Confessions of a Reformed Mooryaan *

“Mankind, even at its most depraved, retains a dogged, enduring nobility.”
Leo Tolstoy.

An Image of Mooryaan (Courtesy: Today, March 2010)

Guled (not his real name)*** usually hangs at a Somali restaurant in a major advanced city in the West when he is off work. He is in his early forties, short and thin. He has a walrus mustache and a clean-cut soft black hair. When he talks to others, his eyes move around as if he is afraid of an ambush. He talks slowly but confidently. At times, his hands flail like a teacher instructing his pupils, but he seems to be polite and courteous. At the restaurant, the customers come and go, and he greets some of them like he is their buddy, and at times, teases some of them for eating ravenously.

 “Slow down, uncle, there is no famine here”, Guled jokes.
“I am harboring an awful secret,” he says matter-of-factly. “Can you believe that none of these men know that I was once a hard-core criminal, a Mooryaan”?

“Hey you pass the hot sauce,” he shouts at a man next to his table.
Guled, indeed, had once a life replete with debauchery and decadence. He was born in the rural areas of Central Somalia in the 1970. He was the only child, and was raised by his single mother.  His mother, a homemaker, owned a herd of goats.

“I was a herdsman,” says Guled, “and as a child, I had never been to school”.

Guled herded goats from sunrise to sunset; keeping an eye on them and taking them to the well. By the time he came home in the evenings, he was exhausted. His family lived in huts, with no electricity and no running water.

“I miss the simple life I led as a young man,” he laments.

General Aidid (Courtesy: The UN, 12/1992)

A poster of the movie, Black Hawk Down

When Guled was 21 years old, his life took a dramatic turn.  He became a gunslinger. He said that he was getting tired of the peripatetic life of a herdsman.

“I was looking ways to get out of the provinces,” Guled added, “and venture into Mogadishu”. To him, Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, was a place full of excitements; cars, tall buildings, good food, wealth, etc.

In the early 1990s, and at the peak of Somalia’s civil war, representatives of Warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid were roving in Central Somalia - near Dhusa Mareb- recruiting young people to join his United Somali Congress (USC) militia. Guled, who had a smattering knowledge of the use of AK-47, was thrilled, and immediately joined the militia. General Aidid was the warlord who became the object of an American hunt during the infamous incident of Black Hawk.

“The movie Black Hawk Down failed to capture how gallantly the Somalis fought, and repelled the American Rangers,” boasts Guled. “I felt proud to be Somali during those historic skirmishes”.
Continued