A Somalia Notebook $ Critique by Bashir Goth

[NASSIR]

A Somalia Notebook

 

M.J. Akbar, mjakbar@asianage.com

Jan 26, 2006

 

How many guns make a warlord? 25 technicals, so about 250 armed men with Russian AK-47s and Belgian pistols make you a lord, and you can go up the hierarchy to viscount or marquis or earl or proper baron if you include a couple of anti-aircraft guns and artillery pieces. But there are no kings in Somalia. A top of the line AK-47 costs between $400 and $500; many of the weapons are below the line. I picked up one, while we were lunching off chunks of dry roast camel in a dhaba, lent to me by a young man in a shy smile and a lungi. It was heavy, a little less than ten kilograms. I gave it back after making appropriate noises, carefully avoiding even passing contact with the trigger. At a rough glance, my benefactor had about a million and a half Somali shillings worth of ammunition in his belts: A dollar fetches three bullets.

 

Three great symbols of modern civilization are available in Somalia — the AK-47, Coca Cola and the mobile phone. Three mobile phone companies, Nationlink, TelecomSomalia and Hormut, ensure proper competition. An international call costs only 30 American cents. They also double up as money-transfer operations and one of them (defunct after landing up in the suspect category) sent Washington into paroxysms after 9/11 with a word that previously did not exist in a Western dictionary but was perfectly understood in much of Asia, hawala. Americans were in Somalia a decade before 9/11 but never picked up this word. Maybe that is why they never stayed. You have to understand Somalia to stay in Somalia.

 

War is a great boon to technology. A cruise liner defended itself against heavily armed Somali pirate boats last year with the LRAD, Long Range Acoustic Device. It emits a sound from a long range that the human ear cannot tolerate and has proved a brilliant answer to pirate guns. So as long as pirates are human they can be driven. I am told that the device is being used in Iraq to disperse unwanted crowds. For more details on LRAD check Google. The Almighty, Omnipotent Google knows all.

 

Their present having been stolen, Somalis take comfort in the past. Ancient Egyptians imported cinnamon, frankincense, tortoise shells and “slaves of a superior sort†from Somalia and conceded that Somali civilization matched their own. If the Magi were kings from Africa, then it is at least plausible that the one carrying frankincense for the infant Jesus came from Somalia. Ibn Batuta, the 13th century Tunisian traveler who did not waste time on inconsequential places, found Maqdashaw a “town of enormous size†where “a single person ... eats as much as the whole company of us would eat ... and they are corpulent in the extremeâ€. The only parallel I can think of is a Kashmiri enjoying his wazwan in front of us mere mortals, but of course the Kashmiri is not corpulent. The waters of Chashm e Shahi keep him slim.

 

How many clans make a nation? The Arabs found 39 when Mogadishu became one of their principal trading colonies in the tenth century. This was the breakdown: Mukri (12), Djidati (12), Akati (6), Ismaili (6) and Afifi (3). The Mukri, who also had a dynastic ulema, were in the ascendant when Ibn Batuta visited the port. The nation state is a recent idea. Nomadic Somalis lived across a far wider region than their present borders, including Ethiopia and Kenya. European colonization came only toward the end of the 19th century. The British came to the north because, as they put it, they wanted guaranteed meat supplies for their garrison in Aden. The Italians wanted the fruit groves of the south. The French were tempted, typically, by temptation and occupied Djibouti. The clans did not wait to be conquered. They took the easy way out and sold their rights, most often for less than a hundred dollars. The treaties were remarkable for their three-point simplicity. Point 1: All rights are yours. Point 2: I get 70 or 100 dollars. Point 3: You have the last word in all disputes. Neighbors could hardly resist exploiting such weakness. In 1891 Emperor Menelik II, founder of modern Ethiopia, wrote to European powers: “Ethiopia has been for 14 centuries a Christian island in a sea of pagans. If Powers at a distance come forward to partition Africa between them, I do not intend to remain an indifferent spectator.†He did not. He sent word to Amir Abdullahi, ruler of the historic city of Harar and pivotal to Muslim East Africa, to accept his suzerainty. The Amir, heir to a dynasty of 72 generations, sent presents and a helpful suggestion, that Menelik should accept Islam. Menelik promised to conquer Harar and turn the principal mosque into a church. The Medihane Alam Church, in front of the Galma Amir Abdullahi, or the old palace, is evidence that Menelik kept his word.

