Jamac

There is a Somali man, now possibly living in the Polish city of Warsaw, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in the spring of 2007. This is a man who is slowly entering his middle age years. He is not very tall, and he has a remarkably thin frame. His eyes are intense. He is fiendishly intelligent and his spirit is indomitable. This man can speak, at the very least, five languages well enough to hold a conversation with any native speaker. This man fascinated me from the very beginning but—and I shall be the first to admit this—I was not aware of the reason why this man held my attention captive at that moment in time. Something powerful, and potentially dangerous, could easily be detected when one is in his company. I made a point of not mentioning my clan lineage when I first met him. It always seems absurd to me that many Somalis feel the need to establish the clan identity of a compatriot when they are a distance of thousands of kilometres away from the Somali national territory.

I learned that my new friend's name was Jamac and that he had spent his youth in Mogadishu, where his father had been a high-ranking member of the dreaded Somali secret police. The curious thing about Jamac was that he was comfortable in the company of absolutely anybody. He could be found engaging in conversations with the wealthy denizens of the enormous Marriott Hotel in Warsaw, or he could be engaged in banter with the substance abusers that gather inside Warsaw’s central railway station late at night. I was intrigued by the fact that this man had known, however small his perception had been, the inner workings of the old Somali state. The fact that he had been born into a military household really interested me. This inspired me to ask him many questions about his time in Mogadishu. To his credit, he told me many things about his privileged lifestyle in those days. He also made it very clear to me that he would do anything in order to be to return to the times of peace, the time of his early youth, in Mogadishu. He kept telling me that the home of his youth had been a paradise on earth. What really pained him was the news that the Ethiopian army had established itself in Mogadishu in the first few months of 2007. Jamac kept telling me how much pain he had felt when he had learned of the news that the Ethiopian tricolour had been raised in Mogadishu, and that Somali children were being made to sing the praises of the invading Ethiopian troops.

Jamac had clearly fallen on hard times since his arrival in Warsaw. I did not ask him how he found himself in his current circumstances, but I did learn that he had taken a very circuitous route in order to arrive inside the borders of fortress Europe. He had originally fled the fighting in Mogadishu for the relative safety of the Middle East. After a few years of life inside the Arab world he moved to Russia, where he had spent the best part of a decade. He told me that he had personally witnessed the economic upheavals of the fall of communism. Jamac could speak the Russian language very well and he seemed to have a great deal of respect for the Russian people. He would often say, “The Russians are people that a man can truly live with”. I quickly learned that Jamac had spent almost a decade in Poland, and that he had mastered the use of the Polish language. He had managed to carve out a niche for himself by giving advice to the many migrants that seemed to be flooding into Warsaw during my time there. I once saw him giving advice to tough looking young Chechen, eager to find dangerous work. I saw him introduce people to an Iraqi Kebab shop owner in perfect Arabic. I even saw Jamac giving directions, in the Italian language, to a group of young Sicilians who had become lost in the centre of the Polish capital.

Jamac impressed me with his capacity for survival and, much more so, for his capacity for suffering. I can never imagine what it must be like to be away from one’s own native culture for such a great length of time. Jamac told me of all of the abuses that he had suffered whilst he had been on his tragic journey. He told me that he had become estranged from his wife and his young child, who had moved to the more affluent European Atlantic coast. He told me that there were no more than a dozen Somalis living in the whole of Poland when he had first arrived in Warsaw. In 2007, when I had briefly visited this historic European city, there were 22 Somali individuals living in the Polish capital. This amazed me in many ways, but I was struck dumb when I learned that some of the Somalis in Poland had actually prospered there during the past 15 years. I learned that some of the Somalis had managed to profit from the collapse of the communist command economy, specifically because they had a better understanding of capitalism than their Polish hosts at that precise moment in time. Even Jamac had managed to secure a great deal of money during the early part of the 1990s. However, unlike some, Jamac had never been a man who is good with money.

I think that the combination of a brutal war at home in Somalia, and a profound sense of culture shock has damaged Jamac, and many other Somalis who have made the perilous journey from Africa to Europe. The signs of this are plain to enough to see. It is rather ironic that I met Jamac in Warsaw, because the city of Warsaw hosts the headquarters of the shadowy FRONTEX agency responsible for the protection of the external borders of the European Union. Indeed, it was Jamac who pointed out to me the angular, and gleaming, new building that serves as the home of FRONTEX. Jamac made a point of telling me how ugly he found the look of this particular building. This building, its physical appearance aside, has a great impact upon the lives of African migrants today. But once inside the European Union territory, migrants have little to worry about as far as FRONTEX is concerned. The agency primarily deals with the people trying to get in, not with those already inside E.U. territory. Many Africans now find themselves stranded in Warsaw. I also met individuals from the Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Mali amongst others. I ask myself why so many African people wish to leave their homelands for the physical confines and legal restrictions of a life in Europe? The answer must surely have some economic component to it, because as well as the Africans, I saw many other foreign people in Warsaw. These people included Iraqis and Armenians, Russians and Chinese. I witnessed a countless number of people that I believed to be Pakistani nationals, being brought in by secret organisations, in order to work in the sweatshops and kitchens of Western Europe.

