I was born under a neem tree, probably in 1985. Neem trees grow everywhere in Somalia, with fragrant blossoms like lilacs and medicinal bitter sap that prevents sores. People everywhere in Somalia brush their teeth with those twigs. Their green fruit turns yellow and juicy, a great treat for the birds. The trees have small leaves, but the limbs spread wide and give shelter from the sun—a good place to have a baby. A good place to be born.
I was born into a culture where birthdays are not celebrated, or even recorded. This became a problem for me when I left Somalia and entered the world of documents and paperwork. My first birthday record was in Kenya at a refugee registration center. The officers there did not bother to ask me when I was born, because they know Somalis have no idea; the flood of Somali refugees coming into Kenya are always surprised by the question. The officers simply wrote down my birthday as January 1, 1985. To them, every Somali is born on New Year’s Day. Arriving in America was different. Here the officials didn’t want to make up “January 1.” I had to come up with a birth date and stick with it for the rest of my life. It’s a strange thing to choose your own birthday. Some people are born lucky, others born unlucky, but nobody gets to choose when he was born, or where. But there I was. I decided I should choose a date around the middle of the year, which would be equally close to whatever was my real birthday. And I wanted a number that was easy to remember. So I chose June 20, 1985.
My parents don’t know the day of my birth, but my mom remembers it was very hot. The blazing sun had turned the streets of Mogadishu ash white and the rooms of our small block house into bread ovens. Mom was on her back under the shade of the neem tree, resting on a jiimbaar, a bed made of cow leather stretched over sticks. Our neighbor Maryan cooled Mom’s head with a fan woven from straw, and cleaned the blood. The women of the neighborhood filled the house, curious to see if the baby would be a boy or a girl. They brought fragrant resins and incense like myrrh and uunsi. For me they brought xildiid, the root of a plant that is mixed with water to bathe and protect the baby. Xildiid is one of hundreds of therapeutic plants that grow in Somalia. You can smell the sweet flowers and pungent leaves on the trees and the low bushes that grow everywhere.
Somalia was once called the Land of the Perfumes; before the wars began, my country exported fragrant and medicinal plants all over the world. My mom remembers somagale, a seasonal plant that sprouts from the ground in the rainy season. She would uproot the plants, crush them, and apply the paste to any bleeding wounds. Awrodhaye was another plant she used to stop bleeding and prevent infections. Mom still believes in those traditional plants that cure everything. She believes knowledge of them has helped her survive anywhere. My mom worried I would not be as strong as her because people in the city don’t know much about the plants and how to survive off the land. Today she asks me on her phone if any of those plants can be found in America. I have not seen them here, but I tell her I have learned other ways to survive.
While my mom was giving birth, the neighborhood women sat on the edges of the jiimbaar talking and laughing, happy to welcome a new baby. Somali culture dictated that my dad had to stay away from the house; he would stay at his friend Siciid’s place for forty days, the amount of time a woman is supposed to remain chaste after labor. During that time she is called not by her name but rather Umul, which means “maternal.”
The moment I appeared, Maryan ran down the street to break the good news to my dad that a boy was born (boys are much more appreciated than girls in Somalia). As the women who surrounded Mom ululated in joy, other female neighbors joined the party. My dad took a day off from work and partied with his friends, buying them qat leaves, a stimulant like strong coffee chewed by men in Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Qat is illegal in the U.S. and in much of Europe. He visited us, as a guest in his own house, at least twice during the day. Mom was still sleeping under the neem tree, near clay bowls and glass jars full of porridge and orange juice and the bottled soft drink Vimto, her favorite. Out of respect to my dad she covered her hair while he was there, looking down as she answered his questions. They would never kiss or hug in public. He stood tall and aloof from her bed, examining me, his second son, lying next to Mom.
The women perfumed the rooms of the house and swept the yard bent over, using a short broom. They came in and out. That same evening, Maryan walked in with ten men, all of them respected local sheikhs. They wore beaded necklaces, the longest string on the leader, and each sheikh kept, in his front pocket, a neem twig for brushing his teeth and a comb and small mirror for grooming his beard after meals. They circled the jiimbaar in the yard where I was lying next to Mom. Some women were cooking a big pot of camel meat; others were mixing a jar of camel milk with sugar and ice cubes from the store. Camel meat and sweet milk together are called duco, a blessing for the newborn. For an hour the sheikhs blessed me, verse after verse, very loud, which makes the blessing greater. Afterward, they all sat on a mat on the ground, washed their hands in a dish of water, and feasted on the camel meat and milk. They must have been very hungry because my mom says by the time they were gone, the serving plate was nothing but bones. This blessing and feast meant I would grow better, be healthy and obedient to my parents. For my mom they left a bowlful of the blessed water called tahliil. The sheikhs bless the water by spitting in it; their spit contains prayers. Mom splashed the water on her body every day. She also splashed some on all corners of our house and drank some to prevent curses. Before I left Somalia for Kenya in 2011, two sheikhs had to spit in the water for me so I would stay safe in my travels. That was Mom’s idea.
