What to Read Now: From Aden to Kampala to Washington, DC

Abstract

6 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017 Ibought Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy on a visit to her Somaliland hometown , Hargeisa. When I visited, Hargeisa was a dreary city—at least that was my first impression—until I got to know it a bit more intimately. The burnt-out shells of tanks and rusting grounded military vehicles lined the runway as we came in to land, hollow-eyed refugee women squatting outside their makeshift nylon and khanga-cloth draped manyattas, stirring their lunch in sooty tins as they watched the plane speed by. It was a city recovering from a devastating secessionist war with the neighboring Siad Barre–led Somalia, and the effects were all over, including the hordes of foreign-aid workers and war journalists who made up three-quarters of the chartered UN flight we were on. I was visiting Hargeisa to attend the 2013 Hargeisa International Book Fair, and I was stunned by what I witnessed. The fresh wounds of the war notwithstanding , the people of the city, as I soon learned, are warm and passionate, their love of life and freedom palpable in their stories and poetry. You need to sit through a poetry reading by their celebrated poet Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame “Hadraawi” to feel it. The packed hall hung onto the poet’s every word, the pin-drop silence alternating with bouts of hearty laughter as the experienced poet skillfully navigated his enthralled audience through various stages of their history—for that is what Somaliland’s poetry does: documents the milestones in the lives of its people. It is this age-old sense of purpose that Nadifa Mohamed brings into her gripping story. Black Mamba Boy not only follows an orphaned boy, Jama, through his difficult childhood in Yemen and then wartorn Somaliland but does so skillfully and compassionately. It is a powerful story of triumph amid despondency that ultimately dignifies a corner of the continent that has received enough flak from foreign press. When his mother dies, eleven-year-old Jama is left on his own. His life takes the only bend open to him: he joins the homeless urchins in Aden’s mean Mu’alla streets, scavenging for scraps the townspeople throw out and toughing it out on the open streets at night. But even that friendship is fleeting, cut short after a knife fight. Now a loner, Jama resolves to wander north in search of his father and an identity, marking the start of his epic journey that takes him through wartime Ethiopia, Djibouti, Egypt, and, eventually, Wales. Ultimately, the story is about the resilience of the Somali people and the pride they take in the fact that they are perhaps the world’s true nomads. The opening of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu brings out a picture of Kampala, Uganda’s capital, in a way that a casual visit to the city wouldn’t draw out. Staying in a hotel for a couple of days and visiting the tourist circuit of the beautiful Notebook what to read now From Aden to Kampala to Washington, DC by Stanley Gazemba WORLDLIT.ORG 7 green city ringed in by hills could never introduce you to the shacks nestled in the city’s swampy wastelands into which the runoff from the gutters uphill eventually drains. Makumbi’s epic saga takes us into Kampala’s crowded Bwaise slums, where the city’s poor retire after their daytime hustles, the fringes of the city where groundwater seeps through the spongy floor when it rains. Most gratifying is that Kintu’s lenses do not look at these shanties through the eyes of the mercy tourists who fly in from the West to witness the misery of Africa’s tin-roofed shacks like an old-time warrior pockmarking his bedstead for every scalp bagged. Instead, the book delves deeper. It is not a voyeuristic piece about Kampala ’s poor but a narrative of the stories of their everyday lives in the crowded places where the city has herded them and where the rule of law can give vent to the more instant “mob justice” in the blink of an eye. The narrative draws its beauty from Luganda folklore, in which...