The Family House
by Nuruddin Farah
Early one January morning in Mogadiscio, I was awakened by a phone call from a woman I didn’t know. I was the first member of my family to have returned to Somalia since the outbreak of civil war, when Mogadiscio descended into anarchy following the collapse of the dictatorial regime of Siad Barre. After more than a decade of turmoil, an interim government had been set up, and I went to the country on a one-man peace mission, hoping that, in my role as a writer, I might be able to bring the politicians and the warlords closer to one another. But the phone call wasn’t about peace. The woman, describing herself as a “looker-after” of my older brother’s property, wanted me or my brother to pay her fifty dollars a month for having kept the house in as good a state as she had found it when the city went up in flames, back in 1991.
I had no idea what to say. I assumed that this woman had occupied my brother’s house because it happened to be in an area controlled by a warlord belonging to her clan family, yet she somehow was not satisfied with having lived for free on the property. She wanted to be paid for her pain. Fifty dollars a month for the last eleven years was no paltry sum, and far more than my brother, who now lived in North America with his family, could ever afford. I asked her, what would she do if my brother couldn’t pay? She said that a refusal to pay would prove most regrettable. Then she hung up.
I was overwhelmed by a sense of agitation. If my brother’s house had been taken over by a stranger, what had happened to the first home we had owned in Mogadiscio, the family house?
• • •
I grew up a couple of hundred miles away from Mogadiscio, in a small town in Ogaden, the Somali-speaking territory under dispute by Ethiopia and Somalia. When I was seventeen, fierce fighting erupted between the two countries, and our family and many others fled to Mogadiscio, abandoning our home and property, including a large commercial farm where my father grew maize, millet, sesame, vegetables, and fruit.
My father’s farm, which yielded two crops in a good year, was in a fertile triangle about a three-hour walk away from Kallafo, a town astraddle the River Shabelle, one of two permanent rivers that rise in Ethiopia and flow southward into Somalia to empty into the Indian Ocean. Because our town boasted the most grain production in the entire region, it attracted a variety of residents, some from the Somali-speaking peninsula, others from Ethiopia. There was a large community of Yemenis engaged in business, and a garrison of Ethiopian soldiers recruited from all the various ethnic groupings of the Empire. At one point, during the better part of a year, the town hosted a small community of Palestinian refugee families whose children attended our school.
Photo by Sahal Abdulle
The town had two schools, both on the other side of the river, right under the watchful eyes of the Ethiopian garrison stationed up on Government Hill. One of them was largely the consequence of my father’s commitment to community-funded education, and the fact that the Ethiopian government, which administered the disputed region, was not keen on providing schooling for us. The other school offered its classes in English, having been established by the American churches. There was a bridge dividing the section of town where we lived from the barracks where the Ethiopians camped. Because their salaries were seldom paid on time, the Ethiopian soldiers were in the habit of levying their expenses by intimidating the civilian population and taking everything at gunpoint. We lived in daily fear for our lives, and suffered humiliation at the hands of the soldiers, who behaved as they pleased. We dreaded crossing the bridge on our walk to school alone, and avoided encounters with the soldiers after dark.
My family had a very large compound that was alive with activity all day long and all year round. There were lots of comings and goings, of relatives visiting from the hinterland, or herdsmen tying their beasts in our huge pen for several days, time enough for them to sell their cattle. Then they would give their customs duty to my father, to buy what they needed from his general store. Our compound was busy, too, because my father, a stalwart supporter of community education, provided free housing and gave his produce gratis to the teachers there. My mother had her own dozen or so head of cattle, received in advance from my father’s holdings in the event of a divorce. We, the boys, helped her milk the cows in the mornings and evenings, and on occasion we assisted the herdsman hired to escort the cattle out of town, where they were meant to graze. One of my younger sisters was assigned to deliver the milk to a restaurant where it was sold.
