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The Mayor of Mogadishu
A Story of Chaos and Redemption in the Ruins of Somalia
By Andrew Harding St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Andrew Harding
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8392-5
CHAPTER 1
A Constellation of Nomads
"There are no records. So you can claim whatever you want."
— YUSUF NUR
It all starts, I suppose, with a lie. Or perhaps it would be fairer to call it an invention.
"I was born here in Mogadishu. My mother came here when she was about nine months. Then she had baby. This baby was me," says Tarzan.
He has an abrupt, intense way of speaking. His brown eyes dart, as if I'm not enough of an audience and he's sweeping the room for other reactions.
It's just gone dark, and we're sitting on the covered terrace outside his house, just below Villa Somalia, the mosquitoes whining lazily at our ankles. It's the last week of Ramadan — a hot, sluggish time in the city — and Tarzan is breaking his daily fast with some dates and a sip of tea, and waiting for Shamis to come outside with a tray of hot food.
The narrow terrace runs along two whole sides of their house. The walls are a pale yellow, the floors covered in white tiles, and the outside arches and corners are crowded with dozens of plants in white pots. That's Shamis's touch. She's worked hard — in part to kill the boredom of what sometimes feels like a prison — to create a homely atmosphere. The terrace could almost be a little café, with its plastic chairs and round tables, each with a plastic tablecloth.
Shamis brings out a thick, porridge-like soup called marak, which Tarzan loves, a plate of fried liver, some pasta — a nod toward Italy's role in Somalia's colonial past — and then Turkish baklava to finish.
She's wearing a long yellow dress, and she drapes an arm on his shoulder. It's a casual gesture, but here in Mogadishu, where women now feel the need to wear a veil in public, it seems boldly intimate. It's not the first time I've been aware of the electric jolt of affection that seems to flicker between Tarzan and Shamis, even after all these years together. I know their children are quietly proud of it — other Somali parents seem so much more restrained.
Tarzan speaks English quickly and confidently, in a guttural accent — part London, part Somali — pronouncing "months" as "month-es," with an emphasis on the last syllable. Most plurals get the same treatment, and it's only some time later, when I'm talking to an Italian who grew up in Somalia, that I realize where that extra syllable might have come from.
"I was born in the Martino hospital. Room 18," he continues, wafting his hand in the general direction of the sea, then waving at two men who have just walked onto the terrace and quietly taken seats in the corner, as if waiting for a doctor's appointment. Tarzan is in his casual clothes — bare legs and feet, a long sarong-like macawis, and a black short-sleeved shirt.
"National health! Free. The Italians controlled the hospital. Nuns. Nuns! They were my midwives. It was 1954." Tarzan is enjoying himself.
The San Martino Hospital — a ruin these days — was once a landmark in the city, right on the seafront, about a mile away from here. Tarzan looks nostalgic as he describes the circumstances of his birth, how his mother dutifully made the long trek from the wilderness of the Ogaden, where the family lived as nomads; and then how she returned with her newborn son, to her husband and firstborn, immediately after Tarzan's birth.
Except that it's not true ... none of his birth story is. But it will take me a while to discover that, and much longer to work out why he feels the need to reinvent himself.
Shamis has brought more tea to the table now, and some honey to stir into it. I've got my notebook out and I've written "Room 18" and underlined it. It's a resonant detail, I'm thinking. Not something I'd have remembered about my own birth.
At this point, I've been visiting Somalia, on and off, for twelve years, as a journalist for BBC News. I can feel the place burrowing into my skull. There is something uncomfortably bewitching about some conflict zones. I've felt it in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, and in plenty of other countries. But there is a particular intensity to the experience of visiting Somalia, and it's hard to pin down why. The sunbaked ruins are spectacular, and the people are impossibly, jaw-droppingly resilient, but it's more than that. It feels like a place untethered from the outside world. A city that has suffered for so long that war has become the status quo.
It's August 2012 — two years before the attack on Villa Somalia's mosque — and two years since I first met Tarzan.
Visiting Mogadishu, particularly as a foreigner, is a risky, expensive, and, above all, logistically complicated process. Who guards you — a particular clan, foreign peacekeepers, the UN, private security contractors? Do you stay with the military, or in a hotel, or with the government? Which rumors to believe? What security advice to trust? Should you avoid all convoys? Is it safer to keep a low profile in a small car, or to hire a dozen guards? Will the budget stretch to bulletproof windows? What does bulletproof even mean, in practice?
The result is usually a string of short, slightly frantic trips.
Tarzan caught my attention from the start. It is, you might say, in his nature to do so. He's impatient, outspoken, and refreshingly different from almost every other politician I've met here. Most are cautious to a fault. And who can blame them? Perhaps Tarzan is a little too media savvy. I always feel slightly suspicious of anyone who actively wants to talk to a journalist. But still, I'm intrigued.
