7:44 pm | Posted by Webmaster

CONFESSIONS OF A NEW COVERT TO THE GERI-KOOMBO CLAN-FAMILY

This is the story of my recent dramatic, almost mystical conversion to the noble Geri-Koombo clan-family. What bizarre private agencies of enlightenment and pleasant beneficence that drove me into abandoning my Leelkase kin and embracing the Geri will take a psychiatrist to divine. But before dwelling on my impulsive, inexplicable adoption of the Geri as my new clansmen henceforward, let me cover a few unattended bases.

Prof Said S Samatar

By any standard of measurement Somalis have, in the matter of clanism and clan allegiance, proven themselves to be a schizophrenic species: on the one hand, if you so much as dare to utter a clan name in a group of multi-clan Somalis, they are liable to be alarmed to the point of hyperventilation: their eyes will begin to dilate and dart about excitedly, expanding at the orbs, their nostrils will fitfully flare up, their teeth will shake animatedly, chattering like the rattle of a lid on a boiling pot, while the mouth, generally, goes gaping idiotically like a she-camel in heat. It is, in other words, a confirmed taboo to intone aloud a clan-name before a clannishly mixed crowd of Somalis.

On the other hand, leave a single clan to themselves, and they are likely to engage in a murderous clan banter, exulting in their rare qualities, while trashing the reputation of other clans and inquiring of each other: how do we loot Reer-Hebel’s (thus and such enemy) clan’s belongings? (Reer Hebel see baan u bililiqaysanaa?). The mention of a clan publicly, that is, troubles their moral sensibility, while privately “hoostay ga guuxayaan” “privately, they can’t help intoning: clan, clan, clan!”. What they say does not issue out of what they think but where they are coming from with respect to clan dynamics. If this ain’t a case of a split personality, well, I don’t know what is!? For example, I chanced the other day on a Somali gentleman—Abukar Maxammad “Gar-yaqaan” (“He who dispenses justic”) Geytaano—on a Toronto Somali TV channel called Todobaadkaan iyo Toronto, or “This Week and Toronto.” His demeanor and bearing bespoke a radiance of dignity: he was impeccably suited, and spoke loquacious Somali, brilliantly—and painfully—articulating a moving tale–that of the unspeakable oppression inflicted upon his people by a predatory cluster of alien-clan invaders. Mr. Garya-qaan told a stomach-turning story of a people denuded of their all—everything they owned: their territory occupied, their corner of the river taken, their farm homesteads confiscated, their able-bodied men slaughtered, their livestock seized, their maato (the weak and helpless) driven into the wilderness and hunted down, the elders rounded up, corralled and burned alive, the fasting(Sooman) matrons raped en mass. Throughout his tale of terrors—and this is the telling point above—he only once mentioned by name the identity of the victims of these atrocities as the Biyamaal clan in an interview of forty-five minutes; while he never identified the clan names of the perpetrators of these crimes, No, he would not name names publicly. It is a taboo do so. Still, most Somalis know the clan name of these murderous thugs (Parenthetically, the parliamentarian, singer and social pundit, Saado Cali Warsame, is alleged to have been gunned down last week, cowardly and in cold blood, because she dared, bravely, to denounce in parliament the persecution of the Biyamaal. As is always the case with the vagaries of human existence, she paid for her bravery with life and limb).

Having gotten the above load off my chest, with clannishness towards all, and patriotism towards none, I hereby break my vow of Omerta—a venerable mafia appellation meaning “Code of Silence”—and herewith renounce my membership in the Leelkase clan cohort in favor of the “Great Commonwealth” of the Geri-Koombo clan-family. No doubt this boiling perfidious betrayal of the Leelkase will earn me the vituperative wrath of my former kinsmen, branding me a quisling, a traitor, a deceitful good-for-nothing, a shameless, self-serving opportunist and a doer of treasonable deeds against his kith and kin—the noble Leelkase! Still, they are unlikely to move against me physically, thanks to the Bald Eagle, Uncle Sam’s insignia that insures my protection. Hence, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

Against all odds, I am particularly attracted to two outstanding features of the vast “planetary pull” of Geri-Koombism: First, the Geri remain one of the few Somali clans that can be said to have a history, thanks to the Geri chronicles recorded in First Footsteps in East Africaby the romantic/eccentric globe-trotting Richard (later Sir) Burton. In 1854, the British explorervisited the Somali coast all the way to the ancient emporium of Harar. (En passant, the claim that attributes history exclusively to the Geri, on the face of it, may sound a nonsensical, arbitrary assertion, prompting the repartee that since all Somalis have a common origin in a single founding ancestor, the so-called Samaale, all Somalis must surely have an equal stretch of history. This is a mere specious objection, and seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding of the term “history.” Why do we speak of, say, the country of Egypt as having a long history, while sub-Saharan Africans, including the Somalis, as possessing practically none? Indeed, does not the whole of humanity descend from Zinjanthropus, the African Ape-man, and therefore own equal tenure on the earth? The answer: because Egypt’s is a written record extending back all the way to the pharaoh Menes –also known as Narmarke–who unified the two Lands of Egypt in 3100 B.C., i.e., Upper and Lower Egypt—with the cobra as the royal emblem of Upper Egypt and falcon as that of the Lower. By contrast, sub-Saharan Africans, with the exception of Ethiopia and the East African Swahili coast, show no evidence of having had an alphabet, and therefore no writing; so precious little is known of how they chanced upon the earth! Well, so much for the excited effusions of a pretender to history who can’t resist any opportunity to cogitate about the field).

Prof Said S. Samatar
Rutgers University