Eventually, Ahmed accepted that all of the friend’s cars were unavailable, and that the seventy-foot truck wouldn’t be ideal for the drive, and the friend went to rent something at twenty dollars per day. Cash is particularly necessary in a country without ATMs. I had hoped to have enough leftover from Yemen. I wouldn’t—not even close—when the bill came for the Oriental. Larger transactions are almost always handled in American currency, of which I had only a few big bills left from the emergency stash. I handed Ahmed’s friend a fifty, expecting thirty dollars or the equivalent bale of shillings in return.
He returned minutes later with no change. It was a two-day minimum, he said, and we needed to buy gas. Trust faltered, but there was no recourse except to whine and ruin everything. I let my displeasure show faintly. I think this put even more pressure on Ahmed. Tourist guides officially required a soldier and government approval, and maybe he started to realize that he couldn’t come through.
Twenty-five minutes outside the city on empty roads, the friend looked worried. He didn’t think we’d have enough gas to make it to the caves. So we doubled back almost all the way to the city, added fuel, and left again, everyone loathing one another more and more.
We approached the checkpoint. “Are you sure we don’t need . . .” I began.
“Don’t worry.”
And when we halted at the metal barrier, the officer took one look in the backseat, at my face and at the papers that didn’t exist, and—I translated on my own by the tone of his voice—told us to have ourselves fucked.
No one really spoke after that. I stewed in the back as we drove solemnly back to Hargeisa, thinking, The only way to travel is to lose yourself in the moment, and that this was the long moment of a beautiful day squandered. As always when I saw that I had drifted out of the present, I berated myself. I wanted so desperately to see things from my eyes and not from far behind them.
Outside the car in an unfamiliar part of town, I asked the friend for the thirty dollars in car rental change. I’d forgotten entirely the math that had gotten us here. At first he was apologetic, shockingly so, and then, as if a switch had flipped, he turned angry. A small crowd surrounded us, gathering information like a lawyers’ barbershop. Ahmed was overwhelmed. Minutes of argument later when I looked back to the car, he was gone.
His friend dropped the car keys in the sand and walked away.
The casus belli was my confusion alone. But no matter how many people I offended, I was still a visitor in their city. A thin and soft-spoken member of the gaggle joined me, and together, as is doable in Hargeisa, we tracked down Ahmed’s friend’s father.
We found him issuing orders in his auto repair shop. “I’m going to solve this. Because one of those kids is my son.”
I talked softly, explaining that his son had spent thirty dollars that wasn’t his.
“What do you want me to do? Where’s my son?” the father began to say, in that part of the day when most men were chewing gat in the shade. He repeated this several times with varying inflection. “Where’s my son?”
“I don’t know. But you can fix this, and maybe you’ll find him one day.” I couldn’t filter all my snideness in the heat, and I hoped it would go unpunished.
“What do you want me to do,” he bit.
It wasn’t a question anymore, and so we left. Reflecting my anxiety in the wrinkles of his own forehead, my new advocate found the owner of the car rental on the street. Because we’d only kept the car for four hours, he gave me ten dollars.
But that wasn’t the issue then. I had let my frustrations—a day poorly spent—turn me sour.
And then I got a call that would fix everything but hurt feelings. The voice on the other end of the line was a friend of Joseph George, the man who always came through.
THE DOORS of the Oriental boxed out memories of the day, the last heat of January replaced by a dark, cozy evening. In the hotel’s leafy atrium I met with Joseph’s friend Omar, a director in the Somaliland Ministry of Youth and Sports. He paid close attention to his phone while we drank spiced tea, oh!—how restorative was the manna from Somali teapots, shaah hawash. The name hints at its relations—to hawayij, that Yemeni spice mix for coffee and a hundred other things—and its role. In Arabic, hawayij means “necessities.”
I hadn’t fully finished a sentence about what I was doing in town before Omar began solving problems. I’ll take you to get the permit, he said. I’ll take you to get your flight tickets tomorrow. Then we’ll get a soldier and I’ll drive you to the caves in my Land Cruiser.
