Muhumed Abdi Elmi, age 50
Muhumed Abdi Elmi, age 50
I met Muhumed Abdi Elmi in the desert of Somaliland while reporting this story for NPR, which just aired. I am convinced that nomads are the world’s biggest badasses.
They spend half the year walking with their animals to find water. They used to spend the whole year doing that but, like most of us, they have gotten lazy through the ages. Where they walk in Somalia is an absolutely inhospitable place where only turtles seem to thrive. Nomads — be them women, men or children — have much work to do herding their animals. Wake up really early, for one. At the end of the day, hack off a bunch of really prickly branches and build a corral for the animals so they can’t escape and so a lion can’t eat them. Tie together the corral with reeds or string. Dig holes for each branch in hard desert earth. Then make a fire, eat something or maybe not, and go to sleep on the ground on top of a reed mat.
Nomads have historically been warriors, though they’ve toned it down in this age. They do carry spears just in case another nomad is like, “Dude, you are taking my water/branch, I found this first, I am going to kill you!” or in case a lion attacks them or a hyena attacks their child.
Muhumed, the man in the photograph, was yelling at us as we first took a picture of his approaching camel herd. We were at a well. “WHY ARE YOU PHOTOGRAPHING ME? I AM SUFFERING! YOU ARE EXPLOITING MY SUFFERING!” he yelled in Somali at my guide Mohamed Amin. Then he told Mohamed that he had been circling the well all day looking for someone to give him the $1 it cost to rent a trough for watering his camels. No one wanted to give him the money or share the well for that matter. I gave him the money. He is traveling with a cousin or something, and actually lives normally in Ethiopia, like many Somali nomads.
Hero Q&A
Translated by Mohamed Amin Jibril
Emily: Tell me about yourself.
Muhumed: I am a pastoralist and I take care of camels and sheep. We want water. We are on the well but we have no access to it because we can’t pay the rent. I have children but because of this terrible drought, I decided not to send my children to take care of the camels. Because I think I am more capable of handling this task. I have more experience than my children, I know where to find water and grass. That’s why I left my children.
Before we were in Ethiopia, where there was not enough water. It was a bad drought. We sleep wearing our shoes and clothes. We couldn’t even find enough water to bathe. Day and night, we are sweating, and by now we have dried up completely.
Seven months we don’t see our families. In these seven months we didn’t go back to where we live permanently in Ethiopia. We are now on our way.
We passed here this morning and saw the water but we couldn’t afford to rent a trough. We didn’t know anyone here. Later we doubled back. We wanted water. That’s our main problem.
Emily: Has there ever been a drought this bad?
Muhumed: Not since the drought of Daba-Dheer. We were young camel herders. (Geer-Jire is a Somali word that specifically means 20-25 year old herders.) Like the camels, we ate leaves of trees and we were just collecting them. The little camels couldn’t get any milk from their mothers teets, so we had to hit their teets to get the milk to come out.
Emily: What’s the problem, I mean, why is there a drought, do you know?
Muhumed: Drought and colonialists have happened to us. We try everything to survive the drought. We go wherever we can to survive and we do whatever we can to survive. We go to anyone we think we can get help from, and the others we just pass.
There’s a certain way to survive on semi-arid land. The environment has different seasons and sometimes organizations come and help the people. They are given wheat, rice, and some other food.
Emily: Do you have any ideas for solving the drought?
Muhumed: We are pastoralists, we are just like our animals, what we know best is how to care for our animals, but we don’t know anything else. But we think about how we can deal with this drought, and we submit our ideas to the local government. Their job is to either help people or call for help from someone else. We tell them, ‘It’s your job to fight against the drought.’
But we the pastoralists, we are just scattered throughout the country. We are just struggling to care for our animals. We’re just running after the clouds of rain. We are on our way to where we’re from originally, where we have heard that there is rain.
Who does this remind you of?
Alessandra Argenti isn’t afraid of anything. She’s open to everything. To use a terrible cliché, she turns shit into gold. That’s how you live in a movie. This is something I have long wondered how to do.