• • •
There were eleven of us when we fled the fighting, and it wasn’t easy to start over from scratch. My parents had lived in Mogadiscio before, and my two older brothers had been born there, but the city still felt alien to us. We weren’t used to living in rented accommodations, or to sharing our space with others. My father fell into a depression that he never came out of altogether.
Mogadiscio, which had existed as a city-state from the tenth century on, had its own cosmopolitan charm. Its history had been that of a prosperous city, beautiful, peaceful, and receptive to newcomers. It had teahouses and restaurants with terraces, and cinemas and theaters. The mysterious quality of the city also had a way of drawing interest. Compared to the hick town where we had lived in constant fear for our lives, Mogadiscio was welcoming, a city synonymous with civility. Moreover, most everybody was in a celebratory mood. If you were lucky, as I was, you got invited to parties every weekend, to dance to the latest music or listen to a singer of the more popular Somali tunes from a musical that had just hit town. I would have myself fitted for a new pair of trousers—when I could afford to—and I often enjoyed my cappuccino along with a sandwich wrapped in take-away foil while sitting with a friend in a car after an evening at the movies. My friends took every opportunity that came their way to throw a party or to go out to one.
When I first arrived in Mogadiscio, I loved the labyrinthine networks of the city’s alleyways; I loved the mélange of its cultures—an eleventh-century minaret cheek to jowl with a glass house. Mogadiscians spoke every language in an idiom of their own manufacture. I loved the contrasts on display at every turn, from the monument raised in memory of Mussolini to the palace in which the city’s Zanzibari sovereign defined the city’s cosmopolite. I adored the sea that served as the city’s face. Above all, I loved the Tamarind shopping complex, the city’s traditional prize market and joy, where the shoppers, dressed in their finest getups, sauntered in, in search of an after-siesta bargain. The city put on a sunny smile soon after siesta; the evenings were starry fun, and the city came alive. In those days, the city was innocent of the meanness of crime.
There was an epic dustiness to the pre-monsoon storms, as the sea raged and the minarets blared, praying for rain. We were poor, though, and our prayers were to own our own house again one day. Meanwhile, we did what we could to survive. I am the third of four brothers, and my older brothers and I landed jobs relatively quickly: one as a teacher, one as an administrator, and I as a clerk and typist. One of my sisters stayed at home to help my mother, and the younger siblings went to school. My three brothers and I, “the boys,” rented a very large room, with its own outhouse, close to where “the family”—my parents and younger brothers and sisters—lived in two rooms. Our food was prepared at the family kitchen, and we all ate together.
Six years later, we were still living in temporary accommodations. I was married and had a young son by then. One day he was playing outside, opening and closing the gate, when the landlady came to collect the rent. I heard her shout, “Stop it!” My son started screaming fitfully and wouldn’t be silenced. When I came to see what was afoot, the landlady was telling my mother off for letting “this small thing destroy my house!” Without thinking, I gave the landlady our notice and told my worried mother to find us a house.
• • •
My mother found a six-room house in the district of Howl-Wadaag. Three of the rooms were tolerably livable; the other three were half mud and half stone. I arranged a loan through a friend at a bank, and we moved into the tolerable part of the house. After having paid off the loan, we hired masons to rebuild the other three rooms and a spacious courtyard. There was also a bathroom with a shower and a kitchen where my mother and her friends used to sit talking as they sifted rice and cooked. We all found ourselves working harder, and even my father’s depressed spirit was somewhat lifted. Now that we had our own house, we no longer felt as if we were strangers in this city.
We registered the property in the name of my youngest brother, being aware that most of us wouldn’t be living there forever. In 1974, I left Somalia on a scholarship to Britain, soon after which it proved unwise to return. I had been threatened with a thirty-year detention by Siad Barre’s regime for a novel I had published in London. My brothers and sisters had stayed on in Mogadiscio throughout this period, gradually acquiring their own homes but continuing to meet every Friday for lunch at the family house.
