by Peter Boehm
I was relieved when The Turban stopped talking to the elderly man and we began to walk on together.
The women were waiting for us by a few huts at the roadside. A woman in the largest hut had already started to prepare tea for us. As we sat around the fire, the warm afternoon light shining through cracks in the hut and painting vibrant stripes on the smoke, and I was offered the first cup of tea, I had to laugh out loud. These good people, who wouldn’t let me pay for my own tea, wanted to kill me! Could there have been a more ridiculous idea?
I had to shake my head about the absurdity of my imagination, or I’d have no longer believed it myself. But it also showed me that it was high time to leave Somalia. After a good two weeks, the Somali film was also beginning to play in my own head. I was just as crazy as the rest. It was high time to get back to a normal environment, with normal people who didn’t think purely in terms of khat and Kalashnikovs. And Djibouti was exactly the right place for this.
The night in the SUV was terrible. We drove until five in the morning, and then stopped at another of these roadside inns, which now made my heart sink into my boots.
Back in Hargeisa I’d asked the driver “hotel?”, and placed my folded hands under my tilted head. He nodded. But they don’t tell you anything. They keep you in the dark on purpose. Did the driver think I’d run amok if there was no hotel?
One thing is certain, thgough – if that was a hotel, then I never want to have to stay in one again. I saw the usual roofs of twigs, with one roof made of wooden slats, on which grass was already growing. There were perhaps seven or eight of them along the road, and each contained a couple of rows of crude wooden frames, with strips of hide stretched across them. There wasn’t a single blanket in sight.
Thank God I was so tired that I fell asleep right away. It wasn’t until the morning that I noticed how dreadfully frozen I must have been while asleep.
I was now really looking forward to Djibouti. Djibouti City is on the coast, and is said to be the hottest place on earth. I imagined myself under palm trees on a beach, or in a hot sticky hotel room with broken air conditioning. I resolved to sweat so much that the sweat would run from my forehead in endless streams.
But before that there were still the Somaliland border officials. The border itself was only a quarter of an hour from the hotel. It was closed at night, and so we’d gained a night in a five-star hotel.
The border wasn’t much to write home about either. The border facilities comprised a small wooden hut, with a large window in the wall, from which two officials peered out. A queue had formed in front of it.
The man ahead of me in the queue handed the customs officer in the hut a bundle of notes. Some African countries don’t let you take the local currency out. So I took the rest of my Somaliland Shillings out of the bag and prepared to relinquish them to the customs officer.
When it was my turn, the second customs officer in the hut said, decisively, “Give him 20,000.”
That was no more than five pounds, and was less than I had in my hand. But the fact that he had demanded a precise sum made me suspicious.
I asked what the money was for.
“Give him 20,000”, the official repeated. But this time it already sounded more like a request.
Now I understood. The man in front of me had bribed the customs officials, and the demand to give the pair “20,000” was an attempt, albeit a very amateurish one, to get money out of me.
What novices! If they really wanted a bribe then they’d have to go about it better than that. They probably didn’t know the first and most important rule of the “Basic course in bribery for security staff”, which would be: More fear = more money.
The pair should have looked to the border officials in the Congo (today, the Democratic Republic of the Congo) for an example. They’ve had years of practice. They’re specialists, real experts. They know how to do something like that. A good start, for instance, is to first lead your victim into a back room. Preferably studying their proffered passport with a worried shake of the head. Then you have to let the victim stew. For a long time – a very long time – so that there’s time for all kinds of thoughts to fly around his head about what on earth could possibly be wrong with his papers.
Then a second official has to come and ask questions – Where are you from? What are you doing here? Where are you going? Nothing specific, but the important thing is the furrowed brow, the genuine concern that this is a particularly serious case.
And then you have to wait a while longer, so that fear creeps up on the victim – fear that he’ll be stuck here forever, or simply disappear into a stinking dungeon, forgotten by the world.
Then, at some point, you’ll offer something of your own accord. That’s very important psychologically. It saves the official that moment of weakness of having to ask for something himself. And besides – you’re not a monster after all! – it means the victim can even claw back a little remainder of his dignity, as he can think he’s actually managed to get out of this mess rather neatly. Despite the fact that, from the very beginning, there’s been no way out other than by bribing the border officials. Of course, some of these practised officials won’t just make do with local currency, and certainly not with just five pounds. But by then the victim is happy to pay anything. Simply to acknowledge the skill displayed in conducting the whole episode.
But “give him 20,000”, on the other hand – that was amateurish! It was derisory! It was an insult!
I put my money back in the bag, and used it later on, in Djibouti, to pay for the drive into the city.
I hadn’t gone 200 yards when one of the officials from the hut had to come running after me to call me back. Due to their sheer nervousness, the pair had forgotten to enter my passport information into their logbook.
Somaliland is still a very young country. Its officials still have an awful lot to learn.
DJIBOUTI
Vehicles in their final stages (Border – Djibouti City)
I didn’t want to have to wait for the SUV which had brought me from Hargeisa to cross the border, and so I got into one waiting for passengers on the Djibouti side. It looked old, but it wasn’t until we set off that I noticed that it wasn’t really a car at all, but rather a wreck with an engine.
