EDNA ADAN ISMAIL was Foreign Minister of Somaliland from 2003 to 2006, and had previously served as Somaliland’s Minister of Family Welfare and Social Development.

She is the director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Hargeisa, which opened in 2002, and an activist and pioneer in the struggle for the abolition of female genital mutilation. She is also President of the Somaliland Association for Victims of Torture.

In 2010, she opened the Edna Adan Ismail University in Hargeisa, Somaliland. She was married to Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal who was Head of Government in British Somaliland five days prior to Italian Somalia’s independence and later the Prime Minister of Somalia (1967–69) and President of Somaliland from 1993 to 2002.

A Woman of Firsts
Edna Adan Ismail

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Copyright © Edna Adan Ismail 2019

Edna Adan Ismail asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008305369

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This book is dedicated to my father Adan Ismail and to all those, like him, who devote their lives to caring for others with humanity, compassion and kindness.

This memoir is based on my recollection of events which may not be as others recall them. Where conversations cannot be remembered precisely, I have re-created them to the best of my ability. Any mistakes are my own.

The borders of Somaliland

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Map

Prologue

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Epilogue

Give

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Prologue

Mogadishu, Somalia, 1975

‘Come with me,’ I told the military director of Medina Hospital, seconds after bursting into his office unannounced. ‘I need you to shoot a baby.’

The colonel, sitting at his desk in uniform with gold braid and pips on his epaulettes, looked up at me aghast. ‘What?’

Spotting a weapon lying on his desk, I grabbed it and waved it at him. ‘Is this your pistol? I presume it’s loaded?’

‘Y-yes, Edna,’ he faltered, as his lieutenant drew his own gun and stepped forward protectively. ‘B-but…’

‘Then bring it with you, follow me back to the maternity ward, and shoot a premature baby,’ I repeated. ‘Isn’t that what you carry a gun for – to kill people?’

‘I don’t understand,’ he pleaded, palms turned to the ceiling.

Leaning across his desk and staring straight into his eyes, I told him, ‘Then let me explain. I haven’t slept for the last three days. I’ve been caring for a premature baby in the only incubator I possess, a generous gift from a patient. I’ve been feeding this tiny infant through a pipette. She’s a fighter and she’s trying to stay alive but the oxygen level on the incubator is running out. I sent a nurse to you twice this morning to ask for a replacement cylinder. Half an hour ago it was returned unfilled with the message that we’re using too much oxygen and putting your hospital in the red.’

I paused to watch him squirming in his seat. ‘When the oxygen runs out in less than an hour,’ I continued, ‘that little baby weighing less than a kilo will gasp painfully for her final breath as I watch helplessly with her mother. If you’re really planning to murder this baby then I must insist you come with me now and end it quickly. Then you can show the whole world how brave you really are.’

The colonel’s face froze. He didn’t move or speak. Seething, I grabbed the document he’d been reading, flipped it over and scribbled on the back the following promise: ‘If I don’t receive oxygen within the next fifteen minutes and – without question – every time that I ask for it thereafter, I, Edna Adan Ismail, herewith declare that I will take no more responsibility for the patients in my care at this hospital.’ I signed and dated my declaration and, before anyone could stop me, I picked up a bottle of Superglue, squirted it generously over the back of the piece of paper, and stuck it with force to the door on my way out.

Still fuming, I drove back as fast as I could in my little Fiat to the maternity ward that was at the far end of the vast hospital grounds. The facility had been built by the Italians when my husband, Mohamed Egal, was Prime Minister. I’d attended its grand opening and visited as First Lady. There were still photos of me hanging on the walls. Since 1972, I’d been a mere employee – the head of the maternity department until today, when I looked set to quit for the sake of a premature baby.

I didn’t much care about the consequences at that point. I was far too weary to worry. I’d empty my desk and walk away. After all, what more could the regime do to me? They’d already taken my home and my belongings; they’d broken up my marriage; they’d imprisoned, harassed and interrogated both my husband and me. They’d even shot my beloved cheetah. My only concern was for the three-day-old girl fighting for her life in an incubator.

I hurried to the ward where the baby’s mother was waiting anxiously for news. Her hands in supplication, she asked, ‘Will they send more oxygen?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t honestly know, but let’s prepare to take your baby to the Martini Hospital just in case. The doctors there won’t let your daughter die.’

Before we could unplug the machine and wrap the baby in a blanket with a portable oxygen mask, a breathless soldier appeared carrying the cylinder I’d requested. ‘The director sent me,’ he said, wiping the sweat from his brow as he put down the heavy canister.

‘About time,’ I said, pointing to where I needed it to be rolled so that I could connect it to the machine. ‘You can tell him from me that he must never, ever refuse me anything like this again. This oxygen isn’t for me, it is for a sick little baby and I never want to fight about this again.’

The soldier agreed to carry my message but then stood around sheepishly.

‘Yes?’

‘The director says to tell you one last thing,’ he added, looking ready to make a run for it. ‘He asks that next time you promise not to use Superglue.’

Turning away to hide my smile, I nodded and waved him away.

Erigavo, British Somaliland, 1950

It was twenty-five years earlier, in the Year of Red Dust, known as Siigacaase, that my journey to nursing really began. The April rains in our part of Africa had failed again and the desert winds had dried the land to a powdered rust that choked and stifled. We were well accustomed to the dry season or jiilal from December to March each year; it was a time of thirst and suffering. In this our worst drought in years, though, more than seventy per cent of the livestock had perished and our nomadic people were penniless and starving.

I would turn thirteen that autumn, but even at such a tender age I saw for myself what famine and malnutrition did to the human body. As the eldest daughter of Adan Ismail – the most senior Somali medical professional in the country and its so-called ‘Father of Healthcare’ – I accompanied him every day of that long, hot summer to the forty-bed hospital where he worked tirelessly to treat people and try to save lives. Hour after hour I’d follow him on his rounds, taking instructions to feed a weak child or making sure that an elderly patient had their saline drip renewed. I cut up old sheets for bandages, washed syringes, and sterilized instruments long blunted. Although the city of Erigavo was the capital of the Sanaag region and part of the British Somaliland Protectorate, it was – as Dad said – ‘too far from the cooking pot’ – which translated to limited supplies and little support from the authorities based in Hargeisa.

As the man in charge of health services for the entire region, my father often had to leave town and drive long distances alone in his ex-British Army Bedford ambulance to tend to destitute families in the outlying refugee camps. In his absence he had no choice but to entrust the running of his hospital to the largely illiterate auxiliaries, only a few of whom were qualified. Fearing for his patients, he’d ask me to oversee them until his return. I was still only a child but his hospitals had always been my playground and I knew my way around. Whenever he was away, he’d leave me little notes telling me what to do so that I wouldn’t forget. ‘Make sure they remove the catheter from that patient tomorrow, Shukri,’ he’d say using the name only he called me. Or he’d remind me, ‘That mother’s sutures need to come out on Monday… and don’t forget to change the dressings on the child with burns in Ward 3.’

Known to all as ‘Adan Dhakhtar’, my father had been trained as a medical assistant by the British in the Crown Colony of Aden before the Second World War, and then later in England. He’d hoped to become a doctor, but a medical degree was never open to someone like him because it would have taken too long and cost the British taxpayer too much money. Instead, he was sent back to his country to take on the full responsibilities of a doctor (on a fraction of the salary), in a series of postings around the country that generally only lasted two years before he was moved on to a new home and a new hospital and new patients to treat. In each new city he was expected to do all this seven days a week and run an entire hospital compound in a role designated as a Compounder.

Far more revered than any British doctor and a versatile all-rounder, Dad treated every patient he encountered– no matter how poor, dirty, smelly or sick – with the utmost dignity and respect. I remember being enlisted by him once to hold a bowl under the face of a hawk-faced old man with an infected abscess in his jaw. The patient was elderly and unclean and my disgust at the pus my father lanced must have shown in my expression because once the old man had been cleaned up and left the room, Dad closed the door and turned on me.

‘Don’t you ever show such an ugly face to any of my patients again!’ he said, his eyes flashing. ‘If you cannot show respect, then stay away from this hospital.’ His reprimand marked me for life and was my first important lesson in nursing care. It was then that I fell in love with medicine. The dirty old nomad was more precious to Adan Doctor than me, his first-born. To this day, if I see something smelly or disgusting or oozing I make a point of diving right in with both hands. It’s my way of training my students that a nurse has to do whatever it takes and treat everyone with the same respect and care.

My father worked seven days a week, 365 days a year, and he loved every minute. Adan Ismail was my hero. He still is. I will never be as compassionate as he was. I will never be as kind and generous as he was with his time, his emotions, and his affection. My father was a very good man. Every day he was hindered by a chronic lack of funds and supplies, many of which he ended up paying for himself. And yet every day he still put on his uniform and went to work with a smile on his face. My mother used to call him ‘the man with holes in the palms of his hands’ because money slipped through them, usually spent on his hospital or his patients. Every day he’d say, ‘If only I had more medicines’, or ‘I wish I had a better sterilizer.’ He’d have happily bought these things himself but they weren’t easily available in our forgotten part of Africa, so he was forever asking me to wash a pair of scissors or some other instrument because he didn’t have enough or the quality was too poor. ‘Not those ones,’ he’d say, gently. ‘They don’t cut well. Bring me the others.’ I wished I could have bought him a whole tray of sharp scissors, a box of gleaming new scalpels, or a pair of forceps that actually worked.

Watching him deal with these challenges every day planted a fertile seed inside my head: a quite fantastical thought for any little girl, but especially one growing up in a developing country. I can’t recall the exact moment when I decided that I would one day build him a hospital, but I do know I had a very clear idea of how it would be run. My only image of the outside was that it was large and white, but I never sketched out any drawings or plans. My dream had much more to do with it being the right kind of place – a perfect new medical centre that would do my father proud. In my head it had all the equipment, instruments and trained staff that he’d need. It was a place where he would be delighted to work. And where I would happily work alongside him.

Back in 1950, my fantasy was little more than a child’s wish to please her beloved father. It was far from realistic in a Muslim country that didn’t even allow schooling for girls. Education for girls was unavailable in case we dared form any opinions or – worse – voice them. Anyway, there was little point when every Somali woman was expected to be a dutiful wife and mother, bound by archaic social traditions as well as often harmful traditional practices. Dad never saw me that way. I was his adored Shukri, his first child and one of three to survive out of five. He called me the ‘apple of his eye’ and encouraged me to read English from an early age. It was he who arranged for me to go to school in French Somaliland, determined that I should have the kind of opportunities he’d been given as a child. Like me, he dreamed that I would one day train as a nurse and help him offer the kind of healthcare he longed to provide for the people he loved. My father wanted me to be the best I could possibly be.

If I were to fulfil that wish then what better gift could I give him than his own hospital? How I would achieve it, I didn’t know. What money I’d use to make it happen, I had no idea. Neither of us knew that political turmoil and civil war would soon devastate our country. We could never have foreseen the suffering. At twelve years old, I only knew that one day my father’s name would be placed for all to see on a large white hospital built in his honour. I didn’t even tell him of my secret plan. Yet the idea sprang into my young head so clear and bright and certain. It lodged in my subconscious like tumbleweed caught on a thorn, and that’s where it remained for more than fifty years until I finally had the time and resources to do something about it. This is the story of how I made that happen, against insurmountable odds.

CHAPTER ONE

Hargeisa, British Somaliland Protectorate, 1937

Seven days after I was born at 9 p.m. on 8 September 1937 following a long and difficult delivery, my father gave me the name ‘Shukri’, which means thanks. This was because I was considered something of a miracle after two years of my mother’s infertility.

The only reason I know the date of my birth is because I was born in a hospital in Hargeisa, unlike the majority of Somalilanders. We didn’t mark birthdays in the same way as people in the West because we didn’t then have a written language, very few people could read, and no one knew what a calendar was. Many my age don’t know when they were born and say simply ‘the time of bad floods’, or ‘the month before the long drought’. Age was counted by the rainy seasons, of which there are two, so a child who has seen two rains would be described as two years old when they were really only one.

