We spent the first night in Baidoa, a hot, dusty market town about 150 miles northwest of Mogadishu and about two hundred miles from the Kenyan border, where we arrived just after nightfall. Then we got on another ramshackle bus to drive to Luuq, an old trading post on the Juba River. As we left Baidoa, the countryside emptied out: there was only sand, scrub brush, thorn trees, and one or two baobabs. This was the kind of land in which my grandmother had grown up. Occasionally we’d pass a young boy herding camels, who would squint at us in the sun, or a woman with a cloth tied around one shoulder and a baby tied to her back, walking into the distance with a stack of firewood tied to her belly.
In Luuq, the people were thin. Refugees were sleeping in the streets, and the houses were pockmarked with bullet holes. The hotel’s tiny rooms were as hot as ovens, so everyone slept outside, the women all on mats laid out in the inner courtyard, the men in the outer yard. There was no running water or electricity. Everyone washed out of a jug and mocked Haweya and me for using the foreigner’s instrument, a toothbrush, instead of rubbing an acacia twig against our teeth. Breakfast was goat liver with garlic and onion; I couldn’t face it so early, but the others tried to induce me to eat it before we entered the hungry places. There would be less food farther down the road.
The pickup droned through the sand in the fierce sun, probably following some kind of path that we couldn’t see. We had no shade; we simply sat on wooden benches.
We spent the next night in Bulo Haawo, a small village on the Somali side of the Kenyan border, with a few thatch-and-stick huts and a shop that had a cupboard with some ice in it. But just a few hundred yards past that shanty village we crossed the border, and there we found the Kenyan town of Mandera, with buildings made of concrete, a paved road, and electricity. Electricity had become a rarity in Mogadishu; we were startled to see it here. We went through an official checkpoint, where people were openly bribing the uniformed officials. (Since Qubqac had a Kenyan ID, and Haweya and I spoke perfect Swahili, we could get into the country without having to pay any bribes.)
Once in Mandera, Qubqac took us to the home of his stepmother and stepsisters, to pay our respects; they had electricity and running water. Mandera had shops and a school, even a district council office and a police station. In every way this little town in Kenya, a country Somalis considered inferior, functioned far better than almost anything in Somalia, just a few miles behind us.
Mandera is inhabited by Sejui Somalis (otherwise known as Kenyan-Somalis), who speak in singsong voices and mix Swahili words into their Somali. The only “native” Kenyans were the police who kept order and the army who manned the border. Events in Somalia had a way of spilling over into Kenya, however. There were frequent cross-border raids on property and cattle, and smugglers brought qat and all sorts of goods and people across the border.
We spent two nights in Mandera before Qubqac agreed to get back on the road. We took a country bus to Garissa, a large town 350 miles farther south, which had asphalt roads, hotels, a bus station, traffic lights, a mosque. There, we bought bus tickets to Nairobi. We were almost home.
As we finally drove into Nairobi, about a week after our departure from Mogadishu, and made our way through the smells and colors of Eastleigh, everything looked exactly as we had left it. Even the pungent odor of sukumawiki was welcome: it meant home to me now. I was looking forward to seeing my mother again, but as we neared our neighborhood, I found I was also dreading the fights and emotional scenes that we would inevitably endure.
* * *
A few days after we arrived in Nairobi, at the end of November, open warfare broke out around Mogadishu. Siad Barré’s army still held the center of town, but the outskirts were completely encircled by the Hawiye rebel forces. Gunmen rode around in pickups, high on qat, shooting at whatever they felt like and burning down farms and orchards.
To split the opposition against him, Siad Barré had been playing on the clan hostility that is always latent in Somalia. His forces staged attacks on the Darod as if the attackers were Hawiye: they left their scenes of murder daubed with slogans like “Cleanse the Darod from Hawiye land,” and “USC,” the initials of one of the Hawiye militias. They did the same to the Hawiye, with slogans like “The Hawiye are inferior and deserve to be wiped out.”
