Tuesday AfricaDigest (9/21): Somali Town Embodies Enduring Sense of Loss
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Sep 20, 2010, 9:40:16 PM9/20/10
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Somali Town Embodies Enduring Sense of Loss
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
New York TImes
WISIL, Somalia — The wind howls here, lifting off the desert, roaring
into town, gathering force as it squeezes between the metal shacks
along Wisil’s main drag and blasts into people’s faces.
Spectral figures tramp by, their faces wrapped in checkered scarves to
keep the sand out of their eyes and prevent it from burning the backs
of their throats. Lashed by the wind, donkeys bow their heads.
Against this tableau appears Mohamed Gelle. He is hard to miss. His
eyes are pried open with little white straws wedged between his cheek
and his eyebrow because, he says, he never wants to sleep. Wisil’s
children laugh mercilessly at him as he hunches under a tree and wolfs
down a melon, mumbling to himself as the juice dribbles off his chin
into the tangle of rags that make up his clothes.
“That man,” said a passer-by, with a sad shake of the head, “used to
be the richest man in town. He had five taxis in Mogadishu.”
What happened?
“The war.”
Not far away, trudging along in oversize flip-flops, is Mahamoud Ahmed
Dini, who unlike Mr. Gelle moves unnoticed, looking completely normal
— until you see the left side of his head. His left ear has been
sheared off, leaving a spongy stump and a sand-encrusted hole.
“It was a 37-millimeter shell. A zook !” Mr. Dini says, almost
proudly. “1991.”
One man loses his ear, another seems to have lost his mind. A single
mother with five children says goodbye to her home during a barrage of
mortar rounds in Mogadishu, the capital, and arrives here broke,
embarking on a life of squatter-hood.
Though Wisil is just another windswept town in central Somalia, barely
a tiny dot on the most detailed maps, it seems to embody something
bigger, something true for the entire nation: an enduring sense of
loss.
Somalia has been missing a functioning central government for nearly
20 years, a record in modern times. The government imploded in 1991
and nobody — not the warlords, clan elders, religious sheiks or United
Nations-backed technocrats — has been able to rebuild it.
The problems that stem from this are scattered far and wide. The
lawlessness, the lack of resources, the isolation and the desperation
extend outward in various degrees of intensity from the bullet-scarred
streets of Mogadishu to remote, impoverished, uneventful villages like
Wisil, which are essentially left on their own to deal with the
wreckage of a never-ending war.
With cloudy eyes and trembling lips, Mahamoud Nur Ali, the oldest man
in Wisil, remembers when the Italians invaded Hobyo, a nearby coastal
town (and now a pirate den) in 1925. He was 8 and his traditional
world of camels and deserts, blood feuds and swords, was about to
change.
But he says he does not begrudge the Italian colonizers. “Actually,”
he said, sitting on a thin reed mat in a house made from flattened oil
drums, “those were the best days we had. At that time, there was some
law and order.”
Today, what law and order there is left in places like Wisil comes
from the intricate clan system. Somalia may be one of the most
homogenous countries on the planet, with nearly 100 percent of its
people speaking the same language, adhering to the same religion
(Sunni Islam) and belonging to the same ethnic group.
But this nation is split into a dizzying number of clans, sub-clans,
sub-sub-clans and so on, and just about everyone in Wisil hails from
the same sub-sub-clan, the Sa’ad. After the government collapsed, many
men here fought fiercely for the Sa’ad’s leader, Mohamed Farah Aideed,
a notorious warlord. Mr. Aideed humiliated American troops in 1993 in
the Black Hawk Down battle but was killed a few years later, leaving
Wisil’s people without a champion.
The village today has a few thousand residents, no running water, no
electricity, no TVs. Its sandy main street is littered with camel
vertebrae, red-and-white Sportsman cigarette packs and donkey dung. A
portrait of isolation, Wisil is eight hours’ drive from the nearest
town with electricity, down a road so bumpy that travelers get
calluses on their hands from holding on so tightly as they are jostled
over it.
The young men here say that if there was a government, maybe there
would be better roads. And wells. And schools. And hospitals. Many
children here have dime-size scars on their foreheads, the mark of
traditional medicine, typically a burning stick touched to a child’s
face in the hope of ridding the young body of malaria and other
diseases.
“What do we do for fun?” said Bashir Ahmed, a young farmer, sitting
with friends outside a bare shop. “We sit here on the stoop and watch
the road. That’s our fun.”
Wisil’s people are herders and farmers, scraping a living from the
thorny landscape. At this time of year, the sun beats down and the
wind picks up, stirring so much dust that the bottoms of the clouds
turn pink, the color of the desert.
That same wind froths up the seas. Wisil is not far from the Somali
coast, and many Somali pirates pass through here, especially during
the de facto pirate summer vacation because of the rough ocean.
The other day, a pirate convoy thundered through town, the tires of
the four-by-four trucks churning up a mini-sandstorm as the trucks
flew past.
“We don’t get anything from them,” scowled Mr. Dini, the man with the
missing ear. “They use their money to drink wine and sleep with
prostitutes.”
Several pirates in Wisil admitted as much. One pirate named Mohamed,
who claimed that he made $250,000 in 2009 for hijacking the Faina, a
Ukrainian freighter packed with arms, said he spent all his money on
cars, qat (a leaf Somalis chew for a high) and women. “If I knew how
to save like a normal person,” he joked, “do you think I’d still be
doing this?”
A small, clan-based local government, the Galmudug State
administration, is trying to establish a foothold in this area, and
clan leaders want money from the United Nations to help create
fisheries, livestock projects and other jobs to give young men an
alternative to piracy.
But the basic human needs here are staggering. On the outskirts of
Wisil stand dozens of deserted gumdrop-shaped hovels made from scraps
of plastic. These used to be homes of displaced people fleeing
Mogadishu’s fighting.
“Where did they go? I’m not sure,” said Abdi Aziz Hassan, a volunteer
policeman. “Maybe they left because of the wind.”
-----------
What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.
Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC), Medea, 431 B.C.
---------------------
This posting is provided without permission of the copyright owner for
purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship, and research under the
"Fair Use" provisions of U.S.Government copyright laws and it may not
be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner. The
sender does not vouch for the accuracy of the content of the message,
which is the sole responsibility of the copyright
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
New York TImes
WISIL, Somalia — The wind howls here, lifting off the desert, roaring
into town, gathering force as it squeezes between the metal shacks
along Wisil’s main drag and blasts into people’s faces.
Spectral figures tramp by, their faces wrapped in checkered scarves to
keep the sand out of their eyes and prevent it from burning the backs
of their throats. Lashed by the wind, donkeys bow their heads.
Against this tableau appears Mohamed Gelle. He is hard to miss. His
eyes are pried open with little white straws wedged between his cheek
and his eyebrow because, he says, he never wants to sleep. Wisil’s
children laugh mercilessly at him as he hunches under a tree and wolfs
down a melon, mumbling to himself as the juice dribbles off his chin
into the tangle of rags that make up his clothes.
“That man,” said a passer-by, with a sad shake of the head, “used to
be the richest man in town. He had five taxis in Mogadishu.”
What happened?
“The war.”
Not far away, trudging along in oversize flip-flops, is Mahamoud Ahmed
Dini, who unlike Mr. Gelle moves unnoticed, looking completely normal
— until you see the left side of his head. His left ear has been
sheared off, leaving a spongy stump and a sand-encrusted hole.
“It was a 37-millimeter shell. A zook !” Mr. Dini says, almost
proudly. “1991.”
One man loses his ear, another seems to have lost his mind. A single
mother with five children says goodbye to her home during a barrage of
mortar rounds in Mogadishu, the capital, and arrives here broke,
embarking on a life of squatter-hood.
Though Wisil is just another windswept town in central Somalia, barely
a tiny dot on the most detailed maps, it seems to embody something
bigger, something true for the entire nation: an enduring sense of
loss.
Somalia has been missing a functioning central government for nearly
20 years, a record in modern times. The government imploded in 1991
and nobody — not the warlords, clan elders, religious sheiks or United
Nations-backed technocrats — has been able to rebuild it.
