In Somalia's Shadow

DR. ADEN ISMAIL, a tall, heavyset man whose size and expensive watch marked him out as a qurbachoog, or returnee, took a few steps into his clinic, ducked a slab of broken concrete, and disappeared.

"Careful," he called back. "There could be unexploded mines here."

I followed him over the chewed-up lip of a wall into an imaginary room. Here the roof and two walls had collapsed. A tree grew in a roughly sketched plot of sun. Its shoaling leaves caught the light, a brief green glitter. A squatter had cleared a path through the mess, superimposing his own floor plan on the doctor's older, remembered one. It twisted through the rubble, terminating in little cul-de-sacs filled with plastic bags, laid with cardboard, scattered with shit. "Here is where I delivered the babies. I had a team of nurses and there were ten patients staying at one time," said Ismail, smiling at the memory. "The mothers enjoyed a good rest."

Our visit to the clinic was the doctor's first in many years. During his semi-annual pilgrimages to Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, a breakaway republic in northern Somalia, he usually avoided the scenes of his former life. It was his way of protecting the past. He'd agreed to show me the clinic because the city was changing so quickly and ruins like these were rare now. Somaliland split from the rest of the country in 1991, after a long war of secession, and a shoestring nation-building project was underway.

"This place was on the front line for an entire month," he said. Ismail touched one of the bullet holes that pocked the walls, fingering its petals of broken plaster. He peeled off a small piece and crushed it between his fingers. "The people who were born here live now everywhere in the world." Before the war, his practice was popular among the city's burgeoning middle class, and for nearly a decade, until he fled into exile, eventually settling his own family in Canada, he was one of Somalia's most successful obstetricians.

We stepped outside. A man with a heavy, greying beard approached. Was he interested in the doctor, or me? Ismail was a minor celebrity in his hometown — he gave lectures on the local TV channel — but people had grown used to the well-heeled former refugees who vacationed here, who brought badly needed investment and Western ideas, who lingered in the past and lost themselves in a gratifying nostalgia, as the doctor now did. Journalists, foreigners of any kind, were rare.

The man harangued us with a story about the Somali Army's wartime massacre of civilians, mainly Isaaq, the clan that led the separatist rebellion against Somalia. "The soldiers, they were stopping all of the mothers with their children at that time. In this very place, they stopped a woman with a young child. When they discovered this one was a male, they" — the man began to shout, miming the violent act — "they throw it away into the ground! The lady, she, she, she —"

"You saw this?" said Ismail.

"She, the lady was, she carry the remainings of her child for three days. Three days!"

"It's true," Ismail said, "there was evidence of systematic —"

But the litany continued: "The boys were killed. Babies, women, old men, so many killings. Her relatives were telling me what happened. She went crazy, her baby was dead —"

"Thank you," the doctor said. He shook the man's hand. I shook the man's hand. We walked back to the car. "Twenty years ago that happened," Ismail said, unlocking the doors. "People, they keep the wounds fresh. Somebody's story becomes everybody's story."

People said that a genocide, or something like it, has happened here, and for that reason Somaliland could never reunite with Somalia. The international community disagreed.

ON MY WAY TO HARGEISA, I'd made a point of visiting the Somaliland Mission in London. I struggled to find the office among the fast food shops and off-licenses along Whitechapel Road, and then, arriving late, struggled to be admitted. Office hours were strictly observed, the secretary explained, and no exceptions could be made. After some undignified pleading I was allowed into the tiny front room, warned that visas could not be issued on the spot, and made to wait.

I surveyed the office from a foldout chair. In one corner stood the Somaliland flag, a recent confection that incorporated the Shahadah, the Muslim declaration of the one true god, and a black star meant to symbolize the death of Greater Somalia. On the wall above the secretary's desk was a portrait of the president. Beside me, on what looked like a repurposed bedside table, were strewn old newspapers from Hargeisa. The windows were shut — I assumed to hide the embarrassment of our location, downwind from the kebab-and-fried-chicken takeaways. A homemade sign that said VISA SECTION marked the consul's office door. We couldn't have been further from embassy row.

After a few minutes the consul emerged, grey and odontalgic, and greeted me with a slow shake of the head. "You must get your visa in Addis Ababa," he said.

"But I emailed last week," I replied, trying to sound friendly. I had no plans to linger in the Ethiopian capital. "And I called this morning."

"It is not possible." He spoke through clenched, knifelike teeth; gum disease had unsheathed their roots.

"But your website says I should apply here."

"It is not possible."

"Oh. Well. It's just, I was talking to" — I dropped the name of a Somalilander politician I'd met while researching the trip — "and he said I should see you first."

"It is not possible."

I started to ramble. "The thing is, I have a flight to catch, and an appointment with—"

But the consul was already opening his desk. "You will need to register with the Ministry of Information when you arrive," he said, retrieving a receipt book and stamp pad. "I can only accept cash. Pounds sterling or American dollars."

The bluff was intended, I suppose, to create the appearance of bureaucracy. Nowhere are the neuroses of shaky states more obvious than in their trembling extremities, in outposts of officialdom like this one, and it was here in London, where the government of Somaliland was concentrating most of its diplomatic efforts, that appearances mattered most. The consul couldn't hide the fact that the Mission was a one-man show. He seemed relieved to be done with the pantomime.

We chatted while my journalist visa printed on the inkjet behind his desk. I offered a provocation: By most accounts I'd read, Somaliland was doing fine without the benefit of foreign aid. Was the breakaway republic not better off without international recognition? Of course, what Somalilanders emphatically did not want was to become a token African success story, applauded as the way forward for Somalia as a whole. Reunion with the south was the thing people feared most.

The consul looked at me blandly. "That is one way of analyzing at the situation," he said. Then, after a beat: "You should see the zoo in Minister A—'s backyard."

"Zoo?" I said, trying not to sound diminished by this sudden, astonishing piece of trivia.

"He keeps lions and hyenas. I think he has imported a tiger as well. Ask around. Someone will be able to take you."

"Tigers," I repeated, stupidly.

"Yes, tigers. Well, one tiger." The consul smoothed the visa into my passport with the heel of his fist. "And a family of lions. It is an amazing thing, when you think of it."

EVERY SUMMER THOUSANDS of well-heeled expatriates descend upon Somaliland, lending a certain glamour to the place. SUVs that sit parked in garages most of the year are waxed and polished and toured through the streets. Pretty girls who talk too loudly and wear their hijabs too jauntily wander the markets, clucking at the gaudy stuff on offer. Slouch-bellied men in golf shirts greet their smaller, thinner, shabbier friends, swallowing them with hugs, thumping their backs. Important meetings are held in the ballrooms of the big hotels and new ventures are reported in the local newspapers. Differences of opinion are reported, too, with an undertone of skepticism about the role of returnee politicians and businessmen in the rebuilding of the country. The diaspora newspapers, which publish online and of which there are many — one, pretty much, for every enclave around the world: in Toronto and Minneapolis; in Washington, D.C and London; in Helsinki and Dubai and Melbourne — gossip about who from their community is shaking things up back home. For a few weeks, anything seems possible, and speculation about Somaliland's prospects for international recognition grows bold.

