Gerlach was tall, potbellied, and good natured, with glasses and a genial smile. He’d married a German woman during the 1970s and adopted her last name. Pictures from Somalia in those days showed a more free-spirited place, with women shroud-free, smiling, in blouses and slacks. Somalia had developed as a poor but successful African nation during the early years of postcolonial independence, with a socialist economy and decent schools, but anarchy since the end of Siad Barre had shifted the people toward headscarves and automatic weapons. “Sa’ads helped topple him,” said Gerlach. “But I am not satisfied with the outcome.”
A plump, youngish Somali with a goatee greeted Gerlach and sat down.
“This is Mohamud Awale,” Gerlach said. “He is the mayor of Hobyo.”
The title surprised us. We were about 125 miles from Hobyo.
“It is an honorary title,” he explained. “Normally I live in London.”
“It’s difficult to work in Hobyo, isn’t it?” Ashwin said.
“Yes, I cannot live there,” said the mayor. “The Galmudug government has no influence on the coast. We hope to assert control one day. But for now, we can try to help—they have problems with food, the people are hungry in Hobyo. If we just say it is difficult, and stay outside, it is no good.”
“Will you come with us to Hobyo tomorrow?” said Ashwin.
“Yes. It is good for me to show my presence.”
“What do you do in London?” said Ashwin.
“I am a bus driver.”
Hamid settled next to us. He was a thin but rather groovy-looking character with a gray-flecked goatee and a taste for Royal cigarettes and wide-collared shirts. He served as Gerlach’s lieutenant on the ground, his sub-fixer in Galkayo. He’d hired our guards, according to Gerlach, with help from a local elder. Now he had surprising news. He said a rumor had gone around that a pirate lord wanted me kidnapped.
“I have heard that Mohamed Garfanji is offering a fifteen-million-dollar reward for you,” he said.
I blinked and felt a deep qualm of fear.
“Do you take it seriously?” I asked.
Gerlach and Hamid conferred. Gerlach shook his head. In German, he mentioned the Gerüchteküche, the rumor mill (literally, “rumor kitchen”). He said the rumor was probably false. But in a semiliterate society, lies could have the authority of firm fact, and false information ran like fire through Somalia. “Die Gerüchteküche ist auch gefährlich” was how he put it. The rumor kitchen can also be dangerous.
“Yes, I know.”
“We will have to be careful,” he said.
I spent the afternoon considering whether to fly home. Flights to Nairobi didn’t run every day, so there would be a delay. Canceling the Hobyo trip would also be complicated. Moving around—keeping the pirates guessing—might also be an improvement over waiting in the hotel.
Later, in our room, I talked it over with Ashwin. “Michael,” he said. “Listen. I know it is unnerving. But they are trying to scare us. Maybe they want more money. If Garfanji wanted to kidnap you, he could back up a technical right now in front of this hotel and make his demands.”
I nodded. A technical was a cannon-mounted flatbed truck, a battlewagon from the Somali civil war.
“We will be fine,” said Ashwin.
“Okay.”
“Gerlach says if we are kidnapped, it will cause a clan war.”
“That’s right.”
“It is just a rumor about Garfanji.”
“Okay.”
I nodded again. We were guests of the president, after all.
VI
Hamid and Gerlach doubled the number of guards for our journey to Hobyo, as a precaution. We set out in the warm hours of the morning with three Land Rovers and one technical raising dust across the bush. Our Land Rover rocked violently. Gerlach pointed at the technical in front of us, indicating a pair of Somali words painted on the tailgate: kibir jabiye. “That means ‘to bring down the arrogant.’ It is an anti–Siad Barre slogan. Technicals were very important in toppling him. Aidid—you know Aidid?”
“Yes.”
General Mohamed Farrah Aidid had led the rebellion against Siad Barre. He was the warlord who challenged the U.N. during the Battle of Mogadishu, in 1993.*
“Aidid was our clan brother,” said Gerlach. “During the rebellion, we put this phrase on some of our trucks.”
“I see. A famous Sa’ad.”
“Yes, yes.”