Soon after I was born, Mom went back to doing her housework, with me tied to her back so that she was there for me whenever I cried out for milk. She watched me crawl out of the shade of that same neem tree into the scorching heat of the sun, and she was there when I took my first steps on the hot dusty ground. At bedtime she told me Somali folktales and sang lullabies like “Huwaaya Huwaa”: “Mommy is not here, she tiptoed away. She may be with the camel herders. Soon she will return with butter and camel milk.” Mom and her stories were my universe.
My dad was working and didn’t do much child care, which is normal in Somalia, except to pull out my loose baby teeth or when he did my circumcision. My older brother, Hassan, and I got circumcised on the same day, at the ages of four and three. Hassan was first. “Look at the airplane!” Dad said. Hassan looked up in the sky at the plane, and the sharp Topaz razor came down on his foreskin. Hassan did not even cry; he was always the bravest boy I ever met. When it was my turn, I realized what was coming and I cried, rolling on the ground. Everyone in the neighborhood came to watch the commotion. Two men held me tight to the ground as Dad used the other side of the razor on me. In a moment my foreskin was gone. “Now you are a man,” Dad said.
Of course we were not men, we were still children, and we never strayed far from our mom. Mom likes to call herself the brave daughter of her brave parents. Her name is Madinah Ibrahim Moalim. She was named Madinah after the holy city in Saudi Arabia. Her parents loved that city; they loved Madinah like I love America. It was their biggest dream to see the place where the Prophet Muhammad is buried, but unfortunately they never got to see it. Mom stole the dream from them and always talked about Madinah and Mecca as the best places to be on Earth. It costs three thousand dollars to go to Saudi Arabia to perform the hajj, and my mom wants to do it before she dies. Growing up with a huge number of Somali exiles returning from Saudi Arabia, I never understood why my mom and her parents dreamed of living in a place where Somalis are unwelcome. It would be many years before I realized that Somalis are pretty much unwelcome everywhere, and dreams are all we have.
I may not know the day I was born, but at least I know where. Mom was born in the bush and has no idea where because her parents were always moving with the goats and camels. It must have been a little before Somalia got independence from the Italians in 1960. She never saw an Italian or British colonialist but remembers her parents talking about people with no skin that they had seen driving back and forth. Mom spent her toddler days on the hump of a camel, being fed with her mom’s breast milk and camel milk. She says it does not matter how old she is, but she knows she is as old as her camel Daraanle, who was also born the day she was. With hundreds of camels, my mom’s parents had a newborn animal almost every day. They didn’t know how to count with numbers, but they named and marked every camel, goat, and cow and could keep track of them by their names. At the end of the day, when all the animals returned to their corral of thorn branches, my grandmother would count all the goats by their names, while my grandfather did the same with the cows and camels. In total they had almost five hundred animals. They provided the family with milk, meat, and transportation, but there were far more animals than they needed for food. Somali herdspeople have no permanent home, no belongings besides clothes, some jewelry, and cooking utensils. Their wealth is the size of their herd. They have no insurance payments, no loans, no future plans, nothing to worry about except lions and hyenas. To them there are only two days: the day you are born, and the day you die. Everything in between is herding animals.
My grandparents on both sides were proud pastoralists. They herded their animals across the rangeland of Bay region in south-central Somalia, always moving to find water. They had never heard of Mogadishu or even Somalia, much less Nairobi or New York. Their grazing land was all they knew. Bay lies between the Jubba and the Shabelle Rivers, which nourish the soil. It has more livestock than anywhere else in Somalia and is famous for its gorgeous Isha Baidoa waterfall and the smooth, patterned clay landscape around Diinsoor and Ufuroow villages. Nomads of Bay region enjoy two rainy seasons over the year: Dayr, with light rains, begins in mid-October; Gu brings heavy rains in mid-April. Before it rains, as the clouds build, the animals can smell the coming rain and they dance in anticipation. The people see the excitement of the animals, and they raise their hands to thank God: “Alhamdulilah!”
