The Boy & the Old Man: Three Years in Somalia

By Omar Eby

So who is Omar Eby? A retired English professor (tenderhearted and cynical) who looks with affection and severity upon the young man he once was in Somalia. Ebys first chapter Learning My Name quickly and playfully sets the tone for this fascinating memoir, The Boy and the Old Man. Identifying with one Omar after another, Eby skips from a Taliban terrorist and a four-star general to a translator of Somali tales and an Old Testament duke; then recalls an English student in Mogadiscio and an Epicurean Persian poet; meets a Chilean Anabaptist and finally names the close friend of Prophet Muhammad, Omar ibn al Khattab. You think this an exercise in narcissism? Of course notthe author finds too many ties linking a nave Mennonite missionary boy to Muslim society and the incredible beauty of the natural worldshows too well the tensions between documented facts and dramatic memory.

On the horn of Africa, Somali pirates seize tankers. On the mainland, clans fire rockets into each others quarters of Mogadishu, once the capital of the Somali Republic. But Omar Eby remembers another Somalia, when he taught there 50 years ago. Through the grid of accumulated years, Eby studies that missionary boy. The reader hears two voices: the 23-year old boy and the 73-year old man. Often the old man loves the boy; often the boy embarrasses him. The Somalis, Eby remembers as beautiful and exasperating, then, in 1959, as now, in 2009.

The chapters are like a series of transparencies laid down one on top of the other. The boys views overlaid by the mans two visits to Somalia in his thirties and then memory laid over everything. With more details, everything should be clearer. Yet, Eby writes in the Introduction, we are pleasantly surprised to find that the historically reconstructed self is still blurred, as muddy as the Shebelli River which flows through Somalia from the Ethiopian highlands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 9, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465325730

Omar Eby

Omar Eby lives with his wife in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Omar Eby.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

57520

Contents

Introduction: An Apology

NINETEEN57

Learning My Name

A New Bible

Testimony of Outgoing Worker

Breaking Rules

NINTEEN58

A Long Ride

A Distraught Woman

Shooting a Hippopotamus

A Pacifist and His Gun

NINETEEN59

God Uses Old Men

Four Women

Vespa

Ice Cream in Nairobi

NINETEEN60

The Beach

War Child

A TESOL Teacher

Two Somali Friends

Afterword

Sources

To: Sherif Ahmed Abbas

Kalif Sufi Mudhir

Allen Brubaker

For making my sojourn

in Somalia pleasant

For their editorial skills, thanks go to:

Anna Kathryn (Shenk) Eby

Mary Swartley and

Carroll Yoder

Introduction: An Apology

Even as I write, (here in late 2008) pirates of the Somali coast seized the Sirius Star—a Saudi oil tanker carrying two million barrels of crude. Earlier, Somali pirates seized a third Greek tanker in the Gulf of Aden. There, also, 52 Somalis out of more than 100 died, attempting to reach Yemen; their smugglers abandoned them in the Gulf of Aden for another boat. Elsewhere, a U.S. naval destroyer and a Russian warship are tracking a Ukrainian ship loaded with 72 tanks and ammunition—also seized by Somali pirates. This year, Somali pirates have claimed more than 90 vessels, far surpassing last year. On the mainland, clan warlords continue to fire rockets into each other’s quarters of Mogadishu, once the capital of the Somali Republic. Scott Johnson of Newsweek suggests that America, by trying to prevent another terrorist haven like Afghanistan from developing, may have strengthened the hand of radical Muslim jihadists and helped create another Iraq in Somalia.

In March 2007, masked gunmen dragged the corpses of slain Ethiopian soldiers through the streets of Somalia’s capital. Reminiscent of fourteen years earlier, when in 1993, slain American soldiers were similarly dragged through the street, following a failed military mission in Mogadishu. Concurrently, militants of opposing clans attack their own federal government, and warlords still fire at each other across a divided Mogadishu.