In the film version of Black Hawk Down, Aidid is a villain. In this part of the world he was a hero.
We bounced and swayed in single file along the dusty trail. Gerlach, Ashwin, Hamid, and I had crammed into one car. A handful of expatriate Somalis from our hotel filled another. We also traveled with a Sa’ad elder named Digsi, who had real influence in Galmudug, maybe more than President Alin. He was a squat, bean-shaped man with a dusting of white hair around his head and a comical rear-leaning gait. The young expatriates represented the Galmudug government, but for the Hobyo pirates, Digsi, as a clan figure, would have more significance. He would keep the peace.
The Toyota technical bounced and swayed with several armed Somalis on the flatbed, sitting around a swiveling automatic cannon.
“Are they all Sa’ads?” I asked Gerlach.
“Yes.”
Our guard from the hotel, Mowliid, had folded up in the rear of the car. He tapped Gerlach on the shoulder.
“Ah,” said Gerlach. “He wants you to know that he is a clan brother of K’naan, the rapper from Canada.”
“Really?”
I smiled at Mowliid. They talked back and forth in Somali. Our driver flipped the music on his stereo to a K’naan song.
“The driver is also his clan brother,” Gerlach said. “K’naan is the other famous Sa’ad.”
At the end of our day of driving, the red sun lit up swirls of distant cloud; the white and reddish dust seemed to glow and burn. We halted the caravan of cars in the road and climbed out to stretch. We were about to drive into Budbud, a village pronounced with curt vowels,* to spend the night with Digsi’s relatives.
“We are taking our time to Hobyo,” Gerlach explained. “Young Somalis can drive it in four or five hours, along khat trails. But we can’t go that fast.”
“What are khat trails?”
“To deliver khat. Every day, from Galkayo to Hobyo,” said Gerlach. “Very important for the economy.”
Budbud was a sparse community of low, poor buildings and quiet wind. Powdery dust caked between the houses in ridges and dunes. “It’s almost desert here,” said Gerlach. “The edge of the savanna. And the desert grows every year because of the climate.”
Our cars pulled up to a pastel-painted concrete house where a crowd of villagers waited. The men wore turbans and sarongs and looked rougher than people in Galkayo. Some had wild facial hair. Elders wore beards tipped with henna dye. They smiled and shook hands with Digsi while Hamid hustled us into the house.
We settled in a dim bedroom, where blue drapes tossed on the breeze at a corner window. Beauty products cluttered a wooden vanity table, and a satin-covered mattress lay on the floor. No other furniture, not even a chair.
“What goes on, in this room?” I heard Ashwin ask Hamid as they sat against a wall, on a patchwork of frayed rugs.
“We are guests of Digsi’s sister. It is her room,” said Hamid.
“I see.”
“The family will slaughter a goat.”
The guards settled around us with their weapons. Mowliid, draped in ammunition, flipped down the tripod of his machine gun and angled it at the doorway. It was loaded, so as long as he wore the rounds, he was also leashed to the gun. To make himself comfortable, he had to unwrap the bullets from his shoulders and roll them into a pile on the floor.
“For protection?” I said, pointing at the weapon.
He gave me a wide smile. “Against pirates!” he said, and offered me some limp stems of khat.
I shook my head.
The sunset had l
eft a soft, apocalyptic glow in the village outside. People came to stare at us from the doorway, tall young men with ragged beards and turbans, and we heard the voices of women working over a fire.
“Michael,” said Mowliid, pointing at one of the bullets in his ammunition band, which looked to be about .30 caliber. “How much for this? Guess.”
“How much money? I don’t know,” I said.
“One dollar!” he said.
“One dollar each?”
He hefted part of the ammunition pile. “All, five hundred dollars,” he said. An average year’s salary in Somalia was about $550. Mowliid looked proud to walk around with such a fortune on his shoulders.
The sky turned deep blue, and two broad pans of pasta came through the door. Someone handed around a pitcher of water, to wash our hands. Hamid poured hot glasses of tea from a kettle. Gerlach and Digsi squatted with other Somalis around one dish of pasta and started winding it around their fingers.