Movies are full of drama, romance, excitement, and emotional catharsis. Stuff happens in the span of a two-hour movie that wouldn’t fit in most people’s lifetimes. But Alessandra has mastered the art. The 30-year-old documentary filmmaker is my roommate in Nairobi. We live in a big house on a canyon with 14 other people and four dogs, two of them are Alessandra’s. They were strays she rescued before moving from her home of Milan, Italy, and bringing them with her to Africa. One of them is a pitbull named Game. Alessandra and Dan, a Kenyan badass profiled earlier in this blog, have the most adorable baby I have ever met.
I am sure it’s fate that I ended up living with Alessandra. I always wanted to meet and study a true Earth Mother in the 1970’s sense. I also wanted to know what my teenage idols did once they disappeared from my hometown of Menlo Park, California. Now I know.
You know that older girl you noticed when you were a teenager, the one who was beautiful, dressed inventively, hung out with every stripe of person in every age group, laughed generously, participated in underground subculture like raves or punk rock shows, and then one day, just vanished? I have long suspected that those girls (who were already too generous to join the “popular people” despite exceptional credentials) got bored of underground subculture, drugs and punk rock boyfriends, so they moved on to the next level. But what was the next level? I thought maybe it was becoming an Anais Nin type, writing and making art and living in New York or Paris. Sure. But those people aren’t African Heroes. That’s the next level: moving to Africa to hang out and help. Part lifestyle and part humanitarian service, this is not a common achievement. Most expats are regular people who try to inhabit the same parameters abroad as they did in London or Los Angeles. They will never live in a movie, marry an African or become heroes.
Alesssandra roams our vast garden with her baby, singing in Italian and watering plants. Sometimes her friends from the slums come over. Other documentary filmmakers always stop by, orphans spend the night, and Italian visitors like Andrea, a man we call Jesus for his benevolence and uncanny resemblance to the prophet, sleep on the couch for weeks. They sit and drink tea and talk about poverty and recycling or make hip hop music videos. When one of our dozens of roommates or houseguests behaves inappropriately or with incredible gall, Alessandra cries “Mamma mia!” with a sleepy smile. One frequent visitor eats everything he can see before returning to malnourished poverty in the slums. Last week he ate five pieces of bread covered with peanut butter and an entire pot of risotto within two hours. Mamma mia!
It’s not easy to get in and out of our neighborhood because you need a car. Since Alessandra and Dan share a car, she’s often stuck at home for days. This is something that would annoy most people, because our house is quite isolated. Exiled African rebel commanders, European ambassadors and members of Kenya’s parliament live next door behind walls and gates guarded by German Shepherds. They don’t come over for tea. I find Alessandra on these lonely days cooking a feast in the kitchen of pizza with homemade dough or lasagna with real béchamel, an impossible find in Kenya. She always shares, even with the monosyllabic roommates.
After moving to Kenya two years ago, Alessandra lived in an orphanage in a Nairobi slum for eight months. You can read the story below or listen to her tell it. She is a wonderful storyteller so I highly recommend a listen.
She was invited by the orphanage founder, a hip, generous community activist and politician from Kenya named Mugabe Were. She met Were through a mutual friend because his wife lives in Italy. Were was murdered this winter during Kenya’s post election violence. His orphanage fell to shambles. The Italian charity that had been funding it withdrew their support. The orphans were freaked out. They thought they would have to go back to living in a garbage dump. But Alessandra took control of the situation, and now works for free as the Italian charity’s point person. They resumed their support with a shipping container full of clothes, bicycles and supplies for the orphans. When one of the orphans disappeared from the home last week, Alessandra asked after him. She discovered that George had returned to his poor, burdened grandmother’s house after fighting with another orphan. He feared reprisals. Alessandra made a visit to his grandmother’s house and persuaded George to come back to the orphanage and make peace. “I think I would make a good diplomat,” she said as we left.
Hero Q&A
Emily: So from what you told me yesterday you were a [video DJ] in dance clubs and raves in Milan before you came to Kenya. How did you transition to living in Kenya and making videos about underrepresented groups of people?
Alessandra: It’s not a meditated transition, it just happened. I knew that after six years of VJing, starting with illegal raves, and continuing with concerts, theatres and nightclubs, I was getting bored. I was feeling that my mission in life was to work with video, but I didn’t know exactly how. I thought it was VJing and using art, but then I thought that art is nice but it’s not a direct message.
I didn’t even think to live in an orphanage. I left Italy to study the African culture through the tribes, through the elders, studying the dances and interviewing the witch doctors and the people but Mugabe Were [the Kenyan city councilor] come and say:
—“No! Before knowing the tribes of wild Africa, you should come to Nairobi and see what is the modern aspect of Africa. You cannot go and say ‘This is Africa’ you should come and see what people in slums and cities are doing. This also is part of the modern Africa.”
—So I say, “Yes, it’s true.” I went to Dandora where he said:
—“I’m doing a cultural center, come to Dandora.”
—I said “But there was an orphan center, I visited it in 2005 there were like 50 kids.”
—He said, “No I’m moving the kids to my new building,” which I realized later was just in front of the [biggest] dump [in East Africa]. And it was not possible for 50 kids to go there unless you want to kill them in a few years. So the kids never moved from the center, which is Villa Teag, I ended up living with the kids and realized that the cultural center was just in his mind, it was not a real thing. It was just an orphan center! With beds and things for the kids. But I said:
—“I should not give up. If I am in Dandora, I should do something.”
I start to meet a lot of people, youth, this artist group called Koflani Mau Mau that are one of the most famous hip hop singers in Kenya. And I start to realize that youth, even if they are living in a poor slum, they are really full of strength and creativity. They proposed me so many documentaries, music videos, so in the eight months I ended up living in the orphan center every day for me was like living in a movie. I was not shooting a movie, I was living in a movie. That’s why I ended up doing several video clips, a documentary called “Trash is Cash” about the dumping site in Dandora, one of the biggest in Africa, and I really produced a lot. I think in those eight months I produced like three years in Italy.
Emily: And a video clip, is it a music video?
Alessandra: Yes
Emily: With Koflani Mau Mau and various musicians from the neighborhood?
Alessandra: Yes but basically with Koflani. They were the ones who stimulated me more because they do hip hop but it’s conscious hip hop. They don’t want a video with naked women, big cars and money raining. No. I can’t do any hip hop video for showing naked women and so on. So they really stimulated me in their daily life. They are a good example of strength and positivity where even if they wake up, they have one meal a day and they are surviving for less than one dollar a day they create so much every day they are in the studio recording, they are promoting their songs they are around Kenya making concerts for like 200 shillings each like they are paid like $3 each per concert but they really believe in what they are doing. So I found we were really similar, we were both really believing in what we were doing
Emily: And the orphan center, what was it like living there? Did you have electricity, did you have your own room, what did you eat?
Alessandra: Eating was a problem I think in the first month I lost like five kilos. Just because I didn’t know where to get food, there are no shops like here – pizza or butcher or drinks – so I had to find out in the shacks which one was selling what. So at the beginning food was a problem but I eat everything so it was not because I didn’t like African food. It’s very good, I never felt sick, I was eating everything from the donuts in the morning to the tea in the evening.
Then electricity was the main problem because working with computer and video editing sometimes I was stuck waiting the next day to edit again, it was like…electricity almost 16 hours on 24.
Water was a problem, no hot water, but you can survive, it’s not cold here. There was water in the morning, but all the mothers and the workers were washing clothes because in Africa you will never find a family with a washing machine. They are used to wash things with hands. SO, in one hour, say at 8 to 9 there was water at 9 it was already finished because every family with five-six kids were washing their clothes. So when I woke up there was already no water. All the day no water because the tank was empty. By evening, the tank was full again. So my best moment was evening when everybody was sleeping, I was getting my water for the day after. And the shower, I learned to do it with the water tank. Cold water, cold shower.
Emily: So you just pour the water over your head?
Alessandra: Yes yes yes.
I had my own room that was… a shame. It was a shame when I arrived, I was really mad at [Mugabe] Were because he just put a bed and a sofa, not even a place to put my dresses that stayed in the luggage for almost one month, not even a kitchen where to cook, the walls were dirty and, ahhhh, it was terrible. So the first thing I bought some paint, colored paint, I painted orange, blue and white it was amazing. I start to put my pictures, I bought my furniture I bought my cooker, at the end was small, but a very nice room.