Some hopeful signs of a political solution occurred early in 2006. In February, the United Nations-backed Somali parliament (elected and sitting two years in Kenya) met for the first time inside Somalia. But in September a suicide bomb attack was made on Somali President Yusuf’s life. The next month, reports began to filter out of Somalia that fighters from Ethiopia and Eritrea were inside Somalia on opposite sides of the conflict. The Ethiopian-backed Somali armed forces (with possible American presence) ousted the Council of Islamic Courts which had seized control of Mogadishu and the southern countryside. The Council was feared to be a front for al-Qaida. By November, the third round of peace talks among all major clans, going on since June, collapsed. And with December the Somali president declared that al-Qaida was gaining a foothold in the Horn of Africa and that peace talks were no longer an option with these militants. Then major fighting broke out in the southern town of Kismayo and proximity. The Somali government called on the Islamic fighters to surrender. Losing out at the start of the new year, 2007, the Islamists abandoned their last stronghold at Kismayo. By February, the creaking machinery of the African Union had agreed to deploy peacekeepers to Somalia. Meanwhile back in Mogadishu, militants continued to attack the newly-seated government.

With these weekly litanies of violence and stupidity going on, these are hardly the days for me to be reminiscing about the Somalia I knew fifty years ago. One should be wringing his moral hands publicly in a display of frustrated impotence over a fifteen-year civil war, which has paralyzed that nation. Not revisiting that twenty-one-year-old boy who went there August 1957, to teach English for three years, a decade before TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) was invented by academia.

Old former colleagues in Africa again will find cause to call me a Romantic. My North American friends, again to name me a Cynic. Yet, I always think of myself as a realist—granted, one with a dark bent, but that psychic poise achieved by rightly assessing the human heart. The human heart, whether beating behind the facade of Eastern totalitarian or Western liberal institutions.

Also, nurturing the memory of my images of Somalia these days, I risk being dubbed an anachronist—sitting fifty years out of chronos. Or a nostalgist—wading the streams of the past, not as lived, but as remembered and imaged. Or an escapist—fleeing ugly technology, denying arthritic joints. Yet, it seems appropriate to follow the heart’s journey, and that without too much defense of nostalgia as healthy.

Remembering a previous time and place with affection—indeed with love—is a kind of wholesome suffering—suffering from reminiscences. Such an attitude is not that disease of the mind which seeks to cling to the past nor imagines those years as a prelapsarian utopia. Rather, this ride in a car rushing forward while one kneels on the rear seat and looks out the back window elevates the past; the experience while comforting also cleanses.

I agree with Andre Aciman, the author of Out of Egypt, on his rueful savoring of memory. We remember not because we have something we wish to go back to, nor because memories are all we have. We remember because memory is our most intimate, most familiar gesture.

The summer of 1997, I found myself thinking about that boy who went out to Somalia forty years ago. I made notes to myself, dropped them into a file, and went on teaching, tending to lawn and garden, and reading to granddaughters. When I took early retirement from the university classroom, I got out those notes, read my letters from Somalia to my parents, and scanned my three earlier books on Somalia. I set about studying that boy through the grid of my accumulated years. Often I loved him, indiscriminately; often he irritated me, thought him a bit of a fool. Then I set to work.

I harvested those three years of living in Somalia among a beautiful and exasperating people, on the harsh and desolate horn of East Africa. I winnowed the memory grains. I resisted self-deception, self-congratulation, sentimentality, and narcissism. The reader will see where I failed and let chaff get into the polished grain. Yet, I wanted to see the beautiful and the divine in the mundane, to delight in the glorious trivia of living out those days in that far country.

Each chapter stands alone, joined by setting, characters, time. Episodic, picaresque. The attentive reader will hear two voices: that of the boy in his early 20s; that of the old man now in his early 70s. One should hear in both voices the thankful awareness of grace, not only of the universal beneficence of God, but also the weighted mystery of that grace peculiar to the Christ. The tone is personal, critical, reminiscent and nostalgic, yet lightly mocking even while in a fierce embrace. The chapters are like a series of transparencies laid down one on top of the other. The boy’s views overlaid by the man’s two visits in his thirties, and then memory laid over everything. Now with more detail and nuance everything should be clearer. Yet we are pleasantly surprised to find that the historically reconstituted self is still blurred, muddied as the Shebelli River full of Ethiopian high country rains.

Some readers will feel that I make too much of a mere three years out of an old life. I cannot defend myself except to say: those years when I was a tender twenty-one-to-twenty-four-year old boy were some of the most formative and informative of my life. Also, some readers may be annoyed not to find what they want out of this book. I can only say: I’m sorry; this is not an ethnography of the Somali people; not a history—modern or contemporary; not an assessment of Somalia’s damaged national political landscape—what the warlords tear asunder, the clan elders hold together; not a history of the Mennonite mission’s exemplary work in Somalia, naming all the fine missionaries. Nor is my book a collection of short stories. And, it is not a novel!

