Kitabı oku: «A Woman of Firsts»

CHAPTER ONE

Hargeisa, British Somaliland Protectorate, 1937

Seven days after I was born at 9 p.m. on 8 September 1937 following a long and difficult delivery, my father gave me the name ‘Shukri’, which means thanks. This was because I was considered something of a miracle after two years of my mother’s infertility.

The only reason I know the date of my birth is because I was born in a hospital in Hargeisa, unlike the majority of Somalilanders. We didn’t mark birthdays in the same way as people in the West because we didn’t then have a written language, very few people could read, and no one knew what a calendar was. Many my age don’t know when they were born and say simply ‘the time of bad floods’, or ‘the month before the long drought’. Age was counted by the rainy seasons, of which there are two, so a child who has seen two rains would be described as two years old when they were really only one.

I was a big, healthy baby although I carry two scars on my head from the forceps used by the English obstetrician who delivered me. Perhaps the miracle of my survival in a country where infant mortality is still the fourth highest in the world is the reason I became such a headstrong child and a stubborn adult – to which many will attest. With ninety-four in every 1,000 babies dying at birth in Somaliland (compared with four or five in the UK and the US), it is customary for newborns never to be named until they are a week old for fear their parents become too emotionally attached.

At my naming ceremony on 15 September, my mother Marian, a Somali who’d been raised a Catholic, called me Edna in honour of a Greek girlfriend who insisted that if I was a girl then I should take her name. It was a moniker Dad never once used. My arrival ended what my mother feared was a curse against her ever since she’d married my father two years earlier. Many of those who liked my father disapproved of his marriage and believed that he should have chosen a Muslim wife. This view only gained currency when Mum hadn’t yet borne him a child, as, in our culture, it is normal for a wife to conceive straight away. If she doesn’t it is usually blamed on ‘the evil eye’ or some other bad spirit and Allah is prayed to, so when Mum finally became pregnant with me the evil eye was considered to have blinked.

My father was over six feet tall, charismatic, generous, fluent in several languages and the best doctor and communicator I’ve ever met. To him, teaching people about healthcare was not only a duty but also a pleasure, and he threw his heart and soul into educating anyone he came across. One of his favourite expressions was, ‘If you cannot do it with your heart then your hands will never learn to do it.’

His own father, Ismail Guleed, was something of a legend in Somaliland. A successful, silver-haired merchant from the noble Arap Isaaq clan of nomadic warriors and camel herders, he was known as Ismail Gaado Cadde, which means White Chest. This referred to the white hair on his chest that spilled over his tunic.

Wealth in my country is measured in camels – a female and her calf can cost £1,000 in today’s terms – and my grandfather exported large herds of them. Independently wealthy, he hired traditional dhow boats to carry goods destined for Ethiopia and service his lucrative contract to supply livestock, firewood and ghee to the British garrison in the Aden Colony, sixty kilometres across the Gulf of Aden – the gateway to the Red Sea.

Grandfather Ismail naturally expected that his two sons – my uncle Mohamed and my father Adan, born in 1906 – would help run his business. He and his wife Baada had moved to Aden once their sons were of school age specifically so that they could be educated at St Joseph’s, a Roman Catholic Mission School, the only place in the region where they could learn to read and write in English. Little did he know that my uncle Mohamed would jump on a ship bound for the Indian Ocean aged sixteen to become a merchant seaman for the rest of his life, while my father would choose medicine. Sadly, Grandfather died in his early sixties, so I never knew him. After his death my father tried to keep the family business going but it became too difficult to manage on top of his medical duties.

I sorely wished I’d asked Dad what made him decide to study medicine because it was truly a vocation for him and something he dedicated his whole life to. Perhaps there was an incident that inspired him. As far as I’m aware, he was never ill, but he did have multiple scars on his legs from playing football and hockey so perhaps that was how he encountered the miracle of medicine.