The rains mean plentiful water, so the nomads can finally settle down for a few months and build their makeshift huts from sticks carried on the backs of camels. At night the animals stay close to the hut in their corral, and the families sit around a fire near them. They dance with songs for the animals—clapping, stomping their feet on the ground, spinning and shaking their heads, and singing, “Hoo hoobiyoo haa!” “You know my camel by its mark, you know me by my mark!” There is laughter and fresh water and jubilation. A good time for patriotic stories, folktales, poems, and delicious meals of corn and meat. In his time, Iftin, my grandfather, would tell his own brave stories. He would talk about the day he met a pride of lions face-to-face near his house and chased them away for a mile. Eventually, the rains stop, the water dries up, and the nomads pack up their stick huts and thorny corrals on the camelbacks and move on.
My parents as well as grandparents could name their own great-great-great-grandparents; they could spend a whole night naming them and telling the stories they have passed down. All these ancestral names carry pride; every single one of them was a brave man or woman, someone who owned many livestock and was well known in the area and probably killed a lion. Brave sons and daughters of brave parents. My parents never talked about their lives without talking about the lives of their parents and ancestors because to Somali nomads there is no individual life, only the life of your family. And like their ancestors, my parents followed the Muslim rules. Women have to respect their husbands. Men have power over everything. My parents never questioned these rules or how they came about.
My mom, Madinah, was a very beautiful nomad girl, tall and slim, with dark hair, a long neck, long legs, and beautiful eyes. One summer day at a watering hole somewhere in Bay region, probably near Buurhakaba with its huge hills, my dad, Nur Iftin, and his herd encountered my mom and hers. She remembers it was raining lightly.
Herdspeople between the two rivers are respectful of each other’s cattle, which is not always the case in other parts of Somalia. Also they were both proud members of the Rahanweyn clan. So when they met, it was friendly. My dad says he could not take his eyes off my mom. He had never seen such a beautiful woman, but most important he liked how shy she was, which in Somalia is a sign of interest. Mom was barefoot, wearing her long guntiino dress, which goes over only one shoulder, a necklace of black wooden beads, and metal bands around her upper arms. The scars on her neck and arms said without words how brave she was fighting wild animals.
Dad was in his macawis, a knee-length cloth wrapped tightly around his waist. He wore his nomad sandals made of animal leather. His camels mixed with Mom’s goats around the watering hole. He approached her, and he bragged about his wealth, the animals, which is the only pickup line in the nomadic culture.
My mom liked him at first sight. Not many men were even taller than my tall mom, but he towered over her. He had a scar on his forehead that showed he had also wrestled wild animals. His high Afro hairstyle crowned his head and wide shoulders. His feet, whitened with the dust, showed that he had walked miles and was still not tired. As he stood there, he introduced Mom to his favorite camels, naming them as they grazed. They also had names for the wild animals that threatened their herds. They talked about Fareey, a local lion who had been terrorizing the herds. Fareey was named for his missing toe, which made his footprints in the clay distinct. Fareey and his pride were smart and killed many animals, including some belonging to my parents’ families, after dark. My dad swore that he would find Fareey and his pride and kill them all to protect my mom’s goats. He never did find that lion, but it was a way to show my mom that he could care for her.
After their first brief meeting, my parents searched for each other for a couple months, like the guy in The Gods Must Be Crazy who is looking for his two lost boys. When they finally met at another watering hole, my dad believed his prayers had been answered. Now Nur Iftin could not hide his love for Madinah and said he wanted to marry her. She did not say yes or no, but grinned and looked down coyly. In Somalia, that means yes. She was around seventeen, he was in his twenties. Dad arranged a meeting with her parents, and one day both families met in a place near Baidoa, the biggest city in the region, where the agreement was negotiated: fifty camels as a dowry that my dad’s parents paid to my mom’s parents.
The wedding happened in a town called Hudur, about sixty miles from Baidoa. This was the rainy season, so the animals were fat, and there was so much meat and milk at the wedding. Guests invited to the wedding were relatives and their own parents. Mom was in a mud hut all day with what they called the expert women, who told her stories about what would happen on the wedding night, and how she would want to be obedient to her husband, and how everything he says she must accept. It was a rented hut; they had to deposit goats to stay there. Neither of them had ever seen a banknote or a coin. At the same time my dad was in a neighbor’s hut with the men teaching him about the first days of marriage.
On the evening of the wedding, six men walked with Dad to the hut where Mom was waiting nervously. Inside the hut were carved wooden ornaments called xeedho, which are decorations to celebrate the wedding, brilliantly patterned clay vessels known as dhiil containing milk, butter, and meat, and a soft cow leather for them to sleep on. After seven days, when their honeymoon officially ended, my dad was dressed in traditional clothes, a white cotton sheet that was wrapped around his waist as a skirt, another piece over his shoulders as a shawl, and seated outside the hut. Then two men held a dhiil full of camel milk and poured it all over him. This signified my dad was now a husband. The evening ended with Dad riding one of the camels as a celebration escorted by some men singing and dancing, but my mom stayed inside the hut, too shy to come out and see people after the wedding bed.
