The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [6]
We arrived at our destination, a virtually abandoned roadside farm fifteen kilometres outside of Garowe. Boyah had recently contracted tuberculosis, and Warsame insisted that we meet him in an open space. As we stepped out of our respective vehicles, I caught my first glimpse of Boyah. He looked to be in his early forties, immensely tall and with an air of menace about him; the brief, calculating glance with which he scanned me left the distinct impression that he was capable of chatting amiably or robbing me with the same equanimity. He was wearing a ma’awis, a traditional sarong-like robe of a clan elder, and an imaamad, a decorative shawl, was slung over his left shoulder. On his feet was a pair of spit-shined ebony leather sandals.
Boyah turned immediately and loped down the dirt path leading towards the farm, Colonel Omar following paces behind him. Threading his way through the mishmash of tomato plants and lemon trees that constituted this eclectic farm, Boyah wove back and forth along the path, like a bird looking for a roosting spot. Finally, he settled on a site in a cool, shady clearing, where an overhead thatching of branches had created an almost cave-like atmosphere. He squatted in the centre of the clearing and began to toy with a dhiil—a wooden vat used by nomads to store milk—that someone had left on top of a nearby stack of wood. His mobile phone resting in his right hand, Boyah remained singularly focused on the oblong container in front of him, twirling it on the hardened dirt like a solo game of spin-the-bottle.
Other than the farm’s owner and his wife, no one was remotely close by, yet the Special Police Unit officers took up positions at either ends of the clearing with an amusing military officiousness. The meeting place filled with the rest of our party, and I decided it was time to force Boyah to acknowledge my presence. I walked up to him and greeted him with the standard Salaam álaykum, and was not surprised when Boyah and those around him responded with startled laughter before quickly offering the formulaic response: Álaykum salaam. Somalis were routinely astonished when I demonstrated the slightest knowledge of their culture or language—even a phrase that they shared with the entire Islamic world.
We seated ourselves on some nearby logs and I began the interview. As I forced out my first question through Warsame, I hesitated to use the word “pirate” to describe Boyah. The closest Somali translation of the word is burcad badeed, which literally means “ocean robber,” a political statement I was anxious to avoid. In much the same way that revolutionaries straddle the semantic fence separating “freedom fighters” from “terrorists,” Boyah and his brothers-in-arms did not like to call themselves “pirates” in their native tongue. In an alliterative display of defiance, they referred to themselves as badaadinta badah, “saviours of the sea,” a term that is most often translated in the English-speaking media as “coast guard.” Boyah joked that he was the “chief of the coast guard,” a title he invoked with pride. To him, his actions had been in protection of his sea, the native waters he had known his whole life; his hijackings, a legitimate form of taxation levied in absentia on behalf of a defunct government that he represented in spirit, if not in law.
His story was typical of many coastal dwellers who had turned