by Peter Boehm
Just a couple of weeks before, a Red Cross delegation had almost been kidnapped there. The three employees, from Nairobi, were to be exchanged for a local politician, who was in prison in Hargeisa at the time.
But it could certainly take a long time if I waited until there was a bus going directly from Garowe to Hargeisa. The hotel owner therefore suggested a driver he knew. And then in Hargeisa he would pass me on only to someone he trusted. So that was what we did.
The journey to Las Anod was uneventful. My driver stopped briefly there and signalled to a minibus, waiting on the main street for passengers, to follow him. We drove a few hundred yards outside the town, and the two drivers negotiated. They told me their sum. I’d have been able to hire my own private car to Hargeisa for little more. Had I even done that? But now wasn’t the time to get involved in long discussions. I got into the minibus. My driver departed and, much to my horror, we returned to the town.
That was exactly what I wanted to avoid. Simply driving through, I’d noticed that things were different in Las Anod. Men walked around there on the main street with Kalashnikovs over their shoulders. You don’t even see that in Mogadishu. And they didn’t look as if they were on patrol, but more as though they were just on their way to the bakery.
We now stopped right in the centre to pick up more passengers. And whenever the driver put the vehicle into reverse – which he seemed to take pleasure in doing – it emitted a loud screech like that of a police siren.
I pulled the curtain across the side window and sank deeper into my seat. I couldn’t laugh now about the plastic decorations on the wing mirrors and the windscreen wipers of our minibus, which so often adorned Somali vehicles. Perhaps the plan we’d drawn up in Garowe wasn’t so wonderful after all. It now caused me 45 minutes of terror.
We stopped first in a residential area to pick up a young woman who had come from Sweden to visit her family. Next to get on was Abdinassir, a young man in his late twenties who was training as a physiotherapist in Hargeisa and had been spending the holidays back in his home town. He was the only one who could speak adequate English. I could communicate with the others through him. Finally, one other man got on – he had two crutches and was going to Hargeisa for hospital treatment. All three of them had already been waiting for a few days for sufficient passengers for Hargeisa.
Back in the main street, our driver happily continued manoeuvring – the vehicle’s siren-like noise now making absolutely everyone aware of me, so that the kidnappers surely couldn’t fail to notice me.
When our driver asked me whether I wanted to buy something to drink, I was almost past caring. You’re scuppered now in any case, I thought. Anyway, it won’t make us stay in Las Anod for any longer.
After yet more messing around with leaping, in reverse, out of the parking place and stopping again at the side of the road, he took the equivalent of about 60p out of the large plastic sack of money. It sat next to me on the passenger seat. I didn’t get anything to drink though. When I asked, via Abdinassir, where the drinks where and why he’d taken the money he said, as though it were perfectly natural, “Oh, that was for me.” I don’t know whether he wanted to buy khat or cigarettes. “For no particular reason really”, Abdinassir interpreted. And when he had to return it, he gave me another look expressing utter incomprehension.
I may have caused him to misunderstand when I drew the curtain across to hide myself. Once we’d left Las Anod, you see, and I wanted to be able to see out again, he hastily drew the curtain back, hiding me again. He told me, via Abdinassir, that I should keep it drawn until we’d passed another couple of villages.
The driver probably didn’t think that I was afraid of kidnappings, but that I didn’t have a visa. In Las Anod, after all, you’re already in the Republic of Somaliland. In fact, I didn’t have a visa for Somaliland in my passport.
Since the country declared its independence from Somalia in 1991, no other country in the world has recognised it. It therefore doesn’t have any diplomatic representation in Nairobi either, and so I had only informed the unofficial visa office in Hargeisa.
I looked again at the writing on the top of my invoice – “Mediation and Logistics Service”. If anyone had asked me for my visa at the border, I’d just have given them the mobile number of the modern Abban in Hargeisa, who would have then confirmed that the Somaliland government was, indeed, expecting me.
But no-one asked me. At the first roadblock after Las Anod, our driver had a rather heated discussion with a policeman. The custodian of the law had emerged, slowly and laboriously, into the blazing midday heat from a dilapidated wooden hut. The other passengers then also started getting involved. But I didn’t know what it was all about. Then the driver became more vociferous. As did the policeman, clad in his washed-out olive uniform.
At this point, however, the driver seemed to consider that the discussion was over. He reversed slightly, and neatly circumvented the roadblock via a detour through the bush. The policeman shook his fist and shouted after us. The driver repeated this war of words with another policeman at the next checkpoint. This time, however, the official raised the barrier after a couple of minutes and let us pass.
A heated discussion now began amongst the other passengers. I’d chuckled at our driver’s evasive manoeuvre. But I hadn’t thought anything of it – it was surely nothing unusual in Somalia. Perhaps the policeman had demanded slightly too high a bribe and the driver hadn’t wanted to pay.
I knew from Kenya that it was best to drive past hungry policemen, and I experienced this later, too, in Nigeria, on the back of a motorbike taxi. But the passengers didn’t calm down.
