‘Be’old a cloud upon the beam,
An’ ’umped above the sea appears
Old Aden, like a barrick-stove
That no one’s lit for years an’ years.’
Rudyard Kipling, ‘For to Admire’
IN 1992, A SENIOR religious figure in Aden complained in the press about the city’s great number of bars and other dens of lewdness. A senior Socialist Party official replied in an open letter: ‘Since the erudite shaykh, as a son of Aden, must know the location of these establishments, then he should inform the authorities at once.’ Nothing came of the cleric’s complaint. But the fact that it had been made at all was significant. It was perfectly justified but, somehow, not on – as if a mullah had barged into a reading from Omar Khayyam shouting, ‘ “A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse”? Infidels!’ Aden was supposed to be different. Perhaps its days as a place where anything went were numbered. I decided to investigate before it was too late.
A desultory fight was going on in the street outside. I ducked under the blows, made it into the lobby, and paid. My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the gloom. A disco globe winked rheumily at a circular room with a small stage and dance-floor. Around this, men in futahs sat drinking beer. So far the erudite shaykh would have heartily disapproved. I’d just found an empty table when a voice, inches from my ear, made me jump. ‘Supper?’ it lisped. ‘Do you want supper?’ I looked round into a black face. Even in the half-light it was clear it had been subjected to heavy-handed maquillage. I nodded. The waiter – it was, just, male – hovered slightly, pirouetted, then glided into a recess. While I waited, the band came on and started to tune up. Again, the hot breath on my ear: ‘Shibz.’ The monosyllable was rich with quivering suggestion; perhaps he was a fan of Zsa Zsa Gabor. With little flourishes, as though his nail varnish wasn’t quite dry, he deposited the plate of chips and a bottle of beer, and melted back into the gloom. Surprisingly, the chips were hot and the beer cold.
The band struck up a Lebanese hit of the ’70s, a strobe was switched on, and a dancer appeared from another recess. The girl looked half-Vietnamese. She had buck teeth and was wearing an Alcanfoil bikini. Slowly, she cranked herself into action. The performance was not so much a dance as a series of little spasms, like the dying stages of an epileptic fit. I could have made a more erotic job of it. Still, some of the men in futahs got up and began thrusting banknotes in the direction of her bra. They tended to miss, and another waiter came to shadow the dancer like a referee at a boxing match, stooping to pick up the fallen notes. Each time he stood up he carefully rearranged the two remaining strands of hair on his scalp. I ordered another beer.
The girl showed her first spark of vitality when the music stopped and she ran off stage. Then the band broke into a sort of Egyptian glam-rock number and, unexpectedly, the floor filled with young men dressed in Paisley pattern shirts and pleated trousers. The number of pleats seemed to reflect their prowess at dancing. One particularly energetic youth – a twenty-pleater – shone out: his pelvis was articulated in extraordinary places, and spurts of sweat shot from his forehead. These were the mutamayk-alin, the Michaelesques – the fans of Michael Jackson.
I was enjoying the spectacle when, suddenly, it was blotted out by a mountainous figure which interposed itself between me and the dancers. This time the sex was in no doubt – a pair of stupendous breasts could be seen shuddering beneath her abayah, like a couple of hippos trapped in a marquee – and the woman, as far as I could see the only one in the place other than the dancer, was gesturing to me to get up and join her on the floor. I was wondering what would happen if I declined when a scrawny man staggered into her and threw up. The vomit just missed her. She went off, disgusted, to look for another partner, while the scrawny man collapsed into a chair next to me. In the light of the strobe, the process of vomiting had looked comical, like an early animated film. The man groaned and I poured him some water.
Up on stage the lead guitarist did a little virtuoso break and the band went into a Queen song, ‘I Want to Break Free’, a bit fast but very competent. The Michaelesques went wild. The big woman was down there with them like a whale among her pilot fish. Even the scrawny man dragged himself up to join them.
The song finished, the main lights went on, and in seconds the place was empty. I caught sight of the buck-toothed dancer slipping out in her abayah; the scrawny man’s vomit lay beside me on the floor, still slightly mousseux.
St Bartholomew, on his way to India, is said to have stopped off at Aden and exorcized a devil from a well on Sirah Island. The devil had been a nuisance to the Adenis for centuries, belching fire and bad-egg smells at them when they came to draw water. According to Ibn al-Mujawir, the well was dug by the Indian afrit, or demon, Hanuman. Also appearing in the traveller’s account is the Prophet Solomon, who expelled a ten-headed beast from Aden in what appears to be another version of the St Bartholomew story, with echoes of the Mahabharata and the Book of Revelation.
The saint’s visit is, of course, a legend; the well-devil can be explained away as a geyser. But Aden has had plenty of other bizarre inhabitants and unexpected visitors: the fifteenth-century Sufi superman al-Aydarus, who saved a sinking ship by going into a trance and flinging his tooth-cleaning stick at the peak of a mountain, which flew off and blocked the hole in the ship’s hull; the Ottoman admiral Sulayman the Eunuch, ‘more a beast than a man’, who invited the ruler of Aden to inspect his flagship and hanged him from the yardarm; Haines, the ‘sultanized Englishman’, who in 1839 founded Aden’s modern trading fortunes and died as a result of a stay in a Bombay debtors’ gaol; Air Commodore McClaughry, the ‘aerial beduin’, relaxing on his veranda with a cigar and an enormous Chinese fan; people like Hugh Scott, on his way to collect 27,000 insect specimens in the High Yemen, who thought Aden was ‘an interesting and likeable place’; others like Vita Sackville-West who thought it ‘an arid, salty hell’ and ‘precisely the most repulsive corner of the world’; Rimbaud, who indulged his ennui above a godown in Crater; all the transients who ebb and flow round great ports – merchants from Ptolemaic Egypt, from Cutch, Canton and Coromandel, Abyssinians and Persians, Hindus who burnt their dead and Parsees who left them to the vultures on towers of silence and wore hats like coal-scuttles, traders out of Conrad, adventurers out of Buchan; all the apparatus of trafficking – pilots and port officials, Jewish customs men, Rasulid treasurers counting the moneyboxes bound for Ta’izz, Somali stevedores who wore their hair like the cords of a Russian poodle, smeared with brick-red clay; Yemenis from the mountains going to live in Cardiff, Welsh conscripts from the valleys coming to die from heatstroke; dark-skinned seamen from Dar-es-Salaam, acne-faced ratings from Rostov-on-Don; President Salim Rubay’ Ali, found guilty in 1979 of ‘loathsome mistakes’ and shot; and, strangest of all, those two other visitors from northern lands who came treading on Britannia’s sullied train, surrounded by a crowd of commissars, apparatchiks, ideologues and ballet instructors – Marx and Lenin. With all these comings and goings, why should Aden not have been host to a demon from Hell and a disciple of Christ?
The setting, for a city so full of ghosts, is appropriate. A British naval officer who passed by in 1830 described it as ‘very remarkable, looking like an island, very high and rugged at the Top with small buildings or Turrets on different Peaks’. In contrast to the tamer Red Sea havens, Aden is a port of call for the Flying Dutchman or the Ancient Mariner; if it did not exist, Mary Shelley, or Gustave Doré, would have dreamed it up.
Aden’s craggy profile was formed by the volcanic activity suggested by the well-devil story and investigated by a party of medieval notables; they lowered a rope into the Sirah well and, when they drew it up, found that its end was singed. As a result of its topography, Aden is not one city but a series of settlements separated by outriders of the central peak, Jabal Shamsan. It is a hemmed-in place, a nightmare for claustrophobes; the tenth-century traveller al-Muqaddasi thought it no more habitable than a sheep-pen. And there is always a creeping suspicion that the everlasting bonfire, the volcano below, has only been damped down, not extinguished: a Tradition of the Prophet states that the appearance of fire in Aden, ‘molten, slowly flowing … which will devour anything it overtakes’, is one of the signs of Doomsday.
On the ground, the geography of Aden is confusing. It would be clearer if we went for a spin out of Khur Maksar aerodrome with the shade of McClaughry and saw the place from the air.
