by Peter Boehm
Long before they start school, children in Somalia learn by heart this mythical line of ancestors, which can be traced back to a clan founder from the Arabian Peninsula.
The Barre regime put an end to the clan system’s most fundamental foundation – compensation payments, or “blood money”. All disputes had to be settled in court. And women’s rights were bolstered, despite opposition from the Islamic establishment.
When filling positions in the government and army however, Siad Barre of course carefully complied with the clan groups. Anything else would have been asking for clan allegiances to be formed against him; well-publicised suicide.
And of course Barre is also responsible for the Ogaden War of 1977-78, against the arch-enemy, Ethiopia. The offensive against their neighbouring country heralded his downfall, and that of the whole of Somalia.
And he is also responsible for everything that followed – for the civil war in the north during the whole of the 1980s, and the subsequent civil war it let to, which pitted everyone against everyone in Mogadishu in the early 90s.
In retrospect, however, it just looks today as though his regime was fighting a losing battle, right from the start, against traditional society. But all people remember is the dictator who, violently driven out of Mogadishu and having already lost everything, once more sent the last tanks up from the south in 1991, in order to take control of the country once again.
I thought that was tragic. After all, it was certainly something the sniggering teenagers wouldn’t understand. How else would they have been able to watch this film without drawing the obvious conclusions from it?
But what was worse was the fact that you couldn’t even hold it against them – the Barre era was simply too long ago. They’d only be able to remember the brutal aspects of it – if they could remember any of it at all.
And then, just as I thought I’d now survived it all and I’d soon be able to leave, the film revealed a second bitter lesson for me. It had already been running a long time – almost two hours. During this time, the young pair had eloped and married, against the mother’s wishes. I thought, all’s well that ends well. The film will soon be over now.
But then it took another twist which shocked me, but which the audience accepted as perfectly natural. The mother hired a hit-man, who stabbed the newly-married groom to death in an extremely drastic, long drawn out manner, almost with enjoyment.
The following day, one of the young employees at the Internet café next to my hotel told me about the trip he would be going on at the weekend. A friend from Mogadishu was going to show him the tomb of the poet and singer Elmi Bodhari, who was famous throughout Somalia.
Young lovers, in particular, made the pilgrimage out there, near Berbera, Somaliland’s Indian Ocean port. The employee told me Bodhari’s story – “The poet saw a young woman and fell in love with her immediately. He wrote her many poems and songs. The object of his affections heard about this, and sent a confidante to him. But he was asleep, and so the messenger couldn’t speak to him. Two or three years passed. The elders of Bodhari’s clan were against the union, so he couldn’t marry the woman he worshipped. So they brought him the most beautiful women in the country – well over a hundred of them – to make him forget his first love. But Bodhari refused to marry anyone other than the woman he’d chosen. He wrote a poem. And then he dropped dead, on the spot.”
In fact, this all happened in the early 20th century. Not in the Middle Ages. So sometimes I wasn’t quite so tragic.
The Somali Film II (Hargeisa)
I had two questions which could best be answered by a psychiatrist, so the obvious thing to do was to go to the state hospital in Hargeisa and ask to see the psychiatric unit.
It’s on the arterial road leading to the Ethiopian border, and from outside you wouldn’t be able to tell what poor healthcare was provided within.
Most of the buildings were single-storey, long barracks, laid out among dried out trees and shrubs, and grassy areas without grass. It was very busy. People were walking or standing around everywhere, as though they were visiting patients.
I was sent to an office where a secretary was in the process of doing her morning paperwork. She offered me a chair, and asked me to wait for Dr Mohammed Abdurrahmen, the head of the psychiatric department.
I thought that the civil war had to be the reason why so many people in Somalia considered themselves to be mad, and I wanted to know what influence the drug khat had on the mind.
I knew it had to be significant. After all, even in the winter of 1998, the mayor of Burao had described to me, in glorious technicolour, what happened if there are a couple of days when no khat planes arrive in the town.
Burao is located slightly off the main roads and the flight paths. He told me that the men would emerge from their houses and begin to discuss what was to be done. These discussions would almost always end up in a dispute, and they rarely passed without any injuries.
I could easily imagine that. Did you get such chaos in other towns too, if khat supplies didn’t arrive?
Anyone who’s been to Somalia also knows that the influence of khat on the civil war shouldn’t be underestimated. You see, there’s hardly a single militiaman who doesn’t chew.
Dr Mohammed was in his early forties, with balding, closely cropped hair. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, but no white medical coat. He greeted me in a friendly, almost effusive way, and led me to the senior consultant’s office.
He appeared amused by my question about what impacts the civil war had on his work. He laughed. And he recited these impacts in a tone you’d be more likely to use when dictating a recipe for a favourite meal, not a list of psychological phenomena – “Children have nightmares and compulsively recurring memories; the civil war is a shattering experience; people become violent and suffer severe depression; everyone is suffering its consequences in some way; many people are still at war. They walk around the town with a broomstick, and shoot at anyone who crosses their path.” Dr Mohammed seemed to think my question was superfluous, the answer obvious. Why was it even necessary to ask?! His thoughts were soon elsewhere, and he asked me which country I was from.
