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The lash is coming fast and violent
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Posted on December 30, 2009 at 06:37:41 PM by mb

The lash is coming fast and violent

December 28, 2009

I do believe that we the Somali society is the most wild, most idiotic, most illiterate, most deformed, most dysfunctional, most hateful, most .., most …

I will here try to justify the first three accusations and leave the rest for the reader.

Why most wild? Because the last time I left the country was in 1980 and that was the last time I personally witnessed two adults fighting one another. Just imagine two adults each one is trying hard to inflict the maximum injury he can upon the other. How could a society that does not only seem to enjoy such a fight but actually likes to encourage it to take place not be a wild society? How could it differ from wild animals? Is there one single behavior that we do not share with wild animals that makes them earn to be perceived as being wild? Like us they cannot be tamed. Like us they are vicious. Like us they like to spill blood and so on and so forth.

If that is no yet enough for us to admit our wildness here is another good reason that will not fail to convince those of us who are reasonable of being convinced of the fact that we are wild. Somalia is not only the only country that rid itself off of government for almost two decades, but also the only country where the people does not even want to do anything with any form of government. The only reason why this last justification may not convince us of our wildness is because we are wild. It is impossible to convince a wild being of being wild. Try hard as much as you like you will fail to do so. Moreover in this regard I will not be mistaken if I go further to claim the idea that we are probably even wilder than some of the wild animals for truly there are some species that accept some form of administrational hierarchy to exist in their societies.

How we are not wild, when there are in this world small countries or even tiny islands that unlike us have never lost their nationhood? Even those countries that had experienced long civil wars like us have never failed a single day to keep their governments. Take for example the case of Lebanon. That small country had gone into a sixteen-year-long civil war in which Lebanese citizens slaughtered one another across religious and sectarian lines. Nevertheless there was not a day that Lebanon was recognized as a failed state. How can we compare ourselves with that small country whose land is less than tenth of our land and whose population is more than our population, a fact that we would want to believe to have been one of the causes of their civil war.

Why most idiotic? Because we are the only society in this world whose life does not make any sense. We are the only society who either does not have any clue as to where its’ interest lies or has collectively chosen to disregard it for the sake of some other forces and there is not doubt both characteristics stand for idiocy. If we need to refuse our shallowness then how could we fail to know the fact that our interest as a unique society does not lie in which tribe our citizens belong to but in our nationhood? How could we not accept the reality that our uniqueness as a society lies in our owning each other not in segregating ourselves from one another on tribal lines, in belonging to each other as citizens of one single nation not as tribesmen of different tribes and in being proud in each other as members of a common entity not in gossiping each other? Wouldn’t these features be the prober answer to the question of what makes a nation a nation?

How could we not be an idiotic society when each and every one of us chooses to associate him/herself to one tribe rather than to the common citizenship and every tribe chooses to associate itself to what it might originally has come from in the past rather than to what it belongs to at the present? How could we not be an idiotic society when our so-called intellectuals never restrain themselves from associating themselves into those different whores? How could we not be an idiotic society when it is our society only who has the tendency to carry on segregating themselves on tribal lines even when they become immigrants in some foreign countries?

Why most illiterate? There is no better way of justifying our being the most illiterate than presenting to the reader a short comedy my friend Ibrahim Aw Youssef presented to a group of us back in Abu Dhabi. Ibrahim who I believe to be one of the few of us who would have liked to see us a proud nation and who used to make a record of the least nasty activities that our society does once happened to try to define our illiteracy and he came up with the following. He asked us the group if we can be able to characterize the Somali illiteracy in whatever means we can and we couldn’t do it. Then he said and I quote, “Ask an Arab whether he has a family? His answer will be ‘Yes thanks to God almighty a good wife and four beautiful children.’ Ask him where does he work? His answer will be ‘Thanks to God Almighty a nice company’ Ask him what his job is? His answer will be ‘Thanks to God Almighty I am a watchman’ Ask him his salary and his answer will be ‘Thanks to God Almighty one thousand Dirhams’” He said. “What answers do you expect from a Somali man?” We said, ‘tell us.’ He said, “here are the exact answers you no doubt will get from a Somali, a damn wife and a damn four unwanted bastards; a damn company; a damn stupid job; a damn two thousand Dirhams” How so true that short comedy is? It surely will be too complicated for a Somali to honestly name his job even if he is illiterate and rightly so because that is who we are – the most illiterate society in the world.

