The World's Most Dangerous Place (45 page)

‘It’s three pounds with a Coke,’ he said, nodding for me to help myself from a small, damp crate on the counter next to him. ‘You want a bag?’

The crate contained perhaps twenty-five tightly bound bunches of qat, twenty stems to a bunch. Their bushy fronds were wilting slightly, and their reddish-green stalks resembled loops of electrical flex. I made a selection and watched as the qat-seller searched on the shelf behind him with slow and fumbling hands. It was obvious from his glassy eyes and his rictus grin that he was very stoned indeed.

‘Sorry,’ he said, as he at last produced one of the thin blue bags that I had seen snagged everywhere on the desert thorns of Somalia, and put my purchase into it. ‘I really need to go home and sleep. It’s been a long night.’

It was eleven o’clock in the morning, although it seemed best to let that pass. The bar, I now saw, doubled as the main switchboard for a minicab service of, I suspected, questionable reliability. The qat-seller had been chewing to keep himself awake through the nightshift. He explained that he had been about to go home some time ago, when a new consignment of qat arrived – fresh in from Nairobi, he said – and he had stayed behind to test the wares, and that one thing had led to another. But the main thing was that he could vouch for the consignments freshness. He said a full crate contained about a hundred pounds’ worth of leaves, and that this marfish got through four to five such crates every day.

I copied the others and settled down to chew. There seemed little technique to it. I picked off the tenderest leaves one by one in the manner of a snacking gorilla, and mulched them into a ball in one cheek until the juices trickled down my throat. I soon discovered
what the Coke was for because the taste was appalling: sharp and astringent. Some of the customers had drilled a small hole through the plastic cap of the Coke bottle to regulate their sips and to keep in the fizz, a modern take on the traditional cold water sipped from a smoked gourd.

When a stalk was stripped of leaves I did as the others did and tossed it on the floor, which was already strewn with discarded foliage, for there was no bin in the room. And then I selected another stalk and began the gorilla thing again, wondering if I should spit or swallow the slimy green bolus in my cheek.

‘Your first time chewing, huh?’ said a kindly customer at the counter who had seen my dilemma. ‘Mm. The first time can be . . . difficult. But it’s OK to swallow.’

He turned out to be a bus driver on the suburban 105 route, Greenford down to Heathrow. He said he was an ex-driver, but that he ‘could work again whenever he wanted to’, a remark that caused the smiley-stupid barman, who showed no sign of going home yet, to laugh out loud. I deduced that the driver was really just skiving off work. He said he was from Hargeisa originally, like most of the other customers present. That, he explained, was the way it worked in the London marfishes: their clienteles tended to break down along clan lines.

‘And why do you chew qat?’ I asked.

‘It passes the time,’ he replied.

That attribute explained why a good supply of qat was considered an essential rather than a luxury by the pirate kidnappers along the Indian Ocean coast, whose tedious job it was to guard docile foreigners for months or years while their ransoms were being negotiated. The author Jay Bahadur described how pirate qat-chewing sessions often lasted for 24 hours or more, because the
drug took away any need to break off to eat or to sleep. Time lost meaning for the dedicated qat-chewer in the same way that it did for the addicted gambler. The Southall marfish reminded me of Las Vegas’s casinos where there were never any clocks on the walls or even windows to remind their patrons that it was high time they stopped.

I had no wish to fall into such a temporal black hole; and after about half an hour, by when I had consumed most of my bag without any noticeable effect, I made my excuses and headed back out to the sunlight. Burton wrote that Europeans ‘perceived but little effect’ from qat, an observation that I took for an example of the lazy genetic racism of his imperial times when I read it. Now I began to wonder if he had been right. My disappointment was brief, however, because back at the station while waiting for the return train to London, my teeth started to grind, one leg began to jiggle, and I felt an unmistakable euphoric glow. I suddenly had so much energy that it seemed a shame, a crime even, to remain sitting down. I did not doubt that I could easily have walked the eight miles back to Paddington; possibly on my hands. It was an unlikely place for a Damascene conversion, but Platform 4 at Southall station was where I finally got the point of qat.

I could also see why many Somali community leaders wanted it banned. Qat’s defenders tended to argue that it was a harmless social activity on a par with drinking a pot of strong coffee, an argument that I now understood could only work with those who had never tried it themselves.