The problems that stem from this are scattered far and wide. The
lawlessness, the lack of resources, the isolation and the desperation
extend outward in various degrees of intensity from the bullet-scarred
streets of Mogadishu to remote, impoverished, uneventful villages like
Wisil, which are essentially left on their own to deal with the
wreckage of a never-ending war.
With cloudy eyes and trembling lips, Mahamoud Nur Ali, the oldest man
in Wisil, remembers when the Italians invaded Hobyo, a nearby coastal
town (and now a pirate den) in 1925. He was 8 and his traditional
world of camels and deserts, blood feuds and swords, was about to
change.
But he says he does not begrudge the Italian colonizers. “Actually,”
he said, sitting on a thin reed mat in a house made from flattened oil
drums, “those were the best days we had. At that time, there was some
law and order.”
Today, what law and order there is left in places like Wisil comes
from the intricate clan system. Somalia may be one of the most
homogenous countries on the planet, with nearly 100 percent of its
people speaking the same language, adhering to the same religion
(Sunni Islam) and belonging to the same ethnic group.
But this nation is split into a dizzying number of clans, sub-clans,
sub-sub-clans and so on, and just about everyone in Wisil hails from
the same sub-sub-clan, the Sa’ad. After the government collapsed, many
men here fought fiercely for the Sa’ad’s leader, Mohamed Farah Aideed,
a notorious warlord. Mr. Aideed humiliated American troops in 1993 in
the Black Hawk Down battle but was killed a few years later, leaving
Wisil’s people without a champion.
The village today has a few thousand residents, no running water, no
electricity, no TVs. Its sandy main street is littered with camel
vertebrae, red-and-white Sportsman cigarette packs and donkey dung. A
portrait of isolation, Wisil is eight hours’ drive from the nearest
town with electricity, down a road so bumpy that travelers get
calluses on their hands from holding on so tightly as they are jostled
over it.
The young men here say that if there was a government, maybe there
would be better roads. And wells. And schools. And hospitals. Many
children here have dime-size scars on their foreheads, the mark of
traditional medicine, typically a burning stick touched to a child’s
face in the hope of ridding the young body of malaria and other
diseases.
“What do we do for fun?” said Bashir Ahmed, a young farmer, sitting
with friends outside a bare shop. “We sit here on the stoop and watch
the road. That’s our fun.”
Wisil’s people are herders and farmers, scraping a living from the
thorny landscape. At this time of year, the sun beats down and the
wind picks up, stirring so much dust that the bottoms of the clouds
turn pink, the color of the desert.
That same wind froths up the seas. Wisil is not far from the Somali
coast, and many Somali pirates pass through here, especially during
the de facto pirate summer vacation because of the rough ocean.
The other day, a pirate convoy thundered through town, the tires of
the four-by-four trucks churning up a mini-sandstorm as the trucks
flew past.
“We don’t get anything from them,” scowled Mr. Dini, the man with the
missing ear. “They use their money to drink wine and sleep with
prostitutes.”
Several pirates in Wisil admitted as much. One pirate named Mohamed,
who claimed that he made $250,000 in 2009 for hijacking the Faina, a
Ukrainian freighter packed with arms, said he spent all his money on
cars, qat (a leaf Somalis chew for a high) and women. “If I knew how
to save like a normal person,” he joked, “do you think I’d still be
doing this?”
A small, clan-based local government, the Galmudug State
administration, is trying to establish a foothold in this area, and
clan leaders want money from the United Nations to help create
fisheries, livestock projects and other jobs to give young men an
alternative to piracy.
But the basic human needs here are staggering. On the outskirts of
Wisil stand dozens of deserted gumdrop-shaped hovels made from scraps
of plastic. These used to be homes of displaced people fleeing
Mogadishu’s fighting.
“Where did they go? I’m not sure,” said Abdi Aziz Hassan, a volunteer
policeman. “Maybe they left because of the wind.”
-----------
What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.
Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC), Medea, 431 B.C.
---------------------
This posting is provided without permission of the copyright owner for
purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship, and research under the
"Fair Use" provisions of U.S.Government copyright laws and it may not
be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner. The
sender does not vouch for the accuracy of the content of the message,
which is the sole responsibility of the copyright
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