Mogadishu Memoir (Part IV): A Neighborhood In Transition

In 1970s, there was a popular Omar Shooli song –lyrics by Abdalla Nuriddin- called ‘Abyan’ which talked about my childhood neighborhood and it went like this;

“Abyan waxay ku nooshahay
Aqalkeda uu yahay
Isku-Raran Agteediyoo
Agagaarka Ceel Gaab


“Abyan lives
[In] a house located
Near Isku-Raran
[And] around El- Gab”

My old neighborhood, El Gab or Isku-Raran, was the hub of Mogadishu, and in its vicinity there were many shops, restaurants, and eager vendors selling their products. Also, the city’s bus depot was located there, and it was the first place where people that came from different cities in Somalia landed when they entered the city. El Gab was a busy place that bustled with people, replete with the sounds of braying donkeys, and symphony of car horns. In essence, it was a lively place. As a child, I used to go to the El Gab Square late in the afternoons when the hot sun cooled down, and I would listen to the story tellers or, as some referred them, charlatans. There were throngs of people surrounding various storytellers and the latter would entertain the audience with the stories they weaved. Most of the stories these men told were laden with superstitious tales but had underlying moral underpinnings. The storytellers always managed to stop when the story got interesting in order to cajole money from the listeners. The audience, who seemed to hate the cliff hangers, wanted to know the end of the story and would willingly donate money. I heard all kinds of outrageous stories, however, the most outlandish was the one about a man whose penis was cut off by his wife but the man finally managed to get his severed manhood back in tact after going through a soul-wrenching process of repentance. Beside listening to the tall tales, I also enjoyed going to El Gab Cinema which was my favorite place to hang out. The neighborhood had two vestiges of Italian colonialism; the ‘Ambulatorio El Gab”, an out-patient medical center, and a big burial site exclusively for Italians that was, in later years, incrementally desecrated and finally removed.

Homes near our house were populated by families, but few blocks away from my residence was a cluster of dwellings rumored to be a hot bed for prostitution? Behind our home, there was a big house and the owner had exotic wild animals such as monkeys, baboons, tortoise, wild cats, and gazelles which he kept them in cages and sold them to the Europeans. I was always scared of getting close to that monstrous house for fear of encountering wayward monkeys or baboons. There were times that some of the male baboons got loose in the neighborhood and caused havoc. Next to the house with the wild animals was where my friend Abdulqadir Mohamed Mohamud Yusuf- nicknamed Cabdulqaadir Cadde- lived. Abdulqadir (Majertein-Issa Mohamoud) and I were best friends in the 1960s and he was a brilliant student who excelled in school. He lived with his single father- a male nurse nicknamed ‘Qoor Dooro’- his younger brother- Abdirizak- his aunt Mulki, and his Ogaden grandmother, Murayo, may God bless her soul. Abdulqadir’s father was semi-educated but he was a committed parent who oversaw his children’s education. Abdulqadir’s mother lived in Garowe and had her own family. Murayo, the grandmother, showed me a great of love and care because she believed that I was a well-mannered boy. As children, Abdulqadir, his bother Abdirizak, and I played together and sometimes we used to pretend to be cowboys. I used to make toy pistols out of thick paper and gun belts from ropes. Abdulqadir used to go beyond the role-playing and would tell his brother and I fabricated stories about cowboys. Abdirizak and I enjoyed listening to these wild stories but, on Abdulqadir’s back, we would grumble about being subjected to a contexture of lies.

There was a Hawadle family across our house; Khalif, his wife Amina, and their children. Khalif was tall, lanky, and hot-tempered man, but his wife was gentle and reserved. Their son, Bashir, and I were in the same age but he attended a school where Italian was the medium language. There were also two families from Eritrean descent that lived three houses away; “Baal Dooro” and Hashim. ‘Baal Dooro’ was a short, stocky man who worked, as a technician, for Radio Mogadishu. I used to see him leave his house early in the morning as he headed to Radio Mogadishu where he was responsible for broadcast equipments running smoothly. I sadly remember times when Siad Barre’s soldiers barged into his house and he was dragged to the radio station so that the government could broadcast urgent news such as aborted coup. Hashim was in his late 40s at the time, always drove fancy cars, and appeared to be well off compared to other families in my neighborhood. One day, Hashim vanished. It was later discovered that Hashim worked for the Ethiopian government and was in Mogadishu as a deep cover spy. My brother-in-law told me many years later that, while in an official visit to Addis Ababa, Hashim came to the hotel where the Somali delegation was staying.

