Open Writing

Chapter 6
Flight (Continued}

When Stewart took off for Nairobi I had expected to hear from
him within hours of his arrival, such was his apparent attachment. A
day passed, then another ....... a week, but still nothing. I imagined
him busy at work yet not so pressed that he couldn’t call. I supposed
he might have had phone connection difficulties. Eventually I took
the bull by the horns and called his office. I spoke to a man called
Brickman, who was not at all pleasant. Before I could explain who I
was he said rather brusquely that Stewart had been sent back to
London. Obviously I had asked when he would return and was taken
aback to hear from the man that ‘Mr Munro will not be resuming his post.’

Stewart had made no mention of his imminent departure and
frankly I was shocked by his lack of candour.

If nothing else I’m a realist. I understand that men often say
things they don’t mean. I soon began to put the disappointment of
Stewart to the back of my mind, realising that he could not after all
be the source of a one way ticket out of Somalia.

Only a few weeks later I had much more than him to think about.

An unexpected turmoil was about to rock my life to its very foundations.

One evening I had been able to escape from work early for a
change. When I got home, father was pacing up and down, visibly
shaken. I glanced sideways to my mother sitting in a favourite spot –
‘her’ Lamu hand-carved chair situated close to a window affording
an often dramatic view of Indian Ocean waves crashing onto the
shoreline. Her face was drained and she clutched and twiddled with
her worry beads. I could see that she had been crying.

‘What’s going on? What’s the matter?’

‘Haven’t you heard Amina?’ my father asked, flabbergasted.

‘Heard what, for heaven’s sake?’

‘There is rebellion in the north. Barre has bombed Hargeisa. Our
people are fleeing in all directions. Hundreds, even thousands are
dead.’

‘But how?’ I asked stupidly, in complete disbelief, and wondering
too how I had not picked up news of this at the Ministry.

‘The National Movement has been flexing its muscles. The President
has obviously taken action to put them down. You know he’ll
be ruthless. We’ve been unable to reach your grandmother or any
other family member. All the lines are down. We fear the worst.’

I remember walking over to my mother and putting an arm
around her slender frame. She hadn’t said a word. She just stared out
of the window as the early evening light began rapidly to fade away –
as if to portend doom, no, a tragedy which was about to envelope
us.

My younger sisters were still in Rome: that much was a relief.

But
where was Mursal? My parents looked at me, and then at one another
as if they had thought of my brother for the first time. He was
only twenty. It was unusual for him not to be home by that time of
day. He loved to sit on our rooftop taking in the sea air, watching the
sun set with only a tea and a bowl of cashew nuts for company.
Mursal had never wanted to study at university though he was by
far the most clever of my parents’ children. They had high hopes for
him to become a doctor or a lawyer. Instead, and with some financial
support from my father, Mursal had started a business importing
vegetables from Kenya. Mainly tomatoes. I have no idea what gave
him the notion, but within a couple of years he was making quite a
lot of money. He bought a car and wore modern clothes. One might
have imagined he’d been seduced by the western culture, what little
he could make of it. Yet he remained deeply attached to our northern
heritage. Though he was under no obligation to do so, given his
still youthful years, as well as helping us, he regularly sent money to
senior members of our extended family, most of whom lived in and
around Berbera. And to cement those northern connections, he
made an annual pilgrimage ‘home’ where those same relatives hosted
him with much warmth and appreciation.

‘Where is the idiot?’ my father asked. This was purely a reference
to my brother’s undisputed hot-headedness; an ability to fly off the
handle at the least provocation. There was nothing ‘cool’ about him.

Papa was worried that he might do something stupid. Take some action
which would put him in danger.

Mursal did not come home that night or the next. In fact I never
saw him again. I learned much later that he had been livid when he
heard about the destruction of Hargeisa and the mass killings at the
hands of Barre’s hated Red Berets. He had used his market contacts
to buy a sniper rifle. Imagine that! A bolt action Remington 308. We
long ago gave up asking how such a specialised gun could get into
Somalia. Even in those days you could win an Kalashnikov and a bag
of hand grenades in a beauty competition.

The same evening that my father had been fretting with us at
home, Mursal found a way of getting through a back entrance to the
Olympic Hotel, one of the tallest buildings in Mogadishu. There
would have been no security to speak of. He must have climbed up
to the roof with his rifle and a pouch of ammunition. He was well
prepared and patient. They found a ten litre container half full of
water and some still unopened tins of food which he’d brought to
sustain him while he waited.

When finally he saw soldiers patrolling in sufficient numbers, he
loaded his rifle and began shooting. He was responsible, the newspapers
said, for killing a dozen or more. It was his way of taking revenge
for the slaughter of Isaaq clan-family members in the north.

At first the army was so confused by the fusillade that they couldn’t
work out where the shots were coming from. Most of those whom
Mursal killed were shot from a distance of eight hundred metres.

Where had he learned to shoot like that? We had no idea.

Lack of detection couldn’t last. Soldiers finally stormed the hotel
building, scores of them booting down doors as they made their way
to the roof. Mursal would have seen them swarm in and known his
end was near. They found him hidden behind a huge air extraction
unit from where he shot three more soldiers (with a pistol) before
meeting God. His bullet riddled body was thrown like a rag doll from
the top floor, his bloody corpse left to rot in the street. My poor
Mursal. What a waste of his young life. I loved him so much.
While Siad Barre’s military did not have the reputation of being
particularly quick witted, the President had instilled in them the importance
of maintaining good intelligence and a network of informants.

It was only a matter of hours before Mursal was identified.

We heard about the Olympic Hotel rampage on the radio, long
before connecting this to my brother’s absence. Then, in the dead of
night, my father got a call from Uncle Jama. I did not find out until
much later, exactly how he knew. He explained Mursal’s terrible fate
and told my father that we were in great danger. He pleaded with us
to take flight; to head for Berbera. ‘You must go now,’ Uncle Jama had
pleaded, ‘leave everything.’

There is no way of describing how that felt. We wanted to stay in
that lovely old house among things familiar to us, to be snug there
like mice in their nest. I so prayed for events to spin back in reverse,
that we had only been dreaming; that the nightmare was at an end.
Instead, not only had we to deal with the trauma of my brother’s untimely
death, but we had also to consider the probability of Red Beret
retribution if they caught up with us.

Instinct told us that Uncle Jama was right. There was no way we
could remain at home in safety. So with my mother and father, I hurriedly
packed a few essentials, and fled the house which had been our
precious home for so many years. As we stepped out onto the darkened
street, it tore at our hearts to close the grand carved door behind
us. Perhaps, we thought, it would be for the last time.