Northeastern Kenya is one of the five points of the Somali star on the national flag; an area sometimes referred to as Kenyan Somaliland.
DAVID L SMITH: BOOK SAFARI
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Britain, at the time it was shedding its African colonies, organised a referendum in which Somalis in the region voted overwhelmingly in favour of joining the new Republic of Somalia rather than becoming part of an independent Kenya. An uneasy relationship between Somalis and Kenyans begins more or less at this point.
Most of my travels in the past year have been for work in Somalia and I have hunted down and devoured as many books about the country as possible. But my Book Safari starts at the centre of Kenyan Somalia -- Nairobi’s Eastleigh district, also known as Little Mogadishu.
I have to come clean and confess that the primary reason for my frequent trips to Nairobi’s Eastleigh in 2010 was to eat camel meat samoosas and drink Somali tea at a favourite café. But also to hunt for books, a search that lasted an entire year.
Usually in the company of a Somali journalist friend, I walked up and down every street in Eastleigh, looking for the printed word. Hopes were high at first and I was sure we would come across at least something by Nuruddin Farah, Somalia’s best known author. If there’s a big five for a Somali book safari then without a doubt Farah is one of them.
Weeks turned into months of fruitless searching -- but I don’t give up easily and I knocked on all doors. At the end of a year’s search we did manage to come up with the most important and influential text in Somalia -- the Qur’an -- but novels of any sort were not to be found, not by Farah, not by anyone.
Book safari trips to the real Moga-dishu and other parts of Somalia yielded the same disappointing results.
This is rather sad. Somalis have an oral culture. They count among themselves thousands of poets and they are extremely active on the internet.
Somali information pages are posted from just about wherever the diaspora is present and numerous radio stations serve as their post office and community billboard.