Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
In the vicinity of the courts in Somalia, it is common for one to see
clutches of men loitering with intent. Some of the men who hang around
at the entrance to the courts are there to help you write your letters
because you happen to be illiterate; some to find you a lawyer at short
notice; but the majority are there to bear false witness. Decently
dressed in a manner that attracts no attention, the men wait as
patiently as vultures perched on the highest point of a roof in the
neighbourhood of an abattoir. Actors manqué, they entertain themselves
with humorous anecdotes about many a vulnerable client, now satisfied,
whom they served at the payment of a fee. These professional men are so
alert they stir into action at the sight of a gullible man or a woman
with a problem. And they offer their services for a price and in cash.
That they can tell the pregnable state of the person as soon as he or
she comes into view is an advantage that serves them well. When you
come down to think of it, it is all part of an act: the judges know the
men who bear false witnesses, as do the jurors and the public too. We
allude to “Carais Ciise”, in the region of Somalia where I come from,
when we wish to imply that So-and-so is bearing false testimony, or
tells lies knowingly, and benefits from doing so.
I can think of many such witnesses, among them a number of well-known
writers. Not committed to telling the truth and lacking deep knowledge
of the areas about which they write, these givers of “false testimony”
are easily discerned, especially by locals. But not so for many of their
readers, least of all those who are unfamiliar with the faraway areas
about which these false witnesses write. I won’t mention the names of
these writers, because it would not be good etiquette to do so.
What I would like to do, instead, is to give another kind of testimony
when the notion of truth suffers unimaginable abuse at the hands of an
entire community or a group of professionals and when truth is
comprised. I am referring here to the commentaries and other forms of
reporting by journalists, writers or political analysts, who offer us
misguided testimony when it comes to Somalia, when they should know
better.
My argument is that much of the commentary on the Somali civil war is
based on a false premise in the form of a cliché, an easy peg on which
to hang a misguided theory. We are told again and again that the Somali
civil war is the consequence of an age-old clan conflict that has only
lately gone awry. The clan is viewed by many of the commentators as the
single most important issue, pitting one family or groups of families
related to each other through blood against others who are not related
to them by blood. This view is also erroneously held by a large number
of Somalis, who ought to know better, but who don’t, for reasons to do,
I think, with a sense of intellectual tardiness.
Of the landmarks of Mogadiscio I remember the Tamarind Market most. As
is often the case, misnomers abound in a city with an ancient oral
history and with a memory far more complex than the lives of the peoples
currently residing in it. Try as you might to trace things to their
origins, and you will find that nobody has the slightest idea why the
market, which isn’t a market in the sense that we understand when we
speak of an African market, was called Tamarind Market. Driven by your
obsessive search for the explanation forever eluding you, you come
across other misnomers along the way. In fact it may even surprise you
to hear that the term Tamarind itself is a misnomer, comprised as it is,
of two Arabic words: timir and Hind, meaning “dates” and “India.” Now
what features do dates and tamarind have in common? But before you
answer the question, if you will pardon my digression, let me ask
another question, at the risk of being indiscreet. Do you in actual fact
know what tamarind is? Have you seen it, eaten it and tasted it? Or do
you know of it only vaguely, in the way a child growing up in the
tropics “knows” of snow in the sense of having seen it on TV, or having
read about it in a folktale? In other words, have you asked yourself
why the Arabs, who “knew” dates and grew it in abundance, gave the name
“dates of India” to the thing we now know as “tamarind”? Perhaps we are
engaged in a prosaic comparison between two unlike items, one known to
those bestowing the name, and the other unknown, and we should just
leave it at that? Equally, we could assume that the sticky melange that
the Arabs named “Dates of India” is what the Indians knew as tamarind?
Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case!
Anyhow I remember the enthusiasm of the seventies in which all Somalis
were in joyous celebration. In those long-gone years, we were
enthusiastic about a number of things. We were highly enthusiastic about
the political independence that was only a decade old then. We were
enthusiastic too about our particular cultural and linguistic legacies
and of the enviable fact that ours was the only country in the continent
of Africa with a sizeable population whose people spoke one language,
Somali. Many of us would also mention another important point of which
we were very proud. We knew that the city we lived in, Mogadiscio, was
not only one of the prettiest and most colourful cities in the world,
but also that it was decidedly the oldest in sub-Saharan Africa and
older than many of Europe’s most treasured medieval cities.
