Final Solution: Rocket Somalis into space?

For some Somalis, peace is the enemy.

PJ O'Rourke wrote in his phenomenal best seller "All the Trouble in the World" some interesting perspectives on Somalia. For instance:

• Going to Somalia was like visiting the scene of a crime and finding that the murderer was still there but the body had fled.

 

• The problem in Somalia was more abstract. This was the first large-scale military operation (the ill-fated US led humanitarian mission) in history to be launched for purely altruistic reasons.Nobody knew how to go about such a thing. In a war against hunger, what do you do? Shoot lunch?

• Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place

• All Third World slums are more terrible than the CNN videotapes can make them out to be. You can’t smell television

• These people (in the Somali refugee camp) were not starving: that is, they weren’t starving to death. Their misery had not quite reached the photogenic stage.

• One of the reporters must have flunked journalism school because he asked a question (to a Somali) that went straight to the point. 

• Before the marines came, the children were dying like . . . “Dying like flies” is not a simile you’d use in Somalia. The flies wax prosperous and lead full lives. Before the marines came, the children were dying like ... children. 

•  Fortunately Gianni and I were adhering to the two key rules of Third World travel:  1.. Never run out of whiskey. 2.. Never run out of whiskey. 

• Generally it’s not a good idea to wear Banana Republic - type khaki journalist clothes in a war zone. You might look too much like something that’s supposed to be shot, such as a journalist.

• You mustn’t ever ask the (Somalis) why they’re fighting. They’ll tell you. (Somalis are only queried with extreme caution and circumspection, being ardent talkers and whiners, they might hold one hostage just to keep talking!)

• Even those of us who are savagely opposed to pacifism are tempted to grab the (Somalis) by their fashionably padded shoulders and give them nonviolent what-for: “Even if you win, you assholes, all you’ve got is (Somalia)! 

I once believed like most people that the problems bedevilling Somalia mainly stem from extreme poverty, ignorance, religious parochialism, clan based bigotry, collision between the strategic interests of external actors with those of major power blocks within Somalia and such like. On the face of it there is nothing unique about it, the same amalgam of destabilizing factors can be said to be the cause of similar problems in a number of countries. Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen easily come to mind. But is that really the case in Somalia?

The enormous landmass of Somalia --it is only inhabited by about 20 million Somalis

Before the advent of colonialism, a huge area straddling Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti was occupied by a nebulous ethnic umbrella, the so-called Somali nation, consisting of all the pastoralist groupings of the Somali speaking people. Then as now they were reputed to be a fractious, vicious, temperamental and haughty war-like race. It was not out of necessity or that the Somalis (who in the late 19th century altogether numbered less than three million) found the land in central Somalia too denuded and lacking in pasture and water that they then had to disperse and cover a region close to a million square kilometers in area.

In fact the land in Somalia was so fertile that migrant Bantu hordes actually roamed all the way from the tropical jungles of Congo to settle at a place called Shungwaya in Somalia. And it is from there that they yet again migrated westwards and southwards, (probably having been weakened by famine or disease, they were then chased off by inimical, hostile Somalis) to make the eastern and southern Bantus of Kenya and part of the northern branch of the Bantu family in Tanzania. It was not need and scarcity but rather the pugnacious, quarrelsome nature of the Somalis  (which inevitably gave rise to interminable internal conflicts which persist to this day) that spurred the Somali to embark on their walk-abouts.

In other words the members of the small Somali populace flagrantly squandered space in most of the eastern part of the Horn of Africa in a desperate quest to get as far away as possible from each other. Unwittingly this has presently made the lucky members of the Somali race the largest, legal land owners  per capita in East Africa.

That should make the Somali a rather happy lot; with vision, planning, unity of purpose and prudent exertion (the same elements and traits they exhibited while chasing off the  lowly agriculturalists to maintain the territorial integrity of that large swathe of land) they could be a seriously wealthy lot as well.

Somalia: Begging for food yet they are sitting on all they need

Yet the reality is that the Somalis in Somalia, and elsewhere in the region, rank amongst the most miserable peoples not just in Africa, but in the world. Over time their population has exponentially increased along with the rest of the other ethnic groups in the region -- but the land has stubbornly remained just about the same ( having marginally decreased due to peripheral pressures from other tribes). This has effectively denied the Somali the room they need to get away from other Somalis -- as they traditionally did. As if that is not traumatizing enough for any average Somali, the situation has been exacerbated by lengthy droughts and desertification -- further concentrating them onto fewer river valleys, water pans, oases, springs etc.