Taking off, we leave the sprawling mass of low buildings and markets at al-Shaykh Uthman and wheel southwards over the orderly but peeling rows of villas beyond the creek, the khur. The tall structure at their southern edge is the severely air-conditioned Aden Hotel, not so much a place of habitation as a giant refrigerator. In front of it a causeway begins, following the line of a former aqueduct which supplied most of Aden’s sweet water. Grubby flamingoes forage in the shallows and the odd pelican clambers into the air.
Reaching the old Turkish wall, outside which only the well-guarded would venture in early British days, we gain height to cross the escarpment. Here the Aden peninsula begins, a rough oval five miles by three, most of it uninhabitable. Following the shore clockwise we come first to the original town, the volcanic crater which gave the area its name under the British. Here too was the port, now silted up and used only by the smallest craft, which brought the city its early prosperity. Overshadowed by a frowning gorge under the lip of the mountains to the west, a series of curiously shaped cisterns built in pre-Islamic times – the Aden Tanks – can just be seen. Vita Sackville-West thought they looked like the penguin house at London Zoo; they take on a more sinister aspect at twilight, when the call to prayer fades away into a whine of mosquitoes and the sound of air rushing through the clefts of rock above.
Continuing clockwise past Sirah, we cross the narrow peninsula of Ra’s Marshaq and then follow an empty coast of cliffs and coves. Some three miles on, a long sandy beach opens up with a headland, the Elephant’s Back, at its far end; the hulk rusting in the shallows was a gunboat, dive-bombed as it lobbed shells over the Elephant during the troubles of 1986. Then there is a string of small sandy bays separated by promontories where, on the verandas of once-grand villas, overworked administrators would relax with a sigh and a sundowner, watching the strange backlit profile of Little Aden to the west as it melted with the afterglow.
Here the wide Back Bay opens out, and we cross the headland the British called Steamer Point and come to al-Tawwahi, which they developed at the expense of the old harbour. The streets are broader and the buildings grander than in Crater. At Prince of Wales (now Tourists’) Pier the liners of P&O, Lloyd Triestino and the Hansa Line would discharge their passengers through a little neo-Gothic building – not a suburban church but the Arrival Hall – into a world of postcards, duty-free and the obligatory trip to the Tanks before they went on to Singapore or Southampton. It was these, and other non-human cargoes, that made Aden at its height in the late 1950s the greatest port in the world after New York. Now the harbour is home to a number of long-term invalids, rusting away at their moorings under the gaze of a miniature Big Ben up on the mountainside.
Over another rocky bluff and the headland of Hujuf, and the last component of this scattered city, al-Ma’alla, opens out. We cross a cluster of oil tanks, the magnet that attracted shipping in later years, and follow a long canyon of apartment blocks, Martyr Madram Street.
Swooping low over Workers’ Island (formerly – plus ça change – Slave Island) we curve round to the west along a low, sandy coast with a few bushes and a clump of early 1960s buildings to the north. This is People’s (formerly Federation) City, which the British built as capital of the ill-fated Federation of South Arabia.
A final ascent takes us over Little Aden, which the French tried to buy in 1862. This second peninsula is as craggy as Aden proper. Together they hold the great bay in a crab-claw grip. Beyond Little Aden stretches a hazy and sparsely inhabited coast, all the way to Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea.
As you scud back over the bay it is all too easy to see through the misty eyes of nostalgia the white prows, the memsahib frocks and hats, the cotton ducks and gleaming mess kits of the British masters of Aden’s heyday. The 1960s, after Suez had struck midnight at the imperial ball, lie outside nostalgia’s periphery. Aden is a feast of faded magnificence for young fogey travel writers and for the Adenis who, never having had it so good, fled Marxism; as it is for some of those who stayed and, even now, sometimes wipe away a tear at the memory of Empire. They forget the cock-ups that surrounded the British departure, that the coolies finally laid down their cheery grins and took up arms. The changes that took place after 1967, so sudden and extraordinary, have for many engendered selective amnesia over what happened immediately before.
It is time to lay the imperial ghosts. Aden, at Unification in 1990, was proclaimed Yemen’s commercial capital. It has the dramatic presence to rival Sydney or Manhattan as one of the world’s great maritime destinations. More important, it has the strategic location to equal Singapore or Dubai as a centre of trade. In 1992, it still tottered along a narrow divide between the quaint and the seedy.
Aden’s topography is the main factor behind its equally bizarre human geography. On the map it is an appendage to Arabia, a geological haemorrhoid, or something alien that has run aground. The Adenis know that they don’t fit into the traditional tribal picture of society. They have not grown from the land but have snagged on it, brought on tides sweeping down the Red Sea or across from India.
The racial mix is ancient. Ibn al-Mujawir noted that all sorts of nationalities lived in and around Aden, particularly Ethiopians and Somalis. Most incomers have been transient, ebbing and flowing with the port’s fortunes. The greatest influx came in the last century. Lord Hardinge, Governor-General of India in the 1840s, feared that free-port status would make Aden ‘the resort of all the loose population of the Red Sea coast’. His worries turned out to be justified: some twenty years later Hunter wrote that ‘the morality of the inhabitants of Aden is not of a high order’ and singled out the problems caused by divorced women. The Jews of Aden, who had some unusual monopolies including the cleaning of ostrich feathers, came in for his particular disapprobation, being ‘not, as a rule, very cleanly in their habits, only washing and changing their clothes once a week’.
Not to be outdone by San’a, Aden claims antediluvian origins – Cain is said to have worshipped fire here, and a tower on Jabal Hadid is billed as the site of Abel’s grave. When the Himyaris first came to power in the north they found it difficult to protect caravan routes to such a distant spot and developed Muza in the region of al-Makha; in the first century AD the Periplus said that Aden, which it calls ‘Eudaimon Arabia’, was only a village. However, by Ptolemy’s day Himyar had extended its rule and ‘Arabia Emporium’, as the geographer calls it, regained its importance. A number of dynasties ruled Aden in the medieval period. Under the Rasulid sultans the trade of Aden greatly increased to compensate Mongol depredations in the Gulf, but its fortunes fell with those of its masters. Their successors, the Tahirids, recognized Aden’s great potential and revived the port by introducing preferential duties.
It was during Tahirid times that the great Sufi holy man of Aden, Abu Bakr ibn Abdullah al-Aydarus, lived. His superhuman doings, in addition to the toothstick exploit, included making the sky rain milk during a famine. Today, the saint’s annual festival is still by far the largest in Aden. Al-Aydarus, however, did not monopolize the miraculous. His predecessor Shaykh Jawhar had a cat called Sa’adah, Felicity, which would indicate how much lunch to prepare by miaowing the number of guests. One day Felicity was found to have miscounted, until it was realized that she had subtracted two of the guests because they were Christians.
By the end of the fifteenth century, Europeans had discovered the Cape route to India; in no time Aden, the Eye of Yemen, caught the eye of Renaissance Portugal, and it was lust at first sight. The Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa wrote that Aden ‘has a greater and richer trade than any other port in the world’, and his countrymen, whose king had assumed the title ‘Lord of the Navigation, Conquest and Commerce of Arabia’, tried in 1513 to capture the place from its Tahirid rulers. Where they failed, the Ottomans succeeded twenty-five years later; but the Turks were tied up subduing the mountain Yemenis and allowed Aden to deteriorate, using it as a punishment posting. The first British ships to visit, early in the seventeenth century, found Aden in a state of decay and turned their attention to al-Makha. In the late 1830s there were about ninety stone houses, much dilapidated, in Aden. Most of the population existed, according to an English visitor, in ‘low crazy cabins of matting or yellow reeds’.
My first sight of Crater brought about a strange temporal displacement, the shock of the not-so-old. Once through a cutting in the volcano’s rim, the road descends then flattens out into a scene curiously familiar to Britons of the pre-Habitat age. Passing what claimed, in large letters, to be a Rootes Group car showroom, I entered an eerily realistic mock-up of a 1950s city centre in the English Midlands – one that had been blitzed, then rebuilt by architects who had ration-book budgets and a nodding acquaintance with Bauhaus. In most of Britain, townscapes like these have been razed or post-modernized. Here the style lives on, needing a lick of paint, Coventry in the sun.
