The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [2]
The last white face disappeared at Djibouti’s dilapidated, near-deserted airport, as American F-16s performed eardrum-shattering training manoeuvres overhead. By the time the plane landed in Galkayo, I was the only non-Somali passenger on board.
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The Antonov’s first stop was Bossaso, Puntland’s northernmost port and most populous city. We wove back and forth over water and land, as Somalia’s undulating coastline cut back and forth across the vector of our flight. Out of the scratched porthole, the solid azure of the Gulf of Aden below was broken only by intermittent white cracks marking the location of swells; from the sky, they looked like fissures erupting on the surface of a perfectly smooth blue rock face. As the plane swung back towards the coast, the lines of white increased in number, joined by the occasional fishing trawler cutting its own independent trail across the water.
As we crossed over land, Bossaso came into view. It was the first sign of life Somalia had displayed, a settlement rising out of the vast, lunar wasteland enveloping it. From the air, the city appeared as a clutter of corrugated roof buildings, gathering in a concentrated burst before spilling into the sea. The minarets of occasional mosques poked out of the conglomeration of one- and two-storey structures. A miniature range of denuded mountains, looking like cropped volcanoes, formed a crescent around the city.
The plane banked precipitously and began its descent towards the thin stretch of unclaimed beach lying between city and ocean, in which Bossaso airstrip was nestled. The temperature in the cabin began to rise once more as the Antonov left the higher altitudes. Within a few minutes, the plane had come to a bumping stop on the sand-coated runway.
The thought hit me for the first time: I am in fucking Somalia.
Somalia is like a country out of a twisted fairy tale, an ethereal land given substance only by the stories we are told of it. Everything known by the outside world has been constructed from news reports spilling out of the country over the last twenty years: warlords, famine, Black Hawks, jihadis, and now pirates. Along with bananas and livestock, international news is one of the few items that Somalia can still claim to export, and crossing the border from Djibouti into Somalia had brought me from the world of news consumers into the world of news producers.
The stopover was brief; as soon as the Antonov had finished refuelling, the remaining passengers climbed back on board and it took off once more, setting a course for Galkayo, a city straddling Puntland’s southern border. The desert below stretched in shades of brown and blond; evaporated riverbeds scarred the pockmarked terrain, carving valleys in their wake. Galkayo is a dangerous place, a crucible where the northern Darod and the southern Hawiye clan families meet, cleaving the city along its east–west axis; the reputed English translation of the city’s name, “where the white man runs away,” did not put me at ease. Though I had initially assumed that the site marked a decisive victory by Somali independence fighters over British or Italian colonial forces, I later discovered that Galkayo was the location of a much earlier battle between invading Somalis and the non-Muslim indigenous inhabitants.
After another ninety minutes and seven hundred kilometres, Galkayo appeared. We touched down on another dusty landing strip, tires churning to a stop near an expectant crowd. It was the end of the line. I stepped once more down the six shaky steps onto Somali soil, and looked anxiously through the milling throng.
My own name had never sounded as sweet as when I heard it being called from across the landing strip. The voice belonged to Mohamad’s cousin Abdirizak, who waved and