Boom ... There's a hollow-sounding explosion, a small one, a few blocks away. Shamis has joined us at the table and looks around sharply, as do I. Tarzan continues to sip his tea and quietly announces, "Grenade." Sure enough, tomorrow's Somali news websites will confirm that a grenade was thrown in the market, just a few hundred meters away, in an area known as Shangani.
This is the third evening in a row that I've spent breaking the Ramadan fast with Tarzan and Shamis at their small home, and I'm slowly getting used to the unusual feeling of being outside the regular security bubble that has, in varying forms, dominated every other trip I've made to Mogadishu.
I was dropped off at around 6:00 p.m. Eight local armed guards, from the foreign-run guesthouse I'm staying at near the airport, drove behind our car and waited at the security barrier at the end of Tarzan's rubbish-strewn cul-de-sac, as we went on through. A tall, cheerful, eastern European security advisor — who rather spoiled the mood on the journey by reminding me that the bounty on a foreigner's head is between US$1 million and $1.5 million — then got out of the front passenger seat of our car, briefly assessed the situation, came to open my door, and escorted me into Tarzan's house, past an elderly man sitting beside the bright green gate with a Kalashnikov on his knee.
And now I've been transferred — and it's hard not to feel just a tiny bit like a hostage — into the hands of Tarzan's own security team. On previous nights, his eldest son Ahmed drove me back, on his own, to my fortress-like guesthouse, picking his way through the dark back streets, past several sleepy crowds of goats, and through a handful of army checkpoints.
It's a year now since the militants of Al Shabab abruptly withdrew from Mogadishu, in the middle of a famine, and the city is currently enjoying a period of relative calm.
On the terrace, Tarzan turns in his seat to beckon the two men who've been waiting for a chance to talk. It's been like this every night — a steady stream of uninvited visitors hoping to bend the ear of the mayor of Mogadishu. The men are from his clan. One wants to become an MP, the other is his lobbyist. They've traveled 400 kilometers from the town of Beledweyne, in the hope of securing Tarzan's endorsement.
"I don't know," says Tarzan, when the men finally leave. He thinks the would-be MP "talks too much." He scratches at his elbow and then lashes out at the mosquitoes around his ankles.
Shamis, meanwhile, has had enough of playing the politician's wife for one day.
"When Ramadan is finished I'm not allowing it anymore. I tell the guards, 'Don't let anyone to come here after five o'clock! No more.' Cos I want to be alone with my husband. When you are at work people should go to your office, but this is my place and I want to be alone with you." Her English is less polished than her husband's, but she speaks with warm, almost theatrical intimacy.
Tarzan chuckles. It's evidently not the first time they've had this discussion.
"You've become English woman! You are not Somali anymore," he teases.
More visitors come and go. Fresh tea is poured. Late in the evening, the business calls thin out, and an old school friend drops in, then the lady who lives across the street. And finally I'm back in Ahmed's car, and he's driving too fast as we go down the hill, through another, bigger security barrier beside the old national theater, then right and along the main road toward the airport.
Ahmed repeats his mantra, "Mogadishu is quite safe," in a distinctively London accent. But he's clearly still edgy about the militants of Al Shabab. "You can't trust anyone here. At least with your own clan you can vet people, and trace stuff back if things go wrong."
Ahmed — his father later admits to me — has been brought back to Mogadishu in order to be "straightened out."
"I'm just trying to find my niche here, cos it's — like — a blank canvas, a lot of things missing. So I'm importing security equipment for now ... from Dubai." Tarzan's critics claim Ahmed has been winning contracts improperly, because of his father's influence.
Ten minutes and a maze of side streets later, I'm knocking on the giant metal gates of my guesthouse, watched by the displaced families still camped out in their ragged tent across the street, and by the armed guards manning the guesthouse's turrets, who peer down and then give a shout to let me in.
* * *
Four months pass, AND finally, I manage to get hold of Tarzan's younger brother, Yusuf, on the phone. It's not been easy to track down his number. Tarzan will talk all night, face-to-face, but he's notoriously sluggish when it comes to answering phones, emails, and texts.
"He's not a good communicator," Yusuf concedes. It's a bit of a family joke. "We Somalis prefer talking to writing anytime."
Yusuf is at home in the United States, with two teenaged daughters and a crumbling marriage. He's a professor, driving every week into Kokomo, near Indianapolis, where he teaches business studies at the university. In his spare time, he's become a fanatical mountain biker.
"It's a two-hour drive. Let's chat."
We fall into a pattern of arranging phone calls while he's doing the commute and, later, on his travels — to northern Somalia, Dubai, and even Taiwan, where his two daughters end up spending a summer teaching English before taking their father on a cycling holiday.