So, as Siad Barré went down, he took the country with him: the fight to oust him became a full-fledged civil war. The Hawiye were no longer just demanding Siad Barré’s head: they wanted ethnic cleansing. The Darod were caught by surprise. They had expected that the Hawiye would seek revenge from Siad Barré’s subclan, but not that they would attack all of the different clans of the Darod. Mogadishu fell into chaos, with looting, wanton killing, and destruction of property. Fighters suddenly swept into neighborhoods and burned houses; children were left behind as their parents fled. Any Darod who could escape drove, walked, or crawled as far as Afgoye, Baidoa, to Kismayo on the coast, and to towns and villages all the way to the borders of Kenya and Ethiopia.
Some of the Darod fought back, and in these battles both the Darod and the Hawiye died in large numbers. Siad Barré’s army had shrunk to the soldiers who guarded his presidential palace. On January 27, 1991, in the midst of this mayhem, Ma, Haweya, and I learned from the BBC Somali Service that Barré had been flown out to safety—to Nairobi.
One evening, as we listened anxiously to the radio in our apartment on Park Road, there was a knock on the door. I was startled to see Abdellahi Yasin, one of Mahad’s best friends in Mogadishu, on our doorstep. Accompanying him was the son of his older sister, a young man whom he introduced to us as Osman Abdihalin Osman Yusuf Kenaidiid, a grandson of Osman, the man who had taught my father to read and write, and a great-grandson of the king whom my grandfather Magan had served. We were simply awed. It was an honor to take this man into our home.
Abdellahi and Osman told us that Mogadishu was virtually paralyzed. Only armed cars were on the streets. In areas that the Hawiye already controlled, gunmen were going door to door rounding up Darod men. Mahad left the city before them, heading for Bari, which was now solidly under the control of the SSDF. My mother became almost hysterical with fear, and Haweya and I were terribly anxious.
Abdellahi and Osman moved into our living room, and they were sleeping on mattresses there two weeks later when Mahad arrived at our door. Ma, Haweya, and I were weak with relief to see him. He had wanted to go to Bari, but the clan had insisted he return to safety in Kenya. He took the same route out of the city as we had, and only just in time: the day after he passed through Afgoye, the town fell to the Hawiye rebels.
Mahad was accompanied by our cousin Warsame, the son of Ma’s twin sister, and by two of Warsame’s half-brothers. We now had six men, all of them more or less family members, sleeping on mattresses in the living room. Next to arrive was Osman’s older brother, Mahamuud. Again, it was a great honor to offer him hospitality, but Ma’s face crumbled in terror when Mahamuud told us that Mogadishu had all but fallen when he left the city. The Hawiye had Siad Barré’s palace under siege, and there was rape and looting everywhere. Hawiye gunmen dragged Darod women and children into the street and murdered them, he said; they even burned down houses with people still inside. Water was scarce, and people were already so weak from the lack of food that they could not fight or flee. Later we would learn that our Aunt Khadija had made it out to Kismayo, where she fell ill. Eventually we received word that she had died there.
Ibabo Dhadey Magan, whose mother was Hawiye, gathered a number of kinsmen into her compound to keep them safe. But the Darod were beginning to move out of the city, in vehicles or on foot, fleeing the disaster. They were making their way down to the coast along with people running from the burning farmland south of Afgoye. There were now hundreds of thousands of people on the move. The massive exodus from Somalia to Kenya, Ethiopia, and beyond had begun.
* * *
Mahamuud told us he had left his wife and children in Kismayo with family members; he had made the journe
y to the Kenyan port of Mombasa in a boat crammed with other refugees, in order to find a safe place for his family to stay in Nairobi. Now he needed to return to the border and bring them to Nairobi. He calculated that they had enough gas to make it roughly to the Kenyan border, to a place that refugees were gathering, about a hundred miles into the desert. Everyone called it Dhobley, the Muddy Place.
Every day for a whole week, Mahamuud pleaded with Mahad, who had a proper Kenyan ID and spoke Swahili and English, to go with him to the border to fetch his family. The border was chaos, and the Kenyan government was trying to stop more refugees from crossing into Kenya; Mahamuud would need help.
But Mahad procrastinated. Every day he waved Mahamuud aside: tomorrow they would begin the trip to the border. We could all feel Mahamuud’s anxiety. Finally, one night, at dinner, he announced that he would leave, alone, the next day. I couldn’t stand it anymore and said, “I also speak Swahili and English, and Haweya and I have just traveled from the border, so I know what to do. I’ll go with you.”