For lack of interest it could otherwise be scientifically and empirically proven that the farther away a Somali is from other Somalis, then the happier and more prosperous he gets. Conversely, the closer any Somali gets to a larger pool of Somalis the more miserable and poorer he gets. Just ask any rational, candid Somali in the diaspora where he'd rather be, at home in Somalia with millions of other hot-tempered, quarrelsome fellow tribesmen or to be in far away Zimbabwe with the equally self-destructive Shona and Ndebele veterans; there is no doubt -- they would choose the failed state of Zimbabwe to the one of Somalia -- the latter amongst other things having the exceptional demerit of being over-manned and too tightly packed with other Somalis.



So where am I heading with this line of argument? What exactly do I mean? That simply due to racial factors the Somalis are good for nought as a people ergo  their misery? Am I negating and rubbishing the importance of the numerous ragtag militia, the mineral wealth deficiency, aridity, complete lack of industrial and agricultural production capacities, low levels of human resource development, negative geopolitical and socio-economic factors as the core reasons for Somalia's problems or for that matter for the marginalized Somali communities elsewhere in the region?

Other than the racial connotation absolutely yes. The Somalis are no better or no worse than any other human race on the face of this planet. It is utterly nonsensical to even think otherwise in this day and age.
In the same vein Somalis are generally better endowed in many respects than other races and ethnic groups in the region. They have plenty of land, immense, untapped irrigation potential, pristine white sanded beaches that stretch hundreds of miles, rights to a large chunk of the East African coast and all the marine wealth that comes with it etc.

So it is not as if they are as in dire straits as the people of the Maldives who with global warming face the real threat of their homeland being swallowed and completely submerged by the sea in less than a century.
The Japanese who live on a country, aggregated from a collection of tens of thousands of mountainous, volcanic Islands permanently susceptible to horrific natural disasters and which form a combined land surface that is over eighty percent uninhabitable, unfarmable and completely lacking in mineral wealth. 
A majority of the people in Niger, Chad and Mali who are constantly grappling with the challenge of living with a grim Sahara desert --  never mind that they are completely landlocked. It is a brazen farce to even try to blame environmental factors.  It all boils down to the Somali people, so what is it about them that spells doom, poverty and misery?

The Colonialists had imaginative ways to keep the war-loving Somalis busy

Plain and simple -- it is the insidious Somali culture. First amongst the aspects that make the Somali culture so nefarious and harmful to their own interests is the over-glorification and exaggerated sense of individual and group honour. 

Over the centuries the Somali have refined boasting to the level of an art form. To any other layman this lethal inclination for extreme chest thumping seems in the very least a rather wanton kind of hypocrisy, scapegoating, blame shifting or a deplorable means of concealing what are otherwise rectifiable inadequacies and deficiencies. At worst it is an absurd and loathsome form of wicked willfulness.

Then there is the Somali tendency to agitate for (communally or individually) and to intently precipitate the all too frequent recourse to violence when settling disputes.The underlying conditioning fosters the belief that it is utterly dishonourable to back-down or compromise.

Families and clans have been known to petulantly get embroiled in fighting, often close to the point of mutual annihilation over issues that started with ludicrously trivial matters. They gleefully butcher each other for no apparent good reason -- for an outsider there would seem to be a deeper, mysterious and incredible form of Somali logic that makes senseless blood-letting perfectly right. A kind of logic equivalent in sense to hacking off of one's limb to test the sharpness of a machete. 

The Somali culture is deliberately attuned to promote aggression and manifestation of might and denigrates reasoned compromise which would otherwise forestall escalation and furthering of losses. 
With such an enabling cultural attitude room has been created for wayward individuals to rashly and flippantly start feuds with the knowledge that they will be blindly backed up. A society thus always in violent turmoil and always engrossed in relentless, bloody feuds must necessarily be a doomed one.

Robbing and terrorizing the neigbourhood is a much better job for many Somali youth

Finally the Somali culture gravely imparts to it's adherents the notion that there are certain jobs that are undignified for self-respecting Somalis, the most eminent being agriculture. What are perceived as menial jobs are looked upon with utter disdain. This in effect conditions the members of the society to be slothful and sloven besides causing communities to be packed with proud wastrels, hangabouts and trouble prone rabble.

Long before the collapse of state institutions  in 1991 with the fall of Siad Barre's regime, the cantankerous Somalis were already infamous and reputed for being a basket case. They wouldn't abandon pastoralism, though it unfailingly and perennially threw them into the unnecessary throes of starvation and famine. Even today they remain steadfastly proud and an extreme, aggressive minority has taken up extortionist sabre-rattling as an economic activity. 

Starved and naked ... and proudly so?

Naked, hungry and war battered the Somali nonetheless remain as stubborn and incorrigible as ever, despite the fact  that abject poverty has already shorn any shred of dignity from the majority amongst them. For peace to prevail and for economic prosperity to be broadly achieved in the Somali society the Somali first need to be encouraged to radically change their culture and rid themselves of the harmful conditioning that has come with it.