SomaliNet Forums

Cumar-Labasuul wrote:Can't say I feel the same, before I went to hargeisa I didn't care to go back or the thought of visiting didn't even cross my mind. Me I need to actually visit somewhere to feel emotionally attached such as when I went to visit hargeisa couple of years ago. I remember the return flight back to London, let's just say I was very sad to leave my birth place: My REAL home.

Voltage wrote:I wish to see peace and development in Somalia particularly where my parents and their families are from but I don't have any special attachment to those places that I wouldn't have for any other place.

Voltage wrote:What is home? Your parents land you have never been to or the actual home you grew up in? I am 22 and have lived in the city I live in now since the age of 4. My concept and sentimental emotional understanding of home is here.

See from a young age, I, like most other Somali youth, accepted the norm of political tribalism. The idea one belongs to a specific stock of the Somali people, live and die by them as was the case with our grandfathers before us, is and was a central existence in the "coming-of-age" of any young Somali man. It was also in a very sympathetic environment such an idea lodged itself in me because as a highly bright and curious young man, I always questioned the nature of our flight out of Somalia and the sad situation the old country continued to find itself in. After all, I was at once American and a product of my environment, but still had parents who sent money back home to aid relatives and house-phones that rang at all extremities of the hour containing the hopeful voices of helpless clansmen back home who sought aid from us, their more fortunate relatives abroad. My acceptance of and championing of political tribalism then became realized. After all, was it not a natural occurrence in such a situation?

To summarize a long story short, it became impossible for me to bridge the gap between the political tribalism I was expected to toe to with respect to Somalia and the daily environment and progressive education before me. What in Somalia's tribalized politics conformed to both the secular and religious educations I had undergone? Nothing. I would sit in a classroom full of White Americans, Black Americans, Asians, Latinos and all forms of colors and creeds. I would come to accept and champion the vibrancy and strength of diversity so when it came to Somalia, it became hard for me to continue to accept this push to want more for political power for people of my clan at the expense of others, in fact seldom not at the expense of others. Why should a clansman of mine be privileged politically at the expense of other more qualified people on account of people of his clan owning more guns then the other clans? Why should I want the top political posts for my clan as a symbol of power when as a person who cares for the development of his nation, I should be choosing on merit? With these confounding differences and confusions, I decided to make my first visit back home to the mother land in East Africa. I went there with these two parralels and worldviews in front of me. The world view shaped by all the education I had undergone, secular as well as religious, that spoke of plurality and put emphasis on merit and the worldview shaped and written into my blood as a member of the Somali race, which stressed allegiance to clan and nothing but clan at the expense of nation, logic, and even at times sanity. In Africa, the worldview espoused by my Somali bloodline was crushed. Nothing else explains it. Going there and seeing the situation with the eyes of a Western-raised, and Western-educated young man who had no physical remembrance of Africa, I had failed to understand why so many our people continue to be indoctrinated into arguably the most primitive of social customs that has become the bane and the destruction of our nation. Perhaps I have written too long but as I flew back from Africa, I held a single worldview that has only come to maturation recently when it became possible for me to condemn even my own clansmen politically. I feel both liberated and alive because of this stance that espouses logic, reason, sanity, plurality, merit, and capability; concepts totally alien to the pervasive tribal culture shaped by centuries of Somali bush life.

Cinque Mtume wrote:I have a very deep emotional connection to Bangkok, I don't know why.

Voltage wrote:If you care I recently spoke on the issue why I do not seem tribalistic anymore when I was one of the most tribalistic people on this forum as a younger man: