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WORK TITLE: The Mayor of Mogadishu
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.andrew-harding.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
http://www.andrew-harding.com/about/ * http://www.janklowandnesbit.co.uk/andrew-harding
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: three sons.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Freelance journalist; journalist for IRN, NBC Radio, Monitor Radio, FSN, Evening Standard, Guardian, and Economist; BBC News, journalist, 1994-.
AWARDS:Britain’s Foreign Press Association; Bayeux War Correspondents Awards; Monte Carlo Television Festival; Peabody Award, 2004; Amnesty Human Rights award, 2006; British Foreign Press Award; Prix Bayeux for War Reporting; Emmy Award, 2014.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Andrew Harding is a British journalist and one of the BBC’s most experienced foreign correspondents who has reported from many locations around the world, such as Moscow, Tbilisi, Nairobi, Singapore, Bangkok, and Johannesburg. Covering wars, conflicts, and parliamentary rebellion in Moscow, Chechnya, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sudan, Liberia, and others, he has published news reports for Guardian, Economist, and BBC News. In 2008, he became the BBC’s Africa correspondent and moved to Johannesburg with his family. Harding has a popular BBC blog and nearly 100,000 Twitter followers. He has won numerous awards including an Emmy, Bayeux War Correspondents Awards, and prizes from Amnesty International and Britain’s Foreign Press Association.
The Mayor of Mogadishu
In 2000, Harding visited Somalia and reported on the collapse and rebirth of Somalia’s capital Mogadishu. He met a man named Tarzan who told him his story, which inspired Harding’s book The Mayor of Mogadishu: A Story of Chaos and Redemption in the Ruins of Somalia. Harding said that he liked books that give a sense of the arc of a person’s whole life. Named “One of Book Concierge’s Best Books of 2016,” the book follows the life of Mohamoud “Tarzan” Nur, who was born into poverty and abandoned in a state orphanage when the country was under British rule. In 1960, Somalia gained its independence. Nur grew up to become Mayor of Somalia’s capital city.
As a youth, Nur was a street brawler and activist known for his fighting skills. But he rose above his beginnings and became a civil engineer and successful businessman in Saudi Arabia and London. When Somalia descended into civil war, he took his young family to the safety of north London where he lived for twenty years. In 2010, Nur returned to the ruins of the city controlled by Islamist militants of Al Shabab and was appointed mayor by the country’s transitional government. As mayor, Nur became a symbol of hope to some, but to others, a thug who succumbed to corruption and clan rivalries. A new federal constitution was established in 2012, and political violence declined. However, in 2014, Nur was ousted, due to a backlash against the diaspora and mudslinging by rival politicians.
In an interview with Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio, Harding explained his inspiration for writing the book: “What I wanted to do with its story was find somebody who could remind people of here’s a country that was once going somewhere better and I think allows people to kind of remember that and to celebrate that and, in a sense, to respect the nostalgia of so many of the Somalis I’ve met in the diaspora who feel like those days have been forgotten completely.”
“Harding’s stunning book relates the country’s recent history through the perspective of one man. The result is great storytelling by a master reporter,” according to Nicolas van de Walle in Foreign Affairs. Van de Walle added that Harding never whitewashes Nur’s faults and reveals some shady episodes of Nur’s past. Despite his flaws, Nur became a symbol of optimism and resilience. Praising the book for being “a fluid, sympathetic journalistic foray into the tumultuous history of Somalia” as seen through an intriguing impresario and activist, a writer for Kirkus Reviews called the book “A beautifully rendered narrative and characterization portrays the soul of a country few Westerners truly understand.”
“Harding skillfully evokes the bifurcated existence of the diaspora community, seeking to build new lives yet drawn back psychologically to their homeland and shadowed by its conflicts,” according to New York Times Online reviewer Joshua Hammer. He added: “As Harding’s fine book makes clear, morally compromised figures like Nur may be the best one can hope for in a country desperately short of heroes.” A writer in New African, said the book was an inspirational story of survival and “a compelling examination of what it means to lose a country and then to reclaim it.”
Constitutionalism and Legal Change in Myanmar
In 2017, Harding coedited with Khin Khin Oo the book Constitutionalism and Legal Change in Myanmar. The editors trace the creation, adoption, and revision of Myanmar’s constitution. In an effort toward governmental reform, the country wrote a constitution in 2008 that was criticized for its emphasis on the role of the military. Nevertheless, it was a step toward a constitutional government and law reform. Opposition to the constitution and calls for a new one were led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. A review process was promised before elections in 2015.
