“The Sultan of Tajura had asked me to meet him, so at 5 o’clock I came back to the commandant’s house. The Sultan, a good-looking young man in an immaculate white robe and closely wound white turban, had a quiet-spoken dignity, unlike our host [the French commandant], who waved his hands about, lit one cigarette from another, and hardly stopped talking- mostly about the advantages of a refrigerator.”
-Wilfred Thesiger, Danakil Diary, May 20th, 1934
Thesiger ended his trip down from the Ethiopian plateau in the village of Tajourah, on the Gulf of that same name where almost fifty years earlier Arthur Rimbaud began his own caravan, heading upwards, waiting almost 9 months there, first for the rifles and pack camels, and then for a suitable European travelling companion. At this same time his prose poems Illuminations were published in Paris, his name there almost forgotten. Rimbaud’s impression of the Sultan, an Afar with 11 sons named Ibrahim Abou Bekr, was not good- “the most incorrigible bandit in all Africa”.
Nineteen years ago I was first in Tajourah, I stayed with the Sultan in an extra room of his house. It was Ramadan so the evening hours were filled with visitors to what passed as his throne room, a bare hall with cushions thrown against the walls. Much coffee, much tea, much qat. I asked the Sultan a few questions, about his duties, when as a shaman he assumes the form of a hyena to prowl through his realm looking for the news of the night.
I lost the thread of his French, my translator’s mouth was full of leaves so he couldn’t talk much anyway, and I wandered into the room next door where the hurma, the hareem, the womenfolk were watching satellite tv, from Paris, a show dubbed into French called My So-Called Life, written by a college classmate. I stuck with the women and Clare Danes over the hyena in the men’s room- their stories, their chewable stimulants, and their guttural Afar exclamations could wait until my other life called.
Fast forward ten years to 2010, I was back in Tajourah with an American tour group, I asked our driver to set an audience with the Sultan, it was agreed and we arrived and took our seats, now in a proper throne room with high back chairs ringing the perimeter. I told the Sultan that I had met him before, that I came to give him greetings and for him to meet retired Americans, all over 65 years. The group introduced themselves one by one, some were former lawyers, some former bankers, one had worked on a Detroit assembly line.
When we were exiting the room, an aged retainer stepped forward, he said that he recognized me from before, he told me in which room I had slept and what questions I had asked. And he remembered that I liked to watch television, beaucoup de télé.
The Sultan and Me