The World's Most Dangerous Place (33 page)

Like Richard Burton who wrote that he could not ‘well explain the effect of Arab poetry to one who has not visited the Desert’, the
Sayyid understood intuitively that nothing touched the fierce nomadic soul like a good poem. His modern jihadist successors had the same insight. Osama bin Laden marked the wedding of his son in Kandahar in January 2001 by declaiming a poem of his own composition that celebrated the recent al-Qaida suicide attack on the USS
Cole
as it refuelled at Aden. The text of his verse later found its way into the pan-Arab newspaper
Al-Hayat
:

A destroyer: even the brave fear its might.

It inspires horror in the harbour and in the open sea.

She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and fake might.

To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion.

A dinghy awaits her, riding the waves
⁵

Until the 1940s, according to the Polish professor of Somali literature B.W. Andrzejewski, oral poetry in Somalia ‘was used in inter-clan and national politics as a weapon of propaganda . . . by custom, opinions expressed in verse could be much sharper in tone than anything said in ordinary language.’
⁶
The poetry itself was highly formalized, and had to follow complex rules of alliteration if it was to be judged any good. The aspiring poet also had to select the metre best suited to the subject matter. The
gabay
, for instance, was favoured for the handling of serious subjects at a leisurely pace, while the
jiifto
was preferred when more urgency was required. Even more urgent was the
geeraar
which, according to Andrzejewski, ‘used to be recited on horseback and was associated with journeyings and war’. Although oral poetry is no longer central to social discourse, poetry recital competitions remain popular in the twenty-first century, above all among the eternally
homesick diaspora, where the best poets can fill arenas and are treated like rock stars. According to aficionados, though, there is no greater master of the language than the Sayyid, a poet who could write a poem about a camel, and ‘capture the innermost nature of the camel’.
*
7

I badly wanted to see the ruins of Taleh, which enticingly lay just 50 miles north of Garowe. The Sayyid built fortresses all over Somalia in the course of his long rebellion, but the Dervish capital was different: a giant complex of thirteen interlocking stone fortresses known as the Silsillat (‘Chain’), a word that also hinted at the holy lineage of the Sayyid, who was said by his followers to be descended from the Prophet himself. The wall encompassed wells, gardens, granaries. There was room for 5,000 Dervish fighters, their horses and camels, and hundreds of head of cattle. There were mighty tomb towers containing the remains of the Sayyid’s parents and other notables, as well as an execution area called Hed Kaldig (‘Place of Blood’). The whole was overlooked by three further forts over 60 feet high, one of which was reserved for the Sayyid himself, and connected to the Silsillat by a tunnel 200 yards long. It was without doubt the greatest archaeological ruin in Somalia.

Nick Beresford, the Garowe UNDP chief, was keen to see it too, and so in early 2011 we began to lobby the Farole government for permission to mount a small expedition there. It shouldn’t have been a problem. There seemed no doubt, and Farole’s ministers agreed, that Taleh came under their administration. The district’s inhabitants were all Darod clansmen, 95 per cent of them
Dolbahante, who belonged to the same Harti confederation of sub-clans as President Farole’s Majeerteen. There were, however, certain difficulties involved with a trip to Taleh, chief of which was that it lay not in Puntland proper, but in the contested province of Sool. This made it a kind of no-man’s-land for the Garowe administration, who tried to avoid antagonizing Hargeisa unnecessarily. The policy was to let sleeping dogs lie, so the Minister for Information, Culture and Heritage, Ahmed Ali Askar, sucked through his teeth when we first asked.

On the other hand, we could see that our request had put him on the spot, for what kind of a heritage minister could not arrange a tourists’ visit to the country’s greatest ruin, 50 miles from his capital? Farole’s critics had always sneered that his authority did not extend far beyond the tarmac between Galkacyo and Bossasso, and Askar’s hesitation now suggested that the jibe might be true. It turned out that very few members of Farole’s government had been to Taleh since he came to power in 2009. Askar himself had not been since 1978. However, after many days of lobbying it became obvious that Farole himself had been consulted, and that he had ruled in our favour. In fact, not only did we have permission to travel to Taleh: we were to be accompanied there by an official government delegation from Garowe. The president, it seemed, had decided to take advantage of our visit to put down a territorial marker for Puntland.

