When I think of the fighter jets that battled overhead, I think also—indeed, primarily—of Asad and how to tell his story. The war may have been fought seven or so years before his birth, and Dire Dawa may have been a place utterly foreign to him, but the 1977 war is nonetheless central to his tale.
—
Were the world to stand vertically, south at the bottom, north at the top, Dire Dawa would look down onto the vast arid plains of the Ogaden, otherwise known as the Somali region of Ethiopia, the territory into which Yindy’s family took Asad when they moved from Dire Dawa to Wardheer. He didn’t know it, but on that journey into Ethiopia’s Somali region, Asad traveled across the ground on which his family had lived for generations and from which they had recently fled.
Nomadic Somali pastoralists, among them Asad’s forebears, have lived on these plains since the sixteenth century and have formed the majority of the Ogaden’s population ever since. Why this Somali-speaking land did not become part of Somalia when the country acquired independence is a long tale of treachery and deceit, one that Ogadeni nationalists like to tell over and again. The Somali-speaking territories controlled by the British and the Italians joined to form the independent state of Somalia in 1960. But the Ogaden was excluded, remaining under the control of Ethiopia, as were the Somali clans of northern Kenya. From the first, the new Somali state agitated without success to redraw its borders to incorporate all Somalis. That the country was incomplete, an amputated limb in Kenya and another in Ethiopia, became Somali nationalism’s great clarion call.
Hawo told Asad that if his father had fled Somalia, it would have been to a place called Qorahay, for that is where the AliYusuf were from. Qorahay is a region of the Ogaden. It is not far from Wardheer. The AliYusuf thus understand themselves to be at the center of the great drama of Somalia’s thwarted nationalism, a part of the limb severed from the motherland. Fate placed them within the borders of the vast, complicated colossus of the Ethiopian empire, one whose subjects spoke no fewer than eighty languages and whose rulers were Christian and conducted their official business in the foreign language of Amharic.
In 1974, Ethiopia’s imperial regime was overthrown in a coup and replaced by a military junta. Several hundred of the regime’s top officials were executed, and the emperor himself, Haile Selassie, was imprisoned and soon died. In the times of instability that followed, it seemed that the Ethiopian state might fall apart, for nationalist demands for succession arose throughout its borderlands: from Eritreans and Tigrayans in the north; from the Afar in the northeast; from Oromo people, who were dispersed throughout Ethiopia; and, of course, from the Somalis in the southeast.
Taking advantage of this uncertain moment, the Somali government began supporting a guerrilla campaign in the Ogaden and then launched a full-fledged invasion in July 1977. Backed by a local population that overwhelmingly supported it, the invading Somali forces were very soon in control of the Ogaden. Flush with confidence, and more than a little greedy, they marched on beyond the Ogaden and attacked Dire Dawa and the ancient city of Harar. This was an altogether more risky business, for the majority of the civilian population here was not Somali, and, to many, the invading army was a foreign foe. Moreover, with Dire Dawa up for grabs, the stakes for Ethiopia now became existential, for the railway line that the French built connected the entire southern and eastern economy of Ethiopia to the port of Djibouti and, thus, to the world. Were Dire Dawa and Harar to fall, Addis Ababa itself would lose its lifeblood.
Why a war is won or lost is always a matter of debate. The Somalis did not anticipate that their invasion would stir feelings of loyalty to the new Ethiopian regime among millions of people, who fought very bravely to defend their cities. As important, perhaps, were decisions made many thousands of miles away. Somalia’s Cold War backer, the Soviet Union, switched sides in the middle of the war. The Somalis found themselves fighting thousands of Cuban soldiers and an army buttressed by endless new supplies of Soviet matériel; the very same Soviet advisers who just weeks earlier were crafting Somali strategy were now devising plans to rout the Somali military.