I arrived in Hargeisa on a hot, overcast afternoon in mid-July. The city spread in clusters along the bottom of a grey and weedy valley, loomed over by the mammary silhouettes of the Nassa Hablood Hills. Its defining features were a corridor of sullen government buildings, remote behind sun-bleached walls; the old British colonial barracks; and the glutinous river on whose shifting banks the city stood. Encampments of patchwork tents grew spontaneously in the empty spaces the war had left behind. They alluded to an older way of life: nomadism, now rooted. Newly risen hotels and offices broke the monotony of the khaki cityscape. There was a technical college and a women's hospital, a couple of new mosques and, in the subdivisions further out, rows of bone-white compounds — vacation homes, of a kind. You wouldn't know that fifteen years ago the city was nearly bereft of people, or that twenty years ago it was a smouldering pile of rubble, or that once upon a time this apostate capital was the center of Somali nationalism.

Historically, Somali society was divided along clan lines, with different clans ruling different parts of the territory that today encompasses Somalia, Somaliland, and Djibouti. But colonialism had the effect of unifying the clans, however briefly, against a common enemy. During the colonial era, in the 1940s and 50s, Hargeisa led the double life of a British garrison town and a centre of political and intellectual ferment for its Somali citizens. It was here that Somali political theatre and music were born and from here that the voice of the pan-Somali independence movement, Radio Somali Hargeisa, first issued its broadcasts. At independence, in 1960, Mogadishu was declared the capital of Somalia and Hargeisa relegated to second-city status. For a time, people embraced a national, Somali identity. But clan differences proved too great, and the era of unity was short-lived. When, in the 1980s, the separatist insurgency broke out in the north, President Mohamed Siad Barre deployed the Somali Army to Hargeisa, essentially as an occupying force.

The war began in earnest after a rebel group comprised mainly of the Isaaq clan besieged the city in 1988. In response, the Somali Air Force carpet-bombed Hargeisa, flying mission after mission out of the airport while the army rounded up and massacred fighters and civilians. By the time the rebels pushed Barre's forces out, in 1991, establishing the breakaway republic of Somaliland, sixty or seventy thousand people were dead and the city had been pulverized. The long recovery began. Today, Hargeisa was almost entirely rebuilt. It was Somaliland's meagre showpiece.

Soon after my arrival, I received an invitation to tea from the Ministry of Information. I'd been in the city less than twenty-four hours; I wondered how word of my arrival had spread so fast? Reluctantly, I went. My host, the Head of Press, was an exuberant and unflinching propagandist. We sat down in his tiny office and he lectured me about how Somaliland's case for statehood was airtight. International recognition was forthcoming — had I seen this country? How could it not be? — and in four years, maximum, Somaliland would take its rightful seat in the United Nations. I kept thinking I saw a tremble of irony in his expression. The Head of Press was one of those naturally funny, compulsively charming guys. I couldn't tell whether he placed his faith in the story he was telling, or in his storytelling abilities. When I said I doubted the world would recognize Somaliland before there was peace in the rest of Somalia, he looked so disappointed I thought I'd hurt his feelings. But the conversation recovered. He told me a story about a local politician I'll call Abdulkhadir: "The minister, he was known for the size of his behind. Now, this was not a small behind. It was very big" — here the Head of Press cupped his hands and spread them wide and then wider again to make his point — "and you know, Somalis, we like to give nicknames. If my friend Yusuf has an ugly face, we will call him Handsome Yusuf. If my friend has a limp, we will call him, what, Elegant."

"Wow," I said, not knowing what to do with this piece of information.

"Really! So this minister, Abdulkhadir, he has a very large buttock. And around this time the government begins to import the Toyotas which have a very large boot. Do you understand what I am saying? The people like this boot. The boot is very, how do you say it—"

"Spacious?"

"Spacious. It is very spacious. They say, 'I like this spacious boot. But, hmm, there is a very obvious similarity between the boot of this car and the buttock of our certain minister.' Can you guess how the car is known here? We call it the 'Abdulkhadir.' We say 'Oh, I think I will drive my Abdulkhadir to the market,' or 'Oh, I need to fill my Abdulkhadir with petrol,' or 'Oh, I think I will hire this Abdulkadir from the Ministry of Information!'"

And so I toured the sights in my rented Abdulkhadir. The driver, also supplied by the Ministry, slouched behind the wheel in a state of near-unconsciousness and drove at speeds proportional to his reflexes. We visited the war memorial, the big hotels, the central mosque, the airport, and the iconic currency market, where traders lounged behind massive bricks of Somaliland shillings and Ethiopian birr. The Ministry itself featured one of the best attractions: an old Radio Hargeisa van from which the rebels transmitted separatist propaganda during the war.

The Head of Press tried to foist a translator on me, too, but I already had one. Ahmed Abdi Jama was a nervous, well-meaning man of about fifty, the friend of a friend. He narrated the tour with a mix of factoids (did I know, for example, that Hargeisa sat at an elevation of over 1,300 metres above sea level, or that it was settled in neolithic times?), personal history ("Before I moved to Finland..." was a frequent preface to his anecdotes), and oddly self-thwarting commentary. "You can see it is very good," he said of the University of Hargeisa, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable institution. "For us. But it is not much compared for example to the universities of Finland."

The diaspora presence was plain enough to see. The most successful businesses and expensive hotels were diaspora-owned or -run. These included the national airline, banks, trading companies, gas stations, even market stalls. One of the most prominent expatriate businesses was Dahabshiil, a money wire service which boasted, legitimately, that it could transfer funds from just about anywhere in the world to anywhere in Somaliland, even the remotest village, within 24 hours. Thanks to the sheer size of the diaspora, hundreds of millions of dollars were pumped into the economy through Dahabshiil in the form of these small cash remittances — more than half of the annual GDP.

The diaspora's summer return was a recent phenomenon. For many years they supported the recovery from the security of their adopted homes, remitting money until the situation stabilized. Veteran politicians and intellectuals were first among the former refugees to return from abroad. They helped to negotiate the peace when, in the mid-90s, a short-lived conflict broke out between rival architects of the breakaway republic. By the turn of the present century, a brave few were spending their holidays here.

Today, the returnees were among Somaliland's most fervent supporters and its most active benefactors. They had taken up the cause of international recognition, and with it, recognition of Somali Army's massacres of civilians during the war. They sat in parliament, they invested in business, they lobbied the foreign ministries of their adopted homes. Because diaspora investment dwarfed the national budget (which was rumored to be about $25 million per year), they could, and to an extent did, hold the government to a higher standard of accountability than was usual in Africa. The United Nations Development Program was creating a program to lure engineers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals back to the country on a permanent basis. One of their reports described the diaspora as an "aristocracy." Inevitably, there was tension.

