Africa Askew Read online

  Another story, of something which had happened just a couple of weeks before my flight, I didn’t hear until I reached Bosaso. The co-pilot hadn’t shut the aeroplane door properly, and was sucked out over the Kenyan-Somalian desert without a parachute.

  So our plane was flown by Asians. This reassured me somewhat, but not completely. Rather than giving us a safety briefing, the co-pilot snapped at us: “The flight takes three and a half hours. Don’t give us any trouble!” And he had to crawl into the cockpit on his stomach because the khat sacks were piled almost to the top of the door.

  We four passengers were left with a small air hole right at the back of the plane, just big enough to sit in. The whole aircraft smelt of khat, just like a town florist’s.

  It can be an unsettling prospect, to be shut up with strangers in such a small space. Added to this, I often suffer from a fear of flying when I’m in these small planes. They sway violently, and sometimes drop into low pressure regions. This time, though, it was ok, because the plane had twin engines. It was relatively stable in flight.

  Mohammed – as the young man later introduced himself – lay down on the khat sacks, pulled out a couple of stems, put them in his mouth, and almost immediately fell asleep.

  That gave us a bit more space on our bench at the back and the second young man, with “ADEAS” and three stripes on his jacket, could sit at our feet, thus entirely devoting himself to his conversation with the girl next to me.

  She, too, was wearing the hijab. As Mohammed later translated, she was at school in Komarock, a suburb of Nairobi. And when the aeroplane encountered turbulence later on, and she briefly took off her covering, we could see that she’d painted her toenails – women aren’t allowed to do anything more – in heinous black. And also that the rather awkward girl with the chubby face was hiding a really pretty teenager.

  After a good three hours of flying, we offloaded some of our cargo in Galkayo. This was home for ADEAS. He had only flown to Nairobi – to civilisation – to have an operation.

  When our door opened, there were already two drivers waiting impatiently on the airfield with their utility vehicles to collect the khat sacks destined for them. Two and a half minutes later they shot out of the airport gate and drove through the town, hooting frantically to tell everyone that the khat had finally arrived and could now be bought at the market.

  After the stopover, Mohammed sat with us at the back. He was over 6 feet tall. And because of his reaction to my announcement that, if necessary, I would pee in a Tupperware pot I’d brought with me, I would have thought he was older - maybe in his mid-twenties. I knew that planes like this didn’t have any toilets and, appalled, he had said: “But that’s disgusting!”

  Now, however, he told us that he was seventeen and lived with his mother, brother and sister in London. The luggage receipt from the international airline was still on his bag, and his English was excellent, with a slight American accent.

  His family had fled to London due to the civil war in northern Somalia in the 1980s. “Because the clans in Somalia are fighting each other”, he explained. And when he told me about London, how he was at a top secondary school, liked listening to hip-hop best of all, and worked in a restaurant in a burger chain at the weekend, he struck me as your typical cool English teenager. From a minority background, and perhaps not living in Chelsea, but perfectly integrated, self-assured, and streets ahead of the Somali boys of his age in Nairobi.

  It all fitted. His basketball t-shirt, and the fact that he explained as though it were a matter of course, that his mother lived on “welfare”, or social security benefits.

  But the closer we got to Bosaso, the more we saw of a different Mohammed. One who complained that the plane was flying so slowly and that the trip was dragging on for so long. I can’t remember now what made me realise this, but it was suddenly obvious to me that Mohammed was dreadfully afraid of what was awaiting him in Bosaso.

  He had told us that he was going to visit his father. He said that he worked there as a fisherman, and always sent some money to London. So I asked Mohammed how long it was since he had last seen his father. His response made everything clear. He’d never met him. He said it as though it were the most normal thing in the world. And he’d never spoken to his father on the phone either. And it was the same for the girl with the hijab, beside me on the bench.

  I’d never have guessed that the teenagers had never been to Somalia before. They’d spoken Somali to each other. And even now, I could only make out the word “Majerteen” from their conversation.

  That is the name of the clan which controls the region around Bosaso. The girl had probably asked whether Mohammed belonged to the Majerteen. That would have made certain things easier for both of them.

  When I asked Mohammed about it, however, he said they hadn’t been talking about their clan affiliation. He acted as though that were of no significance at all. Then he stared intently out of the window. He no longer heard the girl ask him something, and when he didn’t react she remained quiet and fiddled nervously with her watch.

  The idea of what awaited them in Bosaso had sunk them both deep in thought. This atmosphere remained in the air until we landed, like bad breath. It was something everyone had to come to terms with by themselves though. There wasn’t anything left for them to discuss now. Not with each other, and certainly not with me, who might have learnt something they didn’t want to disclose.

  I felt sorry for the two teenagers now. They’d fled abroad with their parents because of the civil war. They only know Somalia from the horror stories in the media. And now they were on their way to a strange country, where every household is armed, where shootings take place daily, and where they would be considered “Sijuis” (from “Kisuaheli”, meaning “I don’t know”), or not true Somalis in any case.