One of Mogadiscio’s best-kept secrets was the shopping complex locally
known as Tamarind Market. This was always abuzz with activities, its
narrow alleys filled with shoppers. You could see entire families
pouring into its alleys and plazas soon after siesta time, some shopping
for clothes, others wishing to acquire what they could find in the way
of gold or silver necklaces, many made to order. Stories abounded in
which you were told that some of the shoppers came from as far as the
Arabian Gulf to strike bargains, well aware that they would pay a lot
more for the same items in their home countries in the Emirates or Saudi
Arabia. In those days, no bride would get married without a collection
of custom-made gold and silver items bought from one of the artisans
there. And, for your tailoring needs, you went behind the market, where
you would be fitted for your shirts, dresses, trousers, caps, jackets or
a pair of your leather boots, all to be had at bargain prices.
The history of Mogadiscio, how it came into being and what became of it
after it went up in flames following the civil war, are to my mind all
tied up with the history and destiny of the small cosmopolitan community
who ran the Tamarind Market. The presence of this small community dates
back to the tenth century, at which time Mogadiscio existed as a city
state and boasted a negligible level of administration run for the
benefit of the bourgeois elite, many of whom came from elsewhere: Iran,
Indian and Arabia. As more and more foreigners migrated to it from
other countries over the years, the city assumed an unmistakably
cosmopolitan orientation. It was an open city with no walls, to which
anyone could come, provided he or she lived in harmony and at peace with
those already there. It was as small as many other cities in other
parts of the world then, probably no bigger than four square kilometers.
And it was prosperous, thanks to its residents, many of them artisans
hailing originally from the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent.
Parallel to the open city, within the radius of a few kilometres in any
direction, there resided a pastoralist community made up entirely of
Somalis who for all intents and purposes were peripheral to the city’s
residents and their cosmopolitan way of life. Traffic was principally
one way, with few and then later more pastoralists taking up residence
in the city so as to benefit from the educational infrastructures there.
Otherwise, the urban and the rural communities existed apart from one
another, except either was selling something to the other. But they
regarded each other with mutual suspicion. The pastoralist Somalis, who
are by nature urbophobics, saw the city as alien and parasitic, and
because it occupied an ambiguous space in their hearts and minds, they
gradually accumulated hostility towards the city until they became
intent on destroying it.
The sacking of the city in 1991, when the Tamarind Market fell victim to
the most savage looting, was not the first time when a conglomerate of
pastoralists acting under the command of city-based firebrands set on
dispossessing the city of its “foreign” elements, laid waste to it. The
same sort of thing occurred more than four hundred years ago, between
1530 and 1580, according to oral historians. The manner in which the
sixteenth century city was laid to waste had uncanny similarities to the
1991 sacking: in both cases, contingents of disenfranchised herdsmen,
led by city-based men and armed with ancient injustices newly recast as
valid grievances, visited havoc on the city.
In retrospect I would say the recent sacking had a lot to do with the
Italian colonial presence, which brought about massive changes in the
city’s demography. After all, it was Italy that recruited many Somalis
into its army to fight in its colonial war of expansion into Ethiopia.
That many of those co-opted into serving in the police and armed forces
were from regions of Somalia other than the communities adjacent to the
city would in a perverse way upset its demographic balance. Following
the Great War, further influxes of migrants swelled the rank of those
already there, and those whom I would describe as “semi-pastoralists”,
because they had one foot in the rural area and the other in the urban,
accounting for the largest number of arrivals. By the time flag
independence came, more pastoralists were poised to move towards the
towns and then to the one and only city in the country, Mogadiscio. And
the pull towards the city and away from the seasonal droughts and crop
failures meant that there would be tremendous demographic upheavals,
giving Somalia one of the highest urban migration rates in Africa.
