knew that it would be a long time before there would be a peaceful scene at the Peace Hotel again.
THE TAXI DRIVER couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Stop the car? Now?
It was a few months after Ethiopia’s invasion, in March 2007, and the fighting in Mogadishu was at its worst in years. Ethiopian troops were battling a fractured Islamic insurgency, clans warred with clans, and criminals and warlords were fighting everyone. As always, thousands of impoverished civilians with nowhere to go were caught in between. The taxi was speeding away from the chaotic Bakara Market, until the passenger, a bespectacled, gentle forty-seven-year-old Somali-born Canadian named Sahal Abdulle, insisted that they stop. Actually, he was yelling, and Sahal almost never yelled.
Ambling across the street, unaware of the war raging around him, was a massive, crusty tortoise. He was going as fast as he probably could, which wasn’t very fast at all.
Sahal had thought he had seen everything in Mogadishu, but spotting a tortoise near the concrete jungle of the market and this far from the city’s rocky coastline was like finding a moose striding across Toronto’s Bay Street, or a bear ambling across Park Avenue in Manhattan. Sahal knew it was crazy to stop. He also knew he had to. “I just need to protect something,” he thought.
Minutes earlier, Sahal had been near the Damey Hotel, reporting on what the mortars and AK-47s and RPGS and bombs had left behind. In military terms, it was called “collateral damage,” civilians caught in the fighting. In real terms, it was dead children, women and civilian men, and severed limbs. Sahal was passionate about his duty as a journalist, but sometimes his work just seemed futile. Especially when no one seemed to care. And it often seemed that no one cared about Somalia.
Sahal yelled to the driver, his friend Hussein, “Give me a hand and open the trunk.”
“No. We’re not doing this,” Hussein replied, but he was already out of the car, bobbing and weaving, flinching with every crackle of gunshots.
Together they lifted the tortoise, struggling with its weight despite their adrenalin-fuelled strength. The mighty beast retracted his head and limbs and defecated on them.
The second-oldest of ten children, Sahal was born Abdullahi Abdulle in the Somali town of Galkayo on a Friday in 1962. His mother was in labour for four days giving birth to his older brother, but Sahal was delivered in less than two hours and that’s why everyone called him Sahal—Somali for easy. Sahal’s early childhood, however, was anything but. As a toddler, he developed a condition that doctors could not diagnose but which had similar symptoms to hemophilia, and his nose bled profusely if he was too active. Most of his childhood and teenage years were spent indoors with the elders, drinking tea. His pillow was covered in plastic so his blood wouldn’t ruin the fabric.
His only relief was a concoction made by his grandmother, a traditional medicine woman. Every morning, Suban Isman Elmi would rise before dawn and brew a soup made of roots, filling the house with the smells of her magic. Sahal loved his grandmother and admired her grit and otherworldly wisdom. “Whatever I had, I would eat that soup and I would be okay,” Sahal said. “I don’t know if it was psychological or physiological but that taste, even forty years later, is kindness.” When he was seventeen, he went to Nairobi, and the cooler climate cleared up his problem. Two years later, a Somali doctor gave him an injection and miraculously, mysteriously, he was cured.
But those early years shaped Sahal. He was different from other kids his age; perceived as weak, he never learned to ride a bike or play soccer. Other children called him “Sahal Oday,” Sahal the Old. He never forgot that feeling of others looking down on him, or worse, not noticing him at all. It was the main reason he became a journalist. He wanted to empower the weak. As he often told others, “I want to speak for the voiceless.”
In the late 1980s, with his life’s savings—a Nikkormat EL2 camera—hanging around his neck, and his passport stamped with a U.S. visa, Sahal left Africa for the first time, in the hopes of becoming a photographer in San Francisco. He had always expected to return to Somalia, but in 1990, when the fighting that would eventually topple the dictatorship of General Mohamed Siad Barre started, Sahal decided instead to travel north. In November 1990, he drove to Buffalo, crossed the border and asked Canada to accept him as a refugee.
He would not visit his homeland until three years later, with a better camera, a new perspective, and a desire to tell Somalia’s story. Sahal lived the life of many Somali-born Canadians, with one foot in each world, their hearts aching for their homelands, their fingers freezing in Canadian winters. His children were born in Toronto and he loved his adopted home. But as a journalist, he struggled with a need to “fix” Somalia, and after 9/11 he feared his homeland would only be considered as an incubator of terrorism; the underlying basic problems such as poverty, education and government corruption would be overlooked.
I had become friends with Sahal in Toronto, but it was during my trips to Kenya and Somalia that I really got to know him. In Toronto, we often rushed through a meal or coffee, apologizing that we didn’t have longer to talk. Yet in Africa we were on Somali time, and one tea led to the next as we apologized for having kept each other so long.
Sahal was working for Reuters while the war with Ethiopian forces was raging in 2007. He had a large home in Mogadishu, across the street from the Shamo Hotel, which was a hub for foreign journalists who were brave or crazy enough to make repeat trips. They liked to tease Sahal about his quirky habits, even though they all had their own ways of coping with war. Sahal had four.
On days when the fighting would wake him before dawn, Sahal, the Constant Gardener (yet another nickname), would seek solace in the cool dirt of his yard, where he had managed to cultivate more than seventy-two different flowers and vegetables. He even grew ginger, which he required for his special brew of Kenyan Ketepa tea. Working in the garden as the sun rose—weeding, watering, caring for these fragile crops—calmed him. At night, he would put on earphones and blast John Coltrane while he smoked a cigar—coping mechanisms two and three. Foreign journalists were his main cigar suppliers and would bring Sahal boxes of Cubans each time they visited.
The rescued tortoise became Sahal’s fourth passion. He didn’t have a name. He became, simply, “Tortoise.” Often when Sahal came home to edit and send photos and articles to his bosses in Nairobi, he was still numb. The lens offered a small measure of detachment in the field, an ability to document but not fully absorb the horrors he was witnessing. But once the fatigue set in and the laptop displayed the reality in full colour, allowing Sahal to zoom in and out and crop. . . well, that’s when Tortoise would start his slow walk. “I would be looking at my computer and I would be stressed out,” Sahal recalled. “Then out of the corner of my eye, I’d see him on one side of the computer, just slowly, slowly walking.” It would take about twenty minutes for Tortoise to make his trek, disappearing for a time behind the laptop screen, before emerging out the other side. “By the time he got there,” said Sahal, “whatever you were doing, you would just think of him.”
I heard news of the war mostly through Sahal, Ali Sharmarke or local journalists and their reports. Increasingly there was talk of al Shabab. When the ICU was in power, a violent splinter group that called itself the Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen was vying for control. More commonly known as “al Shabab,” meaning “the youth,” the group’s origins likely pre-date 2006, but that was when they became an organized force. Aden Hashi Farah, or “Ayro,” was one of the original founders and had reportedly been appointed to this youth militia by Aweys, the Blundstone-boot-loving Red Fox. Shabab were ruthless and had little support among Somalis until Ethiopia’s invasion gave them the recruitment pitch they needed, not only among young, impoverished Somalis, but also among neighbouring Kenyans and disenfranchised Somali youth living around the world just as analyst Matt Bryden had predicted. Those giggling cave-dwellers had another gift they could spin endlessly.