Emily: What was it like to live with orphans, all day every day and every night?
Alessandra: At the beginning it was difficult because they wake up at half past four in the morning. They were 60 and in Kenya schools start very early so…[sigh]…every morning I was woke up by those 60 kids. And I was really sleepy and mad at them but then I start to hear and they were just laughing, at half past four in the morning. They were playing with the water, making joke, they were laughing all the time and screaming, like really happy kids. So for me was like, a good morning. After half an hour I used to sleep again until 8. But then, it was really nice for me because they were always happy, they were always friendly to me, they used to know me, know my dogs name, call me imitating how I call my dog, some words in Italian that I used to say even if I’m speaking English. So, they were all my friends. They were like little elves around.
Emily: Okay, after the orphan center you decided to stay right? So give us the quick history.
Alessandra: I decide to stay because after Dandora I was happy but broke because nobody was giving me money for my documentaries or music video clips. So I decided if I want to stay in Africa, either I work in an NGO or I work in a TV studio, but I was in the point when I left Italy – to not stay enclosed in a room all the day in front of a computer. So to do what I really wanted to do I was in need to it independently, like freelance.
So I met this other Italian guy from [Naples] named Vincenzo Cavallo and we decided to open our own NGO that is called Cultural Video Foundation. And we deal with multimedia as an instrument to develop, inform and educate people among the slums and the rural areas of Kenya. So this is our passion and our mission. Because in our society information is a power. So we want to use it in the right way, not just to enrich ourselves, or to make publicity for somebody else.
Emily: Having lived with you for four months I think you’ve adapted very well to Kenya. You have your dogs now from Italy, you have a baby, you live with your fiancé, and you have a household. So, you know, expat life always seems to be a temporary thing where you live there for maybe one year or two and then you go back to your country. But, you seem to be in a different situation where you might stay here for a long time.
Alessandra: Yes yes. I don’t see much future in Italy. I miss my friends a lot but I don’t see a big future for me in what I want to do, unless I change ideas and I decide to become a video editor full time and stay in the studio eight hours a day. I’m too wild. So I think in Africa I’m realized. I’m happy I have a good family so, I think for now I want to stay here.
There must be some fallout from Africa’s low professional training requirements for jobs from journalist to president. I suppose Idi Amin would be a good example of someone who mucked up his job of leading Uganda due partly to his underqualification. But so far in my travels I have seen more evidence that the lack of technocracy on this continent is a good thing. In fact, this entire blog highlights the triumphs of people who learned how to do their jobs under obligation from real life, dynamic circumstances rather than static classroom simulations. Certainly most of them would have rather gone to an American university to learn their trades, it just wasn’t possible. Not to mention the fact that American universities don’t actually teach any trades, unlike Africa’s pragmatic two-year colleges.
Mariam Mohamud Barre is a young Somali journalist I met the other day at a press conference. She’s the Somali language service reporter for Voice of America, a radio network paid for by the U.S. government that had the original charter of delivering patriotic news to members of the U.S. armed services stationed abroad. Now it’s radio for anyone living abroad and broadcasts in an astounding amount of countries and languages.
The other reporters I was with treated Miriam like a veteran correspondent. She told me she had covered the 2002-2004 Somali government reconciliation conference here in Kenya and I assumed she was about 27 or 30-years-old. She has some serious poise. So I asked her how old she is. She’s 21.
“Wait. You’re 21? So that means you were…15 when you covered the reconciliation conference here in Kenya?!”
“I interviewed warlords!” she chirped with laughter.
“The journalists in Somalia are very young,” said another young Somali reporter. “You will find many who are 21. It is the young person’s profession.”
Miriam started her career by writing articles for a Somali news gossip Web site for a province of the country, the equivalent of a Web site about Orange County, California, or Buffalo, N.Y. Then she and her family had to flee to Kenya because of ongoing war in Somalia. When Miriam mentions this her eyes cloud over and she chokes up. They settled in Kenya and Miriam was hired by one of the main Somali radio stations to cover the reconciliation conference as a correspondent.
