Further Reading
The following books and articles helped shape aspects of A Man of Good Hope. They also serve as a guide to those who wish to read further about some of the many episodes, themes, and events covered in these pages.
Why a country whose citizens share a common language, religion, and long-standing heritage has torn itself to pieces is the great question that hangs over Somalia. It is the subject of an ongoing and sometimes ill-tempered debate. On one side are those who see the civil war of the 1990s as the expression of an ancient Somali proclivity to fight. The best proponent of this position is I. M. Lewis, the grand old ethnographer of northern Somali society. His ethnography of the Somali clan system, A Pastoral Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), was the bible of Somali scholarship until the 1990s, when younger scholars finally rose to challenge it. The latest edition of his A Modern History of the Somali (Oxford and Athens, Ohio: James Currey and Ohio University Press, 2002) contains his fullest account of the origins of the civil war. His take on the war is in part an expression of personal disappointment; he was an ardent supporter of anticolonial Somali movements in the 1940s and 1950s and a great friend to many of the Somali nationalists who dreamed of building a progressive African nation from the ruins of empire.
Pitted against Lewis are a host of younger scholars who take umbrage at the idea that the roots of the war are primordial and are offended by the implication that Somalis are born to violence. These scholars find the roots of the war not in the ancient clan system, but in modern inequities of race and class, in the political economy of avarice and greed, and in the global politics of the Cold War. For an account of Somali society that differs sharply with Lewis’s, see Catherine Besteman, Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence and the Legacy of Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). And for an interpretation of the causes of the war that challenges Lewis’s account, see the articles collected in Catherine Besteman and Lee V. Cassanelli, eds., The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia: The War Behind the War (London and New Brunswick: Haan and Transaction, 1996).
In the late 1990s, Besteman and Lewis had an abrasive exchange in the pages of a prestigious anthropology journal: Catherine Besteman, “Representing Violence and ‘Othering’ Somalia,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 1 (1996): 120–33; I. M. Lewis, “Doing Violence to Ethnography: A Response to Catherine Besteman’s ‘Representing Violence and “Othering” Somalia,’ ” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 1 (1998): 100–108; Catherine Besteman, “Primordialist Blinders: A Reply to I. M. Lewis,” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 1 (1998): 109–20.
In recent years, the debate has moderated somewhat and has become better for it. Now that scholars are no longer shouting one another down, more serious attention is being paid to the obvious complexity of the place of history in the Somali present. See, for instance, Jutta Bakonyi, “Moral Economies of Mass Violence: Somalia, 1988–1991,” Civil Wars 11, no. 4 (2009): 434–54.
Looking at Asad’s life, you can see that questions about ancient times are strikingly close to the surface and yet no less mercurial for that. It never occurred to Asad to ask Rooda, the most important benefactor of his childhood and youth, his clan. And yet, when Asad accounts for the behavior of black South Africans, he refers to what he believes happened to their ancestors in the mists of time. And his decision to marry Sadicya is at once a defiance of genealogical chauvinism and an acknowledgment of its continuing power.
For a penetrating account of the condition of Asad’s home city of Mogadishu a decade after he fled, see Roland Marchal, A Survey of Mogadishu’s Economy (Nairobi: European Commission, 2002). For a brief and incisive account of Somali politics during two decades of war, see Ken Menkhaus, “Somalia at the Tipping Point,” Current History (May 2012).
Anyone interested in Somalia would do well to read the novels of Nuruddin Farah. Readers of A Man of Good Hope might be especially interested in his trilogy made up of Maps (New York: Pantheon, 1986), Secrets (New York: Penguin, 1999), and Gifts (New York: Penguin, 2000) for its attention to the Ogadeni war and its aftermath, which, unbeknownst to Asad, did so much to shape his fate.
For a portrait of the Dadaab refugee camps where Asad and Yindy lived, see Cindy Horst, Transnational Nomads (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2006). An excellent book on how money moves around the Somali diaspora, which includes an interesting portrait of Somalis in Eastleigh, Nairobi, is Anna Lindley, The Early Morning Call: Somali Refugees’ Remittances (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2010). An essay-length history of Somalis in Eastleigh is Neil Carrier and Emma Lochery, “Missing States? Somali Trade Networks and the Eastleigh Transformation,” Journal of East African Studies 7, no. 2 (2013): 334–52.
Precious little has been written on Somalis in Addis Ababa or in Dire Dawa. There is, though, a very fine doctoral dissertation on young hustlers who work the streets of inner-city Addis, the world Asad managed to crack and in which he earned a good living. See Marco DiNunzio, “ ‘The Arada Have Been Eaten’: Living Through Marginality in Addis Ababa’s Inner City” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 2012).