I was a big, healthy baby although I carry two scars on my head from the forceps used by the English obstetrician who delivered me. Perhaps the miracle of my survival in a country where infant mortality is still the fourth highest in the world is the reason I became such a headstrong child and a stubborn adult – to which many will attest. With ninety-four in every 1,000 babies dying at birth in Somaliland (compared with four or five in the UK and the US), it is customary for newborns never to be named until they are a week old for fear their parents become too emotionally attached.

At my naming ceremony on 15 September, my mother Marian, a Somali who’d been raised a Catholic, called me Edna in honour of a Greek girlfriend who insisted that if I was a girl then I should take her name. It was a moniker Dad never once used. My arrival ended what my mother feared was a curse against her ever since she’d married my father two years earlier. Many of those who liked my father disapproved of his marriage and believed that he should have chosen a Muslim wife. This view only gained currency when Mum hadn’t yet borne him a child, as, in our culture, it is normal for a wife to conceive straight away. If she doesn’t it is usually blamed on ‘the evil eye’ or some other bad spirit and Allah is prayed to, so when Mum finally became pregnant with me the evil eye was considered to have blinked.

My father was over six feet tall, charismatic, generous, fluent in several languages and the best doctor and communicator I’ve ever met. To him, teaching people about healthcare was not only a duty but also a pleasure, and he threw his heart and soul into educating anyone he came across. One of his favourite expressions was, ‘If you cannot do it with your heart then your hands will never learn to do it.’

His own father, Ismail Guleed, was something of a legend in Somaliland. A successful, silver-haired merchant from the noble Arap Isaaq clan of nomadic warriors and camel herders, he was known as Ismail Gaado Cadde, which means White Chest. This referred to the white hair on his chest that spilled over his tunic.

Wealth in my country is measured in camels – a female and her calf can cost £1,000 in today’s terms – and my grandfather exported large herds of them. Independently wealthy, he hired traditional dhow boats to carry goods destined for Ethiopia and service his lucrative contract to supply livestock, firewood and ghee to the British garrison in the Aden Colony, sixty kilometres across the Gulf of Aden – the gateway to the Red Sea.

Grandfather Ismail naturally expected that his two sons – my uncle Mohamed and my father Adan, born in 1906 – would help run his business. He and his wife Baada had moved to Aden once their sons were of school age specifically so that they could be educated at St Joseph’s, a Roman Catholic Mission School, the only place in the region where they could learn to read and write in English. Little did he know that my uncle Mohamed would jump on a ship bound for the Indian Ocean aged sixteen to become a merchant seaman for the rest of his life, while my father would choose medicine. Sadly, Grandfather died in his early sixties, so I never knew him. After his death my father tried to keep the family business going but it became too difficult to manage on top of his medical duties.

I sorely wished I’d asked Dad what made him decide to study medicine because it was truly a vocation for him and something he dedicated his whole life to. Perhaps there was an incident that inspired him. As far as I’m aware, he was never ill, but he did have multiple scars on his legs from playing football and hockey so perhaps that was how he encountered the miracle of medicine.

***

My earliest childhood memories are of my grandmothers’ faces, fleeting images of their beaming smiles. These women were perhaps the most influential in my immediate family, although the men in our vast extended clan traditionally exerted the most control. As another Somali girl child my infancy was rather uneventful, apart from the day I disappeared as a baby. Mum left me sleeping on her bed with cushions stacked all around me to prevent me from falling off, then went to the outdoor kitchen at the back of our house to prepare lunch – probably sabaya flatbreads with some curry or beans and rice. Our single-storey detached house had two bedrooms as well as a living/dining room. There was no flushing toilet, just a shaded pit latrine in the yard, and my mother, the cook and a maid heated water over firewood laid on stones and cooked meat over a charcoal burner made from oil drums.

When my mother came to check on me a little while later, she found me missing and the pillows undisturbed. Perplexed, she thought my father must have come home from the hospital in his break and carried me outside. When she couldn’t find us in the yard, she believed he’d taken me back to his hospital without telling her. In a country with regular epidemics of smallpox and other diseases she, like most Somali women of her generation, had a terrible fear of taking a healthy child to a place full of sick people so – furious – she hurried to the hospital only to find Dad alone. He was just as surprised to see her because she never visited unless for a medical emergency. Mum immediately started wailing that I had been stolen. They hurried back home and they, the servants, our neighbours, and eventually the police looked frantically for me and traces of my ‘kidnapper’. Amidst the hubbub, no one thought to look under our dining room table to which I had crawled beneath the tablecloth to resume my nap. Once I was discovered my mother never lived down the embarrassment and Dad would often tell me how lucky I was that I wasn’t chained to the bed after that.

I was only two when the Italians declared war on the Allies in June 1940 and in August invaded British Somaliland and Ethiopia. I have no recollection of the events of the Second World War or the impact upon our family. Nor do I recall the events just before that when my mother’s next child, my unnamed infant sister, died a few minutes after birth following another harrowing forceps delivery. Mum was frail and still recovering when the British declared that all the wives and children of civil servants should evacuate to a small fishing village on the Gulf of Aden. From there we’d board a British naval destroyer for Aden.

My grandmother Clara, my mother’s mother, supervised everything. As they were only allowed to take minimal luggage she wrapped cash, jewellery and the family’s most precious things in a bag she tied around her waist. In the fishing village we were placed in different huts to await the signal that the warship had arrived in the dead of night. My mother, grandmother and I were shivering together in one such hut with several others when a band of thieves burst in brandishing knives and demanding valuables. Clara quickly blew out the kerosene lamp, which plunged the hut into darkness. The women started screaming, which alerted the local villagers who arrived just as the robbers fled. Many claimed afterwards that if it wasn’t for my grandmother they’d have lost everything they possessed.

Once in Aden, Clara once again took charge, selling possessions to rent us a comfortable property. She and my mother had no idea what had happened to my father and grandfather, who’d remained behind to serve the Allies. It was months before we learned that they’d been captured and imprisoned by the Italians and packed into cells in a makeshift prisoner-of-war camp in Hargeisa. Dad spoke of his experiences later and told me that they were treated badly, with little food or water and no toilet facilities. Their cell was hot and crowded with nowhere to sit. ‘If you ever have to go to prison be sure to take a hat with you, Shukri,’ he advised. ‘To urinate we’d stand on each other’s backs and pee out of the window, but the only receptacle we had for bigger business was a fellow prisoner’s hat!’

Hargeisa had fallen to the Italians on 5 August 1940, despite repeated RAF sorties that dropped more than sixty tons of bombs on Somaliland. The rest of the country fell two weeks later with the loss of thirty-eight Allied soldiers and more than two hundred wounded. It was another few months before the operation to recapture it began in early 1941. Hargeisa was liberated – along with my father and grandfather – and the famous Somaliland Camel Corps (a British Army unit based in Somaliland) resumed its military operations. The Italians were pushed out and we were free to go home.

Once back home, my parents discovered that although our government-owned house was still standing, it had been ransacked and the looters had done more damage than the shelling. Hargeisa Hospital, which was erected by the British military during the Second World War and initially comprised mostly tents, had been partly damaged too, so Dad lived in quarters until my mother could get things straight at home. Many friends and relatives had been killed or injured and the only event that brightened our lives was the birth of my brother in late 1941. Farah was born prematurely and was more than four years my junior, but he became my joy as well as the pride of our family.

***

Having survived the Italians my first proper memories are of Berbera, a major coastal town we lived in until I was six years old and where the smell of the ocean pervaded everything. A key character in those recollections was a man known as ‘Mohammed Hindi’ or Mohammed the Indian who ran a dukaan or general store on a corner not far from where we lived. In it, he sold every kind of foodstuff.

As Somali women didn’t often leave their homes, Dad did most of the shopping and would often take me with him as a treat. Mohammed would see me and, with a huge grin, cry, ‘Ah! A biscuit for the doctor’s daughter!’ before handing me a custard cream from a counter cluttered with sweets. Nothing has ever tasted as nice before or since even though I have had them in every country I have visited; I am still looking for the divine taste of those old-fashioned British custard creams. My second big treat in that corner shop was to be allowed to stir the ice cream while Dad shopped for the weekly provisions of sugar, rice, flour, corned beef, tins of beans, butter and jam. Mohammed made the ice cream in a huge bowl packed in blocks of ice, adding eggs, milk, sugar and cardamom that had to be churned the old-fashioned way. If I was lucky, he’d also let me lick the bowl.

I remember that wooden shack of a store so clearly with its high tin roof and dry goods piled to the rafters. It was in the area of town where the Europeans lived, so the shopkeeper cleverly catered to their needs with foreign goods. To me, it seemed as if he sold every item in the world stacked haphazardly, and yet he knew exactly where everything was. I loved that kind, smiling Indian and I loved being spoiled, much to the consternation of my mother Marian. She was, I think, disappointed in me her whole life. From the day I crawled under the dining room table to my later more controversial years I was trouble in her eyes. From the outset I was a rebellious child, devoted to my father, and favoured by both grandmothers. My hooyo (mother), expected me to stay inside and do household chores such as peel potatoes, prepare onions or help wash the sheets. I hated such tasks and would much rather play barefoot outside with my pets, seek out wild animals, climb a tree, or wrestle with the neighbourhood boys. The only job I did enjoy was to accompany the house help down to the well by the river to refill the empty water barrels, something he did at least twice a day. Whenever he had to stop and rest in the heat as he rolled the filled barrel back up the hill to replenish our tank, I had to wedge a large stone under it to stop it rolling away. This felt to me like important, valuable work.

I once found a snake in our household water tank and spent ages trying to get it out with a stick, but was roundly scolded by my mother who was terrified I’d be bitten. Mum kept insisting that I needed to be trained as to how a Somali girl should be correctly brought up. She bought me pretty dresses that were quickly ruined and did her best to tame my Afro hair, tugging at it with a wide-toothed comb until I screamed, or trying to twist it into plaits which quickly came undone. Whenever I was made to stay inside with her, I showed such little aptitude for cooking or sewing that she’d soon release me from my chore. Sulking I’d sit on the verandah peering out and measuring the time of day by the eedhaan, the traditional call to prayer at dawn, midday, mid-afternoon, dusk and at night. If I was really bored I’d flick through my parents’ precious English books wondering what the strange symbols meant, only to be accused of ruining them with dirty fingers when I had no business looking at them, being an ‘illiterate girl’.

I loved it best when Dad came home from work at the end of the day and sat to eat with us by the light of a kerosene lamp as giant moths flapped noisily at the mosquito screens. He’d instruct that the fire be lit on cold nights and burned frankincense to fill the house with the heavenly scent that is thought to be spiritually healing and chase away evil spirits. Sadly, Dad worked so hard that he never seemed to have time to linger, running back to the hospital at the slightest emergency after a hug and a kiss. He was an unusually affectionate man in a society where men are not supposed to show affection in case it’s seen as a sign of weakness. My father loved my mother very much and put up with a lot from her. The youngest and most spoilt of two daughters raised in Aden by Somali parents who were from a small community of Catholics, she was more English than the Queen in many ways and always envisaged a better life. Her sister Cecilia had married a successful businessman from French Somaliland and the couple had moved there to raise a family. By marrying a Muslim and remaining in Somaliland, my mother had tied herself to a life that dictated she should have little of any importance to occupy her days. I know she loved my father very much and it can’t have been easy married to a workaholic who was moved from town to town every two years, but she was often depressed and never stopped complaining.

From an early age I began to appreciate that boys and girls were different, and by that I mean that girls only ever played in small groups in their own homes or back yards up until the age of about eight and the older ones were rarely spotted outside. Instead they were expected to remain inside learning how to be a good wife. That wasn’t for me, so I had no choice but to play on my own until my father erected a long rope swing in our yard, the only one in the neighbourhood, to which local boys would flock. I loved running around with these fellow children of government officials. One of these was Hassan Abdillahi Walanwal Kayd, who was two or three years older than me, taller and more handsome than the others, and one of those I was determined to keep up with. Little did I know then how our paths would collide for much of my life.