An obstacle to reform is the constitution’s rigidity and inability to keep up with rapid changes in society, rule of law, human rights issues, and multi-party democracy. Changes are sought in the areas of the presidency, territorial governance, status of minorities, freedom of religion, civil liberties, courts and justice, and the electoral system.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Foreign Affairs, March-April 2017, Nicolas van de Walle, review of The Mayor of Mogadishu: A Story of Chaos and Redemption in the Ruins of Somalia, p. 189.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of The Mayor of Mogadishu.
New African, October 2016, review of The Mayor of Mogadishu.
ONLINE
Andrew Harding Website, http://www.andrew-harding.com/ (August 1, 2017), author profile.
National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/ (November 28, 2016), Steve Inskeep, author interview.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (January 6, 2017), Joshua Hammer, review of The Mayor of Mogadishu.*
Andrew Harding
Andrew Harding is one of the BBC’s most experienced foreign correspondents, having spent the last 23 years abroad reporting on some of the most momentous events in recent world history. He lived in and reported from Russia, Kenya and Singapore before moving to Johannesburg in 2008 to become the BBC’s Africa correspondent. He has covered the wars in Ivory Coast, Mali, and most recently, the Central African Republic, and made frequent trips to Somalia. He has a popular BBC blog and almost 100,000 Twitter followers – most recently drawn to his courtroom reports from the Oscar Pistorius trial. Over the years Andrew Harding’s journalism has been nominated for many international awards. He has won prizes from Britain’s Foreign Press Association, the Bayeux War Correspondents Awards, and Amnesty International.
Andrew Harding is a British journalist and author. He has been living and working abroad as a foreign correspondent for the past 25 years. Since 1994 he has been working for BBC News.
He began his career in Moscow in 1991 as a freelancer, working for IRN, NBC Radio, Monitor Radio, FSN, The Evening Standard and later for The Guardian and The Economist. Since then he has lived in Tbilisi, Nairobi, Singapore, Bangkok, and for the past 7 years in Johannesburg. He was an expat child, which may explain the itch to travel. He is married with three teenaged sons.
Andrew has covered many International events, from the end of the Soviet Union and Russia's parliamentary rebellion to the Asian tsunami and west Africa's Ebola outbreak. By accident, rather than design, much of his work has been in conflict zones - in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Abkhazia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Burma, Darfur, DR Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, South Sudan, Cote D'Ivoire, CAR, Burundi, Uganda, Libya and elsewhere.
Andrew has been visiting Somalia since 2000, and was in Mogadishu during the height of the battle against the Islamist militants of Al Shabab and during the famine of 2011. He is one of the very few foreign journalists to have travelled into territory controlled by Al Shabab and met their commanders, or to have visited (twice) the pirate town of Eyl.
Awards
Andrew has won numerous awards for his journalism. In 2014 his coverage of the war in the Central African Republic won an Emmy in New York, and two awards at the Monte Carlo Television Festival. His reporting from Burma won an Amnesty Human Rights award in 2006. In 2004 he won a share of a Peabody Award for the BBC's coverage of Darfur, and his work from northern Uganda won him a British Foreign Press Award and a Prix Bayeux for War Reporting.
'Mayor Of Mogadishu': Symbol Of Hope Or Divisive Figure?
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November 28, 20165:01 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Steve Inskeep talks to the BBC's Andrew Harding about his book: The Mayor of Mogadishu. It's a look at Somalia's modern history through the life story of one of its most controversial politicians.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Mogadishu, Somalia, the city once synonymous with chaos, is slightly more functional than it used to be. And one reason may be the man we'll hear about next. He was mayor of Mogadishu from 2010 to 2014. Mohamoud Tarzan Nur was on this program a few years ago. Yes, Tarzan, that's his nickname. He spoke of his ambitions back in 2012.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
MOHAMOUD NUR: Mogadishu used to be one of the most beautiful cities in Africa, and still, we can make it like that.
INSKEEP: Now, the mayor of Mogadishu is the subject of a biography called "The Mayor Of Mogadishu." The book is by Andrew Harding, who's a correspondent for the BBC based in Johannesburg. Welcome to the program, sir.
ANDREW HARDING: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: What's Tarzan Nur like when you meet him?