My parents spent most of their early marriage walking through the bush with their herds, remembering places by the trees. They walked miles every day into no-man’s territory. No one stopped them or asked who they were. It was a peaceful time. To my parents, heaven was beyond the shiny stars they saw at night, and hell was under their feet. When my mom’s bare feet burned in the baking sun, she remembered God’s words that on Earth are samples of hellfire. They believed Earth was flat and that it was Allah’s land, they were only guests. It rains when Allah wills, it turns dry when Allah wills. Animals and humans die when Allah wills. “Inshallah!”
In some ways the nomadic life is more like life in America than the way Somalis live in cities. In the bush Somali men and women work together, talk freely with each other, and even play games together. To survive on the land, a husband and wife must work as a team to make sure their animals are grazed well and that they all get back home by dusk. My dad had introduced my mom to several games like high jump, sprint running, and chasing dik-diks, the little antelopes not much bigger than a cat. Mom loved all those games. They would hold sticks five feet high, then take turns jumping over them. Mom learned to jump and land without stumbling. She said Dad never beat her at this game. Mom was shy and respectful to her husband, but when it came to games and fun, she was a fierce competitor. They sprinted together across the bush, leaping over thornbushes while chasing the fast dik-diks.
Bay region is famous in Somalia for growing corn, beans, rice, sesame, papayas, mangoes, and the tree that produces frankincense resin. Most of that resin is bought by the Catholic church in Rome, but my parents knew nothing of Rome or Christianity. To them the most amazing place in the world was the Isha Baidoa waterfall. It was like their vacationland. Isha means “eye,” and the water flows from a crack high in the rock that looks like an eye. My mom still believes that eye belongs to an angel. During their nomadic travels they stopped twice a year to shower under the water falling from the angel’s eye.
The city of Baidoa is called Baidoa the Paradise for both the nearby waterfall and the fertile red soil. The farms of corn and masago, a type of grain, grow right inside the city, among the mud houses and the mango and banana trees. In the center of town is the huge Afar Irdoodka market, where people come from all across the country to buy and sell food, medicinal herbs, and supplies. Everywhere in that city, donkeys loaded with supplies are moving toward the market.
The Rahanweyn tribe live in Baidoa and on all the land between and surrounding the Jubba and Shabelle Rivers. The word “Rahanweyn” translates into “large number.” There are so many of them, spread across the bush. To most of the other Somali tribes the Rahanweyn are looked down on because they are mostly nomads and poor and have nothing to do with politics. Also, the dialect the Rahanweyn speak, called Maay, is dismissed as the speech of beggars and the lower class because it is not comprehensible to most other Somalis. It is different in sentence structure and is complex to outsiders. So for centuries the Rahanweyn lived their own life, on land belonging to no one.
My parents’ courtship and wedding happened sometime in the 1970s. Soon after the wedding, in 1977, a terrible drought hit Somalia. The rains of Dayr and Gu never came. The corn withered. The red clay land around Baidoa turned parched and bare, its wide cracks littered with skeletons of the animals. Those that survived were thin and dying. The nomads knew it was God’s choice but could not understand why he would do this, because they were not sinful people. They decided Allah wanted the animals for himself and was taking them away. My parents, who had been so proud of their herds, watched their wealth wiped out in front of their eyes. Daraanle, my mom’s favorite camel, turned thin and then died silently.
Droughts were a part of life for nomads in Bay region, but new forces in the world, from far beyond the land between the rivers, would make this drought different. That same year Somalia attacked Ethiopia in a war over control of the Ogaden territory, a part of Ethiopia that is populated mainly by ethnic Somalis. Somalia deployed troops to the border, and the tanks and military vehicles that left Mogadishu passed by my parents. My mom stood there, eyebrows raised, watching these strange moving things. My parents had never seen anything like tanks, they had never even thought about such a thing as a government or an army. They didn’t know it, but under the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, the founder of the Supreme Revolutionary Council, Somalia had amassed the largest army in Africa. Siad Barre was a general who had taken over the country in 1969, then cleverly used the Cold War to extract support from the Soviet Union. But none of this meant anything to desert nomads, who looked in the sky and prayed for rain.