SOMALILAND'S LONG AND UNCERTAIN path to statehood began in the 19th century. During the Scramble for Africa, the European powers invaded the Horn of Africa, eventually conquering the Somali clans and dividing up their territories. The British claimed the north, the Italians claimed the south, and the French claimed a marginal territory in the far northeast. British Somaliland, as present-day Somaliland was then known, occupied a few hundred kilometres of rolling scrubland along the Gulf of Aden, a thin finger of water that separates Africa from the Arabian Peninsula; it was dominated by the Isaaq. Somalia Italia stretched south along the desert coast of the Indian Ocean; it was dominated by the Darod and Hawiye clans. The territories were strategically important but resource-poor. They were governed as protectorates rather than colonies.

Under European rule, the Somalis formulated the ideology of Pan-Somalism, a movement that sought to unite the former clan territories as an ethnic mega-state. And so it was that in 1960, at the beginning of the end of colonial Africa, British Somaliland and Somalia Italia each declared their independence and then merged to form present-day Somalia. It was to be the foundation of an even larger state that would one day incorporate the French territory and parts of Ethiopia and Kenya. The dream of Greater Somalia was never realized.

In 1969, Major General Mohamed Siad Barre, a southerner, staged a military coup and instituted a communist regime allied with the Soviet Union. Obsessed with bringing all Somali regions under his control, Barre embraced Pan-Somalism. Indeed, he pushed the ideology to its logical extreme. An attempt was made to reconcile Islam, the state religion, with Marxism and clans — the powerful and rivalrous family groups that formed the cornerstone of traditional Somali politics — were banned outright. The policy didn't work.

There is a Somali proverb that goes some way to explaining why: "Somalia against the world. My clan against Somalia. My family against my clan. My brother and me against my family. Me against my brother." While clan is not the same thing as ethnicity, its role in Somali society is in many ways analogous. You could argue, for example, that the difference between Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi, two ethnic groups traditionally defined by caste rather than by genetics or language or culture, is hardly greater than that of, say, the Isaaq and Darod, two historically antagonistic clans. Clan identity is deeply rooted, and, as in the case of Rwanda, has led to mass intercommunal violence, if on a smaller scale.

Ultimately, Barre's irredentist ambitions led Somalia into a disastrous war with Ethiopia, another Soviet client state, in 1977. Weakened in defeat and abandoned by the Kremlin, he was drawn into the very clan politics he abjured in an attempt to consolidate his power. The Isaaq and other northern clans were marginalized and formed the Somali National Movement, or SNM, a separatist rebel group in response. The SNM launched its guerrilla insurgency in northern Somalia — the former territory of British Somaliland — and the Barre regime responded with brutal reprisals, poisoning wells and shooting civilians.

Tens of thousands of northerners, mostly Isaaq, were killed, and hundreds of thousands displaced during the four-year war of secession that followed. Much of the population of the north, then about three million people, fled to Ethiopia, settling in refugee camps. Several hundred thousand emigrated abroad. At the time, the enormity of the crisis barely registered with the international media, a fact that rankles Somalilanders even today. As civil war engulfed the rest of Somalia, the former British protectorate withdrew from the conflict, demobilized its rebel forces, overcame a humanitarian crisis, elected a government, and declared independence as the Republic of Somaliland — without any support from the international community. It helped, of course, that the majority of people belonged to a single clan, but the recovery was an impressive achievement that all Somalilanders were proud of. Aid and expertise were supplied by the former refugees who now formed a large and active diaspora in North America, Europe and the Middle East.

Today, people avoided talking about clan. At least the diaspora did. They were cheerful, dogged utopians who called themselves Somalilanders without being able to articulate what, exactly, that meant. Any of them could tell you how it was that their fledgling republic qualified for statehood , yet none could satisfactorily explain what made them different from Somalis without resorting to clan distinctions. So they talked around it. The very idea that a peaceful, relatively liberal democracy could thrive next to the world's longest-standing failed state seemed terribly optimistic. As did the notion that their countrymen, the Somalilanders who never left, would share their enthusiasm for Western culture and post-clan identity. I couldn't shake the impression that the diaspora were talking themselves into something.

BEFORE EMIGRATING TO NORTH AMERICA with his wife and young son; before languishing in an Ethiopian refugee camp; before fleeing Hargeisa on foot and walking across the desert until his feet bled, Dr. Aden Ismail was a prisoner of the Somali Army. An Isaaq, he was arrested after the destruction of his clinic and forced to work at one of the army barracks, patching together wounded soldiers. The rebels had advanced into the city by then, and Hargeisa was the scene of frequent shelling and bombardments. Trapped behind enemy lines, Ismail found himself rooting for the rebels even as he feared that a rebel victory would mean his own inadvertent death.

"I worked almost 24 hours every day for ten days. If I stopped they would kill me," he explained. Somehow — he could barely recall the circumstances, though he remembered walking only at night, to avoid detection — Ismail escaped to one of the SNM outposts, a field hospital near the town of Gedebilay, where he volunteered as a trauma surgeon. His career as an obstetrician was effectively over. At the hospital, which was little more than a few tents hidden under brush, he treated civilians and rebel fighters. Eventually, they were discovered by MiG bombers and everyone was forced to flee.

Ismail wanted to emphasize the scope of the war's psychological toll, how it continued to define Somalilanders, wherever they lived. He used himself as a reluctant example. The round, gray suburban doctor I knew was difficult to square with the gaunt refugee in the photograph he showed me. Taken inside an Ethiopian camp, the photo depicted a haggard man seated with a small child, his son. It is the boy's first birthday. The man looks frail and old, old enough to be the boy's grandfather, though he is only thirty-two or thirty-three. Ismail was in the throes of an untreated thyroid disorder then, and troubled by what, as a trainee psychiatrist a few years later, he would recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

It was easier, he said with typical modesty, to qualify as a psychiatrist than to re-qualify as an OB-GYN. But that wasn't the only reason for the switch when he moved with his family to the US and then to Canada. Ismail and his wife endured frequent nightmares: terrible, vivid horrorscapes. The sound of an airplane passing overhead was enough to cause a panic attack, even in the middle of the day. They sought counselling, but most of the Somalilanders they knew suffered in silence. And if untreated PTSD was a problem within the diaspora, Ismail reasoned, then it would be even worse back home. He had discovered his second calling.

Every other summer, Ismail donated one month of his time and expertise to Hargeisa General Hospital's mental health unit. He closed his practice in London, Ontario, flew to Somaliland, and settled into a house near the hospital grounds. In the afternoons he met with patients, consulted with their families, made diagnoses, prescribed medications. He was keen to show me his work.