I thought with wonder about this for quite a while. It makes sense. Young people are more prone to gossip and often better at it than adults. They are less afraid of authority, especially in Somalia, where teenage attitudes very much resemble those of gum chewing, cigarette-smoking daredevils in American public high schools. And what is reporting anyway? Delivering news to the people. African news is not fraught with the kind of rarified snobbery that our media is afflicted with. It’s practical. And it’s much more popular than news in America.
Everyone in Kenya watches the news at 9pm. Bars hush as people gather round the TV. In Somaliland during the BBC afternoon newscast work halts for 30 minutes. Of course, the incentive to get the news is bigger for most Africans than it is for Americans. Hearing the news in Somalia, for example, can mean the difference between knowing that 14,000 Ethiopian troops have entered your province and are headed for your town or being caught in your underwear by a team of assassins.
Getting back to Miriam, she moved on from Kenya correspondent to become Somalia’s parliament correspondent, living in a dangerous zone constantly under siege from Islamist and opposition fighters. Then she was hired by Voice of America in Nairobi. At 21 she is the Somali equivalent of Anne Garrels.
So really, how much of our lives do we waste in the U.S. kissing people’s asses and attending graduate schools?
It’s shocking to meet young Somalis with great journalism skills. I know that sounds prejudiced, but the country has not had a public school system since 1991. Private school costs about $400 a year, the average monthly income is about $220, and families average at 7 or 8 children, so not every child can go to school unless parents are extraordinarily prosperous. Then there’s the problem of schools and entire cities being shelled. Those who do get to attend will be expected to chip in wages to the family once they get a job. Most of them start their own businesses in high demand sectors like transport or food retail.
So, while journalists worldwide get crap from their families for choosing such a poorly paying, unstable field when they could be using their good brains to be doctors or engineers, the stakes are higher in Somalia if you fail to make a living as a reporter. You may be the only one in your family who got to go to school and now you’re sqaundering your literacy for pennies. That said, someone’s got to do it. A society without intellectuals is prone to fascism, a local and international threat.
Abdiaziz Hassan is one of hundreds of brave Somali journalists who don’t just buck convention by going into such an impractical profession but put their lives in grave danger. His father sent only a few of his 10 children to school and several dropped out early to start their own businesses. The dad himself is a farmer and a shop owner.
Abdiaziz is 25, and ever since he was a kid he wanted to be a journalist. He memorized the voices of the BBC and studied hard in school, avoiding warlords who would have liked him to drop out and work as a gunman. After finishing high school he went to a two-year trade school in Kenya where he earned his associates degree in journalism. He applied to the only two media outlets that were operating in Somalia at the time and was given a job as a reporter and host at the radio station Shabelle in Mogadishu. He was paid $200 a month.
At that time in 2006, the popular Islamist uprising had taken hold in Mogadishu after chasing out the warlords. But the weak transitional government didn’t want to cede to the Islamists. Neither party would negotiate a power-sharing deal. So any journalist who reported on the government would be targeted by Islamists as pawns of the government and any journalist who reported on the Islamists would be targeted by the government as pawns of the Islamists. So much as interviewing one side for an impartial story could get you killed and soon two founders of one of the two radio stations were assassinated. In 2007 eight journalists were killed and the government forced radio stations to close several times.
Abdiaziz says transitional President Yusuf’s spokesman would call press conferences and when reporters arrived they would be taken to jail without being charged. Abdiaziz would receive death threats by text message or anonymous voices. He had no idea whether they were from the Islamists or the government.
“When I was leaving the station heading for home, I would think, ‘When will I be shot? Two minutes later? Three minutes later?’ It was so frustrating. All of my relatives would call me and tell me to stop this.”
Last year Abdiaziz left Mogadishu along with any other journalists who could. Those who remained have militant routines for staying alive; BBC reporters, one of whom was shot dead two weeks ago, have to inform their editor of all their moves. If they are traveling from home to an interview, the editor must assess the risk/reward ratio of such a journey and then say yes or no.
But if they are willing to stay they will have work. Somalia is at war, and while it’s a blip on the news radar compared to Iraq and Afghanistan, international outlets and wire services still need reports from Mogadishu. Abdiaziz has the opportunity to go from a freelance reporter in Kenya to a full-time correspondent for Voice of America’s English service if he returns to Mogadishu. This is what he wants. His mother and father don’t want it.
