For Somalis, 40 years in the desert came and went

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We begin Maggid with an excerpt from Johnny Steinberg's book, "Man of Good Hope."

In January 1991, a civil war broke out in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Two-thirds of the City’s population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militia, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people across sub-Saharan Africa and the world. As a result of being separated from his family Asad became, to paraphrase Marcus Garvey, 'a person without knowledge of his history, origin and culture, he was like a tree without roots.'

Asad lived in a bewildering number of places, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi, Kenya to desert towns in Ethiopia. When he was seventeen, Asad was in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. After some financial and personal successes there, he put twelve hundred dollars in his pocket and set out for South Africa, where he settled into an economically erratic and unpredictably violent life with tens of thousands of other Somali refugees. Today at least 900,000 Somali people live in the diaspora.

We tell the story of Passover each year so as to remind ourselves of our Jewish history. This ritual roots us as Jews. Steinberg and Asad offer us a glimpse of the sadness and confusion involved in being separated from our families and cultures; of the dangers of reifying ethnic divisions; and of the desparateness with which we in the diaspora seek a sense of home. Asad reminds us why we go through the annual ritual of re-rooting ourselves, and what is at stake in denying others of their opportunity to do so.

Qorahay

Asad was on the roof of the truck talking to travellers when one of them mentioned in passing that they had just entered Qorahay. Asad snapped his head up and looked about him. All around was desert. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

‘What is Qorahay?’ he asked.

‘It is a region,’ the traveller replied, ‘a region of the Ogaden. It has a town called Qabridahre and a few villages. Otherwise it is just nomads.’

And then the specifics melt away. ‘I looked around Qorahay,’ Asad tells me, ‘and there was nothing.’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘Did you inquire about your father?’

‘During my time with Rooda, we went to Qabridahre maybe three times,’ he says. ‘There was nothing there.’

We do not talk about Qorahay again for a long time. And then I go to East Africa and to London [for research on this book], and I return with a slippery, difficult gift – some knowledge of Asad’s family history...

I have resolved to tell him baldly and simply what I have discovered. And so I describe my meeting with Sheikh Hussein [someone Asad refers to as his uncle], the London cabdriver. I tell him that Sheikh Hussein’s father and Asad’s grandfather grew up to together in Marsin, a village in Qorahay.

He nods and says he knows of that village; he passed through it with Rooda.

I tell him that his parents were married sometime in the 1970s in Qabridahre, exactly how long before the 1977–78 war I am not sure, but they were among the nearly one million Ogadeni who fled Ethiopia in 1978. I tell him of Sheikh Hussein’s escape from the Ogaden, of the time he spent in a refugee camp in southern Somalia, of the discrimination he and other Ogadeni refugees felt after they arrived in Mogadishu. Sheikh Hussein saw Asad’s father occasionally in the Somali capital, I say, but he left in 1981 for Egypt and lost touch.

For a long time, Asad says nothing. He folds his fingers together in his lap and stares out of the passenger-side window.

‘It would have been easy,’ he says eventually.

‘What would have been easy?’

‘Finding my family. I was told after I got to South Africa that my father had been in Qabridahre when I was living in Ethiopia. But I convinced myself that I would never have found him anyway. From what you are saying, it would have been easy. If Qabridahre is where my family is from, I could have told anyone my name, and they would have taken me to my father.’

‘You were a boy on your own,’ I say. ‘You were careful not to tell anyone too much about yourself. You were protecting yourself. You were surviving. That you did not find your father makes sense.’

‘No,’ he replies. ‘I was not alone. I had Rooda. He was always asking me: “Who is your father? Who are you?” It would have been easy. I was kirishbooy. I had to stay with the truck when we spent the night in Qabridahre. But I could have sent Rooda to find my father. I could have told him to ask questions when he went into town. Given what you are saying, he would have found close family within an hour of making inquiries, maybe two hours.’

‘What do you think stopped you from asking him?’

He shrugs. ‘I was a child. I was not thinking.’

