Continental Drift

Seen from above, then, the flight of a million and a half Somali men, women and children with their sick and dying beasts out of the drought- and war-shattered region of Ogaden in the Horn of Africa would resemble the movement of the Southwest Monsoon Current, for instance, which in the heat of July moves slowly, almost imperceptibly out of the Red Sea just north of Ethiopia and Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean, where it joins the Northwest Monsoon Drift and dips southward along the subcontinent, by winter looping back again toward Kenya and Tanzania, bringing rain to Mombasa and Dar es Salaam and filling the great inland waterways and lakes. The movement of the Somalis would seem inevitable, unalterable and mindless; and because we would have watched it the way we watch weather, it would seem tragic. We could not argue over who was at fault or what should have been done; ideology would seem a form of vanity, a despicable self-indulgence. We would rise from our shaded seat in front of our hut alongside the dusty road that leads from the treeless Damisa hills in Ethiopia to our village near the trading town of Samaso in Somalia, and we would step forward onto the road with a cup of water and a small bowl of millet and whey for the family we have been watching approach for the last hour, a man, tall and gaunt, ageless, leading a half-blind camel with a pack of sticks tied to its back, and, coming along behind, a woman with a scrawny child in her arms, and behind her yet another cadaverous child. We let them sleep under their thin blankets beside our hut, and in the morning, as the sun breaks across the brown plain, give them bread and water and point the way southeast to Samaso, another thirty kilometers, and say the name of the man who is said to own a truck for transporting to the coast and the refugee camps there the people who come down from the hills, the Somali-speaking nomads who have raised cattle in that wilderness for a thousand years and who now must flee famine, drought and the war, the endless war between the Ethiopians with their Russian guns and Cuban allies and the soldiers of the Western Somalia Liberation Front. The man, his black skin cut through almost to the bone of his face with worry and fatigue, nods and repeats the name of the man with the truck. He will take you to Kismayu, we say, just as we told the others, for nearly every day they come. The camps are there, on the coast. There is food and shelter there, and people who will know how to cure your children of their sores. The man asks if there will be a price for this transportation. We shrug, as if we don’t know. He nods. He understands. Perhaps he will be able to sell his wretched camel. If not, he knows that one night soon, on the cold ground outside the tiny crossroads village of Samaso, they will die. First the children will die, then probably the man, and then the woman. And tomorrow or the day after that, another family will come down from the hills and will cross the dry, hot plain along the rutted road, will stop for the night beside our hut and in the morning will move on to the same fate.

In these years, the early 1980s, most events and processes that have been occurring for millennia continue to occur, some of them silently, slowly, taking place an inch at a time miles below the surface of the earth, others noisily, with smoke and fire, revolution, war and invasion, taking place on the surface. We measure the geological change in millimeters per annum, feel nothing move beneath our feet and conclude, therefore, that nothing has happened. By the same token, when we read in newspapers and hear from the evening news broadcasts that there is revolution in Iran, war in Iraq, foreign soldiers and tanks in Afghanistan, because each new day brings a surfeit of such news, blotting out the news of the day before, news of Israelis in Lebanon replacing accounts of Russians in Afghanistan, Americans in Grenada replacing Israelis in Lebanon, we conclude here, too, that nothing has happened.