Unfortunately, most of them were embarrassed to be seen playing with a girl and chased me away whenever I tried to join in. The only exception was when it came to foraging. Near our house was a little garden that surrounded the grave of some prominent person, and it had a mighty gob tree. Gob means noble and these noble trees not only look majestic but give us shade, food, shelter and wood. The yellow berries are like sweet little cherries so the boys and I would clamber over the wall and throw stones to bring down those delicious fruits.

Neighbours and relatives would often complain to my mother that they had seen me running barefoot in the sandy streets again. ‘How can you allow that, Marian?’ they’d berate. ‘It’s not proper. A girl isn’t brought up to run wild outside and play with boys.’ But my mother couldn’t control me and my father didn’t intend to. Mum would simply chastise me constantly with, ‘Where have you been, Edna?’ Or, ‘Where are you going now? Playing with the boys again, I suppose? Ugh. Well, at least put on some shoes!’ I hated wearing shoes and one of my arguments against them was that spiders and scorpions frequently crawled inside so I was safer without. This meant that my feet were permanently dirty and grazed (along with my knees) and a daily pastime was asking my mother or a servant to pull acacia thorns from my soles.

The neighbourhood girls who’d heard their mothers complain about my inappropriate behaviour soon followed suit, insultingly calling me a ‘wiilo’, which means tomboy. My response was to fight them, which only got me into more trouble. If I couldn’t play with the boys I’d go off exploring and looking for animals in the thorn bushes, only returning to the house to eat some papaya, help myself to some tiin or prickly pear from the yard, or to water from the tank. Nature had always fascinated me and I knew every little lizard, squirrel, frog, rabbit or beetle that lived around our property. On hot languid days in the dry season I liked to sit in the shade of a tree, inhaling the scent of jasmine and listening to the chatter of the yaryaro birds. When it was cooler I’d chase the mini tornados known as sand devils that danced down our street. I was repeatedly warned against the hyenas that came at night looking for food, and wasn’t supposed to stray too far.

My parents never once gave me any pocket money to spend but they did buy me toys, usually blonde blue-eyed dolls, which were fun for a short while. I also had a wooden camel on wheels made by a kind British carpenter. I soon grew tired of these playthings, though, because they didn’t move or interact like my cat or my pet goat Orggi or the wild creatures out in the yard. Something that amused me for hours was making drinking glasses from empty bottles, and little lanterns out of old Player’s cigarettes tins, with a kerosene-soaked wick stuffed inside and a hole in the lid for it to poke through. There were severe shortages after the war and many household items were no longer available in the market, so we learned to improvise. The lanterns were easy to make but their wicks smelled even more noxious than the usual paraffin lamps and were a fire hazard, plus they stained Mum’s white walls with black smoke. I much preferred these kinds of activities to peeling onions or potatoes or beating the dust from the rugs.

From the earliest age I longed for a sibling and, although I was thrilled when my brother Farah arrived, I was crushed when I realized that he was too little to play with. Then my mother fell pregnant again. It is only with the wisdom of hindsight that I have come to understand why she chose to have this child at home with a traditional ‘midwife’ rather than in the safety of a hospital run by her husband. In spite of her cosmopolitan upbringing, in the nine years since her marriage to my father she’d remodelled herself into the archetypal Somali housewife who kept close counsel with her female friends and took too great a heed of their scaremongering. ‘Don’t tell your husband when you go into labour,’ they warned her. ‘He will only take you to hospital and put things inside you. The British doctors already killed one daughter and put a scar on Edna’s face. Call us instead. We’ll bring the midwife and she’ll help you deliver naturally at home.’

The morning that Mum’s waters broke she didn’t say a word to Dad as he completed his customary 6 a.m. ablutions, shaved, and slicked back his hair. As the head of the household, he always had priority in the bathroom. While experiencing labour pains, she cooked his laxoox pancakes made from sorghum flour for breakfast, which we smothered in ghee, honey or jam. She waited for him to dress in his regulation white shorts, white shirt, white socks and polished shoes, knowing that he would then walk to work to arrive punctually at 7 a.m. His hospital was really only a series of Army tents around two brick buildings, one of which was the operating theatre, but whenever I could, I’d walk with Dad all the way down the sandy street to the hospital gate, immensely proud of the meticulously dressed man holding my hand who commanded so much respect in our community. The only thing that would tempt me to break from his side was if I saw the local boys running somewhere, then I’d kiss him goodbye and hurtle off in their direction while he laughed.

Back at home that morning, my mother’s labour pains intensified so she summoned her girlfriends as instructed and they called an umulisso, an elderly woman known as a ‘traditional midwife’ who had no nursing training or qualifications. The servants kept me out of the way as I listened in horror to my mother wailing and grunting for hours, wondering what on earth they were doing to her. The ‘midwife’ finally delivered Mum of a healthy baby boy, but then accidentally dropped the slippery baby, killing him instantly when he landed on his head. I was six years old and will never forget my mother’s screams. The women tried to calm her as the midwife wrapped her otherwise perfect baby boy in the tiny blanket that would become his shroud.

‘He’s so beautiful!’ I declared, when I crept into the room and stood over the tiny body in the crib, not much bigger than my doll. ‘Can I keep him?’ Someone pushed me out of the room and told a servant to run to the hospital and tell my father the news. The message Dad received was, ‘Come home and bury your son.’ In the Muslim faith, a body is buried within twenty-four hours of death. As my father knew nothing of the birth he immediately assumed that Farah had been killed in an accident and half-expected to find his mangled body. Running home, a thousand possibilities raced through his mind, he was overwhelmed with relief when – in a house of weeping women – he discovered Farah alive and well, but then shattered to learn that the infant son he didn’t know he had was dead because of the carelessness of an untrained woman.

At such a tender age, I was appalled at the idea of my baby brother being taken away to be buried in the ground, and created quite a scene at the house. ‘Why do you have to take him? Don’t take him away! I want to keep him!’ I cried, until my grandmother Baada pulled me away and the burial proceeded as planned.

My paternal grandmother Baada was kindness itself and I learned so much from her. She was an eloquent woman who taught me my first words and the names of plants, as well as songs, rhymes and stories. She lived close by all her life and would come to our house every morning, bringing me treats she hid from my mother. One look at her face and I’d know she was carrying something – most likely sweets made out of caramel with lumps of sugar and nuts. She also taught me how to be curious, offering me a choice between something I knew or something I didn’t. I’d almost always opt for the thing I didn’t know. I still do.

My disapproving mother frequently guessed that she had given me something and would protest, but I didn’t care. I loved my grandmother. We had a conspiracy together behind my mother’s back. It was our little secret. What I didn’t yet know was how many other secrets there were in female Somali society, the darkest of which was being kept from me.

CHAPTER TWO

Borama, British Somaliland, 1945

Some of my happiest childhood memories are of drinking fresh cow’s milk during our long summer holidays in Borama, near the border with Ethiopia, where my grandmother Clara and grandfather Yusuf lived. I remember going with the maid to collect the frothy warm nectar from Granddad’s cows and helping myself to as much as I liked. I’m sure my father would have disapproved. He always insisted – as I do now – that any milk intended for his children had to be boiled first to avoid contamination. To this day, though, and even after all my years of training as a nurse and public health practitioner, I occasionally sneak a drink of fresh, unboiled camel milk.

The reason we spent so much time in Borama in the northwestern Awdal province was because the British had posted my grandfather there after the Italians left Somaliland. Having trained as a signalman and radio operator Yusuf had served the British in both wars and was awarded a military medal for ‘meritorious service to the Crown’. Then he became Somaliland’s Postmaster-General. Although our country was liberated, the war was still raging elsewhere and his expertise in logistics was needed to facilitate the East Africa Campaign. He soon fell in love with the lush green meadows of Borama fringed by purple mountains and decided to buy a farm and some milking cows, summoning Clara to join him.

My mother would leave us with our grandparents for two months each summer so that she could visit friends in Aden, or her sister Cecilia in Djibouti City in French Somaliland. She may have become a good Muslim and embraced all the traditions and rituals, but she sorely missed the country and lifestyle of her childhood in Aden. Sending us away each year must have been a welcome respite from the nuisance I’d become. Not that I was any less of a problem for my grandparents. Borama was a holiday town and kids from all over Somaliland and from Djibouti City descended for the summer months. I sometimes hung out with girls, but it was still the company of boys that I liked the best. When one time the local gang wouldn’t let me play football with them I retaliated by snatching their ball made of bound rags and ran home with it. I locked myself in the toilet and threatened to throw their ball into the pit unless they agreed to let me join in. My mother was still there then and she had to intervene. After much pleading, she got me to open the door and give back the ball. From then on, one of the boys would grab it whenever I approached their game, afraid that I’d snatch it once more.

One day these boys came to me with an unusual gesture of friendship and asked if I wanted to join them. This was too good to be true and I jumped at the chance. A few minutes after our game of football started on a patch of waste ground, they told me they were going to pick some watermelons from a nearby field and that if I helped carry some home, we’d return to our game sooner. Naturally I agreed, hoping that I’d finally been accepted. I innocently followed them through a gap in a fence and offered to carry the largest of the watermelons in my upturned skirt, as it was too heavy to carry in my arms. As I was tottering back with a fruit that weighed almost as much as I did, the farmer suddenly grabbed me by the scruff of my dress.

The boys melted away, leaving me to face the irate landowner who marched me back to my grandparents’ house carrying the melon as proof of my guilt. I tried to explain and swore that I’d never stolen anything, but my grandparents almost died of shame. When he complained that kids trespassed almost daily to help themselves to his crop, they had no option but to compensate him for the loss of God knows how many melons he claimed I’d taken. The disappointment on my grandparents’ faces was worse than any punishment they could have meted out. I had to listen to them telling me over and over that they couldn’t understand why I’d steal when everything I could want to eat was available on our own table.

In spite of this salutary lesson, as the oldest in our group of neighbourhood friends and the big sister to Farah, I was the Pied Piper for all our adventures. These included the time a group of us unknowingly picked poisonous berries and all returned home with swollen lips. I took the blame for not supervising the others carefully enough, and from then on we weren’t allowed to eat anything we picked until we’d brought it home for adults to inspect and either confirm or confiscate.

Then there was the day that nine of us wandered into the bush and completely lost our way. Boy, I never lived that one down. Even though we’d eaten a full breakfast, we always had room for delicious wild berries. As we picked more and more, we wandered near the path of the donkey caravans on their way to collect water at the wells on the outskirts of town. The herders instantly identified us as town kids because of the way we dressed, and were surprised to find us still in the forest several hours later when they returned.

Seeing that some of the younger ones were crying, and others had slumped down through exhaustion and thirst, they stopped to ask what we were doing there so late in the afternoon. ‘Who brought you here? Why aren’t you at home?’ they asked, clearly concerned. I told them that although I knew where the sun rose and set, I couldn’t tell in the woods and none of us had a clue how to get back to town. With night falling and knowing that hyenas or lions could start to pick us off, the donkey herders scooped up the youngest children and sat them on their beasts while telling we older ones to walk fast, stick together, and follow their caravan. We trudged along the dusty track used by generations of nomads, past colonies of noisy baboons, and finally reached town just before sunset. We found the whole district in a state of panic, and distressed parents who’d been searching everywhere for us berated me. ‘How could you be so stupid to stray so far?’ As the eldest child, I was given the harshest scolding but the worst punishment was that our neighbours warned their kids never to follow ‘crazy Edna’ again if I ever tried to lead them beyond the trees they then set as landmarks at the edge of the forest.

Despite these occasional mishaps, Farah and I loved it in Borama far from the heat of a city, especially when we were able to have as much fresh milk as we liked. My grandmother made the most delicious butter, boiling the milk then skimming off the cream and churning it just like Mohammed the Indian had done with ice cream. When she wasn’t cooking or caring for us, Clara worked in the local hospital, interpreting for the English-speaking medical staff, so I would happily tag along with her in her long Somali dress, eager to hear their cries when we approached of ‘Ayeeyo timid!’ (Grandma is here!). I watched as she’d sit with the patients before translating for the staff. It was painstaking work but she was caring, kind and gentle. How could I not go into medicine with such remarkable role models?

Her only sadness, I think, was the way my grandfather treated her. She was unusually meek in his presence and still he picked on her. He’d complain, ‘Why is lunch cold?’ or ‘Where’s my coat, woman?’ My mother took after him far more than she did Clara. If ever I had a problem, I’d go to my grandmother, who was my ally and my friend.