He would live in their house in the center of Mogadishu, a dangerous neighborhood where Ethiopian soldiers, government troops and Islamists exchange fire and rocket propelled grenades. Islamist fighters plant carbombs and land mines for Ethiopian, African Union and government cars, but taxis and passers-by often suffer the consequences.
Abdiaziz’s family is long gone, living in another province, other African countries or on the farm. Their house is empty and abandoned. He plans to go back in two months. “It’s my country, my people,” he says. “I must go.”
Dihoud
I just returned from a three-week trip in Somaliland, an unrecognized state north of Somalia. Somaliland was a British protectorate in the 19th and 20th centuries, and then merged with Somalia in the spirit of pan-Africanism that was going around in 1960. Somalilanders now consider this a huge mistake. After 22-year-old Siad Barre, a soldier from south Somalia, overthrew Somalia’s first independent government, he became a punishing dictator. He marginalized, tortured, killed and bombed Somaliland. By the mid-’80s he had destroyed the whole region and the people fled to refugee camps in Ethiopia.
Somalilanders caught on pretty quick to his hostility towards them. In the ’70s Barre told Arab leaders in Libya that the Isaaq clan in Somaliland was actually Jewish, and should therefore be cleansed from the north east part of the continent, a predominantly Muslim region. But Siad Barre, Somaliland is 99% Muslim! The dictator made a practice of moving Somalilanders far away so they couldn’t be near their families. It sounds remniscent of Stalin’s displacement policy for Soviets.
At this point the bravest and brightest fled Barre’s campaign and started a liberation movement called SNM: the Somali National Movement.
This movement eventually comprised almost every teenager and man from Somaliland. They hid in the jungle of Ethiopia and attacked Barre’s bases. In 1988, with the help of two other guerrilla groups in south Somalia, SNM overthrew Barre in a bloody battle that would make great cinema.
Dr. Omar Dihoud was one of the founders of SNM, and now he is Somaliland’s only psychiatrist. He was conscripted into Barre’s huge military in the 1970s, and educated in St. Petersburg at a Russian military medical school. (Barre was allied with the Soviet Union until the late ’70s.) Now Dihoud lives in London and Somaliland. He is almost blind from a medical condition he’s had since childhood. He is the most remarkable man, and I was fortunate to live across the hall from him at the Imperial Hotel, where we had coffee or food in the garden on an almost daily basis.
After SNM liberated Somaliland, the movement disintegrated into factions that fought each other for several years. The same thing happens in almost all of the aftermaths of African civil wars — in Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, South Africa, Sierra Leone — but very few, if any countries have successfully addressed the problem of disarming their “freedom fighters.” In most cases, especially Somalia and Congo, the guerrillas who were bent on saving their country end up destroying it later. The UN is prepared to spend $7.4 billion this year to solve this mystifying fallout. Dr. Dihoud has an explanation. It’s not rocket science, but implementation is often more difficult than troubleshooting.
Here is Dr. Dihoud’s story. I highly recommend you listen. His delivery is captivating.
When the people are in a guerilla war, when the people are fighting against the dictator, when the people are in the bush, they resent each other. They disagree with each other. Because, when the people are in the bush, they don’t have clean water, they have no food, hygiene is very poor. Some of them they say: “Let’s speed up the fighting against the dictator!” Others, who’ve got the power in their hands, they say: “It’s too dangerous.” So people, they blame each other because of the difficulties they are going through, because of the danger they are in, because of the condition they are in, they became very suspicious against each other. Some of them, they say, “Ahh, some people are benefiting from the power struggle in civil war, and they are getting more money from the people,” and they are not getting anything.
When we liberated the country, the leaders at that time failed to unite the movement. And the movement disintegrated. And everybody in his area, he put a checkpoint to loot the civilians because they were too poor. The militiamen who liberated the country, they were not unified. And some of the commanders, they were hostile against each other. So the movement split into groups.
