eleven and half years ago. What has happened to the Khat trade now? And what has happened to the Adenis who drew so much solace from it? They at least cannot be grateful to this particular gust of the capricious winds of change.