A Man of Good Hope Read online

  Speeding away from his uncle in a truck full of strangers, Asad was at risk of losing his connection to a lineage. It is an enormously complicated one; which part of it he invokes depends upon the situation at hand. When he counts back two generations, to his grandfather, Asad is an Abdullahi and is united to a handful of people who have the same paternal grandfather. When he counts back nine generations, he is an AliYusuf and regards everyone who can trace his lineage to the same AliYusuf as a clansman. These people are more distant than Abdullahis, and, Asad will come to learn, far less useful. But they are clansmen of a sort, nonetheless. Counting back fifteen generations, he is Mohammed Zubeyr. About twenty generations back, he is Abdille. Some two dozen generations back, Asad is Ogadeni, along with hundreds of thousands of others. Finally, somewhere in the mists of time, about thirty-five generations back, Asad, along with more than a million other people, is Daarood and thus a member of one of the Somalis’ six great clan families. The others are Hawiye, Isaaq, Dir, Digil, and Rahanwiin.

  He draws for me a skeletal image of Somali society, filling in the details of his own lineage while leaving the rest of the Daarood, as well as the other five clan families, peering down a blank page.

  —

  What, practically, do these lineages mean? That is probably the most contested question one can ask about Somalia. There was a time, certainly until Somali independence in 1960, when they were one of the bases of contractual and civil law.

  The border between myth and actual evidence is by no means clear here. But in its ideal form, the story would go like this. Sometime in the past, all AliYusuf families sent representatives to a meeting to thrash out a treaty. They decided how cases should be adjudicated in the event that one AliYusuf kills, injures, steals from, or defames another. They agreed to a scale of punishment. Should the guilty party refuse to pay compensation, they licensed AliYusuf elders to tie him to a tree and threaten to kill his livestock.

  They also agreed on what each family should contribute or receive in the event that an AliYusuf does wrong to, or is wronged by, a person from another group. This payment was called diya. The compensation for a man’s life was, in principle, a hundred camels, a woman’s life fifty camels. At the meeting at which their contract was settled, the AliYusuf would have determined how many camels the immediate family of an AliYusuf murderer pay the aggrieved party and how many camels the AliYusuf as a whole contribute.

  Once the contract was concluded, it would have become a source of unwritten law, recognized in principle by all Somali elders.

  Asad insists that diya is still operative. Were he to injure another Somali here in Cape Town, he tells me, the aggrieved one’s family would seek compensation from the AliYusuf of Cape Town. But I am not so sure. As Asad tells me more about his life, and as I watch the way he organizes his affairs, the place of diya becomes more ethereal.

  In any event, lineage is hardly all that there is to say about Somalia. To suggest so would be scandalous. Somalis have always come together in ways that transcend or ignore clans. There have been religious sects and great nationalist movements. In the cultivating villages of southern Somalia, people who have lived alongside one another for generations are bound to one another by diya agreements, no matter their respective clans. And clans themselves are by no means seamless; there are many internal divisions, some of them related to race.

  When Somalia acquired independence in 1960, a great modernizing project to abolish clans and replace them with citizens ensued. The civil servants who ran the administration in Mogadishu were not permitted to mention their clans when they introduced themselves to one another. They were not meant to be patrons gathering power and goodies for their kin in the hinterland—they were building a single nation.

  But clans remain a life force in politics, and new words were invented to describe them. In the late 1960s, civil servants simply began referring to their “ex-clans.” And so an awkward culture evolved, one that alluded to the presence of ghosts in the corridors of power, describing a civil service that lived in double time, a piece of it in the past, another in a future yet to be realized.

  After Mohamed Siad Barre came to power in 1969, he banned talk of ex-clans; they could no longer be referred to at all, even by another name. And yet, in his three decades in power, Siad Barre came to rule through a network whose members were drawn predominantly from three Daarood subclans. The Somali project to abolish clans had thus turned them into cancers; politics had now become a world in which things could not be called by their names, where people were forbidden from speaking in a language that described how power was actually wielded.

