Somalia

black mamba boy

by nadifa mohamed

To be perfectly honest, I began BLACK MAMBA BOY by Nadifa Mohamed a little reluctantly, not altogether convinced I’d enjoy the story of a young Somalian boy’s long, lonely journey across multiple countries in the Horn of Africa to find his father. Although the story does drag a bit, and seems determined to make Jama the-boy-who-suffered-more-than-any-other-boy-has-ever-suffered, ever, the more I read, the more engaged I became with Mohamed’s richly constructed world and characters.

BLACK MAMBA BOY is the story of Jama, a young Somali who, after his mother’s death, leaves Yemen to search for the father he has never met. His epic journey takes him more than 1000 miles north, through Somalia, via Eritrea, the Sudan, and Palestine, all the way to Egypt, across the Red Sea, and ultimately by ship to England. Set in the colonial period in 1935, Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel is made even more remarkable by the fact that it is a semi-autobiographical account of her father’s life.

This period of history in this part of the African continent is absolutely fascinating to me. Events I first encountered in THE SHADOW KING by Maaza Mengiste. Mohamed’s story is set during the colonial period when Italy, having failed to colonize Ethiopia in the late 1800s, (allowing Ethiopia to become the only African nation to remain free of European control,) decided to try again under Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, while they could capitalize on the insecurity brought by the impending European war.

This war provides some of the backdrop to Jama’s story and it was around this time in the book that I began to be drawn into the tale. It seemed to be the most developed and well-researched part of the book and Mohamed writes unflinchingly about the cruelty of the invading Italian forces, the soldiers’ open hostility and racism, and their resentment at being there, fighting for a land they could neither love nor understand. There’s a particularly brutal scene where a group of bored and sadistic Italian soldiers beat a young Somali to death for the crime of stealing a few pocketfuls of rice and pasta, and further descriptions of the horror inflicted on the local people, many of whom had been recruited to fight as askaris* for the ferengi** army.

“The Italians tried to keep these obedient by shooting deserters or tying hands and feet behind backs and throwing insubordinate men into mountain gullies where jackals waited for them. The Italians also reprised one of their special forms of execution: they tied mutinous askaris, usually nomadic Somalis unused to taking orders, to the backs of lorries and accelerated along the rough road until there was nothing left on the end of the rope apart from a pair of manacled hands. One askari showed Jama and the boys a postcard he had bought from a hawker in Mogadishu. They squinted at the picture of the lorry, unable to see anything of interest. "Allah," shouted Abdi, and he pointed to the shackled hands that hung off the back, piously cupped as if in prayer, but the wrists were shredded stumps, inscribing their curses in bloody script on the dusty road.”

I understand Mohamed was inspired by her father’s own odyssey across the Horn of Africa, but for me, the book would have been improved by focussing on one part of the story and doing a deeper dive into the people and the place. Instead, we get a less fulfilling, more hurried story as Jama is propelled by mishap, tragedy, and circumstance, from place to place and hardship to hardship. However, still a good read - especially for the middle bits!

*a local soldier serving in the armies of the European colonial powers in Africa

**from the Persian word Ferenghi meaning foreigners or Europeans