The Unwelcome Guest: Flight and Arrival in South Africa

It was so peaceful. If you wanted to, you could leave a suitcase filled with cash in the middle of a busy market and nobody would take it. Lots of people were considering going back. I even thought of going back.’Mohamed is speaking of Mogadishu. Not of its early democratic era, when the city, with its pastel arabesque buildings, was known as the ‘white pearl’ of the Indian Ocean, but the Mogadishu of 2006, when it came briefly under the control of the Islamic Courts Union. At the time, clan-based warlords’ divisive 16-year-long control of the city caved under the unifying power of religion. The courts brought together competing clans and expelled private militias. But stability was short-lived. The Union soon rivalled the internationally recognised and pro-Western Transitional Federal Government, which was based in the southern inland town of Baidoa.In December 2006, Ethiopian forces, with backing from the United States, invaded Mogadishu with the intention of bolstering the transitional government and preventing the Union from expanding its control. Unlike more familiar street battles fought with small arms in contained precincts of the city, the Ethiopian invasion entailed widespread rocket bombardment and shelling of the city's run-down and bullet-ridden buildings on a scale not seen before. By the time Ethiopia withdrew its forces two years later, more than 16 000 civilians had been killed and over a million people displaced. But the renewed violence had further consequences. While the leadership of the Union had quickly dissolved into the rubble of the city or surrounding towns and countries, a radical youth militia associated with it, al-Shabaab – meaning the ‘youth’ or the ‘boys’ – refused to accept defeat. As a result, Somalia entered a renewed period of violence and instability that continues to plague the country today.‘Ethiopia will never want a strong Somalia. So long as there is a civil war in Somalia, Somalis won't be able to lay claim to the Ogaden,’ Mohamed tells me one afternoon at the Blue Café. Mohamed's family are originally from the disputed Ogaden region in eastern Ethiopia. He draws a rough map of Ethiopia on a crumpled piece of paper with a small circle in the corner indicating the Ogaden. I later look up the region online.