“There is no silverware, like in Galkayo,” Hamid explained. “We are in a village now.”
The pans full of spaghetti had been mixed with fried onion and chunks of boiled goat. We had to grab the chunks of meat with mitts of pasta.
“Spaghetti’s a remnant of Italian colonialism?” I said to Gerlach, guessing it wasn’t traditional food.
He laughed. “The only good thing they left behind.”
We ate from the same pan on the floor. In the half light I noticed something crawl across the pasta. I have a strong stomach, but it was a fat dung beetle.
“Careful,” I said and pointed.
Gerlach raised the alarm in Somali, and the pan went to Digsi and quickly out the door. A new pan came in just as quickly. I was done with food for the evening, but Digsi found a choice joint of goat in his pan and made an elaborate production of handing it across the room.
“This is the best part of the goat—the shoulder,” Hamid said to me. “It is an honor to eat it.”
“Mahadsanid,” I said in Somali. Thank you.
I split open the meat. It was still piping hot. Digsi nodded and smiled, but the way he singled me out as a guest of honor had something theatrical about it that would remain with me for months to come, as if he wanted to show the other men that he was upholding a Somali tradition of kindness to strangers. It was overceremonial, a perfumed gesture, and my instincts reacted: I felt an unexpected dread. After the meal we rinsed our hands in water from the pitcher, and Digsi handed around a squat bottle of bright-purple cologne. All I wanted was a paper towel or something to wipe off the grease, but Digsi smiled and showed me how to rub my hands and arms with the oversweet stuff, as if the eye-watering odor might dispel the grease from the goat and the day of sweaty travel.
VII
A pair of minarets reared up against the sky, and we fishtailed along a powdery trail that Gerlach referred to as “the Pirate Road,” running through low scrub toward Hobyo, with an occasional view of the sea. “This connects Harardhere to Eyl,” he said, naming two other pirate towns on the central coast. “Hobyo is between them.”
I pointed at the technical raising dust in front of our car. The cannon bounced and swayed. “You think we’re being watched by drones?”
Gerlach laughed. “Yes, probably.”
We ran past a plain but enormous gray mosque. I noticed a pair of figures standing guard on the roof, between the minarets, their faces wrapped like holy fighters. Each held a grenade-mounted rifle. Mowliid, our guard in the rear, said something to Gerlach.
“There is a rumor that hostages are inside,” he translated.
“In the mosque?” I looked out the window.
The mosque and the weapons made me think of al-Shabaab, the terrorist group, which had no firm presence in Hobyo.
“In the mosque, or near it,” said Gerlach.
“Those guys look like al-Shabaab,” I said.
“They must be pirates. But if they have hostages in the mosque, of course they are desecrating it.” Gerlach grew agitated at the whole idea. “Pirates,” he declared, “are not real Muslims.”
Hobyo at first was just a few low buildings, empty sand, and shrubs, until we passed a mansion to our right, surrounded by a stone-and-plaster compound wall. On top of the gate sat an ostentatious decoration, a plaster sculpture of a car like ours, painted in pastels, with land cruiser written underneath. It was a cliché that young Somalis earned expensive cars if they proved themselves as pirates. The message seemed unambiguous: Get yer Land Cruisers here! I mentioned it to Gerlach.
“Yes, that house belongs to a famous pirate boss,” he said.
“Which one?”
“I don’t know.”
We drove through the town and out across a soft, broad beach. The crescent of sand had enormous white skiffs with twin engines tilted, at rest, in the lapping surf. This was the Hobyo waterfront.
We stopped near a natural jetty of sharp black rock, and our guards fanned across the beach. Hamid explained the hopeful Sa’ad vision of developing this curving strand into a harbor. The rock jetty, he said, could become Galmudug’s first functioning pier.
But it looked impractical precisely because of the rocks. Waves shattered against them; spray dampened our faces. Hobyo felt deserted, and our guards were tense.
“Do you see that ship?” Hamid said.
He pointed across the bend of water at a large wrecked ship leaning on its side.
“It is a Chinese fishing boat,” he said. “Pirates hijacked it in 2010. It has been beached for several months.”
