The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963) by Margaret Laurence: a Canadian writer in British Somaliland

The book

The Prophet's Camel Bell is a memoir by Margaret Laurence (1926 to 1987), later known as one of Canada's leading novelists. It was published in 1963 and appeared in the United States in 1964 from Alfred A. Knopf under the title New Wind in a Dry Land: An Account of a Sojourn Among the Nomads of Somaliland (ECU Libraries; Kirkus Reviews). It has stayed in print in Canada, later with an afterword by the critic Clara Thomas (Penguin Random House Canada).

Where it comes from

Laurence lived in the British Somaliland Protectorate from early 1951 to mid-1952. Her husband Jack Laurence, a Canadian engineer, had been hired by the colonial government to build reservoirs in the desert to catch rainwater runoff, and she travelled with him to the work camps. For a short time she also worked as secretary to the colonial administrator. In the same period she worked on English versions of Somali poems and stories, which were printed in 1954 as A Tree for Poverty. She wrote the memoir about ten years later, after the couple had lived in the Gold Coast, now Ghana (Wendy Roy, Canadian Literature, 2001). The colony is described on British Somaliland, 1884 to 1960.

What it covers

The book describes the land, customs, language, poetry and wildlife of the protectorate (Border Crossings, 1977). Kirkus Reviews summarised its account of a region that had gone a year without rain, with people and animals struggling towards water, and the violent return of the rains; a tense encounter with armed men; the relationships among the Somalis she met; and the ruined towns, shifting empires and expatriates she observed beyond the camp (Kirkus Reviews). Several chapters are character sketches of Somali men who worked with the couple, including their driver. A chapter on Somali oral literature is taken almost directly from A Tree for Poverty, with references to God replaced by the word Allah (Wendy Roy). See also Somali poetry.

Laurence also wrote about the lives of Somali women as she saw them from the outside: marriage and bride-price, polygyny, and childrearing. Because she spent most of her time in camps of working men, she met relatively few women (Wendy Roy).

An answer to Burton

The critic Wendy Roy argues that one aim of the book was to answer earlier writing such as Richard Burton's 1856 First Footsteps in East Africa. Laurence follows Burton's route, shows that a complex society had flourished long before his visit, and notes that at a mosque where Burton boasted of having preached, "No one here had ever heard of Burton" (Wendy Roy).

How it has been read

Kirkus called it "creative, informative and a lesson in understanding". Joy Kuropatwa, writing in Border Crossings in 1977, saw it as more than a travel book and linked its themes to Laurence's later novels. Later scholars have been more mixed. Wendy Roy credits Laurence with recognising that she had arrived "in righteous disapproval of the empire-builders" only to find that "I, too, had been of that company", but notes that the book still describes Somalis with words such as "inscrutable", and that it leans on Octave Mannoni's theory of colonial "dependence", which Frantz Fanon and others rejected (Wendy Roy).