Where do all of these immigrants stay at night, I thought? Jamac was kind enough to show me around one of the many camps, where all foreigners are housed after they have served six months in an immigrant detention centre. In such places, their legal status as economic migrants is apparently acknowledged. Many of the inhabitants of the camp in the Agustowska area of Warsaw had found work by selling goods brought in from China at the ramshackle daily market at the national stadium. Many African seemed to have become traders there. They sold all manner of things, and their shift would start well before the crack of dawn. If these people were lucky, they could make a meagre profit at the end of the month. The camp, where they live, is on the edge of the city and near to a great power plant. The giant red and white chimneys, of this power plant, can be clearly seen from great distances. The camp itself is a large, pre-fabricated construction, apparently erected some 35 years ago by the old communist government of Poland. It was never designed for its current function as a home for a multitude of foreigners. This building is in a chronic state of disrepair, and the human inhabitants share the place with giant rodents that only come out at night. I don’t think anybody should live in such conditions, especially the poor people of Africa that have been duped into leaving their luminous homelands for the privations of the developed world. Such miniature concentration camps should really be closed down, and the inhabitants should be encouraged to return to their countries of origin with their heads held high.

Jamac showed this hidden world to me, and I must thank him for this service. For without his assistance, I would never have been able to imagine the sheer scale of the economic oppression of entire nations that is being perpetrated in the name of Globalisation. Jamac—I like to think—acted as the Virgil to my Dante, as we descended the various circles of urban Globalisation. Jamac, bless him, could not imagine why anyone would be interested in the study of this hidden world, and I never made any moral judgements with respect to what I saw. However, I did feel a need to ask him why he thought he had been pushed into the situation that now faced him. I asked Jamac what he thought the future would bring him? He astonished me by telling me he felt that he was being punished for certain events that had happened in the past. I did not attempt to press him on this matter, but he insisted that he needed to speak about these unpleasant things. He told me that his father had participated in the military assault, by the Somali National Army, on the Somali city of Hargeisa in 1988. He said that his father had been well acquainted with the infamous Somali commander, known simply as Morgan, who had been the executive military officer during this despicable bombardment of Hargeisa. As for the future, he said that he would accept whatever the Almighty had chosen for him.

I believe that the self-respect of Somali nation is eroded by the abrasive demands of modern individualism. Individual rights, which undermine the viability of a community, are truly something dreadful. The Somali people are nothing without a sense of community. Yet, we flock, in our hundreds of thousands to the shores of Northern Europe and North America. In the great cities of Northern Europe and North America it is easy to see the dark underbelly of Globalisation. It is difficult to avoid the homelessness, the drug abuse, and violent crime of modern urban living. I believe the sham of materialistic individualism has made it possible for us to tolerate the lack of community dynamism that confronts us in these great cities. I fear that we, the Somali people, benefit nothing from the process of mass urbanisation. I fear that the concept of material consumerism is driving the youth of the Somali nation, now living in urban centres, away from the ancient values of the Somali people. To be perfectly honest, our ancient way of life is neither desirable nor is it practical in the claustrophobic environment of modern cities. Therefore, the question has to be asked, are the Somali people genuinely welcome in such an environment? Perhaps, with all due respect to the hard working taxi drivers amongst us, we have been permitted entry into places like fortress Europe in order to provide certain economic services for the wealthier members of society. I find it somewhat amusing that Somalis provide the taxi drivers; that Filipinos provide the domestic servants; West Africans provide the office cleaners; and so on, and so on in these great cities of the world.

The Somali community should remember people, like Jamac, when they fall on hard times. It is the Somali community that should look after its own. We should never seek the charity of others, for charity is the destruction of a nation. I was rather amused—some years ago—to learn that in the city of London, the Somali community has managed to establish over 140 ethnically orientated charities. These numerous organisations have somehow managed to alienate the very people that they had hoped to impress: The potential donors. These groups now struggle to access charity funding because they were asked the simple question; how can there exist over 140 Somali communities in the city of London if the Somali ethnicity is, by definition, unitary? That is to say, a person either belongs to the Somali ethnic group or they do not. Sadly, such episodes, and what they represent, seem to be lost on many urban Somalis today. This type of dishonourable conduct is but just one example of the shamelessness of many urban Somalis today. And, I think a combination of illusory social welfare and hollow individualism has inspired the rise of this appalling subculture. The Somali people, and their ancient customs, are worth much more than the price being paid for their destruction at the hands of modern urbanism. And every single one of us should be mindful of this fact.