by Abdi-Noor Mohamed
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The photo you see here is a Somali map lying just outside my house in Braås, Sweden. Coming back from Växjö on a very cold October afternoon, I saw a glittering figure with the shape of seven patched on the ground by receding rain waters. With shimmering sunrays falling upon it the reflection nearly blinded me but I insisted to take a full view of the sketch. It was exactly the map of Somalia.
It reminded me one of the most impressive cartoons I ever saw in Mogadishu. It was published in the daily paper of DADKA edited by a journalist by the name of Abdulkadir M. Mursal during the Somali conflict in the nineties. The cartoon showed Somali warlords attending a reconciliation conference jockeying for a top leadership post while forgetting that they have destroyed the whole country and nothing had been left behind to rule.
Out from the blue a man rushed into the conference room shouting loudly as he waved a Somali Map--which he meant Somalia itself--saying: "Has anybody lost anything? I found Somalia on the floor outside the conference hall. Whose country is it?" No Somali warlord responded to him as they were all busy in the final assessment of warlord achievement in terms of killings and to reward to the post of Presidency to the one with the highest crime records. In that case all of them were at a suspense of waiting for the announcement of the winner and had no time to claim Somalia as being their own country. Sad.
When I was reading the weekly paper I thought it was just a joke and a mere drawing of a funny artist but it wasn’t. The message was far beyond from a simple entertainment piece on a fairly infamous paper in a war-torn city. The artist, whom I think was a guy called, Alif, was telling us that there will be a day when all people would be as insensitive and dumb as the warlords, having other pressing agendas rather than wasting time on Somalia even if it appeared like a ghost slithering in the tiny droplets of a European autumn rain.
The magnitude of disaster is greater today than the day warlords disowned Somalia. That day we had Somalis fighting between themselves with foreign support whereas today we have foreigners fighting inside Somali soil to protect their own personal and national interests, reducing us to the status of mercineries who fight the war of others.
In the early nineties we had Somalia in the South and Somali-land in the North and the talk in the streets was mainly dominated by how to put the two back again. But today we have lands disintegrating further into smaller lands and tribe-dominated enclaves as Somalia qualifies to become land of terror held hostage by sea pirates, political pirates, religious pirates, gun pirates, money pirates, business pirates etc who revolve within a frame of international crime syndicate.
When I saw Somalia at my doorstep I took a glimpse at it and with eyes moistened by the memory of the good-old-days I asked why are you here dear Somalia? And she replied to me with this poem:
I AM THE BRAVE SOUL OF THE HORN
ONE WHICH CAN FIGHT WITH VIGOUR
BUT UNABLE TO WIN THE BATTLE
AS MY TWO HANDS TURNED ENEMIES
THEY HAVE A WAR BETWEEN THEM
I AM THE BOLD EAGLE IN THE HORN
ONE WHICH CAN FLY WITH DIGNITY
BUT UNABLE TO REACH ANYWHERE FAR
AS MY TWO WINGS TURNED ENEMIES
THEY HAVE A WAR BETWEEN THEM
FAILURE TO RECONCILE THEM
FORGED ME A DEATH WARRANT
UNLESS NEW HOPE IS INJECTED
I AM BOUND TO MY BURIAL SITE
WOULD ANYONE OFFER ME A HELP?
The weight of these deeply-touching words was too heavy to be ignored. So I fumbled around to scratch a word or two from the flicker of my dwindling inspiration flame.
Though the spot where I met Somalia is dry clean now I still adore it and every morning when I walk to my work at a nearby school, I bless it with a quick looks of nostalgia.
Lastly let me ask: Now that we have a new Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, can we provide hope to this ailing patient, or as usual we sit back and watch and place everything on the shoulders of the PM in a bid to insinuate faults when things have fallen apart and Al-Shabaab took charge of Villa Somalia?.
Abdi-Noor Mohamed
Writer and Film maker
Braås Sweden
[email protected]