It was sometime in the 1970s when a Somali man settled in England. This hard-working man weathered the challenges of adjusting to life in a new home. He studied and worked hard. One day, he met a young White lady, and he found himself falling in love with her. The young woman felt the same. But there was a problem: Her family was adamantly opposed to the couple getting married. The couple went ahead and got married any way. Then the couple was blessed with a daughter and a son. After the birth of their children, the woman’s family softened their stand and accepted the couple’s union.
The Somali man was very close to his children, and would advise his daughter that, when she became an adult, she should marry a Somali man. “The Somali people are great,” he would tell her. The girl listened to her father, and it was cemented in her head that Somali men were, perhaps, unique and would make good husbands.
The girl blossomed into a beautiful young woman and started attending a university. She came to know many students from diverse backgrounds. Then, one day, she met a young, lithe, and handsome Somali man who hailed from Jlib, Somalia. The man, she thought, combined a brilliant mind, disarming modesty, and a buoyant spirit. There was an incredible chemistry between the two and they became attracted to one another. The young lady was so excited that she invited her Somali friend home for dinner. She had already told her parents about the young man, and related the fact that she wanted to marry him. Her father was especially pleased that his daughter was, finally, heeding to his persistent advice that she marry a Somali man.
The young woman and her family were excited about the meeting until the young man showed up. The father was speechless when he saw the man who had been courting his daughter. His wife, however, was jovial and courteous. The father took his daughter aside and asked, in a voice thick with sarcasm, “What the hell are you doing to me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is this the guy that you told me about?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Girl, don’t you know that this young man is Bantu?”
“Bantu?”
“Yes”.
“But he is Somali, Dad. Remember, you always told me to marry a Somali man”
“You don’t understand my daughter. This is not the kind of Somali I was telling you about”.
“What is the problem?”
“I know I did tell you to marry Somali, but…”
“But what! Besides, he is Muslim too”.
The father saw the proposed marriage as being apocalyptically bad. He had a certain ‘image’ to maintain in the Somali community, where gossip could easily incubate and flourish. He was perplexed as to how the Bantu man buffaloed his way into his household. His wife, though, offered a ringing endorsement of the marriage. She was fully aware of the kind of experience she had undergone when she married outside of her race. She questioned why her husband went into a panic mode like someone experiencing cardiac arrest. It was obvious that her husband took umbrage with the fact that the young man was not from the “right clan”. Why, she wondered, was her husband oblivious to his own past?
“Don’t you remember how my family initially treated you, ignored you, and discriminated against you,” She asked.
In an ironic twist, the father started accepting the inevitability of his daughter’s marriage to the young man. He did not have the mettle to wage the type of fight that would alienate his daughter forever.
“Now I understand what the late American novelist John Updike was initially facing when one of his daughters married a Ghanaian,” the Father said with chuckles. “Even among blacks, there is some sort of stratum that is unacceptable.” The man realized that he had to conquer his own prejudices. Updike’s memoir, Self-Consciousness, was dedicated to his two half-African grandsons, and, in a letter in the book addressed to them, he assured them that Americans were, after all, a people “with mixed blood”. The novelist’s son also married a Kenyan.
Note: I want to thank my friend, I. Warsame, in Ohio, for sharing this story with me.