***

Coming from a household of two different religions was an interesting experience for a child. My father was very religious and at every call to prayer he would stop what he was doing to kneel on his mat. He also attended the mosque every Friday and, as a family, we marked Ramadan and Eid.

My grandparents – and occasionally my mother – would go to mass, sing hymns and receive a blessing from the priest, and we also celebrated Christmas and Easter, showing respect for all. Then for the Islamic feasts the cook Ali would slaughter a sheep and people would come to our house to help break the fast. My father was always extremely generous to those who had less than us and usually invited six or seven poor families to take away packages of meat, dates and bread – food many of them came to rely on.

One day when we were expecting guests for lunch, I came upon Ali about to carve up my pet goat Orggi, which he’d already caught and slaughtered. When I became hysterical and tried to stop him, he told me that my kid was to be cooked for the feast. I was eventually pulled away from the scene kicking and screaming, but continued to howl until Dad came home. ‘They killed my friend and are going to feed him to the guests!’ I wailed. Goodness alone knows what he thought. In spite of his attempts to comfort me, I couldn’t understand how Dad could allow them do such a thing to my playmate. I never got over it.

Even though my father worked every day and stayed late, people who needed him out of hours would still seek him out, so there was often someone knocking at the door with a problem. No matter if he was hungry and about to put a spoon to his mouth, if someone called he’d put it down, rise from his chair and tend to their needs. My mother hated that. She often claimed that the hospital was his first wife and that he spent more time there than with us. ‘Where are you running off to again? Why even bother to come home?’ she’d say, or ask, ‘Why do you have to do this? Why can’t someone else do it?’ She considered the patients who called at our house trespassers on our privacy and complained bitterly that this was our home, not a hospital. ‘Besides, what if one of them brings disease into our house?’ she’d cry, exasperated.

Dad never argued with her and tried to explain that people couldn’t help it if they got sick at all times of the day and night. He was passionate about his work and he loved to be needed. With an open face and an open heart, smiling and happy, he’d never turn someone away or tell them, ‘I’m too busy, come and see me tomorrow.’ Instead, he’d sit and listen to their problems. My father was just as generous with his money. There were so many people on his list of charitable donations each month that he must surely have lost count. People I thought were relatives often turned out to be the orphans of a school friend or the wife of a football teammate who was on hard times whose bills were being paid for by Dad.

Everyone assumed he was extremely wealthy, which only led to more name calling by some of the kids in my neighborhood, who’d say, ‘Why do you want to play with us, rich girl?’ I remember running home to ask my mother what their insult meant. She explained that we weren’t as poor as many others, adding somewhat bitterly that we’d be even richer if my father wasn’t quite so generous with our money.

In the same magnanimous way, Dad decided to help improve the education of some local boys and our younger male cousins by hiring a teacher to come to our house every afternoon, except Friday. These boys already attended the local school – forbidden for girls – but the teaching there was limited and Dad hoped to expand their horizons. He paid for a blackboard, chalk and textbooks, and set everything up on our verandah where the pupils squatted on the cement floor with their books on their knees. Many of them were the boys I tagged along with, including Hassan Kayd, so whenever they stopped kicking an old tennis ball around in the dust to hurry to lessons at my house, I would follow. I think now that this was my father’s intention all along.

It was for me to choose whether to carry on playing outside or be curious enough to see what the boys were doing. He knew I had an enquiring mind and hoped that this would pull me in the right direction. So, from the age of six or seven I’d sit on the edge of the verandah listening in or writing out my alphabet as I learned English, how to do calculations, and discovered a bit more about the world. The teacher never told me that I couldn’t be there, but if I ever tried to answer a question he’d shush me and tell me not to interfere. I knew my place; I was allowed to stay because it was my father’s house but I couldn’t take part – even if I knew more of the answers than the rest. My mother didn’t mind me joining in either because it meant a couple of hours’ peace, and stopped me from running wild in the streets.

Those lessons were such a revelation to me. In a colonial region where people spoke and wrote in either Arabic, English, Italian or French, we Somalis didn’t yet have a written language of our own, just an oral one. It seemed like magic then that I could put letters from the English alphabet together to make a word, and then words together to make a sentence. Newly inspired, I’d pick up a book from my father’s bookcase and flick through the pages looking for a ‘T’ or an ‘S’ and then – oh my gosh – there they were! Every day brought a new discovery and I remember the moment I spelled out the word for cat, and was so excited because I had one of those. Reading opened up the miracle of forming something meaningful in my head. I’d always spoken a little English, but now I was able to decipher the mysteries of the alphabet and the secret language between my parents.

‘Could you leave me some M-O-N-E-Y before you go?’ Mum would ask my dad, and I could finally understand what she was asking for. Enthused with my newfound knowledge, I began to read my mother’s Illustrated London News, Woman, and Woman’s Own magazines, which had to be read with the greatest care and passed on unspoiled to the next woman whose name was listed on the cover. I loved those 1940s magazines with their Western fashions, hats and colourful clothes. The lives they depicted seemed like a million miles away from my own in hot, dusty Somaliland.

I wanted to read everything I could after that. I still do. My brain was hungry for knowledge and information. I needed to feed that hunger and when my parents saw me staring intently at the pages of a book, they asked what I was doing. ‘Reading, of course,’ I replied.

‘Let’s see what you’re reading,’ my father said, thinking I was just pretending but, to his amazement, he found that I was reading and learning to pronounce new words. There then began an ongoing family discussion about what to do with a girl who was teaching herself to read in a country where there were no schools for girls. Both my parents had been educated and recognized my yearning. After much debate, they decided to send me to a mission school. I think my mother hoped that the discipline would be the making of me, while my father hoped it would open the door to higher education and eventually nursing. Little did he know.

***

Djibouti City was four hundred kilometres away from Hargeisa, but it was the natural choice for my schooling rather than Aden because I could lodge with my Aunt Cecilia. Her businessman husband had been killed several years earlier in a road accident while she was pregnant with her fourth child. When the shipment he was transporting to Ethiopia was looted after the accident, she lost the income from it too. Widowed and penniless, she never remarried and single-handedly raised all her children – Rita, Sonny, Tony and Madeleine who were older than me but familiar from family visits.

The first I knew that I was going to be educated was when my parents asked me if I’d like to go home with my cousins after their summer holiday that year. It must have been 1945, and although the war was still going on elsewhere, our corner of Africa was safe.

‘Really?’ I asked, astonished.

‘Yes, really,’ my father confirmed. ‘Well, you want to go to school, don’t you?’

This momentous event happened in my eighth year, which proved to be the most significant of my entire life. Going to a proper school for the first time felt like such a milestone. I had never been out of Somaliland, so from the moment I left my eyes were like saucers at the wonder of it all. To make ends meet, Aunt Cecilia worked as a dressmaker and a teacher in a domestic science school. For extra income, she took me in and, later, my brother Farah. She also homed my cousins Gracie and her brother Maurice – the motherless children of an uncle whose wife had died in childbirth – all of us sharing one large apartment that was permanently filled with music, chatter and noise. My aunt was a most resourceful woman and another powerful role model. She had the energy of twenty horses and her determination helped shape me.

Cecilia ran our lives like a military operation. Speaking only English and French so that I’d learn my two new languages quickly, she paired me up with the older kids to do chores such as polish our shoes and make our own beds. We sat at the big table in the living room to do our homework after school, and in the evenings we learned how to crochet or knit by the light of Tilley lamps. If we wanted her to make us something to wear then we had to hem it ourselves, sew the buttons on, and fold it neatly for her – or there would be no garment. My mother never taught me things like that, so I didn’t take to everything at first but soon got the hang of it.

My first day at the École de la Nativité run by Franciscan nuns in white habits was overwhelming chiefly because it was full of white kids, and most of them boys. I had only ever seen one or two white people before – men who sometimes worked with Dad – but I don’t think I’d ever seen white children. There must have been over a hundred pupils in the school – French, Somali, American, Italian, Greek, Jewish, Armenian, Ethiopian, and a few Arabs from Yemen. I was the only girl from Somaliland. Boys and girls sat together in the same class, a fact that further inflamed my relatives back in Somaliland who considered this lack of segregation scandalous. My mother Marian, already the target of their criticism, could only sigh and blame my father once more. How she must have longed for a ‘normal’ daughter who’d stay home, learn to cook, marry young and produce a healthy brood of grandchildren.

There was so much to take in at the École and my brain was like a sponge, soaking up everything. My cousin Madeleine, who was four years my senior (and my childhood heroine), attended the same school, so I didn’t have to face it alone. The hardest thing to deal with was that overnight my world suddenly became French and I learned about Napoleon, Jeanne d’Arc, the three Louis’ and Charlemagne in a language that was foreign to me. I studied the geography of France, recited the prayers of the French catechism and learned more about Islam. I was taught respect for all beings, all faiths. After a faltering start, I did well enough to jump up a year in my class and then again.

Life in Djibouti City opened up a whole new world to me. I couldn’t wait to start my day and learn something new; I wanted to experience all that life had to offer. I was forever running around with loads of energy and few, if any, inhibitions. The nuns, each known as Sister (or in French Soeur) were all very different. I met one of them, Marie Thérèse who taught us maths and became Mother Superior, again in 1991 and asked if she remembered me. She grimaced, ‘Of course, Edna – you were toujours turbulente!’

Little did she know just how turbulent I would become.

CHAPTER THREE

Hargeisa, British Somaliland, 1946

The summer of 1946 marked my first visit home after living in French Somaliland for one year. I was still only eight years old and little did I know that this would be the year that my life changed for ever. It felt good to be home as I had missed my grandmothers and my father especially. I couldn’t wait to tell Dad my news and share all that I’d learned in school.

The strangest thing about being back was that I had a new perspective. My time in a French-run co-educational and largely secular environment had shown me that girls could participate in life as fully as boys, so to return to a place that put so many constraints on my gender felt all the more difficult to accept. None of the local girls I’d left behind were ever seen outside their homes and only the boys seemed to have any freedom – or fun. The camels had more freedom than we did.

When I was growing up I’d noticed something else unusual about the girls in our district. There was a mysterious event that made them disappear for a month or so and when they returned they were different – far more subdued and not participating as much as they’d done before. I thought that maybe they’d been ill and slow to recover, or that their mothers had warned them to behave in a more adult manner. Usually I was too busy playing with the boys to worry too much about why any one girl was acting strangely.

Circumcision for boys was an accepted part of our society, although I had little or no understanding of it. We’d often see the boys walk around gingerly afterwards in their lunghis or long overshirts, carefully holding the cloth away from their groins. As I had no knowledge of the human anatomy, periods or anything like that I didn’t associate what had happened to them with their genitals. In any event, it was an unwritten rule in our society that we never discussed such matters. We girls were especially ignorant and blind so, despite being an inquisitive child, I knew nothing of the traditional rites and rituals because all that was one big secret.

One day that summer, I found myself alone in the house with my mother. My brother was in Borama visiting our grandparents and Dad was out of town visiting the nomads for a few days. These were people who’d often never seen a doctor in their lives and managed any health problems as best they could or with the ministrations of traditional herbalists, bone-setters and spiritual healers. The sick often fell prey to quack ‘pharmacists’ who sold them anything from pills to ward off the evil eye or an injection with something that could potentially be fatal. Whenever my father returned from these trips he’d be exhausted.

That particular morning after he’d left I awoke to find our house bustling with unusual commotion. For some reason, several women – cousins, neighbours, and relatives I called ‘aunts’ – had dropped in to talk with my mother and my Grandmother Baada. There was much hushed chatter and conversations clearly not meant for my ears. ‘Why don’t you go play outside?’ Mum said when she caught me trying to listen in, and – although surprised – I was more than happy to oblige.

