Narratives featuring strange lands with scintillating beauty, unexpected adventures with buxom brunettes, Gothic gardens with sunken treasures and billowing sails underlie smash hit movie series like Pirates of the Caribbean.
Likewise, when thinking of Somali pirates, we imagine adventure-loving characters emerging from ships, chewing khat and playing with their expensive phones. Indeed, Somali pirates have been painted as “womanisers with lavish tastes and an eye for Nairobi real estate.” Yet the pirates of Somalia are a complex phenomenon.
Nuruddin Farah’s latest novel, Crossbones, published in September 2011, tells the other side of the story.
Farah wrote in “The Truth about Somali Piracy,” that, “Unlike many peoples of the sea — including the Greeks, the Danes, the Swedes and the English — who saw the lucrative potential of piracy and pursued it as a vocation, Somalia did not engage in thievery at sea until recently...
At the same time, untruths about piracy in Somalia are perpetuated in print and on TV and radio. When I visited the country, I discovered that Somali pirates do not live the high life, nor do they receive the sums being mentioned, because much of the money stays either in Abu Dhabi or London, where it is banked.”
In Crossbones, Farah doesn’t sanitise the pirates who take people’s riches and lives. However, he shows how war profiteers make lucrative careers out of chaos as the opening paragraph in the novel aptly captures, “A boy of indeterminate age gets out of a car that has just stopped… He is small in stature, huge in ambition.
On his first day as a draftee into (Al) Shabaab, the instructor, upset with him, had pulled him up by the scruff of his neck, shouting in Somali, ‘Waxyahow yar!’ – ‘You young thing!’…He has no education to speak of, yet he feels he is rich in heavenly vision… No doubt he feels lucky to have been chosen for this delicate assignment cloaked in secrecy, his first mission. He will do anything to impress the commanders of the cell of which he is now a bona fide member”.
This young boy, known in the novel as Youngthing, is being used by his recruiters for their selfish ends (it’s all about the money!). Farah paints Somali society as one in which people live in extreme conditions — a people exploited and sometimes left with no choice but to comply with the exacting demands of their masters or face death.
Somalia itself has for years been exploited by Western nations. Ships and speedboats from Europe and Asia have plundered the coastline using fishing methods banned elsewhere. These ships would also dump nuclear, chemical and other wastes into Somali waters and at times even shoot Somalis fishing nearby. This is probably what inspired the rise of Somali piracy. The chaos in Somalia has benefited all manner of profiteers, from the Western ships taking advantage of Somalia’s statelessness to the Al Shabaab.
In his novel, Farah paints a sad picture of a people living under one kind of slavery or another. Farah uses the character Jeebleh to show this. When Jeebleh returns to his beloved city of Mogadiscio to see old friends, accompanied by his son-in-law, Malik (a journalist), he is surprised because he finds no chaos in the city. However, he soon discovers that the city has an eerie calm enforced by ubiquitous white-robed figures bearing whips. That has been the lot of the Somali people — if it is not the Islamic Courts, it’s Al Shabaab or some other shadowy gang with institutionalised irrationalism lording it over them.
In the meantime, Malik’s brother, Ahl, comes to Puntland, the region notorious as the pirates’ base. Ahl is searching for his stepson, Taxliil, who has vanished from the United States and has been recruited by Somalia’s rising religious insurgency. As their search for Taxliil proceeds, Ethiopians invade the country through fierce land and sea raids.
Jeebleh leaves Mogadiscio only a few hours before the Ethiopian invasion. Mogadiscio’s uneasy quiet shatters and the city turns into a battle zone, with Malik and Ahl experiencing the unpleasant surprise of war – with bullets whizzing past. This is the environment Somalis have become accustomed to for two decades.
Somalis are a besieged people caught in the unfortunate cycle of zealotry, profiteering and political conflict – even as they live in inhuman conditions and sometimes die due to hunger and disease – while held hostage by armed gangs.
Kenyans must not forget that Somalis are our good neighbours, innocents caught in the crossfire of conflict, and as one of them put it in a recent interview with the media, “We came to Kenya looking for peace.”
It is now over 40 days since the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) crossed into Somalia.
The Christmas and New Year holidays are usually a good time to spend with one’s family. However, for the KDF in Somalia, this festive season will find them dodging bullets, with hands on the trigger and doing everything just to keep alive. As KDF moves deeper towards Kismayu, the government of Kenya has done an excellent job at explaining that Kenya is not at war with the Somali people but Al Shabaab.For Somalis are a besieged people caught in the unfortunate cycle of zealotry, profiteering and political conflict – even as they live in inhuman conditions and sometimes die due to hunger and disease – while held hostage by armed gangs that are profiting from their misery. It would be fair if Kenyans always remembered that Somalis are our good neighbours caught in the crossfire of conflict and as one of them put it in a recent interview with the media, “We came to Kenya looking for peace”.
There could be a few criminals as happens in every society but we should not condemn them wholly – the besieged and innocent people long for our mercy. It’s the firebrand radicals that want to turn our nation into a lawless one that we must deal decisively with – these are the ones we must be vigilant about in this festive season.
Source: The East African
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