The 1977 war, known as the Ogaden War, was the bloodiest ever between two African nations, with tens of thousands of casualties. The Somali army unleashed its heavy weaponry and Soviet-trained soldiers against the Ethiopians in a massive attack over the border. Somalia had Soviet T-35 and T-55 tanks against Ethiopia’s older Italian tanks from World War II. In the beginning the Somalis advanced deep into Ethiopia, almost capturing the capital, Addis Ababa. But the Soviet Union also supported Ethiopia, which had a Marxist military regime, and tried to stop the war. When Siad Barre refused to back down, the Soviets abandoned Somalia and sided with Ethiopia, a much larger country. Then the war became global when China, Yemen, North Korea, Romania, and other nations got involved supporting either side. With the Soviet Union supplying the Ethiopian Air Force with advanced MiG-17 and MiG-21 jets and other weaponry, the Somali army was pushed out of the country and defeated in 1978. Siad Barre was furious; he expelled all Russians from Somalia. Wanting a buffer against a Soviet-backed Ethiopia, the Americans rushed into the vacuum and began to give military help to Somalia. If not for the American support, Siad Barre might have been driven out of power for his needless and costly war. Instead, he was able to build up his army again.
All these shifting alliances and power plays meant nothing to my parents. But the result—a small country with millions of guns and simmering resentment against Siad Barre for causing so much misery—would soon change their lives forever.
Meanwhile, the 1977 drought was the worst in Somali recorded history, wiping out lives and displacing tens of thousands of nomads. As the animals died, some nomads started moving. The nomads moved everywhere, mostly toward Kenya and Ethiopia. Some moved to the nearest cities with fishing and other opportunities. And so my parents decided to try for a better life in Mogadishu. After fifteen days of walking and begging rides, Nur Iftin and his wife, Madinah, set foot for the first time ever in a city with movie theaters, traffic lights, houses made of bricks, and citizens who spoke a nearly unintelligible dialect.
And statues! There was a bronze statue in the center of Mogadishu, high on a white stone column, of a colonial-era freedom fighter holding a rock. The statue was named Dhagaxtuur, which means “stone thrower,” and it honored the rebels who fought the British with stones after World War II. My mom stood there waiting for the bronze man to throw that rock. Only a week later she realized it was not a real person. The green and red taxicabs that parked everywhere, the portraits of Siad Barre that hung on every street, caught them by surprise. They would later learn that you weren’t supposed to say Siad Barre’s name without adding the word Jaalle before it. Jaalle was a new word in the Somali language invented by Siad Barre, which roughly meant “führer” or “leader.”
My dad’s half brother Hassan, who already lived in Mogadishu, gave my parents a room in his house in the Waberi neighborhood. A mile from their house, to the east, was the Mogadishu airport and the beautiful green waters of the Indian Ocean surrounding it. But civilization sickened my mom. She missed the animals, her parents, the stories, the land, her freedom. She had not slept in weeks due to the sound of the airplanes taking off and landing. She kept looking up and wondering how on earth those things are made. Her first visit to the ocean made her remember stories from her parents, including one about something called a whale that can swallow a whole city. She worried about whales, and she wondered where the ocean ends. Using a toilet, going to a movie, and riding a bus were the strangest things to both my parents, probably the way so many things about America seem strange to me, like snow, cooking on a stove, or obeying traffic laws.
One thing that frustrated her more than anything else was buying milk and meat. In her nomad life these things were abundant; now she had to pay for them with money. Her first visit to the slaughterhouse brought her to tears. The meat dangled on hooks, flies landing on it constantly. Loud men with sharp knives yelled at everyone who stepped into the slaughterhouse, waving their knives in the air and promising the freshest meat. My mom was an expert on camel meat, and she could tell this meat was not fresh, but she didn’t dare to question the scary butchers with their long knives and strange dialect.
During the drought many nomads moved to Mogadishu. The city people made fun of them. My mom remembers other women asking her to make sounds of animals. They were mocking her, but animals were her favorite subject so she was happy to make their sounds for the neighbors, especially the sound of her favorite goat, Eseey, which means “brown.” The city women, who wore nicer clothes, did not want to be seen with Mom on the streets. To them she was a little embarrassing. They mocked her dialect, looking down at her whenever she said something in Maay. She was called Reer Baadiye, “the bush woman.”
The neighbors said her house smelled like goat pee, from her clothes. To Mom the smell of goats and camels was like the perfume of her homeland, and it smelled like freedom. Also she had learned only a handful of verses from the Koran that her parents had taught her, just enough to pray five times a day. But the city women, who had studied at madrassas, knew the whole Koran. They played a sort of competitive religious game called subac where they would sit in a circle and recite the Koran like a round-robin. Each person would have to recite the verse that follows the last person’s verse; to forget any verse would mean embarrassment. But none of those women could jump or run like my mom. They were too fat from all the city food, and they avoided sunshine so they would get lighter skin.