Above the road, the theme of provincial England continues in a neo-Gothic church set on a basalt eminence. St Mary the Virgin, built in 1869, together with Christ Church, Steamer Point, took over from the ‘divine sheds’ which were previously the focus of the settlement’s Christian worship. It is now CID headquarters. Instead of pews there are metal desks; above, a grubby asbestos roof is out of kilter with the line of the gables. Further up from the church I came across a broken concrete slab commemorating the Norfolk Regiment. From here on, the rough path is strewn with dog turds bleached by the sun to the colour of Cheshire cheese. An extermination order was issued against the dogs of Aden eight hundred years ago; they managed to kill one, and the rest escaped to the rocky heights where they hid by day, and still do. ‘I seek refuge with God from their bite,’ Ibn al-Mujawir exclaimed, ‘for it is poisonous on account of the little water they drink.’
In the heat of noon, when even the dogs are laid low, Crater simmers. As I looked over the town, it struck me that, improbable though the natural setting of Aden is, it was nothing to this vision of home – but home misplaced in both space and time. The transposition of England to the East was, in the root sense of the word, disorientating.
Down in the middle of Crater, the vision was dispersed. The older houses are a combination of warehouse and dwelling, a couple of storeys boxed in by screened verandas to catch what breeze there is, a vaulted godown below. On the other side of Jabal Shamsan in al-Tawwahi there are similar buildings, but a greater sense of space and elegance. Here lived most of Aden’s European community.
The Crescent Hotel* in al-Tawwahi uses veranda screening on a huge scale. At first sight, it promised to retain something of the old maritime grandeur. Built in 1932, its lobby had the feel of an ocean liner, with large expanses of dark wood and simple lines. But in the dining-room the napery was crusty and fly-spotted fans hung motionless. There was a miasma of fried fish, but no food. The bar was grotesque. Nursing-home tapestry sofas and club chairs had collapsed in situ, as if someone had forgotten to remove the mortal remains of departed inmates; the carpet was tacky with spilt Sirah beer (God knows where it came from – my bottle, warm and produced after a long search, was ‘the last one’, and the regulars were drinking Stolichnaya); surreal murals included a lady’s leg being swallowed by a giant banana, Carmen Miranda’s final exit. The hotel is a period piece as much as Le Baron in Aleppo, which lives off its T.E. Lawrence connection and is at least clean. When I first saw it, the Crescent’s grandeur was not faded, but rotten.
Someone had advised me to eat not in the Crescent, or the nearby Rock, a monument to 1950s schmaltz, but in the Chinese restaurant in al-Ma’alla. Here you might have found yourself in the company of a Cuban delegation or a knot of Party stalwarts who would slip into Russian over sweet-and-sour squid and Stolly.
The Ching Sing was at the end of a mile-long gash of almost identical apartment blocks in Novosibirsk-brutalist style.
‘I didn’t realize the Russians had built so much,’ I said to the taxi-driver.
‘The Russians? Oh, they didn’t build anything. It was the British.’
In 1963 Johnston, the High Commissioner, described the half-finished Martyr Madram Street (quondam Queensway) as ‘a sort of triumphal way’.
For me, it recalled more closely the description of Aden by Harold Ingrams, the pioneering British administrator of Hadramawt: ‘For soulless, military officialdom did its best to see that nothing picturesque or beautiful was ever allowed to raise its head among the depressing, severely practical, and utterly uncomfortable barrack-like structures it erected itself’ The sentence is telling. It illustrates the peculiarly British gulf that separated the Arabist from the professional administrator, the open-minded from the philistine, or – in the eyes of some – the dreamer from the pragmatist. Ingrams, who responded joyously to the ‘peculiar cachet’ of Hadrami architecture, was appalled by Aden, a literally outlandish carbuncle of a place but the reason for his being in that distant flawed Shangri-la of Hadramawt. The tension is one that lasted from the earliest days of the British in Aden until 1967. Inevitably, it was soulless military officialdom that came out on top.
‘Like a pair of resurrectionists’, on a dark night in January 1839, two men prowled around Aden’s graveyard. They were looking for a choice and movable specimen of the finely carved marble grave slabs littering the ground. One of them was John Studdy Leigh, 24-year-old supercargo of an English trading vessel that had put in at Aden. Next morning he ascended ‘Djebel Shunsum’ with some companions: they had a picnic breakfast, raised three cheers and waved the Union Jack. ‘We left as usual with escaladers like ourselves a memorial of our visit in a claret bottle, which we had emptied.’
It was still some months before the British flag was to flutter more permanently over Aden, but Leigh, an adventurer with a patriotic bent, embodied the soul of the new age. The Napoleonic Wars had marked a turning-point, and just as the Great War a century later loosened corsets and raised hemlines, so Waterloo condemned the powdered wig to its block. The last of the Hanoverian kings had sired ten bastards, but now the debris of the Regency party was being swept away: on the throne sat Victoria, virgin and immaculate, and Aden was the first imperial acquisition of her era.
British interest in the area was not new. The little island of Mayyun, or Perim, in the Bab al-Mandab Strait had been garrisoned in 1799 to prevent the French from sailing to India; but they were soon forced out of Egypt by the Battle of Alexandria, and the British out of Mayyun by lack of water. What brought them back was the need for a coaling-station for the new steamships on the Suez-Bombay run. The first steam-powered vessel to sail the route was the Hugh Lindsay in 1830, and the decade that followed saw a flurry of activity in search of a suitable stop near the mouth of the Red Sea. The Island of Suqutra was tried but abandoned when the troops succumbed to fever. Aden was the obvious choice.
The man chosen to take it over, Captain Stafford Bettesworth Haines, belonged to a recent and more swashbuckling past, the age of Clive and the English nabobs. He was to run Aden for sixteen years by a mixture of chicanery, blandishments, and brute force, which earned him the contempt of Victorian Bombay society who dubbed him the ‘sultanized Englishman’. His portrait does indeed give him a foreign and disreputable air, a corsair forced into a stiff collar. Had he ended up further off the beaten track, like Rajah Brooke in Sarawak, he would have escaped the snooty opprobrium of the Establishment, but in Aden he was caught between the East India Company’s Secret Committee in London and the Governor of Bombay. The military in particular were wary of the way in which he courted local rulers and encouraged trade. His dreams of Aden’s mercantile renaissance resembled those of Raffles in Singapore, but Bombay wanted to straitjacket him within the town’s defences. Haines’s character was a curious amalgam: Bombay accused him of going ‘against the spirit of the age’ when in 1851 he hung the corpse of a would-be murderer in chains at the Barrier Gate; later, on trial for peculation, he was to assert that ‘goodwill, kindness and respect … will do more than even the bayonet can in Arabia’. Ultimately, Haines was – like the city he created – a misfit.
British relations with the tribes were uneasy for the first three decades of their rule in Aden. Their immediate neighbours the Abdali Sultans of Lahj, from whom Haines had taken the port, proved the most fickle; the Fadlis, who controlled the coastal region to the east and whose sultan was described by Playfair as ‘a very old man, but … bold and reckless, delighting in marauding excursions and hazardous exploits’, were the most inimical. The tribes launched a number of unsuccessful attacks on Aden from 1840 onwards, but by the 1860s the British claimed to have broken their spirit.
At first, the people of the hinterland did not know what to make of the alien presence, this cuckoo in the South Arabian nest. So they gave British Aden honorary tribal status, with Haines as sponymous patriarch: the new Adenis became known as Banu Haines.
Haines and his successors realized that Aden, whose only natural resource was salt, had to be supplied from the interior. They began to pay out protection money to the neighbouring rulers, and Bombay came reluctantly to accept that it had spawned a monstrous offspring which grew and grew as the network of treaties and stipends ramified.
Haines’s problem was that he was a lax bookkeeper. British policy towards Aden, whether controlled by the East India Company, the India Office or the Colonial Office, was to be steered to the last by the men in Accounts, and when the auditors found a shortfall of £28,000 in the records he was shipped off to Bombay, never to return. He was cleared of embezzlement but held responsible – as a gentleman – for the deficit.