HARDING: Well, the first time I met him was in pretty unusual circumstances. Mogadishu was at rock bottom in 2010. It was about to experience a famine. The militants of al-Shabab controlled almost all of the city and almost all of the country. And there was this little pocket of stability, you might say, right by the beach in the center of town. And it was being guarded by thousands of African Union peacekeepers. It was this little oasis where dozens of members of the diaspora were coming back to try to nudge their country back to stability.
And I walked under gunfire. In fact, I ran under gunfire into Villa Somalia, this headquarters of the new government. Everyone looked terrified except for this one man who walked up to me like he was on summer holiday and said, I'm the mayor of Mogadishu. Welcome to my city. And it was Tarzan, and he jumped out at me as this guy with this extraordinary courage.
INSKEEP: Where's he from? What's his early story?
HARDING: Well, the interesting thing there is almost the very first thing he told me when I started to think maybe I could write a book about this guy was a lie. He told me he'd been born in Mogadishu in room 18 of a beautiful old Italian hospital right by the beach side. And when I called up his relatives, they kind of went, well, that's not strictly true. The truth, it turned out, was that he was born under a tree inside what was technically Ethiopia.
INSKEEP: Oh, so on the border between the two countries, OK.
HARDING: Exactly. He was born into a very poor, nomadic family, and during a famine, his mother was dying. His brothers were dying. He was dying. The father had already died, and an aunt was summoned. And there was this kind of "Sophie's Choice" moment where the mother had to select two kids to basically give to the aunt to give the rest of the family some chance of surviving. Tarzan and his younger brother were eventually chosen. And that was the moment his life changed because he was brought to Mogadishu, dropped off in a Dickensian orphanage in 1960 just as Somalia was gaining independence and just as this beautiful country was starting to really become the jewel of, well, you might even say Africa.
INSKEEP: Wow, what was it like in the 1960s?
HARDING: Well, you've got to picture this very cosmopolitan small town that was very influenced by its Italian colonizers. So people would walk along the beach after their siestas. They'd go and have a macchiato or a cappuccino, and they would go to open-air cinemas. I remember Tarzan telling me how he and his girlfriend then would walk along the beach and they'd be arguing about whether they'd go and watch a Fellini film at one cinema or perhaps the latest American Western at another.
INSKEEP: How did it fall apart?
HARDING: Well, there are many fingers pointing at an awful lot of people for that. I mean, there was the Cold War. They were caught up in the battle between the United States and the Soviet Union. And then there was the clan rivalries that were always lurking in the background, and they exploded when there became a political vacuum when the dictator Siad Barre clung on too long until he was forced out and was replaced by warlords and by nearly 25 years of anarchy.
INSKEEP: So there was this golden age of Mogadishu that began to fall apart as the country fell apart. There was civil war. The government collapsed, and for much of this time, Tarzan Nur is gone. He went off to Saudi Arabia, went off to London. What brought him back, then, in more recent years?
HARDING: Well, when you ask him that, he says rather grandly, well, I was the leader of the diaspora. And what he means is the diaspora tried to come up with ways to use their education and so on abroad to breathe life back into their country. And by 2010, a new transitional government was formed. And Tarzan was invited back to be the mayor of Mogadishu. And of course, in a way, he was the only one with a serious job. All the others were pretending to be ministers and prime ministers because they didn't have their own budgets. They didn't have any country to rule. So Tarzan was this one man who had a few city blocks where he could experiment and make a difference. And he got to work clearing away the rubbish, putting up street lighting at night.
INSKEEP: I love hearing you say this because there are so many government officials that people in the public aren't quite sure what they do but a mayor you know and a mayor anywhere in the world is expected to deliver. People know if the trash gets picked up or not. That's the position you're saying he was in in Mogadishu.
HARDING: Exactly. And he was lucky. There was a big push against al-Shabab, and so the rest of the city soon fell under the control of this new government. And Tarzan had more influence and more power and slowly more and more enemies, too.
INSKEEP: What sort of enemies?
HARDING: Some of it was clan rivalries. Some of it was mud being thrown at him, and some of it may be true. I mean, there were a lot of allegations of corruption against him. He vigorously denied that and continues to deny it. But a lot of that mud seemed to stick, not least in a country where it's very hard to prove anything. I mean, there are no courts still. There are no credible institutions that people trust.