He falls silent again and resumes his contemplative posture, staring out of the window, fingers folded.

‘It is so strange to think about it,’ he says. ‘If the thought had come into my mind just once, only once; if I had watched Rooda walking into town and called him back and said: “Rooda, in Dire Dawa I was staying with my father’s sister and she told me maybe my father is in Qorahay. Will you ask? I will tell you my father’s and grandfather’s nicknames. I will tell you what you need to know to find him.” If it had crossed my mind just once to ask Rooda that, my whole life would have turned out different. I would never have come here. I would be with family.’

‘What happened happened,’ I say.

He nods. ‘That is how you must think. What happened happened. If you spent your time thinking that where you are now is because of mistakes you made long ago, you would not get up in the mornings. A person cannot live like that.

‘But still, it is natural to wonder. I was young back then. I was like a stone in the road. Anybody could just come along and kick me, and that would decide where I ended up...' [Asad was silent for a time].

‘Let’s stretch our legs,’ [Asad said].

And so we stroll around the town centre for a while, return to the car, and speak of other things. But as we are about to leave for Blikkiesdorp, he raises the subject again.

‘This is the first time I am hearing my story like this,’ he says, ‘and I am finding it very sad. As far as I am concerned, I am from Mogadishu, and the trouble started in 1991. To hear that my parents were refugees and that the place I fled to was actually home: it is a very sad story. Where is home? Do we Abdullahis not have a home? For my family to have been on the run for such a long time is a very sad thing.’

‘It is also ironic,’ I say. ‘The militia killed your mother because she was a Daarrood of Mogadishu, but it seems that she herself was a refugee and may have felt excluded from Mogadishu.’

‘Yes,’ he says quietly. ‘That is a part of what is so sad.’

He asks to hear more about Sheikh Hussein... I tell him that Sheikh Hussein is a militant Ogadeni nationalist.

‘For him,’ I say, ‘home is the Ogaden. It has been taken away, and his primary fight is to get it back. Somalia is secondary for him. He told me that only after the Ogaden has been taken back from the Ethiopians will it be necessary to think about the relationship with
Somalia.’

He nods. ‘I understand,’ he says. ‘That is what a man must do if his home is taken away from him. He must fight.’

‘But I am curious,’ I say. ‘In all your years in the Somali diaspora, you have brushed shoulders with Ogadeni nationalists all the time. They have websites and newspapers. They are very vocal. Hawo had told you that the Abdullahis were from Qorahay. Did it never occur
to you that the Ogadeni nationalists may have been talking about your own family history?’

‘I thought of them as one more political party,’ he replies. ‘The al-Shabaab people talk about Islam and purity and no mira and being holy. The Ogadeni people talk about fighting the Ethiopians. A lot of people make a noise about a lot of things. Until today, I did not think
that what they were saying had anything to do with me.’

I drop him at home and drive back into Cape Town. I am puzzled. He has said that he was merely a boy, that he was not thinking, that if he had had his wits about him he would have found his family. But Hawo had already told him that the Abdullahis were from Qorahay.
Why did he not look for family when he got there? More puzzling are the questions he did not ask in later years. He is a grown man with an adult’s capacity to reflect. He has heard the voices of Ogadeni nationalists all about him. Why did he never connect the dots? The prospect that his family was among the masses who fled in 1978 must surely have crossed his mind.

Perhaps there is a simple answer. Maybe he found the story the Ogadeni nationalists tell to be foreign: foreign to him as a human being. It is, after all, a tale that is hard to own. They are like the Israelites in the desert, but the forty years came and went countless generations
ago, and still they are wandering, their bitterness their sole nourishment. All they know is that they have been eternally robbed of their home.

Perhaps he decided early on that this was not his history. He needed for there to be a foundation. Once upon a time there was a prosperous Mogadishu family: that is how his story must begin. And that is how it must end. His time adrift is an anomaly, a parenthesis. It will end soon.

haggadah Section: Introduction