My mother said no, a young girl should not be allowed to go to a war zone. But I told her I would stay on the Kenyan side: How bad could it be? The conversation lasted for several days. Everyone took sides. Mahad kept promising to leave, then he would head out the door saying he was going to the mosque and stay out until nightfall. It was clear that Mahamuud would have to go with me or go alone.
Finally, at the end of January, we left. I had been home two months.
After a night or two on the road, we arrived at the Kenyan border town of Liboye. Mahamuud was so nervous he could barely speak. He had a leather pouch under his shirt, full of U.S. dollars to use as bribes, but it would be up to me to negotiate with the police at the border post. I had never tried to bribe anyone before; I didn’t even know what a dollar might be worth so far away from the capital.
At the border, soldiers in green uniforms were everywhere, with machine guns and ammunition belts slung across their shoulders. We found an army officer who said he was the commander. I took a deep breath and told him, in Swahili, “This man is looking for his family. They just went on holiday to Somalia and they’ve been trapped there. All we need to do is cross the border and get them.”
The officer looked me over and asked, “How many people will you bring in?” I answered, “One woman with four tiny children. Just one woman, really, because the kids are so small they hardly count.”
He looked at me quizzically, and I reckoned that now was the proper time to give him money. I turned to Mahamuud and said, “Do you have something like five hundred shillings?” I was guessing wildly. It was about a week’s rent on our flat in Nairobi. Mahamuud pushed a banknote into my hand and I handed it to the officer. He looked down and told me “Two more.” We gave it to him and he said, “So, go.”
I asked the officer for his name. He said, “Mwaura,” which is a common Kikuyu name. But I didn’t think this officer was Kikuyu: he was too tall. I told Mahamuud that I didn’t trust this man. We had absolutely no guarantees. Even if we found Mahamuud’s wife and children, there was no way to be sure that we would find this officer again, or that he would really let us all back into Kenya. We hadn’t received a piece of paper or even a handshake. All we had was this dubious name Mwaura and my Swahili, but we had no choice.
We headed into the border zone alone, walking down an empty hill. It was a scene of utter desperation, with refugee tents and ragged shelters strung out as far as the eye could see. It looked as though the entire population of Somalia was camped there. Somewhere beyond this desolate zone was the settlement of Dhobley, erected suddenly by the refugees; and somewhere in Dhobley, Mahamuud hoped to find his wife and children.
It was very dusty, and there were absolutely no trees, no shade at all. The United Nations refugee agency had set up camp on the Kenyan side of the border, at the bottom of the hill. Dozens of bright blue plastic tarps clustered near a large, well-made tarpaulin tent where people were lining up in the sun to register. We passed a health center—really just a place where you could report the dead—around which were thousands and thousands of tents.
The farther we walked, the shabbier the tents became. At first, most of them were blue tarpaulins strung onto branches and twigs, with whole families sheltering under them. A little farther on, the tarpaulins ran out and thin branches and twigs were just shoved into the soil, with cloths arranged over them, women’s shawls or a shirt, so the children could sit in the shade. The tents were clumped around little waterholes in the sand, some of them no more than muddy puddles. The smell of recent rain was still in the air, but the puddles were already evaporating in the heat.
We walked on until we got to a huge parking area where there were a number of pickup trucks and Land Cruisers. Everyone here was Darod—Macherten or Marehan or Wersengeli or Ogaden, but all of them Darod—so we felt comfortable around them. Though there was tension between the subclans, there would not be a massacre here. Mahamuud explained that we needed to drive to Dhobley, which was eighteen kilometers (about twelve miles) away. He negotiated the price for a little while and found a Macherten driver who agreed to take us, but we had to wait for him to fill his car with more passengers.
It was about four in the afternoon when we arrived in Dhobley. There were people everywhere we looked. Under every high thorn tree a family squatted, most on mats, a few just on the dry white sand. Sometimes they had tents, but these were even more shabby and decrepit than the ones closer to the border; they were made of cloths, twigs, and rags.