The driver, a young guy of perhaps twenty, dressed in dirty tracksuit bottoms, just drove in first gear. There wasn’t a second gear. And at every slight bump on the dirt road, the vehicle screeched as though someone had dropped it from a height of six feet.
What was more, the radiator was leaking. That explained the puddle I’d seen underneath the vehicle at the border.
Every few miles, the driver had to untie the rope holding the bonnet onto the car, while his assistant ran into a hut by the road to fill up an old fabric conditioner bottle with water. They then emptied this into our radiator.
And lastly, there was also a problem with the vehicle’s ignition, which got worse and worse as time went on.
To begin with, the car stopped only every two miles or so. But by the time we’d reached the tarmac road, it stopped almost constantly. Then the driver and co-driver had to untie the bonnet again – they usually also took this opportunity to replenish the engine cooling water – and fiddle around with the ignition. Once they were ready, we passengers had to get out and push the car to get it going.
It required a lot of momentum. That explained why the driver left the vehicle running the whole time, while he was waiting for passengers at the border. As soon as we’d driven up a hill, we’d push it down again, backwards. Or forwards. But it was best to start looking for a hill as soon as the car began to splutter again. And so we took the odd detour simply because it promised an incline.
We made our first pit stop at a couple of huts, built completely from shiny silver corrugated iron. In the midday heat, it was bound to be like a sauna inside. A small boy, evidently the driver’s little brother, must have heard the travelling wreck from a long way off, as he was already
standing there with a water canister before we’d even stopped.
Just like in Somalia, many of these huts we now saw by the road were cobbled together from the refuse of civilisation. In Djibouti, however, it must have been far easier to come by scrap metal. A great deal of this had been used in the huts. And there were almost always a few wrecked cars beside the huts. This lent the suburbs something of an air of rubbish tip living.
Then, level with the French military airfield, we passed a genuine Djibouti rubbish tip. It looked rather like some backdrop for a disaster film. The action had progressed so far, however, that the disaster had already happened.
There were hundreds of cattle heads lying right by the road, the skin still hanging on the carcass. Beside them were rows of plastic bottles and canisters, which looked as though they were fresh out of the factory. Behind all this was rubbish, as far as the eye could see. It stank horrendously. A couple of haggard figures were poking around the mountain of rubbish for anything of value. The air was heavy with thick smoke from fires smouldering everywhere. The sun was obscured, covering the whole scene in a pale twilight which made everything appear dismal and dead.
I was somewhat reassured when a policeman we’d picked up en route tried to stop me taking a photo of the inferno. At least he still had some remorse.
But a little further on, I noticed that the whole thing wasn’t, as I’d initially thought, an illegal rubbish tip. Shortly after it we reached the tar road. And there we encountered the smart yellow lorries belonging to the municipal waste collection services. They left the city, turned off briefly at the end of the tar road, and deposited their load here, beside the track.
Immediately behind the rubbish tip, two military aircraft were taking off from a French army base, and just before that a swarm of military helicopters had stormed over our heads.
Djibouti is really little more than a large French military training area, with a harbour attached. At no point is the country more than about 150 miles long or wide. The desert lurks just beyond the settlements.
In the words of a high-ranking French general, quoted in the magazine “Jeune Afrique”, which is usually well-informed about French government policy in Africa, “This territory offers exceptional possibilities for military exercises.” “It is a true desert school, with flat training areas and enormous firing ranges.”
The presence of almost three thousand French soldiers accounts for virtually half of Djibouti’s gross national product. And in addition, around 10,000 French civilians live here. Without them, and French development aid, Djibouti would not be able to survive. This is why the government negotiates fiercely whenever France wants to reduce its troop numbers.
The other reason why France didn’t grant Djibouti independence until 1977, and why it keeps its second largest troop contingent outside Europe here, is the small state’s location on the map. Djibouti’s harbour is located in an extremely important position strategically. From here, you can control the Bab El-Mandeb, a straight between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. All oil tankers travelling from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean have to pass through here.
Djibouti produces virtually nothing, and there’s also hardly any agriculture in the country. All agricultural products and food are imported from Ethiopia or Somalia, or are flown in directly from France. Twelve to fourteen tonnes of khat alone are imported each day from the Harar uplands. The green drug accounts for almost a third of the total value of Djibouti imports. That means food, clothes, furniture, machines, vehicles, weapons – basically everything.
According to a study, the average Djibouti family spends up to forty percent of its income on chewing khat. And Djibouti air traffic control is happy to make large passenger planes stack for a long time, to allow the planes carrying the khat to land more quickly.
This is why you shouldn’t try to visit any office in Djibouti during lunchtime. There’d be hardly anyone around. The officials won’t be back until the next morning.