The women of Mogadishu were circumcised as children, but nomads don’t practice female genital mutilation. So this was even more pressure on Mom. She was made to feel unclean by the neighbors. Eventually, she relented and bravely subjected herself to the cutting. Three neighbor women took her to the house of Hawa, a woman famous in Mogadishu for doing this. Of course there were no painkillers. Hawa usually circumcised little girls who didn’t know what was coming and could be distracted for the cutting, like my brother with the airplane at his surprise circumcision. But of course my mom knew, like I did after seeing my brave brother. And so like me at my circumcision, Mom had to be held down as Hawa worked with that Topaz razor blade for some fifteen minutes while my mom screamed. Once Hawa declared that everything bad had been removed, the other women began ululating in joy. Hawa cleaned up with some warm water and sent Mom home. My dad, who knew of the procedure and approved, had to stay away from her for a few months.
It makes me so angry when I think about it. In my job as a medical interpreter in Maine, I often tell new Somali immigrants that they cannot mutilate their daughters in this country, which surprises them. This terrible custom is rooted in ignorance and will only change with education.
By now my dad had started making some money fishing, which eventually allowed him to rent a room with my mom and leave Hassan’s house. Some of the men would go out in boats with big nets while my dad stayed on Uruba beach, waiting for them to return. When the fishermen came back with their nets full, Dad would carry the huge heavy fish, some as big as a person, on his shoulders. He would carry those fish a mile to the fish market at Geel-Laq beach. Some days he would make that trip dozens of times. After a whole day of that hard work he was supposed to get paid one Somali shilling, but he still didn’t know much about money or coins and was often cheated.
At that time there were still Italians in Mogadishu. Before independence came in 1960, Somalia was two colonies: British Somaliland in the north and Italian Somaliland, including Mogadishu, in the south. So there was a long history of Europeans in Somalia, and in the 1970s and 1980s many still came to do business. They stayed in the big Uruba Hotel, today in ruins, where the women would sunbathe in bikinis. It was the first time Dad saw white people, and he couldn’t believe they walked around almost naked. When he told my mom, she couldn’t believe it either; she had to come and see for herself. Even then she didn’t believe they were real people until she saw them actually breathing. Mom in her nomad life had heard stories about gaalo, the infidels. They are not Muslim, they are all white, and they are not clean. But she didn’t know they had no clothes. She stayed away from the unclean white people she saw at the beach. She wondered, what are they doing here, and why don’t they pray five times a day?
Everywhere in Mogadishu, my dad stood out in the crowd with his strong body and height. He had cut his long nomad hair short and shaved his nomad’s beard, but he left his dark mustache and woolly sideburns. This look was very fashionable in Mogadishu in the early 1980s, especially if you also wore bell-bottoms. He would go out and strut around town. In that Uruba Hotel was a nightclub where dancers stripped and alcohol was served. There were more nightclubs than mosques in Mogadishu back then, all places where you could dance to funk music like on the American TV show Soul Train and drink at a seaside bar. Some Somali men and even some women (without a head scarf and wearing lots of jewelry) went to clubs to mingle with the Italian, British, and American businesspeople before the civil war. Eventually, my dad did go to the Uruba Club, though he never told my mom. He saw Somali women dancing with white men, which in a few years would become punishable by death. Today those clubs are rubble in the sand, a few broken pillars rising from the debris like the ruins of ancient Rome.
The fishing and dancing might have gone on for my dad until the wars came, but then one day he did something that changed his life. He jumped.
It was nothing to him, just jumping over a thorn fence, like he jumped in those games with my mom in the bush. But this jump was seen by a friend of his half brother Hassan who knew a lot about basketball. That game had become very popular all over Africa, and Somalia had leagues, amateur and professional, that competed against each other and other countries. Hassan’s friend said that because my dad was so tall and could jump so high, he should try out for the national basketball team. But Hassan wanted his half brother to join the military, like himself. At that time under Siad Barre, Somalis were very patriotic; joining the army was considered a noble career. My dad had already gone through basic military training, which was mandatory for grown men in the city, and he was fine with being a soldier. Besides, he knew nothing about basketball, had never even held a ball. But Hassan’s friend wouldn’t give up. The Somali national team had been losing a lot of games, and they were recruiting new players. Having a winning team was another part of the patriotic spirit in the country.
So my dad tried out for basketball and was a natural. He towered over his teammates. He could jump higher and had strong hands from working with animals. His herding skills also made him very agile and gave him stamina. It didn’t take long for him to get used to handling the ball. Soon he was nicknamed Nur Dhere, Tall Nur, and he was helping Somalia win games. Soon he stopped carrying fish and started making a lot more money playing basketball. The world changed swiftly for my parents. They learned how to identify and count shilling notes and coins and how to buy things like clothes, curtains, window shutters made of wood, a carpet over their dirt floor, a cupboard, and a shelf. Things only rich people had. My dad also learned to read and write Somali, which was unusual because nomad men and women were mostly illiterate.