INSKEEP: So what does Tarzan's story - Tarzan Nur - tell you about the arc of this country?
HARDING: Well, what I wanted to do with its story was find somebody who could remind people of here's a country that was once going somewhere better and I think allows people to kind of remember that and to celebrate that and, in a sense, to respect the nostalgia of so many of the Somalis I've met in the diaspora who feel like those days have been forgotten completely.
INSKEEP: Would you tell me one more thing? Why is his nickname Tarzan?
HARDING: (Laughter) Well, let me tell you about a morning at this Dickensian orphanage. Mohamoud, as he was then, jumped out of his window and swung on the branch of a tree just in his shorts, at which point the teacher came round the corner, looked out the window and saw this skinny little boy in his shorts swinging from a tree. And so he said, hey, Tarzan, get down from there. And in an oral culture like Somalia, nicknames are everything. And so Tarzan rather clung to his like somebody with a new passport, if you like.
INSKEEP: Boundary pusher from the very beginning then.
HARDING: Exactly. And a mythmaker, if you like, somebody who wants to reinvent himself.
INSKEEP: Andrew Harding is the author of "The Mayor Of Mogadishu." Thanks very much.
HARDING: Thank you.
Africa
Nicolas van de Walle
Foreign Affairs. 96.2 (March-April 2017): p189.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org
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The Mayor of Mogadishu: A Story of Chaos and Redemption in the Ruins of Somalia
BY ANDREW HARDING. St. Martin's Press, 2016, 304 pp.
With the end of the Islamist militia al Shabab's control of Mogadishu in 2011, the establishment of a new federal constitution in 2012, and the significant decline in political violence since then, Somalia seems as close as it ever has been to escaping the bloodshed and chaos that have plagued it for so long. Harding's stunning book relates the country's recent history through the perspective of one man. The result is great storytelling by a master reporter. Mohamud "Tarzan" Nur was born into rural poverty before Somalia won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1960. He was brought up in a bleak orphanage in Mogadishu and spent his childhood as a street urchin respected for his fighting skills. But he grew up to become a civil engineer and successful businessman, first in Saudi Arabia and later in London. In 2010, he returned to Somalia after the country's transitional government appointed him mayor of Mogadishu. At its strongest, Harding's portrait of him resembles a Somali version of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield; the passages evoking 1960s street life in Mogadishu alone make the book worth reading. Harding never whitewashes Nur's faults, giving voice to some of his detractors and pointing to a few shady episodes that have dogged him. But Harding renders Nur as a symbol of the optimism and resilience that Somalis have demonstrated even in the face of their country's collapse. By the end of the book, most readers will find themselves rooting for Nur, Mogadishu, and Somalia.
Hope among the horror; Somalia
The Economist. 421.9016 (Nov. 19, 2016): p72(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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Seeing light through the cracks
A Somali Londoner defiantly returns to his homeland
THE brutal term "failed state" was almost invented for Somalia. Since 1991, when its military dictator was overthrown, it has had no government that fully controls the country and no election worthy of the name. A fanatical jihadist movement known as al-Shabab ("the Youth") still dominates much of the countryside and regularly murders bigwigs and blows up hotels and restaurants in Mogadishu, the seaside capital that was once an Italian colonial jewel. Famine, terrorism, corruption and clan factionalism have prevailed. A swathe of Somalia's people--2m out of 12m, some say--has fled abroad.
Amid this remorseless gloom, however, Andrew Harding, one of the BBC's most intrepid and empathetic journalists, who has been visiting the country since 2000, has chronicled the extraordinarily uplifting life of one Somali, Mohamud Nur, nicknamed Tarzan. Dumped as a child in an orphanage in Mogadishu, he later made good in Saudi Arabia and then London, and returned to Somalia in 2010 to become the capital's dynamic mayor. According to Mr Harding, Tarzan's courage, inventiveness and resilience typify the finest qualities of the Somali people. It would be wrong, he insists, to give up hope.
Yet it is hard, despite the best efforts of Tarzan and his BBC booster, to be optimistic. Perhaps the biggest reason for despair is the Somali clan imbroglio, which has long been a recipe for internecine division. Mr Harding quotes an old Somali proverb:
Me and my clan against the world;Me and my family against my clan;Me and my brother against my family;Me against my brother.