"Hands free, I assure you," he says on the first call. "I'm heading north on Highway 37. It connects my little town to Indianapolis. Sometimes I spend the night at the university. Like tonight — I have a late class. I wish I lived in the countryside, but the children would not let me do that. I'm the only Somali in Bloomington, believe it or not! Well, I wouldn't know for sure, but there's no community, so the only way I'd know if a Somali was in town is if they come to the mosque. There are no Somalis at my campus, either. Indianapolis started bringing refugees in the late nineties and I went to their section of town. They have a restaurant — no food, but a hubbly-bubbly, a water pipe [hookah]. And people chewed khat [a mildly narcotic leaf chewed with vigorous enthusiasm across Somalia] — illegally I guess. I can't stand smoke, so that was first and last time I went there."
As you may have gleaned, Yusuf is a details man, a natural teacher. He's garrulous and charming, too, with a light American accent and an unquenchable enthusiasm for explaining Somali words and customs.
"He told you that?" Yusuf laughs when I ask him about Tarzan's birth, in room 18 at the San Martino Hospital.
But then he quickly changes tone. His brother is a public figure, and he doesn't want to be disloyal. Eventually he settles on a diplomatic but still revealing truth.
"There are no records. So you can claim whatever you want."
"I was born under a tree. It was the most natural birth imaginable," says Yusuf, and as his neat, precise tones zip down the phone line from Indiana, I start picturing the dry wilderness he's talking about.
* * *
"If you drive north out of Mogadishu ..." As I write that sentence, I realize it should probably finish with "then you would be a fool." It's not a journey to be attempted these days, with roadside bombs, kidnappings, and unexpected roadblocks targeting civilian buses, trucks, and armored African Union military convoys alike. But let's put those risks to one side for now, and imagine coming out of Tarzan's house, and turning left onto Corso Somalia, the main road that snakes through the city and out, past the old pasta factory, into the sand-blown, low-rise outskirts. You'll quickly find yourself crossing a dusty plain on a straight but almost comically potholed road. Perhaps an hour out of town, the dry countryside suddenly turns green as the road enters a region irrigated by the Shabelle River, where most of Mogadishu's food is grown. The road follows the river's path upstream.
The Shabelle, meaning a place of leopards, is a meandering river prone to flash floods. It wouldn't get much notice in most countries. But Somalia has only two rivers of any size or significance. The Shabelle begins in the green Ethiopian highlands on the eastern edge of the Rift Valley, then crosses a high plateau into Somalia, heading straight for the coast before losing its nerve outside Mogadishu, swinging south, and dwindling into a few brackish puddles somewhere in the sand dunes outside the port of Kismayo.
After about 450 lonely kilometers, the long road north eventually forks at the tiny town of Jawiil, otherwise known as Kala Bayr, which simply means "fork in the road." It's home to some of Tarzan's extended family, and "the only one town we claim as our own," says Yusuf.
It's rough country — the ragged fringes of the geological bruising caused by the giant Rift Valley. It's not quite a desert, but rain is often rare and always precious.
I've not managed to visit Jawiil. But I once flew to Dusamareb, a much larger Somali town about 200 kilometers to the northeast.
I have two particular memories of the trip. The first is of sitting in the negligible shade of a thornbush just outside town, beneath a blazing afternoon sun, talking to an understandably gloomy man who was scraping a living by gathering scarce firewood from the surrounding plains to sell by the roadside. "I'm waiting for change. But things are just getting worse," he said, as his wife remained hidden behind him inside a tiny tent, constructed from thorn branches and a blue plastic sheet provided by the UN. He'd once had a home and a job in Mogadishu, but the family had been compelled to flee fighting there, then to flee more fighting in Dusamareb, and was now stranded in no-man's-land. I looked around me at the flat, hot earth and the scorched sky, wondered how it was possible to survive here, and thought of the well-thumbed book tucked in my rucksack.
Warriors is one of the few foreign accounts of rural life in Somalia. It was written by a British army officer charged with policing the region during the Second World War, and composed in tones as dry as the place. Somalia was "a desiccated, bitter, cruel, sun-beaten" wilderness, marked by its "mad stubborn camels, rocks too hot to touch, and blood feuds whose origins cannot be remembered, only honored in the stabbing," Gerald Hanley declared.
"But of all the races of Africa there cannot be one better to live among than the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest; the Somalis."
My second memory from Dusamareb is from later the same afternoon in 2009. It was, we discovered, Somali Independence Day. A moderate Sunni group was in control of the town and had just fought off a ferocious assault by the militants of Al Shabab. Outside the bullet-riddled government headquarters in the town center, a group of children, women, and heavily armed fighters had gathered together in a touchingly neat line to sing the national anthem of the period. A local student generously attempted a translation for me and said it was about "waking up and leaning together." The chorus is, indeed, an unusually and pleasingly bossy list of instructions — a distinct change from the wordless old Italian anthem and the more recent, flowery, and forgettable version. Here's a more formal translation of the chorus we heard:
Somalis wake up!
Wake up and support each other.
Support your country.
Support it forever.
Stop fighting each other.
Come back with strength and joy and be friends again.
It's time to look forward and take command,
Defeat your enemies and unite once again.
Become strong, again and again.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Mayor of Mogadishu by Andrew Harding. Copyright © 2016 Andrew Harding. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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