HARGEYSA, Somalia—When I first decided to quit my job in New York and head off to Somalia, I went out for drinks with a friend who has an astute command of geopolitics.
“Somalia is at war, and nobody cares! Mogadishu sounds crazy!” I told Mark.
“Nah. Somalia’s OK,” he replied. “They’ve got their clans—they can sort it out.”
This logic was lost on me. What could clans do to solve the war in Mogadishu, and anyway, what’s a clan?
Six months later, I am in Somaliland, a peaceful breakaway state in the north of Somalia, five hours by air from Mogadishu. I have come to learn the answers to my questions. I have heard that clans did make peace in Somaliland.
I see that Somalis don’t look the same. Some are as pale as Saudis, others as dark as the blackest African. I meet people from many different clans, but members of the same clan don’t necessarily look alike. An ad hoc council of five educated young men tell me there are 13 Somali clans. They warn me not to listen to confused officials who claim otherwise. Hawiye, Darood, Rahanweyne, Issa, Gadabursi, Sheikhal, Isaaq, Biyomal, Gaadsan, Yibro, Midgan, Tumal, and Gaboye are the clans. They make up one tribe and speak one language, Somali. The young men tell me that the father’s lineage decides their clan. This genealogy isn’t written down. It’s an oral society. The clans might as well be like tribes—in fact, the people here call them that—and you can go to town with your Rwanda and Kenya comparisons, because warfare between rival clans destroyed south Somalia after 1991.
There is a drought in Somaliland, so I go to the desert to interview nomads who are living without water. I find a father outside his home, a structure of sticks and mats of woven grass covered with tin and colorful fabric. Ali Jama Odowa allows me and my team of two soldiers, a guide, and a driver to sleep on the ground outside his family’s tent. Before we go to bed, and after everyone has listened to the scratchy shortwave broadcast of the BBC World Service, he tells me his problem: The drought might kill his cows, and they hardly have enough water to bathe with, cook with, and drink. The children look dangerously thin. I ask if he can take his family and move to another region where there’s more rain. I have heard this is what nomads do.
“It’s difficult for us to go where our clan doesn’t live. We can’t,” he tells me.
“But there might be water there,” I say, suggesting that he move into a region where the Darood clan rules. Odowa is from the Isaaq clan.
“There’s no problem that would force us to go that far. We haven’t seen that kind of a drought yet,” he says, flustered. “We can travel inside Ethiopia where our clan lives, and we can wait for Allah to bring rain.”
My guide and translator, Mohamed Amin Jibril, reminds me that Siad Barre, Somalia’s dictator for 22 years, was Darood. Somaliland is populated by the Isaaq clan. Barre killed more than 50,000 Isaaqs in the Somali civil war of the late 1980s. In one incident, his soldiers tied more than 1,000 Isaaq men and boys to trees with barbed wire, pumped them full of bullets, and then drove over them with tanks, burying them alive. Barre’s army bombed and razed Hargeysa, Somaliland’s capital.
Isaaqs fled as refugees to Ethiopia or, if they were rich, to the United States, Canada, or Europe. So, to ask Odowa if he would move to a place where Daroods live is ridiculous, cruel even.
“You have made this man deny that there is even a drought!” my guide says disapprovingly. Odowa would rather die of starvation than travel inside the territory of an enemy clan, however lush.
Wandering around some more, we cross the unmarked border with Ethiopia. We run into a small, smiling lady in threadbare clothes; she has a dozen sheep. She and my guide speak in Somali, and I see that she is mentally ill. My guide picks up one of her sheep to joke with her, and she throws a stick at him and runs away, bursting into tears.
“It is something from the war. Maybe her parents were murdered in front of her,” says Mohamed. “I asked her if she knew she was in Ethiopia, but she doesn’t know what Ethiopia is. She does not know her own country even. She only knows her clan.”
In the closest village, we learn that the woman’s family was killed in front of her; only one brother survived. He and their extended family, the Isaaq subclan called Makahil, take care of her. She knows only what’s necessary to survive. In a pinch, clan is more important than state. This may explain why Somalia never unified as a nation-state until 1960 and why Somalia has been a failed state since 1991.