"You will see the problem," he said, leading me past the spartan offices where staff and patients loitered. The unit occupied a remote corner of the hospital grounds. Twelve-foot walls squared the complex and divided it in two. The men's ward opened onto a courtyard of weeds and dust and sun. An archipelago of rag-piled mattresses spanned the width of it. On the far side was an L-shaped dormitory, and, nearer us, a patio where patients slept or sat, sloe-eyed, beneath a high tin roof. They wore sour-smelling t-shirts and maccawiis, a traditional wrap favoured by Somali men. A young man saluted us and stood at attention until Ismail, grasping his role in the boy's delusion, ordered him to stand at ease. The boy grinned and returned the baseball cap to his head.

"He thinks he's a rebel fighter. It's a common delusion. His generation grew up on stories about the war. They fixate," said Ismail.

As we approached the dormitory, the atmosphere of benign neglect gave way to an evil smell, a mixture of chemical smoke and human waste. Ash drifted from the foot of the 'L,' where the most serious cases were held. A patient called Abdillahi was calling for a doctor. He had set his clothes and bedding alight. The orderlies doused the flames and piled his belongings in a smouldering mass outside. Stuttering and naked, Abdillahi stabbed a hand through the bars of his cell. Ismail shook it. Words spilled from the young man's mouth in a torrent, as though he'd been waiting his whole life to unburden himself. The doctor interrupted: How long had the CIA been spying on him? Abdillahi wasn't sure. They talked for awhile and the man grew calmer. "Probably bipolar," Ismail said to me. "He believes the American government is persecuting him. I'm told he's admitted to the hospital every few months."

Some patients shuffled towards us, their legs chained at the ankle, the chains streaking the dust. They were curious. The psychiatric unit had no doctors on staff. Somaliland had no mental health professionals at all. The unit functioned as a repository for the mentally ill, the traumatized, and the khat-overdosed, rather than as a treatment centre. "The families provide the chains, to keep them from escaping," said Mustaffa, the manager.

Ismail gave Abdillahi two tablets of chlorpromazine, an antipsychotic, and pencilled his name into an appointment book. "When I come here what I am doing is triage," he said. He expected to see scores of people over the next four weeks, the majority of them outpatients. "A lot of the serious cases that come through here are war veterans, but post-traumatic stress is a problem for everyone."

"That one fought in the war," said Mustaffa. He pointed out a tall, balding man who lingered shyly behind the other patients. The man smiled at us, gratified by our attention. His mouth was a toothless void. Ismail continued: "When I first started coming here, what I saw was a lot of acute mental illness, people dealing with severe trauma. Soldiers, widows, mothers who lost children. Now I see more patients complaining of nightmares, insomnia, anger that they cannot explain." As the situation improved and people returned home from the refugee camps, the long-suppressed trauma of the war bubbled up. By the doctor's own estimate, more than half of the population, locals and diaspora alike, had suffered, or was suffering, from PTSD, which can be mistaken for other, better-known mental health issues such as depression and bipolar disorder. Untreated, the effects can linger for years.

"It's hard to diagnose because the symptoms are diffuse: anger, depression, malaise, insomnia. And it's the tip of the iceberg. Most will never seek help. If they do, they go to a healer. Or they chew khat to make the problem go away." Somali culture understands mental illness as a sickness of the spirit brought on by outside forces. Traditional healers are sought to exorcize djinns and lift curses. To cure, rather than to manage, the illness. The mental health unit was a last resort. The problem was that most patients couldn't be cured and the unit couldn't keep them. All but the cases of violent psychopathy were discharged within a few months to make room for new admissions.

Chlorpromazine, an anti-psychotic from the 1960s, is the only medicine available at the mental health hospital.

I sat in on a consultation with an angry man and his nephew. The man spoke loudly while the nephew, who was twenty and handsome, gazed stuporously at the wall. Ismail listened with interest. The nephew lived in France with his family. They moved from Hargeisa to Marseilles during the war, when he was young. The uncle, who stayed behind, remembered him as a good boy, quiet and polite. As he got older, the boy started smoking marijuana and consorting with "thugs and prostitutes." He dropped out of his lycÃ©e and worked casual jobs, but most of the time he parasitized his family. That was bad enough. Then, about a year ago, the boy grew violent. There were "incidents" with his mother and sisters — the uncle wouldn't elaborate.

At first the family thought it was some kind of cultural sickness. There's a word in Somali for people who grew up in the diaspora: dhaqanelis. It means "person without culture," and it's usually reserved for kids who run afoul of their parents and are dispatched to Somaliland for cultural rehabilitation. The nephew was sent to live with the uncle. He helped out with the uncle's business, even made a few friends. Things were okay. Then he discovered khat and everything, the uncle said, went to hell. The boy stayed up for days, chewing and smoking cigarettes. He started seeing ghosts and talking to himself. Fearing for the safety of his own family, the uncle brought him to the ward.

Chewed in small doses, khat, a psychotropic plant popular across the Horn of Africa, has mild amphetamine effects. The leaves induce a sort of euphoric loquacity in the chewer. Sleeplessness and paranoia are typical side effects. Chronic consumption can cause psychotic breaks. Its use — and abuse — had increased since the end of the war, which Ismail linked to high unemployment rates and unresolved trauma. The doctor asked the boy a few questions. Had he experienced hallucinations before trying khat? What did he remember of the war? 'Yes' or 'no' answers were a struggle. The boy was rendered near-aphasic by the chlorpromazine he'd been given. In the absence of a diagnostician, and for the safety of the staff, all new patients were blanketed with the drug. It was an old-fashioned antipsychotic supplied by the World Health Organization and used in ordinary clinical settings to treat schizophrenia. The side effects would have to wear off before Ismail could assess him.

"Khat can act as a trigger for incipient mental illness," the doctor explained. It was possible, he said, that the boy was headed for a psychotic break and that khat had pushed him over the edge. Or, he was simply lashing out. "You see that, too, in the diaspora. Problems at school, or working. If that is what happened, then it is a straightforward case of psychosis and he will be fine when he stops chewing." Ismail proposed to observe the boy for a few days and then report back to the uncle. The old man nodded grimly and left.

The doctor looked tired. "The families expect a cure. They don't want the stigma of chronic illness."

If the boy proved to be mentally ill, Ismail would fax a prescription for the appropriate medication to his family in France. They would have it filled and mail it back to Hargeisa. It was the best that could be done under the circumstances. Indeed, for patients who had family in countries where sophisticated medicines were readily available, his scrips were their best hope for recovery. But if what Ismail said about the scope of unresolved trauma was true, if mental health facilities were so scarce, and if the stigma against both mental illness and psychiatry were so strong, what hope did most people actually have?

"Our obsession with recognition, with the international community, I think this is our talking cure," he mused. "There is so much stigma. We don't like to talk about what happened to ourselves, so we talk about what happened to other people. We talk about how the world must know us. I don't know. Maybe it is a symptom. Statehood is a way of talking about the war without talking about the war."

ONE AFTERNOON I DROVE OUT to one of the mass graves, near the army barracks with Rashid Sheikh Abdullahi, the head of the War Crimes Commission. He stood now at one of the burial sites, on a promontory above the churned-up riverbed where our car got stuck on the way over. His pink shirt and khaki trousers spattered with pale mud.