I need to assure my colleagues of those years—1957-1960—that I am aware that some experienced far more traumatic occurrences and dramatic incidents and spent many more years in Somalia than did I. That they cherish quite a different memory of those distant years is quite understandable. I can only say, I write from my own. I do not ask for their endorsements nor seek their corrections. Rather, I urge them to write up their own accounts, their happy and terrible experiences of their own years in Somalia, including me or ignoring me, as they wish. I remember the members of my Somalia mission family with a great deal of affection and respect—well, almost all of them!

Further, I want to stress that the Somali people, even when absent in name from some chapters, are present in influence and color.

Finally, I must thank that wise professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine for agreeing with me. Man’s greatest pleasure is remembering, Richard Selzer writes in Raising the Dead. It’s what makes us godlike, distinguishes us from animals. Remembering is a way of reclaiming what was mine—. So be it!

2002-2008

Note on the spelling of Somali words:

During the Italian presence in Somalia until 1960, Italian spellings are used for places, i.e., Mogadiscio, Chisimaio, and so forth. After independence, the British English spellings are used, i.e., Mogadishu, Kismayu, and so forth. During the literacy campaign of 1972-73, Somali linguists occasionally employed more accurate phonetic spellings. So as not to confuse the reader unnecessarily, these spellings are not used in the text.

NINETEEN57

Learning My Name

Omar—I’ve been thinking about my name these days after the September 11 terrorist attack on the New York World Trade Center towers and a wing of the Pentagon in Washington. Mesmerized by horror, with the world I watched the re-plays of an airplane slamming into those walls of steel and glass. Worried to distraction I tried again and again to ring up our daughter who with her family lives in Manhattan only 20 blocks from the WTC towers. Later, I acknowledged a private snaky dread slithering silently through the gray shadow land of my mind: would that honorable old Arabic Muslim name—Omar—come up on the evening news? Be embedded even in my provincial newspaper? Would some militant mullah marketing this evil be an Omar? Would some disenfranchised Palestinian youth with stone still in hand applauding these infernos be an Omar? Would some politician of a Muslim state defending Osama bin Laden be an Omar?

I know! It’s pathetic—that in the face of such mind-numbing images and private sorrow and national tragedy, I am defenseless before the associative power of this one Muslim name—Omar. This egocentric—even referential mania—fills me with shame. Writing about it gives no catharsis. It might be better to remain silent, lest these private sentiments distract from the thousands of individuals and families at their sorrowful job of attempting to sweep up their broken hearts. Yet, these months of writing about my early years (1957-1960) of teaching in Somalia might excuse this bit of narcissism these days.

Omar. There he is! Within days of the terrorist attack a Taliban leader in Afghanistan declaims defiance to the American President’s request to turn over Osama bin Laden. His name is Mohammed Omar. Osama will be the last person to leave Afghanistan, the Newsweek (October 1, 2001) quotes Omar saying to a visiting delegation from neighboring Pakistan. Other Omars will follow.

I have no fear of a Muslim Omar. Rather, if I have any fear of getting shot, it comes from the inflamed henchmen of our own North American brand of militant fundamentalists: Tele-evangelist Jerry Falwell with his stupid retort: The pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians . . . the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen’. And his TV host and cohort Pat Robinson, darling of the white political right wing, nodding his smarmy agreement. And their junior brat, Louisiana Representative John Cooksey, with his southern brand of idiocy: If I see someone come in and he’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked! I imagine that out in some NRA boondocks a disciple feels it’s his patriotic duty to shoot a 450-year-old pacifist Mennonite Omar.

So, having a name like Omar in America these days can leave one feeling vulnerable. No famous WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant) four-star general today bears that name to wither any kudzu-like bigotry that might be creeping over that good Muslim name—Omar. Today’s younger generation does not remember Omar Bradley and his one million men in forty combat divisions, which swept through France, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia during World War II. A generation for whom Vietnam is an ancient war does not have World War II on its historical radar. Nor Somalia, East Africa, since the withdrawal of American troops following the 1993 special operations disaster. The Army’s Delta Force and a Ranger battalion engaged Somalis in urban combat. A debacle in the back alleys of Mogadishu left eighteen American boys dead, some to be dragged by their heels through the streets. But it was there with the Mennonite Christian mission in 1957 that the private confusion with my name Omar began, which gave rise to the likes of which follow.