 

The mosque was converted but not the people. While Ethiopia proudly and correctly claimed to have become Christian at the time of Constantinople, lands like Kenya changed only during the wave of missionary activity that accompanies colonization in the 19th century. As Jomo Kenyatta, first president of independent Kenya, famously said, “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible in their hands and we had the lands... We closed our eyes to pray and when we opened them, we had the Bible in our hands and they had the lands...â€

 

Harar has the feel of a city that has traveled a long way through history but now has nowhere left to go.

 

UNESCO has recognized Harar. There is some excitement among the educated elite that UNESCO may do more for Harar than all the rulers since the defeat of Amir Abdullahi at the battle of Chelenko in 1887. There is hope but not too much trust. As a sociologist who did his postgraduate studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Bombay some twenty years ago, told me over mercato in the lovely café in the courtyard of the city, “We have been living too long on a diet of pledges.â€

 

Little was done for the people, who are of Somali origin, but bitter wars were fought over them. In the 1970s, Siad Barre of Somalia invaded Ethiopia to take back the ****** region, where Harar is. Talk that ****** possessed huge reserves of oil and gas might have encouraged the invasion. Siad Barre’s tanks penetrated deep into the desert before they were defeated by Cuban soldiers who acted as mercenaries of the Soviet Union (Ethiopia had a Marxist-Leninist regime then, a fact that merely Socialist Siad Barre forgot). Hararis remember the Cubans as a wild lot, shooting donkeys playfully even after being told how valuable these pack animals were.

 

A few Cuban faces in a traditional and conservative society are more evidence that “liberators†make their own rules.

 

The elders, gradually losing their eminence as a new anger slowly seeps through the young, are resigned to stagnation, and the eyes flicker with old zeal only when they dream that Menelik’s church will once again become a mosque in their lifetime. The people, as elsewhere in Ethiopia, can be strikingly good— looking.

 

The mansion in which the Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie, was born is in the old city, called Jubal, and was built by an Indian. You walk down a narrow stone alley full of shops and tailors with Singer sewing machines. Indians, particularly Bohras from Bombay, dominated commerce during Muslim rule in Harar. Haile Selassie was born here because his father, Menelik’s brother, was made governor after the defeat of Amir Abdullahi. UNESCO has allocated funds for the restoration of the mansion, but ten families have made it their home and will not move. The most interesting occupant is a healer.

 

He sits, erect, on a mattress at the center of one end of a spacious drawing room on the ground floor. His fame is recorded for posterity in a notebook where his literate patients describe their miraculous recovery, and attach passport-size photographs to add a face to their identity. He is 52 and learned his skills from his father, whose picture is framed on the high wall behind him, above a carpet with a drawing of the Holy Mosque at Makkah, and a much-extended string of prayer beads which he uses for dhikr, a Sufi form of devotion, at night. A woman enters, kisses his extended hand twice while he continues talking to us, and joins another with a child in a corner. There is a telephone on a table, and two small tape-players, one broken. The telephone rings once during our visit, and is picked by an aide lounging on the side who, we realize later, also speaks English. A notice board indicates that the healer cures all the tough diseases, including gynecological problems, but, alas, back pain is not on the list. He assures me that he can repair nerves that wrack your back as well, and there has been a cancer patient or two who has gone home happy. He explains that he uses herbs and plants, and not shaman-style magic.

 

Perhaps he tells villagers, who crowd around him in the mornings since they have to return by nightfall, something different; perhaps he is equally candid with them. He asks about herbal medicines in India and I include Tibet’s fame in my response.

 

The notice outside affirms that the healer does not accept fees, but donations for the cause are not unwelcome. I do not use his expertise, but my donation is not unwelcome either.

[NASSIR]

Akbar's Somalia Notebook of Infamy

 

Bashir Goth

January 28, 2006

 

Wardheernews

 

In the opinion article "A Somalia Notebook", published by Arab News on 15 January 2006, the writer, A.J. Akbar, marshaled all the expletives he could muster to insult and ridicule the Somali people of the Horn of Africa. I wracked my mind to find a single justification for such uncalled for and invective diatribe which may even cause some of the most racist writers to blush.

