The World's Most Dangerous Place (36 page)

Given her upbringing, it was perhaps no surprise that she saw the world as a dangerous, hostile place. More bothersome was her deep, visceral belief that the only way to survive it was always to fight, as though the best form of defence was invariably to attack, whatever the odds. This was the strategy of the successful street-fighter. It was also the sometimes baffling philosophy of the nomad
– what Gerald Hanley called ‘this continual challenge, this nomad
machismo
. . . the sharp, impatient bloody-mindedness of the Somali’.

There was plenty of machismo on display in the Tudor Rose that night. The dance floor was hot and dark and packed.

‘We Somalis are very strange,’ Ayaan yelled in my ear. ‘We run away from each other at home, but no matter how far we run we always end up seeking out other Somalis when we get there.’

The music was too loud for a sustained conversation. The club was a regular stop on the London reggae circuit, and the sound system was correspondingly immense. The hall was hung about with Jamaican and other Caribbean flags, and the bar at the back sold Red Stripe on tap, although there were no takers for lager tonight. Indeed, the area in front of the long counter, much to the bemusement of the staff behind it, was the emptiest in the entire room. Whatever vices these Londonized Somalis might have had, a taste for alcohol was not among them. It was as though the customers feared contamination by osmosis through the soles of their shoes, for the floor by the bar was gummy with old spilled beer.

From time to time, an MC in a baseball cap shouted incomprehensibly into a microphone on the tiny stage at the front. Later on he was briefly joined by a man in a white
jalabiya
– ‘Very traditional!’ bawled Ayaan – and, equally mysteriously, a military officer in full dress uniform, who stood at ease with his hands behind his back as he beamed at the crowd below. He never said anything, and no one else tried to explain his presence. It was impossible to tell whether he was a real soldier or a man in fancy dress – a freelance representation, perhaps, of some forgotten hero of the struggle for independence.

The DJ, operating from a kind of cage to one side, played music in the rap-meets-calypso Somali style. The dancers grinned as they moved to the slower numbers with a sinuous African grace, their hips swaying, their hands outstretched before them. I was pleased that I actually recognized one of the tracks, a number called ‘Deeqa’ by a young exile from Somaliland, Aar Maanta. Written in the pentatonic scale with traditional alliterative lyrics, it was a melancholic protest song about the racist abuse he once suffered at the hands of immigration officials at Heathrow airport: a modern interpretation, perhaps, of the incident in Berbera in 1895 with which the legend of the Mad Mullah began. Deeqa, a popular girl’s name meaning ‘gift’, was also the name of the defunct Somali national airline, a playful double-entendre typical of Somalia’s long bardic tradition. The Sayyid himself would have approved of Aar Maanta.

The crowd sang along happily to this music of exile, as they did to the national anthem, ‘Soomaaliyeey Tooso’ (Somalia, Wake Up!), the words of which clearly still meant something to the audience here, despite having been written in 1947. When it was played for the first time, I was standing near a group of four demure young women dressed in blue and white headscarves, one of whom smiled and shyly offered me the corner of the national flag she was holding. Then we all waved it gently up and down, like nurses changing a bedsheet.

Somalis wake up,

Wake up and support each other

Support your country

Support them forever.

Stop fighting each other

Come back with strength and joy and be friends again

It’s time to look forward and take command

Defeat your enemies and unite once again.

Become strong again and again

The atmosphere in the club changed as it grew later. I spotted one or two toughs who I was sure had not been there earlier, threading their way purposefully through the crowd, their unsmiling eyes bright with the expectation of trouble. All of a sudden there was a pronounced tension in the air, although it was Ayaan who sensed it first.

‘There’s going to be a fight,’ she yelled. ‘Come on, let’s leave.’

But we were too late, because back by the ticket office, our exit to the street was blocked by one of the bouncers.

‘I wouldn’t go out there if I were you,’ he said laconically. ‘Bottle fight. I’d wait twenty minutes.’

‘There’s
always
a fight,’ said Ayaan, rolling her eyes as we went back inside. ‘Every bloody time . . . I nearly wasn’t going to bring you here.’

