A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (9 page)

At first, Asad could not get any work. Nobody in town knew him as a water carrier, and thus nobody came to him. And he was shy. But in the absence of work, he was going hungry. On the first evening, one of the three boys left Asad a few morsels of his dinner. On the second, one of them gave him a few shillings with which to buy a glass of camel milk. He could not live off their largesse. By the end of the third day he was so ravenously hungry that he could not sleep. They were in a mosque that night. He got up and walked around the empty building and ground his teeth, imagining that he was chewing food.

On the fourth morning, the boys went their separate ways, as they always did. They would work alone during the day, each looking for his own packets and kicking his heavy barrel across the sand; they would only come together again well into the evening, once the restaurants stopped calling for more water. Asad picked a cafeteria and went inside, and when a waiter came to chase him away, Asad pushed out his chest and announced that he was here to carry water. The waiter shouted that he had no need for thin little boys and told Asad if he did not get out from under his feet, he would kick him into the sand.

Asad turned his back and left and sat down on the hot sand and felt the sun throbbing on his head and allowed the sand to run through his fingers. He steeled himself to stand up and try another waiter, but before he could get to his feet, something large and heavy hit him on the very top of his head. The thud echoed along the walls of his skull, and he reeled backward. The waiter who had just turfed him into the sand was walking away from him. A sixty-liter barrel lay at his side. He had just been asked to fetch water.

And so it began. By the time the sun went down he had done four or five trips to the well and his stomach was full and he was so sore and so tired that he could barely stand.

That is how he remembers some days. Other days, he says that the work was impossibly hard; for the first week or two, he was quite sure that he could not keep it up and that he was destined to die. When he woke in the mornings, his weariness was so profound he was not certain whether he could rise, let alone kick another barrel of water through the soft sand. Lying there one morning, he felt his breathing grow awry. For a moment, he wondered whether some invisible creature was sitting on his stomach, until it dawned on him that his own panic had seized his diaphragm and contorted it into a clench. He truly did not know whether he could survive this life. And if he could not, if he fell very ill, he wondered whether anyone would care enough to nurse him.

Sitting in my car, he ducks his chin and brushes the back of his hand over his chest and down his stomach. “I became very thin,” he says. “I have never become fat again.”

I glance down at the parts of his body his hand has shown, and, momentarily, I glimpse his form through his eyes. He is indeed lean, but he is also broad-shouldered and tall, and I have always understood his body as a badge of elegance. For him, I now realize, it is a legacy of hardship, a mold in which his life experiences have found form.

Aside from those who gave him work, he avoided contact with adults, for they asked questions. “I told some truths and some lies,” Asad recalls. “An adult would come up to me in the street and ask why I was alone. I would shrug. He would ask my lineage. I would answer truthfully: Reer Abdullahi. But when he asked where my family was, I would say they were all in Somalia. I am not sure why I lied. Sometimes I would say, It is none of your business, and walk away.”

As for the boys, Asad warms whenever he speaks of them. It is the in-between one whom he remembers most vividly, the boy who was neither short nor tall, neither thin nor fat. His name was Khadar.

“We called him Zena,” Asad tells me, “which means ‘news' in Amharic. He was a spy, always picking up information and taking it to other people, even though nobody forced him to. It is just something he enjoyed doing. The other two were Abdi, the short one, and Tube, the tall one. I have no memory of us fighting. Well, we would have small fights, as children do. But never anything serious. We sometimes lent each other money. We cared about each other. Even long after I stopped staying with them, I would come and find them, I would do things for them.”

I ask Asad what sorts of news Zena brought to the boys from the world of adults, and my question is not innocent. The more I read about the places where Asad lived as a child, the more astonished I become. Asad is telling me his story with a child's innocence, questions of history and of politics all but invisible. Through my reading, I discover that he was living in the midst of something of a catastrophe. I ask Asad about the news Zena brought from the world of adults because I know that the town circle in Wardheer had been the scene of a massacre just two years before Asad arrived. The Ethiopian army accused the town's leading families of harboring Somali rebels; it took its revenge by dragging several dozen of Wardheer's most prominent residents into the circle and executing them in front of their peers.

For several days I try to prompt this information from Asad without suggesting it myself, but nothing is forthcoming. Eventually, I ask him if he did not hear of the killings that occurred before he arrived.

“Yes, you are right,” he says. “In 1994, the army killed a lot of people in the town center, nearly a hundred, I think. The rebels were in town. The army tried to catch the president of the rebels. The town defended him. People were talking about it when I got there. The kids I was sleeping with were witnesses. They would say the names of people. They would show where and how they were killed.”

