Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur Read Free Book Online

Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh, unofficially known as “Little Mogadishu,” is a slice of Somalia transported into Kenya; the roads are unpaved and perpetually clogged with noisy traffic, and khat leaves litter the ground between colourful rows of open-air kiosks. As he dropped me off at the outskirts of the sprawling neighbourhood, my Kenyan taxi driver earnestly cautioned me to stay alert. “Somalis don’t argue with you,” he warned. “They just stab you.”
    House prices in Nairobi have risen two- and threefold over the last five years, and angry local residents have naturally turned to Somalis—already viewed with suspicion by native Kenyans—as convenient scapegoats. Since the piracy outbreak two years ago, the scapegoating has included allegations that pirate dollars are in large part responsible for the rising costs. 8 A few days earlier, a University of Nairobi medical student I had met on the streets downtown echoed the concerns felt by many Nairobi residents. “Somalis are buying all the land from the Kenyans,” he exclaimed. “How? Where do they get all the money?”
    Strolling down the streets of Eastleigh in December 2009, I could not deny that the neighbourhood was in the midst of a building boom. Alongside the broad thoroughfares carving up the suburb, layers of scaffolding snaked around the shells of six-storey buildings under construction. I stopped and began to question passers-by, and soon a small mob had gathered around me. I asked the crowd for their thoughts on a recent broadcast by the Kenyan Television Network, which had sent a team to Eastleigh with the express purpose of looking for pirates. “All they found were Toyota Surfs and mirra [the Kenyan term for khat],” one man shouted out. “That’s not enough evidence!”
    Irrespective of whether pirates are hiding out in Eastleigh, a rough calculation is sufficient to dismiss the notion that piracy has had anything to do with the skyrocketing demand for Nairobi land. At the time, pirate ransoms had not totalled more than $125 million; given how much pirate booty is blown on cars and khat, it would be a miracle if as much as a tenth had made its way from Somalia into the Nairobi property market. And $12.5 million in over two years could not noticeably affect average property prices in even the smallest slum of a global city like Nairobi.
    Though admittedly not as glamorous an explanation, the Nairobi property boom has been a result of the Kenyan government’s investor-friendly policies over the last half-decade—not the laundered proceeds of pirate kingpins.
* * *
    Looking beyond the mythology that has coloured the reality of piracy both past and present, there are some striking similarities. Despite their notorious reputations, the pirates of old, like Somali pirates today, usually left their hostages alive (after all, they needed to provide an incentive for crews to surrender without a fight). Like the Somalis, they were spendthrift; Captain Kidd was the only pirate known to have buried treasure, and he did not do so very often (pirates didn’t—and still don’t—plan for the future). Even in their organizational cultures, the two groups are remarkably similar; like the Somalis, pirate crews on seventeenth-century vessels more resembled associations of shareholders than servants indentured to a despotic captain.
    Among the Somali pirates, of course, not all shareholders were equal.

4
    Of Pirates, Coast Guards, and Fishermen
    T HE DAY AFTER MY FARM MEETING WITH B OYAH , I WAS SITTING at the dining-room table of my guest house in Garowe, sipping a cup of Shah (sweet tea) and waiting for Abdirizak, my host and interpreter, to bring me a pirate. Before long, I heard Abdi’s station wagon pulling through the fortified iron gate and into the courtyard, and he soon appeared with a sullen youth in tow. Consistent with the Somali nickname culture, Abdi introduced him as Ombaali, meaning “the burdened camel”; I learned only later that