  By the time Asad was born in the mid-1980s, there was civil war in northern Somalia, many miles away from the still-peaceful Mogadishu. It was as close to a clan war as Somalia had experienced in generations, for to be Isaaq or Hawiye was to be cut off from one’s own nation-state, to be shut out in the cold.

  The five men who pounded on Asad’s mother’s door that morning in January 1991 had walked into a capital city that no longer made any pretense to be theirs. It was, for them, a source of power and wealth that had been captured by an enemy. Their task was to rout the city’s power holders, to force them to turn on their heels and flee, to leave them so wounded as to be unable to come back and fight.

  In January and February 1991, clan allegiances were probably sharper and more poisonous than ever before in Somali history. What it might mean to be cut off from one’s lineage, as had just happened to Asad, was hard to know.

  —

  Precisely what it was Asad left behind as the truck sped away is something about which he would often change his mind. That he was an Abdullahi and an AliYusuf would disappear from his life for years on end; there are, he would discover, many ways of being Somali other than through one’s clan. And then, without warning, his lineage would burst back into his life and shape his fate. When it did so, he would feel that he had been asleep for years, reeling further and further from himself.

  There and then, on that truck, Asad and Abdi were two minors without family. They were headed south toward Kismayo, the last Somali city before the Kenyan border, in a vehicle commanded by people with no immediate interest in their fate.

  On the second night, they stopped at a town called Afmadow. In each previous town, the refugees had settled into mutually wary groups, and everything had felt brittle and on edge. Here, there were people in control. Some of the men in charge were government soldiers. Others were clearly not. The memory of them brings forth fragmentary images from Mogadishu: Asad recalls important men striding through government buildings. These buildings were unlike any others in Mogadishu. He remembers them by their very tall arches; he remembers walking beneath an arch and looking up. The men here in Afmadow, he registered, moved with the same long and purposeful strides as the ones in the government buildings.

  For the first time, Asad was asked two questions that would be repeated to him again and again over the following twenty years: Who is your father? What is your clan?

  He grabbed these questions gratefully, as if they were gifts of milk and bread. “Abdullahi Hirsi,” he replied. “AliYusuf.” These men would know what to do with such information. Perhaps they would lead him to uncles or other family; perhaps Aabbo himself was here.

  Asad and Abdi were assigned places to rest for the night. They bedded down side by side. Many other bodies surrounded them. Asad enters the head of his young self, drifting off to sleep in a strange city on an evening in February 1991, and he thinks he knows what the young Asad saw. He rose up above the mishmash of bodies and found a cord running from each, just where the buttocks meet the back. These cords all raced away in one direction, many dozens of them, toward Mogadishu, where each made its way to the home in which its owner belonged. Asad’s cord snaked into the house he had sketched for me and found its way to the parental bedroom where it wrapped itself with hunger around his sleeping mother.

  When he woke, it was daylight. People were wa
lking about. It seemed that much time had passed. He turned to his cousin to find that Abdi was not there. He remembers wandering from adult to adult, asking each if he had seen his cousin. And then his memory blanks. He does not recall how he found out that during the night the important men who reminded him of the government buildings had recruited Abdi into a militia, that they were conscripting every boy fifteen years or older to fight.

  Yindy

  The stack of names Asad had offered when first asked—his own name, that of his father, his lineage, his clan—entered the great circuit of information that traveled through the ranks of Afmadow’s refugees. It was as if Asad’s lineage was being poured through a sieve so that the grit of thicker, closer attachments would get caught in the netting.

  At some point during this process of sifting, Asad was led by the hand through a market in the very center of the city and deposited into the hands of a woman he did not recognize. He had been told that she was family, close family, and that she would look after him. He remembers well his first sight of her. She sat on a low stool, legs apart, stirring a large pot of tea. Her name was Yindy. As with his siblings, Asad describes her in the first instance by her teeth.