The cuckoo in the nest, meanwhile, kept growing; Haines’s successors continued to sign ad hoc agreements with more and more distant rulers. It was not until the turn of the century that Ottoman expansion from the north forced the British to consider fixing a limit to their sphere of influence, and it took until 1913 for Whitehall and the Sublime Porte to ratify a border treaty. This delineated a boundary running north-eastward from Bab al-Mandab. The following year, the two powers went to war and the treaty was rendered meaningless. On this slender legal basis was Yemen partitioned.
The clash of the two empires in South Arabia* was not so much a sideshow as a freak show which might have been funny had it not been grotesque, ludicrous and – even by First World War standards – incompetent.
British and Ottoman forces arrived at Lahj simultaneously, and exhausted, on the evening of 4 July 1915. Almost the first casualty was Sultan Sir Ali ibn Ahmad al-Abdali, who was mistaken for a Turk and shot by a sepoy as he rode out to greet the column from Aden. He died shortly after. Following this inauspicious start the British, outnumbered, withdrew, and the Turks marched on to take al-Shaykh Uthman; their raiding parties reached as far as al-Ma’alla – unopposed, since the naval-gazing British had all their big guns pointing out to sea.
The saviour of Aden was Sir George Younghusband, brother of the more famous Younghusband of Tibet. He was called in with the message, ‘The Turks are on the golf course’ – not a metaphor, as Aden Golf Club’s links were on the isthmus south of Khur Maksar. Sir George later provided the epitaph for the Lahj fiasco: ‘the army sat down and incidentally began to die of heat … Some said advance but most said retire and did so.’
The British under Younghusband quickly retook al-Shaykh Uthman and set about fortifying the isthmus, to the dismay of the Golf Club. For the rest of the war they and the Turks glared at each other across no man’s land, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and occasionally lobbed shells. Transit passengers in Aden would ride out to the barbed wire, hoping to catch a bombardment. It was altogether a chivalrous affair. The Turkish commander refrained from interfering with Aden’s water supply, and on the British side the only unpleasantness was, as usual, financial, with London and India wrangling over who should foot the bill. In the end, they went Dutch.
Of the two imperial dinosaurs one expired gracefully at Versailles; the other began a long Middle Eastern suicide when Balfour opened its veins with his promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Death was slow, its final throes in Aden played out not to the stately measures of Elgar but to the sound of grenades and snipers’ bullets.
‘I am an Imperialist,’ Harold Ingrams had said in the 1941 introduction to Arabia and the Isles, ‘and equally certain that the vast majority of Arabs in the Aden Protectorate are too.’ In the 1966 edition Ingrams felt obliged to furnish a ninety-page apologia for the sentence. In the intervening years, everything he and the few men like him had achieved had crumbled to dust.
The treaties which Haines and his successors had signed with minor potentates had left the map of southern Yemen a crazy patchwork of states, most of them miniscule. These were divided into a Western Protectorate, extending inland from the coast 100 miles either side of Aden, and a far bigger Eastern Protectorate, largely made up of Hadramawt and al-Mahrah. During the 1930s, Ingrams had succeeded in bringing peace to the Eastern Protectorate. The Western Protectorate, however, remained unsettled. Following the Ottoman withdrawal, Imam Yahya had loudly asserted the unity of Yemen and had occupied parts of the Western Protectorate; the British had responded by bombing raids on the Imam’s domains, and Yahya had accepted the status quo but without dropping his claim to rule all of the Yemen. From the late 1940s, however, the British pursued a forward policy in the Western Protectorate, imposing their ‘advice’ on its rulers. The new Imam, Ahmad, reacted by encouraging rebellions against the British who, in turn, sent in troops. Ingrams viewed this British interference – which he called ‘Englishry’ – with dismay.
Worse was to come. Having lost their hold on the Suez Canal at the end of 1956 the British decided, urged on by America and Cold War paranoia, to compensate by enlarging the Aden base. To this end they greased the Protectorate rulers’ palms liberally in the hope of gaining their goodwill and assurances over its future. In 1959 they tried to impose order on the free-for-all by setting up the Federation of South Arabia. Eventually, a dozen rulers signed up; those of the larger Eastern Protectorate states refused, partly because they were unwilling to share potential oil wealth with their neighbours. The idea was to create something like the United Arab Emirates-to-be, but while Britain could hand each federation ruler a ministerial portfolio, it could not give them the loyalty of their subjects.
The British had lost Suez, but in trying to cling on to it they had also lost their prestige and – in the eyes of many – their conscience. Cairo Radio was there to tell anyone who did not already know, and at a period when cheap transistors were turning the airwaves into a genuinely mass medium. The Aden government suggested lamely that its good relations with Aden and Protectorate Arabs were ‘unimpaired’. In stark contrast is the report of an eye-witness, David Holden, who described news of the British defeat over Suez running through Aden’s back streets ‘like an orgasm’.
Nasser’s finger pointed not only at the British but also at the Indians who had come to dominate commercial and political life in the Colony. New laws introduced in 1955 meant that four members of its Legislative Council were now elected, but the mass of the population – Arabs from the Protectorate and further north – had no vote. ‘Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master,’ said the philosopher George Santayana of the British. If Suez proved that Britain had grown into an embittered and tyrannical old man, then electoral policy in Aden was all too close to that of Athens in ancient times, where a semblance of democracy teetered on a mass of unenfranchised non-citizens.
Yet, for two or three years after the start of the Federation, Aden boomed. There was a lot of money about, and the new refinery at Little Aden was in full swing. For the British, or at least the Conservative government, the worm in the apple was Abdullah al-Asnaj. With his podgy and deceptively innocent features he bore a resemblance to Harold Wilson, whose opposition Labour Party courted him. The al-Asnaj-led trades union movement, encouraged by the unlikely trio of Wilson, Nasser and (for very different reasons) Imam Ahmad, was able to cause serious disruption. A lot more was on the way.
Life for the British went on, though it seems, with hindsight, to have been tinged with a Buñuelesque surrealism. The Fisheries Department was looking into the possibility of catching sucker fish, which after a ten-day training period could be used to hunt green turtles; the fish only required feeding and exercise, ‘like pets’, and the turtles could be made into soup and toilet preparations. On the surface of the water the Reverend J. Fisher buzzed about Back Bay distributing spiritual sustenance not, like his Beatrix Potter namesake, on a water-lily leaf, but in his new launch Speedy II. His Excellency the Governor, Sir William Luce, spoke of the need for secondary industries in Aden for fear that perhaps the large sums spent there on Her Majesty’s Services might one day be reduced. ‘No matter how unlikely such things may appear in the near future,’ the Port of Aden Annual commented, ‘wise men should listen to wise guidance.’ Not to worry. A 1962 Defence White Paper had pronounced, with the sibylline certainty of the Queen of Hearts, that the base would be maintained for at least ten years. That meant a lot more balls to be bowled down the wicket at Steamer Point (157,000 in 1962), a lot more chukkas to be played at the Khur Maksar polo ground. There seemed to be no croquet enthusiasts; in these last looking-glass days of the Colony the flamingoes grazing on the nearby beach didn’t know how lucky they were.
For six months of the year, the 1963 Welcome to Aden Guide told newcomers, you could enjoy a climate normally available only to wealthy invalids (even if, as the Federal Army Commander Brigadier Lunt admitted, it was too warm ‘to wear a tweed suit with any degree of comfort’). Never mind the other six months and the expense of cook-bearers, the suggestion was that in Aden everyone could be a nabob, or at least a nob.
This was far from the case. As usual in colonial outposts, social stratification was more pronounced than at home. Even the beaches were segregated to prevent officers, other ranks and civilians catching sight of each other’s flesh. Social streaming had always been a part of Aden life. In the 1930s, the British were the A Stream, notable Arabs, Parsees and other non-British VIPs the B Stream; the C Stream was the Rest. In the 1950s and 1960s it was no less rigorous. New accommodation for refinery staff in Little Aden was arranged in four grades, from detached through semis and terrace houses down to flats, the latter equipped with yards ‘for purdah ladies to take the air’. The roads were named after English counties.