The most useful account of the Ogadeni war of 1977–78 I have read is Gebru Tareke, “The Ethiopia-Somalia War of 1977 Revisited,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, no. 3 (2000): 635–67. On the Somali region of Ethiopia during the period when Asad lived there, see Tobias Hagmann, “Beyond Clannishness and Colonialism: Understanding Political Disorder in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, 1991–2004,” Journal of Modern African Studies 43, no. 4 (2005): 509–36; and Tobias Hagmann and Mohamud H. Khalif, “State and Politics in Ethiopia’s Somali Region Since 1991,” Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies 6 (2006): 25–49. On the complicated ethnic politics of Ethiopia and the nationalist movements in its borderlands, see Christopher Clapham, “Rewriting Ethiopian History,” Annales d’Ethiopie 18 (2002): 37–54.
Asad’s journey from the Horn of Africa to Johannesburg is well trodden. Thousands embark upon it each year. For an attempt to map this odyssey and to account for the various fates of those who undertake it, see Christopher Horwood, In Pursuit of the Southern Dream: Victims of Necessity: Assessment of the Irregular Movement of Men from East Africa and the Horn to South Africa (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, April 2009). There is also a perceptive and deeply intelligent doctoral dissertation on the subjective dimensions of the sort of journey Asad embarked upon, albeit the subjects of this study were moving north, toward Europe, rather than south. See Joris Schapendonk, “Turbulent Trajectories: Sub-Saharan African Migrants Heading North” (Ph.D. diss., Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 2011).
A small literature is beginning to emerge on the Somali traders who operate in the shacklands and townships on the southeastern periphery of Cape Town. See Andrew Charman and Laurence Piper, “From Township Survivalism to Foreign Entrepreneurship: The Transformation of the Spaza Sector in Delft, Cape Town,” Transformation 78 (2012): 47–73; Andrew Charman and Laurence Piper, “Xenophobia, Criminality and Violent Entrepreneurship: Violence Against Somali Shopkeepers in Delft South, Cape Town, South Africa,” South African Review of Sociology 13, no. 3 (2012): 81–105; Vanya Gastrow with Roni Amit, Elusive Justice: Somali Traders’ Access to Formal and Informal Justice Mechanisms in the Western Cape (research report, African Centre for Migration and Society, Johannesburg, 2012).
Much has been written on the nationwide violence against foreign nationals that broke out across South Africa in May 2008. Of particular interest is a debate between two scholars from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. See Daryl Glaser, “[Dis]connection: Elite and Popular ‘Common Sense’ on the Matter of Foreigners,” in Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa, ed. Shireen Hassim, Tawana Kupe, and Eric Worby (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), pp. 53–64; and Loren Landau, “Loving the Alien? Law, Citizenship and the Future of South Africa’s Demonic Society,” African Affairs 109, no. 435 (2010): 213�
��30. See also Southern African Migration Project, “The Perfect Storm: The Realities of Xenophobia in Contemporary South Africa,” Migration Policy Brief, no. 50 (Southern African Migration Project, 2008); Loren Landau, ed., Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits, 2011).
As for Sadicya’s harrowing story, the most illuminating material I could find on Somali minority clans was by the scholar and human rights activist Virginia Luling, who died while this book was being written. Especially informative is the expert testimony she gave to the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal in 2006 on the fate of the Galgale during the civil war. See https://tribunalsdecisions.service.gov.uk/utiac/decisions/2006-ukait-73. See also a document prepared for Canada’s immigration services by Lee Casanelli, Victims and Vulnerable Groups in Southern Somalia (Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board, 1995).
My understanding of the arc of Asad’s life was influenced by the work of the wonderful anthropologist Michael Jackson. See, especially, At Home in the World (Durham, North Carolina, and London: Duke University Press, 1995); The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press); and Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2008). It is from Jackson that I got the idea that Asad’s journey was animated by the desire to effect a revolution in the history of his lineage. See Jackson, “The Shock of the New: On Migrant Imaginaries and Critical Transitions,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 73, no. 1 (2008): 57–72. Interestingly, when he republished this essay in his book Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), Jackson excised the word “revolution.” Jackson has recently published a book on migration that I did not get to read before A Man of Good Hope went to press: The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration and the Question of Well-Being (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonny Steinberg was born and bred in South Africa. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Three Letter Plague, published by Vintage, and Midlands and The Number, both of which won South Africa’s premier nonfiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize. Steinberg was also a recipient of one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes. He teaches African Studies and Criminology at Oxford University.
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