Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography (2 page)

It’s been written that I was born and raised in Somalia. Strictly speaking, this isn’t true. While I was born in Mogadishu, the capital in the south of the country, I spent the early part of my childhood growing up in Somaliland, the area to the north of the country and although it’s not recognized by the UN, to all intents and purposes, Somaliland is an independent country and claims ownership of land roughly the size of England. Somaliland has its own currency – the Somaliland shilling – its own police force, and its own capital, Hargeisa. It even has its own flag (horizontal green, white and red stripes with Arabic script across the top bar). It also has its own national anthem, ‘Samo ku waar’, which translates as ‘Long life with peace’.

Historically, people from Somaliland and those from the south of the country have struggled to get along. The tensions were inflamed by Siad Barre, the former military dictator who ruled Somalia. When he was deposed in 1991, the government in Somaliland declared independence, although it escaped much of the violence and chaos that engulfed the south of the country in the years that followed. I remember my childhood as a mostly happy time. For the first four years of my life we lived in Gebilay, a small town about an hour’s drive west from Hargeisa and forty minutes from the border with Ethiopia. The land in that region is mostly desert scrub, though there are some hilly green areas and the occasional forest. In the distance you can see vast mountain ranges lined up along the horizon. The scenery is beautiful. The people are warm and welcoming.

Two years after I was born, my mum gave birth to another baby boy, Wahib. A fourth son, Ahmed, followed when I’d reached the grand old age of four and Wahib was two. Looking after four children was a full-time job for my mum, but she was only doing what Somali culture expected of her. Somalis are a strong, resilient people, and very conservative. The culture is big on tradition. The values haven’t changed much in hundreds of years. The men work, the women cook and clean. I’m not saying this is the way things should be. It’s just that people in Somaliland grow up in a conservative environment and this is all they know.

People have described my childhood as poverty-stricken and surrounded by bullets and bombs. That’s not really true. In the memories I have of Gebilay, there were no soldiers in the streets, no bombs going off. Whatever violence was going on at the time, as children we weren’t exposed to it. Most of the problems were taking place far to the south. Around the time I was living in Gebilay, the government in Mogadishu was about to collapse. But we lived far from trouble. Although as it turned out, we had a lucky escape.

One day my mum sat Hassan and me down and told us both that the five of us, including Wahib and Ahmed, would shortly be leaving Gebilay to go and live with our grandma, Amina, and our grandad, Jama, in Djibouti. Our dad wouldn’t be following us, however. He had to return to England – for his studies and his work, I believe. I accepted this decision without protest. Of course, every young kid wants their dad around. But I had seen very little of him while growing up in Gebilay. He always seemed to be away working and we didn’t have a chance to build that bond. Besides, Hassan, my best friend as well as my twin, would be coming with me. That reassured me. Plus, I couldn’t wait to see Grandma and Grandad. Living with them would be fun, I thought. I was sad about having to leave Gebilay. But mostly I was just excited about spending time with my grandparents, exploring a new country and getting up to no good with Hassan.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but a year after we moved out of Gebilay, Somali forces under Siad Barre bombed Hargeisa and Berbera. The cities were flattened. Water wells were blown up. Grazing grounds were burned. Tens of thousands of people died in the bombings. Many more fled to Kenya and Ethiopia. It hadn’t been the reason for our move, but we had a lucky escape all the same. If we hadn’t moved out of Gebilay, we might have been caught up in the violence that followed. If you visit Hargeisa today, there’s a war memorial in the middle of the city: a Russian fighter jet, like the ones that bombed Somaliland.

Grandma Amina and Grandad Jama had already been living in Djibouti for a number of years when we moved in with them. My grandparents had done okay for themselves in Djibouti City. My grandfather had a decent job working in a local bank. They had a good standard of living compared to Gebilay. Grandma looked after the family at home. Life wasn’t a walk in the park, but it wasn’t the struggle that some people have tried to make out. I guess by Western standards my grandparents might have appeared poor, but to us kids, we looked at Djibouti as a big step up from life in rural Somaliland.