How could we not be so when we are the only society who has the capability to take an illiterate a director of an institution or a minister of a department or even the president of the nation?

How are we not illiterate when we are the only society who loves lying about our jobs? We lie about our being clerks; we lie about our being operators; we lie about every job we do as far as it has no relation with supervisory or administrational level. Think about this short real story which I consider to be a good example of our rascality. An unskilled Somali man once put in his mind to take a very beautiful girl for a wife. He decided to dream of a long list of beauties lined up for him to choose from. He determined to put his dream into effect and thought the best way to do that is to prove him a manager of a fictitious company. He put on a newly bought set (i.e. suit, tie and shoes matched for the occasion), handed his video camera over to his friend and asked him to take a video of him in the midst of poor innocent Pashtuns wearing their untidy traditional dress. He believed how that simple video is going to put his dream into reality and meant to take it in the upcoming leave so that he can show it to as many girls as he is able to meet. Some of us would want to sense some ingenuity in this man’s action however the question is not how he dared to do what he did but how he lied about his job. Let us stop laughing at him and look back into our past and find out if it is not true that there were occasions we did or liked to do what this rascal did.

We are so illiterate to the extent that it is in our culture to feel offended by all kinds of professions. If that is not so then why do we give bad names to the Metalsmiths, Shoemakers, Pottery Makers, Builders, Barbers, etc.? If not because of their skills why do we choose to look them down as if they are untouchables or gypsies? How many of us - Somali men - were ever ready to participate in the businesses of our homes? I can even think about the fact that that last question may excite some of the readers about who I am. It certainly will make them give me names like we always give names to whatever we come across. Be that as it may the issue here is not whether I am kitchen-lover or woman-helper but rather to tell who we are? We are so illiterate that we can not even afford to clean our streets even if there are mountains of garbage, because every one of us considers himself proud to do such a despicable job. Who do you think we are waiting to do the job for us? May be aliens from other planets or even may be the United Nations.

I am accusing us that we are not only the most wild, most idiotic, most illiterate but also the most sick society that God Almighty might have created in the universe and for that I sometimes ask myself whether our worshiping Him in the way we decided to worship him will benefit us in the hereafter. Idiocy has nothing to do with heaven. We can worship God Almighty as long as we are alive but that is not going to help us a bit. After all isn’t the translation of the word idiot in Arabic “Ahmaq”. How than do we want to relate “ahmaq” to heaven? Heaven is for wisdom. Do I look like somebody who is hopeless for us? No! But only if we need to turn back and qualify each and every behavior that belongs to us. Our faith must be able to cleanse all kinds of evil from our hearts and minds otherwise all that we are trying to perform is just activities like ordinary activities. And I wonder what is evil if not those characterizations mentioned above.

Here comes the nasty paragraph of this small article. If the question of what can be done about us arises here is my only answer. If it is possible for God Almighty to grant me the necessary limited power I would have us collected from all corners of the world, made sure none of us is left loose in somewhere, put us in a very big secure camp where it is impossible for anyone to escape, hired a huge strong energetic cruel and loyal mercenary, given him the proper lash and allowed him to do to us what is needed until he succeeds to remove the sickness that occupies our hearts and minds. After all whether we like it or not that huge mercenary is somewhere on the border and the lash is coming fast and violent.

I always wonder what our country would have become if it would have been lucky enough to be given to any European society or Japan or China or even the tiny Republic of Singapore. No doubt with in one year it would have become a destination of immigration instead of being a source of immigration which is what it is now.

abdulghani1157@hotmail.com

Abdulghani is based in Ottawa.


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