Early the following morning, one of my mother’s friends turned up at the house with a strange old woman I’d never seen before, and a fattened sheep. These were only ever brought to the house for feast days and, as far as I knew, this wasn’t one of them, so I was even more mystified. Odder still, Mum told me to take a shower, after which I assumed I’d be expected to put on my best clothes. ‘No, no. Wear a clean nightdress,’ she instructed. How peculiar, I thought. Equally strange, my bed was pushed into a corner of my bedroom and a mat laid on the floor. Someone placed a stool in the corridor and when I emerged from the shower room I found a group of women standing around it waiting for me. Smiling shyly at them, I wondered what was happening and then I realized with a pang of hunger that no one had prepared me any breakfast that morning.

No sooner had I sat down on the stool as instructed than mother’s friends grabbed my arms while others yanked up my nightie, grabbed my legs and pulled them apart. One woman gripped my left leg and another my right, while a third held me in a stranglehold, pressing me down firmly by my shoulders. In a well-planned operation that relied on speed and surprise, I spotted a knife glinting in the morning light streaming through the window and screamed as the old woman squatted before me and started cutting between my legs.

I can still remember the pain more than seven decades later, and I live that moment over and over again each time I think about it. I could feel the knife slashing through the sensitive flesh of my private parts and the stickiness of my blood as I screamed and struggled. My mother and grandmother watched my ordeal but neither came to my rescue. They just stood there, ululating joyfully as they witnessed what we now call FGM, female genital mutilation – a barbaric, ritualistic circumcision far more common than vaccination in my country – designed to act as a human chastity belt until the night of my marriage.

I must have passed out because I can remember waking up physically and emotionally exhausted. I had no more fight left in me. There was a horrible wheezing sound coming from my throat. The next thing I knew, the old woman was stitching together my wound with acacia thorns, pulling them together with string like a shoelace. The pain was excruciating. In what felt like a living nightmare, my legs were then bound all the way up to the thighs and hips. The women then lifted me onto the disposable mat that would soak up my blood and had been laid on my bedroom floor for this purpose. It had been so carefully planned. The old woman sprinkled a mixture of herbs, sugar and a raw egg yolk onto my open wound to form some sort of crust.

‘Egg will make you fertile,’ she declared with a toothless smile. ‘And sugar will make you sweet.’ Now that I’m a nurse, I can’t help but think that the mixture was a perfect medium to enable bacteria to grow, plastered onto an open wound by a woman with dirty hands, a dirty knife, using dirty rags. It was so gruesome at the time, and it is still gruesome to recall.

As I lay on the floor bleeding and sobbing in shock and pain, I was astonished that not one person showed me any sympathy at all. There was nobody to cry with or complain to, including my own flesh and blood. On the contrary, they were in a happy, festive mood. The sheep was slaughtered outside and a grand lunch prepared, with many of our neighbours summoned to share the special meal in my honour. The daughter of Adan Ismail had been ‘cleansed’ and all were invited to partake of the purification feast and celebrate the occasion. The women I loved the most in the world and who I’d always thought would protect me had deliberately selected the day for my gudniin or circumcision when they knew my father would be out of town. They then stood by while this horrific ritual was performed on me without any anaesthetic. They saw me kicking. They heard my screams. They paid for my butchery to be performed by someone who was neither medically qualified nor professionally trained.

They never warned me of what was about to happen in what I now understand to be a conspiracy of silence among Somali and other women dating back centuries. Far from being horrified at this brutal thing that had been done to me, they were happy and relieved about it.

As an eight-year old child, I could not comprehend it.

As a woman in her eighties, I still cannot accept it.

***

The next thing I really remember was hearing my father’s voice. It must have been much later that night when he returned from the bush. Unable to move for the pain, I cried out to him. ‘Daddy! My Daddy!’ as he hurried in to see me.

Holding up a Tilley lamp, he took one look at me and fell to his knees, his prone figure casting a huge shadow on the wall. ‘What have they done to you, Shukri? What have they done?’

My grandmother berated him from the doorway, telling him that it was nothing to do with him and that he shouldn’t interfere. The women genuinely believed that if I were seen by a man then it could ‘contaminate’ my purification so that the wound wouldn’t heal, the skin wouldn’t fuse together, and the procedure might have to be done again. Ignoring his own mother, he slumped onto the mat and cradled me in his arms, allowing me to cry and cry until there were no more tears.

‘Aabo wey i qasheen!’ I wept. ‘Father, they slaughtered me! They carved me up!’ I believe I saw tears in my father’s eyes too. For the first time since my cutting I had an ally – somebody who was offering sympathy and seemed to be hurting almost as much as I did.

Then my mother rushed in, shouting. ‘Leave her alone, Adan! Don’t touch her or you’ll infect her. It will undo the stitches!’

I have never seen my father so angry. ‘How could you?’ he raged. ‘Why have you done this?’

From the expression on her face, I think my mother was suddenly very ashamed. My grandmother countered that they had only done what was expected of them. I remember she used the expression ‘the right thing’. There was a terrible argument between the three of them then in the next room; unlike anything I’d witnessed before. I will always associate it with that day. Listening to their row and seeing how upset my father was by what had happened to me gave me a little courage. It made me realize that this wasn’t right. If it had made Father angry then what had been done to me must be wrong.

In silence and with his jaw clenched tightly, he came back into my room with a glass of water, some painkillers, and a few cloths to clean myself with. Grandmother kept telling him not to give me anything to drink, as it would make me urinate before the wound had fused. Tradition prevented him from examining me, sterilizing the cuts or giving me surgical dressings. He remained furious for weeks and continued to support me as best he could from afar, but we both knew it was too late for him to change what had been done.

It was many years before I discovered exactly what the procedure had involved. The old woman, who had the spurious title of ‘traditional birth attendant’, had sliced off my clitoris and labia minora with her knife and then pared the sides of my labia, removing all the skin right down to the perineum until it was raw and bleeding profusely. Without a surgical glove in sight, she attached the folded edges of my vulva or labia majora to the raw flesh, covering my vagina like a hood. This would eventually fuse together to form a hard bridge of scar tissue that would almost completely restrict the opening. The medical term for it is infibulation, and in what these women considered to be a ‘properly infibulated girl’ you should not be able to get anything larger than the head of a matchstick into the vagina from that day on until the night of her wedding. This means that whenever urinating or menstruating, urine and blood has to drip-drip out of a hole approximately 1.5–2 mm wide.

I knew nothing of this as a child, of course. I simply lay trapped and isolated in my room, a prisoner of my mother and grandmother, in agony as the wound began to scab and congeal around the thorns. What hurt the most, though, was the overwhelming sense of betrayal. This changed my relationship with them for ever. Custom dictated that I was to lie on the floor for a week to allow the wound to heal, and hardly drink anything. I was given a little white rice to eat with some sour milk or yoghurt, designed to keep me constipated for several days. But the time came when I needed to empty my bladder, so – although I no longer trusted my mother – I had no choice but to call to her for help. She and my grandmother carried me to the toilet pit and lay me on my side on the floor. ‘Go ahead and urinate,’ they said, as if it was as simple as that.

Can you imagine? My legs were tied to prevent the wound from opening, I was lying on a dirty and cold cement floor, and the urine wouldn’t come. They poured cold water on my feet to make me go, which eventually worked but it stung like crazy. I screamed and tried to halt the flow, but they told me, ‘Don’t stop. You’ve got to keep going.’

I didn’t believe them so, in what felt like a new form of torture, they kept pouring cold water on my feet to make me start again, and then I longed to empty my bladder completely so that I would never have to endure the pain again. At that point, I also wanted to never drink anything again even though I was so thirsty, because I now knew what fresh agonies a full bladder would bring. Little did I know then that the more concentrated the urine is the more it hurts, so drinking more water would have made it less painful, but nobody told me that.

Just like millions of Somali girls before me and since, I went from one day to the next in my little room, separate from the world and from humanity. Every day, I heard women from the neighbourhood drop in to tell my mother, ‘Congratulations, Marian, your daughter has been purified.’ What they were purifying an eight-year-old girl from I have no idea. In time, I grew accustomed to turning over gently and to urinating, even though it still hurt horribly. After seven days, the women undid the bindings from my legs and slowly parted them, causing fresh pain. They removed the thorns to see if the wound had fused together, and thank goodness it had – probably thanks to my father’s medications. Then they tied my legs together again to keep it from coming undone. They got me to stand up, still bound, and helped me to move about a little one baby step at a time. I felt very dizzy – I had lost a lot of blood and had been lying down for a week. One thing I still remember vividly was the horrible smell of sweat, urine and dried blood that emanated from me, as I hadn’t washed for ten days. And this was called purification?

The women who were minding me kept saying, ‘Inan baad tahay, Edna’, which means, ‘You are a young woman now.’ I was no longer an aruur, a child. By this they meant that I had been prepared and was ready to be considered for marriage, even though in our culture girls do not generally marry until they are around fifteen (although there are exceptions). As a ‘cleansed’ virgin, I would be trained to be shy and obedient, respectful and domesticated – the perfect Somali wife.

Eventually the wound mended some more and I was allowed to gently wash myself. They let me sit up, took off my leg bindings and helped me to take a shower. They told me I was healed. Psychologically, I was far from healed. Only then did I understand why the other girls in the neighbourhood had disappeared for three or four weeks and had emerged pale and silent. Just as they must have been, I was terrified that the wound would reopen. Feeling completely alone, I didn’t want to see anyone or go out. When I eventually ventured outside, the neighbourhood women constantly reminded me, ‘Watch out, don’t do too much because if it comes undone we will have to do it again.’ You can bet I was careful after that.

Tomboy Edna who’d been such a carefree, rebellious kid had gone for ever. In her place was a frightened little girl who was instructed not to talk about what had happened, which only made me more aloof. While my friends of both genders were playing and singing, laughing and joking, I felt so different. Every time I walked, sneezed or coughed, I remembered the warning that filled me with dread: ‘We will have to do it again.’

My grandmother Clara had always been such a comfort and an ally to me, so I longed to see her and have her hold and reassure me, but she was in Borama. By the time she came to visit, my wound had healed and I was already indoctrinated into never speaking about what had happened to me. Later I came to understand that Clara too would have considered my mutilation to be completely normal. From that day on, I regarded all the women in my family with something akin to suspicion, even contempt. They had conspired against me, lied, and disfigured me permanently. How could I ever forgive them?

***

I have never written or spoken about my own experience with female circumcision in any detail before. It isn’t easy, but it is time because this mutilating trauma has to stop. Every Somali woman has to live with the memory and then with the physical consequences. It remains with you for life.

Of course the wound heals and gradually you learn to behave normally again. Eventually even the fear that something might happen to undo it subsides. But it takes years to trust people again, or to grow accustomed to the new way of living and urinating. Many teenagers suffer frequent infections and pain. Some even need surgery while menstruating because of blockages, and this has to be done in a certain way and then be certified to prove that the girl’s virginity is still intact or she and her family will be dishonoured.

I knew what had been done to me was wrong, but I had no idea what to do about it. Almost every female I knew had gone through the same experience, and virtually everyone younger than me was going to have it done. It took me decades to pluck up the courage to ask questions about the practice, and many more years before I decided to speak out against it.

I wanted to know where and how it started and was astonished to discover that this paganistic ritual pre-dates Islam and Christianity, going back to the fifth century BC and the time of the Pharaohs. In some countries, it is still referred to as ‘Pharaonic circumcision’.

The River Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt and the story goes that the god of the river was considered to be the most powerful, and had to be appeased. The most beautiful virgins were chosen for sacrifice and thrown into the river to drown. It was considered an honour to the family of a girl to be so favoured by the Pharaoh in order to ensure the survival of her people and the punishment for refusal was severe. If the river ever dried out or flooded the fields then it was presumed that the girl chosen hadn’t been a true virgin, which had somehow angered the god. To ensure that all future ‘gifts’ would be appropriate, girls were circumcised and sutured and taken to the temples to be guarded by eunuchs until it was time for them to be killed. In time, the practice was adopted as an initiation ceremony by most of the people who lived along the Blue Nile, which rises in Ethiopia and flows north to Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, joining the White Nile from Burundi. The custom travelled across the equatorial belt through the Nubian tribe to the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the Somalis, and sixteen other countries in Africa as well as a few in Asia. Female circumcision is largely an accident of geography.