Next to Hashim’s house was where the Baynax Barre family (Ogaden) lived and I was friendly with their two boys, Abdilatiif and Liban. There was also the house of “Jamal Jabiye” (Jamal the Breaker/Demolisher); a Reer Hamar man, that worked for the Municipal Authority and whose job was to demolish homes that were on the way of new streets to be paved in the city. It was ironic that Jamal Jabiye’s own home was later destroyed by a government decree to make way for a major street in our neighborhood.

A Dhulbahante man (Du’ale) lived two houses away from our house with his wife, Caanood, a fierce Marehan woman, and their children. Their daughter, Duniyo Dualle, was my sister’s age and quite popular. This family used to rent out one of their rooms. I remember one particular Hawadle family that rented out a room from the Du’ale family which consisted of an army soldier, his wife Habibo, who had arrived from Hiiraan region, and their young children. This soldier was called Guurgarato and he would become, at the height of Siad Barre’s rule, a tycoon. Sometime in May 1991, and at the peak of the Somali civil war, my mother told me that she was boarding a plane at Mogadishu Airport on her way out of the country when she saw Guurgarato flanked by bodyguards. Guurgarato was surprised to see her and exclaimed, “Oh! Dahabo! Were you still in Mogadishu?” My mother, who always had high regards for Guurgarato, was miffed that the tycoon did not even show common courtesy of greeting her or inquiring about her welfare. Not known for nourishing a grudge, that was a peculiar encounter that my mother never forgot.

A block away from my home was the house of Abukar Kassim (Geledi), his Ogaden wife, and their children. The Kassim daughters were one of the prettiest in the neighborhood; one became an air hostess with the Somali Airlines and another became the wife of General Adan Gabyow, Somalia’s Defense Minister in mid 1980s. Few houses from the Kassim family was the house/store of Hajiyo Bullo (Majertein-Nuuh Jabraa’iil); the mother of Abdalla Mohamed Fadil, who later became a member of the Supreme Revolutionary Council and a Cabinet Minister under Siad Barre regime.

The family that had some indirect influence on our neighborhood, perhaps, was the one next door to us. The patriarch of this family was an elderly man named Garweyne (Majertein-Omar Mohamoud) who lived in Mogadishu all his life. I found Garweyne’s household to be fascinating and, in retrospect, different than other homes in my neighborhood because it had an astounding array of characters. The Garweyne family consisted of the family patriarch, his wife Axado (Habar Gidir-Saleebaan), aunts, children, grandchildren, and other relatives; the house was always full of people. Ali Garweyne, the son, was in his twenties at the time, and worked for the American Embassy. He was an archtype soccer fan; garrulous and loyal. From time to time, he would come out of his house, sit on the front stairs, watch the children play in the street, and he would prod, tweak, and challenge them. Salado Garweyne was several years older than me, and she moved to Italy in early 70s. Lul Garweyne, a divorced woman with a son, was in her twenties and was tall and beautiful. Zeinab Garweyne was my sister’s best friend in the 60s and 70s and she was always polite to others. She and my sister shared a lot. It is, as the French say, “Tous les beaux esprits se recontrent” (All beautiful spirits find themselves). Zeinab ended up marrying a Majertein guy (Mohamed Ali Maad) who worked for the Somali Airlines and later defected after joining the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF). Maryan Garweyne was in her thirties at the time and was married to a Reer Hamar artist, Mohamed Osman Ibtilo. Ibtilo used to appear in Reer Hamar plays. Zahra Garweyne was the oldest of Garweyne children and was married to Mohamed Geedi, an Habar-Gidir businessman, and had several children. Two of her children, Sa’eed and Su’di were close to my age. Zahra worked at a hospital and was often away from home but, when she was home, her presence was widely felt. She was tall and endowed with remarkable physical strength. Zahra was my favorite Garweyne children because she was, by all measures, a portrait of kindness and generosity. If her children went to the movies, and she saw me playing outside, she would call me and would give me money to go to the movies. She wanted me to have good time, and her generosity toward me was something I will never forget. Zahra was assertive and witty. In fact, the Garweyne progeny brought a great deal of humor to our community and elements of Westernization. But then, phases of modernization were already creeping in Somalia in 1960s.