They told their militiamen not to obey the order coming from the authority. There was a hidden civil war for nearly three years. So everybody was armed to the teeth, and everyday, the militiamen were attacking each other in Hargeysa — they were different subclans. There was a technical, with a pointed artillery. There were many young people armed with Kalashnikovs. So they used to shoot each other and it was very dangerous to travel from place to place. There were more than 30 checkpoints between Berbera and Hargeysa. In Berbera and Burao, another 30. Even my mother’s side and my father’s side, they were hostile against each other. And my grandmother’s side, they were hostile against each other. Every subclan divided into two or three. At that time, I realized how to disarm the militiamen, how to unify Somaliland.
In the first three years, the president and the vice president, they failed to unite the Somali National Movement army. Then we called a conference in Boruma. In that conference, we decided to appoint as a president the man who was the first prime minister after independence [from England in 1960]. We thought, “This man is not in the movement, nobody is blaming him, and that was the man who liberated the country from the colonial power. Maybe, if you appoint him as a President, everybody will support him.”
So we appointed Egal as a President. But it was very difficult for Egal, immediately. Some big tribe blamed him that he was always – even as a prime minister – against them. They didn’t want to give arms to him, other tribes also didn’t want to give up their arms to the government. So, I said, what to do?
One day my subclan leaders, elders, they came to me. And they said, Dr. Omar, give us $200. I asked them, what do you want to do with it? They said, “We want to sit together, we want to discuss whether we will disarm ourself or not. Whether we will give our arms to the government or not.”
I said, okay.
They said, “another two problems: we will also want to discuss that man from our tribe who killed three men from the northern part of Hargeysa.”
And we are in the southwest part of Hargeysa. I said, “Okay, I will come to you at 4:00, because I don’t chew khat [a local plant stimulant.”
I came to them at 4:30. I listened to discussion. I said after one hour, “Can I talk?” They said yes.
I said, “What have you reached?”
“Nothing,” they said. “We failed. We have not reached anything about the disarmament. And the other case, the man who killed three men from another tribe, we will hand that man to that tribe.”
I said, “Let me talk.”
They said, “Go ahead.”
“I am a psychiatrist,” I said. “And as I am a psychiatrist, we are all paranoid after the war. We are all traumatized. We developed suspiciousness during the civil war. We had blood on our hands, we fought against a dictator, and we killed each other. So everybody is paranoid that somebody is following him. And we think that if we give up the arms, that other tribes will attack us. Let us disarm ourselves and give the arms to the government.”
“Ohhh!” they said. “If we give our arms to the government, we will become like the ladies. Other tribes, from the east and from the west, they will attack us!”
I said, “Uhuh. I tell you what.”
They said, “What?”
I said, “We will disarm ourselves, but our boys and the guns will remain together! They will go into the military camp, they will get to keep their guns, but they will be out of the town, out of the city. If our tribe will be attacked from the west, from the Sa’ad Muse subclan, or from the east and the airport, our boys with the Kalashnikovs — they will jump over the fence, and they will come to defend us. Don’t worry!”
They said, “Uhuh….and what is the benefit?”
“The benefit,” I said, “our boys will REST. Our boys are traumatized from what they experienced and witnessed during the civil war – the life threatening they have gone through. They killed some people and they lost their loved ones, so they experienced and witnessed the deaths of their friends and disintegration of their families. They will rest. They will sleep. They will have a shower. They will cut their hair. They will clean their teeth. They will clean their clothes.”
They said, “That’s a very good idea.”
“They will get rid of the nightmare,” I said. “They will get rid of the trauma symptoms, they will become human. They will marry our girls. They will think about their families.”
They said, “very good! What else?”
I said, “And they will be paid by the government because the government will collect tax! And if somebody will attack you, with good military training, they will jump over the fence and protect you.”
Dr. Dihoud continues relaying his advice to the elders that fateful day. “Number two: Your children, every night they hear gunfire from your boys. That gunfire will be shut down. The children, and the mothers, and the elders – your fathers – they will sleep quietly as well.”
They said, “Very good, doctor. You gave us counseling. But Dr. Omar,” our sultan said, “don’t tell anybody that you give us this advice. And we will not tell anybody except the president.”
I said I will not tell. So, in February 1994 they disarmed our tribe. They transferred the weapons to the government with the boys. And how we benefited: In one year, our people, no one killed another boy. So gradually, Somaliland was disarmed in 1998, and we established a unified army.