Now slightly unsettled, I asked Abdinassir what was wrong. He said that the first policeman had shouted after us that he would radio the next police station. But he probably hadn’t, as the second policeman had simply let us through. Or perhaps the police didn’t even have a radio. But why had we avoided the checkpoint like that?
“Because of you, of course!” Abdinassir explained. Now that really did astonish me. I’d still been anticipating a border post, with a sign informing you that you were entering a different country. With some kind of symbol of sovereignty, and perhaps a building where you had to show your passport.
If such a post existed at all, then we must have passed it by now. And if there were no radio communications between these posts, then I probably couldn’t hope to be able to make mobile phone contact with Hargeisa either.
Once we’d passed two more checkpoints, the driver drew back the curtain from my window. That was the signal that I could now relax slightly more. And from this point on, we passed the checkpoints without any heated discussions.
Abdinassir didn’t tell me the whole story until we arrived in Hargeisa. There had been both Puntland and Somaliland police at the first checkpoint after Las Anod. Hadn’t I noticed the two different flags waving outside the officials’ hut? To be quite honest, I hadn’t. This may have been to do with the curtain in front of my face.
So that explained it all – this region was home to two opposing authorities which were equally hostile towards each other. This was, therefore, a clear case of over-governance rather than under-governance.
And we didn’t encounter the other thing you always expect when you cross a border – the bureau de change – until we reached Yerowe, almost 200 miles after Las Anod.
Abdinassir and I got out to change our Somali Shillings in to Somaliland currency. We wanted to use the remaining notes to buy something to drink, but suddenly our path was blocked by a young man.
He looked about fifteen – certainly no more than eighteen – and had obviously been chewing khat. It was still early in the afternoon, but we could already see the telltale signs of small balls of green plant mush around the corners of his mouth. You only get that when you’ve already been chewing for hours, and can no longer properly control your mouth muscles. He spoke to Abdinassir. It didn’t strike me as particularly threatening, but rather a muted ton
e. His hand movements made it clear, however, that he wanted our money.
I’d already taken a deep breath in preparation for giving the guy a talking-to. He was at least a head shorter than me, and I still had the attitude with which I approached such impudence in Nairobi.
But then I saw Abdinassir’s reaction, and it made my blood run cold. He looked down meekly and, without a moment’s hesitation, gave him the money, as though he were pleased to finally be rid of it, grabbed me by the arm, and led me quickly back to our minibus.
The young man took the handful of notes, calmly wandered over to a few children beside a bureau de change, sat down and returned to his khat chewing. Abdinassir explained to me what had happened only when I pressed him, once we were back in the bus.
The young man had threatened to “hack me to pieces” with a knife if we hadn’t given him our few notes. Even though I don’t believe he had a knife, I have to admit Abdinassir was right. It wasn’t worth risking it for just a few pence.
And besides, we weren’t in Nairobi now, but Somalia. Just seven months earlier, Dieter Krasemann, a German aid worker, had been stabbed to death in Burao, just twenty miles from here. By a madman, according to the Somaliland authorities.
We were still waiting for our driver. A kid of perhaps twelve or thirteen, with a snotty nose positioned himself in front of my window, smirked at me, and drew his finger across his throat with an expression of great satisfaction. He probably didn’t have a knife. And the small child with him cocked his toy gun – some kind of “Starship Enterprise” pistol - at me and fired. The idea of killing a white person seemed somehow to fascinate people here.
They were no different from the rest of the country in this – you couldn’t overlook that. You see, there’s quite a high value placed on the heads of white people in Somalia.
The first translator Mohamoud Askar had introduced me to in Bosaso had wanted to take this into account right away. He had worked at Cape Hafun once before, and therefore suggested that we should pass ourselves off as aid workers. The problem was that the fishermen there weren’t particularly well-disposed towards Western visitors. But if we made it clear that we were planning an aid project to support fishermen, then we would probably be well received.
I’d first encountered this hostility on a visit to Somaliland in the winter of 1998. The mayor of Burao was showing us around a new marketplace in his town. A couple of years earlier it had been burned to the ground during the internal Somaliland civil war. The town had financed its reconstruction itself, with no outside aid. That was unusual in Africa. I’d been impressed. All of a sudden, however, we had found we couldn’t move any further as an old woman was blocking our path. She had flung her arms in the air and begun shouting at the mayor. He had retreated the few paces we’d left, for safety’s sake, between us and the agitated woman and had explained, in a low tone, that she would attack the next white visitor with a knife. There was a large one lying within her reach, on a table beside some pieces of meat ready for sale. The mayor had explained, in a subdued voice, that the old woman had said that he’d brought white people there so often, but that they’d never helped the market traders. The message was clear – the task of white people is to provide help. But they don’t fulfil this. White people are bad. And we don’t need them.
Once we’d almost reached Hargeisa, our driver suddenly did an Abdullahi. He’d been chewing khat all day, his movements had slowed, and he was moving his nose up and down the windscreen as though it were a window reflecting the sunshine, as though he were looking for a gap through which he could peer.
I began to imagine myself waking up in a ditch somewhere. But once I’d spoken loudly to wake th driver up things improved. He shook himself slightly and was more awake again. We arrived safely in night-time Hargeisa.