By the time I was born, my parents had become the honored basketball family in the neighborhood. They were famous all over Mogadishu. Dad was traveling a lot outside the country, bringing medals home. He had a shortwave radio in the house and would listen to songs by famous Somali singers. My nomad parents had a lot of good things happening, but my mom missed everything in the nomad world. She thought that city life was hard and resented having to stay inside a house all day, cooking and cleaning, instead of herding her goats across the landscape, while Dad was out playing basketball. She was worried that her kids would grow up in Mogadishu not knowing anything about the life of nomads. The few women friends she made, like Maryan, had nothing in common with her. They all talked about popular Somali music and shows. Instead, she would entertain herself around the house by humming her favorite nomad songs.
Dad spent most of his time away from home, training with the basketball squad. Usually he returned on Thursday for two days (Friday being the holy day), still wearing his red Somali team shirt and bringing gifts of clothes and toys for us, sometimes jewelry for Mom.
Our neighbor Siciid visited often when Dad was at home. They sat under the neem tree in the evening chewing qat leaves and talking late into the night. Mom was exiled to the house while the men talked, but from time to time she brought them tea. Siciid looked short and fat compared to Dad, a smile constantly fixed to his round face. Like Mom he told many stories and also jokes, and he provoked Dad into arguments, just for the fun of it. Siciid was a professional driver who earned his living delivering food and oil for the government. He came home after work smelling of fruit or oil or whatever he had been transporting that day.
Sometimes Dad took me to watch him train at the Horseed Stadium in downtown Mogadishu. Mom dressed me up with a nice clean vest and shorts. The court was behind a thick concrete wall; police with dogs patrolled around, fending off people who tried to sneak in to watch the players. Some of the fans would climb up a tall tree to get a view over the wall. They sat there for hours watching as my dad and his teammates, the best in Somalia, played basketball all afternoon. I had the honor to walk into the building with my dad holding my tiny hand in his big hairy one. People greeted him like a star and also gave me a gentle touch on the head. The police and soldiers saluted him like he was a general. Dad played for hours, and eventually I would fall asleep on the stairs, only waking on his shoulders as he carried me home.
The training ground was one kilometer from our house, and we walked home in the evening past the big KM4 traffic island, the Cinema Ecuatore, and shops and restaurants bursting with laughter, music, and discussion. People talked about concerts and plays at the theaters. The famous Waberi entertainment club presented great shows on Friday that would make people laugh a lot. There were famous comedians like Aw Kuku, Aw Kombe, and Aw Daango. Most would be killed or displaced soon, during the civil war.
In the old part of town, above the ruins of the medieval sultanates’ castles, rose the white spires of the ancient Arba’a Rukun mosque and the Catholic cathedral, which had been built by the Italians. We could see the ocean beyond the Almara lighthouse, built of stone in the fifteenth century when Mogadishu was a major African port, and we felt the power of the sea breeze against our faces. “Mogadishu is a great city,” I thought, “maybe the greatest in the world.” The White Pearl of the Indian Ocean, they called it. I felt so lucky.
My earliest memories of Mogadishu always include my brother, Hassan. He was a hero to me, only one year older but always my protector from the other boys in the neighborhood who tried to bully me. Hassan was without fear and would fight with boys older than himself; sometimes he would fight with three at the same time, returning home with cuts to his body and dust on his clothes. On one occasion I was attacked by two boys who threw me to the ground, then punched and kicked me. I didn’t tell my mom, but I did tell Hassan, who went after them and beat them. Even though I was smaller than Hassan, I ate more than he could, and I snatched food from his hands. Still he did not chase me. But we played fun games like hide-and-seek, gariir (a type of marbles game using rocks), and blindman’s bluff.
Hassan went to the madrassa, where he learned the Koran with eighty other boys sitting on the sand in a shack. There was no paper; the students wrote on long wooden boards, using ink made from coal. They wrote a passage from the Koran in Arabic, memorized and repeated it, then washed off the ink and wrote the next passage. All day they did this. Mistakes were severely punished by the teacher, a scowling bearded man named Macalin Basbaas, roughly translated as “the teacher who uses hot pepper and scorpions to bite on wounds.” Never was someone better named, though later we nicknamed him the Angel of Punishment. Hassan returned home bleeding from the beatings he got.
The madrassas were the only kind of school in Mogadishu, and there was nothing to learn there except the Koran. So my mom became my greatest teacher. She could cook, bake, and sing like any good Somali mom is supposed to, but what I loved most about her were the tales she told us about her nomadic youth. She would sit cross-legged under the neem tree with Hassan and me while our baby sister, Nima, perhaps a little more than a year old, slept with her thumb in her mouth. Mom would talk of her time as a herdswoman in the desert scrub, protecting the goats and the camels from lions and hyenas.