  “They were damaged,” he says. “I had never seen teeth like these before. They were black, as if they were bruised. As if somebody had beaten her in the mouth. What I remember is that they were darker than the skin on her face. She was very pale, and also very short.”

  It was early evening. Yindy, it appeared, was serving customers. They sat on plastic chairs at the roadside and drank her tea and spoke to one another. Much later, Yindy opened a large black pot and began serving them food. Asad remembers thinking that Yindy resembled her pot: short and squat on legs that barely raised her from the ground.

  This drinking of tea and eating and talking seemed to Asad to go on forever. Several times, he drifted off and found himself hurtling through the night toward Mogadishu, only to be startled back to Afmadow by a shout or a laugh. He seemed to have entered a world that did not sleep, where people drank tea through the small hours instead of going home to families.

  Eventually, he grew so tired that he crawled under a plastic chair and slept, the voices of Yindy’s patrons filtering through his dreams. He was woken, gently, by the morning call to prayer and by the shuffling of many feet. He climbed out from under his chair to discover that the patrons were all gone, their place taken by several middle-aged women who were moving about among the pots and brewing tea. Yindy chatted with them for a while and then led Asad away.

  At first, he did not realize that they had arrived at Yindy’s home, for it did not seem a private space at all. It was a two-room shelter made of wood and zinc and mud. In front of it stood a small yard that opened onto the street. The room in which Yindy put him to sleep was so close to the people walking by, it felt as if a hand could reach in at any time and snatch him away.

  —

  He does not recall whether it was Yindy or someone else who explained it to him, but she was a close relative, the daughter of Asad’s father’s sister.

  “She had walked by herself all the way from Mogadishu,” Asad recalls. “I am not sure what her family situation was, only that she was divorced and that her husband’s family was not helping her. She was alone and in trouble. She got by running a cafeteria, cooking, and selling tea. She worked very, very hard and each day had just enough to eat.”

  Yindy was not quite alone. Asad had entered a world of women. There were about half a dozen of them, as he recalls, and they shared the cafeteria in shifts. Each day, Yindy would leave her home for work at five or six o’clock in the evening and would begin to make tea and food. She would work through the night. In the morning, at first prayers, other women would take over, and Yindy would go home to rest. She seldom slept in one of her two rooms. Instead, she would make herself a bed in what Somalis call the balbalo. Each Somali household has one, some two or three. It is a wall-less shed—four poles holding up a thatched roof—and stands in the family yard. When the temperature reaches a hundred or so degrees it is too hot to be indoors or in the sunlight, and people live in the shade of their balbalo.

  Lying there under her thatched roof during the daylight hours, Yindy was practically on the street, her only shield from passersby a large barrel that lay on its side across the width of the balbalo; Asad wondered how she managed to sleep. But sleep Yindy did, without stirring, sometimes until as late as two or three o’clock in the afternoon.

  Asad was forbidden to leave the yard while Yindy rested. The world outside was deadly, she kept warning. It was no place for a child.

  “She was not wrong,” Asad recalls. “Everyone was shooting. Two people would start arguing in the street. One would shoot the other. Ogadeni shooting Ogadeni. Refugee shooting refugee. And there were constant rumors that the Hawiye were going to attack. And so there was this nervousness, this fear, that tomorrow the world is going to fall on everyone’s head, so maybe it is better not to care so much about anyone today.”

  Yindy’s yard became the whole of Asad’s world. There were the two rooms, each insufferably hot and dark; there was the yard, barely large enough for him to pace; and there was the sleeping Yindy in her balbalo. Sometimes, he would enter the balbalo and watch her diaphragm expand and contract until the rhythms hypnotized him and the street outside disintegrated. He would find enormous relief in this movement of her body; he had no idea why.