In late 1960s, Zahra’s husband decided to run for a seat in the Somali parliament and the Garweyne family rallied behind their son-in-law by soliciting the support of the people in the neighborhood. As a child, I remember seeing a lot of people coming to a weekly party which was held at the Garweyne house where food and soft drinks were served while the pulsating music blared in the background. Zahra’s children, Sa’eed and Su’di (under ten years old at the time) opened the party with beautiful dancing that used to captivate the attendees. Then, two lines of dancing were formed, one for the men and the other for the women. As I recall, I was always a spectator because dancing was not my bailiwick. Besides, I was shy in public places. But story had that one night I joined the crowd of dancers and did a bit of dancing. My sister and Zeynab Garweyne conveyed this story to me many years later, but I have no recollection of this incident. I have doubts that I was brave enough to dance in front of tens of people. I can only think of one occasion in which I danced so enthusiastically and wildly, but then I was an adult. It happened in 1983 or 1984 while in college in Ohio and during Eid celebration. I was hanging with some Arab men from the Gulf who were singing folk songs in a tiny apartment. It was an unremarkable experience except for its dullness. I wanted to rejuvenate the men in that joyous occasion so I started dancing wildly. I thought this peculiar incident was in the dustbin of history until my then wife informed me that the Arab women in our married-student complex were impressed with my dance moves. I was unaware that the event was even videotaped. That was a scene I would have paid real money to see it in tape!

The Garweyne family probably introduced some Western music to our neighborhood. For the first time, I saw teenage boys and girls in the Garweyne compound and listening to the Beatles, Elvis, Ray Charles, etc. The youngsters would sometimes hang in the alley between our house and the Garweyne compound and engage in amorous flirtations. But in all fairness, the Garweyne children were not involved in those illicit acts, and they made a show of rising above the fray. Paradoxically, Garweyne children were a bit conservative even though the family was indirectly facilitating the introduction of some elements of Westernization in the neighborhood. For instance, most of the Garweyne girls ended up marrying men arranged for them by relatives. Members of the Garweyne household used to call me, “Hassanow” and would ask me to entertain them. They listened, with rapt attention, to my impetuous and idle talk. Oddly, they thought I was very funny, but as a child I loved the attention I was getting.

One incident had a searing effect on me because it involved the brutal murder of one the members of the Garweyne family. I think I was either nine or ten years old when an aunt of Garweyne children, who used to take care of them, became the victim of homicide. Our neighborhood, at the time, noticed a sharp spike in criminal activities such as burglaries. Criminals became so bold that they used to break in homes and take portable items. Some of these criminals would dig holes under the front doors to seep inside the houses. The Garweyne aunt, apparently, foiled numerous attempts to rob that big and tempting house because she was vigilant and tough. However, the criminals became frustrated with her and one of the hoodlums managed one night to lure her out of the compound, and struck her head with a metal object. The blow to her head was followed by a primal scream that pierced the still night which woke up many people. Sadly, the criminals managed to vanish in the darkness of the night. The aunt was taken to Digfer Hospital, and I remember neighbors pouring into the Garweyne house anxiously waiting to hear news about the aunt’s condition, but she died several hours after the incident. For the Garweyne family, and all of us who knew the aunt, it was a sad moment and we all felt the loss. Personally, I felt like a member of my own family was brutally murdered. The family was buoyed by a wave of sympathy and support and the ordeal clearly taxed and tested the neighborhood. Few years later, the perpetrator of this heinous crime was arrested for committing another brutal murder in Baidoa, 200 Kilometers away from Mogadishu, and was sentenced to death. During the court proceedings, he dropped a bombshell when he confessed to a long list of criminal activities including the killing of the Garweyne family aunt.

The neighborhood that I grew up was diverse when it came to its ethnicity and clan make-up. As mentioned above, there were families from Eritrean descent. There was one family from Arab descent and also a group of Oromo (Aruso) migrant labor. In mid sixties, Mogadishu experienced a torrential rain that devastated some houses and especially the shoddy-built house which was rented by the hard-working Oromo men. The entire neighborhood came to their assistance by giving them money and food. For weeks, the women in the neighborhood took turns cooking food for the Oromo men. One of the memorable moments for me was when one of the Madhiban girls, and a close friend of Zeinab Garweyne, got married, and many people in the neighborhood took part of the celebration. I remember luminary singers like Hassan Diriye, Omar Dhuule, and Mohamed Saleebaan coming to the neighborhood and singing at the wedding. Our neighborhood was also home to the poet and entertainer Hirsi Siiqe (Majertein) and his Marehan wife who hailed from Cawuduwaaq in Central Somalia. The couple’s daughter, Hodan, and another girl in the neighborhood, Asho Liin, were one of the vanguard children who became part of the group “Ubaxa Kacaanka” (The Flowers of the Revolution) under Barre regime.

The old Somali Youth League (SYL) headquarter was located three blocks away from my house and I recall two young men from Mozambique living in one of the back rooms of the center. Some of the neighborhood children used to taunt and harass one of the young men by making ‘ugly’ faces just because he looked, to their eyes, different. The young man, in turn, used to go berserk and would chase the children.

