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The best books on Somalia include The World's
Most Dangerous Place; The Orchard of Lost Souls; and Crossbones. Each one
explores the human cost of civil war
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Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah
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| Nuruddin Farah |
Set in Somalia around the 2006 US-backed Ethiopian
invasion, the final volume in Farah's Past Imperfect trilogy can be read as a
standalone novel. This absorbing story puts a human face to the tragedy of a
failed state.
Three members of a
Somali-American family return to find their homeland imploding under an
Islamist regime in control of the capital, Mogadishu, as war nears and piracy
proliferates off the coast of breakaway Puntland.
Foreign correspondent Malik
has come to write about political conflict and piracy; his father-in-law,
Jeebleh, is re-establishing contact with old friends who he hopes will protect
Malik and ease his path; and Malik's elder brother, Ahl, is searching for a
stepson thought to have joined the Islamist militia on advice from an imam in
his Minnesota hometown.
Farah skilfully evokes
the paranoia and desperation that stalks the fragmented country, where trust is
in short supply and good people find themselves unable to steer it away from
self-destruction.
This is an impassioned
insider's portrayal of present-day Somalia, and of lives blighted by relentless
violence and civil war.
Somalia's most famous
novelist went into exile in the 1970s, during the rule of the dictator Siad
Barre. He now lives in the US and South Africa, but has vowed "to keep my country alive
by writing about it".
On the eve of the
civil war in the late 1980s, two women and a girl in Hargeisa, north-western
Somalia, find themselves caught up in the turbulence as their lives intersect.
In this story of
conflict and survival, events unfold through the eyes of Deqo, a nine-year-old
orphan born and raised in a refugee camp, who ran away and is now cared for by
prostitutes; Kawsar, an elderly, grieving widow bedridden after being beaten at
a police station; and Filsan, a zealous young soldier from Mogadishu, here to
help suppress the growing rebellion against the dictatorship. All three are
wrestling with memories of lost loved ones.
In a chapter on each
revealing their past, Mohamed sensitively builds her cast of strong,
self-empowered female characters.
As the revolt grows
and the army moves "not just to black out the city but to silence
it", the civil war's first "orgy of violence [is] enacted". But
amid the harrowing events taking place, the author inserts a ray of hope.
Mohamed succeeds in
achieving her stated goal of "[elucidating] Somali history for a wider
audience". The author, born in Hargeisa (now in Somaliland), came to
Britain with her family aged five – a temporary move made permanent by the
civil war.
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| James Fergusson |
Under the
attention-seeking title is a perceptive and engaging account of Somalia's
descent into violence and lawlessness. The country has not had a properly
functioning central government since the overthrow of the dictator Siad Barre
in 1991.
Meanwhile, it has seen seemingly endlessclan warfare,
a brutal Islamist
insurgency, foreign military
interventions,famine, pervasive
corruption, piracy and – unsurprisingly – the flight of about 2 million people
abroad.
The civil war is known
locally as "the destruction", and one source tells the author that
wherever the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride out to in the world, they
return nightly to stable in Somalia.
Fergusson travels
within Somalia and beyond, also visiting the peaceful but
unrecognised Republic of Somaliland; the breakaway region of
Puntland, home to a lucrative piracy industry; and Somali diaspora in the US
and UK.
He explores the
backstory essential to understanding how the country gained its unenviable
reputation as "the
world's most failed state", and why peace and security in Somalia
matter far beyond its borders.
Fergusson detects
reasons for optimism, with the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Shabaab
Islamists in retreat, piracy reduced,
bustling markets, Somalis
returning from abroad, and politics and law and order slowly
re-emerging.
The author is a
veteran British journalist and foreign correspondent.
Source: theguardian.com
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