Later, slave traders adopted its use to keep their female ‘goods’ from getting pregnant (they also earned more money for virgins), and nomadic herders also accepted the tradition for population control or to ‘protect’ their women from rape. It is still widely practised by African Muslims, as well as non-Muslims, west of the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, as far south as parts of Kenya and Tanzania. In some instances it is the local blacksmith who performs the cutting rather than a birth attendant. Nations on the other side of those two seas don’t do it at all, or only so that it sheds a symbolic drop of blood. In truth, it is not a religious obligation required by any faith, but primarily a cultural tradition from a time when people believed in river gods.

Thanks to ignorance and fear, female circumcision is now a widespread practice that is still carried out on an estimated three million girls between the age of five and ten every year. In my country it is estimated that the most severe form, as practised on me, affects 76 per cent of the female population, a trend that is down from the 100 per cent of my youth and the 98 per cent prevalence we found two decades ago. Because of migration, the practice is also emerging among the refugee communities of Europe and North America, and British hospitals currently treat around 9,000 cases every year.

For now I want to send comforting thoughts to the terrified eight-year-old me who was so bewildered and confused by the heinous thing that was done to her that she still weeps at the cruelty of it.

***

When I returned to Djibouti City at the end of that summer I could tell from the look in my Aunt Cecilia’s eyes that she knew what had been done to me. Not that she said anything – not even ‘sorry’. As I was fast learning, to say nothing about FGM is the considered wisdom among my people.

It was years before I realized that my mother and aunt, as Somali girls from a highly respected family, were also cut but would have been spared the most radical infibulation like mine, and that in French Somaliland Cecilia was free of the social and cultural pressure to have her own daughters ‘cleansed’. Rita, Madeleine and Gracie were all untouched, so I was the first daughter of my generation affected. My sister Asha was born in 1948 while I was away at school, and I hoped she would be spared. No such luck.

I now know that families are very often shamed into it, with friends and relatives warning them that their daughters will be spinsters because ‘Any husband would expect it.’ This is what happened to my mother, who had married young and moved to an environment very different to her childhood. She desperately wanted to fit in and be seen as a good Muslim wife who’d done the right thing for me. As the eldest child of Adan Doctor I had to be of impeccable moral standing.

The pressure to conform doesn’t only come from adults. Children pick up on the language and often tell an ‘uncut’ girl, ‘Keep away from me. Mummy says you still have your shame. You’re not halal.’ Without even knowing what the procedure involves, girls beg to be ‘cleansed’ so that they can be just like their friends. It is a mystery to them but a natural response from innocents who also want to fit in. And as in every country where female circumcision is practised, religion plays no part because it happens to all girls, be they Christian, Muslim or from a pagan background. There is little chance of escape.

CHAPTER FOUR

Djibouti City, French Somaliland, 1947

Settling back into my parallel life in a place far from home was all part of the healing process and I embraced my schooling with new fervour. I was there from 1946–1952 and I loved every minute, even though I had the bittersweet knowledge that when I returned to Somaliland my education couldn’t be continued.

My brother Farah, who I hardly knew but who joined me at my Aunt Cecilia’s when he was eight years old, became my daily companion as we held hands each morning waiting for the school bus. He also embraced our new life in French Somaliland and, in time, we became very close.

We still went back home each summer, spending time with my parents and then holidaying with my grandparents in the country. As soon as school broke up, Farah and I would be driven from Djibouti City to wherever Dad was working, a journey of three or four days. He was usually too busy to pick us up himself, so would send a relative who might also collect other children. For us the journey was the greatest excitement of all, as we passed trees festooned with goats nibbling at the branches, as well as camel herds and donkey caravans in every kind of landscape. One trip home took nine days because of heavy rains. A distant aunt had secured us seats in a truck heavily laden with commercial goods that then became stuck in the mud. There were no phones or other cars on the road to ask for help, so everyone had to help dig it out. Our family knew we were en route but when we didn’t show up as expected they were very worried. The only foods we had were onions, salt, tamarind and sweet potatoes, which we roasted. It was on that trip that I learned that peeled bark from an acacia tree could be boiled to make a tea called asal. It was cold at night so we drank it to keep warm. Asal is also good for cleaning wounds and sterilizing vessels – a fact I logged for later use.

My brother and I didn’t mind being stuck in the middle of nowhere because it felt like a free holiday. The truck was carrying so many interesting people from different tribes all riding on the top, which was heavily laden with goods. My aunt paid extra for us to sleep in the cab at night for safety from wild animals, but Farah and I longed to be up on the roof where our fellow passengers hung off ropes on the sides telling poems and singing songs. There were arguments and running battles, there was love and jealousy and friendship. All of life was there.

Desperate to join them, Farah and I would seek out an old woman or a mother and child and offer them our seats. My aunt praised us for our kindness, never quite appreciating that we did it only so that we could swap places and climb up under the stars to inhale the sweat and the tobacco smoke and listen agog to all the stories.

Life as a child in Africa was such a big adventure.

I always loved reconnecting with my father who’d occasionally take time off to bring us home. I remember him driving us back once and letting me hold the steering wheel while sitting on his lap. Mother was screaming from the back seat, ‘Don’t let Edna drive, Adan, she’ll kill us all!’ Dad just laughed and promised to go slowly, letting me steer the car for miles down those bumpy roads and sparking my lifelong love of driving.

Those first summers after my ordeal were when I first started going with him each day to the hospital in Erigavo, the northeastern capital where he was living and working on yet another two-year rotation. I would walk him to the door as I did when I was small but now I’d carry on inside, chattering away and willing to offer my assistance. I was always much happier rolling bandages or washing Dad’s medical instruments than peeling potatoes for Mum and – after several catastrophes in the kitchen – she accepted that it was probably better that I didn’t help her after all. If we had people coming and I asked if she wanted me to do anything, her answer would be, ‘No, no! We have guests today’, which told me something about her opinion of my domestic skills. All her life I think Mum believed that my father had gained a daughter in me but that she never really had one. Whenever she told me crossly, ‘You’re just as bad as your father!’ she had no idea that it was the best compliment anyone could pay me.

When Dad came back from work for his meal, I’d be the first to greet him and would occasionally volunteer to make him something he liked. Goodness alone knows what it tasted like, but he always pretended it was delicious and made a big fuss of me. The one thing he especially liked during Ramadan was labania – custard made from rice. It was my job to make it – a process that took an entire day, as there was no custard powder back then. First I had to soak grains of fat rice until they expanded, then I had to drain them and scatter them onto a tray to dry in the sun. Then I’d have to pound and sieve it repeatedly until it was powdered, before slowly adding water so as not to make it lumpy. While it was cooking, I’d add cardamom, sugar and milk and then pour it onto little saucers and put them on the windowsill to set, as we had no refrigerator. Dad would taste it, grin and say, ‘Hmmm, this is soooo good, Shukri! Only my daughter could have made this. Did you make it? I knew you did!’ He made me feel like I owned a million camels.

***

I was twelve years old during the Year of Red Dust, our country’s worst drought in years, when I became indispensable to my father at the Erigavo hospital. He not only appreciated my help but also came to rely on it, especially when the drought and famine gave him so much extra work.

There are so many more people to deal with in bad times, and not just those dying of hunger and thirst. Animal carcasses litter the roads and attract flies that carry more disease. Starvation compromises the immune system, which gives people a lower resistance to diseases like TB. Dark hair pales through loss of pigmentation, skin wrinkles and ankles swell. The children especially suffer from protein calorie malnutrition, also known as kwashiorkor, or fluid retention in their bellies as their spleens and livers enlarge. The British-organized military response teams and the Somali Army set up huge camps in the desert to hold 30-40,000 destitute people. Dad and the Army nursing officers would travel back and forth to bring the most desperately ill to the hospital for treatment. Mostly they needed water and food – a little at a time or they’d die of diarrhoea. We fed them a kind of gruel or boiled white rice and watered-down milk. If their veins hadn’t collapsed, we could give them saline through a drip. If they had we were to administer subcutaneous injections daily so that their bodies could absorb it.

Every morning Dad would ask me to help him with something else. ‘Come with me today?’ he’d plead. ‘There are too many patients for me to deal with and I need your help with the dressings.’ Or, ‘Have breakfast early tomorrow, I want you to assist with a procedure, so dress up and meet me on the ward.’ He knew he could trust me that if a surgical instrument needed washing I would do it properly, and that it wouldn’t be stolen. We were so short of supplies that the families of patients would be requested to bring in their own sheets, as well as old ones they had no further use for, which I would cut up for dressings. I’d sit in a side room with piles of striped sheets of every colour, ripping and cutting them into every size Dad might need. Every outpatient would also wash their own bandages and bring them back so that we could boil them all up again and issue them with fresh ones. The brand new custom-made bandages from England were kept back for surgery.

My father’s single-storey hospital had a male ward, a female ward, a medical ward, a surgical ward, outpatients and a maternity ward. There was room for forty patients. Babies slept with their mothers in their beds as there were no cots and an incubator was unheard of. The staff was largely illiterate and not very conscientious, but the whitewashed building was clean – if a little tired – as it was still inspected by the British once a year.

Dad was run ragged delivering babies, performing minor operations and rehydrating patients. Often he was hampered by the unwritten custom in our country that any surgery or lifesaving procedure on a woman has first to be agreed to by their closest male relative, or the one who is financially responsible for her. Seeking that consent from nomadic families scattered in remote places was often difficult and sometimes impossible to get. He was also much hindered by a lack of supplies, as whatever the British provided was never enough and in times of crisis the demand trebled. He was constantly sending telegrams pleading for extra saline drips or needles, more paraffin, wicks and lamps. In desperation, he would sometimes put on his best clothes and go in person to see the District Commissioner to ask for what he needed.

I was only permitted to help my father on the outpatient’s ward and never near the delivery room. God forbid a Somali girl is let in on the secrets of the female body. If Dad was away visiting the nomads, I was then allowed onto the other wards to supervise those he was most concerned about, help the auxiliaries, and follow the numerous instructions on his list.

My mother objected vociferously. ‘Why do you have to go to the hospital again, Edna? What do you know about patients? You’ll kill people!’

‘I’m not going to kill anybody. I’m just going to make sure the staff are doing what they should be doing.’

‘How do you know what they should be doing?’

‘I follow what Dad tells me on the piece of paper he left me.’

It never occurred to her to help him, too, or to get some other job. She was a bright, educated woman who’d grown up in a different country, spoke several languages, and could easily have worked as an interpreter or translator. Yet she chose to stay at home to be influenced by her Somali girlfriends about how a wife should be.

***

When my schooling in Djibouti City ended after six years, I returned home proudly to Somaliland with my Certificat d’Études Primaires. I had done very well, but at fourteen years old I couldn’t help but wonder what was in store for me next. Formal education in Djibouti didn’t extend beyond primary school, so there was no reason for me to stay and some pressing reasons for me to go home.

Most Somali girls are married between the ages of fifteen and eighteen and if they are still single much beyond that then they are considered not only unmarriageable, but also unlucky. Marriages are often pre-arranged between families, rather than purely for love. Tribal influences are still important and girls are either wed into their own tribe or into a compatible one to establish new alliances. As a naïve teenager, I had no thoughts about marriage and no idea about sex. Anything relating to my private parts was abhorrent to me after my cutting and I couldn’t countenance the idea of intimacy of any kind. I enjoyed the weddings of my cousins and other family members with their various ceremonies, dances and feasts, but was puzzled by the notion that Somali men can take up to four wives when I had grown up in an unusually monogamous household.

Instead of boys, my focus was on perfecting my languages. Although I was fluent in French by then, my English was poor – especially my pronunciation – so Dad hired a teacher to show me the correct way to say things by having me study diction and read out loud. Armed with this skill, and with my father’s encouragement, I happily jumped at the offer to work for six months as an interpreter for a British doctor named Dr Ashe in the Ruth Fisher Clinic in Hargeisa. This women-only facility had been opened by the Governor’s wife in 1945 with an all-female staff designed to encourage Somali women – banned from seeing a male doctor – to attend hospital whenever they were ill or pregnant.