The city only briefly comes to life when the planes bringing the khat from Ethiopia have landed. Then the men stand around in small groups in front of the khat traders’ stalls and wait. The noise level gradually increases, and tension builds. It reaches its peak when the dampened potato sacks are finally delivered. The customers now pick at and shake the bunches, wrapped in cellophane, and replace them with outbursts of great indignation. Then they pick them up again and shake them, put them down again, pick them up to shake them, until everyone involved has worked themselves up into a rage, or finally agreed on a price.
I’ve twice seen the midday khat rush. If you’ve seen the city at other times, you really had to wonder where its residents suddenly got the strength for these outbursts of energy.
The day was over after that. The men disappeared into their cool homes. They now went home to “graze”, and the city sank back into its usual stupor.
By the time we were on the tar road I’d had enough of our mobile scrap heap. When we had to push it yet again, I picked up my luggage and simply flagged down a different minibus.
Although more than half the population of Djibouti are Somalis, I had now reached the end of my Somalia journey. I’d travelled almost 1,000 miles and hadn’t seen a single field of wheat or a single garden growing vegetables or fruit – just herdsmen with their camels, sheep and goats.
I was now back in a city again. Djibouti, the capital of the country with which it shares its name, is built on a promontory in the Indian Ocean. It’s a mixture of old and new. White colonial buildings with beautiful archways and shady balconies stand beside modern functional buildings, and then there are more run down wooden sheds.
The narrow alleys in the old town, near the large mosque and the bazaar, give the city the charm of the Orient, whilst the new buildings, housing government bodies, trading companies and western businesses give it the character of a modern metropolis.
Admittedly they’d already seen better days, and the paint was peeling off the façades everywhere. But when you’ve come from Somalia, as I had, that didn’t really matter.
I suddenly saw French soldiers’ wives with dark glasses and fashionable haircuts, driving through the streets in SUVs which glinted in the sunshine, and teenagers in western clothes and without Hijabs, hanging around in small groups outside the suburban schools. There were no mounds of sand, but instead tarmac roads and real high-rise buildings, restaurants, shops and cinemas with garishly colourful, enormous billboards for Hollywood films – life! Yes, I was back. I couldn’t have been happier.
• Hotel de la Paix (Djibouti City)
I could tell immediately what was going on in Hotel de la Paix. A girl was sitting on the floor outside her room, with her legs apart and her skirt hitched up. And the looks I was given by the other girls weren’t looks of curiosity – they were looking for potential customers.
I left again. I had visions of nights of loud music, loud shrieking, and loud hammerings on my door. I needed peace. I wanted to catch up on the sleep I’d missed the previous night, on the journey. And it seemed that, of all places, the Hotel of Peace was where I’d be least likely to find this.
It seemed, however, that the cheap hotels listed in my guidebook no longer existed. And a young man took me to ones which seemed to me to be suitable only for suicidal guests, they were so dark, stuffy or dirty. If I’d wanted another older, but clean, hotel I’d have had to pay over 100 dollars per night. So I went back to Hotel de la Paix and moved into room 10.
The hotel was on the first floor of a dirty white house dating from the 1930s, in a side street off Rue d’Ethiopie, and just a few minutes from the central Place Menelik. It had a dusty bar, which had obviously not been used for years, and ten rooms grouped around a large hall. Inside the hall, a private space was separated off by floral curtains. There were a number of sofas there. At night, the girls would take the cushions off, put them on the floor, and sleep on them.
Once I’d understood how the hotel worked, I could tell whether
or not the girls had had a good night by how full this room was. A lot of them shared a room. If, in the morning, there were a lot of girls in the room in the hall, then it had been a good night. It meant that a lot of men were spending the night with the girls in the rooms. If the inner space in the hall was empty, there had been no customers.
In the evening, the three Ethiopian girls in room 7 invited me for a drink of Tej. Djibouti’s cheap labour is recruited from Ethiopia. This means that you can buy everything there that Ethiopians wouldn’t be able to survive without.
The girls were eating injera, their home country’s traditional thin, rubbery flatbread. They popped little pieces of it into each other’s mouths, and into mine. They drank Tej – the traditional honey wine, which always tastes rather like young wine. They listened continuously to the same cassette of their sad Amharic music. And they were terribly homesick, even though Addis Ababa is just an affordable train ride away.
They asked me whether I’d ever been there, and I said “Yes. I thought it was very beautiful, but also very poor.”
One of the girls battled with her indignation, as though it were entirely impossible for her to understand how she’d even ended up in Djibouti in the first place. “Poor?! That’s my city. I love it. How can Addis Ababa be poor?!”
They had a visitor with them – François, in his late thirties, a helicopter pilot with the French army. Initially he was still in the nextdoor room with his girl. But the girl who seemed to be the oldest had said, “Too much fucking for too little money” and had hammered on the wall a few times. Then the pair came over and joined us.
François explained that most of the Ethiopian girls are living in Djibouti without a residence permit. Admittedly, though, the police aren’t particularly bothered about it. It means they can earn a bit on the side.
Consequently, the girls only go out wearing a headscarf, and if they go do their disco in the evenings they have to get a taxi right to the door. “If they are arrested”, François said, “then they sort it out African style.”