Nadifa Mohamed - Black Mamba Boy

He went and told the manager that he had found two layabouts crossing his water, but the man was in no mood for action, his hair was stood up, sleep in his eyes. “I don’t give a damn about them, look at the time! Don’t wake me up again, you fool.”

The Nubian sheepishly led them out of the villa. “You want to buy me tea?” he asked audaciously, but they were so happy to be let loose that they agreed.

The last task was to cross the Suez Canal to Port Said, and with the money given by the Sarafand men, they bought two boat tickets for two pounds. They boarded the ferry, and Jama scanned furtively around for undercover policemen, moving with solemn poise to a secluded bench. The sun appeared from behind the one scrappy cloud in the sky, and its spilled rays lit up the lateen sails of the feluccas as they skated between the clumsy cargo ships. On either side of the canal were fishing villages crowded under giant palms, and beyond them telegraph poles stretched into the distance, holding hands.

“Mahmoud said we leave the ferry at exit gate ten for the garden, didn’t he?” checked Jama.

“Yes,” guessed Liban. All they knew was to head for a garden where there was a tea shop frequented by Somalis.

“We’ll sit apart in case one of us gets caught,” ordered Jama as the boat started its engine. He sat next to a bedu and made small talk to calm his nerves.

“This is gate ten,” said the bedu man at last, and Jama signaled to Liban, bade the bedu a safe journey, and disembarked. Liban wanted to rest on a park bench but Jama was unable to stop, he was a bloodhound with a scent, and he led Liban out of the garden and finally to the teahouse.

“Oh God, it cannot be, you little hoodlums!” the crowd shouted as they caught sight of Jama and Liban. Jama looked around as if in a daze and saw all the boys he had met outside Rafah, the ones who had told him to go to Sarafand in the first place. They had made the same journey across Palestine a week earlier and were still recuperating. “Tell them the news, then,” said Gaani, his face full of mischief.

“The tea shop owner has some bad news for you,” said Keynaan gravely.

Jama’s knees buckled. “What?” he whispered.

“I had two customers here from Alexandria, they had just picked up their passports and saw two other names on the list. I’m sorry to say both your passports have arrived and are waiting for you in Alexandria,” the chai-wallah boomed. “The luck some people have!”

The men picked them up and threw them into the air, cheering and singing.

Jama and Liban held hands over the men’s heads and shook with hunger and happiness. They knew they might now make something of their lives. The chai-wallah, the only man there with any money, opened the leather pouch hanging from his belt and gave Jama and Liban eight shillings each to buy return tickets to Alexandria. They collapsed onto his dirty kitchen floor and slept for many, many hours before venturing to the train station.

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NAME: Jama Guure Mohamed

DATE OF BIRTH: 1/1/1925

EYES: Brown

HAIR: Black

COMPLEXION: Man Of Colour

NATIONALITY: British

PLACE OF BIRTH: Hargeisa, British Somaliland

This thin description of Jama in the dark green passport was all that the Western world needed to know about him; he was a subject of the British Empire. The passport determined where he could go and where he couldn’t, the ports where his cheap labor would be welcome and the ports where it would not. In Alexandria, Liban and Jama were constantly asked by the other Somali boys to show their precious passports. The documents were passed around in awed silence. Jealous boys leafed through the pretty watermarked pages and fingered the embossed lion and unicorn on the covers, stared at the black-and-white snapshots, scrutinized the cross that Jama had made as his signature, wondered if they could do it better.

“You’re going to become Fortune Men,” “No more jail for you,” “Sell it to me,” they said before handing the passports back.

Liban and Jama were now gentlemen; all they needed was a job to enter the richest caste of Somali society. Stoking the boilers of steamships could earn them in a week more than they had lived on in a year. They headed back to Port Said on their return tickets, where the British Shipping Federation officers recruited new sailors. Liban sat back in his seat, smiling at the villages and towns running past the train, confident that the British consulate would now save them from harassment. Neither Jama nor Liban knew anyone in Port Said but they expected to turn up and find a ship ready to take them aboard. The reality would turn out that way for one of them but not the other.

Liban and Jama found lodgings with other prospective sailors, and the word was sent out that they were looking for work. A Somali elder who had remained in Port Said after losing an arm aboard a British ship was the local headhunter, spending his days arranging work for clansmen. As Ambaro’s clansman rather than Guure’s, the Somali elder was not compelled to help Jama, but he called him in for an audience. Liban was less fortunate, as he was the only Yibir in all of Port Said, and with scarce work for Aji Somalis, he was locked out of the old nomad’s network. As Jama was shuttled from one meeting to another, Liban was left to wander around the docks, looking for work as a stevedore or panhandling for food. With a useless passport in his pocket, he thought of the walk from Romani with growing bitterness as a failed escape from a family curse. The Somali elder had found an Eidegalle sailor on a British ship sailing to Haifa, and the sailor was sure that with a certain kind of sweetening, the captain would take Jama as part of the crew. The elder arranged a collection and raised five pounds from Jama’s clan, and this was smuggled to the ship’s captain, who then signed Jama on as a fireman. Within sixteen days of collecting their passports from Alexandria, Jama had his first navy job and Liban was wondering where else in the world he could go.

Jama gave Liban all the money he had before departing for the ship. “When I come back, brother, I’ll help you find a job.”

Liban nodded as if he believed him and embraced Jama in his new shirt and trousers. “Take care of yourself,” said Liban, hiding his envy and sadness.

Their goodbye was protracted and uncomfortable; Jama kept trying to reassure Liban. “Who knows! Maybe when I get back you’ll be away working.”

“Go, man, don’t keep him waiting,” said Liban finally.

Jama’s clansman walked him to the ship that had taken nearly a year of his life to reach. She was a leviathan, the tallest, longest, greatest thing he had ever seen, stretching like a steel town along the canal, black hull bobbing gently in the water. Jama pointed at the meter-high white letters near the prow and Abdullahi read them for him: “ Runnymede Park, London .”

Jama stopped at the gangplank and took a last look at Africa. Beyond the faux European skyline of Port Said lay his heart and home, the mountains and deserts of Somaliland and the valleys of Eritrea. He knew that if he died this would be the last thing he saw in his black eyes. The hot red dirt of Africa, scintillating with mica as if God had made the earth with broken diamonds, would not be found anywhere else. But like the Somali women in Aden, Africa struggled to look after her children and let them run with the wind, giving them freedom to find their own way in the world. Jama placed both feet firmly onto the Runnymede Park and waited to be borne away.

I think this is going to be a strange voyage,” said Abdullahi, Jama’s clansman. Abdullahi had been told at first to expect a short trip to Haifa then Cyprus, but on the journey to Port Said he had seen the captain in huddled conferences with military men. He took Jama to the cabin that they would share: a small porthole funneled in light and two bunk beds with thin mattresses stood with a night table and lamp between them. There were twelve Somali firemen to stoke the engine, and the rest of the crew were white British men, all senior to the Somalis. Jama was the youngest on board apart from a slip of an English galley boy with fine blond hair. Abdullahi took Jama from fore to aft, into the holds, around the engine room, through the coal bunker, past the steering room to where the lifeboats hung lifeless. Jama was happy, happy, happy, and when Abdullahi presented him to Captain Barclay, he genuflected, curtsied, and held on to his hand as if it were the hand of the emperor of the world. Jama’s pay was set at nineteen pounds a month, a quarter less than the British sailors, but still a fortune to a boy who had once fought cats and dogs over bones. He intended to send half to Bethlehem when he was finally paid. Jama asked what they would be transporting. “Jews,” said Abdullahi.