At the border of death

As the last member of the Kenyan defense force pulled a wooden plank across the patch of dust which marked the Somalian border, Abdi Razaaq Hared, began to speak.

“You will see, it is 100 per cent safe,” he said. “This is a new era for Somalis.”

Described by locals as “Mpaka wa Kifd”, the border of death, the eastern boundary of Kenya has been a flash point of violence since the Somalian civil war in 1991. And Dhobley, several miles into south Somalia, is a tenuous experiment in trying to rebuild some semblance of security in the area.

Only four months ago the town was overrun by members of the Islamist militant group affiliated with Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, which controls most of southern Somalia. Two separate strands of militia loyal to the country’s Transitional Federal Government drove Shabaab out after several heavy battles. Now hundreds of those militia, kitted out in pressed green uniforms, patrol the streets and outskirts of the town, looking for signs of the enemy.

Omar Khalif, a 24-year-old militia man wearing a red head scarf, was part of that force.

“They are the lowest form of existence,” he said of Shabaab. “They are cannibals.”

The fighting took its toll on Dhobley. The hospital was destroyed. Bullet holes pepper store fronts, including the enthusiastically named “Peace Hotel”, while wounded civilians hobble the streets on makeshift crutches. One elderly man exposed his arm. A bone protruded from his skin with a makeshift screw bolted into it.

“It was a gunshot,” he said.

Dhobley is also the last Somalian settlement before those fleeing the effects of famine attempt to make their way into Kenya and onto Dadaab – the largest refugee camp in the world. Hundreds are still stuck here without the resources or energy to make the 60 mile journey into Kenya. There is a small amount of food and water.

“We don’t have the supplies,” said Ali Yussef, the manager of a holding house for displaced people. “We can give only pain killers, no medicine.”

Abdi Nasid Haji travelled for 15 days by donkey cart with her six children to get here. She had already been in Dhobley for several days.

“If I can get somebody to take me (to Dadaab) then I am ready. If nobody can, then I will have to stay.”

Kenyan North Eastern Provincial Commissioner James Seriani recently told a security meeting in Mombassa that the refugee crisis, ambiguous ethnicities and clan identities made it hard to single out militants.

“The Al Shabaab insurgents fight in Somalia but when they are defeated by the TFG soldiers they escape to Kenya as refugees,” he said.

In August, Al Shabaab pulled out of Mogadishu. The understanding among the militias of Dhobley was that Shabaab would try to consolidate their presence in the surrounding countryside not under their control.

However, Abdi Razaaq Hared, a Nairobi-based Somali who fled the country before the outbreak of civil war, had hope when he returned to his homeland. He saw the future of a nation in the ambiguous coalition of forces, some of them only teenagers, that patrolled the streets with AK-47s.

“These are young soldiers ready to die for their country. They are the hope.”

The man who controls that hope personifies the fragmented nature of Somali politics and the danger of speaking too optimistically. Ahmed Mohamed Islam also known as Ahmed Madobe was a senior member of the Islamist administration stripped of power by Ethiopian forces in late 2006.

He was pursued by American troops, wounded during an air strike and then captured by the Ethiopian army where he was imprisoned for two years. Madobe was also an early member of Al Shabaab before turning his back on his former allies to side with the U.N.-backed government.

His gunmen rattle through the area on the back of pickup trucks, wrapped in belts of high calibre bullets.

“We are waiting to fight,” said one of them called Mohamed Mohamed.

In the defense compound on the outskirts of Dhobley, Madobe sat in a thatched hut contemplating the nature of his control.

“Maybe you see me and think ‘this is a new warlord’,” he said. “But I am telling you, I am not a warlord.”

Despite his allegiances on paper, Madobe had a deep distrust of Western involvement in Somalia and saw no place for it in the future of the country.

“We are a victim of political ideas from international organisations who use Somalia as a laboratory for seeing how long society can exist without a Government. We are a lab rat.”

He insisted that any form of peace could not be created in the hotel lobbies of Ethiopia or Nairobi. He said that reconciling the local clans and traditional leaders was the only way to stability.

“Only Somalis can fix Somalia.”

Despite originally being part of Shabaab and its affiliate organisations, Madobe now insists his role is to eliminate it completely.

“I want to be a member of those with the ideology of fighting against Al Shabaab,” he said. “I have no doubt they will disappear.”

But signs of that reality emerging are difficult to see.

The International Crisis Group has warned that the growing factionalism within Somalia’s Islamist movement risk plunging the country even deeper into violence and bloodshed.

“If the foreign jihadis fend off their local challengers, Al-Shabaab’s rapid transformation into a wholly al-Qaeda franchise might become irreversible”, said François Grignon, Crisis Group’s Africa Project Director. “That could cause havoc even well beyond Somalia’s borders.”