 

Setting the tone for his sworn crusade in a cliché description of Somalia's well known situation as a war-torn country awash with armory where nearly 250 trigger happy teenagers with some technicals could turn a rogue into a warlord, the writer surges ahead by describing Somalis as pirates, slaves, inferior people who couldn't wait to sell their land and pride in a whistle to European colonizers and excessively fat due to their voracious appetite for food. He also brands them as pusillanimous beings who readily allowed their mosques to be turned into churches to save their skins, backward people whose only experience with modernization are the Ak-47 guns, Coca Cola and mobile phones and pathetically ignorant stock who trust their life and fate with shamans and fraudulent Muslim clerics whose only qualification of religion is long prayer beads in which they practice their faulty Sufism brand of Islam.

 

The writer gathers his testimony of infamy during his short encounter in Mogadishu and through a tour de grand through what he calls " the Almighty Google". He selects quotes out of context from notes ranging from the medieval Arab traveler Ibn Battuta, 19th century European missionaries and other odd sources with a premeditated intention to inflict maximum harm on the Somali people, may be with an erroneous misconception of all Somalis being ignorant people who will not be able to read his spite. A good proof of this is the strange juxtaposition of fiction and facts and viewing all people with Muslim names he encounters from Mogadishu to Harar and Addis Ababa as Somalis, thus giving himself the wide liberty of rubbing every despicable characteristic he finds on his hapless Somali punching bags. It didn't matter to him whether Amir Abdullahi who ruled the city state of Harar in the 19th century was of the Harari or Oromo ethnic race, or whether the modern shaman squatter of the mosque-turned Church was an Afar or any of the many races that live in Ethiopia. For him any person bearing a Muslim name and was engaged in something cowardly and ignoble, had only one name - Somali.

 

Now using the same modality of selectivity and premeditated goals let me highlight the bright side of the Somali people that M.J. Akbar tried to suppress.

Where the eminent Journalist's perceptive eyes could see only AK-47s, Coca Cola and cell phones as the only symbols of civilization in Somalia, they failed to register the more than 10 universities that have been established in different parts of Somalia and breakaway Somaliland, thus showing the Somali people's resilience despite problems. Other significant developments that slipped the writer's attention are the more than a dozen private airlines that reach every corner of the country where Somalia used to have only one national carrier during the heyday of Siyad Barre's rule. A little more investigative work would even have revealed to the writer the peace, stability and robust trade taking place in places like Somaliland and Puntland.

 

The widely admired achievements of the breakaway Somaliland often called by foreign observers as the "Africa's Best Kept Secret" and "The Little Country That Could" has been beyond the reach of the writer's eyes. It is a mystery how the Mighty Google failed to show him the peace and stability and the impressive democratization process that has been taking place in Somaliland over the last 15 years. It almost questionable how any objective Journalist would miss to notice a country that held three peaceful and fair elections including municipal, presidential and parliamentary elections under international observers. A visit to other major towns other than Mogadishu such as Bossasso, Beletwein, Merca and others in Somalia as well as Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, would have shown the writer that the Somali people have the will and the wisdom to build and prosper.

 

In an out of context quotation from Ibn Battuta's travelogue, the writer brands the Somali people as extremely fat. He ignores that Ibn Battuta stayed only few days in Mogadishu and his contacts were limited to the city's ruler and his entourage. No serious intellectual will take few opulent traders as representative of the whole people. Besides Ibn Battuta didn't meet Somali nomads who are the real Somalis. Despite that the writer sidestepped other good things that Ibn Battuta said about Mogadishu and its Sultan. He said:†Upon arrival in Mogadishu harbor, it was the custom for small native boats ("sunbuqs") to approach the arriving vessel, and their occupants to offer food and hospitality to the merchants on the ship...on Friday, the Sultan sent clothing for them (Ibn Battuta and his delegates) to wear to the mosque. The clothing consisted of a silk wrapper (trousers were unknown), "an upper garment of Egyptian linen with markings, a lined gown of Jerusalem material, and an Egyptian turban with embroideries."

