Notes from the Hyena's Belly by Nega Mezlekia

Author:Nega Mezlekia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466893245
Publisher: Picador

BOOK THREE: STORM

WINDOW ON HISTORY

IN THE YEAR A.D. 1000, if you had strolled along the northern frontier of the Horn of Africa, you would have witnessed a human tidal wave moving inland, and wondered where it could have come from. You might even have glanced at your surroundings and surmised that these nomadic people had somehow crossed the bottleneck at the Gulf of Aden; the vast Indian Ocean was impossible to navigate.

Having crossed this bottleneck, the Somalis found themselves in one of the harshest regions on the Horn, with little to recommend it for human settlement. They immediately started elbowing their way south and, to some extent, west. By the turn of the twentieth century, they occupied the regions they currently inhabit. Their progress, however, was not without obstacles. The Somalis faced their greatest challenge from the Oromo people, who were the original inhabitants of these regions. They drove the Oromos from their traditional homes into the Ethiopian highlands at the turn of the sixteenth century.

The land occupied by the Somalis is, for the most part, an arid savannah—an endless steppe punctuated by acacia trees, huge anthills and the thick-trunked baobabs. Somalis are nomadic pastoralists, their favoured domestic animal being the one-humped camel. This beast is the hardiest of all animals. In the dry season, it can go without water for more than three weeks. Between rains, Somalis can be seen driving a caravan of camels for a week or more, without regard for political borders, as they search for water holes and grazing lands. They repeat this arduous task, without rest, until the rains come. The nomads themselves subsist, during this period, entirely on camels’ milk.

Today, Somalis number between four and five million. Three-quarters of them are still nomads. They have a modern form of government, but it has little meaning for them, indeed, is of no relevance in their day-to-day life. Somalis pledge their allegiance to traditional chiefs, who have powers over matters that concern the group as a whole. The chief heads the clan. The clan is subdivided into patrilineal kinship groupings, which themselves are subdivided into smaller hereditary groupings. The diya-paying group is the smallest and most relevant to the rank-and-file Somali.

Diya means blood compensation. A diya-paying group consists of anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand kinsmen. If a Somali has been wronged by another Somali, it is unlikely that he will go to the police or the courts for justice, preferring to lay the matter before his diya-paying group instead. This group makes sure that compensation is made for injuries sustained, or for a violent death. Compensation takes the form of camels offered to the victim or the victim’s family.

Somalis have managed their affairs without outside intervention for many centuries. They have cultivated a rich oral literature, an egalitarian culture and religious institutions that are centred around Islam.

Many of the present-day Somali problems have their root in the European scramble for African territories, not to mention Ethiopia’s own imperial ambitions. The recent

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.