Aden’s emblem at this time might well have been the stuffed dugong, or sea cow, displayed to gullible ratings as a mermaid: it was a creature more of sea than land; it was beginning to come apart at the seams; it was monumentally ugly; and it was billed as something it was not. Despite the sun, the sea and the servants, Aden was a more a mixture of Gibraltar, Crewe and Hell with duty-free facilities.
With the post-Suez influx of servicemen and camp-followers, the old Arabists and other enthusiasts were being squeezed out. For them Aden, the Eye of Yemen, had always been its eyesore, a place to be left as quickly as possible for bracing trips into the Protectorate; now they were seeing the Colony inundated by tens of thousands of outsiders. Khur Maksar became a bungalow jungle, and Arabic ‘Adan’ was transformed into Anglo-Saxon, adenoidal ‘Eighden’, a phonetic semblance of some Kentish village. For the majority of Britons during Aden’s final colonial decade the Arabs existed, if at all, on the periphery, insulated from them by a social Bombay mix of banyans and baboos. Ships’ passengers were invited to go and look at the cargo coolie they would find taking a nap on deck. ‘You’ll see a little brown man (probably he won’t come up to your shoulder) … Often he is quite surprisingly handsome … His habitual expression is, I should say, one of sardonic resignation.’ The point of contact was tangential, if that.
Increasingly, too, even those who lived and worked in South Arabia and spoke the language kept themselves largely at a remove. Harold Ingrams, an exception to the never-the-twain style of administration, attributes this distancing to the influx of scores of colonial officials from Africa who were used to a totally different social system. Ingrams’s belief that the British could penetrate Arabian society and thought was attacked by the Governor of Aden, Sir Charles Johnston: ‘I could never follow him in his view that the Englishman in Arabia must try to think as an Arab. It is, I believe, an impossible undertaking, and those who have attempted it usually end up in an esoteric faith based on the incomprehensibility of Arabia and the inherent hopelessness of any Western attempt to influence its development … the attitude [is] … half rational, half mystical, and wholly oracular.’ A photograph in Sir Charles’s book, The View from Steamer Point (the title is in itself significant), shows him taking tea with the Qu’ayti Sultan in al-Mukalla. The atmosphere in the Delhi-Edwardian sultanic saloon is distinctly uncomfortable: the Sultan, in a curious winged turban, looks like an eisteddfod bard; the Governor frowns into his cup as though he’s found a scorpion in the tea-leaves.
Aden is sui generis, and in their last decade there the position of the British was in itself increasingly bizarre. Yet Aden is conceptually the closest they and other Westerners of a certain age can get to Yemen. It was surely the Adenis of the 1960s to whom Margaret Thatcher was referring when she advised a British couple about to leave for a posting in San’a: ‘You’ll have to watch the Yemenis. They’re very fly, you know.’
Still, early in 1963 something of a calm prevailed. Even if the mercury was rising in the political thermometer, sang remained froid. The armed forces had not had to exert themselves, except for the aptly named Flight-Lieutenant R. Sweatman who had, for unexplained reasons, made a forty-mile route march across the desert in eighteen hours with only five pints of water; the only violence reported was an attack on a group of RAF men, out climbing in the Western Protectorate, by eight four-foot baboons.
Back in my days as a teacher of English, I often knew how the Queen must feel at Buckingham Palace garden parties. Nasir the engineer was number fifteen. For two months, I’d been teaching him the difference between ‘How do you do?’ and ‘What do you do?’; but it was the end-of-course oral test so I had to ask him yet again. ‘And what do you do, Nasir?’
‘I am an engineer.’
I forced a smile of encouragement, then the prescribed ‘Oh, really? What sort of engineer?’ He told me he was in cement, which I also knew. I asked about his father; Nasir said he was dead. The past tense was uncharted ground. ‘And what did your father do?’
Nasir looked out of the window at the San’a night. Was he struggling with some painful memory? Or with an irregular verb form? Then his eyes turned back to me, their corners creased, and his face broke into a wide grin.
‘My father killed the British!’
Nasir’s father, Qahtan al-Sha’bi, waged a four-year war against the colonial authorities. His National Liberation Front (NLF) had its first success in Radfan, a mountainous area north of Aden near the border with the fledgeling Yemen Arab Republic. The place is now commemorated in a brand of cigarette; the date, 14 October 1963, remembered as the start of the Revolution in the south. In Radfan snipers tied down two British battalions for six months while the armed uprising spread to Aden, where the hand grenade became the NLF’s preferred weapon; in December 1963 they nearly succeeded in assassinating the High Commissioner, Sir Kennedy Trevaskis. A state of emergency was proclaimed which lasted until the British left and Qahtan, recognized as president, shed his futah and battledress tunic in favour of the former oppressors’ suit. He was the only member of the NLF leadership over forty.
Over these four years the British found themselves under siege: from the NLF; from the unions, who also took up arms and metamorphosed into FLOSY, the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen; from Arab nationalism in general; and from the UN, which was calling for a proper constitutional state. They had their backs to the Federal wall, and even the wall was to go against them.
A century earlier, in his Account of the British Settlement of Aden in Arabia, Captain Hunter had warned that ‘long residence [in Aden] impairs the faculties and undermines the constitution of Europeans’. Perhaps, though, it was a siege mentality that caused the final policy meltdown. Under attack from the guerrillas, the British reacted first by firing back at them, then attempting to infiltrate them (using an ‘undercover’ team led by a gigantic Fijian, Sergeant Labalaba of the SAS), and finally wooing them. Lord Shackleton was dispatched to Aden in April 1967 with the request, ‘Would you kindly refrain from shooting us? Then we can talk.’ ‘Impossible,’ the NLF retorted. ‘We must be seen to be driving you out.’
And drive us out they did. For the military, such a loss of face was unbearable. Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mitchell of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders put it thus: ‘Well, you know, purely as a soldier … the whole prestige of the Army depended on going back in, obviously. You know, we were thrown out, if the truth be known, and we had to go back in.’
Mitchell was speaking to the television cameras in early July 1967. In the UK he became known as ‘Mad Mitch’, something of a folk hero. Eyes glinting beneath his glengarry, his clipped Sandhurst syllables hardly concealed a note of triumph. The Argylls, pipes skirling and kilts frou-frouing in the land of the checked futah, had retaken Crater after a thirteen-day rebellion by the previously loyal Armed Police. They had even – an important consideration – saved money by not using the Carl-Gustav antitank missile with which they had planned to open the doors of the Chartered Bank, their intended HQ. Someone had the bright idea of ringing the bell, and the caretaker let them in.
‘We’re a very mean lot,’ Mad Mitch went on. ‘We’re very fair, you know, but if anyone starts any trouble they’ll just get their heads blown orf. They’ll get the message in time, you know.’ Time, however, had run out. Senior officers put the lid on Mitch, who went on to become a Conservative MP.
The NLF and FLOSY were fighting the British; they were also fighting each other. The third element, the Federation sultans, had at first been backed by a Labour government in Whitehall under pressure from Washington (once in office, Harold Wilson had dropped his lookalike, al-Asnaj); but when in 1966 Whitehall realized how much the place was costing, the decision was made to drop Aden itself, Federation, sultans and all. Bombay had complained in the 1870s of the heavy burden of Aden’s cost, £150,000 a year; by 1965 the most conservative estimate of its annual drain on the Whitehall budget was £60 million. The Foreign Secretary George Brown summed things up in September 1967 when he said, ‘we want to be out of the whole Middle East as far and as fast as we possibly can’.
We shall never know whether, given more time, the Federation would have collapsed anyway once its ties were cut, or whether it could have survived, Pinocchio-like, without its puppet-master. In the event most of the sultans went on to a life of comfortable ennui in Saudi Arabia; many of their supporters were killed. Whitehall, like a twitchy gambler who loses his nerve and backs a sure winner when the odds are lowest, finally threw in its lot with the NLF. The first UK-NLF talks began on 21 November 1967 at the Geneva YWCA; later that month it was rumoured that RAF planes were being sent to attack FLOSY positions.
