Nuruddin Farah - Maps

Anyway, that weekend entered the annals of Somali history as The Tragic Weekend. In it, the Soviet, Cuban and Adenese generals (with a little help from the Ethiopians) masterminded the decisive blow which returned the destiny of the Ogaden and its people to Ethiopian hands. And imagine, I was ill and in bed when this happened. While the nation mourned, I lay unconscious in a swamp of my own fever, my own rubble, my own stubble. Transported across mirages by the burning heat of my own blood, I discovered sheets were too hot to come anywhere near me, the mattress not level enough to keep my aching body in firm position. I asked for impossible things, I demanded that miracles be performed. These included studying the possibility of replacing my skin, because it was too hot, with another — cooler. When the nation mourned the loss of the Ogaden, I was preoccupied with the state of my health, my body, my skin. I will never forget that.

I was the last to hear of the loss. By then, there was no point in crying over spilt milk. “One has to be strong enough to accept defeat. But well return in maybe ten, maybe twenty years and put back the Ogaden where it belongs — in Somali hands.” I said this as I fed my then undernourished, frail body with the food Uncle Hilaal had prepared for me. Propped up against the wall supporting my back, with a spoon in my hand, my knees trembling under the sheets, I asked, “What next? What do you think will happen now?”

He predicted, “An influx of refugees. That’s what defeat will mean.”

My expression told him that I didn’t follow his argument. Whereupon, he remarked that if the Somalis had won the war, there wouldn’t have been “Somali” refugees, but Ethiopian refugees. In any case, he went on, for-exampling his way to the nerve of the matter, since Ethiopia had only military garrisons and no civilian population in the Ogaden (in Kallafo, there may have been a couple of hundred women who provided one service or another to the military garrison on the hill — and many never crossed the bridge separating the Ethiopians’ side of the river from the civilian Somali population), yes, if the Ethiopians had lost the war, the men who fell into Somali hands would have become prisoners-of-war and not refugees.

“And if I hadn’t come as early as I had done, if I hadn’t come until after the Ogaden was reconquered by the generals from the Soviet, Cuban and Adenese armies — what then?”

“Every ethnic Somali is entitled to live in the Somali Republic. They may belong to any Somali-speaking territory, be it Kenyan, Ethiopian or even Djebouti. Every Somali has the constitutional birthright to reside anywhere in the Republic. The status of who is a refugee, however, points two fingers at two parallel issues — political and economic. If a Somali in Ethiopia or Kenya or Djebouti fears for his life, that Somali has the status of a political refugee, but doesn’t need to declare himself as such unless he is in no position to look for and obtain a job and live practising his profession. If, however, the Somali from outside the Republic is not economically self-sufficient, or if his relations aren’t well-off enough to support him, then they might declare themselves as ‘refugees’. It is estimated that more than a third of the registered population in the Republic came over from the Ogaden or Djebouti long before the 1977 war. Many have joined the army. They form a large percentage of the soldiery as well as the officer corps. Many have joined schools and the university here, or the civil service or the government in one capacity or another, some holding very highly placed jobs as ministers, director-generals or else they have been recruited into the diplomatic corps.”

“And what will happen to those who do not flee the Ogaden?”

“For example, the Ethiopians poison their wells, rape their women and conscript their children into the Ethiopian army or the police force. They compel them to learn Amharic, force them to adopt the ‘Amharic’ culture and dispossess them of their land.”

There was a pause. I took mouthfuls of the minestrone Uncle had dished out for me, having added salt, pepper and lime. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back unsupported, and I suspected the strain was affecting his lumbago. He touched his spine as though it were cold and he were rubbing blood into its circulatory system.

I asked, “Are there any parallel situations you can think of anywhere?”

“How do you mean?” he said.

“Can you think of any other country where a person bom in another may assume its nationality on the strength of ethnic origin?” I asked.

“Yes. An ethnic German is, by right, a national of the Federal Republic of Germany Anyone bom in East Germany after its creation is also a bona fide national of West Germany”

He looked exhausted — and talked tiredly too — becoming long-winded as he spoke. I wondered if it was pain in his back causing strain on his nerves. I suggested he sit on a proper chair. He did. I? I felt weak — almost as weak as Misra when she aborted. I remembered her lying in bed for days. The loss of the Ogaden was greater, of course. But I could only view it as a personal loss so as to understand its dimensions. It was as if my whole blood had been drained out of me — that was how weak I felt. To me, that was how tremendous the loss had been.

“But they’re not coming here, are they?” I said.

“They? They who?”

“The Ethiopians? They’re not coming to Mogadiscio?” I said.

Uncle Hilaal reflected for a while, then, “Menelik, the Emperor that gave the country its name, once claimed the boundaries of his country to include the whole of Somalia, parts of present-day Tanzania, a greater part of Kenya and Uganda including Lake Victoria and parts of the Sudan up to and including Khartoum because he was wanting to claim the Nile. He was after a littoral territory for a landlocked Abyssinia. Emperor Haile Selassie made similar access-to-the-sea claims as recently as 1953. In the end, Haile Selassie gave up his claim because Eritrea, which has access to the sea, was given him by the United Nations to administer. He annexed Eritrea.”

I said, “We won’t allow it. Mogadiscio is ours.”

“We won’t,” he said. “Now eat.”

After a pause, I said, “I like Mogadiscio a lot.”

I accepted Mogadiscio as a provisional measure, loving its sandy beaches, swimming in its sea, disliking its mid-day heat but liking its enormous spaces and its reddish-brown earth in which my ideas flowered. It was understood that, come one day, I would leave it but perhaps to love it more. I had a job to do , as Armadio used to say I had a home to return to and re-liberate, a mother to be reunited with. “But before you leave …,” I can hear Uncle Hilaal say; “But before you leave us,” I can hear Salaado begin — I know! I knew I would’ve had to study harder, put in more hours of study, read more than the boys or the girls who didn’t have the same sort of responsibilities as I, who didn’t have a job to do, as 1.1 would sit with Hilaal or Salaado and things would be explained to me in great illustrated detail. Maps were shown to me; the psychology of warfare; why the Cubans dared not enter directly into war with the South African army in Angola; why they withdrew whenever the army of apartheid made belligerent incursions into the country in which twenty thousand of their soldiers were stationed. In the company of Salaado and Hilaal, the universe altered perspective, it shrunk into a tiny chessboard where the Africans weren’t the kings. the queens, the bishops and not even the pawns — where we were part of the reserve; our land was nothing but a playfield; our wars were turned into weekend affairs, during which the Russians borrowed a West-German-manufactured tank code-named Leopard and sold it to Libya. The idea was to test if this sophisticated article of German warfare would stand the conditions and climate of the Ogaden. After the weekend job, Leopard was flown to Odessa and dismantled, according to western intelligence reports quoted by Reuters and other agencies. A rat race faster than the arms race — and we’re starving!