A Woman of Firsts
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.
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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.
CHAPTER TWO
Borama, British Somaliland, 1945
Some of my happiest childhood memories are of drinking fresh cow’s milk during our long summer holidays in Borama, near the border with Ethiopia, where my grandmother Clara and grandfather Yusuf lived. I remember going with the maid to collect the frothy warm nectar from Granddad’s cows and helping myself to as much as I liked. I’m sure my father would have disapproved. He always insisted – as I do now – that any milk intended for his children had to be boiled first to avoid contamination. To this day, though, and even after all my years of training as a nurse and public health practitioner, I occasionally sneak a drink of fresh, unboiled camel milk.
The reason we spent so much time in Borama in the northwestern Awdal province was because the British had posted my grandfather there after the Italians left Somaliland. Having trained as a signalman and radio operator Yusuf had served the British in both wars and was awarded a military medal for ‘meritorious service to the Crown’. Then he became Somaliland’s Postmaster-General. Although our country was liberated, the war was still raging elsewhere and his expertise in logistics was needed to facilitate the East Africa Campaign. He soon fell in love with the lush green meadows of Borama fringed by purple mountains and decided to buy a farm and some milking cows, summoning Clara to join him.
My mother would leave us with our grandparents for two months each summer so that she could visit friends in Aden, or her sister Cecilia in Djibouti City in French Somaliland. She may have become a good Muslim and embraced all the traditions and rituals, but she sorely missed the country and lifestyle of her childhood in Aden. Sending us away each year must have been a welcome respite from the nuisance I’d become. Not that I was any less of a problem for my grandparents. Borama was a holiday town and kids from all over Somaliland and from Djibouti City descended for the summer months. I sometimes hung out with girls, but it was still the company of boys that I liked the best. When one time the local gang wouldn’t let me play football with them I retaliated by snatching their ball made of bound rags and ran home with it. I locked myself in the toilet and threatened to throw their ball into the pit unless they agreed to let me join in. My mother was still there then and she had to intervene. After much pleading, she got me to open the door and give back the ball. From then on, one of the boys would grab it whenever I approached their game, afraid that I’d snatch it once more.
One day these boys came to me with an unusual gesture of friendship and asked if I wanted to join them. This was too good to be true and I jumped at the chance. A few minutes after our game of football started on a patch of waste ground, they told me they were going to pick some watermelons from a nearby field and that if I helped carry some home, we’d return to our game sooner. Naturally I agreed, hoping that I’d finally been accepted. I innocently followed them through a gap in a fence and offered to carry the largest of the watermelons in my upturned skirt, as it was too heavy to carry in my arms. As I was tottering back with a fruit that weighed almost as much as I did, the farmer suddenly grabbed me by the scruff of my dress.
The boys melted away, leaving me to face the irate landowner who marched me back to my grandparents’ house carrying the melon as proof of my guilt. I tried to explain and swore that I’d never stolen anything, but my grandparents almost died of shame. When he complained that kids trespassed almost daily to help themselves to his crop, they had no option but to compensate him for the loss of God knows how many melons he claimed I’d taken. The disappointment on my grandparents’ faces was worse than any punishment they could have meted out. I had to listen to them telling me over and over that they couldn’t understand why I’d steal when everything I could want to eat was available on our own table.
In spite of this salutary lesson, as the oldest in our group of neighbourhood friends and the big sister to Farah, I was the Pied Piper for all our adventures. These included the time a group of us unknowingly picked poisonous berries and all returned home with swollen lips. I took the blame for not supervising the others carefully enough, and from then on we weren’t allowed to eat anything we picked until we’d brought it home for adults to inspect and either confirm or confiscate.
Then there was the day that nine of us wandered into the bush and completely lost our way. Boy, I never lived that one down. Even though we’d eaten a full breakfast, we always had room for delicious wild berries. As we picked more and more, we wandered near the path of the donkey caravans on their way to collect water at the wells on the outskirts of town. The herders instantly identified us as town kids because of the way we dressed, and were surprised to find us still in the forest several hours later when they returned.
Seeing that some of the younger ones were crying, and others had slumped down through exhaustion and thirst, they stopped to ask what we were doing there so late in the afternoon. ‘Who brought you here? Why aren’t you at home?’ they asked, clearly concerned. I told them that although I knew where the sun rose and set, I couldn’t tell in the woods and none of us had a clue how to get back to town. With night falling and knowing that hyenas or lions could start to pick us off, the donkey herders scooped up the youngest children and sat them on their beasts while telling we older ones to walk fast, stick together, and follow their caravan. We trudged along the dusty track used by generations of nomads, past colonies of noisy baboons, and finally reached town just before sunset. We found the whole district in a state of panic, and distressed parents who’d been searching everywhere for us berated me. ‘How could you be so stupid to stray so far?’ As the eldest child, I was given the harshest scolding but the worst punishment was that our neighbours warned their kids never to follow ‘crazy Edna’ again if I ever tried to lead them beyond the trees they then set as landmarks at the edge of the forest.
Despite these occasional mishaps, Farah and I loved it in Borama far from the heat of a city, especially when we were able to have as much fresh milk as we liked. My grandmother made the most delicious butter, boiling the milk then skimming off the cream and churning it just like Mohammed the Indian had done with ice cream. When she wasn’t cooking or caring for us, Clara worked in the local hospital, interpreting for the English-speaking medical staff, so I would happily tag along with her in her long Somali dress, eager to hear their cries when we approached of ‘Ayeeyo timid!’ (Grandma is here!). I watched as she’d sit with the patients before translating for the staff. It was painstaking work but she was caring, kind and gentle. How could I not go into medicine with such remarkable role models?
Her only sadness, I think, was the way my grandfather treated her. She was unusually meek in his presence and still he picked on her. He’d complain, ‘Why is lunch cold?’ or ‘Where’s my coat, woman?’ My mother took after him far more than she did Clara. If ever I had a problem, I’d go to my grandmother, who was my ally and my friend.
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