"It began in May 1998," he said. "The rainfalls uncovered many skeletons in this area. Maybe 1000, 2000 people. I can't say. If we include graves 500 metres from here, maybe 2500 total. That was the first time the attention of the people turned to the mass graves and mass killings." The commissioner trod through the scrabbly grass. He was a stocky man. He paused for a moment and seemed to count the acacia trees around us. The graves, which dated to the last year of the Somali Army's occupation of Hargeisa, were unmarked.

"Over there, 12 secondary students are buried at the time of the war. The witness was the tractor driver who was forced to dig the grave."

Not long after the first bones were uncovered, the government of Somaliland invited Physicians for Human Rights to excavate the graves. Their team of forensic scientists studied three different sites around Hargeisa, determining that systematic killing had indeed taken place. Some of the victims were tied up; nearly all had been shot. Abdullahi was using their report to guide our walk.

"Why were they killed?" I asked.

"Well, many people were being killed at that time. Mostly civilians, and many soldiers, just because they were from the Isaaq clan. Look," Abdullahi said, pointing at the distant barracks. "There was the headquarters of the Somali army. They were taking rows of ten persons bound together and they were just killing them under that tree. Taking people and killing. There was a kind of ethnic cleansing here." Abdillahi licked his thumb and rubbed at a spot on his shirt.

There was a time when the survivors of the war wanted only to put the conflict behind them. They had other things to worry about: rebuilding their homes and their neighbourhoods, their villages and their cities. As more people returned from the camps and the diaspora made those first visits home, as Somaliland began to resemble a viable independent state, and the stakes grew higher, there was a push to document the past. The families of the disappeared needed answers and the government wanted evidence of the atrocities that could one day be submitted to the International Criminal Court. The Somaliland War Crimes Commission staked out the position that President Barre's campaign against the people of northern Somalia amounted to ethnic cleansing or even, it was hinted, genocide. This fudging of clan and ethnicity was, I thought, a rhetorical flourish, designed to bolster the case for recognition (on the grounds that Somaliland and Somalia had suffered an irreparable break), but it turned out to be one of the many complexities that beset Somalilanders' thinking on the question of identity.

It was a question I returned to again and again. If Somaliland was a colonial fabrication, 'Somalilander' was an utterly modern one. The appellation, with its sonorous noun and unwieldy Saxon suffix, is fittingly clunky, bearing as it does the weight of a people's colonial past and their uncertain future. The term had existed as a sort of catch-all for northerners but only really gained a foothold as a political and cultural identity in the aftermath of the 1988-91 war, emerging from the 'never again' mentality of the survivors and promoted by the founders of the breakaway republic. They equated clan — specifically Isaaq, though other, smaller clans were also persecuted during the war — with ethnicity for the purposes of categorizing the siege of Hargeisa as a crime against humanity, but ultimately they saw clan as an impediment to national unity. So instead they promoted a national identity that depended on the idea that the Somalis — regardless of clan, regardless of geography — are a single people, and the more controversial notion that the Somalis of the north, because of their shared experiences of trauma and migration, and in spite of their clan differences, could together forge ahead as 'Somalilanders.'

And so, with a few a stumbles, they had. Whether or not they agreed on the definition of the word, the Somalilanders I'd met, almost to a person, believed statehood was their right and their future. Demographics played a role in this. The older generation recalled the postcolonial fever-dream that had unified Somalia in the early sixties with a certain wistful nostalgia, but for most people the trauma of the war was the defining moment of their lives. And again, it helped that Somalilanders belonged overwhelmingly to one clan. The Isaaq had suffered the most under the Barre regime and were the first to rise up against it. I met others — members of the Issa and Gadabursi clans — who shared their sense of grievance and their optimism.

Still, the history of modern Somalia was a history of failed states. Somalia was failing now, spectacularly so, just as Greater Somalia failed before it. This was a source of anxiety to Somalilanders. Their nation-building project recalled the hubris of the early 1960s that got them into trouble in the first place. And so, eyeing the chaos to the south, they told themselves stories. Every Somalilander had a theory about what made their situation unique, what set their breakaway republic apart from the failures of the past. Somaliland and Somalilander meant different things to different people. The beginnings of a national identity, one that might some day supersede clan politics, was emerging, but it was fragile. There was no consensus yet. For every returnee who proudly called himself a Somalilander, there were many more people, mostly locals, who couldn't shed their clan identities so easily.

"Watch! The ground is soft," Abdillahi shouted. I'd walked out along the promontory for a better look at a gravesite. He caught up to me. "The rain is always moving things. Floods are coming, and every time they are taking away many evidences that shows the atrocities committed by Siad Barre's regime. This is a problem we are having."

WE WERE ON THE LOOKOUT for khat. My translator, Ahmed Abdi Jama, and his friend Mohamed had invited me to join a khat session. Etiquette dictated that we bring our own supply, plus a gift for our host. In Somaliland, as in every Somali-speaking region, the leaves are spiritual food and societal glue. My friends told me that to understand the people, the culture, the issues of the day, you had to chew. You could find khat on any street, but Mohamed, who was on a mission to chew as much and as often as he could before returning home to Ohio, was being picky.

"See that one?" he said. He pointed out a vendor with a khat leaf painted on the side of his cart. It looked like a frill of parsley. He palmed his scalp, teasing with his long fingers the hair that wisped like ash between them. "No good. Old leaves."

"How can you tell?" I asked. I was keen to try the stuff.

"By the shitty look of his operation." He pinched his lip and scanned the street.

I contemplated the vendor and his cart, and the vendors across the street and their carts. They all looked shitty to me: clumsily muralled, with chickenwire display cases and dirty patio chairs pushed up behind them. The vendors sat alone or with a friend, never more than one, untroubled by the lack of business. They doubled as moneychangers. I had to admit that our guy looked forlorn among them, with his yellowing beard and threadbare djellaba.

"No one is buying. The guy has no connections," Mohamed said. "This whole street, nothing is happening."

We crossed the river into the southern half of the city. The neighbourhoods were empty of traffic. A few men, skinny stragglers, their arms still wet from ablutions, hurried along with their bundles. Every afternoon Somaliland turned its back to the world. The ritual began after midday prayers, and by half past twelve the great majority of men could be found gathered in knots under trees, in the backrooms of shops, in the curtain-drawn parlours of friends' homes. Khat was their muse, opinion their true drug; both were enjoyed lavishly. Politics was the favourite topic. You could expect every man, from the moneychanger to the banker, the labourer to the politician, to have more than a few ideas in his head about how Somaliland should be governed and about how its crisis of recognition should be resolved. This was the Somali anti-siesta: great effort expended in idleness. It was in these sessions that the opinions of the day were formed.

