Mogadishu Memoir

By Hassan Abukar

This memoir is an evocative, intimate account of a country struggling how to balance tradition and modernization, as seen through the eyes of a young man coming of age. With insight and humor, the author shares his story of abandonment, love, and family through Somalias greatest period of social and political upheaval.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504911559

Hassan Abukar

Hassan M. Abukar is a prolific writer and essayist who writes about politics, social issues, and radical groups.

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© 2015 Hassan Abukar. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/12/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0766-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1155-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907312

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Prologue I Dream of Mogadishu

Chapter 1 Close, Yet Far Away

Chapter 2 A Unique Woman

Chapter 3 My Sister and Defying the Odds

Chapter 4 Uncle 'Abdi Gurey'

Chapter 5 Neighborhood in Transition

Chapter 6 Housemates Unplugged

Chapter 7 The Hamar Jab-Jab House

Chapter 8 Hamarweyne, Mon Amour

Chapter 9 The Cultural Milieu

Chapter 10 Crime and Punishment

Chapter 11 The Education of a Generation

Chapter 12 People Who Made a Difference

Chapter 13 Seven Months Out of Mogadishu

PREFACE

The writing of this memoir started many years ago when I was 33. I wanted to delve into my childhood and write stories about my upbringing and about the people who were instrumental influencing me in my formative years. I was in California then, and I saw an unprecedented influx of Somali refugees to San Diego. I grew up in Mogadishu, the capital, and various clans lived side by side in peaceful coexistence. That was the Mogadishu I remembered, a melting pot dominated by law and order.

I filled half of a stenographer's notebook with my stories. Then, I stopped writing. I became busy with my family, my work, and various community activities. It was sometime in 2008 when my daughter, Sarah, after reading my long emails to her, saw something in her father's writing and suggested that I write and publish. She wanted me to write opinion articles and publish them. I took her advice and thought of perhaps writing my own memoir.

In 2009, I did something unthinkable: I posted excerpts of my memoir in Wardheernews, a popular Somali online website. Members of the Editorial Board at Wardheernews were very supportive particularly Ahmed Abdirahman Hassan Sitiin, Abdikarim Abdirahman Hassan, Adan Makina, Ismail Khaliil Abdirahman Hassan, and Abdikarim Buh. The Somali novelist Yasmeen Maxamuud provided me advice and encouragement. I have received so much positive feedbacks over the years from the readers of Wardheernews, who were astonished by the emotional frankness in the excerpts and the portrait of a past that seemed distant but yet still fresh in the minds of many people. Several readers questioned if I were indeed a Somali man because males in my native country rarely talk about their vulnerabilities and failings.

I am grateful to all my family members and friends whose support for this book project was essential. My children Sarah Abukar, Mohamed Abukar, Kareem Abukar and Yusuf Abukar were very supportive. I am also grateful to Asmahan Sh. Mussa for her moral support and constant encouragement.

This memoir is not about nostalgia for old Mogadishu, but instead a portrait of whom we were, how we lived, and what made us tick. It is, of course, centered on me as I saw the world in the first eighteen years of my life. I wrote it for my children, my nephews, my nieces, their offspring, and for all the young Somalis who grew up in post-1991 when the civil war devastated Somalia. It is, in essence, their country's cultural history. It is not a call to go back to our past and relive it, but rather to obtain an understanding of that lost past. A friend told me that the memoir should be sub-titled Somalia Before the Madness, − Somalia long before it experienced a 22-year old civil war, religious radicalism, and piracy.

This book is dedicated to my mother for her support and all the opportunities she furnished to me when I was a child. She passed away in 2009− may God bless her soul--- and I know she would have been proud of me and of the book. Of course, I can imagine seeing her cynical face and her saying, "Bal eega wuxuu dadka u sheegayo," (Look what he is telling people about!).

September 20, 2012

Scottsdale, Arizona

PROLOGUE

I Dream of Mogadishu

I have not seen Mogadishu since 1987.

