A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) by Jonny Steinberg Read Free Book Online Page B

asked with arrogance. It was like a challenge to a fight. If the older child could not answer, he was
reer baadiye.
”
    It was thus that Asad, along with many other Liboi children, educated himself. He left Liboi in 1993 with basic numeracy and a capacity to recite the Latin alphabet. Soon, he would acquire the ability to put to paper any conversation he had conducted in his mother tongue. His grammar was shocking, his punctuation rudimentary. His phonetic spelling and oratory phrasing made the language he wrote a territory of its own, quite distinct from that of standard written Somali. But he could read and write, after a fashion; he could add and subtract, and he could multiply. These were the anvils and chisels with which he would fashion the rest of his life.
    He learned something else at Liboi. In Mogadishu, the languages he knew were the Arabic of the madrassa and the Somali of the world. It had never crossed his mind that there might be other tongues. The first time he walked across the border post at Liboi to forage for himself and Yindy, he heard Kenyan soldiers talking to one another in Swahili. The shock was so great that the ground rushed up to meet his eyes. And when the soldiers spoke to him in their simple, practical Somali, he at first did not understand what they were saying. The moment he returned to Yindy in Dhoobley he asked her what it was he had heard, and she laughed and explained to him that here and now across this world human beings were chattering away in dozens upon dozens of languages.
    In the camp at Liboi, there was the Somali of the refugees, the Swahili of the Kenyans, and the languages of those who staffed the UNHCR and the nongovernmental organizations. There was French and German and Danish. But more important than all the others combined was English, for that was the language in which the camp was run, and those who ran the camp knew not a jot of Somali. To learn English was thus to become useful to those with power.
    The race to learn English began the day the camp opened its doors. All sorts of English schools appeared; the nongovernmental organizations provided them with blackboards, chalk, and learning materials. Refugees paid good money to send their children there. Perhaps people sensed even then, in the earliest days of the war, that the damage being wrought on their country was immense and that they would have to learn the skills of an exile. Among the reasons Asad so hated his madrassa was the knowledge, as he sat there listening to the endless recitations, that across the camp other people were learning a language that would take them upward.
    “Two groups of people at Liboi spoke English,” Asad recalls. “The first was those who got jobs with the NGOs. They considered themselves the elite of the camp. They would speak English and French among themselves, in front of everyone else, to show that they were superior. The second group were the people who went to the private schools. They would also flaunt their English, practicing with each other in the middle of the camp. In loud voices, they would say: ‘How are you?’ ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘It is unusually hot today.’ ”
    I ask Asad why Yindy did not send him to a school that taught English, hoping, in this manner, to learn something of her thinking.
    “I don’t know,” he replies. “Some children went to madrassas, some to English schools, some to the mathematics schools. I think maybe it was just chance.”
    It is not the first time I ask Asad a question designed to elicit something about Yindy. She and Asad were so viscerally close, the bonds between them made of pain and blood. And yet, when he speaks of her, a lifeless being spills from his tongue. His love for his mother he can conjure from a brief description of the plaits that run down her back. His father he brings to life in the recollection of a single embrace. Yindy, by contrast, is a mere corpse.
    Once, driving through Bellville Town Centre,