The Tudor Rose, it seemed, was well-known for gang violence. In 2002, two men were shot dead on the dance floor during an anti-gun-crime event headlined by the rapper Dizzee Rascal. One of the chief suspects, Wayne ‘Brands’ Freckleton, belonged to a gang called the Church Road Soldiers from a housing estate in the borough of Brent, a place notorious among Somalis for the earlier stabbing to death of a 15-year-old schoolboy, Mogadishu-born Kayser Osman.

It was a relief when the bouncer announced that the danger had passed and we were permitted to stumble out into the cool of the night. There were no immediate signs of the earlier violence,
although that, I discovered, was only because I didn’t know how to read them. As we were negotiating the club’s outer gate, I was tapped on the shoulder by a shifty-looking teenager wanting to borrow a pen. I offered him my biro.

‘That’s blue,’ he said, peering at it. ‘Have you got a black one?’

I said I didn’t. He hesitated before taking the blue one anyway, and walking off to the side of the building where he turned his back, hiding something. I couldn’t resist sneaking over to see what he was doing, and found him carefully inking a dark round dot on to the back of his left hand. I couldn’t make sense of it. Was he mad? A drug casualty, perhaps? Or maybe he was an illiterate, pretending for some reason to be able to write?

It was not until much later that I learned that he was most likely trying to simulate a ‘gang mark’ tattoo. Like most street gangs, the Somali ones tended to be highly territorial, and many of the people here were a dangerously long way from their patch. There was a particularly big group from Leyton in east London, who had come to Southall when a party there was cancelled at the last minute. It was two in the morning, and Leyton was 16 miles away, which was so far it was ‘like going to the moon’, according to Ayaan. She had never been there herself, even after twenty years of living in London. I suddenly felt a little sorry for the teenager who had borrowed my pen, for he had only been trying to bluff his way home.

The street beyond the Tudor Rose was not as empty as it first appeared. Here and there we passed parked cars containing young Somalis, all of them men, who were watching and waiting for something, anything, to happen. It wasn’t clear how many of them had even been into the club. Ayaan reckoned that most of them couldn’t afford the entry price, but had come over to Southall
anyway for no other reason than that this was where the action was tonight. Somalis, she said, were ‘night people, like the Arabs’. These ones were here, as she put it, ‘to see what they could get’ – or else, she grumbled, to hassle girls. They were loitering with intent, as the police used to say, and we felt unpleasantly scrutinized as we passed down the pavement.

‘Hey, sister,’ called one of them, lowering his car window, ‘what are you doing with him? You should be with me. Is there something wrong with your brothers?’

Two Somali faces appeared over his shoulder, their eyes and teeth gleaming in the car’s dark interior, leering and egging him on.

‘Idiots,’ Ayaan retorted over her shoulder, without stopping or slowing down. ‘Don’t you know incest is illegal in this country?’

The catcaller’s mates found this putdown hilarious and shouted for us to
Yo, stop!
, but we kept walking.

‘God,’ she muttered, ‘don’t you hate that? Bloody kids.’

It was a relief when we reached the safety of the car around the corner. Ayaan knew what she was doing, but there was still a bit more bluster to her streetcraft than felt comfortable.

I wanted to find out more about the gangs, and in particular to explore what connection they had, if any, with Islamic extremism. I had not forgotten the criminologist Daniel LaDouceur’s theory in Garowe that al-Shabaab was in essence a big street gang, indistinguishable from those found in almost every big Western city. The impulse for joining any gang, as he told me, was the same: it was a primitive survival tactic based on strength in numbers. The Home Office’s Prevent strategy documents identified various places where young Muslims were vulnerable to ‘violent
radicalization’, such as schools, universities, prisons and mosques. Muslims could also radicalize themselves, courtesy of ‘Sheikh Google’, alone at home on a computer. But the Prevent strategy made little mention of London’s gang culture, an oversight pointed out at a Home Affairs committee hearing in 2012, where it was stated that there was ‘a particular risk of radicalization linked to membership of some criminal gangs’, especially if those gang members ended up in prison.
²

