African Heroes: stories of brave badasses

African Curriculum

BOOKS

“A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah

I stayed home for three days without leaving my bed to finish this book. It’s a true story about a brave, clever young boy whose whole loving family is massacred by Sierra Leone’s RUF rebels. He runs through the jungle for something like 6 months to escape them, and his only salvation is a rap tape of “OPP” in his pocket that amuses villagers who would otherwise burn him at the stake (as in, “You down with OPP man? You know me!”). He’s a hero, anyone would like this book whether they care about Africa or not. It’s also a great way to learn about Sierra Leone and west African values in general, which are quite impressive.

“Warriors: Life and Death Among the Somalis” by Gerald Hanley

If you don’t get why on earth I am so keen on Somalia, read this book. Gerald Hanley is a soul searcher who imparts precious insights about the human condition and I think he saved me from five nervous breakdowns. His memoir is about his five years working as a British military captain in Somalia during WWII, and accounts brilliantly the character of his endlessly charming Somali soldiers.

“Another Day of Life” by Ryszard Kapuscinski

This guy is the original badass. He drives across embattled Angola dodging ambushes, land mines, roadblocks and South African mercenaries, then does some calisthenics. (He also manages to explain the convoluted roots of the Angola’s 20-year civil war in a non-boring way.)

“The Graves Are Not Yet Full” by Bill Berkeley

Bill is one of my mentors and in this comprehensive tome of African politics in the 1980s he gets into the nitty gritty of corruption, war and genocide. It’s not an easy read but it’s edifying. All of those vague African tragedies from McNeil Lehrer or whatever that old news show was called in 1980’s are here in this book — a great service to all of us who were just kids at the time. Bill illuminates all the disgraceful blunders of the Reagan administration and the various ethnic cleansing campaigns that we inadvertently funded with our tax dollars.

MUSIC

Ethiopiques Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale 1969-1974, by Mulatu Astatqe

You never knew Ethiopia was one of the coolest places on earth right? You will learn.

Club Sodade, by Cesaria Evora

This album would make the perfect soundtrack to Kapuscinski’s book if it were made into a black and white art film. Cesaria Evora is from Cape Verde in west Africa so she sings in Portuguese. I like the remix album as much as her acoustic stuff, it’s got a really poignant cinematic vibe.

MOVIES

“The Passenger”

Antonioni’s movies are more like slideshows than plots, but no matter. Jack Nicholson is in full badass mode as a cynical journalist who steals the identity of a murdered arms dealer in a state of existential ennui. The movie gives a vivid portrait of windswept North Africa with its sinister leaders and complete oblivion.

“Blood Diamond”

Gripping action movie with moving romance and realistic journalist protagonist gives lesson about the war in Sierra Leone.

“The Lost Boys of Sudan”

This loaded documentary about South Sudanese refugees moving to the U.S. for a better life and then realizing they’d rather be refugees in their own country than live in Texas shows why it’s not necessarily benevolent for celebrities to adopt poor African children and move them to Beverly Hills. It also shows how empty American culture can be. And how important it is for African countries to retain ambitious young people rather than lose them in a brain drain.

“The Lord of War”

Appealingly rebellious premise and protagonist in this Nicholas Cage movie about an arms dealer during the cold war. It’s handsomely edited and depicts the Liberian problems of the 1980s and 90s. See it if you want to understand Charles Taylor, an epic villain. A friend of mine also wrote a great article about Charles Taylor’s equally sinister dum-dum son, Chuckie, which you can read here. And my badass friend, veteran Africa correspondent Massimo Alberizzi, says he wrote the articles that inspired this screenplay.

I’m Starting a Newspaper with One Computer, Three Months Worth of Paper and a Cartoonist

If Mohamed Amin runs out of money in the process of building his start-up newspaper, the “Hargeysa Guardian,” he will ask his sister, who works as a maid, if she can spot him. He and his illustrator colleague Abdirashid are the editors-in-chief. They have just hired their first reporter, who will cover youth issues. I told them about my old “Act One” column and they were inspired.

Mohamed Amin grew up in the countryside. When he was 10, he and his family fled Somaliland to live in an Ethiopian refugee camp while Siad Barre bombed their village (see earlier post for explanation). Then his dad died. Some said he had diabetes, others cancer. But no one could offer any solutions.

Mohamed studied hard, even in the refugee camp, and when his older sister moved to Djibouti, he followed her to attend high school there. He took English and writing courses at a protestant mission after high school (he personally practices Sufi Islam) and was then recruited to work as a newspaper reporter by a former commander in the guerrilla army that helped overthrow Siad Barre, the Somali National Movement. For the past 7 years Mohamed built up a career as a human rights investigative reporter for Haatuf Media Network, the former-commander’s contentious but popular Hargeysa newspaper.

