The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [40]
For better or worse, the end of SomCan’s contract quashed its pirate employment experiment in its infancy. Garaad, however, appeared to have seen some limited service with the company before being decommissioned. According to Joaar, SomCan’s May 2009 attack on the three ministry-licensed fishing vessels was carried out by a strike team composed of former pirates. “There were sixteen pirates from Eyl onboard, including Garaad,” he said. “These [SomCan owners] are crazy people.”
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Our meeting over, Garaad got up and silently walked away. An hour after he left, a call came to Warsame’s phone: it was Garaad, asking for his help to arrange an interview with President Farole. As with Boyah, his reason for talking to me had been rendered perfectly transparent.
He was, I heard, already back with his friends, chewing khat as the sun set.
6
Flower of Paradise
THE ARRIVAL OF KHAT IN GAROWE IS A CURIOUS SIGHT.
Each day at around noon, the first khat transports begin to roll in from Galkayo, coinciding with the typical waking hour for a pirate. The angry honking of the incoming vehicles rouses the city from its lethargy, bringing expectant crowds flocking into the streets in defiance of the midday heat. Screaming down the highway at reckless speeds, high beams flashing, guards perched on top, the transports arrive on the southern road. Turning off the highway and rumbling down the embankment towards Garowe’s main checkpoint, they are eagerly greeted by barking soldiers, who fill their arms with leafy bundles before waving the vehicles through. Behind the barrier, a fleet of white station wagons stands ready to be loaded; hired hands follow behind female merchants decked in vibrant headdresses, hauling rectangular bushels wrapped in brown canvas.
As the transports arrive at the khat market, or suq, the whole city begins to buzz with activity. Throngs of shouting men press into the suq as older children and adolescents mob the transports, hoping to snatch what they can in the scramble of the unloading. In the poorer neighbourhoods, barefoot children gather in circles in front of hovels, slapping hands and jostling for a few stalks scattered in the dust. Even the goats respond with Pavlovian consistency to the tooting of the station wagons, trotting after them in the hopes of nabbing a few fallen leaves.
This is the most significant daily event in Garowe life, repeated with unfailing precision every single day of the year. Steadily increasing in popularity in recent years, khat has become—along with livestock and fishing—one of Puntland’s most lucrative economic sectors. As a Puntland cabinet minister once told me: “In Somalia, there are two industries that work: hawala [money transfer] and khat.” If so, piracy has certainly made the khat trade work even better—since late 2008, the suq has been awash with the freshly minted bills of pirate ransoms, threatening to turn a tolerable vice into a national addiction.
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Across clime, culture, and continent, people will find some way to intoxicate themselves. In Somalia, a uniformly Islamic society where alcohol consumption is highly taboo, the intoxicant of choice is khat, an amphetamine-like stimulant consumed either by chewing the plant’s leaves or by steeping its dried leaves to make a tea.
Khat—which the Arabs nicknamed the “flower of paradise”—has for centuries been used by Muslim scholars to assist the performance of their intensive day- and night-long studies (and, in more modern times, by Kenyan and Ethiopian students cramming for exams).1 Growing up to twenty metres high, the plant is extremely water-intensive and better suited to altitudes of 1,500–2,500 metres, giving the Ethiopian highlands and the provinces of northern Kenya a strong natural advantage over Somalia. Once confined to East Africa, the demand for the drug has been