***

My earliest childhood memories are of my grandmothers’ faces, fleeting images of their beaming smiles. These women were perhaps the most influential in my immediate family, although the men in our vast extended clan traditionally exerted the most control. As another Somali girl child my infancy was rather uneventful, apart from the day I disappeared as a baby. Mum left me sleeping on her bed with cushions stacked all around me to prevent me from falling off, then went to the outdoor kitchen at the back of our house to prepare lunch – probably sabaya flatbreads with some curry or beans and rice. Our single-storey detached house had two bedrooms as well as a living/dining room. There was no flushing toilet, just a shaded pit latrine in the yard, and my mother, the cook and a maid heated water over firewood laid on stones and cooked meat over a charcoal burner made from oil drums.

When my mother came to check on me a little while later, she found me missing and the pillows undisturbed. Perplexed, she thought my father must have come home from the hospital in his break and carried me outside. When she couldn’t find us in the yard, she believed he’d taken me back to his hospital without telling her. In a country with regular epidemics of smallpox and other diseases she, like most Somali women of her generation, had a terrible fear of taking a healthy child to a place full of sick people so – furious – she hurried to the hospital only to find Dad alone. He was just as surprised to see her because she never visited unless for a medical emergency. Mum immediately started wailing that I had been stolen. They hurried back home and they, the servants, our neighbours, and eventually the police looked frantically for me and traces of my ‘kidnapper’. Amidst the hubbub, no one thought to look under our dining room table to which I had crawled beneath the tablecloth to resume my nap. Once I was discovered my mother never lived down the embarrassment and Dad would often tell me how lucky I was that I wasn’t chained to the bed after that.

I was only two when the Italians declared war on the Allies in June 1940 and in August invaded British Somaliland and Ethiopia. I have no recollection of the events of the Second World War or the impact upon our family. Nor do I recall the events just before that when my mother’s next child, my unnamed infant sister, died a few minutes after birth following another harrowing forceps delivery. Mum was frail and still recovering when the British declared that all the wives and children of civil servants should evacuate to a small fishing village on the Gulf of Aden. From there we’d board a British naval destroyer for Aden.

My grandmother Clara, my mother’s mother, supervised everything. As they were only allowed to take minimal luggage she wrapped cash, jewellery and the family’s most precious things in a bag she tied around her waist. In the fishing village we were placed in different huts to await the signal that the warship had arrived in the dead of night. My mother, grandmother and I were shivering together in one such hut with several others when a band of thieves burst in brandishing knives and demanding valuables. Clara quickly blew out the kerosene lamp, which plunged the hut into darkness. The women started screaming, which alerted the local villagers who arrived just as the robbers fled. Many claimed afterwards that if it wasn’t for my grandmother they’d have lost everything they possessed.

Once in Aden, Clara once again took charge, selling possessions to rent us a comfortable property. She and my mother had no idea what had happened to my father and grandfather, who’d remained behind to serve the Allies. It was months before we learned that they’d been captured and imprisoned by the Italians and packed into cells in a makeshift prisoner-of-war camp in Hargeisa. Dad spoke of his experiences later and told me that they were treated badly, with little food or water and no toilet facilities. Their cell was hot and crowded with nowhere to sit. ‘If you ever have to go to prison be sure to take a hat with you, Shukri,’ he advised. ‘To urinate we’d stand on each other’s backs and pee out of the window, but the only receptacle we had for bigger business was a fellow prisoner’s hat!’

Hargeisa had fallen to the Italians on 5 August 1940, despite repeated RAF sorties that dropped more than sixty tons of bombs on Somaliland. The rest of the country fell two weeks later with the loss of thirty-eight Allied soldiers and more than two hundred wounded. It was another few months before the operation to recapture it began in early 1941. Hargeisa was liberated – along with my father and grandfather – and the famous Somaliland Camel Corps (a British Army unit based in Somaliland) resumed its military operations. The Italians were pushed out and we were free to go home.