‘Those people in the marfish? Most of them haven’t got a life,’ said Sharmarke Yusuf, the chairman of the Association of Mosques and Islamic Centres.

Because chewing was traditionally a man’s habit, many of qat’s
most vociferous critics were women, who complained that it made their husbands spend time and money in the marfish rather than at home with their families, and that it also killed their will to work. After what I had just observed, I was sure they had a point. Furthermore, everyone from Jane, the state-school teacher in south-east London, to Hanif Qadir in Waltham Forest, asserted that qat was a major contributor to the specific Somali problem of paternal absenteeism. How many of the customers in the marfish I visited were the fathers of wayward teenage sons?

The damage qat caused to family life was difficult to prove, and naturally hotly disputed by many Somali men. Yet the serious medical harm that overconsumption could cause was not in doubt. In Hargeisa I had been accosted in the street by a ranting, shoeless madman with cud like puréed spinach dribbling from one corner of his mouth, his breath reeking of silage, his pupils as big as chocolate buttons. Mania and psychosis were classic signs of qat abuse, while even moderate long-term use was associated with depression, aggression, irritability, paranoia, insomnia, lethargy, heart problems, tremors, impotence and mouth cancer, not to mention the risk of teeth being stained permanently green.

Cathinone, qat’s active ingredient, was a naturally occurring substance that was nevertheless classified as a ‘Schedule 1’ drug under the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the same classification as LSD and Ecstasy. In its chemical structure it was closely related to the once-fashionable Western designer drug mephedrone, also known as miaow-miaow, which was linked to so many deaths in the UK in 2010 that the government introduced emergency legislation outlawing it. My Ealing friend Ayaan – who thought qat-chewing ‘absolutely revolting’, and the government’s failure to ban it a disgrace – said the miaow-miaow ban proved that
parliament could move quickly against drugs when it wanted to. For all the soothing talk that qat was a benign socializing drug, I very much doubted it would be so popular if it didn’t have cathinone in it. The chemical was highly unstable, with a tendency to break down and lose potency as the leaves dried out. This was why qat was flown into London from Nairobi four times every week. If you wanted to get high, the leaves had to be fresh.

Ayaan was convinced that the government would regret it if they did not ban qat soon, because the argument that the habit was confined to middle-aged Somali men, and therefore not worth legislating over, was no longer true.

‘I’ve seen school kids in uniform aged fourteen, fifteen, white ones, black ones, Indian ones, chewing qat on the way to school,’ she said. ‘An English guy asked me just the other day where he could buy qat. I misunderstood him. I thought he wanted to buy a cat.’

She reckoned the habit was increasingly popular with Somali women, too, although they didn’t frequent the marfishes but tended to chew at home, in secret. Ayaan knew of an Ealing woman who chewed when she was pregnant, and gave birth to an underweight baby as a result. She knew of another, a childhood friend, who had progressed from qat to crack cocaine, an almost unprecedented development among Somali women.

‘The long-term use of qat leads to mental illness, no question,’ she said. ‘It’s just as bad as cocaine for that.’

She wasn’t alone in worrying about its effect on the young. Paul Birch, the SO15 officer, recalled how as a policeman on the street in Wood Green in north London, he would occasionally come across a car-load of young Somali men ‘looking hard and nasty with these blazing red eyes from the qat – and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it’.

In January 2012 the Conservative MP Mark Lancaster, the sponsor of the latest parliamentary debate on qat, pointed out that no fewer than three Conservative shadow cabinet ministers had pledged to ban the drug while in opposition, and expressed his frustration that, a year and a half after election victory, no government action had been taken beyond the commissioning of a fresh review by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

‘Kicking this issue into the long grass with further “monitoring” is simply unacceptable,’ said Lancaster. ‘After years of talk on qat, if my Government wish to retain the trust of the East African community, the time has come to follow the rest of the Western world and act.’
⁸

His opinion was echoed by the UK ambassador in Nairobi, Matt Baugh, who described qat as a ‘festering’ social issue in Britain. Officialdom’s inertia, Baugh thought, was ‘symptomatic that we’ve kind of forgotten’ about Somalia and its problems: an example of the old policy of containment rather than the new one of engagement that the government was supposed to be pursuing.