Dr Mohammed wasn’t exaggerating. Mental health problems as a result of the civil war are extremely widespread in Somaliland. Dr Hussein Bulhan confirmed this. He had trained as a psychiatrist in the USA and had taught there, but had now been working for several years in Hargeisa. He told me that really every extended family in Somaliland had experienced some such case. In many households, violent patients had to be tied to window frames or pieces of furniture for their own safety, and that of their families.
Dr Mohammed sat down behind the large writing desk at the back of his office. A large portrait of the Somaliland president was hanging on the wall behind him. Next to it was a poster of one of those naively realistic paintings so popular with Somalis. It depicted two infants. One of them was carefully and cheerfully holding out a hypodermic syringe to the viewer.
When Dr Mohammed had been called, he must have also told others, as more doctors and hospital employees were now gradually streaming into the senior consultant’s office. Ten minutes later, the conference table and the worn sofas by the walls were almost entirely occupied.
“Our visitor wants to know about the consequences of the civil war”, Dr Mohammed announced to the group, smiling – rather as though it were highly amusing that anyone should be interested in his work. He asked his colleagues to talk about their experiences.
Dr Omar, from the surgical department, told us about 31st May 1988 – a day when Siad Barre’s troops heavily bombarded Burao
The office had blinds at the windows, keeping out the glare of the sun, but Dr Mohammed put sunglasses on, and jiggled them around on his nose, as though he were in front of a mirror.
“The artillery bombarded the town from six in the morning until six in the evening. I was working in one of the rebels’ field hospitals, out in the bush. There were two air raids on the
town, one after the other.”
One of the arms of Dr Mohammed’s glasses was clearly broken. It fell down. Much to his colleagues’ delight, Dr Mohammed squinted through his wonky glasses.
“My 16-year-old sister was killed during one of the raids”, Dr Omar continued. “She was buried under the rubble of a hut in our compound. She’s still lying there.”
This was obviously all there was to be said about war-related consequences, as Dr Mohammed now told everyone assembled that I was a journalist from Germany, and that I had more questions.
So I asked about the psychological consequences of indulging in khat.
This topic seemed far more popular. Everyone now wanted to have their say, because they almost all chewed, and whenever one of the doctors mentioned a side effect, then someone would immediately say “Yes, I know that one!”, or, “Yes, I’ve experienced that too!”, while the others all laughed.
The doctors mentioned the following effects: euphoria, loss of appetite, feeling wide awake, shivering, sexual arousal but lack of potency, over-estimating your abilities, insomnia, auditory hallucinations, nightmares and depression.
Dr Mohammed said that, not infrequently, high use of khat could also induce psychosis, and he broke into a sniggering laugh. “There are just so many people in Hargeisa who haven’t had this diagnosed yet.”
On our journey to the easternmost point, Nuredin had told me about the “Somali Film”, and the paranoia which is so widespread among young men in Bosaso. So I asked the group whether the doctors also knew of this phenomenon.
They didn’t. But once I’d explained what it meant, Dr Mohammed said that the phenomenon was known in Hargeisa as “Bah”.
Bah?
“Bah, Bah, Bah!”, he responded, with his usual impatience. “The word for a plastic bag. It’s because of the rustling noise they make, which is like the noise people think they hear behind them.” And, to the great amusement of the group, one of the administrative staff blurted out, “I had that just yesterday – when I went home last night I thought someone was following me, but there was no-one behind me.”
I’d once chewed khat myself – in Nairobi, where you can buy the twigs cheaply. Not often though, and not very much on each occasion. But now I wanted to write about it, and so I’d decided to try the drug once more, with seasoned Somali chewers. I’d hoped to find a group of militiamen for this.
Now, however, as I sat in the office, I realised that I could find no better companions for this than these doctors. Dr Mohammed seemed pleased. He promised to organise it. Then he invited me to have a look around the psychiatric unit.
We went to the men’s unit. A wall separated it from the rest of the hospital. Its two buildings, however, looked just as low and simply built as the rest of the hospital. There was a kind of pavilion in the courtyard – a roof supported by metal pillars. A few patients were lying on its concrete floor on thin raffia mats, and two had mattresses. All of them were chained to the pillars by their ankles. One patient was shuffling, slumped in on himself, around the courtyard. His chain and its padlock were dragging behind his foot.
More patients were chained to barred windows under the two buildings’ awnings. These rooms, too, had just a stone floor and a couple of mattresses. A lot of patients were standing by the windows, hanging on to the bars, and staring vacantly into the far distance. Their chains glinted in the morning sunshine. They looked new – like a chain you’d buy from an ironmonger back home, to lock a garden gate or a bike.
Dr Mohammed was still in a good mood. He took me around and introduced me to the carers and patients. He was now wearing a faded blue baseball cap with the slogan “Bulls” – not “Chicago Bulls” – and over his shoulder he was carrying one of these natural-coloured leather bags, like we had in Europe in the 1970s.