  He was left with his thoughts, and these, recurrently, were of his house in Mogadishu, of his mother, his father, of his life. His memories, he found, took the form of several images—some of his mother, others of siblings, others of the hindi tree, some of the madrassa. They would come to him in sequence and reel over and over before his eyes, the order in which they appeared always the same. It was so unreal, the recurring sequence; it struck him that, already, after just a few weeks, he was losing his memory of his life. For these spooling images did not seem to involve him: they were images from another world.

  On some evenings, he accompanied Yindy to the cafeteria, where he would sit and listen to the adults talk and thus get some sense of what was happening. It was here that people kept discussing an imminent Hawiye attack and exchanged stories about refugees shooting one another in the streets of Afmadow. They discussed, too, whatever news or rumor they had received from Mogadishu. These discussions fell together into one big stew of talk so that Afmadow and Mogadishu, the past and the present, bubbled and cooked.

  In Mogadishu, it seemed, the Daarood people who had not left had been sucked into a hole of butchering and slaughter, and he wondered whether his father had escaped or whether he was among the dead. He heard, too, at the cafeteria, that the Hawiye militias had taken the towns on the Kismayo highway one by one, and as the names spilled off the tongues of Yindy’s customers, he recognized each as a town he had passed through. Until, finally, someone among Yindy’s customers mentioned the town of Qoryooley, where Asad had been separated from his family. The Daarood in this town and the others, people said, were “hostages.” Although it was not a word he had heard before, he soon knew what it meant, for the people were saying that the hostages were like slaves and that those believed to have worked for the Somali government were being tortured, some of them killed.

  —

  How long had he been in Afmadow when it happened? He is not sure. He thinks maybe a month. It was late morning on an especially hot day. Yindy was asleep in the balbalo. Asad, a child with no use for shade, even when the sun pelted down, was lying on his stomach on a concrete slab between the house and the balbalo. Half awake, half asleep, his ear flat against the slab, he was roused by a thumping and pounding that seemed to emanate from the ground. He raised his head in time to watch a woman hurdle his prostrate body and make for the house. She pulled unsuccessfully at the door; it was locked. Then she jumped over Asad once more and ran to the entrance of the balbalo, kicked aside the barrel that served as its door, and went inside.

  A man
ran into the yard from the street and skidded to a halt. Only once he was past Asad and standing in the mouth of the balbalo did Asad notice that in one of his hands was a pistol, its barrel pointing at the ground. The man lifted his gun, turned his face away, and fired twice into the balbalo. In that instant, Asad recalls, he was struck by the oddity of the man looking away. Why shoot at all if you do not direct your eyes at your target? What is the point?

  From the balbalo came a volley of cries. Although he had never heard Yindy cry like that before, Asad nonetheless recognized them as hers. The man turned on his heels and ran. Asad pursued him, primarily to get away from the noise Yindy was making. He recalls sprinting through the crowded streets of Afmadow, screaming, for all he was worth, “You have killed Yindy! You have killed Yindy!”

  And then he was surrounded by adults, and he was crying, and they were leading him back to his house. A crowd had already gathered. Yindy lay in the balbalo sweating, delirious, cursing under her breath. She had been shot square in the shin, and the wound was deep and wide and gruesome. Chipped bone and blood and raw flesh: things, Asad thought, the world had no right to see.

  Later that day, he learned that the man and woman who had run into Yindy’s yard were brother and sister. The woman had just announced that she was pregnant. She was also unmarried. Her brother had picked up a gun and chased her through the streets in pursuit of his family’s stolen honor.

  Asad scoffs as he tells the story.

  “Somali men,” he says. “Shooting an innocent woman in the leg to get back this thing called honor, a thing you cannot even see, let alone eat or drink.”

  He will do that again several times: he examines things Somali from a distance and shakes his head in disbelief. At other times, though, he is the dishonored man, and he warns that no deterrent is frightening enough to stop him from snapping a South African’s neck.