Almost everyone in Djibouti lives in the capital. As soon as you get there, you can see why. It’s this huge, frenetic place, with traffic and noise everywhere. Men pushing wagons through the streets selling fresh loaves of bread and honking their bicycle horns. There are goats and camels everywhere. In the distance you can hear the
athan
, the call to prayer sung by the muezzin: ‘Allah Akbar! God is great!’

Our grandparents lived in a stone house on the outskirts. Each part of the city is named using a number scale: Quarante-Deux-Trois (40–2–3), Quarante-Deux-Quatre (40–2–4), and so on – a legacy of French colonialism, which continued until 1977. When I was a kid, our house seemed huge. I remember arriving at the house and thinking that Grandma and Grandad lived in a mansion. When I returned to Djibouti many years later, I revisited my old home. I couldn’t believe it when I found the right address. I was like, ‘Seriously, we lived here?!?’ The house seemed so much smaller than I’d remembered it.

In Djibouti we had access to all kinds of things that we didn’t have in Gebilay. There was a local cinema, basically a dark room with a TV at one end wired up to an old-school VHS recorder. Whenever Hassan and me had a few coins, we’d be straight off to the ‘cinema’ with our friends to watch a movie. Sometimes the cinema owner would show one of those old black-and-white Westerns with cowboys and Indians. Other times it was a Disney cartoon or a Hollywood action movie – whatever they happened to have on tape at the time. We didn’t care. Most of the time we didn’t understand what was being said by the actors anyway (there was no dubbing, and we couldn’t read or write in English). We just liked watching the films, seeing all these exotic locations, people doing crazy things. Sometimes I’d get bored and make animal noises over the film. We were just kids having fun.

Dad occasionally visited, flying back to Djibouti from London for a week here or a few days there. I was probably too young to appreciate the difficulties of travelling back to Djibouti from London at the same time as working and studying, not to mention the cost. Looking back, I can understand the reasons why my dad wasn’t able to visit more often. But that didn’t make it any easier to accept as a young boy. We never had that normal father-son relationship. For me, there was my grandma and my mum, and my brothers, and that was it.

A few people in our neighbourhood had TVs, and we watched programmes whenever we could. My favourite was
Esteban, le Fils du Soleil
, which translates as ‘Esteban, Son of the Sun’. It was a French cartoon series from the early 1980s about a Spanish kid called Esteban who goes on this great adventure to the Americas to find a lost city of gold. (In English it’s known as
The Mysterious Cities of Gold
.) His friends accompany him on his epic quest, including an Incan girl called Zia, and Tao, the last survivor of an ancient civilization. But although Esteban is on the hunt for the cities of gold, that isn’t his real mission. Actually, he’s searching for his dad. Esteban also wears this cool medallion around his neck that allows him to control the sun. As a kid, I thought this show was the best thing ever on TV. Every day at 6.30 p.m. on the dot, I’d find a TV to watch it. I never missed an episode. I was totally addicted.

But following the adventures of Esteban and his crew was a bit of a challenge for a kid living in Djibouti. The city suffered almost daily power cuts, and more than once I’d sit down to watch the latest episode and then – phhtt! – the power would cut out. The TV screen went blank. No way was that going to stop me. I simply had to know what happened next, so I’d sprint out of the house, racing across the streets and running towards the lights of a friend’s house several streets away, where I knew the power would still be working. In a matter of minutes I’d get to my friend’s house, catch my breath and tune in to
Esteban
. A few minutes later, same thing. Power cut. I’d dart off again in search of the next house where I could watch the programme. Sometimes I’d have to rush between three or four houses across the city just to catch a single episode of
Esteban
. But it was worth it. I was totally mad about that cartoon show.

Looking back on it, I guess it was pretty good training for a career in distance running.