Dr Ashe was an obstetrician married to a fellow doctor and she was very kind to me. I was conscripted into interpreting for her during the morning outpatients’ clinic for sick women and children. I didn’t know the medical terms for the different medical problems and neither did the patients, but I’d describe their symptoms and the doctor would say, ‘Ah, yes, that sounds like cellulitis to me’, or, ‘I think you may have eczema.’ In every case, if she required surgery, each female patient needed to obtain the permission of the male head of her household, which often delayed and complicated treatments, so I had to help with that too. Very often Dr Ashe would be summoned for a difficult delivery so I would also be called. I was usually kept well back but I still witnessed my first births that way, and there was no time to feel squeamish about it. What struck me most of all was how respectful and professional Dr Ashe was and how she worked very hard to keep the mother and baby alive. It was working alongside her that I first learned that the two main killers of pregnant women in my country are poverty and ignorance. A poor nomadic woman who may have started having babies in the bush as a young teenager and could be on her twentieth child by her late thirties has never had any proper medical supervision or social justice. If she starts to bleed out during yet another pregnancy then the chances are that she will die unless her relatives can get her to a hospital.

I was working with Dr Ashe one day when a woman was brought in who’d got into difficulties giving birth at home, which was the first we knew of her – as is often the case. She’d delivered her baby but was haemorrhaging badly and left a sticky trail of blood right into the waiting room. Dr Ashe stayed calm but announced that we had to get her to the operating theatre in Hargeisa Hospital urgently. In spite of transfusions and other measures, this young mother died. Dr Ashe was very upset but still respectful and thanked me for helping her try to save the mother’s life. She made me feel important in the equation and she whetted my appetite for even more health work.

When the first boarding school for girls opened almost two hundred kilometres away in the town of Burao in February 1953, Dr Ashe surprised me by recommending to my father that I be sent there as a pupil teacher. ‘Edna shouldn’t be wasting her time following me around as an interpreter,’ she told him. ‘She has the making of something better. She can live in the teachers’ accommodation and continue her secondary school education.’ There were two British teachers at the Burao school, neither of whom spoke Somali, and one Somali assistant teacher who spoke only limited English. They needed someone with both languages, so I was selected as one of the two pupil-teachers appointed that year. The arrangement was that the staff would give me tutorials after school hours. It was the only option open to me if I wanted to go any further.

For almost two years I lived and worked in Burao, working as an interpreter in the mornings, sitting in on the classes for the first twenty-seven pupils of the new school. I also earned my first wage, which amounted to thirty East African shillings a month plus food and accommodation. I thought I was rich. Every afternoon I had three or four hours of lessons in higher-grade maths, English and biology – all subjects I’d need to pass if I were to one day become a medical assistant to my father. I had to take these lessons alone as it would have been considered improper for me to sit with the high school boys my teacher also taught.

The British authorities had set up a scholarship scheme in which the best students in the Protectorate could be selected to pursue secondary education and professional training in other countries. Scores of teenage boys had already been sent to Aden, Sudan, Kenya and the UK to study anything from engineering to politics, among them several members of my tribe and one from my neighbourhood, Hassan Kayd, who had gone to the prestigious Sandhurst military academy in Britain. Each year a representative from the British Colonial Office came to Somaliland to examine and interview potential candidates for a scholarship, and in 1953, the teachers in Burao put my name on the list – a first for a girl in Somaliland.

The arrival of the British representative, Miss Udell – I’ll never forget her name – was a big event in our education system. There was even a countdown to when she’d arrive. It was like a royal visit and the teachers prepared us well with mock exams and staged interviews. First she supervised exams at Sheikh Secondary School and interviewed the boys who obtained top grades, and then she came to Burao to examine a small number of the boys for the scholarship exams – and me. At sixteen years old and approximately five feet tall and weighing fifty kilos, I was the only girl. There was one supervisor for the boys and one supervisor just for me, in a separate room. The Colonial Office must have wondered at Miss Udell’s decision to let me sit for the exam and queried whether I would prove a good return to British taxpayers.

To my amazement I passed with flying colours. My father was so proud of me when I told him, but there were problems other than my gender. I was still working towards my secondary school certificate, had a strong French accent, and needed to improve my English. Plus, I was small and skinny for my age, even though I could eat a mountain. Miss Udell considered all these factors and decided that although I’d passed and had good overall grades, I was too young to be sent overseas. ‘See you next year, Edna,’ she told me with an encouraging smile.

By the time she returned to Somaliland the following year, I had filled out a bit and had one more year of learning and teaching under my belt. I passed the exam once more and could hardly believe it when she told me that I’d won a scholarship to study in England. There were multiple forms to fill in, but when it came to the question that asked me to indicate my preferred course of study, I wrote ‘nursing’ without a moment’s hesitation.

There was one additional hurdle to be overcome before I could be sent to London. The authorities needed to find one other girl to accompany me as a fellow student. The most qualified candidate in the region was Jessica Joseph Raymond from a mission boarding school in Aden who also wanted to be a nurse. Her father was half Indian and her mother half Welsh. Jessica was a delightful young woman; a truly cosmopolitan Somalilander and an ideal companion for someone like me, who’d never travelled further than Djibouti.

CHAPTER FIVE

Jessica and I flew to England in October 1954. I was seventeen years old and she was three months younger. Leaving all that I knew behind, I set off on my big adventure. I’d never been on a plane before so I was agog at our multiple flights in a DC-3 via Aden, Khartoum, Cairo and Athens with eight young Somali men who’d also been selected for a scholarship.

From the moment we arrived at Heathrow airport and were met by representatives from the British Council and the Colonial Office we were treated extremely well. The Somali boys were especially protective of us and anxious that Jessica and I wouldn’t be living with them but placed elsewhere. Traditionally, the scholarship boys were put up in a boarding house with older pupils already in the UK who could help them adjust. Jessica and I were such novelties as girls that they didn’t know quite what to do with us, so we were put in ‘digs’. Our new home was in Balham, south London with a family called the Rodgers. The father worked as a postman and the couple rented out their upper rooms to lodgers. Jessica and I shared one room and there was a tenant in the other. The Rodgers were very welcoming and they introduced us to their children, Gillian, Jacqueline and Roger, who were close to our age and kind to the two strange girls in their midst.

The first thing that struck me about Britain was how cold and wet it was. I’d read Dickens and the Bronte sisters, so I’d expected rain and autumn mists but not the damp chill. My English vocabulary immediately grew with words like fog and frost, slush and sleet. It also got noticeably darker so much sooner than in Somaliland, where the sun sets and rises roughly the same time all year. We didn’t have televisions in Somaliland but we did go to the movies, so we had a general idea of what London looked like. The big city was far larger than I’d imagined, though, with so many cars. What shocked me most were escalators and lifts, neither of which I’d ever seen before and was afraid to use at first.

Perhaps the most memorable initial experience in London was having so much of my own money. The Colonial Office paid us an allowance of £33 a month to cover our rent, breakfast and evening meal, provided by Mrs Rodgers. We could buy lunch at our college and keep the rest of the money back for bus and train fares, and other expenses. They also gave us £50 each with which to buy some clothes suitable for a British winter. Fifty ‘quid’ was a small fortune and we couldn’t believe our luck. A family friend of Jessica’s offered to take us shopping, which excited us until he took us to Woolworths and the Army & Navy stores where he insisted that we buy identical shoes, raincoats and hats. We reluctantly did as we were told but kept some money back and the next day went out on our own to the West End.

Oxford Street was like El Dorado to us; we were so amazed by how beautiful and shiny and silky all the clothes were. We blew almost all that was left of our allowance on impractical blouses and silly frilly things that were completely inappropriate. The only scary part of our big day out was taking the Tube. I’d seen trains before in Djibouti but I’d never actually been on one. I didn’t know that they could go underground, and that frightened the life out of me, for fear that the roof might collapse or there’d be a flood. To this day, I take the bus rather than the Tube.

Within a few days, I had run out of cash and couldn’t afford the train or the bus but I knew I couldn’t ask the Rodgers for money. Jessica had an aunt in Cardiff who helped her out, but I had no one, so I went to a post office and sent a telegram to my father.

‘Dear Dad. STOP. Urgently need money for bus fares. STOP. Please send money. STOP. Shukri.’

The reply came back surprisingly quickly:

‘Don’t waste your money sending telegrams. STOP. Make do with what is given to you. STOP.’

I was so angry with him then. He was a rich man by Somali standards. He was building his own house – as the first Somalilander who’d been allowed to purchase a plot of land in the exclusive European residential area. Yet he was refusing to even send me as much as the sixpenny bus fare to tide me over. I now know that this was exactly the right thing for him to have done and – thanks to Adan Ismail – I have always lived within my means. Embarrassingly, though, I had to borrow money and walk instead of catching the bus until my next month’s allowance arrived. That’s when I started saving – the best lesson I ever learned from my father.

Because I was not yet eighteen, I couldn’t enrol in a nursing programme immediately even if I’d been ready for it, which I wasn’t. My scholarship provided for two years of preparatory study that enabled me to complete my secondary schooling and a pre-nursing programme at the Borough Polytechnic in Elephant & Castle, south London. Jessica and I started together at the ‘poly’ where I was the only black girl in the class (being of mixed race, she was much fairer skinned than I was).

Despite standing out physically, I didn’t feel different and quickly made friends. I was popular with the teachers and loved my studies, apart from domestic science in which we had to make hot cross buns and a Sunday roast – things I would never make in Somaliland. If only they’d asked me to make rice custard! As in Djibouti, my biggest challenge was the language. Jessica spoke English far better than I did because she’d done all her basic schooling in it, but once I grasped the language I was away.

There were so few coloured students that I was in demand as a model for the art students to practise pigmentation and skin tones. One of the teachers there also taught in a studio in St John’s Wood and paid me £1 per session plus my bus fare to go there one night a week. The students only ever painted my hands, learning how to mix the colours to achieve my particular shade of brown. It may have been unusual for the times, but I don’t honestly remember encountering any racism in London. I was more of a curiosity than a threat, like the time I was on the bus and a mother and her young son sat opposite me. The child couldn’t take his eyes off my Afro hair and finally asked his mother, ‘Can I have a golliwog doll for Christmas?’ I didn’t say anything but the woman was clearly embarrassed, even more so when I made some response to the ticket collector and the child piped up, ‘And can I have one who talks like that?’ Seeing the mother’s horror, I just smiled and said, ‘And I sing too!’ as his eyes came out on stalks. I think that put us all at ease.

Later when I was nursing, old ladies seemed especially fascinated by me, but were still always polite. They’d rub my hand with their white sheets to see if the colour came off, or ask questions about life in Africa. One pensioner thanked me for helping her with something before asking, ‘Tell me dear, do you people have houses in Africa?’ I masked my surprise and told her that, yes, we did. It was a question I was asked very often, and I eventually came up with an answer that tended to prevent further enquiries: ‘Why would we have houses when we have trees to hang from?’ Perhaps the strangest question of all was, ‘Is it true that Africans have a tail?’ I was so taken aback that I replied, ‘Yes, but I had mine cut off.’ Seeing a Nigerian nurse working on the other side of the ward, I suggested, ‘Why don’t you ask if she still has hers?’

Aside from the Rodgers family, Jessica and I were also under the benign supervision of a guardian from the Colonial Office, Colonel William Vernon Crook, who’d recently retired from his position as Director of the Department for East Africa and Aden affairs. The colonel, who had a daughter our age and an unmarried sister called Mouse, took Jessica and me under his wing. He had a cottage on the Thames where he kept a boat, so he and his family would take us on cruises up the river and to Kew Gardens to see the tropical plants. He introduced us to horticulture and took us to the Chelsea Flower Show, an annual event attended by the Queen that we’d never otherwise have known about or made time for. I don’t know if the colonel’s prize-winning roses ever made it to Chelsea, but that kind old man with the handlebar moustache gave me a lifelong love of growing plants.

Around this time, I found myself some part-time work reporting on life in the UK for the BBC, which had a relay station in Berbera that broadcast a daily Somali programme of news and events across East Africa. The ‘Beeb’ constantly required new material and would store future fillers, it’s not like milk that can go bad. Somebody at a party asked me if I’d like to contribute, as they wanted female voices for a female audience. I told them I didn’t know how but they sent me to a woman who taught me how to speak slowly into a microphone, take the right number of breaths and never rustle my papers. An engineer and an editor guided me and my reviews about British cultural events were never live so they could always edit out my many mistakes.