 

Amazingly, the writer failed to notice the unique physical features of the Somali people, a phenomenon that has bedazzled foreign writers since the dawn of history. They unanimously describe the Somali people as being tall, slim and handsome. The writer has not only decided to sidestep this fact but he branded the whole Somali race as corpulent although he didn't hesitate to voice his admiration for the beauty of the Ethiopian people; at least a redeeming act for his otherwise slanderous piece. Why even internationally acclaimed Somali super models such as Iman and Waris Derie didn't come to his mind is indeed a cause of suspicion. I will quote below only a few of the Western writers' admiration for the good looks of the Somali people. Describing the different races including Somalis he saw in Aden during British rule, David Holden writes the following in his book Farwell to Arabia:

 

"...These are financial lords of Aden; the serfs are in Cater's slums, a dusty, geometrical grid of streets where all the styles and faces of Arabia and the Indian Ocean have fetched up over the years of imperial rule. Arabs of the coast and Arabs from Sudan, in long white dishdashers and turbans; Arabs of the interior and the Yemen in printed cotton Futas, or kilts, and bright, embroidered Kashmiri shawls wound their heads. Somalis, proud of carriage and skinny of leg, stalking among the rest like black and glistening warding birds in a throng of chattering sparrows. Indians crouched in dark cubby holes with sewing machines and Pakistanis squatting sleepily among bales of cloth..."

The versatile 19th century English adventurer writer Richard Burton, describing the beauty of a Somali girl in Dobo, Harawe valley, wrote in hisFirst Steps in East Africa:

 

"... The head was well formed, and gracefully placed upon a long thin neck and narrow shoulders; the hair, brow, and nose were unexceptionable, there was an arch look in the eyes of jet and pearl, and a suspicion of African protuberance about the lips, which gave the countenance an exceeding naiveté. Her skin was a warm, rich nut-brown, an especial charm in these regions, and her movements had that grace which suggests perfect symmetry of limb..."

 

Joe Palmer, a former American Professor of English, who stayed sometime in Somalia in the sixties wrote ". Somali men are handsome, wiry and tall, as fit as marathon runners, full of pride, quite self-contained, having no need of you. They are tall because of natural selection; tall people see trouble in the bush coming sooner. Their beautiful maiden sisters, crowned with tonsures of black ringlets, are the infibulated property of their fathers."

Describing Somali boys watching their vehicles against theft in Mogadishu, he wrote "...Many of them were beautiful, with clear almond skin, large, dark eyes, noble noses and aquiline features that distinguish the noblest Somali from other."

 

Visiting modern Damascus, another western observer Bob Cromwell couldn't miss the beauty of Somali women:

 

"Damascus is a fascinating place to see and the people are fantastic. A fascinating ancient city, from before there was history. The most multi-cultural place I've been -- walking down the street you see a mix of Bedouin just in from the desert; urban dwellers; Yemeni and Somali women in brightly colored robes, looking like supermodels."

 

Ignoring all these facts at his fingertips, our writer chose to resort to two of Ibn Battuta's erroneous observations on Somali people that they were corpulent and that the Somali people of Zeila were rejecters or Shiites, while history and reality on the ground vouch for the Somali people being 100% Sunni of the Shafi'i school.

 

Relying on his patchy excerpts he couldn't wait to accuse the Somali people being inferior and weak people who genuflected for the colonial favors to buy their land and their pride:

"...The clans did not wait to be conquered. They took the easy way out and sold their rights, most often for less than a hundred dollars. The treaties were remarkable for their three-point simplicity. Point 1: All rights are yours. Point 2: I get 70 or 100 dollars. Point 3: You have the last word in all disputes..." He added that neighbors could hardly resist exploiting such weakness and the Abyssinian Emperor Menelik II, founder of modern Ethiopia, spread his suzerainty to the Islamic city state of Harar where the Emir Abdullah had readily handed over the town to the Emperor and accepted the Grand Mosque to be turned into a Church.

 

Again one may remind the writer of Joe Palmer's words that "...The first lesson a Somali boy learns is basic spearsmanship. How will you live if you do not know how to kill an attacking leopard?.." Surely a man who can wrestle with a leopard has no feeble hearted. It is also obvious that the British description of the Somali people as the " Irish of Africa" for their pride and unruly independence has never reached the ears of the eminent journalist.

 

A brief glance at history will also expose the writer's ignorance of the Somali people's heroic struggle against foreign occupation from the 16th century to the colonial days and beyond. Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (c1507-1543), a Somali Imam and General who was born near Zeila, capital of the medieval Adal State, conquered much of Ethiopia. His forces exhausted and devastated by the Imam's assault, the Ethiopian emperor Lebna Dengel (reigned 1508–40) appealed to Portugal for help. By then, the Imam, known as Gran or Guray, left-handed, marched all the way to the province of Tigray where he defeated an Ethiopian army that confronted him there, and on reaching Axum destroyed the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in which the Ethiopian emperors had been coronated for centuries.