Once back home, my parents discovered that although our government-owned house was still standing, it had been ransacked and the looters had done more damage than the shelling. Hargeisa Hospital, which was erected by the British military during the Second World War and initially comprised mostly tents, had been partly damaged too, so Dad lived in quarters until my mother could get things straight at home. Many friends and relatives had been killed or injured and the only event that brightened our lives was the birth of my brother in late 1941. Farah was born prematurely and was more than four years my junior, but he became my joy as well as the pride of our family.

***

Having survived the Italians my first proper memories are of Berbera, a major coastal town we lived in until I was six years old and where the smell of the ocean pervaded everything. A key character in those recollections was a man known as ‘Mohammed Hindi’ or Mohammed the Indian who ran a dukaan or general store on a corner not far from where we lived. In it, he sold every kind of foodstuff.

As Somali women didn’t often leave their homes, Dad did most of the shopping and would often take me with him as a treat. Mohammed would see me and, with a huge grin, cry, ‘Ah! A biscuit for the doctor’s daughter!’ before handing me a custard cream from a counter cluttered with sweets. Nothing has ever tasted as nice before or since even though I have had them in every country I have visited; I am still looking for the divine taste of those old-fashioned British custard creams. My second big treat in that corner shop was to be allowed to stir the ice cream while Dad shopped for the weekly provisions of sugar, rice, flour, corned beef, tins of beans, butter and jam. Mohammed made the ice cream in a huge bowl packed in blocks of ice, adding eggs, milk, sugar and cardamom that had to be churned the old-fashioned way. If I was lucky, he’d also let me lick the bowl.

I remember that wooden shack of a store so clearly with its high tin roof and dry goods piled to the rafters. It was in the area of town where the Europeans lived, so the shopkeeper cleverly catered to their needs with foreign goods. To me, it seemed as if he sold every item in the world stacked haphazardly, and yet he knew exactly where everything was. I loved that kind, smiling Indian and I loved being spoiled, much to the consternation of my mother Marian. She was, I think, disappointed in me her whole life. From the day I crawled under the dining room table to my later more controversial years I was trouble in her eyes. From the outset I was a rebellious child, devoted to my father, and favoured by both grandmothers. My hooyo (mother), expected me to stay inside and do household chores such as peel potatoes, prepare onions or help wash the sheets. I hated such tasks and would much rather play barefoot outside with my pets, seek out wild animals, climb a tree, or wrestle with the neighbourhood boys. The only job I did enjoy was to accompany the house help down to the well by the river to refill the empty water barrels, something he did at least twice a day. Whenever he had to stop and rest in the heat as he rolled the filled barrel back up the hill to replenish our tank, I had to wedge a large stone under it to stop it rolling away. This felt to me like important, valuable work.

I once found a snake in our household water tank and spent ages trying to get it out with a stick, but was roundly scolded by my mother who was terrified I’d be bitten. Mum kept insisting that I needed to be trained as to how a Somali girl should be correctly brought up. She bought me pretty dresses that were quickly ruined and did her best to tame my Afro hair, tugging at it with a wide-toothed comb until I screamed, or trying to twist it into plaits which quickly came undone. Whenever I was made to stay inside with her, I showed such little aptitude for cooking or sewing that she’d soon release me from my chore. Sulking I’d sit on the verandah peering out and measuring the time of day by the eedhaan, the traditional call to prayer at dawn, midday, mid-afternoon, dusk and at night. If I was really bored I’d flick through my parents’ precious English books wondering what the strange symbols meant, only to be accused of ruining them with dirty fingers when I had no business looking at them, being an ‘illiterate girl’.