In Tarzan's case, though he hails from a tiny sprig of one of the big four clans, he was endlessly tripped up by envious rivals, often stirred up by a sense of clannish competition. Somalis as a whole are homogenous, speaking the same language and sharing one religion and culture. Yet the extraordinarily intricate web of clans can lethally "divide and destroy".
Another source of division, documented by Mr Harding through the prism of Tarzan's family, is the resentment felt towards the scattered Somali diaspora, especially when its members return home (even though remittances are crucial to the survival of many of those who have stayed behind). Tarzan's wife and six children were by no means thrilled to come back after two decades in London. Mr Harding poignantly describes the churning of emotions that many migrants (not just Somalis) experience as they are tossed and tugged between competing cultures. Tarzan's wife Shamis talks of "being marooned between two identities".
Though the violence that runs like a thread through every aspect of life in Mogadishu is usually attributed to al-Shabab, Mr Harding makes it clear that it is also endemic among those who are meant to be jointly opposed to the jihadists. Mogadishu, says Tarzan, is "a city of sharks". Business rivals are liable to bump each other off--and blame al-Shabab.
Another twist, in this tangle of suspicion, is that the differences between al-Shabab and the beleaguered new establishment to which Tarzan belongs are often quite narrow. People change sides. Cousins, even brothers, fight on opposing sides. A close friend of Tarzan's was killed by a cousin's suicide-bombing daughter. His own cousin returned from America to join al-Shabab--and then switched sides again. "If you see him, if he comes close to my house, shoot him," Tarzan told his guards. They were later reconciled, more or less.
After four topsy-turvy years Tarzan was bounced out of his job. His courage and dynamism were undisputed. But he also faced envy-driven charges of malfeasance and thuggishness, which the author, who clearly admires his subject, leaves studiously unanswered. Whereas Shamis apparently flits between a business in Dubai and her old home in north London, where most of the couple's children still reside, Tarzan has hunkered down in Mogadishu, perhaps poised to bid for the presidency in the upcoming indirect election.
"Somalia has slowly begun to make measurable progress," writes Mr Harding in a final, doggedly optimistic passage. "Piracy has almost stopped. Al-Shabab controls much less territory, there is oil offshore, a flourishing livestock industry, and a talented and wealthy diaspora. And yet the politics are still dangerously messy, fuelled by the greed of unaccountable politicians. This may no longer be a 'failed state', but the jigsaw is still in pieces." You can say that again.
The Mayor of Mogadishu: A Story of Chaos and Redemption in the Ruins of Somalia.
By Andrew Harding.
Andrew Harding: THE MAYOR OF MOGADISHU
Kirkus Reviews. (Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Andrew Harding THE MAYOR OF MOGADISHU St. Martin's (Adult Nonfiction) 26.99 ISBN: 978-1-250-07234-4
A fluid, sympathetic journalistic foray into the tumultuous history of Somalia as lived by an intriguing impresario and activist.Riven over the decades by clan divisions, famine, military coups, dictatorship, and terror by the jihadi group Al-Shabaab, Somalia has seen much of its population displaced and traumatized and only now returning to some peace and stability. In his engaging biography of one unlikely local hero, Mohamud Tarzan Nur, Johannesburg-based journalist Harding follows the fortunes of one family of exiles who have returned to the war-scarred capital of Mogadishu to stick it out and reclaim their city from a horrible legacy of civil war. With elegant descriptions, Harding brings this East African coastal country to vivid life, depicting a sun-drenched pearl of the Indian Ocean made up of tall, slender nomads whom he found impossibly, jaw-droppingly resilient in the face of decades of hardship and violence. The author hones in on Nur, who was born to a poor mother, fatherless, raised in an orphanage, found some outlet as a youth in basketball, and was educated largely by his wits. His outspokenness and the Somalian war with Ethiopia over the neighboring Ogaden region prompted him first to seek employment in Saudi Arabia. His bride, Shamis, followed for love, and the couple had six children, whom Shamis mostly raised by herself after seeking asylum in London without her husband. The family eventually returned to their homeland in 2010 when the Al-Shabaab terrorist group finally left the city. Courageouslyor foolishly, as Harding suggestsNur accepted the dangerous job of mayor and proceeded to try to infuse the destroyed city with his jaunty brand of optimism. While corruption still prevails, Harding reveals enormous goodwill in the beleaguered people who have returned to rebuild their beloved country. A beautifully rendered narrative and characterization portrays the soul of a country few Westerners truly understand.