 

A Portuguese force led by Christovao da Gama, brother of the famous explorer Vasco da Gama, and included 400 musketeers and a number of artisans and other non-combatantswho landed at the port of Massawa on February 10, 1541, in the reign of the emperor Gelawdewos. The Portuguese led force eventually succeeded to defeat and kill the Imam after fierce battles.

 

As American Ethiopian expert Paul B. Henze wrote "...In Ethiopia the damage which [Ahmad] Gragn did has never been forgotten. Every Christian highlander still hears tales of Gragn in his childhood." Henze said Haile Selassie referred to him in h is memoirs: "I have often had villagers in northern Ethiopia point out sites of towns, forts, churches and monasteries destroyed by Gragn as if these catastrophes had occurred only yesterday."

 

At the turn of the 20th century, the Somali hero Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, described by one scholar as the George Washington of Somali nationalism, led an exhaustive and long resistance war against the combined colonials powers of Britain, Italy and Ethiopia (1898-1920).

 

Not being able to break the will and resolve of the Mad Mullah, as the British called him, the British colonial government resorted to its Royal Air Force (RAF). In Jan - Feb 1920, RAF units made sorties against the Mad Mullah's dervish forces in what it called the RAF's first "little war". The airborne intervention, the first in Africa, was "the main instrument and decisive factor" in the success of the operation. Ten dH9s were dispatched to form "Z Force", and were used for bombing, strafing and as air ambulances according to military documents from the British Archives.

 

Bent on not leaving any insult unpeeled, the writer throws his last salvo by accusing Somalis of taking comfort in the past and boasting of Ancient Egyptians importing “slaves of a superior sort†among other things from their land. This is a pathetic attempt by the writer to insinuate Somalis taking pride in being slaves, albeit of better stock. It is a historical fact that Somalis were never taken as slaves, although their ports of Zeila and Berbera were used as embarkation points for the inhumane slave trade going to Arabia Felix.

 

While turning a blind eye to all these facts, Akbar didn't fail to underline the superiority of his pedigree to that of Somalis and indeed Africans by proudly highlighting the Indian achievements in Ethiopia as architects, traders and civilizing agents. In fact apart from Akbar's pomposity, the Somali people draw great pride in their strong historical commercial and cultural relations with India, a fact that their folklore heritage celebrates until today.

 

Bashir Goth

E-Mail:bsogoth@yahoo.com

[nuune]

Thanks Naasir, that was good read, great come back from Bashir Goth

[NASSIR]

Nuune, little research would have helped him write better with even little bias. What made him to resort to all these name calling I don't know. Was he mistreated or his life threatened during his stay in Mogadisho?

 

 

One click only of one-sided Part of Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan's history from colonial records. Google

 

 

Ahmed Gran (Gurey, Left-handed)

Or this simple Dialogue

 

 

"The only parallel I can think of is a Kashmiri enjoying his wazwan in front of us mere mortals, but of course the Kashmiri is not corpulent. The waters of Chashm e Shahi keep him slim." M Akbar

 

I think the below quote of which David Holden, in his book Farwell to Arabia,mentions Pakistan and other groups in parallel to Somalis could be the precursor of Akbar's resort to giving Somalis an inferior description, which is very very unknown to anthrapologists and hitorians who had made contact with Somalis. The quote, provided by our brother Goth, sums up,

 

""...These are financial lords of Aden; the serfs are in Cater's slums, a dusty, geometrical grid of streets where all the styles and faces of Arabia and the Indian Ocean have fetched up over the years of imperial rule. Arabs of the coast and Arabs from Sudan, in long white dishdashers and turbans; Arabs of the interior and the Yemen in printed cotton Futas, or kilts, and bright, embroidered Kashmiri shawls wound their heads. Somalis, proud of carriage and skinny of leg, stalking among the rest like black and glistening warding birds in a throng of chattering sparrows. Indians crouched in dark cubby holes with sewing machines and Pakistanis squatting sleepily among bales of cloth..."

 

 

I retrieved all of this from "the mighty google" in just one second.