In fact, I have not lived in my hometown since 1978. But I visited it briefly, for not more than two weeks each time, about four times between 1979 and 1987.

The Somali civil war reached Mogadishu in January 1991 when President Siad Barre and his supporters were driven out of the city. What happened next in the capital is beyond comprehension. Thousands of people were killed, many were targeted because they belonged to the wrong clan, and others were caught in the crossfire of fleeing government soldiers and opposition forces. Many were uprooted, and the city was destroyed by marauding armed militias. Government buildings were looted and damaged. Many of the residents suffered continuous bombardment from warring factions and ended up being killed or wounded, while others fled to the countryside or to neighboring countries, especially Kenya. Today, at least 600,000 Somali refugees still live in Dhadaab camp, on the Kenyan side of the border.

The destruction that occurred in Mogadishu was unfathomable. Keith Richburg, a Washington Post reporter, wrote a vivid portrayal of the city in the early 1990s in his interesting book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (1997):

When I first saw Mogadishu in 1992, the capital looked like a transplanted set from Mad Max movies, about a surreal post-nuclear world where scavengers survive by slapping together debris and bits of scrap metal. Mogadishu hadn't gone through a nuclear inferno−but it seemed about as close as you could come in an urban setting.

According to Richburg, sections of Mogadishu were so dangerous that a Green Line divided the warring factions, a term aptly borrowed from Beirut during Lebanon's civil war. One particularly dangerous and treacherous section was called Bosnia. The American government's brief humanitarian intervention in Somalia was preceded by an opinion article in the Washington Post penned by its flamboyant ambassador in Nairobi, Smith Hempstone, who warned about sending troops there. The piece was fittingly titled, If you liked Beirut, you will love Mogadishu. in essence, Mogadishu became a derelict and dilapidated city.

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Mogadishu scarred by war in 2014 (Photo: Courtesy Abdi Latif Dahir, November, 2014)

The armed militias took the entire city hostage in their bellicose pursuit of hegemony. They became unhinged in a shocking display of brutality and terror toward residents. People in the city were unable to extricate themselves from the situation. As a result, they led a regimented existence created by a culture of fear. Mogadishu residents experienced high unemployment because all the major institutions and businesses were destroyed. It was a situation just like that encountered by the late Arab-American reporter of the New York Times, Anthony Shadid. In his memoir, A House of Stone (2012), Shadid referred to his ancestral home of Lebanon during its civil war as tribes bereft of citizenship.

One thing that has gone viral on the Internet, and even in some books, is the notion of juxtaposing old images of serene Mogadishu and the newer pictures: a contrast of growth vs. destruction, civilization vs. decay, peace vs. war, and normalcy vs. anarchy.

Mogadishu is the same city that the famous Moroccan traveler, Ibn Batuta, visited in 1331 and found to be steeped in history and tradition. Mogadishu was prosperous, diverse, and well-connected to the world markets. The Arab traveler said the men were hefty eaters, corpulent with protruding stomachs. To the keen traveler, the city seemed prosperous and lively. Oddly, in the 1990s, there were rumors in Mogadishu that incoming travelers were weighed at the old military airport in Balli Doogle for ransom purposes. Rumor had it that if you had extra pounds you were likely to pay more money to protect yourself from kidnapping. That is when appearances became a deadly reality.

I was in California when streams of Somali refugees arrived there in 1991 and afterward. Before their arrival, the Somali community was small and cohesive. We visited each other, occasionally ate together, and helped the needy. The arrival of droves of Somalis fresh from Somalia, a country that had abysmally failed, was jarring. Refugees from various clans who hated each other were placed in San Diego. However, although resentment and suspicion permeated their relationships, they were not in a position to engage in violence.