To my delight, I was given tickets for the Ideal Home exhibition at Olympia, the ballet at Sadler’s Wells, and concerts at the Royal Festival Hall, reporting on them to my people. I also provided the female voices for some of their regular entertainment programmes such as 1001 Nights. One of my fellow reviewers was a Somali Army cadet called Abdullahi Said Abby, a charming young man who was training in London and who I frequently bumped into at receptions. The BBC paid me five guineas if I was working from a script written for me, and extra if I wrote the script myself. That was a lot of money for a student in those days. If I recorded two or three programmes at once, I’d take home fifteen guineas when a student nurse would only earn eight guineas a month. Working for the BBC helped pay for driving lessons (something I wouldn’t have been allowed to do back home), and enabled me go on holidays to Amsterdam, Paris and the Austrian Tyrol with friends.

The biggest thrill about my work for the BBC was that my father heard me on the radio, and wrote immediately to express his surprise and pride. ‘How do you find the time in between your studies?’ he asked. My mother, who only ever signed the bottom of his many letters to me with, ‘Love from Mum’, didn’t make any comment.

***

The departments and classes at Borough Polytechnic were enormous and I had to adjust to being surrounded by hundreds of teenagers also studying for their O levels in everything from pre-dentistry or pre-medicine to engineering and catering. Those two years were a great experience and forced me to develop better study habits. During my time there I prepared for the state preliminary examination for nursing and also did the equivalent of the first term of Nursing School. This exempted me from one semester of the nursing programme once I was admitted.

One day a week we were taken for some practical experience to the Victorian Belgrave Hospital for Children near the Oval cricket ground in Kennington, south London. In huge, efficient wards, unrecognizable to me from anything I’d experienced in Somaliland, I worked alongside nurses, washed babies, fed and changed them, read to the older children, and helped give them their medication. It was our job to get the more mobile patients out of bed and take them to the window or wrought iron balcony for some fresh air. It was basic, uncomplicated care and we were given no responsibility in case we did something dangerous. I’d done much more practical nursing at home for my dad and was itching to get on, but I wasn’t old enough or good enough yet.

My early years in London weren’t all about work, though – far from it – and Jessica and I could be quite mischievous at times. On the last Saturday of every month there were college dances known as ‘hops’. As this was the Fifties the music was largely swing and jazz featuring singers like Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Although I’d listened to my mother’s records when I was small, it was in London that I really discovered music for the first time. I bought my first record player, a secondhand Grundig, and spent ages browsing through the Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong albums in record shops. I even queued to see Harry Belafonte perform at the Hammersmith Palais. A few of us also learned to dance so that we could show off at the hops. From then on, dancing became my number one hobby. With my pinched-in, 22-inch waist accentuated by a flared tulle underskirt and my Afro tamed into the tight chignon, I learned the tango, the quickstep, the foxtrot and the rumba.

The music department provided the musicians for these events and the catering students made the food and sold the drinks, so the whole college was involved. Dancing is thirsty work and one night Jessica and I spent so much on orange squash that we didn’t have the Tube fare home. We began to walk, but had no idea of the direction. The Rodgers had told us that if we ever had a problem we should find a policeman, so we walked and walked looking for a ‘bobby’ until we found two on foot patrol. We always carried a piece of paper with our address in it – 137 Ramsden Road – so we showed it to them and explained that we were lost.

‘Goodness, you’re a long way from home!’ one of the officers exclaimed. ‘Just a moment.’ He went to a telephone box, called up his police station and before we knew it a squad car arrived to pick up two ‘lost’ girls – who weren’t lost at all really – and drove us all the way to Balham. We arrived at about 1 a.m. and a policeman rang on the doorbell (waking the whole household) and handed us over to the Rodgers, telling them, ‘We found these two waifs.’ Mr Rodgers thanked them for their kindness and we all went to bed. Very cheekily after that we made one more attempt to use the Metropolitan Police as a kind of personal taxi service. We even made a game of it, walking miles in the search for different policeman to trick into taking us home. In the end, word got around and the long-suffering officers told us, ‘No more!’

After my first Christmas in London, I attended a New Year’s Eve ball for overseas students and their host families arranged by the British Council. This gala event had a big band and lots of dancing. I don’t recall the venue, but I do recall the handsome man who came up to ask me for a dance. While we were waltzing, he asked, ‘Where are you from?’

‘Somaliland,’ I replied.

He stopped dancing and stared at me.

I laughed. ‘What, don’t you know where Somaliland is?’

He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Yes, I do. I am from Somaliland too!’

It was my turn to be shocked. ‘No! Then w-who are you?’ I stammered. I thought I knew all the students from Somaliland, but here was a Somali I’d never encountered.

‘Well, who are you?’ he countered.

‘I am Edna Adan Ismail,’ I told him, knowing that the mention of my father’s name never failed to impress someone from my country. It worked. He couldn’t believe it and said that he was directly related to my mother. His name was Mohamed, the twenty-six-year-old son of Haji Ibrahim Egal, whose family I knew. I spent the entire evening dancing with him after that and when we parted I gave him my address and phone number.

The next day the first bouquet I ever received in my life was delivered to Ramsden Road. The enormous cluster of roses from a handsome older man made quite an impression on a naïve seventeen-year old. I kept the note I found nestling in among the blooms for many years. It said:

‘Thank you for such a wonderful, delightful evening. Do you realize that we made history – probably the first Somalis who danced together in England? Mohamed.’

Mrs Rodgers found a vase to put my flowers in, and for several weeks they brightened up the living room we shared. I was not a very romantic person and had never been out with any boy before, unless in a group. I was too passionate about my work to have time for romance and anyway the Somali tradition was that you never ‘messed around’ until you got married. Not that I could – my circumcision made that decision easy – and any boy who violated the daughter of Adan Dhakhtar Ismail and robbed me of my virginity would be considered to have raped me, with terrible repercussions for his family. There would have been vendettas and rebellions, as this was one code of ethics you did not break.

Nevertheless, a few days later Mohamed invited me to dinner and I accepted. To my surprise, he arrived in a convertible sports car. This was the first inkling I had of his fondness for expensive, showy things; but then I remembered that his father was reportedly one of the richest men in Somaliland. All the neighbours peered out of their windows and I could almost see their blinds twitching as I climbed into the red MG. We had a lovely evening and he took me to dinner a couple of times after that, but then he simply disappeared. I never heard a word from him. Mrs Rodgers would ask, ‘Whatever became of that nice young man who sent you flowers?’ I had no answer, because I didn’t know what had happened to him. We hadn’t fought, we hadn’t argued. He just vanished. It was almost a year later when I learned that his father had suffered a stroke and he’d flown back to Somaliland in a hurry. As the only surviving child of a mother who’d been pregnant eighteen times and lost her other son to a snakebite, Mohamed’s duty was to be by her side. Haji Ibrahim Egal died six months later, and Mohamed remained to run the family business, forgetting to write to a girl he’d once sent flowers to in London.

After a year with the Rodgers, Jessica and I bade them a fond farewell and moved into a boarding house run by nuns at 24 The Boltons, off the Old Brompton Road in Kensington. It was a place that took in mainly rich girls from abroad studying the arts. The property was a fine white stucco building with individual bedrooms and a common dining room. It was located in a very fashionable part of town, closer to the station and with a more frequent bus service. We loved living there and when we weren’t working, we went to the movies or to dances with friends. I recall that one of the films I saw that I enjoyed the most was called The World of Suzie Wong, starring the Hollywood heartthrob William Holden. Once a week we’d have social evenings where we were each invited to discuss our cultures. Jessica and I learned all about Ireland, the Gambia, China, India, Portugal and Finland from the other girls before it was our turn to don traditional Somali nomad dress – six metres of unstitched white cloth tied a bit like a sari and adorned with amber beads – and sing Somali songs. It was a great way to break the ice.

It was a lot of fun living in the centre of cosmopolitan London. I was made so welcome and enjoyed my newfound freedom. Despite the parties and the pranks, however, I remained a diligent student and passed all my exams – including anatomy and physiology – with good grades. I did so well, in fact, that my teachers hinted that I might consider switching from nursing to medicine, but I was undecided about that and resolved to ask my father’s advice when I was next back home. The previous few years had brought about such momentous changes, yet there I was, eighteen years old, living in a very different kind of world and with my nursing studies about to begin. I was no longer a frightened little girl, confused by life’s mysteries and holding onto my father’s hand. I was a young woman doing as I pleased, on the brink of my chosen career. Life was good.

***

In the summer of 1956, I went home for the first time in two years. This was something that had always been promised by the Colonial Office and was much anticipated by those of us who’d been away so long.

Everything seemed smaller than I remembered but it was good to be back. I’d been especially homesick for spicy curries and chilli peppers. The food in London seemed so bland by comparison to our Indian-influenced cooking. I had also missed my brother Farah and my younger sister Asha, then eight. I wished my grandmother Clara were still alive so I could go to Borama with her and drink cow’s milk, but the herd had been sold long ago and she’d died of cancer of the uterus before I left for Britain. Most of all, I wanted to see my dad. By then he’d finished building his house – one of the first in Hargeisa to have electricity and a telephone (connected to an exchange) – and he even owned his own car. For the first time in his working life he was no longer dependent on the British government for accommodation or transport. My parents were proud of me, or at least my father was. Mum never said much and I’m sure she wanted me to give up my dream, come home and settle down. Her most oft-repeated comment was, ‘I married a crazy husband and he gave me a crazy daughter.’

I was delighted to learn that my cousin Gracie from Djibouti would be spending the summer with us. She was only eight months younger than me and we’d been close at school, so I loved reconnecting and catching up on all the news of Aunt Cecilia and the rest of the family. Having had unlimited freedom in Britain, I was even more independent than before, so Gracie and I went out on our own, as carefree and unescorted as if we were living in London or Djibouti. I was careful not to upset my mother and knew my behaviour would raise eyebrows among her friends and family, but I also knew how important it was to remain true to who I was. In fact, I was hardly ever at home because of all the invitations I received, many of them from the British because of my father’s status, but also because the authorities wanted to be reassured that they hadn’t wasted their money sending me abroad. They were relieved to find a young woman who dressed like them and spoke their language, and pleased to know that I was doing well.

The reaction from the Somali women couldn’t have been less encouraging, however. Everyone voiced their opinion and my mother’s cousins, neighbours, friends and aunts continually reminded me that as a woman I didn’t need to learn how to be anything. The rest of my family was chiefly focused on the honour of the tribe and were quick to warn me I was jeopardizing myself and the rest of the clan. ‘If you carry on working and living like a Westerner, you will never be considered worthy of marriage,’ I was informed. ‘This will reflect badly on the women in our family, especially your mother who’ll be harshly judged for having brought you up unprepared for a life of marriage and domesticity.’

I was so committed to my studies by then that nothing anyone could say would put me off. As far as I was concerned, my only decision was to choose between nursing and medicine. This dilemma arose after the completion of my first year of pre-nursing training when Colonel Crook called me in for a chat. After closely studying copies of all of my grades and supervisors’ reports, he told me, ‘Look, Edna, you are getting good grades, your teachers respect you, and everyone is very happy with your progress. Given your performance, you might want to know that we would consider changing your scholarship from nursing to medicine.’

Goodness, I was only a teenager and my brain was still growing. I seriously considered his offer but told myself, ‘Medicine? That will take me six or seven more years. My God, I’ll be so old when I finish! It is too long. I’m going to stick to nursing.’

Colonel Crook advised me to think about it and I suspect he hoped that I’d discuss it with my father when I went home. My instinct told me that Dad would say: ‘Medicine, of course’, and I didn’t want that pressure on me, so in the end I didn’t even ask him. When I got back to London, Colonel Crook asked, ‘What’s it going to be then, nursing or medicine?’

‘Nursing,’ I replied decisively.

‘Are you sure? Have you discussed this with your family?’

‘I don’t need to discuss this with anyone. This is my life and it is my decision. This is what I want to do.’

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