Again, I let myself lean on the goodness of new friends. I wondered if he was one. He was tall, middle-aged bordering on three-quarters, and moved the way a man does when he grew quickly as a boy. While we sat, he looked away often, his face set and distracted. I wondered if he felt an obligation to babysit.
True to his word, Omar whisked me in the morning to the Ministry of Tourism and Culture to reserve a twenty-five-dollar ticket to see the caves and sped through town to the station where soldiers are rented. My eyes unfocused and took in mostly colors. And then: a billboard for Haatuf News, where Brittany’s friend Yusuf worked. I scribbled down the large-lettered Hotmail contact as we tore past.
LAAS GEEL WAS “DISCOVERED” in much the same way America was, as a work of publicity far more than actual unearthing. In 2002, a French archeological team learned of the site’s existence, about five kilometers off the main road. As far as outsiders were concerned, Somaliland put its first treasure on the map. Since then, tourists have learned to ask for directions here, generally making a side trip from Ethiopia. Marked with the previous month’s dates, there were about fifty names in the Laas Geel Visitors Register.
The pre-Islamic shelters are largely unexplored. Some pastoral communities might be aware of the artwork in their area. Some nomads use them as temporary refuge. Some imbue the pre-Islamic art with mystical properties, or avoid the caves for fear of evil energy. To others, the large slabs of rock are good material for toilets.
The Holocene legacy does not filter into Somali or Somalilander identity like the Pharaonic does in Egypt—there aren’t five hundred-foot pyramids staring anyone in the face. The caves haven’t had thousands of years to find their place in the consciousness of any particular collective. The State hasn’t built a national myth here. Celebration of pre-Islamic history can incite a cognitive dissonance in religious circles, as in Saudi Arabia, where the first-century Mada’in Saleh complex carved by the Nabateans (of Petra fame) has suffered the legend of a Quranic curse. In Laas Geel, the major obstacle toward embracing history was the confounding effect it has on modern tribal demarcations. I am proud of this, our shared history; however, we do not share this history. Or, Behold! Something older than I can accept! The cave paintings are a shared ancestor. Preserving this heritage, says Somaliland’s ten-year-old Department of Archaeology, is a major key to peace. It was easy for me to love it all, because I came from the outside.
OMAR’S LAND CRUISER found a little red-roofed house in the shade of a desert tree. A sleepy guard emerged to walk us up the stairs—there are stairs now—to the first of the twenty shelters so pristine I thought they might have been painted within the week.
For the first few seconds I saw only bloodred contours as my eyes rebounded off shapes only man could have made. There are 350 images on the surfaces of Shelter One alone.
My favorite among the cows was not one with strings across its harp-shaped neck, or alternating bars of red ochre and white, but a rare one that filled the space of the lyre with pure abstraction. There were red strings, yes, but then there were the teeth of a comb, and squiggling blobs, wild but contained. They reached the border of the neck, where wide horns appeared in smooth arches, and stopped. I started to see these cow wattles like signatures. Maybe this was an assertion of the artist—in each of these empty necks, there is squiggle room for the individual to take shape.
On the rocks down below, there were real goats, a real camel brave
ly suckling on the pads of a cactus, an iguanid lizard with perfect camouflage, and an antelope so unflinchingly adorable that our soldier gazed at her with soft eyes. I caught him. The space is spectacular. These are not the electric torch-lit grottos of western Europe, where humans hid from the cold in the bowels of deep caves. Laas Geel, “the camel’s watering hole,” covers a high outcropping where the region’s early settlers could oversee the sloping scrubland below with granite at their backs.
Beholden to few hard facts, we could interpret these discoveries as we wanted. I saw the painted people standing underneath their cows, arms raised high, and wondered who they might have been. The solid white figure with red legs had just bought new pants. Another shape was proud of his coat.
The guard-guide was getting excited, and Omar was, too, as if he hadn’t expected to be. The guide leaned through a tight aperture in a cave wall, narrowing his eyes along the barrel of his index finger and following the sight down into the valley. “When enemies come, they could look out from here.”
“Sure,” I said. “Cool.”
