Decade of Fear. Michelle Shephard
my trips to Kenya and Somalia that I really got to know him. In Toronto, we often rushed through a meal or coffee, apologizing that we didn’t have longer to talk. Yet in Africa we were on Somali time, and one tea led to the next as we apologized for having kept each other so long.
Sahal was working for Reuters while the war with Ethiopian forces was raging in 2007. He had a large home in Mogadishu, across the street from the Shamo Hotel, which was a hub for foreign journalists who were brave or crazy enough to make repeat trips. They liked to tease Sahal about his quirky habits, even though they all had their own ways of coping with war. Sahal had four.
On days when the fighting would wake him before dawn, Sahal, the Constant Gardener (yet another nickname), would seek solace in the cool dirt of his yard, where he had managed to cultivate more than seventy-two different flowers and vegetables. He even grew ginger, which he required for his special brew of Kenyan Ketepa tea. Working in the garden as the sun rose—weeding, watering, caring for these fragile crops—calmed him. At night, he would put on earphones and blast John Coltrane while he smoked a cigar—coping mechanisms two and three. Foreign journalists were his main cigar suppliers and would bring Sahal boxes of Cubans each time they visited.
The rescued tortoise became Sahal’s fourth passion. He didn’t have a name. He became, simply, “Tortoise.” Often when Sahal came home to edit and send photos and articles to his bosses in Nairobi, he was still numb. The lens offered a small measure of detachment in the field, an ability to document but not fully absorb the horrors he was witnessing. But once the fatigue set in and the laptop displayed the reality in full colour, allowing Sahal to zoom in and out and crop. . . well, that’s when Tortoise would start his slow walk. “I would be looking at my computer and I would be stressed out,” Sahal recalled. “Then out of the corner of my eye, I’d see him on one side of the computer, just slowly, slowly walking.” It would take about twenty minutes for Tortoise to make his trek, disappearing for a time behind the laptop screen, before emerging out the other side. “By the time he got there,” said Sahal, “whatever you were doing, you would just think of him.”
I heard news of the war mostly through Sahal, Ali Sharmarke or local journalists and their reports. Increasingly there was talk of al Shabab. When the ICU was in power, a violent splinter group that called itself the Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen was vying for control. More commonly known as “al Shabab,” meaning “the youth,” the group’s origins likely pre-date 2006, but that was when they became an organized force. Aden Hashi Farah, or “Ayro,” was one of the original founders and had reportedly been appointed to this youth militia by Aweys, the Blundstone-boot-loving Red Fox. Shabab were ruthless and had little support among Somalis until Ethiopia’s invasion gave them the recruitment pitch they needed, not only among young, impoverished Somalis, but also among neighbouring Kenyans and disenfranchised Somali youth living around the world just as analyst Matt Bryden had predicted. Those giggling cave-dwellers had another gift they could spin endlessly. Christian crusaders were trying to take over Somalia. This was a war against Islam.
The emails I received from Ali Sharmarke during the war sounded more desperate by the week. “You don’t know who’s attacking you,” he would write, since the ICU, al Shabab and the Ethiopian-backed TFG were critical of any negative press. Few foreign journalists covered Somalia that year, but local reporters were dogged and for their efforts they were being targeted and assassinated in record numbers.
ON AUGUST 11, 2007, a large group of Somali journalists, including Sahal and Ali, gathered at the funeral of one of their own. They were burying Mahad Ahmed Elmi, a popular talk-show host on HornAfrik. Mahad didn’t mince words, and, despite death threats, he was relentless in holding the warlords, the Islamists and government officials accountable. Mahad was shot three times in the head on the way to work that morning and was buried the same day, as is customary in the Islamic faith. Before going to the funeral, Ali had called Ahmed Abdisalam Adan, one of his HornAfrik co-founders, who was visiting Canada. “I’m just worried about the young reporters,” he told his friend in a weary voice. “The risk is getting so great.”