The Mayor of Mogadishu!
New African. .565 (Oct. 2016): p102.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 IC Publications Ltd.
http://www.africasia.com/icpubs
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THE MAYOR OF MOGADISHU!
BY ANDREW HARDING
20 [pounds sterling] HURST PUBLISHING
ISBN: 9781849046787
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Mayor of Mogadishu tells the story of one family's epic journey through Somalia's turmoil, from the optimism of independence to its spectacular unravelling. It is an unsparing and revealing portrayal of Somalia, from the Siad Barre decades to Al-Shabaab, seen through the eyes of "Tarzan".
Mohamud "Tarzan" Nur was born a nomad, and became an orphan, then a street brawler in the cosmopolitan port city of Mogadishu--a place famous for its cafes and open-air cinemas. When Somalia collapsed into civil war, he and his young family joined the exodus from Mogadishu, eventually spending 20 years in London.
But in 2010 Tarzan returned to the unrecognisable ruins of a city largely controlled by the Islamist militants of Al-Shabaab. For some, the new Mayor was a galvanising symbol of defiance. But others branded him a thug, mired in the corruption and clan rivalries that continue to threaten Somalia's revival.
The Mayor of Mogadishu is an uplifting story of survival, and a compelling examination of what it means to lose a country and then to reclaim it.
The author, Andrew Harding, has worked as a foreign correspondent for the past 25 years in Russia, Asia and Africa. He has been visiting Somalia since 2000.
His television and radio reports for BBC News have won him international recognition, including an Emmy, an award from Britain's Foreign Press Association, and other awards in France, Monte Carlo, the US and Hong Kong.
Return to Mogadishu: Trying
to Reclaim a City for Its
People
By JOSHUA HAMMER JAN. 6, 2017
THE MAYOR OF MOGADISHU
A Story of Chaos and Redemption in the Ruins of Somalia
By Andrew Harding
Illustrated. 278 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $26.99.
In the spring of 2013, during a lull in Somalia’s near-ceaseless violence, I flew
into Mogadishu aboard an aging Boeing 707 operated by one of the country’s
struggling private airlines. Al Shabaab, the radical Islamist terror group, had pulled
many of its fighters out of the city, and members of the Somali diaspora were
beginning to return home. Traveling through the bullet-pocked, bombed-out
remnants of the capital, I noticed a striking sight: two policemen in white uniforms
proudly directing traffic at the busy K4 roundabout, long a target of suicide
bombings and other attacks. Solar-powered streetlights, a gift from Norway, had
been strung along the main avenue, providing illumination at night for the first time
in a generation. Yet the city’s recovery was a work in progress. Hours after I flew
back to Nairobi, a squad of nine militants wearing suicide vests attacked
Mogadishu’s supreme court, killing 35 and injuring dozens.
In “The Mayor of Mogadishu: A Story of Chaos and Redemption in the Ruins of
Somalia,” the veteran BBC reporter Andrew Harding tells the story of the man
largely responsible for those streetlights and traffic cops: Mohamud (Tarzan) Nur, a
7/9/2017 Return to Mogadishu: Trying to Reclaim a City for Its People - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/books/review/mayor-of-mogadishu-andrew-harding.html 2/5
scrappy street kid turned businessman and political activist who fled Somalia before
the country collapsed into civil war in 1991. After becoming a leader of the Somali
community in London, Nur returned home in 2010 at the height of a terror
campaign waged by al Shabaab. Soon afterward, he was appointed Mogadishu’s
mayor.
Harding, one of a handful of foreign reporters who have visited Somalia on a
regular basis in recent years, followed the charismatic Nur as he braved death
threats and tried to revive the ruined city. Part on-the-ground war reporting, part
investigative biography, Harding’s book captures both the fragile hopes and the
appalling violence of Somalia. It also conjures the ambiguity of its central character,
a self-mythologizing showman trailed by a whiff of corruption and not averse to
shading the truth.
Nur’s rise to prominence resembles a Horn of Africa version of the Horatio Alger
story. Born in 1954 in a nomadic camp in the Ogaden, a desolate region in what is
now Ethiopia, Nur wound up homeless and starving alongside his four siblings and
mother after his father perished during a drought. A well-to-do aunt in Mogadishu
took custody of the children, but Nur wound up in an overcrowded state orphanage,
“a military-style concrete barracks” crammed with castoffs and misfits. There he
earned a reputation as a brawler — even losing part of his ear in a fight — and a
rebel. A teacher designated him “Tarzan” after finding him hiding half-naked in a
tree during an unannounced dorm inspection.