There were, naturally, several false starts. Various government ministers announced that they were coming, dropped out, changed their minds again, but eventually two of them committed themselves: Ahmed Ali Askar and the Security Minister, Khalif Isse Mudan. At this point the local UN security chief, an ex-Spanish air force officer called Jorge, got wind of the trip and insisted on
coming too, along with a paramedic in case of emergency, and an empty spare car in the event of a breakdown. The local press were tipped off, and the Puntland Intelligence Service. With Khalif’s heavily armed security detail in two overloaded technicals and our own SPU added in, there were forty-one people assembled outside the UN office on the morning that we finally set out, dispersed among no less than ten four-wheel-drive vehicles.

The journey itself was a delight. We lurched off the tarmac after less than a mile and plunged exhilaratingly into the desert. There was no urban hinterland. One minute we were on Garowe High Street, the next we were streaming across the immense Nugaal plain, the vehicles fanned out in a V-formation to avoid the towering plumes of choking orange sand thrown up by the car in front. The plain was dotted with scrub and the occasional cluster of acacia, and was not empty but teemed with life. I spotted an ostrich bounding along the shimmering horizon with its own plume of dust rising in its wake, its neck outstretched like Walt Disney’s Road Runner. Every so often we passed a nomad
zareba
with their attendant herds of goat and camel, some of which numbered in the hundreds. Even the nomad’s sheep here were indigenous, although the breed is known, confusingly, as a Blackhead Persian – a small, fat-tailed beast with a skinny white body and a striking, ebony black head. The shepherds were mostly sun-scorched children armed with sticks, looking small and vulnerable in the blazing vastness, yet unquestionably also a part of the ecosystem.

Hyena and cheetahs were said to live here, and East African oryx, and Soemmerring’s gazelle. At one point the convoy was obliged to slow to a crawl in order to ford a watercourse, where the spiky greenery flashed with exotic birdlife, weavers and bee-eaters and who knew what else. Back on the plain, a herd of tiny antelope
scattered at our approach, bouncing like clockwork toys among the thickets. Our driver said they were dik-dik, although they might easily have been
Gazella spekei
, Speke’s gazelle, a species identified by the discoverer of the source of the Nile himself.

When one of the vehicles suffered a puncture, and the convoy stopped and everyone got out while it was being fixed, I looked around to find that everyone was grinning. The sense of space and freedom of the desert made me, too, want to sing, for there was no better cure for the claustrophobia of the town. Garowe was not a popular posting among the UN staffers, who were forbidden to leave the office without armed guards, and never after dark. Every evening at sunset there was always someone jogging or speed-walking around the barbed-wired edge of the compound, like an animal pacing its cage in a zoo, studiedly ignoring the guards in their watchtowers.

I thought of Benson, the whimsical Kikuyu cook in the canteen on the high top floor of the UN building, who had twice extended his contract in Somalia because of the pay. Benson wore a full chef’s toque and whites, which greatly flattered the broiled chicken and rice he seemed to produce every night. His spare time was spent in front of the television or staring through the window at the desert haze out beyond the town, sighing heavily and seeing neither. ‘Ohhhhh Gaaarowe,’ he would groan, in a way that made the foreign staffers laugh; although the joke never quite concealed the deadness in his eye.

A place like Garowe could easily drive foreigners ‘sand-happy’, as Gerald Hanley called it in the 1940s. Hanley memorably described interrogating a tall, grey-haired Italian officer who had been found wandering in the desert equipped with nothing but a kettle. When questioned, he explained that he had been walking
back to his wife and children in Italy, and begged, with a trembling hand, to be given a pass and sent on his way. One military doctor told Hanley that ‘isolation among the wolves can bring about exactly the same effects as a good long drenching of shellfire’, and I had no doubt that was as true now as it had been for Hanley’s generation of Europeans.

