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The latest sign of contradiction is the Somalis shooting at those who came to save them. What’s the matter with those Somalis, anyway?

"To really reach a Somali’s heart, you must communicate in poetry," a Somali scholar wrote recently.

Poetry is not what first comes to mind when one is confronted by those starving faces. The West has not understood Somalia in the past, and we don’t understand it now. This has helped create and fester Somalia’s problems, which, no matter how hard we tried to look the other way, have become our own.

There is more to Somalia, even now, than meets the eye, including the camera eye. More, that is, than starvation and death. There is, among other things, a history.

The Somalis and we parted company centuries ago, when we moved to towns while they followed their camels over the Horn of Africa hills. In time, their nomadic life evolved into a structure of five clans, in turn divided into subclans and further, lesser, extremely complex groupings. Centuries of nomadic life created a psyche that more recent colonialism and similar "civilizing" influences were unable to eradicate.

Wrote I.M. Lewis (The Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa: Westview Press, 1988), "A hierarchical pattern of authority is foreign to pastoral Somali society, which in its customary processes of decision-making is democratic almost to the point of anarchy."

Several well-known colonizers tried to tame and organize Somalia. The French arrived first, in 1860, followed in the 1880s by the British. In the 1890s the Italians squeezed in to the south of the British. They all tried to centralize and bureaucratize.

They built roads and railways and towns and schools. The Italians created extensive banana plantations because, it is said, Mussolini had decreed that every Italian eat a banana for breakfast.

The colonizers handed the region, about the size of Texas, back to the Somalis in 1960. The nomadic, anarchic spirit quickly reasserted itself Life continued to be harsh, even primitive. As one Somali described it, "In the past, our people wandered from plateau to valley, from water hole to water hole. If there were enough water and pasture to share, all went well – if not, families and clans fought to kill."

This might recall the recent Mogadishu thugs and their "technicals" robbing the starving at gunpoint. But Americans with long experience of Somalia warn that cultures other than our own are seldom as obvious as they seem.

The Somalis "work at a volatile level," concedes Eric Olfert of the Mennonite Central Committee. "They get easily into verbal conflict." And, as we now know, physical conflict is frequently not far behind. But, insists Olfert, we should not judge this by our standards.

Not surprisingly, says Hershey Leaman, who lived in Somalia from 1960 to |61 and visited there many times since, colonialists found the Somali context "exceedingly difficult to understand, and particularly the issue of conflict resolution."

The intricate traditional system of governance and justice by clan elders gradually seems to assume the deliberate vagueness and labyrinthine social contortions generally associated in this country with organized crime, except, perhaps, that life and death have never been so well-camouflaged in Somalia.

The colonizers created a university and thus an intellectual class. Many other Somalis were educated in England, Italy or, later, the (then) Soviet Union. In many ways, theirs was a headlong leap into modem times. They have bad their own written language only for the past 20 years. Their oral tradition was correspondingly alive.

They use poetry as a means of recording and reflecting on their life’s experiences, especially their happy experiences," says Olfert. "They will begin composing poetry in a rhythmic manner, having to do with, let’s say, a work situation, and they’ll begin dancing to it, and they’ll do one verse and, sure enough, another verse will develop, and another one will begin dancing … all spontaneous.’

Another area in which the Somalis have clung to the past is religion. Overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims, they have been discouraging to Christian missionaries, although their 1960 constitution does allow freedom of religion.

As the world opened to them, many became prosperous. Leaman told how they can, even in today’s circumstances, with a phone and a fax, locate a camel in the boonies, get it transported to the sea, then to Saudi Arabia, make a deal there for, say, a jeep, which will soon be delivered in Somalia’s outback. This acute business acumen has become in a small way legendary, and no doubt derives in part from centuries of haggling over camels and water rights.

To exemplify the curious schizophrenia of ex-nomads who made good, Olfert tells bow, on his last visit there, "before things came apart, on the road from Mogadishu to Baidoa, on a Friday afternoon (their sabbath), I saw at least six large expensive cars, Mercedeses and such, pulled off the road under the trees, where these businessmen and government officials from the city had come out to spend their day off with their camel herds."

After colonialism, Somalia became a pawn of the Cold War. Amid the gathering chaos and postcolonial corruption, Gen. Mohammed Siad Barre gained power in a military coup in 1969. The Soviet Union plied him with arms. The KGB trained his police, who then created a police state. Siad Barre encouraged his own cult status. Kids sang of him as "the Father of Knowledge."

But then, in 1977, when war broke out with equally Marxist Ethiopia, the Soviets backed the latter, so Siad Bane embraced the United States.

"During the 1980s," writes Edward R.F. Sheehan in The New York Review of Books, "the Reagan administration provided Siad Barre with about $1 billion in military and economic aid and sales …. American diplomats are highly defensive about this today, but one wonders whether U.S. policymakers at the time had any notion of the complexity and instability of Somali clan politics."

It’s not as if Siad Barre were uprigbt and honorable. Africa Watch described how his corruption and viciousness led to more organized opposition, which "resulted in wholesale slaughter of noncombatants …. Entire regions have been devastated by a military in combat against its own people, resembling a foreign occupation force that recognizes no constraints on its power to kill, rape or loot."

Siad Barre was toppled in early 1991. He is still waiting in Nigeria to get back and restore old glory. Into the vacuum, meantime, have stepped the thugs.

"We (Mennonite Central Committee) have taken the position that this military intervention was probably a mistake," said Olfert. "It has probably set back very significantly initiatives to put in place a longer-term solution ….

There was a lot of good effort going into fixing and re-empowering the traditional elder/clan system that dealt with conflict and retribution in such situations." In northwest Somalia, the old system of rule by elders is working quite well even amid the current turmoil, he said.

Although many more might have died from hunger in the current crisis, Olfert claims that likely failure to fix the long-term situation will mean that even more will eventually die.

The United Nations, by dealing with the warlords, even if only to oppose them, has given them a significance and role that future problem-solvers will find very hard to take away, Leaman said.

The intervention could also play into the hands of fundamentalist Muslims. If the United Nations, an ostensibly Christian force, fails, this will tell Somalis not to rely on the West for prosperity and stability, and the only alternative will be Islam.

Somalis have "an incredible sense of humor," says Leaman. They are gong to need it. Even in the camps, he says, "the kids are playing, there is a lot of laughter and a lot of fun." This, too, the West might find hard to understand.

"The best time for any composer or artist is when times are bad," said poet Mohamed Ali Kariye. Hard to understand a country where the worst of times is the best of times.

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