The Federation, in the words of its Foreign Minister Muhammad Farid al-Awlaqi, felt ‘completely betrayed’ by Britain’s dishonourable action; for the ‘Fidaralis’, the phrase wa’d injlizi, an Englishman’s word, took on a new meaning. According to David Ledger, a political officer in Aden at the time, one of the Federation rulers went further: ‘It is far better to be Britain’s enemy than Britain’s friend. If you are the former there is a possibility of being bought. If you are the latter there is a certainty of being sold.’ The British weren’t just paranoid – in South Arabia everyone really was against them.
It was three in the afternoon on 30 November 1967. A windmill looked on motionless as the last helicopter clattered into the air. The sun was past its height and heading for the sea behind Little Aden, but a fierce light still glared off the Khur Maksar salt pans. The British had left, in the words of Brigadier Lunt, like thieves in the night.
Publicly, and with masterly understatement, George Brown declared that ‘some things which the United Kingdom expected to settle before independence may be left pending’. The last High Commissioner, Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, admitted that ‘our period of occupation did the country little permanent good’. Richard Crossman, in the privacy of his diary, confided: ‘Chaos will rule after we’ve gone and there’ll be one major commitment out – thank God.’
‘The problem is the coffins,’ said Abdullah the sexton. ‘The water rotted them and they collapsed.’
We were drinking clove-flavoured tea in the Christian cemetery of al-Ma’alla. Many of the graves had become gaping holes, as though their occupants had jumped the Doomsday gun and burst out. Aden had just suffered one of its rare but disastrous floods, and even the dead were affected. The surface of the ground was littered with bleached shells and bits of coral – at first I took them for bones, transformed by some sea-change, but then realized that they had been used to decorate the graves. Some of the monuments had been defaced recently. Abdullah shook his head sadly. ‘Those who did it are not Muslims,’ he said.
In this place of toings and froings, here were the ones who had stayed on. Soldier and civilian, tommy and toff lay side by side; the younger sons of county families shared the earth with Greek and Chinese merchants, Italian submariners, a solitary French Baha’i – one of the small number of post-independence interments – and Henry Martin Sandbach, who died at sea in December 1896 ‘as a result of wounds received attempting to save the life of his shikari whilst on a lion hunt in Somaliland’. A good number of the graveyard’s occupants had expired, their headstones said, ‘on entering Aden’.
The British left much behind beside their dead. Right-hand-drive Humbers, Rileys and Morris Minor 1,000s chug around the streets; across from the Sailors’ Club a long-stationary Bedford van sells fish and chips, wrapped these days in the Straits Times. Pillar boxes are still in use, but with the royal cypher chiselled off. A driver is a draywal, a screwdriver – by some obscure semantic quirk – dismis. An old man stopped me on the street and recited ‘One, two, buckle my shoe …’ Queen Victoria used to sit in the garden next to the Crescent Hotel; she now lives in the National Museum’s back yard.
Time has picked clean much of what was left by the duty-free vultures of a generation ago, but the signs are still up at Steamer Point: shipping companies, chandlers, Stop-and-Shop, the Seamen Store, the Lax Stores (motto: ‘Try us before COMMITTING yourself’). The latter carries an eclectic stock – stopwatches, bedpans, defunct petrol lighters, bits of diving gear and so on; but the main line is in lacquered and mounted sea creatures. A faint whiff of putrefaction spills out on to the street.
‘They never buy anything,’ sighed the man behind the counter as a group of Russian ratings loped out of the shop. ‘Well, maybe a lobster now and then.’ He fumbled in the dust under the glass counter and pressed a pair of cufflinks into my hand. ‘Baltic amber.’
‘How much are they?’
‘Nothing. I like to give my best customers a little present.’ It was my first visit and I hadn’t bought anything. ‘Where did you say you were from? Germany? France? Italy? Belgium?’
Belgium. We were here for 128 years, for heaven’s sake. We were the ones who understood the Arabs. We gave them pillar boxes, and Coventry. ‘I’m British.’
‘Ah. Then I’ve got a special present for you …’ He reached down into the lowest shelf of the counter, found whatever it was and added, as he blew the dust off it, ‘something we forgot to give you before.’ He resurfaced and held out the object.
It was a hand grenade.
‘There’s nothing in it now,’ he said, smiling. The grenade was empty. It would make a fine cigarette lighter. I thanked the shopkeeper and left, still without buying anything.
The eponymous proprietor of Aziz’s Bookshop is a better businessman. He knows the value of the period piece, his period being the early 1960s. High glass-fronted bookshelves contain copies of Billy Fury and Z-Cars fanzines, ‘9 Views of Aden – Coloured Real Photographs’, and greetings cards from the saucy Barbara Windsor blonde to the beatnik (‘Hey, I got so hepped-up about your birthday … like I almost combed my hair!’).
Aziz exists in a perpetual autumn of disintegrating ephemera; to me, his shop smelt of childhood attics. As he listens to the BBC English Service, his days measured out by Just a Minute and The Vintage Chart Show, he must be aware that he didn’t get his turnover right. Still, he isn’t the first: Aden shopkeepers in the days of the Periplus, the later Rasulids, the Turks, all suffered from slumps caused by the vagaries of geopolitics. Small comfort.
The history of Aden’s earliest trade is a matter of guesswork, but by the tenth century we have a clear picture of the port’s position at the hub of international commerce. The Cairo-based Fatimid dynasty had begun to outshine Abbasid Baghdad, and Aden became the entrepôt for its oriental supplies. Al-Muqaddasi, writing at the time, calls it ‘the entrance-hall of China and the warehouse of the West’; contemporary sherds of high-quality celadon ware have been found in the region, and the Far Eastern connection lasted – an early fourteenth-century inscribed stone discovered recently in Canton records the building there of a mosque gate and wall by a trader from Abyan, the area immediately east of Aden.
The most detailed account of Aden’s medieval trade is provided by Ibn al-Mujawir, who lists the products brought to Aden from India, Sind, Ethiopia and Egypt, together with the duties paid on them. Detailed ledgers were kept, and on one occasion this caused friction between port officials and merchants. A party of Hadrami cloth traders arrived and were asked for their names. ‘Ba Arse, Ba Shit, Ba Slit, Ba Silent Fart, Ba Pubic Hair,’ they answered.* The outraged customs officer refused to let the Hadramis through, so they were left waiting while their merchandise was trampled underfoot. By chance the Sultan was passing and asked what was wrong.
‘Sire,’ said the customs man, ‘their names are, … unmentionable.’
‘Well,’ answered the Sultan, ‘if you cannot bring yourself to mention their names, how can I take duty from them? I absolve them from all payment!’
Security at the port was rigorous. Men were frisked everywhere, including ‘between the buttocks’; a crone was employed to examine every crevice of the female arrivals. In the slave market girls were stripped, perfumed and submitted to no less probing an examination.
‘Al-Hasan ibn Ali Hazawwar al-Firuzkuhi told me,’ Ibn al-Mujawir recorded, ‘ “I sold an Indian slave-girl to an Alexandrian at Aden. He kept her for seven days, and when he tired of her he alleged that she was defective and had a writ served on me on the grounds of selling poor-quality merchandise. The judge asked, ‘What is her defect?’ and the buyer said, ‘Her vagina is loose and flabby.’ So I retorted, ‘If your prick is so small that you can’t do your best to fill her up, then what use to you is her sleek, white, plucked and scented pussy?’ On hearing this the judge cried to those present, ‘OUT WITH THEM!’ So out we went. I returned to my work, the girl stayed with the Alexandrian, and I don’t know what became of either of them.” ’
The medieval period was the high point of Aden’s trade until 1850, when it was transformed by its new Free Port status. Commerce rose again sharply with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and goods brought to Aden and listed by Hunter in 1877 include feathers, fireworks, fish fins and maws, shells and cowries, tortoiseshell, umbrellas and opium. The drug trade was legal but controlled: opium was not sold to Europeans ‘except under a pass’, and hashish had to cost at least Rs.100 a maund (about £10 for 28lbs) ‘in order to prevent abuse’. Trade was not only seaborne – around a quarter of a million camel-loads arrived from the interior annually.
