French navy forces intercept suspected pirates off the coasts of Somalia and the Seychelles in this picture released by the French Ministry of Defence November 13, 2009. PHOTO/ REUTERS
Narratives featuring strange lands with scintillating beauty, unexpected adventures with buxom brunettes, Gothic gardens with sunken treasures and billowing sails underlie smash hit movie series like Pirates of the Caribbean.
Likewise, when thinking of Somali pirates, we imagine adventure-loving characters emerging from ships, chewing khat and playing with their expensive phones. Indeed, Somali pirates have been painted as “womanisers with lavish tastes and an eye for Nairobi real estate.” Yet the pirates of Somalia are a complex phenomenon.
Nuruddin Farah’s latest novel, Crossbones, published in September 2011, tells the other side of the story.
Farah wrote in “The Truth about Somali Piracy,” that, “Unlike many peoples of the sea — including the Greeks, the Danes, the Swedes and the English — who saw the lucrative potential of piracy and pursued it as a vocation, Somalia did not engage in thievery at sea until recently...
t the same time, untruths about piracy in Somalia are perpetuated in print and on TV and radio. When I visited the country, I discovered that Somali pirates do not live the high life, nor do they receive the sums being mentioned, because much of the money stays either in Abu Dhabi or London, where it is banked.”
In Crossbones, Farah doesn’t sanitise the pirates who take people’s riches and lives. However, he shows how war profiteers make lucrative careers out of chaos as the opening paragraph in the novel aptly captures, “A boy of indeterminate age gets out of a car that has just stopped… He is small in stature, huge in ambition.
On his first day as a draftee into (Al) Shabaab, the instructor, upset with him, had pulled him up by the scruff of his neck, shouting in Somali, ‘Waxyahow yar!’ – ‘You young thing!’…He has no education to speak of, yet he feels he is rich in heavenly vision… No doubt he feels lucky to have been chosen for this delicate assignment cloaked in secrecy, his first mission. He will do anything to impress the commanders of the cell of which he is now a bona fide member”.
This young boy, known in the novel as Youngthing, is being used by his recruiters for their selfish ends (it’s all about the money!). Farah paints Somali society as one in which people live in extreme conditions — a people exploited and sometimes left with no choice but to comply with the exacting demands of their masters or face death.Continued
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