Photo by Sahal Abdulle
Near the end of the 1980s, the internal politics of Somalia erupted. Siad Barre had come to power through a military coup in 1969 and was determined to hold onto it until he was run out by a ragtag of armed militiamen. A cold war strategist, he played the Soviets against the United States and its allies, now befriending one who supported him, now turning to the other in search of further military and financial assistance. He was a dictator, divisive in his politics, aligning himself with this or that clan family until he ran out of friends—when everyone had become his foe. He came to rely more and more on his immediate family, in whom he invested politically, militarily, and financially. Several powerful clan families had rebelled against Siad Barre’s regime, and there were insurrections throughout the country. The clan, let me explain, is an extended patrilineal network that owes its existence to a political construction whose aim was to provide the blood community with an imagined identity. That the concept of a clan was artificially constructed is evident from the notion of tol, a Somali word meaning both “kinship” and “to stitch together”! I am of the heretical view that it is worthwhile to find out what has made two clan-based militia groupings clash, not just who is fighting whom. Power (who is to become the head of state) and wealth (who has the right to collect taxes or tributes and keep them) are two of the primary reasons for all of the fighting between clans. To prove that he had more right than anyone else to remain president, Barre sent in his army to quell the militiamen fighting to overthrow him, and he also employed South African mercenary pilots to raze entire cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. As a result, Mogadiscio came under attack from a confederacy of clans, and Barre took to bombing those parts of the city suspected of harboring dissidents.
At the time, I was living close by in Uganda, where I was teaching at the university. I remained aware of what was going on through contact with family and friends. My mother had died a few months before the fierce fighting broke out. As the conflict worsened, the clans that had variously collaborated with the regime until Siad Barre’s overthrow began to fall out with one another. With the situation growing worse by the day, the rest of my family locked up their houses as though they were going away for the weekend. First they went to the coastal city of Kismayo, where they camped for a week while awaiting news. When rumors spread that Kismayo would soon come under attack, they left by boat for Mombasa, in Kenya, where they were put into a refugee camp.
Eventually, one of my sisters migrated to the United States. My father died two days before he was due to join her. One of my brothers made his way to Minnesota. My eldest brother died in Addis Ababa in 2007, and my youngest now lives in Britain, while I am in Cape Town. We’re scattered across the world, but the memory of our family house unites us whenever we talk.
• • •
I was so disturbed by the early morning phone call in Mogadiscio that I spent the day talking about it to as many people as I could, including some whose own property was now in the hands of militiamen. The family house was located in an area that had lately come to be known as Bermuda because it was thought to be so dangerous. Everyone advised me not to go there without first getting in touch with either the deputy chief of the police force, who could provide a security detail for me, or the warlord whose militiamen controlled the area. I also sought the opinion of the manager of the hotel where I was staying, in the north of the city. He was a stalwart politician with many connections, and, as luck had it, he knew a distant cousin of mine. Perhaps she could enlighten me as to what had become of our family home, he said.
The following day, the young woman came to see me. Clearly worried, she explained that Bermuda was a no-go area, notorious for its years of fierce street-by-street gunfights between militiamen allied with the most ruthless of the warlords. She had lived there herself until the fighting drove her out. When I insisted on going to find the house, she suggested that I call on “Warlord G,” whose militiamen were said to run Bermuda as their fiefdom these days, and request that he provide me with a clearance so that I wouldn’t come to harm if I were stopped there.
I had met Warlord G once before, in 1996, and he struck me as a man with whom one could do business. I arranged to be taken to his stronghold by two men related to him: one was a former colonel in the defunct national army who was now chief of the prime minister’s security detail; the other was a member of parliament.
Photo by Sahal Abdulle
Only one route linked the northern part of Mogadiscio, once under the control of the warlord Aideed’s faction, to the south, formerly under the control of the warlord Ali Mahdi. The traffic was very heavy: taxis, trucks, private saloon cars, government-owned vehicles bearing military or police insignia, “technicals” carrying their warlord en route to or from their reduced power base.