When I asked about the chains, he said that they were simply necessary for violent patients. They were often brought in by the police, but sometimes by relatives who were at their wits’ end and could no longer help.
Dr Mohammed wasn’t able to offer his patients much. An aid organisation had recently donated some Haldol – a medicine also common in Europe. But otherwise the relatives had to bring medication themselves.
Dr Mohammed said that there were currently a good 100 patients in the unit. Then he flung his head back and laughed, so you could see his huge teeth. “But there are many thousand more still out there.”
I returned to the hospital the following morning to ask whether a time had been decided on yet for our khat session. By coincidence, I bumped into Dr Mohammed just outside, in the grounds. He was wearing the same things again – jeans, t-shirt, his “Bulls” cap, the slightly orange leather bag and his broken glasses on his nose. He was still bubbling with cheerfulness and, as before, his laughter was a little too over-excited.
I couldn’t put a finger on anything that particularly stood out. It must have been the overall impression, the slight strangeness emanating from him. He suddenly reminded me of one of these freaks, such as you sometimes see trailing through small towns in Europe, or appearing in newspaper offices with files which they claim can prove the full details of a major CIA conspiracy. At first everything seems simple and clear – until it suddenly dawns on you how very strange it is.
There was a lot about Dr Mohammed which irritated me – his deep-rooted cynicism, and the fact that he seemed to feel no pity for his patients. At this moment, I couldn’t shake off the thought that perhaps, instead of being the head of the psychiatric unit, he was in fact one of its patients.
Of course, this thought was in bad taste. But it would have explained a few things. Maybe Dr Mohammed had heard, in the unit, that a journalist had arrived to talk to the senior consultant, and had simply impersonated him. It wasn’t impossible. Psychiatric patients are often very intelligent. Perhaps the doctors from the other departments had played along with the joke. That would have explained the group’s relaxed mood. After all that I’d experienced in Somalia, I just couldn’t discount the possibility that the hospital staff would have found this a really good joke.
Or maybe they, too, were patients who had also played along with the prank? And the carers in the psychiatric unit perhaps weren’t carers after all!
I suddenly had no idea what to think, and I decided always to be on my guard around Dr Mohammed in order not to become the laughing stock of the hospital.
He once again led me purposefully to the psychiatric unit and greeted the carers. Yesterday one of the patients had clicked his heels when he’d seen us and had more stammered than said that he’d served in Kuwait. Grinning at me, Dr Mohammed had asked him, “But please tell us who you served under.”
“Under General Colin Powell”, the old man said, shyly. He jumped to attention again. Then he turned to me, “You know who this is, don’t you?”
Another patient claimed to have fought in the Gulf War. “There are many mercenaries in Somalia”, Dr Mohammed said, probably because he’d sensed my doubt.
We then went outside and I asked him whether he thought conditions were bad in his unit. Of course, there are many state hospitals in Africa where treatment isn’t particularly good. Money is in short supply everywhere, and you often find patients lying on the floor, or two to a bed.
But the new, gleaming chains restraining the patients in his unit had shocked me, and I wanted to hear him express some pity.
But he just said, with no apparent emotion, “It’s just like in every department in the hospital. If you want an operation, you have to bring a relative with you who can donate blood.”
And as we passed the hospital’s main gate, an old man was standing there, in threadbare clothes, with unkempt grey hair. Dr Mohammed greeted him and told me, in English, but loud enough for the man to be able to hear, “We were at school together once. But then he ended up with a bit of psychological problem.” And then, although barely able to contain himself anymore, he added in a conciliatory tone, “But now he works at the hospital.”
Was that true? It didn’t look like it, from the old man’s clothing. Or could he have been one of Dr Mohammed’s patients, and he’d just been making another of his jokes?
If so – and I now knew this much at least – then Dr Mohammed’s sense of humour went too far for me.
The Somali Film III (Hargeisa)
Doctors belong to a profession which is known for cynicism. And it’s the same with journalists – especially those working in crisis areas.
I may have had a sheltered childhood, but any sensitivity was soon driven out of me in Africa. I’d puzzled for years about whether or not my dead grandfather’s neck had already started to decay. As a small child, I’d seen him in a mortuary a couple of days after his death.
But that was nothing compared with what I experienced as a correspondent. Whether I wanted to or not, I saw corpses in Africa in all conditions and states of decay imaginable – still warm, following deployment of the infamous police special force “Operation Sweep” in Lagos, Nigeria; a week old, so swollen and stinking that it turned my stomach, and that of everyone else present, on the Ethiopian/Eritrean front; and leathery and dried out in the sun, like a frog run over by a car, in South Sudan on a street near the town of Yei, virtually on the border with Uganda. Do you imagine that the soldiers in the North’s government army would have buried anyone? Quite the contrary – the lorry drivers ran them over quite deliberately! After all, it was a hated soldier from the North.
Feeling pity for “the poor people” would have been dysfunctional in these situations. You’d no longer have been able to do your job properly. What’s important is to keep your distance, and not to get involved with other people’s feelings. And in such situations, making jokes is about the most certain and elegant method of not allowing this distance to get smaller.