Among other feats, Mohamed got a mentally handicapped man moved from jail into a mental hospital. He persuaded the police at the precinct, who felt bad about keeping the mentally handicapped man in jail but didn’t know what else to do since he sometimes threatened local residents, to “arrest” Mohamed for a fictional crime so he could sit in jail with the man and interview him. They agreed. The next day’s Mohamed’s newspaper ran his story on the cover. Within one day the Minister of Interior dispatched someone to remove the challenged man from jail and put him in a hospital.

In ten years Mohamed wants to run for president of Somaliland. He hopes Hillary Clinton wins the U.S. election, and thinks America is helping Iraq. “When I am president of Somaliland I will also help people in other countries if I have a strong army,” he says. When I voice dissent, he says: “What? Do you want Iraq to be another Somalia?” He has a point. The roots of Somalia’s present instability are in the vacuum that was created by Siad Barre’s deposition after a long tenure as dictator.

ABOUT THE ARTICLE: Mohamed Amin will be the star of my Somaliland essay.

Catching Terrorists In Somaliland

This man is a former Minister of Interior for Somaliland, a country north of Somalia that’s not recognized by any country in the world. He’s on the lot of his old house, which got bombed in 1988 along with the rest of Somaliland by Somalia’s then-dictator, Siad Barre. Mr. Osman is looking at his late khat-chewing room. Khat is a popular plant stimulant that men chew for hours while shooting the breeze.

People in Somaliland say 100,000 were killed by Barre’s paranoid massacre of Somalilanders, most of whom are from a rival clan to the late dictator’s. Somalia and Somaliland don’t have tribes because they are all one people, the Somalis, and share one language, Somali. They have families, sub families, sub sub families, and sub sub sub families, otherwise known as clans.

Siad Barre buried alive thousands of people and when it rains their bones get dug up and float into the (newly built) backyards in Hargeysa, Somaliland’s capital. Civic minded citizens had to line river with concrete because the river banks have so many bones and shredded clothes stuck inside of them from the people who were buried alive that they filled up the city during rainy season. I saw some clothes sticking out of a local river and some bones, also rice sacks from the people who were suffocated/buried alive inside of the bags.

Anyway, Mr. Osman, the former Interior Minister, has a pretty moving story about catching a handful of terrorists three years ago who. The offenders killed an Italian nun, a Swiss development worker, two British schoolteachers and a Kenyan NGO worker here in Somaliland because their presence threatened the ideal of Somalia’s radical Islamists, the as-of-yet unrealized Islamic republic of Somalia. I call them “terrorists” because the killers had expansionist ideals that involved unprovoked attacks on peaceful people.

Mr. Osman’s government went on high alert. They were looking out for their own interest to be recognized by the U.S. and Europe as much as they were looking out for foreign visitors like me. When their intelligence agents figured out where one of the terrorists was based, Mr. Osman went on the radio calling on all the residents of that small town to blockade exits. He says 80% of them took to the streets to hunt down the offender and even built a trench around the town. They succeeded in catching the man who then gave up his partners, three of whom are awaiting the death sentence. The other is still at large. I like his story becuase it demonstrates that terrorism is really an aberration in Somalia’s Muslim culture, not a paradigm.

ABOUT THE ARTICLE: This is one vingette of a long essay I am writing about Somaliland.

Nairobi's DIY Public Transport

The best and the worst part of Kenya’s sprawling capital, Nairobi, are one and the same: transportation.

It’s three p.m. and I have an appointment downtown. Let’s just say I live in Bel Air, since Nairobi is exactly like Los Angeles. My hill in Nairobi is cut through with a verdant canyon of eucalyptus and pepper trees, palms, psychedelic bougainvillea, and it’s nearly impossible to get in and out of without a car. Add a distinctly African army commander with camouflaged tanks of soldiers going in and out of his gate, several exiled African leaders, every ambassador in Kenya, bush babies, monkeys, snakes (“they could devour you!” warned my Spanish expatriate neighbor), a cow I hear but never see, and the musty smell of burning trash. I am not a member of the leisure class like most of my neighbors, and must go into town every day to work. Today, how will I get there? And how will I return? Nairobi is a place where a young woman should not walk at night, where people of all stripes try to get home by dark, lest they taste the city’s alternative namesake: Nairobbery. Due to the great distances between hubs, walking is more like a pilgrimage than a method of transportation. A taxi is $30 roundtrip.

“Don’t they have any public transportation in this city?” I asked everyone. “Yes, just learn the routes,” they said. “You’ll save a lot of money.” I assumed they meant a municipal bus service. But there are no buses. The routes are for matatus — flamboyant, private minibuses that move the majority of Nairobi’s residents. These routes, however, were initially anathema. Unlike the public buses I am used to in the States, there are no formal stops with schedules printed on posts. It’s a very good thing that this transport is private because if it were public it would not work.

