Search just our sites by using our customised search engine

Unique Cottages | Electric Scotland's Classified Directory

Click here to get a Printer Friendly PageSmiley

Writings of Albert Morris
Article 42 - Impressive new breeze in war reporting


AMID rockets’ bright glare, shells bursting in air, we knew from our screens that Rageh Omaar, the BBC’s Baghdad man was still there, unruffled by the fog and explosive impact of war.

While I believe war reporting lost an authoritative voice when Kate Adie, that booming Boadi-cea of the BBC’s battlefront reporting, was dropped in favour of, she claimed, younger and sexier front-line correspondents, I welcome a new, youthful-looking, impeccably-accented and incisively-delivering reporter to the front-line, mass-information echelons.

That he is Somali-born did not surprise me, a sun-dried, fly-stung, camel-bitten veteran of Somaliland’s deserts, because he seemed an older version of Yusev, a Somali lad, aged about six summers, who was gainfully employed as a punkah boy at British Army HQ, Hargeisa, when I was there in 1945-46, and resembled a cherub blowing wind in an old map.

Punkahs are fans, sometimes made of leaves. The military version was a large blanket fixed to a ceiling and swung by a cord attached to it and Yusev’s big toe. Thus, he sat, dreamily, on a chair and, when inclined, briskly agitated the oven-hot atmosphere while we administrators performed vital tasks of filling forms for issues of moustache cups (officers only), trouser-pressers (field service) and native auxiliaries’ buttonsticks.

Yusev, an early-starting entre-preneur, was a bright lad, probably born to bloom unseen in a desiccated, bitter, sunblasted wilderness, with some fertile areas, which by a cruel twist of fate, contains some of the acutest minds in Africa.

The tragic paradox of Somali-land was emphasised for me during one of my imperial tasks - overseeing the unloading of dhows at the port of Berbera. These were scenes of high action, suggestive of Sindbad the sailor and Ali Baba and the 40 thieves of Baghdad; the sleek craft from Zanzibar, Aden and Mombasa, pitching and rolling in the bay, their fluttering lat-een sails, heraldic in the sun, and, on shore, stevedores chorusing work songs of a presumably respectable nature, and my Somali clerks counting stacked goods with lightning accuracy that left my mind floundering.

I also had dealings, through interpreters, with merchants and tribal chiefs, and found minds among them so sharp they could have settled on a razor and found spare room. All this mental acuity existed in a land of sand and rocks for vast distances, snakes and scorpions, bitter water at scarce waterholes, blood feuds, killings, ingenious intrigues and female circumcision.

Then, the Army regarded the area as one vast, insane asylum. It was a land of Somali-brandished daggers, spears and ex-Italian army rifles, fierce eyes under mops of black, crinkly hair, crazed, recalcitrant camels, endless and near-insane, tribal litigation, often over disputed, half-dry water holes and the occasional British officer or ranker, in lonely outposts, succumbing to sun and sand madness and ending it all in drink or a well-aimed bullet.

Oddly enough, I liked Somali-land for its great desert silences, the sense of being in a mighty continent and suddenly, irrationally, enjoying the isolation from the pressures of Western civilisation. I admired the unflinching independence of the Somalis, among the proudest, friendliest, vainest, and, I have no doubt, most contentious races in the world.

Alas, they still live in turbulence. Somalia, a 1960 union of British and Italian Somaliland, was racked by clan-based civil war in the 1980s. In 1991, the dictator, Siad Barre, fled the country and the former British area declared its independence. In 1995, a US-led, United Nations peace-keeping deployment, designed to alleviate famine, withdrew after two years of suffering unfriendly and lethal fire.

Even with the so-called Transitional National Government, Somalis still fight among themselves, especially warlords and factions who dispute control of Mogadishu, Rageh’s birthplace and former prosperous Italian colonial capital, which a 1930s writer described as "sane and orderly", and is now described largely as a shanty-town.

If Somalis ever unshackle themselves from tribal and factional feuding and unite as a nation, they could surprise the world by creating, with their keen minds and high, nervous energy, an exemplary prosperous and - miracles could happen - stable society.

Meanwhile, Rageh, on leave in his Johannesburg home, is well out of Somalia’s murderous maelstrom. His Iraq work has fanned an impressive new breeze in war reporting - an outstanding punkah-puller of the media.


Return to Article Index Page


 


This comment system requires you to be logged in through either a Disqus account or an account you already have with Google, Twitter, Facebook or Yahoo. In the event you don't have an account with any of these companies then you can create an account with Disqus. All comments are moderated so they won't display until the moderator has approved your comment.

comments powered by Disqus

Quantcast