Mogadishu Memoir Part III: Defying the Odds

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust.

***

It was challenging for me as a young boy, while growing up in Mogadishu in the 1960s, to be surrounded by two strong-willed women. If my mother was a symbol of doggedness in the face of adversity, my sister was the paragon of discipline, competitiveness, and self-confidence. If my mother had a way of giving her views without appearing to do so, my sister enunciated her thoughts clearly and carefully.

My sister, Lul Mohamed Nur, is five years older than me, but I would not dare say so in front of people who have seen both of us lest I be accused of wishful thinking. Simply put, she appears much younger than me. She is tall, sociable, and smart. As a child, I was always conscious of giving her that power of being my ‘protector’ and she, in turn, always saw me as her little brother who needed her guidance. I do not know if my sister knows this; she did have some influence on me, especially in my formative years.

I remember my sister being a well-behaved and well-liked child in our neighborhood. When most young women her age stayed home and did domestic chores, my sister was an assiduous student who attended, in the 60s and early 70s, an all-Arabic Egyptian-run school (Jamal Abdinassir) from kindergarten to the 12th grade. If my sister liked something, she was not bashful of letting people know. I remember an incident in which my sister and some of her girl friends went to the house of a lady that baked Somali bread ‘muufo’. The baker lady at the time was churning milk into yogurt and my sister commented how the yogurt looked good. “Do you want some?” the lady asked my sister and her friends. The other girls sheepishly said “no” except my sister who said, “I would love to have some”. Then, the lady offered the yogurt only to my sister and when Lul tried to eat, the girls asked her if she could share it with them. “No way,” my sister protested, “you were offered but refused to accept the offer”.

I was probably 4 or five years old when I started going to the Quran School, or Dugsi as it is called, with my sister. We had to walk to the school, which was at least 15 minutes away. While attending the Dugsi, I got involved in a Quran contest with a beautiful, bright, and competitive Abgaal girl named Rahma. Rahma was new to our school but felt at ease with the new environment. She and I were in the same age group but the age or gender was not important factors. What was important was to see which student had memorized the Quran the best and the most. In our Dugsi, there were always contests and Rahma and I became finalists for one of those contests. Initially, I was able to beat her in one of these contests because of my sister’s assistance. But Rahma was a fierce competitor and she kept coming back more determined than before. I held my ground and managed to get ahead of her. After a while, I did not care much about competing with Rahma, but my sister did. Lul used to spend more time with me in order to get ahead of Rahma but that girl proved to be a formidable contender and my victory was short lived. After my sister graduated from the Dugsi, Rahma caught up with me and got ahead. When some of the children in my neighborhood told my sister about my embarrassing defeat in the hands of Rahma, Lul was very disappointed. Somehow, she felt that I had let her down.

I was fascinated by my sister’s creativity when it came to cooking; she always experimented with different things which at times seemed odd to me. My sister would buy vegetables and make delicious meals out of it and she seemed averse to traditional food of rice and spaghetti. Even today, as an adult, she enjoys cooking and I consider her a great chef.

My sister Lul was a voracious reader. She was the one who introduced me to Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. I always admired the good education my sister was getting from her school. I do not recall ever studying Shakespeare or Charles Dickens in my own prestigious Russian-built Benadir Secondary School. I still remember Lul reading to me Shakespeare’s famous play, The Merchant of Venice, and becoming enamored with this captivating tale of a Jewish merchant, Shylock, bent on getting a ‘pound of flesh’ from poor Antonio. I was fascinated with Portia defending her husband and his friend by disguising as a male attorney. As a child, I could not help but admire this type of storytelling. She also read to me Charles Dickens’ famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities. As a child, I had hard time understanding the killings and the carnage engulfing France during the revolution, but I was fascinated with the love story between Lucy and her noble husband Charles Darnay. Later, as a teenager, I started reading my sister’s Arabic books and became more entranced with them.

While growing up, my mother always treated Lul like a grown up. I was the impetuous child who required close supervision, and that used to irritate me. At age eleven or twelve, my sister lost her expensive watch that my mother had bought her while in school. Petrified to face our mother’s wrath, my sister, after school, went straight to my Uncle Abdi Gurey’s house in Hodan District. My uncle had to bring her to our house and plead to my mother to forget about the watch and forgive my sister, who was afraid and remorseful. My uncle gave my mother some money to cover the cost of the watch. All this was unfolding without my mother ever uttering a word or even showing how she might have been upset about the lost watch. My mother, a known martinet, kept smiling and seemed to be amused with the comic potential of the whole incident.