Somalilanders' love affair with khat began hundreds of years ago. The plant is believed to have originated two hundred miles east of Hargeisa, in the highlands of Ethiopia, where it's still grown today. For nearly a millennium the leaves have been transported along what used to be an Arab slaving route, from Harar to Dire Dawa, through what is now Somaliland, and across the Gulf of Aden to the Arabian Peninsula. Its use was tolerated in Somali-speaking regions during colonial rule, and banned in 1983 by Siad Barre, who believed the khat trade was funding the SNM rebels. Over the past fifteen years its popularity had surged. Ninety percent of all men in Somaliland chewed khat. Khat did not grow easily here, so the bulk of the leaves were imported.

We followed the airport road, finally stopping at a vendor Ahmed Abdi Jama knew. The stall looked more permanent than most: three tin walls and a wooden countertop painted yellow. Mohamed was intrigued. "This one they call dirr, it's cheaper," he said, digging into the bins. He brandished two identical bundles: "This one is like beer and this one is like whiskey." A group of strung-out boys looked on, amused, from a mat inside the shack. Their cheeks rolled fatly in their thin faces as they worked the leaves into a pulp. They pursed their lips, jaws muscling, and swallowed the juice. One boy smoked a cigarette.

Ahmed Abdi Jama shook his head. "They should be in school," he said. He was in the habit of addressing imagined objections, ones I never voiced. Ahmed Abdi Jama lived abroad for a few years, long enough to have been impressed by it — he spoke nostalgically of Helsinki — but not long enough, like other returnees, to have formed a critical appreciation. He held Somaliland to an impossible standard that he assumed I shared. People drove badly, he said. The supermarkets were poorly stocked, he said. The men were too idle, he said.

Mohamed was insisting on further distinctions between the higher grades of khat. This bundle, with its dusky pink stems and hard, dark leaves, he said, was like a good Scotch. Mellow at first, with a surprising kick. A Glenmorangie, say. There was the question of how Mohamed knew this, for he claimed not to drink, but it went unasked. We settled on a few bundles of lager, with some whisky thrown in for our host.

There were two rooms at the back of the house with a toilet between them. One was emptied of furniture, bare apart from cushions arrayed on a cheap Persian rug and lit by a long fluorescent bulb. Here a khat session was well underway. The second room was larger. Sofas had been pushed up against three walls and the curtains drawn. They rolled on a breeze from the open windows. Again, a rug, and again, cushions, but more expensive. Khat and sugary drinks were piled on trays around the room and against the fourth wall a wooden bookcase with irregular shelves held photographs of a young family, our host's. The large, middle-aged man who presided over the room, stretched out whale-like on a pillow, looked nothing like the youth in the pictures. The photos were twenty-five years old, taken in Mogadishu and Hargeisa before the war. As introductions were made I tried and failed to imagine what each man would have looked like before the fighting altered the course of his life.

Their ages varied. Hussein was the youngest. He was a local reporter in his late twenties. Mohamed was forty and vague about his profession. The eldest were Ahmed M. and Old Mahmoud, both in their sixties. One was a businessman, the other a retired academic. They embodied the emphatic thinness for which the Somalis are known. A few men had bellies, but theirs was a compact, mesial roundness that only exaggerated the stringiness of their limbs. They wore golf shirts and macawiis and watches that dripped from their wrists.

I tore eagerly into my stash.

"You must take your time," Mohamed said, licking a film of green pulp from the corners of his mouth. His cheeks bulged with leaves.

"You will never sleep again," teased Old Mahmoud. He blew smoke from his nose. The older men were cheerfully dissolute. They seemed to embrace old age as though, having lived through the war, having escaped death, they now shouldered the responsibility of their own demise, which they were bringing about with khat, with cigarettes, with drink. It was to be a slow end: Omar, our host, sipped a can of dealcoholized beer, the best even a well-connected man could do in booze-free Somaliland.

"Don't listen to these guys," said Ahmed M., with a flourish of his teacup.

They were from all over. Some had never left Somaliland, others lived abroad. Ahmed M. had lived all over, running businesses in Africa and the U.S. Old Mahmoud lived in Saudi Arabia and found Africa pleasantly liberal. Khat was illegal in most countries in the West and the Middle East, so holidays were an occasion to enjoy it. Only Ahmed Abdi Jama refrained from the stuff. He had foresworn khat long ago. "Unlike some of my friends here," he explained solemnly, "I am around khat every day. There is no in between. I have to never chew it, or I would chew it all the time."

Everyone agreed that the country was addicted to khat, and everyone but Hussein agreed it should be banned.

"The problem is that what you are chewing right now is the highest source of income for the government," said Ahmed M. Prohibition was out of the question because the government depended on khat for valuable custom and excise taxes, though one politician I'd interviewed admitted that it was probably the single biggest economic issue the country faced, in terms of labour lost and the extraterritorial flow of disposable income.

I told my new friends about the cases of khat psychosis I'd seen at Hargeisa Hospital and floated Dr. Ismail's theory that the spike in its use after the war could be attributed to widespread PTSD.

"Yes!" said Ahmed M.

"What is it, PTSD?" asked Hussein.

Ahmed M., who knew about these sorts of things, took the liberty of explaining.

"Well, I am not sure — I have nightmares," said Hussein.

"You know it was a genocide here," said Mohamed.

"What happened in Somaliland, you cannot call it genocide," said Old Mahmoud.

"It is for the International Criminal Court to decide," said Hussein

I packed fresh leaves into my cheek. Once you worked them into a lather, they tasted okay. Good, even. They were bitter, with a peppery undertone, and snapped easily from the branches. I was really enjoying the ritual of peeling the fleshy stems from the branches. I sipped some Coke. The flavour was terrifically complex. I tasted caramel, vanilla, something medicinal, maybe anise. The khat's amphetamine effect rolled in on euphoric waves. I could feel the energy tumbling around the room and I savoured everything: the taste of the cola, the throb of the sun behind the curtains, the lucid incoherence of the cross-talk. I really, really liked these people.

"That is why the diaspora is so important," Ahmed M. was saying. "You can make Somaliland look and smell like a rose but you need those people who can peddle influence with their governments."

"The problem," said Hussein, gravely, "is that we depend too much on them. Somali culture needs to be protected. Somaliland needs to be protected."

Old Mahmoud agreed. "Socially, we may have problems with people coming with different ways of living." Someone attempted to light a cigarette backwards and Old Mahmoud laughed. His eyes bulged. A vein wormed its way out of his crow's feet.

"The problem," said Ahmed M., "is that we are being held hostage by the situation in Somalia." He enjoyed strong opinions, whether they were his own or borrowed from other sources. His theory, which echoed the theories of most Horn of Africa experts, was that the African Union would never take the necessary first step of recognizing Somaliland's claim to statehood. Member states like Nigeria, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali — half of the A.U., probably — wouldn't risk emboldening separatist movements within their own borders. The push for statehood needed to come from the international community, from powerful countries like the U.S. and U.K. But the risk of lawless Somalia becoming a haven for Islamic terrorism was too great, and Somaliland too geopolitically insignificant, for the big players to make recognition a priority. The U.S. State Department would continue to sponsor secular strongmen who could, in theory at least, stabilize Somalia and who, if they ever won the peace, would demand reunification with Somaliland. And reunification, Old Mahmoud pointed out, would mean another war between north and south.