But our outing was a boon to the Somalis, too. In Garowe, Askar, Khalif and the guards and drivers who surrounded them seldom went further than the Ruqsan Square, the charms of which had palled for me after the first visit. Both ministers had returned from years in exile in order to serve in Farole’s cabinet. They had settled in the same suburban Western haven, Woolwich in south-east London, where they must have spent many homesick evenings lamenting the absence of nomads and camels and wondering if they would ever see these things again. So there could be no more satisfying trip for them than this one, particularly as we were heading to Taleh, the centrepiece of the Dervish legend that went to the heart of the Somali national identity.

The landscape through which we drove was the setting of a famous Somali novel,
Ignorance is the Enemy of Love
by Faarax M. J. Cawl, in which the hero Calimaax, a Dervish warrior-poet in the mould of the Sayyid, conquers lions and leopards with his bare hands but misses the chance to win the hand of his true love through his inability to read her letters. Published in 1974, Cawl’s novel was very much a product of its time, when the country was in the grip of a government education drive. It was also, extraordinarily, the first novel ever to be published in the Somali language. Many cultures define themselves, at least in part, by their published literary canon, but not Somalia, a country whose stories had always been declaimed from memory, and where books other
than the Koran barely existed. It was not until 1972, when Siad Barre formally adopted the Latin alphabet and rejected the Arabic one, that Somalia even had an official orthography. So it was highly significant that Cawl’s novel, the foundation stone of modern Somali literature, should glorify the Dervishism of the 1910s via a hero who repeatedly recites the Sayyid’s actual poetry as the plot unfolds:

The provisions and the clothes which keep people busy in the towns

Bustling and trading, are merely lifeless wealth brought in from outside.

If the town is cut off from the interior, the Angel of Death soon comes to it on his errands.

Taleh, when we finally reached it, felt extraordinarily cut off. The domed tops of the towers of the Silsillat were visible from miles away, rising above the plain like the warheads of missiles from a silo. It was like catching sight of Xanadu for the first time. A senior elder was waiting for us at the city limits in the shade of an old and lonely acacia tree. The ministers got out of their cars and each gave the elder, whom they clearly knew, a manly cheek-to-cheek hug, a small but essential ceremony that signalled our formal permission to proceed.

A crowd of two or three hundred awaited us in the town centre, which was dominated by an acacia even older and larger than the first one. On a low stone wall surrounding this magnificent tree were gathered all the elders of the community, the faces of some of them as gnarled as the bark of the acacia. Each carried a walking stick, a badge of authority in this herding community. The sticks
had been customized according to taste. Some were ornately carved, or had been jazzed up with coloured tape. Others had been buffed to a lustrous finish, or were tipped with glittering brass or silver ferrules. All of the elders’ sticks, though, were topped with a curved handle, unlike those of the boys and young men standing in the rank behind them, which were plainer as well as straight.

A group of women ululated energetically as the crowd parted, and we were shown to a row of chairs in the centre of the circle, the honoured guests of the village parliament. This was, you could tell immediately, the way things had always been done here. It felt like communing with the Tree of Souls in the James Cameron movie
Avatar
. A hundred yards to the left, tantalizingly, was the crumbling, cream-coloured corner of one of the forts. The ruins, though, would have to wait. First it was time for a speech from the district commissioner.

His tale of woe was translated, divertingly, by a man with a master’s degree from Bangor in north Wales. The district commissioner said there had been no effective administration in Taleh since Siad Barre’s time. All social services had collapsed. There was no doctor, no police station, no water management, no telephone line to the outside world. The only things that worked here were the school and a mother and child clinic, both of which had been funded by charitable donations from the diaspora. There had been no help from the government in Garowe, let alone the one in Mogadishu, and no help either from the international community, not even from UNESCO, who he thought should recognize the Sayyid’s fort as a World Heritage Site. When he had finished I asked how long it had been since a gaalo had been seen in Taleh. The district commissioner turned to consult two other elders before replying that we were the first since
some Norwegian aid workers had passed this way in 1997.