Of course, you must have guessed what our driver had passed me off as at the roadblock near Las Anod....as an aid worker, obviously! I was Egyptian. That wasn’t quite as bad as being a real white person, but still explained my pale complexion. I was an Egyptian doctor to be precise. I’d come to help people. I was a good white man.
The Somali Film (Hargeisa)
There was a whiff of perfume, teenage flirtation and lifted headscarves in the air. There were significantly more ponytails in evidence among the girls in the cinema than you usually saw among women in the street. There was even one brave girl right at the back without any headscarf at all.
Although most women from Hargeisa onwards wore brightly coloured headscarves instead of the black/brown/grey hijab, they still revealed just as little. They wore them wound tightly around their heads, with just their faces exposed, but not their foreheads or necks.
The only time you could see women in Somali without a headscarf was in a passport photo. The photos hanging in the windows of the photographic shops, however, struck me as obscene. The women in them seemed exposed, like animals for slaughter, whose skin had been peeled off.
They were almost exclusively teenagers in the cinema. The girls had arrived together in small groups, as had the boys. If they were lucky, the end boy and end girl of two groups would find themselves seated next to each other and then, at the end of the film, the happy pair could exchange a few words with the strange being of the opposite sex.
In Burao I’d seen a cinema from the car. The outside walls were dirty and full of holes, and the posters were old and very dusty and yellowed. You’d have expected some kind of cave behind the dark entrance, but not a cinema. I’d have loved to go, but we didn’t stop in the town.
So Abdinassir and I went in Hargeisa instead.
Here, however, the cinema was even less recognisable as such. There were no posters or signs advertising it. It was on the ground floor of a low, unimposing building near the large mosque, but when we arrived the auditorium was already full.
As the tickets cost less than 20p, however, you couldn’t complain about being seated at the back, on a spare chair. Of course, most people were smoking and of course, when the lights went on at the end, there were heaps of khat stalks all over the floor.
They were showing the film of a play from the early 1980s. The actors – without doubt the former stars of Somali theatre – declaimed their lines into microphones. The women were dressed in sparkling costumes, their hair piled high. And of course they sang an awful lot – as is always the case in Eastern films.
Just as with Hindi and Hausa films, the musical interludes were probably the only reason why the teenagers liked the film. Otherwise, it was simply a video projection, not a true film. You could easily rent it from any video rental shop in Hargeisa.
The atmosphere in the cinema was electric. I felt as though I were the only one to be rather depressed by this, being just a film of a film. Abdinassir sat beside me and translated. Whenever one of the stars took to the stage for the first time he’d say, “She lives in Germany now.” Or, “He’s now in the USA.”
And he’d tell me about things before they even happened. But when I asked him how often he’d seen the film, he replied sheepishly, “twice.” The rest of the audience also seemed to know exactly what would happen. I got the impression that they all knew the film inside out.
The play was about a pair of lovers who couldn’t reach one another. The daughter, played by Hibo Mohamed, who is still a popular singer in Somalia today, was the main character. Her mother, however, was opposed to the marriage. I didn’t understand why, but it’s not exactly uncommon in Islamic societies to find that two young people are not allowed to marry.
The play was also a bit too forced for my taste, and seemed to be pointing the finger rather too clearly. One of the khat chewers could no longer speak, and could barely walk. The audience laughed. A woman appeared, wearing trousers. The girl’s unsympathetic uncle was shocked, “What’s that meant to be – some kind of man?” he asked in disbelief. Raucous laughter from the audience.
The girl’s father literally threw money around, and took a young girl as his lover. Later it eve
n emerged that she was a prostitute. But that was obvious too. The prostitute wasn’t portrayed as being all that bad.
And it got better. Her captivating dancing, her breasts wobbling energetically, as she begged her lover to “touch me, touch me!” provoked a real storm of enthusiasm.
It seemed to me that the audience’s reaction was false. I hadn’t seen a single woman wearing trousers in Hargeisa, apart from white female aid workers. Neither could I imagine that the girls in the cinema had ever tried to get away with wearing such an item of clothing in front of their brothers, fathers or uncles. No, I couldn’t even imagine that it had ever crossed their minds to try. That was just simply no longer an issue for debate in today’s Somalia.
Prior to the civil war, however, things were different. During the long evenings in Mogadishu, when I had been unable to leave the aid organisation complex, I inevitably always encountered someone who could still remember Somali as it was before the civil war. Someone who talked about the old days, of how worldly the country had been, of the Embassy parties – with alcohol, of course – of the discos, and the seaside restaurants.
I could only ever feel sorry for these storytellers. I attributed their sentimentality simply to their having drunk too much. It made no sense to mourn something which couldn’t return. Now that I was in the cinema, however, I could see for myself the clearly tangible image of what had once been a better Somalia, and the country’s fate now seemed genuinely tragic.
Under Siad Barre’s government, Somalia had at least tried to overcome the clan system – the civilising level of nomadic society. In the 1970s, the government symbolically buried the plaques symbolising the clans’ lines of ancestors, in public ceremonies.