Today, Mogadiscio is relatively peaceful, and Somalia’s interim government, the Transitional National Government, exists alongside the warlords in an uneasy cohabitation. Some warlords, including Warlord G, hold ministerial positions in the transitional government and thus are not in opposition to it, yet they continue to strengthen their hand in any way they can. Others have allies in neighboring Ethiopia, which is interested in keeping Somalia from being divided into fiefdoms. Even though the city is awash with weapons—some going back to the Soviet era, and many more from the time when the United States was an ally of Siad Barre’s regime—people are not disturbed by the presence of these weapons until there is a shooting, which is rare these days. At the time of my visit, however, a spirit of danger still reigned.
When we arrived at Warlord G’s redoubt, he and I talked about peace for a good two hours. He wore jeans and trainers, and was so relaxed—even when he called over a young militiaman who had misbehaved—that he might have been a man on safari. (I had no idea what the man being admonished had done.) Just before we left, I asked Warlord G if he thought it safe for me to go to Bermuda to see what state our family house was in. He responded that, as far as he knew, the area was now very safe. He offered to send in his special commando, if need be, but he doubted that it would be necessary. Still, it took some arm-twisting to make the colonel who had driven me to Warlord G’s stronghold agree to let us use his personal car, and even more to convince the member of parliament to come with us.
We were well on our way when the colonel revealed that he knew that our family home was two doors away from his uncle’s property. We entered Bermuda from the south and drove as slow as a snail in an effort to avoid impact from the deep depressions in the roads. The colonel explained that the ditches had contained sewage system drainage pipes rumored to have been sold in Nairobi and the Arabian Gulf by militiamen. The telephone poles had no wires, and you could be sure that the water pipes had been removed, too.
As we drove slowly along, suddenly the earth gave way under the tires of our car, and we fell into one of the ditches. The two front tires spun round and round, covering us with fine red sand. By now the whole place was alive with curious onlookers. We clambered out of the vehicle and pushed it out of the sand, back onto firmer ground. A bare-chested man in a sarong, between forty and fifty years of age, came forward in the self-important manner that some men display in such situations.
When he asked the purpose of our visit, the colonel introduced himself in a way that made it clear that we had been sent there by Warlord G. “We’re looking for my uncle’s house,” he said, mentioning his uncle by name. Could the man take us there? “No problem,” the man in the sarong told us, instructing us to park the car under the tree in front of his house, lock it up, and follow him.
We walked eastward, away from the inhabited area of Bermuda and into a zone of total grief. I had never seen so much devastation in my life. What I saw called to mind wartime images of humans with their eye sockets emptied, their noses removed, heads bashed in until they were featureless and couldn’t be recognized as humans anymore. The houses of Bermuda looked like no houses at all. Having been exposed to the elements for several years, vandalized, and not lived in, they had no roofs, no windows, no doors. We stopped walking, and the man in the sarong pointed at a house, saying to the colonel, “That’s your uncle’s house.” Whereupon the colonel turned to me and said, “In that case, it’s yours.” I couldn’t believe that I was looking at my family’s savings so recklessly wasted. I refused to go inside, fearful that I might do or say something stupid, or perhaps even faint from the shock of the destruction before my eyes. Could somebody else please go inside and tell me if it was really our family house? I stayed where I was, and described to the others what I remembered about the layout of the six rooms.
The others went inside and then came back out, confirming that it was indeed as I had described. But I dared not step inside, lest I should feel sadder than I already felt, having seen so much devastation all around. This was judgment day, and I didn’t like the thoughts that were crossing my mind.
• • •
Photo by Sahal Abdulle
I met Warlord G once again, at an airport, when I was leaving Somalia. He asked if I had found our family house. I told him about its state of ruin, how there was no roof, the windows had been removed, and the doors, too. He called a construction engineer over and then offered—if I would put in about two thousand dollars to have it redone—to rent the house for me and send the rent money to me anywhere I liked, even Cape Town. I said I would think it over.
Nuruddin Farah is the author of ten novels, including his most recent, Knots, and one nonfiction book, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora. His works have been translated into twenty-five languages. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.