Another natural ledge was the throne room. On the ceilings there were drawings too high for us to reach. “Back then they were five meters tall,” said Omar.
AS WE DROVE HOME, I realized the steering wheel was on the right even though traffic kept to the right. This was a rare combo, shared by some taxis in Afghanistan, like a British string around the new country’s finger. The lettering on the dashboard was all in Japanese. The air-freshening spray was all Omar’s own: “Pure Cigar.”
This might have been where he asked for sixty or eighty dollars. These one hundred kilometers were not a gift—I had mistaken an extra day’s work for charity. Even a director of the Ministry of Youth and Sports could use gas money. (“I have twenty-two children,” he said.)
It is embarrassing to assume extraordinary goodwill in the place of mere politeness. I panicked at the thought that I had been doing this across the Middle East, recognizing an offer but mistaking its kind, making assumptions at lunches proffered, and then leaving local couples shrugging at each other: I guess that’s just what the Americans expect. I’d figured out that the Somali letter X was the same as the hard H in Arabic, the one I once couldn’t distinguish or pronounce without choking a little—and it felt so good to recognize something in a place I couldn’t otherwise read. But the Semitic grammar I’d studied in school, the few Cushtic phrases I’d absorbed here, did not make me part of the family. Recognition is not awareness.
Omar and I began to bargain, factoring in gas and our moods and the soldier-for-hire, to land somewhere a little under the hotel’s package price. And then, somewhere on an empty stretch the car gave up and sputtered to a stop, steaming. We looked inside the hood, and then milled about. The soldier stood at the edge of the pavement, his shadow reaching nearly across the road. A woman in a floral robe and a green shawl strode by, a toddler jouncing on her back. A man passed in mismatched shoes. We looked to be miles away from any shade we didn’t cast ourselves.
When a van came with space for one, Omar ushered me inside, out of hospitality, or automatic custom, or to get rid of me.
THE NEWS ISSUED LOUDLY from the van speakers in a northern accent. In the back, Mogadishu-born Abdirazak and I talked over the radio. His hometown was safe now, he said, but Hargeisa offered more opportunity. And he argued the southerner’s call for unity, appealing to my United States for support.
“Which is better, fifty states or one government?”
“Both,” I suggested. “The states can focus on local services while the federal government can have more power.”
He picked up only on the five-dollar word. “More power,” he repeated. “Somalia is one state. Same language, same religion, same culture.”
IN THE END, the cave paintings told me about as much about Somaliland as a woolly mammoth would tell me about Alaskan politics. But now Yusuf, Brittany’s friend, who had answered the e-mail I sent to the address I’d spotted on the billboard, was coming for tea in the Oriental.
He had the kind of voice Goldilocks would have followed, in English, neither high nor deep. His glasses, with the simplest of frames, were the kind I stopped noticing. A small space between his front teeth, and body language that was never loud. When he laughed, not too often, I felt fully understood.
Just after New Year’s in 2007, Yusuf was arrested with two other colleagues for “defaming” Somaliland’s third president, Dahir Riyale Kahin, and his wife. (In fact, he was charged with obstructing the police work of arresting others in the newsroom for defamation, but he hardly remembers.) As the chairman of Haatuf Media Network, he had published a series of articles outlining the depth of the president’s nepotism and corruption. He waited three months in prison for the trial. By the time of his conviction, the reaction to his cause célèbre forced the government to let him go, a free man with a guilty record.
At our table in the leafy lobby, I delivered my cargo from the Emirates, and Yusuf spoke to me about where I was. “Hargeisa was the bastion of the ‘Greater Somalia’ concept,” he told me. “Hargeisa was spearheading this Somali idea of unifying the whole Somali-speaking territories on the Horn of Africa. ‘Let’s make sacrifices.’ But this didn’t materialize. The only two parts which united were Somaliland and Somalia out of the five—and their unification didn’t work well.
