The Mayor of Mogadishu by Andrew Harding

Author:Andrew Harding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Shamis with the kids, 1991. COURTESY OF THE NUR FAMILY

For years, Abdullahi was a difficult, hyperactive child. At home, after school, he would crouch behind the television set mixing flour and oil together on the floor, then pelting his older brothers and sisters.

“I swear, if I had this child I would either kill him, or kill myself,” said the lady next door. Tarzan sometimes felt almost the same way—“Believe me, he was crazy.” Shamis was more patient, but still, she admits, “Abdullahi was DIFFICULT! I could not sit when he was awake.”

The oldest boy, Ahmed, had the occasional run-in with the police. “He could be a little bit rude,” Shamis concedes. But Mohamed was quiet and earnest, and all three girls were thriving academically.

All six children went to the state primary school in a stern Victorian building just down the street. Shamis had become a support teacher there, helping other Somali children who had arrived more recently to master English. She organized coffee mornings for the new parents, explained the local bus routes and the welfare system, and still struggled with the rent on their council flat. London was growing on her, and she was good at making friends. Even the local drug gangs—Somali or otherwise—would leave her in peace now that they started to recognize her from school.

Years later, I’m sitting outside a café in north London with Abdullahi and his big sister Ayan. He’s now a gangly, charming, scatterbrained, information technology graduate looking for a job. She’s taking a lunch break from the private clinic nearby where all three of Tarzan’s daughters—all university graduates—now work. Ayan has her father’s almond eyes, a neat black hijab covering her hair, and a quick, warm laugh.

“I’ve always been a daddy’s girl!”

“He spoiled you,” Abdullahi teases, and then adds, “Mum used to spoil me.”

They talk about the camping trips that Tarzan would organize through the Somali Speakers Association for families that couldn’t afford holidays. A different place outside London every summer. As a teenager, Ayan used to help out. Abdullah, too, but he says he didn’t have any Somali friends when he was growing up. Only in sixth form.

“Somalis always used to call me ‘white boy’ cos I only had, like, white friends!” he says, and with that, perhaps inevitably, the conversation veers toward the subject of clans.

Both insist they grew up neither knowing nor caring about their own famously small clan. Abdullahi says he found out about the Udeejeen when he was a teenager but didn’t know where the branch fit in relation to the bigger clan tree. And it wasn’t until Ayan was about seventeen that some Somali girls started “acting weird and raising eyebrows,” and then one friend said, “Why don’t you ask Ayan—she’s from that tribe.”

“And I remember going home that night and asking my dad, ‘Am I this tribe?’

“And I remember my dad laughing, and saying, ‘Don’t buy into this filth.’”

By now, Tarzan seemed settled in London. Not as much as his children or Shamis, perhaps. But he was certainly busy.

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.