In the 1960s, I first heard about the Beatles, Ray Charles, the Temptations, and Elvis, through my sister. The information that I was imbibing from Lul about Western Music at the time was, at best, mediocre. I still remember my sister telling me the story behind Ray Charles’ hit “Hit Road Jack”. She made it more like a racial matter in which a black American man was trying to pass some Whites in a street and was being harassed. Of course, the movie RAY told a different story.

In mid 1970s, I decided to join the Somali officer-training program so I could go to the Soviet Union. I was interested in studying abroad and coming back to Somalia as an army officer. Naively, I contacted ordinary people who happened to be Marehan so they could intercede on my behalf. I remember going and seeking the help of a young man in our Isku-Raran neighborhood, Omar Yusuf Marehan, at a café close to El Gab Cinema and meeting him to help me. Omar, though Marehan, was in no position to help me achieve my career goal. Perplexed by my request, he looked at me and politely promised to look into the matter. In the midst of my obsession to join the army, my sister intervened and said that I would not leave school and join the army. At the time, she was the breadwinner in our household, and I chose not to disagree with her request but I was disappointed and felt that I had missed an opportunity. This was in 1976, and a year later, Somalia was involved in a bloody war with Ethiopia. I always wondered how my future would have turned if I joined the army.

In 1978, my sister married her boss: a family man 20 years her senior and with wife and eight children. We, family members, became our own befuddlement. Abdirahman Jama Barre was the Foreign Minister of Somalia and my sister’s immediate supervisor. Although Abdirahman and I come from two diametrically-opposed political spectrums, there were many times-in a span of 32 years- he had shared with me some intriguing stories, but that is a discussion for another day.

My brother-in-law Abdirahman was, in all fairness, always kind to my mother but his marriage to my sister drew the ire of one strong man; President Siad Barre, his brother. The president was concerned that Abdirahman was wrecking his first marriage in favor of a young and upcoming woman. After three years of marriage and the birth of two children abroad, my sister, posted in Europe at the time, went back to Somalia. One day, Siad` Barre summoned her to the presidential palace, Villa Somalia. Lul must have felt a morbid fear in facing the president. My sister found the president in his office incandescent with rage like a snake coiled to strike. Siad Barre asked Lul to leave Abdirahman Jama alone because he was already married and was the father of eight children. Barre was under pressure from Abdirahman’s first wife (Shiikhaal) to intervene and do something about the couple’s faltering marriage. Siad Barre offered my sister a plumb job-away from the Foreign Ministry- if she left Abdirahman and saved his first marriage. My sister, a quiet and a courteous person by nature, politely declined. The president flew off the handle, asked my sister her full name, as though he did not know the person he had summoned, scribbled something in his desk calendar book, and abruptly dismissed her from his office. My sister thought that she would be facing an uncertain and possibly treacherous future. It was widely rumored that whoever made the listing in that notorious book was doomed. But she was vastly relieved when nothing ominous happened. Several years later, Siad Barre became cordial and left the couple alone after they started having a total of seven children.

My sister and I used to get into heated political debate in Egypt in front of friends. I was the critic of the very government she was working for and she was the defender. It was only natural, that while in a visit to Mogadishu in 1985, that my brother-in-law rendered a characteristic verdict against me in my mother’s house. “Your son,” my brother-in-law told her, “is a good student and a fine young man, but he is ‘kacaan-diid’ (anti-revolutionary)”. I thought that Abdirahman had gotten a waft of my discussions with my sister in Cairo, but I was wrong. Oddly, he had something else in mind. In 1982, while visiting some friends in Washington, D.C, I was invited to a wedding. Someone, whom I guess must have been suffering from Kat hangover, came up with harebrained idea of asking me, a 22-year old man from Ohio majoring political science, to give an impromptu speech. That was a colossal mistake. It was a social and joyous gathering attended by many people, including Somali diplomats. After congratulating the young couple, I took few jabs at the policies of the Somali government. The speech lasted ten minutes, and I honestly thought it was all forgotten until someone told my brother-in-law about it. He was, to put it mildly, incensed but he never confronted me.

While growing up, my sister loved learning and always wanted to seek higher education. However, she got married at age 23 and, after a year, became a mother. Nevertheless, she started attending the Somali National University and because of family responsibilities and the gestation of the political turmoil in Somalia in late 1980s, Lul was unable to finish her college education. The words ‘discipline’ and ‘determination’ often come to my mind when I talk about my sister. Ten years ago, my sister, over forty, went back to school and took university courses with American youngsters that were young enough to be her children. She had an adamantine will to get her college degree and, indeed, she succeeded in obtaining her B.A in Business Administration.