It was during this period that the great trading houses of Aden founded their fortunes. At the forefront were the two Parsee firms of Messrs Cowasjee Dinshaw and Mr Muncherjee Eduljee, the Harrods of Crater where, Hunter says, ‘almost anything that could ever be wanted may be purchased’. These emporia, and others like that started by Captain Luke Thomas, were still going strong in the 1960s, when their lists of agencies included transport and irrigation equipment, Doulton Sanitary Potteries Ltd., Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, Babycham, and Walters’ Palm Toffee.
Greatest of all was the business founded by the Provençal Antonin Besse. Besse, who inevitably became known as al-Biss, the Cat, arrived in Aden in the late 1890s and stayed until his death in 1951, by which time he was able to donate £1.5 million to set up St Antony’s College, Oxford. The money came from a vast empire of concerns around the Horn of Africa and along the Arabian coast to Hadramawt. Besse handled ‘hides, skins, oilseeds, pulses, black and white cottonseed, incense, myrrh, opoponax, aloes, mother of pearl shells, cuttlefish bones, gum Arabic, and coffee’, but the bulk of his fortune derived from monopolies on the distribution of sugar and paraffin. An eccentric, his loves included Nietzsche, Wagner, street football and rambles over Jabal Shamsan; his bugbears were Mussolini and anyone who wore socks with shorts. The latter must have caused friction with the bestockinged British, who prattled about him mercilessly. Perhaps worst of all in their eyes was that he chose to live on the wrong side of Aden, in Crater. But whatever was said about him, Besse was an extremely successful businessman who combined a romantic streak with hard-nosed acumen – something most Anglo-Saxons could only envy. He remains a paradigm for Aden’s curious marriage of the exotic and the mundane. John Masefield might have described the arrival in Aden, this city of lists, of a Besse freighter,
With a cargo of kerosene,
Car tyres, spare parts,
Frankincense, lavatories, and Gilbey’s gin.
It is all gone. But yet again the tide is on the turn for Aden’s trade, heralded by publicity brochures for the resurrected Free Zone; and by that small, insistent voice, pleading from Port Sa’id to Penang and now once more in the late-night hotel lobbies and taxis of al-Tawwahi: ‘What you want? I get you anything … anything!’
Alongside more tangible goods, Aden has long had a parallel market in ideas. This century it has been host to anti-imamate Yemenis, Nasserist Arab Nationalists, the labour movement and Marxism.
A photograph taken in 1977 shows the three major personalities of the Marxist period – Salim Rubay’ Ali, Abdulfattah Isma’il and Ali Nasir Muhammad. Salim Rubay’ looks cuddly, a teddy-bear of a man; Abdulfattah is diminutive and sly; Ali Nasir is thick-set, no great thinker but, in retrospect, a survivor. All three wear regulation safari suits; all are looking to the left as the Independence Day parade rumbles past, out of the picture. They might more usefully have kept their eyes on each other. In less than a year President Salim Rubay’ would be deposed, shot, and succeeded by Abdulfattah; in 1986 Abdulfattah was himself killed in a coup against elements unsympathetic to Ali Nasir. In the ideological jostle of PDRY politics, shove all too often turned to putsch.
The growth of Marxism in such an outwardly conservative society as that of South Arabia came as a surprise to many; it was largely due to the unique hothouse atmosphere of Aden itself. In the end, differences between the city and its vast hinterland, between the Sons of Haines and the Sons of Qahtan, were never reconciled.
Three factors helped the rise of the Left. First, the British had engaged in a programme of massive social deconstruction. The cash donations handed out by them over the years to Western Protectorate rulers, and which had increased considerably during the 1950s, enabled the sultans to develop standing armies, thereby reducing their need to control or cajole difficult tribesmen. Even more marked was the outcome of this policy in the Eastern Protectorate, where Ingrams was so successful in promoting peace treaties and centralizing authority that in 1953 Sayyid Abu Bakr al-Kaff said of the newly gunless Hadrami tribes, ‘They are dead.’ At the same time the sayyids, the traditional mediating class, were denied the role on which much of their standing in society depended. Some of them became characters in search of parts.
The British, meanwhile, had been rebuilding society in a way that was to have far-reaching consequences. An educational system was set up based on the public-school ethos with an Arab-Islamic overlay. Its beginnings were small: in the Aden Residency School in the 1870s pupils were taught ‘the Elementary Histories of England, India and Rome; Euclid as far as the first book; Geography, Arithmetic and Algebra’. The intake was mostly from Adeni Indian families, but at Aden College eighty years later it had widened to encompass the sons of the traditional learned classes. The British brought boys from sayyid and other influential families into a milieu where free thought was encouraged. After a millennium of received notions, the colonial rulers took their Arab protégés and introduced them to ‘character training, physical training and literary education’ based on the ideas of Plato, Rousseau and Dr Arnold. The sprouting intelligentsia included many members of the traditional elite: Hadrami sayyids like Haydar al-Attas and Ali Salim al-Bid were to play an important part in the spread of Marxism.
The third – and decisive – factor in the growth of the Left was the defeat suffered by Egypt in the 1967 war with Israel. The NLF had begun life as the Yemeni branch of Dr George Habash’s Arab Nationalist Movement, founded in Beirut in 1954. Thirteen years on, Nasser’s rhetoric had begun to ring hollow and Dr Habash embraced Marx and Lenin instead. The NLF followed suit. In the face of Zionist and imperialist might, revolutionary guerrilla struggle was totally alluring and at least partially successful.
Curiously, the doctrine of Scientific Socialism pursued in the south, ‘making use of all that is positive and fighting all deviations’, was not unlike that of the Zaydi imamate, which enjoined ‘commanding all that is suitable and prohibiting that which is disapproved’. To determine what constituted strayings from the Straight Path of Islam, or leftist/rightist swervings from the Socialist path, the northern sayyids studied the Book of God, while the books of Marx and Lenin became the major reference for the Socialist Politburo. Chief Politburo exegete was Abdulfattah Isma’il, an expert on Socialist doctrine who was known, wrily, as al-Faqih (literally, the scholar of holy writ). Under his guidance, the early caliphs of Islam were classified according to their rightist or leftist tendencies.
According to another Scientific Socialist tenet, ‘not all the old and traditional is bad, and not all that is new is good’. But much of the traditional was deemed bad and the post-independence regimes continued the transformation of society begun by the British. Tribal surnames were banned, qat restricted, polygamy prohibited. As for the new, housing (except that which was owner-occupied) was nationalized, as were businesses (except BP and Cable and Wireless) and transport (including, it was mooted, bicycles); women were deveiled and encouraged to join the army; a Fine Arts Institute was set up to provide courses in music, painting and sculpture, acrobatics, theatre and ballet; speaking to a non-South Yemeni without permission became a criminal offence.
Within two years of the British departure, President Qahtan al-Sha’bi had been branded a moderate and deposed in a Corrective Move. He was to die after a decade of house arrest. Then, in December 1970, Aden ceased to be a free port. With the remains of Western trade went the fag-end of Western aid, but the PDRY joined another international fraternity and developed close ties with Cuba and East Germany. South Yemen’s socialist clubbability was confirmed when the USSR shifted its regional naval base from Somalia to Aden in 1977.
Relations with the neighbours, however, ranged from sullen to violent. There were border clashes with the North well into the 1980s, and the PDRY supported Dhofari resistance to the Sultan of Oman. A singular bone of contention was the tiny Kuria Muria group of islands off the Dhofari coast: Muscat had presented them to Queen Victoria in 1854, Britain had given them back to Oman in 1967 and, although their only natural resource was guano, Aden laid claim to them and incorporated a blue triangle into its flag to symbolize concern for overseas possessions.
Another neighbour, Saudi Arabia, was alarmed by developments within the PDRY – perhaps because, according to a statement from the World Bank, the PDRY had ‘among the world’s most egalitarian systems for the distribution of domestically earned income’. Nevertheless this income was minute, and by the government’s own admission over a million PDRY citizens left home in the decade following independence – somewhere between a quarter and half of the population. Those who stayed were deprived of all but the barest essentials of life. An Italian diplomat, on his way to Nairobi in 1977, said he was going there ‘to buy tomatoes’.