And a great many young Somali gang members did end up in prison. I spoke to a number of community leaders in the course of 2011, and they all said the same thing. Sharmarke Yusuf, the chairman of AMIC, the Association of Mosques and Islamic Centres, an umbrella group of seven London Somali mosques, and whose office was around the corner from the Tudor Rose, told me that a ‘majority’ of Somali youth was either currently in or had recently been through the criminal justice system. At any one time, he asserted, fully two-thirds of young London Somalis were ‘on the street’, by which he meant they were actively involved in gangs or drugs or other minor crimes. Mohammed Elmi, the Wembley-based head of the community group Somali Diaspora UK, spoke even more gloomily of a Somali youth crime ‘time-bomb’ in Britain. He had recently visited the Youth Offenders’ Institution at Feltham, and was appalled to discover that, for the first time, it contained more inmates from Somalia than from any other foreign country.

‘There were over sixty Somalis in there! More, even, than the Jamaicans,’ he added in shocked tones.
³

Feltham, as the Home Office were all too aware, had a dangerous reputation for radicalization. Richard Reid, the would-be ‘shoe-bomber’ who tried to blow up an American Airlines
passenger jet in 2001, famously converted to Islam while locked up there for petty theft. Muktar Said Ibrahim, the leader of the failed suicide attacks against London Transport on 21 July 2005, also once did time in Feltham for a gang-related offence. The 21/7 attacks had a pronounced Horn of Africa flavour: Ibrahim was from Eritrea, while two other conspirators, Ramzi Mohamed and Yassin Omar, were born in Somalia. Another former Feltham inmate, Jermaine Grant from Newham in east London, was arrested in December 2011 in Mombasa, having entered Kenya on a false passport; police were convinced that he was a part of an al-Shabaab bomb plot.

The Feltham connection was highly suggestive, yet Sharmarke Yusuf did not think that this institution per se was to blame for the radicalization of Reid and the others.

‘There is no overt evidence of al-Qaida radicalization within Feltham,’ he said. ‘It happens, rather, on Feltham’s doorstep, back out in the community, underground.’

He thought that radicalization, like incarceration, was an effect rather than a cause of a deeper, social problem. He pointed out that unemployment among Somali men of working age had doubled in the last ten years, to 40 per cent, the highest rate of any immigrant community. This was just an average, for the rate was far higher in some parts of London, and higher still among the young. Only half of British Somalis had any educational qualifications at all, and only 3 per cent of them had a higher education qualification.

‘Life in the UK can be overwhelming for Somali teenagers,’ he said. ‘They do badly in school, they can’t find work, and we have so many prejudices to deal with. We are Muslims, and we are black. To cap it all, we are Somali, which means that we are even rejected by other Africans.’

It was hardly surprising, he said, that so many young Somalis felt alienated from society, and no less surprising that they should turn to Islam as a means of coping with that feeling. As the chairman of an association of mosques, Sharmarke naturally saw nothing wrong with that. But, as he acknowledged, alienated young people were also vulnerable to ‘misleading influences’ – and that was when radicalization could occur.

The British government, he thought, was partly to blame for this state of affairs. Perhaps like any community displaced by a brutal civil war, the Somalis had special needs, and so needed extra support to help them assimilate into British society. Instead, however, they had largely been ignored, at least until the London bombings of 2005, when the government properly woke up to the threat of Somali extremism. The early years of the Prevent programme, however, had been ‘a disaster’.

‘The government saw the issue in black and white, but there are no quick fixes because the roots of the problem run so deep,’ Sharmarke observed.

The government was so anxious to be seen to be tackling the causes of extremism after 2005 that they granted Prevent funding to almost any Muslim organization that asked for it, with the minimum of checks as to its suitability, and little control over how the money was spent once allocated. Dozens of new community bodies were set up, some of which appeared to exist almost solely in order to get their hands on the government cash. The budgets were huge. In 2008–9, according to a report by the Institute of Race Relations entitled ‘How Not to Prevent Violent Extremism’, the government blew £140m on projects such as the Enfield ‘Shoot a Ball not a Gun Basketball’ project (which received £26,000) and the Edmonton Eagles Boxing Club (£16,000).