“The armed struggle began in earnest at the end of ’82. At the beginning of ’83, I was expelled from Qatar because I was mobilizing people,” Yusuf said. Despite sweeping achievements in road paving and irrigation and education and literacy—and the unifying power of the newly codified Somali language—Somali president and communist autocrat Major General Siad Barre had been assassinating his critics for more than a decade. With despotism lingering in the Somali government and the economy in shambles, the champions of unification were now fighting for separation. In 1988, guerilla campaigns converted to full-blooded war, attacking Somali Army troops in Somaliland. Siad Barre retaliated with carpet bombing and massacre. “This city was destroyed completely. Most urban centers in Somaliland were completely razed to the ground.”
Other rebel groups contested in the south and by 1991, Siad Barre was ousted by the southern United Somali Congress, who became the factional new rulers of Somalia.
Four hundred meters from the Oriental in the center of Khayriyada Memorial Square, a MiG fighter plane that once bombed the city is immobilized on a painted pedestal. On one side of the mount: 26 JUNE, a reminder of Somalilanders’ first taste of self-rule in modern times, in 1960, when British Somaliland was granted its independence. Five days later, they joined with Italian Somaliland to form the Somali Republic. On the other side of the fighter plane memorial: 18 MAY. In the wake of the gruesome civil war, on May 18, 1991, the Republic of Somaliland declared itself independent. It is recognized by no one.
“Has Hargeisa recovered?” I asked, pouring cream-colored tea into our cups.
“It recovered and expanded—it’s larger than before. Of course, infrastructure and things like that are still bad, but Hargeisa is far better than it was before being razed to the ground.”
With passports meaningless in every country but Ethiopia, though, Somalilanders are still trapped. Until now, the international community has rejected their plea for self-determination.
Whenever I wrote friends or spoke of Hargeisa to myself, I never knew what to call the country it was in. Somalia, maybe, when I wanted to invoke its relationship to the world. On the ground, I saw why the name was meaningless, or repressive. No matter what, when I gave the place a name I gave one argument power.
YUSUF WAS RESTING his hand on Brittany’s book. “People take the same language, the same religion, and say it’s okay, it’s this homogenous society. But the peril is—there is the caste system in Somali culture.”
Somalia’s demographics are at the top of the homogeneous list in Africa: more than four-fifths of the country is ethnically Somali. A common language is a sign of pride, but
it is also a mechanism for condescension. The four seminomadic clan families whose Northern Somali language was declared “official” are known as “noble” clans. About 15 percent of Somalia is non-Somali, speakers of Bantu languages and the Swahili of neighboring Kenya.
In 2000, the transitional federal government introduced the notorious 4.5 system, whereby each of the four noble clans is allotted one share of the power structure, and the remaining minorities are given a collective half.
Another autonomous region had sprouted in the center of the country, and another still on the southern tip, supported by Kenya and Ethiopia as a buffer against Al-Shabab insurgents. (Once, the newly elected president of this state had come to Abu Dhabi for a conference at the NYUAD Institute. Through cosmopolitan Gila, he had extended me an invitation to visit. I could never reach him. “J’habite dans le brousse, moi,” he had said. I live in the bush. The president couldn’t even live in his state, because, insofar as a state exists, it didn’t.) The new names on maps hardly touched life on the ground. It seemed like the region was trying to fight terrorism with semantics.
Each subdivision created a new majority in a smaller place, appearing like cracks across a frozen river. New minorities found themselves stranded and divided. In Somaliland, too, there are segments that decry the Ishaq clan’s hegemony and seek adoption into Somalia proper. These contested districts have opted to create their own autonomous state with a kind of aspirational branding. The Khatumo State, which endeavors to secede from the secessionists, takes its name from Arabic: khatima means “conclusion.”
“A CLAN IS OF COURSE a kind of tribe, but it’s more complicated: it has a system of lineage,” said Yusuf. The obsession with this lineage is soil for the roots of all Somali conflict. Somewhere though, between the painting of Laas Geel and the cornerstoning of the Oriental, there is a shared root. All Somali clan families trace their lineage to the patriarch Soomaal, a descendant of the house of Muhammad. The clans break off at different points in the family tree, spidering into subclans and sub-sub-clans and blood-money-paying groups. Each element is a vital part of a Somali’s identity.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 31