Mapping the points of a star

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

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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.

Perhaps therein lies the crux of the matter, at least when it comes to Farah: Somalis always communicate in Somali, but he writes in English.

Fortunately, only a stone’s throw from Eastleigh is probably the best selection of books on Somalia in Africa, including most of what Farah has written.

Tucked into a corner of the third level of Nairobi’s Ya Ya Centre is the Bookstop. It is truly one of the great bookshops of the world. If at all possible, go there.

I’ve picked up a lot of books at Bookstop in the past year, including a book I had hoped to find in Little Mogadishu, Maps by Farah.

Book Safari is much more about the search for books rather than the book themselves There is insufficient space within this column to do justice to a book as deep and important as Maps. What I can say is that this book helps to clarify one of the most confusing and misunderstood tragedies on the African continent: the tragedy with which the people of Somalia have been living for decades.
Maps looks at one chapter in Somalia’s difficult recent history.

Askar is a young boy from the Ogaden, an area referred to by Somalis as Western Somaliland but recognised by the rest of the world as part of Ethiopia. Ogaden is also one of the five points of the Somali star (the three others are what was British Somaliland, now Somaliland, Italian Somalia, now Somalia and French Djibouti, now Djibouti). His childhood coincided with a war in the 1970s during which Somalia tried unsuccessfully to win control of the Ogaden from Ethiopia. Among other things, Askar follows the many battles on the maps his uncle has given him.

The greatest accomplishment of Maps lies in its illustration of what it means to be Somali. Farah argues that the ethnic homogeneity of Somalia sets it apart from other countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa, where nationality and ethnicity are not one and the same.

Book Safari doesn’t recommend travelling to Somalia to look for original reading material but does recommend anything (and there’s a lot of it) by Farah. The author lives in Cape Town, where he has probably shed a few tears not just for his own country but also for those of his countrymen who have fallen victim to xenophobic violence in South Africa. I tend to doubt such attacks would be committed if the perpetrators had read one of his books. Just a thought.

Maps retails for about R123 in South Africa and can be found at the usual shopping mall or online spots.

David L Smith is a director of Okapi Consulting, which set up Radio Bar-Kulan, a peacekeeping radio network for Somalia. In his spare time he hunts for local authors wherever he travels.

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