"A few writers have emerged who have chosen to use English (italics, mine). The American-born Omar Eby published a number of books in English in the early 1970s, including the collection of short stories The Sons of Adam: Stories of Somalia (1970)." This bit of wonderful silliness was brought to my attention by Dr. Roger Kurtz, a young friend, a former student. His specialty being African literature, Kurtz attends to all the truly great and the truly dreadful literary productions from that continent. To the several photocopied pages from Gareth Griffiths’ book, African Literatures in English: East and West, Roger penned: Congratulations, Omar! Professor Griffiths, writing from his perch in Australia, has enshrined you as a Somali who has ‘chosen to use English.’ Good choice, I say!

In this Longmans publication (London, 2000), I garner further delightful error. In an appendix of fine print, Further References, I find an eight-line mini-profile of me. At first, all facts are accurate: my date of birth, my Alma Maters, my Virginia employment, the list of publications. Then the good Aussie authority on African literature writes: "Most of Eby’s work has been in non-fiction or in the translation of Somalian tales" (p. 271), (again, italics, mine)!

I would happily take that credit: for translating Somali tales from the Somali language into the English language. But a life-long affliction of modesty married to truthfulness will not allow the honor. I never learned to speak the Somali language during my three years in Mogadiscio (1957-1960). Only to hear a little of it. Only to sing heartily in phonics a few Christian ditties. And to read none of it: not until 1972 was a script devised so that Somali could be written. Before that, all formal writing and education had been conducted in Italian (the official language of the colonialist), Arabic (the religious language of Islam), and English (the language used during the British occupation of World War II).

So, there my Eby, Omar name sits in Griffiths’ index, cheek-to-jowl, between Danquah, Deneke, Deng, Dibba, Diop, Dipoko, Du Bois—on the one side, and on the other—Egbuna, Ekwensi, Emecheta, Epie’Ngome, Equiano, Eyoh, Ezenwa-Ohateto—and there the photocopied page ends. Griffiths’ listing me among African writers while honorable is a mistake. (One wonders how many other mistakes of this magnitude crouch elsewhere in the learned professor’s book.) In his Index my name—this author who chose to use English—Eby, Omar 268, 371-2—falls between Ebony Dust (Moore) 255, and Echoes from the Valley 255.

Griffiths’ mistaken confusion about my name and nationality and faith is only the most recent. Fifty years ago, perplexity began on my landing in Mogadiscio, Somalia, August, 1957. First, the immigration officials, then our cook, then my adult students of English. Over those first months, it would take the occasional witness of my passport to convince people that my name was indeed Omar. And that I had not adopted Omar as my new name in some early rush to identify with my national hosts’ country, Somalia, a Muslim people, except for the Italian Roman Catholic administrators. (Four decades later, on returning to the States and bearing a name like Omar, I would probably be branded a fake Arab, along with the fake Latinos, who have put some of the real Latinos into a racial snit.)

So, full of ignorance, I, Omar, carried my name into Somalia with its Muslim ethos, myth, and culture. Ignorant, too, of the religious and historical aura haloed above the name Omar, I learned my name.

But I did know that Omar was a Bible name, well, if only in a list of the begats in the Old Testament. Granted, Omar does not have the awe of a Christian-sanctioned Jewish name such as David and Isaac, nor the Christian panache as do Paul and Mark. Still, Omar is there, in Genesis 36: 11 and 15. Granted, he is of that branch of early men whose progenitor is Esau, a man of whom Jehovah in a righteous pique will later say through his last prophet, Malachi: I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated (1:2, 3).

Esau took his wives from the women of Canaan (Gen 36:1), polytheists, no doubt, each with her own private household goddess. Later, reconciled to that deceiving brother Jacob, Esau moved to a land some distance from his brother Jacob. Their possessions were too great for them to remain together; the land where they were staying could not support both because of their livestock (36:6,7). The land to which Esau and his clan moved was the hilly countryside of Seir, the Horite. Over time, Esau’s people in Seir, the land they occupied (36:42), became assimilated with the Horites and themselves assumed chiefdoms. So there Esau became the father of a people to be known as the Edomites. This fact the Bible records with guileless simplicity: This was Esau, the father of the Edomites (36:43).

