Araweelo

On the tracks of the northern Somali country there are heaps of small stones that nobody admits to starting. They sit at the edge of the path, knee-high or higher, and in among the grey rubble there are scraps of cloth and sprigs of green thorn going brown in the heat. A caravan comes by. A man stoops, picks up a stone and throws it onto the pile. A woman behind him tears a strip from the hem of her skirt and tucks it between the stones. Both of them are answering the same queen, and they are giving her very different answers.

Her name is Araweelo, and the cairns are hers. That is the one point on which every early record agrees. The French explorer Georges Révoil, travelling in the valley of the Darror in the far northeast, wrote down in 1882 that the tumuli were called the women’s heaps and that the evil genius of a dead queen lived in every one built after the pattern of her grave. Harold Swayne, a British officer who spent the years from 1885 to 1893 surveying the country, heard the story from a man of the Esa Musa while camped on the Golis range, and again from men of the Habr Awal, and published it as the tale of Arroweilo. Ralph Drake-Brockman gave the fullest telling in *British Somaliland* in 1912, under the name Arawailo. Three outsiders, a generation apart, in different corners of the country, all set down the same core story.

That story is set a long time ago. Drake-Brockman’s informants said thousands of years, in the country later held by the Habr Toljaala. Swayne’s said it was in the days before the Somali clans, when an older people held the land, and the great cairns on the hilltops belonged to that vanished age. Araweelo ruled from a place called Murihi, and by 1912 all that marked her capital was a huge mound of stones she was supposed to lie beneath. Révoil called her a conquering queen. No telling names her parents or says how she came to the throne. She simply is the queen, and she is feared.

What she did is the reason she is remembered. In Révoil’s version she ordered the mutilation of male children to make her hold on the kingdom secure. In Drake-Brockman’s she turned against her male subjects toward the end of her life and had the boys gelded. Swayne’s informant put it more bluntly: she conceived a ferocious hatred of all male children, and she was the origin of every evil in women to this day. That last line shows who was doing the talking. It was men, and they were not trying to be fair.

The heart of the tale is a single boy. In the Drake-Brockman telling, Araweelo’s own daughter gives birth to a son and the queen orders him cut. The mother begs for time until he is weaned. The queen agrees. Then until he can walk. Then until he can herd the sheep and goats and have something of a childhood. At last the daughter asks that he be allowed to reach manhood, to wear the tobe, carry a shield, a sword and two spears, build thorn enclosures and water the camels, and the queen grants it on one condition: at the end of it he must be handed over like the rest of his sex. It is bargaining in slow motion, and every year it buys is a year the queen does not notice she is losing.

The young man grows up and finds that every other boy of his age has been cut. He talks it over with them, and they agree that he will kill her. Each morning he goes to Araweelo and asks if he should take the camels to water, and each morning she says no, because she has not yet washed her little finger. The next day it is the ring finger. For seven days she gives the same excuse with a different finger each time, and the legend, as Drake-Brockman admits, never explains why. On the eighth morning she walks with him to the wells.

He has warned his friends to watch. If she cries out like a man when the spear goes in, he tells them, they must come and help, because then everyone will know she was a man all along. If she cries out like a woman, they can leave her to him. The spear goes in and she gives the woman’s cry. The men rejoice and the women weep.

Swayne heard a harsher ending. There the mother flees with her infant son to a far country, and he comes back grown, with a sword, and catches the queen alone in a mountain pass. He cuts her to pieces, ties the pieces onto a camel and sends it off with a slash across its flank. The camel bolts across the whole country, and wherever a piece of Araweelo falls, a passer-by says a prayer and throws a stone on it to keep her down. In that version every cairn is a grave, and she is buried everywhere.

Drake-Brockman’s version explains the two halves of the custom. The women buried her with great ceremony, and the men came from far and near to throw stones at her grave in contempt. So men throw stones and women leave cloth or twigs. Révoil recorded the women’s side in more detail. Passing one of the heaps, a woman would first kiss the ground and pray to turn the evil spirit away, then add her own stone. Before deciding on a marriage, Somali women went to the spirit for advice, and they called on it so that their sons would not be born without their sex. The spirit that had once gelded boys was now asked to protect them.

This is the power Araweelo kept: a presence in stone and a say over births and marriages, felt along every path where someone has begun a heap. Her limit is the one the story gives her. She could put off the eighth morning with excuses, but not forever, and a spear at the well was enough to end her. Drake-Brockman separated her heaps of small stones, fresh ones always appearing, from the great old graves of heavy stones on the hilltops that Somalis called talo, though Swayne’s informants told her story over the big hill cairns. He added that Somalis started new Araweelo mounds for reasons they would not tell him.

In the twentieth century she took on another life. Retellings in Somali and in the diaspora often turn the old tale around and make her a queen who fought for the rights of women, and a bilingual Somali and English collection, *Sheekooyinkii boqoraddii Arraweelo*, The Stories of Queen Arraweelo, was published by Mohammed Sheikh Hassan in Stockholm in 2002. Modern arguments over whether she was a heroine or a monster go back to the same small stones. A queen who wanted a world without grown men was stoned by men and honoured by women, and both kept at it for centuries.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Araweelo in Somali legend?

Araweelo was a legendary Somali queen who is said to have ordered the castration of male children in her kingdom. Early records place her far in the past, before the present Somali clans, with her capital at a place called Murihi. She was killed by a grandson her daughter had kept from the knife.

How did Queen Araweelo die?

In the version Ralph Drake-Brockman recorded in 1912, her uncut grandson asked every morning to take the camels to water. For seven days Araweelo refused, each day saying she had not washed a different finger, and on the eighth she walked with him to the wells, where he speared her. In the version H. G. C. Swayne recorded, a young man hacked her to pieces in a mountain pass and sent her remains off tied to a runaway camel.

Why do Somalis throw stones on Araweelo’s cairns?

The small roadside heaps of stones are said to hold Araweelo’s spirit. Men traditionally threw stones on them in contempt, or to keep her down, while women placed a strip of cloth or a green twig on them out of respect. Georges Révoil reported in 1882 that women also kissed the ground and prayed before adding a stone.

Is Araweelo a hero or a villain?

The oldest written records, collected by European travellers from Somali tellers between 1882 and 1912, present Araweelo as a feared tyrant whose death was celebrated by men. Many modern Somali retellings instead portray her as a queen who fought for women’s rights. Both readings draw on the same tradition, in which women honoured her grave while men stoned it.

Related Entries

Somali Mythology, Werehyena, Adbar, Amazons, Medb, Hermes