“Where are the hostages?”
“Somewhere in Hobyo. Maybe near the mosque we passed.”
So hostages lived around us, in a parallel world.
“One hostage killed himself,” Hamid went on. “A Chinese man.”
“How long has the crew been held?”
“About fifteen months.”
Pirates were holding hostages for longer stretches of time, clinging to fantasies of spectacular ransoms, but seafarers on most of the ships belonged to a lost underclass. Ashwin made noises of pity. “The Chinese don’t rescue,” he mumbled, “and they don’t pay ransom. They just leave their people to rot.”
Digsi picked his way onto the rocks, wrapped in robes, but nimble. He told us in a stream of insistent Somali that the water here was emptier than it used to be. He pointed from one end of the horizon to the other, and Hamid translated. “He says once you could see hijacked ships lined up here from left to right. Now you see nothing.”
The German reporter who had traveled with Gerlach in 2011 had filmed hijacked ships at anchor off another town in Galmudug. He’d said, on TV, that the crowded waterline resembled “the Port of Amsterdam.” Digsi wanted to express his pride that pirates held so few ships in his region now.
“Just that wrecked ship on the beach,” I commented.
“That’s right,” said Hamid.
Our guards yelled a warning. They wanted us to return to our cars.
“We are being watched by pirates,” Hamid announced.
Two cars had emerged from Hobyo to study us from an elevation of sand. We heard a crackle of gunfire. I darted across the beach for cover, but someone else motioned me into the car. The firework noises made my stomach swirl.
Ashwin, Hamid, Gerlach, and I crowded into the Land Rover and Ashwin said, “Michael, they were not shooting in our direction. You can tell from the sound. I have heard a lot of guns in my time. They were firing into the air.”
“Okay.”
“It sounded like firecrackers,” Ashwin said. “When it sounds like that, it is not aimed at you. It is just warning gunfire.”
“Okay,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Warning about what?”
Gerlach said, “They think we are in Hobyo to free hostages. They believe we’re allied with Operation Atalanta,” the European Union’s naval mission. “We’ve explained that we’re journalists. We’re looking for a peaceful solution. But our guards are ready to fight if necessary.”
&
nbsp; “Okay,” I said.
Our guards wandered the beach, cradling their guns. I couldn’t tell who was looking for a peaceful solution—no one seemed to be on the phone—but after a few minutes the guards looked more at ease, and one by one they folded into our cars.
“We are being allowed to leave the beach,” said Gerlach.
Our caravan drove in single file around the outskirts of Hobyo, past sand bluffs and old fence posts. We came near enough to the beached fishing vessel to see its pale-blue keel and its long streaks of rust. It tilted over the sand, on the edge of the surf, and from Ashwin’s close-up footage of the hull we could even make out a name, in English and Chinese: the Shiuh Fu 1.
We filed into a row of houses on the edge of Hobyo, where a stout, deep-black man with a sarong and a flamboyant turban waited for us to park. Digsi climbed out to shake hands.
“That man is a bandit,” mumbled Gerlach, watching them.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“He is our host,” Gerlach said. “From the other Sa’ad family.* They have invited us to lunch.”
We stepped into a hot room furnished with gold-threaded sofas. Someone had prepared the room for guests. Bottles of water and cheap mango juice waited on a low table, and cardboard Somali flags lay along each couch, spaced evenly. I muffled a sharp sense of entrapment, a sudden vulnerability out here on the edge of a country where no one could save me if things went wrong. We picked up the flags and sat. Flies buzzed in the hot marine air.
Our flamboyant host introduced himself as Abduelle and claimed to be the mayor of Hobyo. I glanced around for Mohamud Awale, his rival for that title, but he’d disappeared. In expansive gestures and a husky voice this new mayor gave a speech, which Gerlach translated into German: “We would like to welcome our clan brothers as well as our guests from far away. And we would like to plead with outside powers for urgent aid. We need weapons and logistics to fight the pirates here—anything that can help us fight them—and we would like to plead for coordination between our side and Atalanta. Many people in Somalia doubt whether Atalanta can be effective.”
The Desert and the Sea Page 3