I loved it best when Dad came home from work at the end of the day and sat to eat with us by the light of a kerosene lamp as giant moths flapped noisily at the mosquito screens. He’d instruct that the fire be lit on cold nights and burned frankincense to fill the house with the heavenly scent that is thought to be spiritually healing and chase away evil spirits. Sadly, Dad worked so hard that he never seemed to have time to linger, running back to the hospital at the slightest emergency after a hug and a kiss. He was an unusually affectionate man in a society where men are not supposed to show affection in case it’s seen as a sign of weakness. My father loved my mother very much and put up with a lot from her. The youngest and most spoilt of two daughters raised in Aden by Somali parents who were from a small community of Catholics, she was more English than the Queen in many ways and always envisaged a better life. Her sister Cecilia had married a successful businessman from French Somaliland and the couple had moved there to raise a family. By marrying a Muslim and remaining in Somaliland, my mother had tied herself to a life that dictated she should have little of any importance to occupy her days. I know she loved my father very much and it can’t have been easy married to a workaholic who was moved from town to town every two years, but she was often depressed and never stopped complaining.

From an early age I began to appreciate that boys and girls were different, and by that I mean that girls only ever played in small groups in their own homes or back yards up until the age of about eight and the older ones were rarely spotted outside. Instead they were expected to remain inside learning how to be a good wife. That wasn’t for me, so I had no choice but to play on my own until my father erected a long rope swing in our yard, the only one in the neighbourhood, to which local boys would flock. I loved running around with these fellow children of government officials. One of these was Hassan Abdillahi Walanwal Kayd, who was two or three years older than me, taller and more handsome than the others, and one of those I was determined to keep up with. Little did I know then how our paths would collide for much of my life.

Unfortunately, most of them were embarrassed to be seen playing with a girl and chased me away whenever I tried to join in. The only exception was when it came to foraging. Near our house was a little garden that surrounded the grave of some prominent person, and it had a mighty gob tree. Gob means noble and these noble trees not only look majestic but give us shade, food, shelter and wood. The yellow berries are like sweet little cherries so the boys and I would clamber over the wall and throw stones to bring down those delicious fruits.

Neighbours and relatives would often complain to my mother that they had seen me running barefoot in the sandy streets again. ‘How can you allow that, Marian?’ they’d berate. ‘It’s not proper. A girl isn’t brought up to run wild outside and play with boys.’ But my mother couldn’t control me and my father didn’t intend to. Mum would simply chastise me constantly with, ‘Where have you been, Edna?’ Or, ‘Where are you going now? Playing with the boys again, I suppose? Ugh. Well, at least put on some shoes!’ I hated wearing shoes and one of my arguments against them was that spiders and scorpions frequently crawled inside so I was safer without. This meant that my feet were permanently dirty and grazed (along with my knees) and a daily pastime was asking my mother or a servant to pull acacia thorns from my soles.

The neighbourhood girls who’d heard their mothers complain about my inappropriate behaviour soon followed suit, insultingly calling me a ‘wiilo’, which means tomboy. My response was to fight them, which only got me into more trouble. If I couldn’t play with the boys I’d go off exploring and looking for animals in the thorn bushes, only returning to the house to eat some papaya, help myself to some tiin or prickly pear from the yard, or to water from the tank. Nature had always fascinated me and I knew every little lizard, squirrel, frog, rabbit or beetle that lived around our property. On hot languid days in the dry season I liked to sit in the shade of a tree, inhaling the scent of jasmine and listening to the chatter of the yaryaro birds. When it was cooler I’d chase the mini tornados known as sand devils that danced down our street. I was repeatedly warned against the hyenas that came at night looking for food, and wasn’t supposed to stray too far.

My parents never once gave me any pocket money to spend but they did buy me toys, usually blonde blue-eyed dolls, which were fun for a short while. I also had a wooden camel on wheels made by a kind British carpenter. I soon grew tired of these playthings, though, because they didn’t move or interact like my cat or my pet goat Orggi or the wild creatures out in the yard. Something that amused me for hours was making drinking glasses from empty bottles, and little lanterns out of old Player’s cigarettes tins, with a kerosene-soaked wick stuffed inside and a hole in the lid for it to poke through. There were severe shortages after the war and many household items were no longer available in the market, so we learned to improvise. The lanterns were easy to make but their wicks smelled even more noxious than the usual paraffin lamps and were a fire hazard, plus they stained Mum’s white walls with black smoke. I much preferred these kinds of activities to peeling onions or potatoes or beating the dust from the rugs.