Hours later Ali spoke passionately at the gravesite. He lamented the loss of Mahad, and another blow to journalism in Somalia, and the dwindling hope for peace in the country. “We are in the crossfire—all of us journalists,” he said. “The killing was meant to prevent a real voice that described the suffering in Mogadishu to other Somalis and to the world. He was a symbol of neutrality. . . The perpetrators want to silence our voices in order to commit their crimes.” This was uncharacteristic of the usually cautious Ali. But he was mad and feeling guilty. He had inspired a generation of journalists who were now being slaughtered at the rate of one a month.
Ali left the funeral exhausted, and slumped in the front seat of a black Toyota Land Cruiser. Duguf, who had been our fixer, was driving. Sahal sat in the back with Falastine, Ahmed’s wife. They were only eight kilometres from Sahal’s home near the Shamo Hotel, where they could mourn their colleague behind guarded walls, where the garden and cigars, John Coltrane and Tortoise waited.
Bang. Darkness. Dust.
It was never determined if Shabab had detonated the remote-controlled improvised explosive device or if the Ethiopians or TFG were behind the killing. As Ali had said, everyone wanted journalists dead. The Land Cruiser passengers stumbled out bleeding and deaf. Ali had to be pulled out. He lay motionless on the road. He was fifty.
At first I didn’t believe the news when I heard it a day later. I remember the call; I remember that it was my birthday. But I can’t remember who called me. There were always rumours from Somalia, and besides, Ali was just one of those guys who didn’t die. A picture of his body on the Internet confirmed it and I sat at our kitchen table crying and hating Somalia. Thinking back to the corridors of Horn-Afrik’s newsroom, where Ali had proudly hung the international awards his radio station had received, I remembered the dozens of sayings and words of inspiration taped on walls or sitting framed on desks. One hanging near Ali’s office read: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Sahal was not sure if he would ever return to Mogadishu after Ali’s death. Reuters offered to put him up in a Nairobi hotel after the bombing. He chose a modest one in the town centre and rarely ventured out. When he did, he would see Ali walking the streets. “I knew it was a matter of time before something happened; statistically the chances were there,” he told me years later, still tearing up at the thought. “But my sons, Liban and Abdul Aziz, what would they think if anything happened to me? Would they think, ‘That son of a gun abandoned us because he was there, selfish, looking after his career and Somalia instead of us?’ But I wanted them to have a part of their heritage—the gift of what I had of my father. But now I feel like that gift was taken away,” he paused, then repeated, “Now I feel like that gift was taken away.”
Liban, Sahal’s eleven-year-old son, helped him heal and find the courage to return to Toronto, and then eventually back to Somalia. Liban later conveyed his pride in his father’s work to a room packed with Canada’s top journalists who had gathered at a gala dinner in Toronto to honour Ali posthumously. Standing on a box to reach the microphone, his voice unwavering, Liban read a speech that reduced the cynical, grizzled crowd to tears. “Reporters have a lot of courage and determination. All they want is to make a difference, to educate people on what’s going on in the world. That’s exactly what my uncle Ali Imam was trying to do,” Liban told the crowd. “Can you believe someone could be killed because they wanted a better world, a more educated society?” After his speech, Liban ran around the ballroom collecting business cards from the journalists, later beaming as he showed me the stack like they were precious and rare hockey cards.
While recovering from his wounds in Toronto, Sahal had left his Mogadishu home, his garden and Tortoise in the care of a trusted cousin, who carefully tended to the plants and animals. But one day in the summer of 2008, cleaners scrubbed the concrete patio outside Sahal’s home with a mixture of chlorine and chemicals. The toxic brew pooled in one of Tortoise’s favourite cool afternoon resting places. Tortoise died later that afternoon, and the death of that stubborn reptile felt like Ali’s death all over again for Sahal.
Tortoise had somehow survived traffic, the power-hungry warlords, insurgents, clan warfare,