She told us about the day when a hyena suddenly appeared, growling and gnashing teeth. She chased it with her stick through the scrub before returning to the herd, knowing she should get the animals to the corral near her parents before darkness, when the hyenas would be at their most dangerous. But the pack had already scattered the herd. Without fear she chased them, for Somalis value their goats and camels as much as their own lives. A hyena leaped at her, pinning her to the ground, its sharp claws cutting into her neck. Luckily, her uncle arrived and started striking the hyena with a stick. Three days later, still in great pain, she was sent out again by her parents to mind the herd.
My head rested on her lap, looking up at the hyena scar on her neck. She still wore the necklace she had on when she met my dad—black beads made from hard, polished wenge wood, the sort worn by women in the bush but rarely seen in the city. I wondered how my quiet mom, who hid in the house when men visited, could chase hyenas.
The scariest story she told was about the night when a lion entered the hut where a relative was sleeping with his children. This hut was made of discarded plastic and paper. A paper house is no match for a hungry lion, and that big cat dragged the man out into the bush screaming and crying while his children slept. Mom was one of the people who came out of the huts armed with spears, but when they reached him, he was almost dead. “There was a whistling sound coming from his neck where the teeth had sunk in,” she said. I tried to imagine what it would be like to see dead people.
The story of the lion haunted me and gave me nightmares. I sometimes asked myself, “What if I was born a nomad?” Surely I would be killed by a lion. I hated death. I just wanted to live a good life like the one we had and hang on my dad’s shoulders walking around town being cheered. Mom told us these stories not to scare us but to help us understand life in the bush, to appreciate it and remember the details. Her goal was to keep us from becoming city boys who know little about nomad life. She wanted us to not mock other nomads who came to the city but respect them and listen to their stories. We were also able to learn and speak the nomadic Rahanweyn dialect because Mom told all her stories in Maay. She trained us in the house and courtyard on how to fight, climb trees, and jump. Hassan and I could jump higher than most of the boys in the neighborhood.
One morning when I was around six, I woke up to see feathers covering the mat under the neem tree; a bird had been killed by someone’s cat, Mom said, but all I could think of was a lion. “There are no lions in the city,” she said, but I wasn’t sure.
I asked Mom how the birds can be protected. “These birds are our guests,” I said. “How come we can’t save them?” She had no answer. After dark I went out to the tree and said to the birds, “I can’t protect you from the lion tonight; may Allah be with you.”
It was around that same time when Dad told our family that the basketball was finished and he would be staying at home now. I didn’t know how basketball could be finished. There was always another game, on another day. Could there be no more days? Soon I began to notice people were tense and there were lots of changes in our routines. Siciid was now with us most of the time, returning to his own house only to sleep and spending long hours with Dad listening to the radio. His wife and children had left Mogadishu and gone to stay with relatives in the north of Somalia. Like Dad, he had stopped going to work.
Dad and Siciid talked about politics. Since the end of the bloody Ogaden War with Ethiopia in 1978, Somalia’s economy was limping. Inflation was so high you needed baskets of paper money just to buy a kilo of Italian pasta (Mogadishans learned to love spaghetti from their colonizers), when you could even find it. People were angry at President Siad Barre, especially the people around Mogadishu who were mainly from the Hawiye clan. Siad Barre came from the rival Darod clan up north. There were five major clans in Somalia, but since independence the Hawiye and the Darod had nominated themselves as the only people who could be president or prime minister; members of other clans could only be members of the Parliament or the cabinet. Soon, instead of presidents and prime ministers, the Hawiye and the Darod would give us brutal warlords.
Before the Ogaden War, when he was still popular, Siad Barre managed to keep the Hawiye people under control, and he watched them carefully. One of their leaders, an army general named Mohamed Farrah Aidid, had been jailed for a time. Now he was free again and ready to fight his Darod rival, thanks to weapons and money he was getting from Ethiopia, which also hated Siad Barre because of the war. Aidid had whipped up the Hawiye of the rural areas, and that’s where the fighting was going on, like a bunch of lions and hyenas in the bush. But how long could this fight stay out in the bush?
Of course I was too young to understand any of this, I didn’t even understand that spaghetti came from a place called Italy or that no spaghetti would soon be the least of our problems. I just wanted to go to the snack bar. I begged Dad to take me, but for the first time ever I saw that his face was not happy. In his eyes I saw fear; I could feel it like the way I felt when boys in the neighborhood bullied me. This was a new thing to see in my dad, and while I understood it as part of something larger beginning, all I could think of was that everything I knew was ending.
He did not want to take me to the snack bar, he said.