A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (3 page)

“My memories of this are not concrete,” he says. “It is just a piece of knowledge that floats in my head. I don't remember the adults talking about it. I don't remember whether they were worried. Maybe they were worried; the regime could keep you locked up a long time.”

Asad's other memory of his father takes the form of a single, vivid image. It was early evening. Asad heard footfalls in the yard. He stepped outside to find his father standing there, a bag over his shoulder. He had been away, somewhere, on business; Asad had not been expecting him. “Aabbo,” he said.

In reply, his father put down his bag, flashed the broadest smile, and opened his arms. Asad ran to him and found himself lifted up to his father's face. They were so close that their noses almost touched. He inhaled Aabbo's breath; it was fresh, it smelled of a sweet herb. He observed the pores in the skin of his father's cheeks above his thin beard: they glistened; the skin was a little oily. But what remains with him most vividly is the smiling mouth into which he stared: the wide, pink tongue; the teeth so long and so perfectly shaped they seemed like narrow ivory tombstones.

“I have his teeth,” Asad tells me. “When I look in the mirror and examine them, I think of the evening I looked into his mouth.”

I think of Asad examining the smiles of the many Somalis he has met on his journey; he is judging his distance from them by what he sees in their mouths.

And then there is the madrassa. It was quite literally across the road from his home, as he remembers it. The journey from his front gate to his classroom took less than a minute.

That the making of ink is his most cherished memory of school is no surprise, for the rest, it seems, was not very nice. He remembers his teacher Dahir by his ceaseless voice and by his thrashing stick. Dahir had been reciting both books of the Koran for so long that he could shout passages of the Holy Book in rotation to twenty students at a time, each student at a different place in the text.

That is what Asad remembers. He clutched the handle of his
loox
in one hand, his pen in the other, and waited his turn. His cup of ink lay ready at his feet. The sound of Dahir's voice, hurling holy passages at one student after the next, would grow closer. Then it was Asad's turn. Dahir would shout; Asad would write on his
loox.
He kept his writing small, for if both sides of the
loox
were full before his passage was complete, he would have to try to remember the remainder of the passage by the sound of Dahir's voice.

As soon as Dahir moved on, Asad would begin to memorize what he had just written, for the clock was ticking; in the late afternoon, he would have to wash the ink off his
loox
with a damp clod of grass. The following morning, he recited what he had learned to Dahir. How much Asad failed to recall determined how heavily Dahir beat him.

Asad was six when he started at the madrassa. Learning both books of the Koran was meant to take another six years. He should have begun learning other subjects when he was twelve, like the Latin alphabet so that he could write Somali, then geography, history, and mathematics.

On the morning he describes the madrassa, I drive away from Blikkiesdorp thinking of what he has said, and I see his mother and the learning of the Koran as opposite poles of his childhood. His time with her was what he lived for, it seems, while his time at school was so cold and drab. Then I blink and think again, and now I see that mother and madrassa share something important. They were the two pieces of Mogadishu Asad took with him into exile. His mother he felt inside him all the time. As for the learning of the Koran: wherever he went, no matter how far or how strange, somebody was always starting a madrassa. Wherever he found himself, the Holy Book would open in front of him until he knew the whole thing by heart, as he does now, and as do the one hundred sixty or so Somali souls who bed down each night in Blikkiesdorp, each of them many years from home.

Led by Asad's uncle, the party of fleeing Abdullahis made its way to Afgooye, a town thirty-one kilometers west of Mogadishu. Thousands upon thousands of people filled the town center, all of them in flight from the capital city, all of them Daarood, all discussing in which direction to go next. Here Asad learned not just that adult fear has a place in this world but that it can fill up the world. News was spreading that the militias were on the heels of the refugees, that they did not want able-bodied men to leave alive, that they had mortars and cannons and machine guns.

Asad remembers, above all, in Afgooye, his uncle flinging an arm around a truck driver whom he had come across on the street. There was something furtive in this gesture, as if his arm did not quite belong on the strange man's shoulder, as if he were trying something out. Although his uncle's face remained hard and blank, his excitement was betrayed in his dancing eyes. He had struck gold. For the truck in front of which the driver stood was from a fleet of what Asad still remembers today as “special trucks,” special because they were run by clansmen, by Ali-Yusuf people. In normal times, they carried produce from the fertile river valleys of southern Somalia to Mogadishu. Now they were a passage to safety for anybody who could trace his ancestry nine generations to a forebear called AliYusuf.

On the back of the AliYusuf man's truck, the family moved from town to town. Asad names them one after the other, marking each on a map that lies between us. His marks stretch farther and farther south on the highway between Mogadishu and the Kenyan border. Were one to have a bird's-eye view, he says, and take in the whole, one would see a squirming snake of Daarood people. Most were on foot. Some, like the Abdullahis, were crammed into trucks. Asad concentrated above all on his uncle's face, for its expression was a weather vane telling him how things were among the adults. He recalls his uncle carrying a plucked chicken like it was his own nakedness, as if he were clutching in his arms a deeply private piece of himself. Then his uncle sat and hunched his shoulders and cut pieces from the chicken while the family assembled around him, a jealous and shameful gathering. It was only now, Asad says, perhaps as long as two or three weeks after witnessing his mother's murder, that he imbibed quite how much had changed. To see a strong, tall patriarch of a man cutting up a chicken like a guilty thief—he was truly in a foreign world now.

He points to a place on the map: Qoryooley. It is no more than a speck, about a quarter of the way from Mogadishu to the Kenyan border.

For some reason Asad no longer recalls, they were at this point separated from the AliYusuf fleet for a while; the driver of the truck was a stranger. Asad's uncle supervised the boarding of the vehicle. He gave his son, a fifteen-year-old boy called Abdi, a foot lift onto the truck. Then he passed his bag to Abdi, who put it down beside him and reached out his arms to receive whatever his father was going to pass him next. The rest of the family party was somewhere behind Uncle, waiting for their turn to board. Uncle picked Asad up and handed him to Abdi. There was a brief exchange, when the weight of the airborne Asad was transferred from his uncle's to his cousin's arms. At precisely this moment, the whistling of a handheld mortar arched over the scene, and everyone froze and looked up. The roadside exploded, throwing clumps of earth and rock into the air, and the truck rocked and tilted. And then Asad heard the truck's engine screech, and he was moving, still in his cousin's arms, the two of them thrown against the people next to them. Asad swiveled around in time to see his vanishing uncle turn his back, his attention now on those of his family who remained with him on the ground. Asad turned again and looked into Abdi's eyes; they were glazed over as if covered in a treacly liquid.

Something momentous can happen to a person we barely know, yet we will understand intuitively what he is going through simply because we, too, are human. But there are also moments in a person's life one will never understand if one does not know something about his world. Asad turned his face from Abdi's to take one last glance at his uncle's receding figure. Then he faced front and stared ahead. What lay before him was human, to be sure, but it was also distinctively Somali.

How best to describe this? Here is one way. Were I asked to name my forebears I could immediately rattle off the names of my parents and grandparents. With some mental effort, I could also tell you the names of some of my great-grandparents. Beyond them, I know almost nothing.

This is not so for Asad. From a very young age, he, along with all the other children with whom he attended madrassa, knew by heart the names of the last dozen generations of male ancestors on his father's side. It was the recital of these names, rather than a place on a map, or the site of a grave, that informed Asad who he was.

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 representa
tives 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?