Letter From Somalia

Letter From Somalia: Terrorists keep targeting a Mogadishu chef’s restaurants, but he won’t shut down. Now Serving

by Xan Rice

 

In the summer of 2008, a forty-two-year-old chef named Ahmed Jama left London to live in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, where he was born. To his family and friends, it was a puzzling decision. Twenty years earlier, Jama had arrived at Heathrow Airport with a forged passport, no local contacts, and little command of English. He was now a British citizen, and the owner of a successful restaurant in London. He had a wife and three young children.

Mogadishu was in ruins, and at war. In the latest of a series of conflicts that started in 1991, a group of Islamist insurgents, the Shabaab, was battling Ethiopian troops, who were propping up Somalia’s transitional government. In the previous eighteen months, gun battles and shelling had caused eight hundred thousand people—Jama’s mother among them—to flee the city. Jama, with fifty thousand dollars in savings, flew to Mogadishu, where he checked into a hotel and started looking for a site to open a restaurant.

One of the few roads that were reasonably safe was Makka al-Mukarramah Street, which ran northeast from the airport toward the Presidential Palace. Jama found a plot of land on the street, near the derelict national theatre, and paid off the young men who had claimed it. As armored vehicles barrelled past, on their way to the front lines, he carted off seventy-two bags of rubble and trash. He planted trees and hired laborers to build a circular barista station. Inside it, he mounted an Italian-made espresso machine, its electrical innards removed, above a charcoal fire. . . .