Now the first of Esau’s three wives, Adah, bore them a son, whom they named Eliphaz. To an unnamed wife, Eliphaz had five sons: Teman, Omar, Zepho, Gatam and Kenaz. And to a named concubine, Timna, Eliphaz had a sixth son, Amalek. If Omar had sisters, their names, unrecorded, are lost to us, as was their mother’s name, she, too, presumably from the Canaanitish people of her mother Adah.

Only recently did I bother to figure out the Biblical Omar’s relationships: father, grandfather, brothers, and Grandmother Adah. Early in my literate childhood (I was not an early reader even though I was sent to the first grade at Cearfoss Public School as an immature five-year-old), I did not understand what the sacred text meant when it recorded this action by a husband: . . . now he went in unto his wife, and he knew her. (How dumb can a little Cearfoss farm boy be, not to make the connection between the Biblical account and the weekly barnyard activity before his eyes, the lusty bull going in unto the unhappy cows!) But I had guessed that begat had something to do with fathers and sons, that I, Omar, was the son of my father, Noah, the Cearfoss farmer, not the builder of the first luxury cruise liner equipped with fresh beef, poultry and eggs.

In my father’s Bible, which I perused during the hour-long sermons of my Reiff’s Mennonite childhood, short, black-stockinged legs swinging to the rhythmic drone of the old preachers, I first discovered my name. Reading on, I found that Omar becomes Duke Omar, according to the 1611 King James Bible, the only edition allowed in my church. Duke Omar! The first Omar became a duke. But still reading on, any vicarious inclination towards aristocratic puffery is checked when I read that all of Omar’s six brothers receive dukedoms, as well as his male half-cousins.

What the King James translators render from Hebrew for duke is flattened to mere chief in my 1986 New International Version. Chief seems the more appropriate—these were, after all, a nomadic, tribal people. Chiefs, we call the leaders of such people whether in pre-Columbia North America or pre-colonial Africa. One can understand the 17th century British translators reaching for Duke, their own social and political milieu infested with titular nobility: King, Lord, Highness, Sire, Czar, Maharaja, Nawab, Regent, Viceory, Prince and Duke. And I, without a shred of nobility—the blood of German peasantry beats in my veins, regardless of my Arabic name—much prefer Duke Omar to Chief Omar, prefer the royal title even if I seem pathetic in my lack of guile, craving the aristocratic aura associated with the term: Duke.

In my late afternoon and early evening English language classes in Mogadiscio, I had several Somali Omars, and at least one Yemeni Omar. Handsome young men, the whole lot, but particularly Omar Abdulkadir Sharif. In his mid-20s, he did not work at anything. Understandable, since unemployment of adult males stood somewhere around the mid-forty percent. But Omar Abdulkadir Sharif wore his unemployment as a presumed right, fully conscious of belonging to a corps d’ elite. Not only did he not work. He would not work, certainly not as a nomadic camel driver—bushmen—the towns people called such. Shop-keeping and policing and bureaucratic paper-shuffling for the Italians, too, lay outside Omar Abdulkadir Sharif’s image of himself. Perhaps after he perfected his English he would consent to being an official translator for one of the United Nations officers, watchdogs sent to Mogadiscio to nudge the Italians towards granting the Somalis their independence in July 1960.

Omar Abdulkadir Sharif wore his full-time leisure with the lethargic elegance of a Charles Bon, a character in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! I was to meet years later. Bon’s mother was probably one of the cafe au lait octoroons, those kept mistresses of corrupt old southern white gentlemen, who raised their bastard offspring in the comparative wealth and idleness of New Orleans. These Faulknerian descriptions of Charles Bon seem tailored for Omar Abdulkadir Sharif: he had an air of sardonic and indolent detachment like that of a youthful Roman consul making the Grand Tour of his day among the barbarian hordes. Bon reclined in a sunny window in his (university) chambers, this man handsome elegant lazy and even catlike and too old to be where he was, too old not in years but in experience, with some tangible effluvium of knowledge, surfeit: of actions done and satiations plumbed and pleasures exhausted and even forgotten. Years later, now back in the States, I saw in Michael Jackson with his surgically-modified face and limp wrist a reincarnation of that distant Somali Omar, minus the one white glove.

Omar Abdulkadir Sharif was in the 4:00 o’clock class, my first for the late afternoon. He always sat at the front-most table for students, inches from my teacher’s table. He held open his English reader with beautiful fingers,