Like Los Angeles or Bangkok, the dearth of public transport options and the vast urban geography of Nairobi has a way of diluting local culture and isolating residents in their microcommunities. For miles you can walk or drive past nothing but hidden, gated homes or drab, 1970s office blocks. Sometimes you’ll be on the freeway for 20 minutes en route to a simple appointment, an experience as uninspiring here as it is everywhere else on earth. As Dorothy Parker would say, there’s no there there. I was starting to get depressed and ever more broke after a week of cabbing it. I felt like an outsider who couldn’t crack the nut of Kenya’s culture.

At last I stood next to the corn cart at the bottom of my hill with some locals and waited for the matatu. After five minutes a white, battered, clanking minibus emitting profuse exhaust veered off the road onto the dirt shoulder and I jumped in like the others while it continued to move at about 7 miles per hour. The 14 seats were all taken and more so – children with backpacks sat on their parents’ laps and a man with a horn of some agricultural product was perched in the aisle. I half perched on someone’s thigh and nearly dislocated my neck in order to tilt my head away from the metal roof. The man who slid open the van door at the shoulder hung out the open door with his feet planted inside as the van picked up speed and then closed the door behind him to lean on me, the last one in, with much of his weight, holding the rest up by clutching a hand rail for dear life. We each paid him 10 KSh, about 16 cents. The street we drove twists and turns through enough picturesque canyons to qualify for a James Bond film location. With each turn and each pothole I slammed helplessly into metal, heads, children, and soft body parts of the conductor. But despite these bumps and the reek of body odor from some fertile laborers on board, I enjoyed riding the matatu. It felt like an amusement park ride, and I liked being among the locals. I was hooked. And it only gets better.

Getting to downtown Nairobi from any other district during traffic is nothing less than an odyssey. Gridlock. Fumes. Heat. Potholes large enough to lose a baby in. Matatu drivers don’t hesitate to drive on the sidewalk or create a third lane of traffic. The only mercy is the throbbing music inside. It might cry “Babylon!”, “I just called, to say, I love you,” or “I ain’t a killer but don’t push me, revenge is like the sweetest joy next to gittin pussy.” No matter what style of music, it always seems to me that heads are bobbing to the beat, in tune with the vibe, grooving with it – kids’ heads, moms’ heads, grandpas’ heads.

The white matatu I rode was a sterile version of most, which are painted wild purples, oranges, and greens and adorned with graffiti, airbrushed paintings of Barack Obama, the Rwandan president, or Tupac. Words or matatu names are artfully inscribed on windshields and everywhere else, from “SKILLET” to “BONES” to “HUSTLARZ AMBITION.”

Hustlarz Ambition is the name of my roommate Dan’s matatu. He has two. The other is called “The Tiger: Straight Outta the Jungle.” Like most of the matatu ilk, he is in his mid twenties. He relaxes by watching hard-core hip hop videos or performing himself, in an R&B group. His favorite artist is Tupac. “I always wanted to have a big company,” he says. “I’m a hustler, and now I’m just comin up. With the matatu you have to create a style, pick the music, the paintings, for your passengers. You have to know what they like on your route. If you choose Tupac maybe you fill the 12 magazine changer with his albums, from earliest Tupac when he was just a child of 12 to the last album from him. You choose the music videos. You choose the lights, the color of the seats. It’s like you are creating a place for people.” A good portion of these badass minibuses play Tupac, Biggie, Snoop, Nelly, Mace, Naz. And on weekend nights they are truly the club before the club, strobe lights flashing, dressed up passengers, base bumping. The conductors and drivers are hyper agressive and tough, and many chew khat, a local plant stimulant. Apparently teenage girls would die to date one, sort of like how I used to feel about skateboarders.

Matatus are the poetry of Nairobi. Last night I noticed that one had written on the back the words: “I feel nothing.” Below that it said, “Established, such and such date.” As in, the matatu is the business of the human soul, set up whenever the owner realized he felt emotionally numb? What’s your interpretation?

The Ghetto Film Club

One day I was listlessly following my fabulous Italian roommate through a Nairobi slum and I found myself inside of a red metal shipping container sitting on a couch and looking at Patrick. He was talking about his Ghetto Film Club. Turns out the shipping container is actually a radio station called Koch FM, a recording studio, a newspaper headquarters and a film studio.

Since 2006 the GFC made 7 movies about life in the Nairobi slums for $0. Local young people starred and learned to operate equipment borrowed from media professionals. The club meets once a month or so to screen their movies on a sheet strung up in a dusty schoolyard or other ad hoc venues.

The newspaper covers issues and news in the slum. It comes out once a month and a crew of volunteers write and edit it. Ditto the radio station, which you can hardly hear through scratchy airwaves but broadcasts round table discussions and other talk about life in Korogocho.

ABOUT THE ARTICLE: “Good” magazine will run my GFC profile in the August issue.