The Gardener of Villa Somalia

Posted by Jon Lee Anderson

While reporting my recent Letter from Mogadishu, I stayed at the presidential compound, Villa Somalia. Sheikh Ahmed Mursal, the chief gardener, gave me a tour of the grounds.

Sheikh Ahmed started working at Villa Somalia in the late fifties, when the Italians were still in charge. He had only recently come to Mogadishu from the south. He marvelled at the sight of Somalis wearing Western clothes and drinking tea with Europeans at the legendary Croce del Sud café, in the city center next to the great cathedral, which was blown up in 1992. “In my village, only the Europeans dressed like that. In my village, we couldn’t even speak to Europeans.”

Sheikh Ahmed is now a limber, straight-backed man of seventy-five, with a fulsome hennaed beard. On the day we spoke, he wore a white skullcap, a long red shirt, and loose pantaloons.

After a light morning rain, the sky was overcast. A humid breeze blew. Sheikh Ahmed rattled off the names of trees and shrubs in half-remembered Italian. A yellow, bell-shaped flower on a tree was a “campanelli yalo”; another tree, its branches thorned and festooned with beanlike pods, was an “anganelli.” There were also some frangipani trees, and a false tamarind that he called simply “arbol indio,” or Indian tree. He had also planted edible greens, tomatoes, and bananas under the shade trees, and some yellow crotons—“croto amarelo.” In the old days, there had been animals, too: monkeys and antelope, a caged lion and tiger, and a giraffe that wandered freely around the grounds.

He walked me around a plaza laid in white, blue, and ochre terrazzo tiles around a decorative flowerbed and a white flagpole. From it hung Somalia’s flag, a simple five-pointed white star on a blue field. Sheikh Ahmed Mursal explained that this was where Somalia’s Independence Day had been celebrated in 1960, and every other great occasion of state since, including presidential inaugurations and visits by foreign heads of state. He pointed to a large shade tree under which foreign dignitaries would sit, and another spot where musicians played.

We were standing next to the guest house, a white, sixties-era mansion made of concrete and glass. I had been given the V.I.P. suite, a beat-up but spacious apartment with its own balcony. I knew that I was receiving special treatment; senior government ministers and presidential advisers were sleeping two and three to a room.

Sheikh Ahmed recalled that the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada had stayed in my suite. “We welcomed him well,” he said. “We loved him because he was an African president.” Sheikh Ahmed liked working for Major General Mohamed Siad Barre, Somalia’s dictator from 1969 until 1991. “I watched him escape out there,” Sheikh Ahmed said, pointing to the front gate. He then indicated a stand of trees at the opposite end of the compound: “Thirty minutes [later], his enemies entered from over there.” Of all of Somalia’s presidents, Siad Barre had taken the most interest in the garden, sometimes bringing back seeds from abroad for Sheikh Ahmed.

Two thin, robed women approached us. They had been cleaners at Villa Somalia but had been thrown out during the last presidential changeover and were now unemployed. They blamed Sheikh Ahmed for their predicament. One complained to me, “He has brought his own people here and is taking care only of them. We are out, and we are not getting anything.” They asked for their old jobs back. Sheikh Ahmed looked down at his feet. Occasionally, he glanced up, staring stonily back, as if from a great distance. Eventually, their arguments exhausted, they retreated.

Sheikh Ahmed said that the women were from a sub-clan favored by the warlord General Mohamed Farah Aidid, who had seized power at the height of the civil war. After Aidid lost control of Villa Somalia, the women had been displaced. “They always come to Villa Somalia,” my interpreter, a presidential aide called Hussein, explained. “They have come back and been kicked out again by every president for the past several years.” Hussein shrugged. In Somalia’s society of clans and sub-clans, people look after their own.

Sheikh Ahmed has a sizeable brood of his own—on his own word, no fewer than thirty-five children, “praise be to God,” and his current wife, his twelfth, is now pregnant. “The whole clan is one hundred and ninety-five, including grandchildren,” Sheikh Ahmed said proudly. “And not one of my children has ever carried a gun. Everything I have has come from gardening, from trees and flowers.” He had seen to it that his children were educated; one son had been sent to Finland, another to the United Kingdom—both popular destinations for the Somali diaspora, along with Nairobi, Oslo, and Minneapolis.

Eyeing my notepad, Sheikh Ahmed instructed: “I want you to hear what I have to say, and I want you to write this down. I am an old man and I have worked a long time, and I am sad my country is in this state. I wish I had a country that could reward its best citizens. If my country were not at war, I would have retired by now; I would have received my reward, because I have worked hard. I never harmed anyone. I raised my children properly, and they have never harmed anybody, either. So I wait for this weak state to give me my reward, so I can go home.”