In the late seventies, after another war between Somalia and Ethiopia
over the Ogaden, a massive number of refugees, in addition to a huge
internal migration from the regions with depressed economies helped to
make the urban growth reach alarming figures. Somalia by then had
become a state with one city, ruled by a single tyrant, Siyad Barre. It
came to pass that in the late eighties the city moved toward its own
extinction, because it no longer had any of the amenities one normally
associates with cities. In spite of this, everyone gravitated towards
it: to find jobs, to be where the action was, where the industries were,
where the only university was, and where you could consult an eye-doctor
or a heart specialist. Power was concentrated in the figure of the
tyrant: and he was there, too.
Local orature has it that in 1989, just before the armed militias
invaded the city, close aides to the “Mayor of Mogadiscio,” as the
tyrant was known then, suggested to him that he quit the city. His
arrogant dismissal of the suggestion now seems prescient, for he is
rumoured to have responded that if anyone tried to run him out of his
city, then he would make sure that he took the whole country along with
him to the land of ruin.
There are very few things that we know with absolute certainty when it
comes to Mogadiscio. A city with several names, some ancient and of
local derivation, some hundreds of years old and of foreign origin. The
city claims a multiplicity of memories and sources, some of which are
derived from outside Africa, others native to the continent. However, no
one is sure when the name Mogadiscio was first used, or by whom. Does
the name consist of two Somali words Maqal and disho, meaning, in
Somali, “the place where sheep are slaughtered,” and indicating that it
was once an abattoir? Or is the etymology non-indigenous, derived from
Arabic, at one time the lingua franca of the city-state? In other
words, is it the composite word Maq’adu Shah, meaning “the headquarters
of the Shah?” Does its local name Xamar define a city built on “red
sand”? Or does the red colour implicit in the word Xamar refer to a
people of reddish hue?
Myself, I find it fascinating that there are arguments and
counter-arguments and claims and counter-claims about the history of the
city to the extent that we cannot shrug any of them off, nor accept any
at face value. However, if there is one thing of which we are absolutely
certain, it is that the relationship between the urbophiles and the
pastoralists was a vexed one, regardless of whether we think of the
sixteenth century or the 1991 sacking. In both sacking, what took the
cosmopolitan communities several hundred years to build was destroyed in
a very short time by the invading hordes of pastoralists and borderline
city-dwellers, both groups being hostile to the cultural melange of the
city.
The 1991 sacking was more destructive, because by then Mogadiscio had
become the factotum-state of a nation, and into which all the country’s
available resources were poured into it. But it was similar in important
ways to the city’s sixteenth century precursor, because it too was a
city-state and set apart from the austere cultural landscape of the
country surrounding it, a cosmopolitan city with a negligible level of
administration. Insofar as most Somalis were concerned, the power
inherent in the city was invested in people who were alien to them,
“foreigners” of a kind and elitists at that. Perhaps what the warlords
and their irregular armies managed to destroy in Somalia was not the
infrastructure of the city, of which there was very little, or the
foundation of the state, of which there was hardly any worth saving.
Rather, they destroyed the spirit of a place like Tamarind Market,
murdering the people who ran it, chasing out those who frequented it, in
short demolishing the idea of cosmopolitanism.
In my most recent visit to Mogadiscio, I was at a loss for words when I
saw what became of the Tamarind Market, a place of carnage. For me,
there was a cause to mourn: the murder of the cosmopolitan spirit of the
Market. In its place, another market to serve the needs of a city now
largely emptied of cosmopolitans has been created: the Bakhaaraha
Market. At this newly established “Market of Silos,” for that is how its
name translates, market forces prevail, and “the clan” reigns supreme.
It is the height of a nation’s tragedy when those who pillaged and
therefore destroyed a city’s way of life are allowed to turn murder into
profit. Militarised capitalism is on the ascendancy, and the idea of
cosmopolitanism is dead and buried.
The destruction of the Tamarind Market augurs badly if, like me,
you’ve invested in the metaphoric truth implicit in the notion of
Tamarind, an evergreen tree of the pea family, native to tropical
Africa. The seeds of the edible fruit are embedded in the pulp of the
tamarind, which is of soft brown or reddish black consistency, and used
in foods as much as in medicines. Not so the Bakhaaraha Market. To me,
a silo suggests an entity that takes pride in its separateness,
intolerant, parasitic and unproductive.