Later, my guide explains how his clan protected him one night in Djibouti. He was in the neighboring country on a work assignment, but he had no money, so he slept on the beach. In the middle of the night, Mohamed says he woke to hear three Djiboutian soldiers discussing how they would drop a boulder on his head. Why they wanted to kill him is a mystery, but it isn’t surprising in these parts. “I knew I had a relative who owned a guest house in the town, so I went there,” Mohamed continues. “I woke him, and I said to him, ‘I am your relative, I come from such and such clan, and my uncle is so and so.’ ” The distant relative was unmoved. “I told him, ‘My security is threatened, and I need a place to sleep. I can sleep inside on the floor if you just let me in.’ ” Finally he agreed, and Mohamed slept safely.
I stay for three weeks in Hargeysa. It has been rebuilt since Barre’s bombardment and looks a lot like Tucson, Ariz. The garden behind my hotel is the haunt of men with ideas. I meet politicians, poets, activists, and businessmen. They drink tea and converse in the style of many Italians I know. They’re merry, grave, or excited, and sometimes arguments flare. Many have just returned to their country after fleeing in the 1980s. These members of the Somali diaspora are invariably progressive, and they don’t speak of clans, except to complain.
“It’s primitive gangsterism,” says Ali Hassan Osman, a businessman who settled in Toronto 20 years ago. He met a white Christian woman there and married her. His son doesn’t speak Somali. When Osman is annoyed with the slow service, he asks the waiters, “What is this, Jamaica?” He doesn’t think bloodlines should matter anymore.
Abokor is the hotel concierge. During my stay, his wife gives birth to their first child, a son. “I have named him Jibril Abokor Isaaq!” he tells me. “People can’t believe it, because Isaaq is really my last name, and it’s also the main clan of Somaliland. And Jibril Abokor is a subclan of Isaaq. So his name is after my subclan and my clan!” It’s like an American naming his baby Cambridge Boston Ireland.
My friend Mark’s claim that clans can work out their own problems proves to be correct here. One of the regulars in the hotel tea garden is Somaliland’s only psychiatrist, Omar Dihoud. He co-founded one of the rebel groups that ousted Siad Barre in 1991. Dihoud is a natural born storyteller and always has one ready for me when we meet. The best is the tale of how he helped to disarm his subclan after 1991. Somalilanders who had fought against Barre turned against one another once the dictator was gone. They were all members of the Isaaq clan but from different subclans. “There were many young people armed with Kalashnikovs,” says Dihoud. “They used to shoot each other, and it was very dangerous to travel from place to place. There were more than 30 checkpoints between Berbera and Hargeysa.”
One day in the middle of this chaos, the elders of Dihoud’s subclan invited him to a brainstorming conference. One of their boys had killed three men from another subclan, and the elders from that subclan demanded justice. How would these elders prevent such things in the future, and how could they convince their violent young men to give up their arms? “I am a psychiatrist,” Dihoud remembers telling them. “And as I am a psychiatrist, I know we are all paranoid after the war. We are all traumatized. We had blood on our hands. We fought against a dictator, and we killed each other. So everybody is paranoid that somebody is following him. And we think that if we give up the arms, other tribes will attack us. Let us disarm ourselves and give the arms to the government.”
The sultan of Dihoud’s subclan, whose authority could be compared to Native American tribal chiefs, ordered the boys to join the army. Other sultans across the region issued the same orders, and now Somaliland’s small government has a huge, unified army. (Click here to hear Dihoud tell this story.)
In matters of love, clan elders are less popular judges. One man tells me he was never permitted to marry a Midgan woman because his clan considered Midgans inferior. Somaliland’s own Romeo and Juliet is the legend of Hothan and Elmi Boderi. Residents look to the sky with wonder in their eyes when they speak these names, but no one could properly explain the tale to me until, by chance, Hothan’s son drove me to the coast. Abdisalam Mohamed Shabeelleh says his mother was a member of a noble clan. About 60 years ago, when the late Hothan was 12 years old, she went into a bakery in her village to buy cookies. There she met the owner, a middle-aged man named Elmi Boderi. It was love at first sight for Elmi, but because of her youth and noble blood, he was not allowed to speak to Hothan. For months he didn’t eat or sleep; all he did was recite mad love poems in the streets. And then he died.
Romance may not have changed with the times. I ask Abokor, the new father, whether his family cared what clan his wife belonged to. “If I bring to my family [someone from] some other clan as a wife, they will not bother me,” he says. “Although my wife and I are in the same clan.”
