Life is cruel, life is hard,

You're just left out in the yard,

And you wait there for the next round of abuse,

You say nothing, you just wait,

For whatever is your fate,

Not complaining nor objecting, what's the use?



You get taken out to tether,

Regardless of the weather,

In searing heat, or cold or driving rain,

They tie your feet together,

With a plastic rope – not leather,

Which cuts your legs with agonising pain.



Nobody seems to care,

To complain you wouldn't dare,

Donkeys are not supposed to care or mind.

So we stand there and just stare,

With our strangely mournful air,

And conclude the human race is just unkind.


Don't they stop and ever think,

That they drive us to the brink,

Of misery and hopeless sad despair

Don't they ever wonder why,

We seem to smile as we die,

There's a better life awaiting us – by far.

Part III – Settling In

El Gee turned out to be a delightful little animal. He quickly became
very friendly - probably realising that he is a thousand times better
fed and treated than any other donkey in Morocco. Within a couple of
days, he was following Fatima without a lead rein - unless he decided
to go somewhere else - and looking positively chirpy - for a donkey. He
did not have that look of depression on his face. As an old friend
pointed out, "they always have the same expression in their faces - of
abject misery, which has stayed with them since Jesus took a ride on
one instead of calling a cab as any normal traveller should." But El
Gee wasn't miserable and – as Auntie Aicha said one day – 'He smiles
at you'.

I began to understand why my mother used to want a donkey, although I
seem to recall that my papa's argument 'against' her having one, was
that 'the hole would be too damned big'. He was always a very
practical man, as well as blunt to the point of calling a 'spade' a
'bloody shovel'.

For two weeks – about a month after he arrived - I had to attend to
all the daily needs of our little steed as Fatima succumbed to the
toils of collecting grass in the cold and the rain and took to her bed
with flu. At first El Gee was a mite suspicious, obviously thinking
that I had disposed of Fatima, but he soon got used to the change in
routine, especially once he understood that he got rather more
bread-in-a-bucket when he came home of an evening.

Fetching El Gee became an odd routine. One of the first things that I
noticed was that he recognised me from an extraordinary distance. On
seeing me coming, he would walk directly towards me – until the tether
stopped him in his tracks, but the moment I reached him, he would turn
his back on me and walk back to where the stake had been hammered into
the ground. There he would stand, until the stake had been removed and
any rope untangled from around his legs. As soon as this was done he
would head for home, and if he'd been free, he would have set off at a
gallop.

However, he did not go 'straight' home. To get there we had to cross
the un-made track that goes from the road round to the back of the
village. Here, El Gee would stop and spend some time looking at and
sniffing the ground until he found 'just the right place'. He would
then scrape the ground with a front hoof before lying down and rolling
in the dust – both sides, twice. He would then get up, shake himself
and set off for home with a snort – as much as to say, "That's
better."

But I was curious to find out just how well he recognised me as I had
never heard nor read anything about donkeys being known for
recognising anyone at all. One evening I donned a hat, sunglasses, and
a coat that he hadn't seen before. When I went to fetch him –
approaching from a slightly different direction, as I was returning
from the shop - he recognised me just the same. It must be something
about the way I walk but there was no question about it, he knew it
was me and approached me just as normal.

One morning, I had to go to Casablanca to see someone about some work
so - for once - I was dressed in something like respectable clothes.
El Gee's reaction – when he saw me – was extraordinary. His head went
up, his ears came forward and his eyes opened wide as he stared at me.
Then he let out a questioning bray – as if he was saying, "Where the
hell do you think you're going?"

I returned from the metropolis to find Fatima still ensconced in her
bed and that El Gee had been left out all night (not that it would
have made a blind bit of difference to him). When I went out to fetch
him in, he seemed even more pleased to see me than usual - positively
friendly and nuzzled me as I unwound the rope from around his legs.

On another occasion, I went to collect El Gee one evening. I had no
idea where Fatima had put him so I wandered off along our side of
what– years ago – had been a small railway line, towards where he
usually grazed. Suddenly I was aware of El Gee's mournful braying (and
'yes', by then I could tell him apart from all the other donkeys) from
the other side of the small embankment and, when I turned round, there
he was, at the end of his tether, ears forward, calling me as much as
to say; "Hey – where the hell do you think you're going – I'm here."
They are strange and endearing little animals.

It's funny how ignorant one is about things that don't directly
impinge on one's life. Although I have lived here – amidst many donkeys
– for eight years, until we actually had one of our own, I had never
realised just how individual their voices are. Braying isn't
necessarily the most soothing or musical of animal noises but all the
donkeys (here at least), bray in quite different and individual ways
in addition to which they make quite a variety of sounds which have
specific meanings.

Yes – I do talk to him and 'yes' he does respond, and if this means
that I have gone 'nuts', so be it. El Gee talks as much sense – if not
more – than anyone in 'The Garage' – the least reputable of the
Benj'Dir pubs - and one helluva lot more than any politician that I
have heard speak recently. I considered myself fortunate in having an
animal to teach me something of the other end of existence in this
world.

Nonetheless, I had to face the fact that everybody in Casa thought
that I had finally 'flipped'. Getting a donkey appears to have been
the last straw. The odd thing here is that the Moroccans (the sort of
ones that I teach) know absolutely nothing about villages like
Benshasha and have certainly never been into such places. They have
always found it strange that I can live here perfectly happily - in
many ways I actually prefer it – but 'getting a donkey' is quite
beyond their bounds of comprehension.