Beyond that, he has nothing to say, not how he felt about it then, nor how he feels about it now. It is something I have brought in; it does not arise from the feelings his memories evoke.

I imagine Zena and Tube and Asad in the town circle in the dead of night. Zena and Tube lead Asad to a spot in the inner circle and point to it and tell him that it is the ground on which the head of Reer Abrahim was killed. Zena takes Tube by the throat and enacts the scene. The rest of the town is still. In all of Wardheer, there are just three people awake, three street kids, and they are replaying the town's great trauma.

I wonder about the countless events that do not come into a person's head when he is telling his life story to a chronicler. Is it simply a question of chance? Had we not been in Blikkiesdorp, but elsewhere, in some Somali settlement in an American city, for instance, would Asad's recollections of Wardheer have triggered very different memories? Would the reenactment of the massacre have taken center stage? Or does it simply lie untouched, out of reach, on the deep ocean bed of his inner world?

I was walking past Dire Dawa's railway station on a Saturday afternoon in April 2012 when the heavens opened. Solid sheets of water slammed down onto the street and onto the backs and the heads of passersby. People scattered, their shirts clinging heavily to their shoulders and chests, goose bumps welling up on their necks and arms.

I scurried onto the veranda of the large café opposite the railway station. Already it was filling with wet bodies and hot breath, all of us refugees from the torrent. After an initial flurry—fur
niture being rearranged, waiters weaving their way through the crowds in response to the deluge of new orders—the café calmed. We sat there, about a hundred of us, staring at the rain. The noise of the storm drowned the sounds of conversation, so that it seemed we were sitting in silence. A lovely feeling descended upon me: the rhythm of the rain outside, the protection of the shelter within, the many faces looking out; for a while, the gathering felt almost religious, as if we were paying homage to a force much larger than us.

As I sat there, my mind played an odd trick. I wondered whether people had huddled together in this very space thirty-five years earlier, in 1977, when the skies over Dire Dawa were filled, not with rain, but with fighter jets, the Somali air force's Russian MiGs in battle against the Ethiopian military's F-16s. I have tried to find out how badly the city was damaged during the war and how many of its civilians lost their lives, but the documentation I have found skates over these questions. What I do know is that the city was under siege for several months and that the crux of the battle was for air supremacy. Relations between Dire Dawa's residents could only have been tense, for while most of them wished desperately for the Ethiopian forces to successfully defend the city, some wanted the Somalis to overrun it.

When I think of the fighter jets that battled overhead, I think also—indeed, primarily—of Asad and how to tell his story. The war may have been fought seven or so years before his birth, and Dire Dawa may have been a place utterly foreign to him, but the 1977 war is nonetheless central to his tale.

Were the world to stand vertically, south at the bottom, north at the top, Dire Dawa would look down onto the vast arid plains of the Ogaden, otherwise known as the Somali region of Ethiopia, the territory into which Yindy's family took Asad when they moved from Dire Dawa to Wardheer. He didn't know it, but on that journey into Ethiopia's Somali region, Asad traveled across the ground on which his family had lived for generations and from which they had recently fled.

Nomadic Somali pastoralists, among them Asad's forebears, have lived on these plains since the sixteenth century and have formed the majority of the Ogaden's population ever since. Why this Somali-speaking land did not become part of Somalia when the country acquired independence is a long tale of treachery and deceit, one that Ogadeni nationalists like to tell over and again. The Somali-speaking territories controlled by the British and the Italians joined to form the independent state of Somalia in 1960. But the Ogaden was excluded, remaining under the control of Ethiopia, as were the Somali clans of northern Kenya. From the first, the new Somali state agitated without success to redraw its borders to incorporate all Somalis. That the country was incomplete, an amputated limb in Kenya and another in Ethiopia, became Somali nationalism's great clarion call.

Hawo told Asad that if his father had fled Somalia, it would have been to a place called Qorahay, for that is where the AliYusuf were from. Qorahay is a region of the Ogaden. It is not far from Wardheer. The AliYusuf thus understand themselves to be at the center of the great drama of Somalia's thwarted nationalism, a part of the limb severed from the motherland. Fate placed them within the borders of the vast, complicated colossus of the Ethiopian empire, one whose subjects spoke no fewer than eighty languages and whose rulers were Christian and conducted their official business in the foreign language of Amharic.