I used to see two friends who drank tea together every day in a fast food restaurant. They belonged to the same clan but from two different sub-clans. One day, I noticed the two were no longer socializing. When I inquired about the reason for their estrangement, one of them told me that they had a falling out because of recent flare-ups of fighting in the port city of Kismayo. It was apparent then that the Somali civil war had reached San Diego sans the violence.

My mother stayed in Mogadishu for the first few months of the civil war. She was attacked with gun fire once when a group of marauding gangs robbed her in her house. My cousin Shukri was fourteen, and she suffered a minor injury when a splinter hit her arm. When the fighting got intense, my mother fled to Afgooye to my brother-in-law's villa. A militia headed by Colonel Ahmed Omar Jess, a warlord, occupied Afgooye and forced my mother out of the villa. She and my cousin returned to her home. My mother did not want to leave her house until my sister persuaded her to leave. She flew to neighboring Djibouti where I met her and arranged an entry visa to the U.S for her and my cousin. She arrived in San Diego in May, 1991.

I can only speculate that my mother went through two stages after her escape from Mogadishu: stress and indifference. In the beginning, she was edgy, worried, and apprehensive about what the future held for her in America. She initially thought that the civil war back home would subside and that she would be able to return to her beloved city of Mogadishu and her villa. My mother always wanted to have her own house when my sister and I were growing up, but she couldn't afford it. Only after the two years when my sister and I left the country was my mother able to purchase a house. She was so proud of her house that she became distraught when she left Mogadishu. Her neighbor agreed to look after the villa in her absence. However, my mother never returned to Mogadishu and passed away in San Diego eighteen years after her arrival.

Several years after her arrival in California, my mother started showing indifference to Mogadishu. She no longer talked about the city or her house. She had spent forty years in the Benadir region, of which Mogadishu is the capital, and only twenty years in Qardho, her birthplace. When I offered several times to take her to Qardho for a two-month vacation, she declined. Her usual answer was astonishing: What am I going to do there? She wanted to spend the rest of her life in Mogadishu but had accepted the reality that the civil war was not winding down but instead intensifying. To her, Mogadishu slid slowly into an abyss.

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The Old Parliament Building

(Photo: Courtesy Abdi Latif Dahir: November, 2014)

I have never lost hope for Mogadishu. Somehow, I knew that the city would recover from its destruction and decay. One thing I had faith in was the people of Mogadishu − the ones who fled and the ones who stayed behind. Those who fled kept up with news of the city. I saw people from Hargeisa who would tell me about their good memories of Mogadishu. They missed it as much as the people who called the capital home. The city had captivated them intensely. There is something magical about Mogadishu. The city has the capacity to shape its residents, regardless of their background. It molds them as time goes by and exposes their softer sides. Mogadishu provides ample scope for acceptance, compassion, and forgiveness. It is an ancient city that has always been rich in its tapestry of people.

Although the capital has a long way to go in terms of recovering from its devastation, there are glimmers of hope that people are coming together. Some of those who fled are back − not only reclaiming their properties, but also feeling confident in their safety. People who would have been hunted two decades ago are building businesses in the city and are now an integral part of the new Somalia. These people have shattered the psychological barrier that crippled them and made them prisoners to their fear and biases. They thought they would be killed and ostracized. Instead, they have found their brethren welcoming them with open arms. Of course, there are cases in which the returnees were murdered by criminal elements. However, this does not represent the majority of Mogadishu residents who no longer believe that the capital must be devoid of its original residents.

I believe there is hope in the reconstruction of Mogadishu − not just in building houses, but also in building trust and confidence. Mogadishu residents are doing just that, even if incrementally. Rome, after all, was not built in a day, and so it is with Mogadishu. The city's past mood of utter despondency has been replaced with feelings of hope for rejuvenation. Yes, residents were subjected to a great deal of trauma, but some people have had time to wallow in that trauma. Now they are war-weary.

The Canadian comic Jim Carrey makes an interesting and revelatory statement in the film Dumb and Dumber. After