As we left the car we walked past two men who were arguing about a jerry can of water. One of them lost his temper and pulled a gun, and my heart thudded. Suddenly all the men around us had guns—pistols or rifles. My eye caught a series of spent bullets on the ground, nestled in the sand. Three or four older men walked up to the man with the gun with their arms out and said, “Take the water. It’s yours—go,” and gave it to him. He sat down on the sand and put his hands over his head and cried. His clothes were torn; his toes poked out of his broken shoes; he looked wretched.
The older men tried to take his gun away, but they couldn’t get him to give it up. They gave the other man another can of water. Everyone badly wanted everything to stay calm—suddenly everyone was an expert in conflict prevention. I crept up to Mahamuud and said, “These people are dangerous.” He looked at me and said, “They are dangerous. They are hungry and thirsty. They have been walking for a long time. They have nothing left to lose. They feel like they are dead already.”
He was right. The people all around us looked like ghosts. They were gaunt. They had been moving away from their homes for weeks, and had lost everything along the way. Babies had died; there were listless children in almost every mother’s arms. They had been attacked by bandits, and they had crossed all kinds of battlefronts. When I looked into people’s eyes, it was disorienting. They looked as if they had been to Hell and back.
I felt totally helpless. I had come to help one man find his family, and there was a sea of desperate people around me. Among them I stood out as the only one who seemed rested and well-fed. I looked like almost the last hope of every woman, every family, under every tree. Many people came up to me begging, “Will you talk to the border guards, can you take me there? I have family.” And I had to say “No. No I can’t, there is nothing I can do.” I was there with Mahamuud, and he had only one aim, which was to find his family.
We pushed on, asking everyone if they had seen a woman named Si’eedo Mahmud Osman Yusuf Kenaidiid; Mahamuud’s wife was his cousin, so they shared the same grandfather names. As we walked on, people asked our names, of course, and it was natural to answer with the long version: “I am Ayaan Hirsi Magan Isse.” It was like a massive clan gathering: your name was your identity card.
Someone said, “Under that tree, over there, are some Jama Magans,” and when I walked over I saw them: Ainanshie and Aflao, and Amran and Idil, from Mogadishu. When I had last seen them—the day I left Mogadishu mysel
f, barely ten weeks before—they were rich people, with fat, powerful legs and arms. Now they were gaunt figures in clothes that hung loose and huge on their bony frames. Their faces were familiar, but these weren’t the same people at all. They were so thin. With them was Abdiwahab, another second cousin of mine, who worked in Aflao’s espresso bar. Abdiwahab had been enormously fat and tall; now he was like a skeleton, and appeared even taller. His eyes bulged out of deep sockets, and his cheeks had caved in so that his head resembled a skull, with skin that seemed only barely to stretch across his bones. It was like looking at a zombie.
They came up to me and hugged me and started to cry—we all cried—and the two girls, Amran and Idil, began pleading, “Please don’t leave us here, take us with you,” and I knew I couldn’t.
I had no money of my own. Mahamuud had only enough to save his own family. I had told the border official we would have only one woman with us, and we hadn’t even found her yet. All I could do was tell them that I would go back to Nairobi and we would raise the money for Mahad to return to the border and somehow get them out.
They started to cry desperately. Amran and Idil were only about seventeen and eighteen years old. They said, “You’re here with this man to save his family, and we are your family, but you won’t save us—we thought you came for us.” They were hysterical. Haweya had once called Amran and Idil the Barrels, they were so fat; now they were malnourished, frightened, and desperate.
Aflao’s wife had miscarried a baby on the road, and Ainanshie had had to leave his wife and their tiny baby behind in Mogadishu, because she was Hawiye, from the clan of the enemy, and she would have been killed on the road by the other Darod refugees. Ainanshie told me that he had fought with the Darod against the Hawiye in Mogadishu, and had killed people. He said it felt good to do it, to take revenge for all the slaughter. “There was one man with a knife. I shot him and cut his throat from ear to ear,” he said with something like satisfaction. I started to shake—the whole thing was impossible, it was a kind of hallucination of horror. I remember thinking, “This is Hell: this is the beginning, the first gate of Hell.”
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