Ayaan put it more forthrightly. ‘Of course it should be illegal,’ she said, ‘but why would the government give a toss?’

It was perhaps fortunate that, despite the experimentation of a minority, the great majority of young diaspora Somalis felt as Ayaan did, and had rejected qat without the encouragement of officialdom. Chewing was a pastime associated with their parents’ generation, not theirs, most of whom had grown up in the West, and thus had little or no nostalgia for the old café culture of Somalia. I thought it significant that none of the customers in the marfish in Southall was under thirty. But there was another and more important reason why many young London Somalis considered marfishes uncool. As the route 105 bus driver had
explained, the chewing dens were patronized according to clan affiliation. They thus perpetuated in exile the political system that had pushed Somalia into civil war. I later heard of a stretch of road in Kentish Town in north London where there were five marfishes in a row, one for each of Somalia’s main ethnic groups. It was a street version of the 4.5 clan power-sharing formula espoused by the TFG in Mogadishu – and as I was still discovering, there were a great many young diaspora Somalis who had nothing but scorn for that.

‘I think clanism is a disease, like AIDS,’ said Ayaan. ‘I hate it. When people ask me what clan I’m from I never tell them, ever. It makes some of the older Somalis really mad, but I just laugh at them.’

Her attitude was not unusual among London Somalis. She was in fact one of a new breed that was determined to challenge tradition and break with the disastrous prejudices of the past, the first and worst of which, she believed, was clanism. I had a lot of sympathy for this view. Not long previously I had received another heart-breaking email from Aden Ibrahim in Mogadishu, who against the odds had found a job at last, but was now about to lose it again in the cruellest way.

I think our contact became a low on these months, because I am busy in a job working in 9 hours in a day and an internet café is not near to my residence in the night going a far away from the village is danger.

I was really happy having this job but now things are changing, I have to train a person who will take my job in 30 days time and that will left me a jobless!!!!

The one that I am teaching a job his uncle belongs to the company which I work for, Tribalism is common problem across the country!

Perhaps the purest expression of Ayaan’s impatience with clanism – or tribalism – was an organization of which she wholeheartedly approved called the Anti-Tribalism Movement. From its base in Acton, west London, the ATM had accrued more than 67,000 online members since its launch in 2010, the great majority of them between the ages of sixteen and thirty. I went to meet the ATM’s director, Adam Matan, in a hotel café near Paddington station.

He was a 25-year-old business management graduate from Roehampton University who had gone on to work as a ‘community engagement officer’ for Hounslow Council.

‘We are not against the tribes, which are an important part of who and what we are,’ he said, ‘but we are against tribalism, a system that fragments and diminishes us.’

The ATM’s supporters were by no means all from the diaspora. Some 27,000 people had signed up from within Somalia itself, including nearly 4,000 in Galkacyo.

‘Why?’ said Matan. ‘Because Galkacyo is the
home
of tribalism . . . The Darod and the Hawiye who live there think of each other as animals.’

The movement’s ‘three visions’, according to Matan, were the eradication of tribalism, the unification of Somali hearts and minds, and the promotion and preparation of the future leaders of the country. Some supporters of the ATM, which described itself as a ‘revolutionary youth-led non-profit social reform movement’, hoped it might even herald an Arab Spring for Somalia.

As Matan well knew, he was not the first Somali to attempt to
abolish the clan mindset. Others had tried and failed in the past. The country’s first political party, the Somali Youth Club, was founded in 1943 by thirteen activists who refused on principle to reveal their clan lineage. Siad Barre also identified tribalism as the greatest obstacle to scientific socialist progress. In 1970 he held a huge public rally at which a Guy Fawkes-style effigy of
qabyalad
, tribalism, was symbolically burned and buried. The regime’s official maxim became
maxaa taqaan
rather than
ayaa taqaan
– it was not ‘who you knew’ but ‘what you knew’ that mattered.
⁹
Siad Barre’s prescription for Somalia failed, but that did not mean it was wrong. The problem was that he refused to swallow his own medicine. Even in his first cabinet, appointed in 1969, half of the fourteen ministers were from the dictator’s own Darod Marehan clan, a bias that only grew more pronounced as his rule progressed.