The Dhobley hospital, a short drive from the military compound, was a crumbling white-washed relic. Its walls still stood but it was empty. Next to the hospital sat three small huts. Inside were mattresses lining the thatched walls. This was the new hospital. The thin men lying down laden with bandages were the patients.

Next door Ishmael Daout, a 23-year-old shirtless Kenyan emerged from another shack. He arrived in Somalia several months ago with his brother. He wanted to go to medical school but did not get in. He was Dhobley’s doctor.

“And now I am in the Somali forces. That’s how life is,” he said.

Propped up against the outside of the ward was a man lying on a dusty mattress with a bandage around his leg. He was brought in an hour ago after being shot. He was foraging in the outlying bushes when the militia mistook him for the enemy.

“It happens,” Daout said.

Soon an argument broke out among the militia. The cause was not clear – whether they were on edge because of a skirmish at the line of control the previous evening or because we had refused to pay Madobe for his time.

“There is tension,” said Shiek Abdi Raman Jibbrill, a Somali working for a Kenyan NGO. He pulled at our shirts and told us to get back into our truck.

“It is time to go.”

We travelled back to the lone solider who pulled back the plank. We rolled slowly over the no man’s land and into Kenya.

Later, I asked him what happened.

“You know, that place,” he said, “that place is 100 per cent dangerous all the time.”

Reading the signs on the Delhi Metro

On every carriage of the Delhi Metro there are small,white posters pasted above the sliding doors. Reading the quadtych one will learn that it is not ok to sneeze on the Delhi Metro, it is not ok to eat on the Delhi Metro and it is not ok to smoke on the Delhi Metro. The last image is more ambiguous. It depicts an unusually square and quite obviously ironed pair of pants with a hand hovering over what seems to be a pocket. The hand is a ghostly apparition – a floating, disembodied thing that teasingly seems to be sliding a finger inside the unseen depths of the material. Perhaps not unintentionally, the finger doing the sliding is the middle one. It seems the offender is offering a somewhat inglorious “fuck you” to his hapless square-panted victim. Though the artwork is less than transcendent, the message is clear – people like to steal shit on the Delhi Metro. Whether it is condoned or not is not clear.

I liked my wallet. It was a gift. It held things like old receipts, notes to oneself and redundant currency quite well. It that wallet I had 15 Ethiopian Birr which I was unable to change in Kenya. I also had about 1000 Somaliland Shillings which, in terms of changing your life, is about the equivalent of finding a piece of lint stuck in your ass crack. I had gone two and a half years without losing my wallet, without even misplacing it. We were old friends. But complacency is a funny thing – you don’t know you have it until you have a reason to. So this morning as I packed up language notes into my pink see-through folder with the worlds “My Clear Folder” emblazoned on the side and packed some pens into my adventure man bag (not to be confused with the more common “man bags” which are for douche cakes), I never thought to myself “gosh I am complacent today”.  But, it seems, I was.

I don’t look for signs. I don’t look for the significant in the insignificant. And though I did stop when a hairy, turbaned man ordered me to stop from across the road the other day, I didn’t buy what he was selling – a clear understanding of my life’s path as dictated by the planets. I do believe in signs, however. I do believe things happen for a reason. The reason, though, has nothing to do with the alignment of Saturn, or my chakras being out of synch or the fact that I didn’t get a henna tatoo, dreadlocks, clown pants or buy weed from a dodgy Kashmiri in order to be in closer contact with the earth mother. I didn’t buy a bongo drum either. The reason some fucker stole my wallet was because on some level I was tired. Ten months going around the world and, on some level, I had stopped giving so much of a shit. I wasn’t as into it as I thought I was. And around this time every year for the past eight I have gotten ancy in October.

So what does one do when they get ancy? Well, you move on. You just read the signs.

On how I was forced to bribe a particularly frumpy Kenyan immigration official

So this is what it feels like to be totally emasculated – a pathetic, vulnerable fool at the mercy of a large, particularly frumpy Kenyan woman with a penchant for asking for cash in a particularly maternal way.

Kenyatta Airport. 1.30am. I had been warned before I left Addis Ababa that it was required for all travelers to have a yellow fever shot. Of course, I did not have a yellow fever shot.

“You will have to pay,” the desk clerk for Ethiopian Airlines said. OK, I said. Whatever, I thought. I can pay.

Upon arrival at the other end, after a plate of plastic chicken and some of the most vigorous turbulence I have felt in some time, I found myslef scribbling out an entry form at the Nairobi customs counter.

She saw me quickly. She was seemingly adept at stalking vulnerable looking idiots.

“Let me see your vaccination certificate.”

I told her I did not have a yellow fever shot.