Politically, the PDRY was beset throughout its short history by Party squabbles, which reflected splits in the wider Socialist bloc. Salim Rubay’ Ali, influenced by the example of Chairman Mao, brought peasants into Aden during the 1970s to demonstrate against bureaucrats and in favour of low wages. Abdulfattah Isma’il, who ousted him in 1978, was pro-Soviet: it was to Moscow that he fled when, two years later, he was himself deposed by the more moderate and pragmatic Ali Nasir Muhammad. In 1985 Abdulfattah was back in Aden and encouraging hardline opposition to Ali Nasir. Events were to reach a bloody climax in January 1986.
‘So Ali Nasir said, “Yes, but what do I do with the opposition?” and Mengistu said, “Oh, it’s simple. Kill them.” Well, that’s what some people say …’
The man smiled into his tea. The story of the Ethiopian leader’s advice to his South Yemeni counterpart may not be entirely apocryphal – Ali Nasir was in Addis Ababa in December 1985, and Mengistu was to support him subsequently; but it is only one of many versions – onion layers which you peel to get to the heart of the matter. Except that, like onions, the stories tend to have no heart, just a final little layer curled in on itself, and the truth is no more than the sum of its different versions. At least, that is how it seemed at the Zaku Café in Crater which, being the centre of Aden’s busiest market, the Suq of Rumours, ought to be a place for intrigue and the telling of tales. The Four Martyrs, hardliners killed in the 1986 coup and subsequently beatified by their victorious comrades, smiled avuncularly down as they did all over the former PDRY, and gave nothing away.
The Aden Ministry of Culture’s official account, Aden’s Bloody Monday, was published three months after the events of 13 January 1986, when truth was still at its most malleable. Wherever it stands on the line between fact and fiction, the booklet is compelling reading, a mixture of Marxist rhetoric, British understatement and Damon Runyon. It was 10.20 a.m., the booklet says, and in the Politburo premises Vice-President and Presidium Vice-Chairman Ali Antar, Defence Minister Salih Muslih Qasim, Politburo member Ali Shayi’ Hadi and others were preparing for a routine meeting when one of the President’s bodyguards walked into the room and shot Ali Antar in the back. As the account comments, ‘One can well imagine the moments of total surprise that prevailed.’
While the diehard Marxist dialecticians Salih Muslih and Ali Shayi’ were swiftly added to the PDRY role of martyrs others, including the future leader Ali Salim al-Bid, dived for cover and escaped down a rope of curtains. Meanwhile, a gunboat pumped seventy shells into the villa of the Fourth Martyr, Abdulfattah Isma’il. (He was not at home, but may have been canonized presently by an anti-tank missile; Aden’s Bloody Monday is strangely silent on his fate.) Throughout the city Ali Nasirists moved against other hardliners.
Ali Nasir Muhammad, for nearly six years Party and State leader, was a reformist seeking to broaden dialogue with his neighbours and the West. What he had not allowed for in his drastic solution to problems at home was that, for the most part, the army was loyal to Ali Antar and Salih Muslih.
The fighting lasted ten days, leaving thousands dead – far more than in the struggle for independence. By the end of it ‘the so-called Ali Nasir, a cunning opportunist petty bourgoise [sic] giving not a hoot to scientific socialism or the class struggle’, was out of the country. The hardliners had won.
In their public ‘confessions’, Ali Nasir’s supporters repeated the claim that he had duped them into believing they were fighting a ‘rightist’ coup against him. By the airforce commander’s admission, ‘there was a great deal of mystery surrounding the situation, which was getting out of hand’. He had put his finger on it: the PDRY had entered an Einsteinian world where the usual co-ordinates of right and left had been reversed, and revolutionaries had become reactionaries.
Much has been made of the fact that the conflict was polarized between regional groups – Ali Nasir’s power base was Abyan and Shabwah, that of his opponents Lahj – and commentators have seen the root of it in a centralized ‘distributor’ state favouring one region over another. At the same time, the more recent history of the former USSR shows how bitter the reformist-traditionalist struggle within Socialist regimes can be.
The waste was appalling, one PDRY diplomat declaring, ‘When they see how hard we fight our own brothers, no outsider would ever dare to interfere in our internal affairs.’ After the unification of Yemen in 1990, the two sides declared an amnesty, and Ali Nasir stated in Damascus – his home since 1986 – that responsibility for the bloody events was shared. ‘The files’, he said, ‘must be closed.’ Memories, however, will last even longer than the rusting and crab-infested hulk of the gunboat in Elephant’s Back Bay.
In 1982 it was not outlandishly prophetic to say, as Robert Stookey did in his book on the PDRY, that ‘The association [between the PDRY and the Soviet bloc] has, in all likelihood, passed beyond the point where it could be dissolved even in favour of such a major national objective as union with North Yemen.’ Unification agreements had been signed by the Yemens in November 1972 and March 1979, both after periods of violent border clashes. Both came to nothing. And then the unthinkable happened: the Soviet bloc crumbled. The PDRY was no longer viable as a state, politically or economically. By 1989, its leaders could see that their own future – like that of their comrades in Eastern Europe – was bleak, and suggested federation with the YAR. At the end of the year YAR President Ali Abdullah Salih made a surprise visit to Aden, and his PDRY counterpart Ali Salim al-Bid agreed to a merger. The Yemenis, a people joined by history, culture, religion and ancestry, had been separated by nineteenth-century empire-building and by Cold War ideology. On 22 May 1990, the two parts of their country reunited and adopted a system of parliamentary democracy with San’a as the capital. And the PDRY, that strange offspring of imperialism and Marxism, ceased to be.
There had already been an intimation of change during the fighting of January 1986, when the British Royal Yacht Britannia evacuated the Soviet expatriate community from Aden. Perhaps it was then, in the heat of a South Arabian winter, that the Cold War finally began to thaw. At any rate, those on board, the British and the Russians, might well have reflected as they looked back at the smoking barrack stove of Aden that, between them, they had a lot to answer for.
The Marxist period now seems like a dream that slid in and out of a nightmare. Somewhere back in the ethnographic present of this chapter, in the dying stages of dream-time, I was down in Aden again. Passing by the night-club, I noticed the same desultory scrap going on by the door, and remembered Fidel Castro’s comment to the Yemeni Socialist Party leader, Ali Salim al-Bid, following the 1986 bloodbath: ‘When are you people going to stop killing each other?’
The answer came, as I shall relate, in 1994. The war of that year, between the pro-unity government and a secessionist faction led by al-Bid, was to bring to an end a quarter century as bizarre, in its own way, as the British era. But, while memorials to the British are ubiquitous and tangible, the traces of Marxism have all but vanished: the war sent Scientific Socialism the way of the well-devil of Sirah Island. With it went Ali Salim al-Bid, the Four Martyrs and the night-clubs. Husky Havana voices are no longer heard in the Ching Sing, and Arabia has lost its only brewery, dismantled in spite of a last-ditch attempt to convert it to the production of lemonade. Now, work is under way to extend Aden’s port facilities; the Crescent Hotel is getting a facelift; Rimbaud’s godown in Crater has become the French Cultural Centre and offers films, good coffee and tasteful décor; and the advance guard of a new imperialism has landed – on Crater sea-front opposite Sirah, at the place where the Portuguese were sent packing, where Sulayman the Eunuch and Captain Haines landed, and plonked down next to the Abdali Sultan’s lavatorial green palace, sits a building with a red-tiled roof as unexpected as a Parsee hat: the Aden Pizza Hut.
Looking at it over the water, I had an awful vision: today the Aden Pizza Hut, tomorrow the Marib McDonald’s, the Sa’dah Spud-U-Like … Yemen subjugated by an empire of fast food, held in bondage by restaurant chains. The vision went. This, after all, was Aden, and here, in this island manque, the finest harbour of the Old World, alien arrivals had come, tied up for a time, then passed on; and so they would until Doomsday.