By March 1978, the war was over, Somalia’s armed forces in hasty retreat. But for the Somali-speaking people of the Ogaden, the trauma was only beginning. Precisely what transpired between the Ethiopian military and Ogadeni civilians in the aftermath of the Somali defeat has never been recorded except in the Ogadeni memories that have become folklore. But it was pretty devastating. An estimated eight hundred thousand people fled the Ogaden for Somalia. Many were slaughtered. If the fictional reconstructions of the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah are accurate, entire families were killed, the inhabitants of entire villages cut down, on suspicion of having supported the enemy. Any Ogadeni who was educated, or who had wielded political power, fled for his life. By the early 1980s, the population of the Ogaden had halved.
Although he does not know it, Asad’s parents were among the eight hundred thousand who fled. This information is new to me. I learned it just a week before I came to Dire Dawa. After much searching, I had found an Abdullahi in London who grew up with Asad’s father. He was a cabdriver in White City. As we sat in his living room on a Saturday afternoon drinking tea, he relayed what he remembered of Asad’s parents’ wedding. It was a garrulous, colorful affair, he said. To my surprise, he mentioned in passing that it had taken place in a village called Marsin in the Qorahay region of the Ogaden.
“The wedding was not in Mogadishu?” I asked.
He shook his head. Hirsi Abdullahi grew up in Marsin. He and Asad’s mother fled the Ogaden shortly after they were married. This was in March 1978, in the aftermath of the Ogadeni war.
And then the man, whose name was Sheikh Hussein, described his own flight from Qorahay in 1978. He spoke of his years in a refugee camp in southern Somalia and of his perilous journey back into the Ogaden to retrieve a sister who had been stranded there. He described what it was like to be a refugee in Somalia—they were treated like leeches, he said, like second-class people, like beggars. He left Somalia in 1981 and worked first in Libya and then in Saudi Arabia.
I asked if he saw a lot of Asad’s parents before he left Mogadishu. Not much, he replied. Asad’s father was doing well as a trader. He had been lulled into thinking that maybe he belonged in Mogadishu. Sheikh Hussein’s tone seemed bitter to me.
That evening, as I left White City, I had to examine Asad’s story anew. The way he had it in his mind, his was an old Mogadishu family, his parents ensconced and comfortable in the city. His mother’s death and his own flight were the beginning of an unraveling. That they were refugees who had been torn from their homes, the city around them strange and unwelcome, was a notion he had not dreamed of.
Far more dramatic, though, were the implications for his time in Wardheer. Here was a lost boy, pushing barrels of water through hot sand, his family lost. Little did he know that he was home, the villages a few hours to the west teeming with his kin, many of whom had recently returned.
Rooda
Walking his barrel through the sand in Wardheer’s midday heat, Asad felt a pair of eyes on him. He looked up to see a woman standing at the entrance of a cafeteria, her hands on her hips, scrutinizing him without apology. She was young, about twenty, he guessed, and she was beautiful, her eyes wide and very large, her back straight and resolute. Her stare was curious, rather than hostile, but he nonetheless recoiled from it. He imagined himself from her perspective, a scrawny, half-grown boy pushing a barrel many times his weight through boiling sand. He stood up and returned her gaze with silent anger. She held his stare for a moment, unembarrassed, then turned away.
Later in the day, after he had delivered his barrel of water, he walked into her cafeteria and told her that he wanted to fetch water. If she could stare at me like that, he thought, she could at least do something useful for me, too. She smiled at him in a way that made it seem as if she was laughing to herself and told him to come back the following morning.
That night,
Asad asked Zena about her, and Zena, who knew everything about everyone, said that her name was Nasri and that she was entirely alone: she had no brothers with her in Wardheer, no father. She ran the cafeteria Asad had gone into she was a young, independent businesswoman, her own boss. Her house was at the back of her restaurant; she shared it with another single woman.
Within a week, Nasri had become Asad’s most regular client. He carried water for her at least twice a day. She said very little to him. But her waiters would reward him well, not so much with money but with a good supply of healthy food. It was, he believed, on her instructions that he was so well fed.