"We Isaaq, we can never go back," said Hussein.

"I am sorry to say it, but my young friend here is right," said Ahmed M. "'Somalilander' is a pretty word, but this is a place by and for Isaaq. I can say this, and I myself am not Isaaq. Whether you agree what happened was a genocide, or ethnic cleansing, or nothing like that, the fact is that they have lost the most, and they have the most to lose if there is a reunion."

"This is why people come back to help," said Old Mahmoud. "They need a place where their people can be safe."

"War is good," said Ahmed M., grinning, "as long as it continues only in Somalia. That could be ten, twenty, fifty more years."

There would be time, my friends believed, for the people of Somaliland to figure out who they were and what kind of country they wanted; time to change the world's mind about their case for statehood. With so much khat to chew and so many ideas to debate, they needed it.

ON MY LAST DAY in Somaliland I drove into the desert with Dr. Ismail and his old colleague, Dr. Ahmed Askar. It was to be the final stop on Ismail's personal history tour. We visited the field hospital near Gedebilay where, during the war, they received a bloody procession of civilians and rebel fighters. The hospital, what remained of it, spanned a few acres of thin, sun-washed forest — a string of vanishing footpaths, a few clearings. As I followed Ismail and Askar, sidestepping thorny bushes and camel dung, I began to grasp the logic of the place. The clearings had been wards: here, beneath this tree, they had performed triage; there, at the foot of that tree, they'd buried the dead. They lingered over every detail, incredulous, luxuriating in dangers past from the safety of the present.

"At night, when the MiGs were gone, this place became a city of light," Ismail marvelled. "Cooking fires under every tree. What a sight it was."

Askar, who was as short and thin as Ismail was tall and heavy, pried a broken ampoule from the dirt. "The children played in the dark while we worked," he said, scraping at it with his thumbnail. He coughed and spat. "It was a great relief to hear their laughter."

Ismail grasped his forearm. "Do you remember the old man who used to count the cries of the hyenas?"

Askar laughed. "Every night he said to us, 'If it is an odd number, we are going to be okay.' And if there were ten cries, he always heard eleven, even when nobody else could. But we believed him!" The memories of terror and uncertainty were yielding to a pleasurable nostalgia. They were like joshing schoolboys, each trying to outdo the other with his stories of hasty amputations and midnight supply runs fraught with engine trouble. Who was the first to run for cover when the Somali Air Force strafed their makeshift operating room? Who saw the worst cases of gangrene? It had been twenty years; they couldn't agree.

"For me, it was like a bad dream. It was like it never happened," said Ismail. "Being here is a reminder that it is real. When I see everything is being rebuilt, and the past is disappearing, I want to hold on to it."

"The world must know about what happened," said Askar, adopting the familiar tone of citizen-ambassador. "Then we can move on with life."

We said our goodbyes at the taxi park in Gedebilay. I was headed to Addis Ababa. On my way I would pass through the Ogaden — Somali Ethiopia — where there was trouble. The Ogadenis, another Somali clan, were fighting their own, doomed war of secession against the Ethiopian army. They hadn't given up on the old Pan-Somalist dream of uniting the Ogaden with Somalia. I knew from the newspapers that the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a rebel group, had recently stepped up its guerrilla campaign, provoking vicious reprisals, and a mantle of military paranoia settled over the region. The Somalilanders regarded the ONLF as a band of dreamers and criminals, but towards the Ogadenis they felt an estranged kinship. They owed them nothing but they didn't feel right about the way they were being made to suffer, either. No one wanted to talk about it. I anticipated the trip with grim curiosity.

"Be careful," said Askar.

"Watch out," said Ismail.

I promised I would. And so I found myself rattling across plains grey and vast towards the Ethiopian border.

"You are beautiful, no matter what they saaay," sang the taxi driver, trying to make eye contact with the girl in the backseat. He divided his attention between the girl, the road, and the treats arrayed in his lap: khat, a half-litre of Sprite, a packet of cigarettes. His name was Abdurahman. He was young and spoke English with a North American accent. The girl didn't look up. He pretended to receive a text message. "Words can't bri-ing me down," he mumbled. Villages accumulated along the road, a human sediment deposited by the recent flood of cross-border commerce. There were rumours Ethiopia would be the first to recognize Somaliland's claim to independence, but Hargeisa always buzzed with talk of impending statehood. A visit from a Canadian official a few years ago occasioned feverish speculation that the West would throw its weight behind the aspiring republic. Nothing ever materialized. And so the Ethiopians remained Somaliland's closest ally and primary trading partner, even as they oppressed the Ogadenis and periodically invaded Somalia. Horn of Africa politics were nothing if not complicated.

To the north, rubbly fields yielded to pasture land, erupting into mangy hillocks as the landscape emptied out. Cloudshadow streaked the grass like errant cue-strokes on an old billiard table. When a young shepherd dared to steer his flock down the middle of the highway — by now a loose curl of tracks sketched across the green expanse — Abdurahman lost his temper. He stomped the brakes, whipped the door open, grabbed the boy, and kicked him roundly in the ass. The shepherd threw a hurt look over his shoulder as he ran limping after his sheep. One of the stragglers received a brutal kick of its own.

"Boy," Abdurahman said. A cruel appraisal. We drove on. I recognized in him the euphoria of the khat. He savoured everything, even the rancour of his slow-burning argument with a man in the back. When the man thumped the driver's seat with his fist, Abdurahman only grinned and disagreed more loudly. A glimpse, perhaps, of his erstwhile delinquency. I had him pegged for a dhaqanelis. He told me he grew up in the refugee camps across the border and, later, in Canada. He was taking classes at the vocational college in Hargeisa and driving his uncle's taxi for something to do. Recognizing a missed opportunity, he asked us how much I would've paid him to be my translator. He described the Internet business he would someday run, back in Ottawa, and the places he would travel. At one point he tried to steer with his knees, the better to defoliate the khat, but another curve in the road sent us briefly, terrifyingly, into the other lane. Experiment over.

Abdurahman had been living in Hargeisa for nearly a year: "It's amazing, man. They know you're not a local just by the way you walk down the street. The dudes here have a different kind of swagger, you know? But I love this place, it's like a second home to me, know what I'm saying?" I wasn't convinced. He seemed adrift, beset by a deep, undefined hunger that manifested itself physically: in the haggard youthfulness of his face, which pulled at the cheekbones and bibbed around the eyes, in the open parentheses of his bony shoulders. His clothes, probably new and certainly fashionable when he'd arrived, at least by the standards of local kids, looked outmoded, carelessly worn. Abdurahman radiated an aura of anxiety, exhaustion, false cheer. I thought he might be the loneliest person I'd met. Perhaps it was the khat, and this was what acculturation looked like. After all, half the men in Somaliland looked strung-out and underfed by two in the afternoon.

