The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [81]
Colonel Omar introduced me to the townspeople as “the son of Levish,” a local man renowned for his light skin. The Colonel had taught me to recognize the Somali question “Which clan are you?” and to respond with Reer Jarafle, the name of his own sub-clan, five levels deep on the Somali clan tree. I performed the routine repeatedly, like a jester, to great acclaim; it invariably provoked hearty peals of laughter from the assembled crowd. So amused was he by his joke that from time to time the Colonel would elbow me, winking and exclaiming, “Eh, Levish? What clan do you belong to?”
As we were preparing to leave Hasballe, an old man approached the car window. “Please don’t kill the pirates,” he pleaded. “You need to give them jobs.”
From the townspeople in Hasballe, we had learned that the islaan was currently residing in his bush hut, some distance down the road. My interpreter Omar made it clear that passing by without stopping was not an option. “It would be the ultimate show of disrespect,” he said.
Three-quarters of an hour later we turned off the road and crossed a lush plain of green grass, towards a mudul no different in size from the others I had seen along the road, amidst a herd of grazing camels. One of the islaan’s wives informed us that he was napping and would be out shortly. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, the islaan soon emerged dressed in the simple nomad’s attire of a shawl and ma’awis and exchanged warm greetings with the two Omars, as I stood awkwardly by. Just when I was starting to think that he had not noticed my presence, the islaan turned to me with an expectant glance.
“Do you have anything to say to him?” Omar asked me.
For the first time in my life, I found myself completely tongue-tied, frozen under the spell of pomp that Omar had lent to the meeting.
Mercifully, Omar stepped in. “He thanks you for welcoming him to the homeland of the Isse Mahamoud,” he said, relaying my phantom message.
“I thank you for coming to visit us,” the islaan replied in Somali. “Foreigners are always welcome here.” Omar stood between the two of us, hands solemnly folded in front of him as he translated. I requested to take a photo with him, but the islaan demurred.
“I will gladly take a photo with you, but not here. Wait until I am in Garowe, when I’m dressed properly.”
The last stretch of the journey took us across a sparse plateau where the only sign of human presence was a curious sequence of pipes punctuating the road every few kilometres, from which arrow-straight dirt trails jutted at right angles into the distance—the long-abandoned boreholes and service roads set up during Conoco’s oil exploration in the 1980s, before the company declared force majeure and departed Somalia in the wake of the civil war. Colonel Omar pointed out a landing strip, now little more than open bushland, which British forces had used to transport supplies during a nineteenth-century siege of Eyl. From this escarpment, said the Colonel, colonialist forces had unleashed their bombardments on the town below. As if in silent testament to his statement, we passed by a crumbling graveyard containing the remains of Somalis killed during the anti-colonial struggle.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when we finally reached the outskirts of Eyl. It had taken us seven hours to cross 220 kilometres.
* * *
The town of Eyl is a historic place. Long before it became known to the world in 2008 as the infamous “pirate haven,” it had served as a base for an equally notorious character, anti-colonial freedom fighter Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, nicknamed the “Mad Mullah” by his British adversaries. A warrior-poet in the purest sense, the beauty of Hassan’s verses attracted a diverse following to his Dervish movement, which for twenty years successfully held off British colonial expansion into the Somali interior (notwithstanding their common association with dancing and whirling, the Dervishes also knew how to fight). Despite