As his presence became routine, so Nasri began using him for other work. Once, when the cafeteria ran out of meat in the middle of dinnertime, she gave him money and instructed him to rush to the butchery. The following day, she sent him to buy camel milk. He treated these errands as urgent business, batting off all distractions and returning to her restaurant with speed. And he made a point of giving her the right change, never pocketing so much as a shilling.
—
Among Nasri’s regular customers was a young truck driver. “His name was Abdiyare,” Asad tells me. “But nobody called him that. His nickname was Rooda. It is a girl’s name. I don’t know why he got that name. He was in love with Nasri. He wanted to marry her. Whenever he passed through Wardheer—and it was often, sometimes as much as every week—Nasri’s cafeteria was where he would chew his mira and eat his meals. He would stay until she closed, always the last customer to leave, every single day he was in town. He was a very warm man, a gentle, laughing man. It would be a long time before I saw him angry.”
And then Asad suddenly pivots the discussion in another direction and says something I don’t quite understand.
“I was suspicious of him and Nasri. Her house was at the back of the cafeteria. She did not allow anyone there, except Rooda. He was always going back there. I wondered why.”
“Do you think they were having sex?” I ask.
“No. That would have been bad. They were not married. Culturally, premarital sex is not something we do.”
“Maybe something short of sex, but still physical?”
“Nasri was a good girl,” he replies. “If any customer tried to touch her body, she chased him away. She had a reputation for that.”
“So why did she and Rooda make you suspicious?”
“Because she was always taking him back there to her house.”
“But you don’t think that they were doing anything untoward there?”
“No.”
We were going around in circles, and so I changed the subject. But as I drove away from Blikkiesdorp that afternoon, it was still on my mind. Was Asad filtering away his subsequent, adult thoughts and simply reinhabiting his thirteen-year-old self? Was he telling me that he recognized sexual play without yet having the words or the concepts to know what it was? Or was it that his sense of decorum prevented him from talking frankly with me about sex? I am not sure about that, as he would soon share something of his own sexual experience, albeit it in the most measured way. In any event, I would imagine that he feared for Nasri: a young woman alone, running her own business; so much rested on her reputation. Perhaps he was troubled that others might see what he saw.
As Asad remembers him, Rooda spent his waking hours feeding himself a succession of stimulants. If he was not chewing mira, he was drinking Coke. Often he did both at the same time. That is how he and Asad got to know each other. Nasri did not sell Coke. Instead, she stocked an Arabic drink called Shani. Rooda would call Asad over and give him five hundred shillings and instruct him to come back with a few bottles of Coke. Asad would return with Rooda’s drinks and his change, and Rooda would line the Coke bottles up on the table in front of him and drink them one after another in the course of the evening.
Soon, Rooda was asking Asad to do all sorts of things. Sometimes, he would remember that he had left something he needed in his truck—a pocketknife, perhaps, or an article of clothing. Asad would hoist himself into the cabin of this great beast and wriggle into the imprint Rooda’s form had left in the cracked plastic cover on the driver’s seat. He would finger the gear stick and press his palms down on the dashboard until the heat shot into his fingers, and he would pull his hand away.
Other times, Rooda would send Asad to the mira market. This was, without doubt, his most exciting task, for East African men take their mira extremely seriously, feeling the texture of the leaf in their fingers, burying their nose in the plant to ascertain its purity. And here was Asad, a mere street boy, expertly roaming through the plants, running leaves through his hands. He would return with his purchase and wait eagerly for Rooda to put the first of his replenished stock in his mouth and then watch his face to see whether he was pleased.
“After a while,” Asad recalls, “Rooda learned everything about my life. I did not tell him, but he found out. He would ask me about being alone, about being on the street. He would ask about Islii. Once, he even asked me about my mother. But he did it in a way that did not make me want to run away. He did it in a sidewise sort of way. Sometimes, I would be sitting in the sand outside Nasri’s restaurant, and I would look up and see that he was watching me. He would be laughing and talking loudly and chewing his mira, but while all this was going on, he would look at me out of the corner of his eye.”