I became curious as to why donkeys are – universally – considered the
epitome of stupidity. I suppose that it is that they are generally
kept by singularly stupid and ignorant people (like Fatima and me) and
get branded with their owners, rather the same way that bull terriers
and Rottweilers do. I suppose that the fact that they are also so
incredibly hardy and uncomplaining is also interpreted as 'stupidity'.

But stupid, they are not unless it is that they tolerate such
incredible abuse at the hands of man. Donkeys were used by the early
railway builders to survey the route for the proposed track. In fact,
the Berbers – in the mountains in Southern Morocco, still use them to
find the easiest path up the mountainsides and the whacky-baccy
smugglers in the north still use them to find the best paths through
the Rif mountains. Donkeys have their own form of GPS and will always
walk along the flattest route possible. On the same scale, I suppose
we rank pigeons amongst the most stupid of birds yet they have an
inbuilt navigation system that makes what people pay a fortune to have
in their cars look positively antediluvian.

And – on the subject of the illicit traders in the Rif, there was a
lovely story about the life (and ending) of Moroccan donkeys about
five years ago:

An inventive form of smuggling across the Morocco - Algeria border,
which had been closed some 10 years previously, was curtailed with the
slaughter of 200 remote-controlled donkeys. This caused outrage
amongst the inhabitants of Bab el Assa who claimed that the Algerian
police's action is 'illegal'.

The donkeys had been plying their daily trade between Bab el Assa in
Algeria and Ahfir in Morocco, along the well-trodden smuggling
tracks, which they knew well as they had surveyed the routes in the
first place. Mindful of the illegality of crossing the border and in
order to minimise risks, as well as reduce expenses, their owners had
been sending the donkeys on their own. However, they did strap tape
recorders to each donkey's back with the exhortation: "E'rrr azid,
e'rrr azid" in his masters' voice. This prevented the donkeys from
dallying too much by the wayside and further improved efficiency.

Once the beasts had crossed the border, other gentlemen of the
import/export business met them. The tape recorders were switched off
and the animals were relieved of their loads. They were then
re-loaded, turned round 180° and sent back to whence they had come,
not forgetting to switch the tape recorders back on.

Apart from anything else, the arrangement demonstrated a quite
remarkable level of mutual trust between Moroccan and Algerian
'traders'.

This semi-automated mode of transport was a great improvement all
round, not least for the donkeys. Anyone who has seen a Moroccan
donkey being driven by its owner, whether involved in smuggling or
not, would realise that walking with only a tape recorder saying
"E'rrr azid, e'rrr azid" is about as close as paradise on earth as a
it is likely to get.

For the donkey owners - the smugglers - it proved to be a vast
improvement in time-management and efficiency, allowing them
considerable extra hours to attend to and improve other aspects of
their business. In any other enterprise such a scheme would have
certainly earned them the highest commendation and probably promotion.

The only problem was that the police - or rather their pension fund -
was an integral part of the financial equation and the poor donkeys
had not been taught the meaning of the word 'Bakhsheesh'. They paid a
high price for this omission in their education and were summarily
executed, much to the ire of their owners who stoically maintained
that this minor setback would not curtail their trading activities.

However, the real cause of controversy was that the police - ever
eager to redress the financial imbalance in their providence account -
were accused of slaughtering the animals in an 'other-than-halal'
manner and to make matters worse had then sold the meat in the local
souks, passing it off as 'prime beef'.

A donkey's life is never an easy one.

But back to the present - as the weeks rolled by, El Gee became far
more confident and self-assured. I began to realise that he had worked
out who was who in the family, especially the multitude of small
children and treated them quite differently. People and children that
'belong' were 'accepted', in as much that he did not shy away of them,
even if he was never overtly friendly towards them. Anyone else was
treated with distinct wariness, to the point of ensuring that, if they
came too close, his back legs would be positioned for a kick, if
required.

Whether this is just natural caution, I don't know, but the way that
he winces and shies away whenever any stranger approaches him, I can't
help thinking that he has – at some point in his short life, been
'hit'. That would be par for the course in Benshasha where everybody
regards me as being slightly cranky for patting or stroking him. The
average Benshasha male regards donkeys as having been put on God's
earth for the sole purpose of testing the strength of pieces of
four-by-two!

However, I could not just relax and do nothing. I did realise that we
have to have El Gee gelded, otherwise he would become unwieldy when he
got bigger.

Many people would disagree with me, but I DO know my limits so 'No' –
this is not something that I would attempt on a Benshasha-DIY basis of
brute-force, a penknife and a red-hot poker, even though I do actually
have some experience of the operation.

As a pre-school child, I recall that one of my 'jobs' - on the
neighbouring farm, where I was dispatched to fetch our daily milk -
was to hold the poker over a brazier for Mr Doidge and Harry De-Quick
– when, each spring, they castrated the male lambs and piglets. The
noise that the piglets made was indescribable, which is maybe why I
remember it so vividly.

Today, like most of the things we did in childhood (picking primroses,
collecting birds' eggs, lighting campfires and building tree houses),
it would all be regarded as both illegal and - probably - perverted in
today's nanny state and the farmer would have been incarcerated for
child abuse, and I would have been 'taken into care'. Undoubtedly, I
would have taken up serious crime, if only by way of amusement and as
a means of keeping myself occupied.

Finding a vet here was quite another problem as there are no livestock
farms anywhere in the vicinity and the only vets around will touch
nothing larger than a pet dog. My enquiries in Casablanca brought looks
of blank incredulity that made me think that they were seriously
considering sending for the 'men in white coats'. I would have to find
another solution.

Meanwhile, El Gee thrived, blissfully unaware of what I was plotting
against him.

Tales of Benshasha Archive

PedanticBarSteward

08.05.08 Front Page

Back Issue Page