Pro Said Samatar
My Dostoyevsky Syndrome: How I
Escaped Being a Self-Hating Somali
/.../ All of the above — from a hellish continent to a humiliating career to a hopeless country to a hapless elite — conspired in a nefarious cabal to saddle me with a crushing load of self-doubt. I hit the depths of a spir- itual low, and hence the looming nightmare of self-hate in the offing.
when I proceeded to conceal my national identity as a Somali. Yes, I variously posed as an Eritrean, an Ethiopian, and a Sudanese; but then I lurched back violently when Eritrea plunged into war and misery, the Ethiopian government started killing university students en masse, and the Sudan lapsed into an interminable racial and religious conflict. I began to wonder what country is left that could serve as a creditable camouflage for my concealment; whereupon, I hit upon Kenya as a reasonable comer for self-hiding. So, I began to claim to be a Masai, on the grounds that of all Kenyans, a Masai is easiest for a Somali to impersonate! For one thing, their physical looks and pastoral lifestyle resemble those of the Somalis to a remarkable degree. For another, no Masai sojourned at my university, making the risk of exposure rather low. Quite confident in reinventing myself as a Masai, I pulled off the shelf a couple of works on the Masai and joyously reread the wonders of Masai life and lore. In this endeavor of happy fraud, I particularly feasted on Joseph Thompson’s account, in the 1880s, of the Masai’s beautifully bucolic life. The only feature of Masai culture that worried me concerned the requirement to confront and kill a lion with a spear single-handedly, as a Masai warrior must in order to earn eligibility for marriage. Still, I relished the description of the life of the last great Lai- bon, or Prophet-chief and Boss-Universal, with his one hundred ador- ing wife-lasses, a realization that served to inflame my sexual cupidity! But another thought accompanied and doused with frigid waters my inflamed libido. I remembered that the consumption of cow blood occupies a key place in Masai culinary arts. This cut against the Quranic injunctions against eating blood, causing the Islamic residue in my makeup to rebel. So, I stopped being a Masai and tried Rwanda (the author of this piece truly did sustain these mental lacerations). Though I was not too crazy about getting mixed up in the Hutu/Tutsi bouts of bloody feuds, I could cover up easily as a Tutsi, the Watutsi being lost Somalis, or at any rate, lost Cushites, and therefore bear a striking physical resemblance to Somalis. I stayed comfortable in my new identity as a Tutsi for a season. Then, disaster. The Ebola mystery, an incurable plague, far deadlier than AIDS, broke out in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, threatening to engulf western Rwanda. The Congo that boasted the dubious distinction of being the birthplace of AIDS, obliged once again to give the world the new gift of Ebola. This, together with the massacres of 1994, made Rwanda not so attractive an adopted country, after all.” ......
the stark difference is so funny