Expecting to hear a story about teeth, I ask Asad what Rooda looked like. But, for once, his portraiture drifts from physical description and melts into an account of Rooda’s spirit.
“Rooda is a short man,” Asad says. “He has white skin, soft hair, a long nose. He is a happy person. He is always smiling. And he is a great mira eater. You wonder when he sleeps.
“I would miss him when he was traveling. Sometimes he was away for a month, sometimes two weeks or a week. I would wait for him to come. Someone would tell me that his truck had arrived, and I would feel excited.”
—
One afternoon in Nasri’s restaurant, a couple of months after he and Asad met, Rooda tossed a proposition into Asad’s lap. He was leaving the following morning, and he wanted Asad to come along. Asad had asked him several times in the preceding weeks if he could accompany him. Rooda had just laughed, as if Asad had been joking. He recalls the proposition as two great hands grabbing him by his sides and shaking him.
“How long will we be gone?” Asad asked.
Rooda shrugged. “Maybe a week.”
“I have nothing,” Asad said. “No food, nothing.”
Rooda smiled. “I have food,” he said, poking a finger into his own chest. He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “We will be going to Dire Dawa. I will buy you clothes there. The things you have on your shoulders are rags.”
Asad picked at a hole in his shirt’s sleeve.
“I do not know what a person does in a truck,” he said.
“What a person does,” Rooda replied, “is follow Rooda. Rooda will show a person everything he needs to know. You are not going anywhere alone. You are going with Rooda.”
—
Asad takes my notebook and pen from me and begins yet another sketch, not of a place, but of a set of relationships: he is showing me the division of labor on an Ogadeni truck.
“You get three people in the vehicle,” Asad tells me as he draws. “The first is the truck driver. The second is called the deni. He is the one representing the owner of the truck. He is responsible for the safety of the cargo, for negotiating with officials in and out of the Ogaden, negotiating the price of the load, negotiating with people who want to travel on the roof of the truck. And then you get the kirishbooy, who is in charge of the cargo, flat tires, the engine: everything to do with the truck except driving it. That is what Rooda had in mind, that he would save me from the streets by training me to be a kirishbooy. It was a long-term vision. I was still too small and weak. The truck jack, for instance: you let it go, the truck will crush you.”
The following morning Asad fo
und himself in the back of the truck cabin with the kirishbooy. Rooda was in the driver’s seat, the deni in the passenger seat. Before the truck had even started moving, the kirishbooy complained to the deni about having to share his space. The kirishbooy was a very tall young man, and thin, too, which made him seem even taller. His name was Bille Dheer, dheer being the Somali word for “tall.” He folded his arms and told the deni that he refused to travel with this young boy all over his space. Rooda turned around in his seat and told the kirishbooy to be quiet. And then the deni joined the dispute on the kirishbooy’s side, asking why a little shrimp of a boy of no use to anybody should take up valuable space in the cabin. In future, Asad would travel on the roof.
When they finally drove out of Wardheer, the vehicle that carried them seemed to Asad not so much a truck as a moving city. The back was packed to the ceiling with all sorts of cargo from livestock to furniture to an assortment of sealed boxes. And the roof was filled with people, about forty of them in all, each on his or her way to somewhere in the Ogaden.
They drove through many, many miles of desert, and it seemed as if they were going nowhere, for everything looked the same. At about midday, they stopped, and the kirishbooy jumped down from the cabin and began pointing out young men on the roof, commanding them to help him. Together, three of them took a two-hundred-liter barrel of gasoline off the truck. Bille Dheer uncapped it, lowered a short pipe into the petrol, sucked, and then quickly steered the pipe into the petrol tank. He filled the radiator with water and checked the tires, and by the time they were moving again, the sun was at its zenith, the temperature well over a hundred degrees.
A Man of Good Hope Page 9