“I am looking through your certificate and I cannot find it. I cannot find the yellow fever vaccination. Is this my mistake or yours?”

I told her it was mine.

She rounded up another British man who I would learn via audible pleading through the thin “medical officer” office walls, that he worked for an NGO. He wanted to help Kenyan people. He had a conference to get to. He was very tired. And, unfortunately, for him, he also did not seem to have a yellow fever shot.

After about 10 minutes he exited the office.

“A bit of a fuck up aye?” I asked him.

“I just don’t know what she wants.”

She then ushered me in, asked for my passport, and from then on would be on a first-name basis with me, though I would never know hers.

She was large, to be sure. She had a friendly face and seemed concerned for my well-being. I admitted blame. It was my fault, I said.

“Good,” she replied, “yes it is your fault.”

She showed me the list of yellow fever countries where it was compulsory to have the vaccination before entering. She pointed to Ethiopia.

“See you understand?”

Yes, I said, I understood. I was stupid.

“No, no, no. Do not insult yourself.”

I said I was not sure what else I could do.

She gave me two options, neither of which were really options.

Either I went back to Addis, or I waited until the morning in the airport for a doctor to give me the shot.

I could handle that, I thought.

“Then,” she said pointing to the vaccination booklet, “you need 10 days for it to work.”

Right.

So in that case, she continued, I would have to spend 10 days in the airport. Ten days mingling with the duty free peddlers. Ten nights, 10 days.

I am not sure if my reaction was audible, or if my face said it all, because I felt the blood drain out of it.

“Speak up,” she said, “speak up, you need to say something.”

I told her I was not sure what to say. These were my only two options?

“You tell me?”

I am also not sure when the conversation turned to cash and her doing me a favour and her having to check with her “supervisor” and her offering me help because she was concerned about me. But soon I found myself standing over an ATM machine trying to figure out the exchange rate. I later learned I got it horribly wrong. For her, though, it was horribly right.

I went back into her office, my wallet thick with Kenyan Shillings.

Here, I said.

“Let me see.”

She took the wad off me and counted it in her thick fingers.

I had not been to Kenya since I was about seven-years-old, back when I spoke with a horrendously posh accent, confirmed by home videos of me telling my brother to “Thomas, Thomas, look at the monkeys.”

There were no monkeys here. Just a ticking clock, this woman, and the crappy artificial lighting which always goes hand in hand with crappy airports.

“Ok,” she said, “now I want you to understand. This stays between us, because I have done you a favour, Ok? You have to understand this stays between us.”

I sighed, and told her I understood.

I felt like shit.

It was now almost 3am, my pick up for the hostel had likely long since left. I wanted to get out of there.

I understood a lot, I said as she continued in a soft, caring voice.

She smiled.

I used the muscles of my face to stretch my mouth out offering a small glimpse of teeth.

“Ok,” she said again.

She did not say thank you.

I saw the British man on the way out. I did not speak to him. I wanted to forget that incident. His face seemed pale too.

 

The Nowhereland

The man sat cross-legged in the dust. His feet were caked in greyish mud. He did not move. He sat and he stared. Children played around him. They kicked an old tennis ball, and sat on yellow, plastic jerry cans and rode them like horses. He did not flinch.

“He has mental problems,” Sainab, a refugee worker said. “He lives here with his mother.”

Three kilometres out of Hargeisa, down a dusty road, past the NGOs and the ministry of justice and the presidential house, another track diverges. The asphalt stops and it becomes rock and mud. Soon shelters are seen – hundreds of them, then thousands. They are fashioned out of food packaging, tarpaulins and branches of trees. They are built where any space can be found. It is here where the victims of years of civil war, disease and hunger came to find refuge. They started coming almost two decades ago. Most never left. They are still coming.

There are now almost 30,000 here, in the place locals call the State House. Once it was a hub of the British administration who held a protectorate status over this place, Somaliland, until the 1960s. Then it became part of Somalia. Then it declared independence and it went to war to prove it. Now it is a nowhere land – a place which the international community refuses to recognise as a country.

The man in the dust came with his mother during the war with Somalia which saw most of Hargiesa bombed to the ground. The monument to that is a Russian MIG fighter jet elevated on a plinth near the town centre. Somalilanders will say they shot it down. Others will say it just crashed.

The mother stooped through the limply hanging corrugated iron door. She came out of the shade. She held a walking stick and looked up into the sun. She asked a young man to help her sit down.

“We have nothing,” she squeaked, barely audible. “We don’t have anything to eat.”

She looked at her son.

“I am too old to work.”

Sometimes the neighbors will help them. Sometimes they will offer the pair food. But not often. The old woman knows, they too are often starving.

The Wawahweewah Storm