I asked Abdurahman what he remembered of the fighting. "I remember the camp where I lived with my family," he said. "I remember having fun because there was no school, and I remember my uncle going away to fight against Siad Barre. My father and my brothers went to Jijiga and they bought scrap metal. The Ogadenis, they looted our empty houses and sold them back to us, piece by piece. It's weird, but those were happy days."

Born a decade earlier, he would've sought his fortunes with the SNM, a teenage guerrilla fighter like the veterans I'd met in the dried-out settlements beyond the capital. These were men who'd settled into middle age by their early thirties, contented, uncurious men for whom the stretch of desert they'd wrested from the once-mighty dictatorship of Siad Barre and could now call their own, was world enough. One veteran, an engineer at the water sanitation plant in Gedebilay, had shown me the jagged stump of his arm. He was haunted, still, by the ghost of his hand, which sometimes curled into an invisible fist, but the sacrifice, he explained, squinting at my translated question, had been worth it. "We are free," he said, "and that is enough." (Dr. Askar admitted he'd performed the amputation: "You can see the tools we used were not made for people.") Another veteran bore a shrapnel scar that bloomed, caramel-coloured, around his misshapen bicep. Half the muscle was gone and what remained squirmed up his arm like a vine. He'd been at the front line on the outskirts of the capital when his unit was strafed by MiGs. By the time he saw a doctor, the wound was badly infected and the muscle had to be cut away. It was strange, he said, but he'd seldom dreamed about the war, even during combat.

I remembered the words of another veteran I'd met, a rebel-turned-historian called Boobe Yusuf Duale: "Nobody has given us enormous amounts of money to disarm our people or hold elections. The idea has been ours and the resources has been ours. The local people, the diaspora. We need foreign aid. We need it. But it would have ruined us." He was right: Somaliland needed time to grow without it. Statehood might provide a salve to the wounds people carried with them, and it might build roads and schools, but something fragile and incredibly important would be lost. Better, for now, that the breakaway republic depended a little too much on the strivers and the dreamers, the qorpachoog and the dhaqanelis, however unwelcome their influence sometimes was, than on an international community that had no stake in its future. Better that Somaliland remained a hardscrabble work-in-progress.

The mood was light as the taxi pulled into the border town of Wachaale. We arrived in time for a football match between local teams. The khat vendors had locked up their stalls and a moneychanger was bagging huge, filthy bricks of currency in a plastic sheet. The roads were gutted, the day's rain filled the potholes. A yellow froth scummed the puddles. But the pitch, around which a crowd began to form, was striking: a neat white grid laid over manicured grass. The players, too, in their immaculate kits, green and black, red and gold. I wanted to stay for the game but I had too far to go.

I said goodbye to Abdurahman (he tried to sell me his iPod, settled for my email address) and hired a wheelbarrow-boy to port my bag across the border. The Ethiopian customs officer was an elegant man in his thirties, better dressed, in his shirt and tie, than he probably needed to be, managing a provincial outpost like this one. Pasted to the filing cabinet behind his desk was a photo of two little girls, their hair in plaits, giggling.

"Why did you go to Somaliland?"

"Tourism," I said, hopefully.

"Moment." The customs officer stepped into the back room.

From my seat against the wall I watched him consult with a man who lay curled around a bowl of steaming wat on the floor. The soles of his feet were cracked. I stepped outside. Past the low wooden houses, with their bare, churned-up gardens, a pack of ruderal children chased a soccer ball. Locals wandered in no man's land.

We left Wachaale at dusk. Everyone was anxious to move on before dark, and there was a fight for the last seats. Inside the bus the women held their children close and the men pretended to sleep. Outside a storm was gathering. Bean fields swished under a hard, crystalline sky. Then a roadblock, manned by Ethiopian soldiers. They were fit, well-equipped, their expressions grim. We stepped off the bus into wind. Distant clouds drifted across the sky like a smack of luminous jellyfish, aswim in spectral light. Lightning tentacled from their blackening underbellies.

The women lined up first, documents in hand, and they were searched while the men looked on in silence. The soldier tasked with the pat-downs was careful, almost deferential. Old and young, slender and stooped, the women cut austere figures. Their dresses — flickering yellows, reds, turquoises, purples — bled into the dusk, a mess of colour expressing what their inscrutable faces did not. I was taken aback by their beauty. So, I think, was the soldier. A pageant of ghosts. As they climbed back onto the bus they were apparitions become flesh once more: mothers nursing bug-eyed infants, old women minding arithritic joints.

The men were frisked and shoved. A soldier climbed atop the bus and made the conductor pick through the luggage. He was on the lookout for arms coming across the border to supply the Ogadeni rebels. "This is yours?" the soldier called down at me, tugging at one of my bags. I nodded. He gestured for the key. He rooted through toiletries, clothes, notebooks.

Half an hour later the storm was upon us. I watched my reflection float just beyond the window, disfigured by the rain. People were falling asleep. I thought about my wife, how in the heat of the Toronto summer we drag a mattress downstairs and sleep on the floor. Our own little island. The hiss of summer rain and the relief it brings. The sound of her feet peeling from the hardwood as she rises, an hour before I do, to wash and dress for work. It was the first time I'd thought of home in awhile.

The sky flinched and there it was: the second roadblock. A man with dreadlocks and a kerchief wrapped around his face boarded the bus while another guarded the door. These weren't soldiers. If their masks didn't give them away, their equipment did. A ragged satchel and an old Kalashnikov hung from the man's back, the crisscrossed straps burrowing into his chest. There wasn't the same alienated calm inside the bus this time. I hoped we'd be leaving the checkpoint with our belongings. The rebel strode down the aisle, stopping halfway to loosen the kerchief. Something caught his attention — his own disembodied face, suddenly strange? — and he stared out the window. His long fingers caressed a seatback. He was a little younger than Abdurahman, about twenty, and in that instant reminded me of him. The same yearning look, the fuzziness around the edges. But it passed when he shook his reverie, and anyway the comparison was probably fanciful: there was a look of real impoverishment to him. He was counting us with his eyes.

The rebel spoke to the conductor in hushed Somali and the conductor handed over a wad of bills. I guessed now that such contingencies accounted for the higher nighttime fare. The rebel stepped off the bus and we pulled away. For awhile no one spoke. Then a cellphone flared in someone's hand, illuminating a row of weary faces. Somali faces. A murmur issued from the broken silence and drifted through the bus. Rain struck the roof and settled into a thrum. Again the small talk dissolved into silence. In the distance I could see Jijiga, a smear of light along an invisible horizon. In the foreground, another roadblock.

*Note: An abridged version of this story appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 2012). The final section was published in a slightly different version as a standalone essay in Descant Magazine.

How a determined group of rebels, refugees, and diasporans is building a democracy in the shadow of the world's longest-running failed state. A dispatch from Somaliland, Africa's best-kept secret. BY TYLER STIEM