I
GOT
my first experience of school in Djibouti when I was five. There was no formal primary school system as such. Kids like Hassan and me were required to attend the local madrash each morning from eight o’clock through to midday. The madrash was basically a long, narrow room built next to the local mosque, with rickety chairs for the kids and a massive blackboard at the front of the classroom. Our teacher was an old man with a shaven head and a stern look in his eyes. If he spotted you misbehaving in class, he’d march you to the front of the classroom and start whipping you on the backside with a cane in front of the other kids. Sounds pretty shocking now, but this was the norm in Djibouti. The cane had the desired effect. None of us dared step out of line.

Our studies at the madrash focused on the Koran, but we also studied French and local history. Some mornings at the madrash we’d take turns to read out passages in front of the class. This was hard for me because I couldn’t read or write and I suffer from dyslexia. When it came to my turn, I’d spend the evening before class learning the passage until I had it committed to memory. The next morning I’d head to the madrash with Hassan and ‘read’ in front of the teacher and kids, with my eyes glued to the page to make it look as if I was reading rather than reciting. Most of the time I got away with it.

Part of my problem was that I never had anyone sit me down and help me with my studies. Half an hour, forty-five minutes a day outside of school, with one of my relatives patiently teaching me how to read and write – I never had any of that. It’s not the Somali way. I was just expected to go to school and get on with it.

Typically, Somali mums and dads want their children to become doctors or lawyers when they grow up. They want their kids to have the kind of opportunities they didn’t have themselves, to have the things they didn’t have, to be able to afford a good house and provide for a family. From my perspective I can’t understand that way of thinking, given that, in that environment, it’s very, very hard to obtain the qualifications necessary to become a professional. It seems naïve to expect children to do well whilst at the same time not providing them with the educational tools they need.

In those days, I wanted to be a car mechanic. I loved the idea of handling bits of machinery and fixing things up. To this day, I’m forever taking things apart and fiddling with stuff. If I see a button on a wall, I have to press it. Fire alarms, intercoms, whatever. I can’t keep my hands by my sides. Being a mechanic, I thought, was a great way to put my fidgety nature to good use. And I loved cars. It was the perfect match.

There were always bits of scrap metal and rusted parts lying at the sides of the road in Djibouti. People often dumped their rubbish out on the street, so you could find all sorts of stuff piled up by the road. One day I was walking home from the madrash with Hassan when I stumbled upon a few pieces of scrap metal that looked like the kind of things used to assemble cars: spark plugs, exhaust pipes, that sort of thing. My eyes instantly lit up. I grabbed as many of the parts as I could carry and raced home. I must have been six or seven years old at the time, and I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing. I remember being really excited as I laid out all the parts on the ground in front of the house and began playing around with them whistling to myself, when suddenly this stern voice barked out behind me: ‘What have you got there?’

I spun around.

Uncle Mahamoud, the strictest man in the family, towered over me. Whenever me or Hassan stepped out of line and needed to be taught a lesson, it was our uncle who sorted us out. Once I took a pee in the bowl at the back of the family refrigerator. When Uncle Mahamoud found out, he punished me. So I must have looked a sight to him, standing there with my grubby hands, my T-shirt and shorts smeared with grease and dirt from handling the car parts. Uncle Mahamoud just stood there and waited for an answer.

‘I’m putting something together,’ I replied.

Uncle Mahamoud peered over my shoulder and saw all the car parts spread out.

‘You shouldn’t pick up things from the street,’ he said. ‘What are you doing with all this junk, anyway?’

I grinned. ‘It’s not junk, Uncle! These are car parts. I’m learning what they do. I want to be a mechanic when I grow up.’

Uncle Mahamoud’s face went dark. ‘A mechanic?’ he spluttered. ‘Tell me something, then,’ he demanded, rolling his eyes in the direction of the madrash. ‘Why am I paying all that money for you to go to the school and get an education if you want to waste your life fixing cars?’

That was the end of my brief experiment with building my own car. But I didn’t give up on my dream of being a car mechanic – at least, not for a few more years.

Unlike me, Hassan had a natural talent for learning. He did well at the madrash; he had a sharp mind. This is one of the few ways in which we were different. When it came to learning something new, Hassan had this ability to pick it up like
that
. My dyslexia held me back and hindered my ability to learn. I would continue to struggle with it throughout my years at school.