From the earliest age I longed for a sibling and, although I was thrilled when my brother Farah arrived, I was crushed when I realized that he was too little to play with. Then my mother fell pregnant again. It is only with the wisdom of hindsight that I have come to understand why she chose to have this child at home with a traditional ‘midwife’ rather than in the safety of a hospital run by her husband. In spite of her cosmopolitan upbringing, in the nine years since her marriage to my father she’d remodelled herself into the archetypal Somali housewife who kept close counsel with her female friends and took too great a heed of their scaremongering. ‘Don’t tell your husband when you go into labour,’ they warned her. ‘He will only take you to hospital and put things inside you. The British doctors already killed one daughter and put a scar on Edna’s face. Call us instead. We’ll bring the midwife and she’ll help you deliver naturally at home.’

The morning that Mum’s waters broke she didn’t say a word to Dad as he completed his customary 6 a.m. ablutions, shaved, and slicked back his hair. As the head of the household, he always had priority in the bathroom. While experiencing labour pains, she cooked his laxoox pancakes made from sorghum flour for breakfast, which we smothered in ghee, honey or jam. She waited for him to dress in his regulation white shorts, white shirt, white socks and polished shoes, knowing that he would then walk to work to arrive punctually at 7 a.m. His hospital was really only a series of Army tents around two brick buildings, one of which was the operating theatre, but whenever I could, I’d walk with Dad all the way down the sandy street to the hospital gate, immensely proud of the meticulously dressed man holding my hand who commanded so much respect in our community. The only thing that would tempt me to break from his side was if I saw the local boys running somewhere, then I’d kiss him goodbye and hurtle off in their direction while he laughed.

Back at home that morning, my mother’s labour pains intensified so she summoned her girlfriends as instructed and they called an umulisso, an elderly woman known as a ‘traditional midwife’ who had no nursing training or qualifications. The servants kept me out of the way as I listened in horror to my mother wailing and grunting for hours, wondering what on earth they were doing to her. The ‘midwife’ finally delivered Mum of a healthy baby boy, but then accidentally dropped the slippery baby, killing him instantly when he landed on his head. I was six years old and will never forget my mother’s screams. The women tried to calm her as the midwife wrapped her otherwise perfect baby boy in the tiny blanket that would become his shroud.

‘He’s so beautiful!’ I declared, when I crept into the room and stood over the tiny body in the crib, not much bigger than my doll. ‘Can I keep him?’ Someone pushed me out of the room and told a servant to run to the hospital and tell my father the news. The message Dad received was, ‘Come home and bury your son.’ In the Muslim faith, a body is buried within twenty-four hours of death. As my father knew nothing of the birth he immediately assumed that Farah had been killed in an accident and half-expected to find his mangled body. Running home, a thousand possibilities raced through his mind, he was overwhelmed with relief when – in a house of weeping women – he discovered Farah alive and well, but then shattered to learn that the infant son he didn’t know he had was dead because of the carelessness of an untrained woman.

At such a tender age, I was appalled at the idea of my baby brother being taken away to be buried in the ground, and created quite a scene at the house. ‘Why do you have to take him? Don’t take him away! I want to keep him!’ I cried, until my grandmother Baada pulled me away and the burial proceeded as planned.

My paternal grandmother Baada was kindness itself and I learned so much from her. She was an eloquent woman who taught me my first words and the names of plants, as well as songs, rhymes and stories. She lived close by all her life and would come to our house every morning, bringing me treats she hid from my mother. One look at her face and I’d know she was carrying something – most likely sweets made out of caramel with lumps of sugar and nuts. She also taught me how to be curious, offering me a choice between something I knew or something I didn’t. I’d almost always opt for the thing I didn’t know. I still do.

My disapproving mother frequently guessed that she had given me something and would protest, but I didn’t care. I loved my grandmother. We had a conspiracy together behind my mother’s back. It was our little secret. What I didn’t yet know was how many other secrets there were in female Somali society, the darkest of which was being kept from me.