I have worked in the most remote areas of africa, as well as in Asia and America, but Somalia holds a specail place in my Heart. Possibly the genes of my Kerry forebears who survived on bare rockey hills far from the green fields of Eire influenced this unusual, and, if the attraction to Somalia was purely hereditary, that might explain, why i hold so firmly to this isolated and. until recently, forgotten part of East Africa.
I have returned there again and again, twelve trips in fiften years ad traveled all somaliland, working among the sick, carrying on medical research, rejoicing with my Somali friends as their own new nation evolved. I have relished every hot, dirty, lonely moment of it.
It is the people, more than the land, that captured me, for here are " The Irish of Africa."
Sir Richard Burton not today's Celtic thespian, but the explorer and linguist who discovered one of the sources of the Nile, mapped much of Africa, and was the first non-Muslim to visit Mecca and survive, left Aden in 1854 and traveled across the Gulf into an unknown land. Five months later, with a Somali spear having pierced his jaw and with one of his companions dead on the beach of Berbera, he returned to "civilaztion." Burton had visited the holy city of Harar, had recorded the customs and langauge of the Somali, and described the people as "a fierce race of Republicans, the irish of Africa.
In addition to their possessive love of the land, the Somali had other typical Celtic qualities: great respect poetry, religion, song, democracy, and age.
They loved to talk and had a highly developed sense of humor. They were brave but reckless. As Burton noted, they had "an unquestioned, if not occasionally injudicious, war like manner." Above all they had a fanatic pride in Somalia and the Somalis. Burton wrote: "they are full of curiosity and travel the world accepting almost any job without feeling a sense of inferiority, perhaps becouse they blieve that they are superior to everyone els." Irish indeed.
The eastern horn of Africa is the land of the Somalis. It's coustline, the largest in Africa, runs from the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden down the indian Ocean for sixteen hundred miles. The strategic signifcance of the vast expanse of shoreline, and particularly it's critical position across the oil lanes from Arabia and at the entry to the Red Sea, has not been missed by the superpowers of today.
In the southern part of the country two fertile strips of arable land surround the juba and shabelle rivers that run from the ethiopian highlands toward the indian Ocean. But the rest of the Horn is harsh and arid.
I have traveled the bush for weeks on end with the nomads, slept in the open under the southern Cross,and shared their meals, while tracking their deaseas, i have come away with an enormous respect, almost approaching an awe and certainly reflecting a love that can only be forged in hardship, for their trength, their kindness to the stranger, their silent wisdom, their knowledge of nature, and their remarakable ability to read the stars and the hot winds.
The physician has a unique opportunity to communicate with even the proudest people from totally different cultures.
I take inordinate satisfaction in the knowledge that slim book still serves as the basis for the Somali medical services. The privilege of setting up a new nation's health system must be akin to the joy a lawyer might experience if asked to write a new constitution. That joy is rare and treasured .As i write this article in mogadiscio in june, 1977, I sense the roots of kerry deep in the soil of Africa. I'm received as, and feel a part of the people.
I hear the chant of the muzzin calling of the faithful of islam to evening prayer. There can be few more beautiful or melodious souds. One fellow African traveler described my reaction as one of having the unreasonable feeling that i have discovered what i have been searching for without really defining what it is. I only know i fall asleep feeling once more at home among the irish of Africa.