  The plane had first encountered turbulence on our descent into Galkayo, because the wind can sweep across the hot, flat steppe here unchecked. And now, again, the plane was lurching wildly. The girl pulled her hijab up over her head and, whimpering, clung onto the chain that held the disembarkation ladder to the aeroplane’s fuselage.

  Mohammed translated for me – she said she always had problems with her heart on landing. I knew these heart problems – an irrepressible fear of flying. I’d hidden myself, moaning, in my seat often enough. But covering my eyes had helped me, too. I think it’s because I find it easier this way not to think about how high our aeroplane is above the ground.

  And as is often the case, when others are frightened you realise properly for the first time that you don’t feel so bad. It was now my turn to lie face down on the khat, to mentally stretch my arms and float, relaxed, down to the ground. I was pleased that the roles had reversed for once. That I, the white person, for once wasn’t the only one who was nervous because he was about to land in a foreign country.

  It happened as expected. Outside, in front of the aeroplane, I was immediately surrounded by a group of five or six men. They seemed agitated. They tried to drown each other out with their questions. Who was I, what was I doing here? – I was just attacked by questions like this. They only let up once I’d identified the man from the aid organisation who was meant to collect me. I hadn’t been allowed to fly on their plane, but Garibaldi, their contact locally, had said he was prepared to get me a visa.

  Beside the airfield was a hut, made from pieces of warped wood nailed together – Bosaso airport terminal. An official led me inside and stamped my passport.

  The group of men, realising that everything would go smoothly with my entry, now turned, as one man, on Mohammed. As I went past him he was saying, helplessly, that no-one was there to collect him.

  From inside the hut, through the open window, I heard the loud dispute outside: “Who is your father? We don’t know him! But you said he was your father. What you’re saying makes no sense!” Mohammed stuttered. You could tell that he was becoming uncertain, that he was afraid. It was precisely this, however, which seemed
to egg the men on. At first, Mohammed had still been speaking Somali, but they had immediately spoken English, making it crystal clear that he was considered a foreigner here.

  When I left the hut again, Mohammed was sitting on a wobbly chair, and was no longer really trying to answer all the questions he was being bombarded with. He was shaking all over. He now said quietly that the girl who had been with us on the plane should actually have taken him with her. Was he already losing his nerve?

  Garibaldi urged me to get into the car. He said, about Mohammed: “What? He’s from London? What the hell is he doing here?! Maybe they’ve thrown him out over there.”

  A couple of days later, I tried find Mohammed. But unsuccessfully. At the airport, I discovered that he’d finally been picked up by an uncle. But I couldn’t find this uncle.

  And Mohamoud Askar, whom I would get to know for myself later, and who was also one of the men who had hassled Mohammed, said the next day that they’d been suspicious of Mohammed because he’d spoken Somali, and then English again. The border guards had apparently thought “the boy isn’t all there. First he says he knows what his father looks like. And then that he doesn’t know.”

  So was Mohammed crazy? He’d seemed quite normal to me. But then, many people in Somalia consider themselves mad, as I would learn for myself later. It’s just a question of the perspective.

  In Bosaso, for example, a crowd suddenly converged in the street outside my hotel. It was the middle of the afternoon. It looked to me as though the man in the group of curious onlookers was preaching. But when I asked one of the crowd, he simply turned his index finger, pointed towards his temple, and said: “People are coming back from Europe and want to introduce a democracy here. They’re not quite right in the head.”

  And of course, Mohammed also had his own ideas about his compatriots. After I’d laughed about the pace at which the two drivers in Galkayo had transported the khat, he had stuck his chin out and said, quite matter-of-factly, “Well they’re all crazy anyway!”

  SOMALIA

  At the easternmost point with Abdullahi (Bosaso – Hurdiye and back)

  Somalia is every traveller’s nightmare. Since the outbreak of the country’s anarchic civil war in the early 1990s, you can’t do this and you can’t do that without endangering yourself – in fact, there’s not much you can do. The country has disintegrated into clan-ruled provinces. Travelling alone, without a bodyguard, is only possible in the two “peaceful” regions in the north – the autonomous region of Puntland in the north-eastern corner of the country, and the self-declared Republic of Somaliland in the north-western corner.

  The background to the civil war in Somalia is quick to relate, as the foundations for the country’s later collapse had already been laid by the subjugation of the Somali regions to a range of colonial powers – the centre, later the Somali Republic, was colonised by the Italians; the south, today’s north-east Kenya and the north-west, today’s Somaliland, by the British; the north-east, today’s Djibouti, by the French; and the west, the Ogaden region, was ceded by the British at the end of the 19th century to today’s Ethiopia.

  In 1960, the former British Somaliland and the former Italian centre united to form one country, which gained independence as the Somali Republic. The majority of the Djibouti population (in particular the Afar people who constituted the small state’s second-largest population group after the Somalis) and the French, had voted two years earlier against a union with the Somali Republic.

  Even the independent Somali Republic’s national flag made the neighbouring states of Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti wary, since each had several million Somalis living on their territory. The flag depicted five gold stars on a blue background. The stars represented the five Somali regions which the country wanted to unite into one territory. And the jingoistic rhetoric of the government in Mogadishu, about a united Great Somalia, certainly didn’t help to dispel the neighbours’ distrust.

  In 1969, the apparently progressive Somali army chief, Siad Barre, gained power through a bloodless coup. He flirted with Marxism, and turned towards the Soviet Union and the progressive Arabic countries.

  In the summer of 1977 the Somali army advanced westwards, and tried to take control of the Ethiopian regions of Somalia. The Ogaden War had begun.

  The attack on Ethiopia was a bold move, which ultimately spelled the collapse of the Barre regime. It had posed an unsolvable dilemma for the Soviet Union, which was an ally both of Barre and of the Communist regime in Ethiopia.

  Before the Ogaden region fell completely to Somali, the Soviet Union decided to rush to the aid of communist Ethiopia. Overnight, 20,000 Cuban soldiers and several hundred Soviet military advisers were flown to the front. They saved Ethiopia’s Mengistu regime from military defeat. In the spring of 1978, all Somali soldiers were drive out of Ogaden.

  Siad Barre now turned to the West in his search for allies. But it was already too late for this. Supported by Ethiopia, several rebel groups formed in the 1980s, and tried to oust him. In the late 1980s, Somalia lost de facto control over Somaliland. In 1991, the former British colony declared its independence.

  In the end, Barre’s army disintegrated along clan lines. Once he had been driven out of the capital, Mogadishu, a number of warlords fought for power there. Somalia became a synonym for a country torn apart by anarchic civil war, where clan militias held each other in check.

  Since the early 1990s, the self-declared Republic of Somaliland, in the north-west, has banished civil war from its territory and is considered very safe for travellers. Admittedly, though, no country in the world recognises the small state’s independence.

  Suffering from insecurity and disorder, the country’s north-eastern corner also declared its autonomy in the late 1990s, under the name Puntland.

  Puntland was the name given to the Horn of Africa in Ancient Egypt, and it was an important trading partner for the empire on the Nile. It provided gold and ivory, tropical woods and slaves.

  The Majerteen are the dominant sub-clan in Puntland, and since no-one else disputes their political supremacy, the autonomous region is considered relatively safe by Somali standards.

  Nonetheless, everywhere in Somalia it’s advisable, in any case, to accept the help of aid organisations. They are the only ones with a reliable infrastructure, and with employees who can advise you on what you can do at present without risking your life, and what you should avoid.

  The greatest danger in southern Somali is kidnapping. The bandits often demand ransom money and, sporadically, even disputed salary payments. There have often been cases of aid organisation employees being kidnapped by their former members of staff, who claimed they had not been paid or that they’d been unfairly dismissed. The ransom demands have levelled out at $40,000 per person. And even if the aid organisations always claim, once the hostages have been released, that they didn’t pay.....they did. Such kidnappers don’t recognise any other negotiation basis. Even if they wanted to, the warlords would only rarely be able to exert pressure on the bandits.

  Not even the warlords, with their militias, dare enter the Bermuda Triangle, a notorious district of Mogadishu.

  Therefore, aid workers and journalists – after all, no-one else ever finds themselves in Somalia – can’t leave the house without bodyguards. In Mogadishu, I never drove through the city without a handful of militiamen in the luggage area or the back seat of an SUV. Sometimes we even took two cars, so that more men with Kalashnikovs could accompany us.

  I wasn’t even allowed to go for a swim in the sea on my own. The beach was only 100 yards, across level sand, from the grounds of the aid organisation where I was staying. However, the two men patrolling the beach, or standing guard, legs apart and with Kalashnikovs pointing skywards, rather spoilt the fun of my swim.

  Now, in Bosaso, I again heard warnings from all sides. Garibaldi advised me not to leave the hotel unaccompanied. “These Islamic fundamentalists come out of the Mosques all worked up, and will throw
stones at you”, he warned.

  And he certainly wasn’t saying this without reason – after all, just two years earlier a Kenyan colleague of mine had had stones thrown at her. She’d left the hotel wearing a sleeveless t-shirt.

  And even the advice of a native aid worker – “Don’t worry too much. You really only have to watch out for crazy people” – only slightly reassured me. Depending on your perspective, that could be an awful lot of people in Somalia.

  I was disappointed. I didn’t want to have to see the country, yet again, simply from the hotel window or from the passenger seat of an SUV. I’d already visited the country half a dozen times, which was more often than I’d been to many other African countries, but I still didn’t know anything about its people.

  I was now in the autonomous region of Puntland. There was said to be something of a resurrection of governmental administration here. This time, I didn’t want to have to keep my distance yet again. This time, I didn’t want to have to put up with panes of glass between me and the local people.

  On the first morning, however, I started off on the safe observation platform of the hotel terrace. From here I had a wonderful view of the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean and of the harbour basin, made of roughly-hewn rocks, as well as of mountain ranges of pale red rock beyond the town, patterned by shadows from the cloudy sky.