The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [45]
Soon we were tearing along the main road out of Garowe, breaking off after ten minutes to join the dirt trail leading to the cooperative farm where I had first met Boyah. A short time later the station wagon pulled up and parked alongside the Land Cruiser; inside were Colonel Omar and two of Boyah’s former running mates: Momman (a nickname) and a man I will call Ali Ghedi. The gathering soon assumed the atmosphere of a picnic, with eager hands offloading the day’s supplies: dirins (woven mats), thermoses of sweet tea, bottles of water, packs of cigarettes, and the half-dozen black plastic shopping bags containing the khat. We unfurled the dirins in the shade of a broad-limbed acacia tree and settled down, tossing our sandals into the dirt. A short distance away, a dishevelled young farmhand sat in the shade of a wooden shack, absorbedly chewing a few stems of khat that one of the pirates had handed him.
As soon as we had settled down on our dirins, I reached into my bag and pulled out the thank-you gift I had brought for Boyah, in appreciation of his willingness to be open with me: an Alex Rios Toronto Blue Jays T-shirt. He broke into a broad grin, immediately removing his own shirt and putting it on. “Is it official?” he asked, and I answered that it was. “How much did you pay for it?”
The Colonel laid his mat a dozen paces distant and flopped down on it, the crook of his elbow covering his eyes. He had been khat sober for thirty-two days, part of an all-around cleansing policy that granted few exemptions: “Only in wartime, when things get a little stressful,” he explained. Colonel Omar, I had learned weeks ago, was not really a colonel. A battle-hardened militiaman, the Colonel had fought in the south alongside former Puntland president Abdullahi Yusuf against the Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab, one of three conflicts he claimed to have participated in; after each, he said, he had promoted himself by one rank. “I’m going to Ethiopia soon to receive training,” he had told me. “When I get back, I’ll be a general.”
The sun was mild and a light breeze was blowing, a pleasant change from the gale-force winds constantly sweeping Garowe. Taking periodic breaks from the khat, Boyah opened a small plastic bag and removed a pinch or so of chewing tobacco, depositing it gingerly into his mouth. The conversation turned to sundry topics: women, Omega-3 fatty acids, naming customs. The pirates collectively warned me that the khat would make me sexually aroused, to the point that my urge for a woman would be unbearable; I informed them that I had chewed it before, experiencing no such effect. “The white people we see in porn movies are always so horny,” said Momman. “So how is it that you’re not?”
Mobile phones chimed like persistent alarm clocks every few minutes, each member of the circle splitting his conversational energies between his phone and the people around him in almost equal measure. One particularly harsh voice blaring from Momman’s phone, allegedly belonging to a member of Al-Shabaab, piqued my attention. My interpreter Omar summarized the exchange: the caller expressed displeasure that Momman’s pirate earnings, in his opinion, had gone not to support the Somali people but to fund President Farole’s political campaign, and he warned Momman that he might have to forfeit his life to atone for these sins. Momman remained curiously calm throughout the call; when I expressed my concern, he waved it off with one hand and told me that these threats happened daily as a matter of course. Shabaab apparently conducted its terror campaigns not only through assassinations and suicide bombings, but over the airwaves