In 1974, Ethiopia's imperial regime was overthrown in a coup and replaced by a military junta. Several hundred of the regime's top officials were executed, and the emperor himself, Haile Selassie, was imprisoned and soon died. In the times of instability that followed, it seemed that the Ethiopian state might fall apart, for nationalist demands for succession arose throughout its borderlands: from Eritreans and Tigrayans in the north; from the Afar in the northeast; from Oromo people, who were dispersed throughout Ethiopia; and, of course, from the Somalis in the southeast.

Taking advantage of this uncertain moment, the Somali government began supporting a guerrilla campaign in the Ogaden and then launched a full-fledged invasion in July 1977. Backed by a local population that overwhelmingly supported it, the invading Somali forces were very soon in control of the Ogaden. Flush with confidence, and more than a little greedy, they marched on beyond the Ogaden and attacked Dire Dawa and the ancient city of Harar. This was an altogether more risky business, for the majority of the civilian population here was not Somali, and, to many, the invading army was a foreign foe. Moreover, with Dire Dawa up for grabs, the stakes for Ethiopia now became existential, for the railway line that the French built connected the entire southern and eastern economy of Ethiopia to the port of Djibouti and, thus, to the world. Were Dire Dawa and Harar to fall, Addis Ababa itself would lose its lifeblood.

Why a war is won or lost is always a matter of debate. The Somalis did not anticipate that their invasion would stir feelings of loyalty to the new Ethiopian regime among millions of people, who fought very bravely to defend their cities. As important, perhaps, were decisions made many thousands of miles away. Somalia's Cold War backer, the Soviet Union, switched sides in the middle of the war. The Somalis found themselves fighting thousands of Cuban soldiers and an army buttressed by endless new supplies of Soviet matériel; the very same Soviet advisers who just weeks earlier were crafting Somali strategy were now devising plans to rout the Somali military.

By March 1978, the war was over, Somalia's armed forces in hasty retreat. But for the Somali-speaking people of the Ogaden, the trauma was only beginning. Precisely what transpired between the Ethiopian military and Ogadeni civilians in the aftermath of the Somali defeat has never been recorded except in the Ogadeni memories that have become folklore. But it was pretty devastating. An estimated eight hundred thousand people fled the Ogaden for Somalia. Many were slaughtered. If the fictional reconstruc
tions of the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah are accurate, entire families were killed, the inhabitants of entire villages cut down, on suspicion of having supported the enemy. Any Ogadeni who was educated, or who had wielded political power, fled for his life. By the early 1980s, the population of the Ogaden had halved.

Although he does not know it, Asad's parents were among the eight hundred thousand who fled. This information is new to me. I learned it just a week before I came to Dire Dawa. After much searching, I had found an Abdullahi in London who grew up with Asad's father. He was a cabdriver in White City. As we sat in his living room on a Saturday afternoon drinking tea, he relayed what he remembered of Asad's parents' wedding. It was a garrulous, colorful affair, he said. To my surprise, he mentioned in passing that it had taken place in a village called Marsin in the Qorahay region of the Ogaden.

“The wedding was not in Mogadishu?” I asked.

He shook his head. Hirsi Abdullahi grew up in Marsin. He and Asad's mother fled the Ogaden shortly after they were married. This was in March 1978, in the aftermath of the Ogadeni war.

And then the man, whose name was Sheikh Hussein, described his own flight from Qorahay in 1978. He spoke of his years in a refugee camp in southern Somalia and of his perilous journey back into the Ogaden to retrieve a sister who had been stranded there. He described what it was like to be a refugee in Somalia—they were treated like leeches, he said, like second-class people, like beggars. He left Somalia in 1981 and worked first in Libya and then in Saudi Arabia.

I asked if he saw a lot of Asad's parents before he left Mogadishu. Not much, he replied. Asad's father was doing well as a trader. He had been lulled into thinking that maybe he belonged in Mogadishu. Sheikh Hussein's tone seemed bitter to me.

That evening, as I left White City, I had to examine Asad's story anew. The way he had it in his mind, his was an old Mogadishu family, his parents ensconced and comfortable in the city. His mother's death and his own flight were the beginning of an unraveling. That they were refugees who had been torn from their homes, the city around them strange and unwelcome, was a notion he had not dreamed of.

Far more dramatic, though, were the implications for his time in Wardheer. Here was a lost boy, pushing barrels of water through hot sand, his family lost. Little did he know that he was home, the villages a few hours to the west teeming with his kin, many of whom had recently returned.