Harding vividly describes prewar Mogadishu, a city permeated by an Italian
flavor long after these colonizers pulled out in 1960. “People would surface from
their siestas at about 5 p.m., stroll along the seafront, eat some stew with flatbread
made from maize flour at a local restaurant, and then stand at the counter at a cafe
for a macchiato,” he writes. “After that it was time to catch a film. The cinemas
would be open from around 6 each evening, and for one Somali shilling you could
stay until midnight.” (In one memorable scene, Harding takes an excursion through
one of the city’s ruined theaters, a place much like those where Nur and his friends
would watch Fellini films and Italian-dubbed American movies like “It’s a Mad,
Mad, Mad, Mad World.”)
7/9/2017 Return to Mogadishu: Trying to Reclaim a City for Its People - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/books/review/mayor-of-mogadishu-andrew-harding.html 3/5
In 1969, the army’s commander in chief, Gen. Mohammed Siad Barre, seized
power in a coup, the first step in Somalia’s disintegration. At first, the dictator
devoted himself to the country’s development. Nur — by then a star on a state-run
basketball team and a prominent figure in Mogadishu — had met his future wife, a
beautiful and brassy young woman named Shamis, during a successful literacy drive
led by the young urban elite. But Siad Barre soon turned the country into a police
state, awakened clan rivalries and assassinated political opponents. A 1988 bombing
raid on the northern town of Hargeisa, a stronghold of the rival Isaaq clan, opened
the door to civil war, famine, anarchy, the Ethiopian invasion, the rise of Islamist
radicals and Mogadishu’s descent from offbeat tourist destination into Hobbesian
hellhole.
By the time of Somalia’s transformation into a failed state, Nur and his family
were living abroad — first in Saudi Arabia, then in a council flat in the Belsize Park
neighborhood of London. Harding skillfully evokes the bifurcated existence of the
diaspora community, seeking to build new lives yet drawn back psychologically to
their homeland and shadowed by its conflicts. Nur studied for a business degree and
organized the Somali Speakers Association, a group providing guidance to newly
arrived Somalis. His children assimilated easily into British society, but Nur, who
belongs to a branch of the clan that chased Siad Barre out of Mogadishu, found that
many Somali expatriates clung fiercely to their clan identities. As al Shabaab
recruited new members around the world, MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency,
interrogated Nur’s oldest son, mistakenly suspecting him of having radical
sympathies.
Harding struggled mightily to get inside Nur’s head, but his quarry remained
elusive. Nur lied about the circumstances of his birth — telling Harding that he was
born in Mogadishu’s “Martino hospital, Room 18” rather than in the bush — and
evaded other questions about his humble childhood. Nur, Harding writes, conveys
the “sense of a slate being scrubbed clean, a fresh start, a man choosing not quite to
reinvent himself, but to grasp the opportunity to control his own story.” His
persistent obfuscations obliged Harding to piece together his subject’s life from
former classmates, a brother teaching at a college in Indiana, even a SouthAfricabased
Somali whose nomadic childhood resembled Nur’s. At times, these
investigative excursions give the book a meandering quality, as do the narrative’s
7/9/2017 Return to Mogadishu: Trying to Reclaim a City for Its People - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/books/review/mayor-of-mogadishu-andrew-harding.html 4/5
frequent geographic and chronological leaps — from Queen’s Crescent in London to
the Indianapolis suburbs to the front lines in Mogadishu. Harding also glosses over
the complexities of Somalia’s meltdown in the 1990s, paying scant attention to the
rise of the warlords, the American misadventure and the apocalyptic destruction of
Mogadishu by competing factions.
It was into these ruins that Nur plunged in 2010. In the book’s climactic section,
Harding shadows the new mayor as he tries to rebuild the city’s cultural and
economic life. Nur spent his days, Harding writes, “haggling with local businessmen
about how to get the streets cleaned, reminding them that they’d paid no taxes for
two decades and that perhaps it was time to think of the greater good.” By the time
Nur was sacked in 2014 — driven out by a backlash against the diaspora and
mudslinging by rival politicians — al Shabaab’s depredations had erased the mayor’s
improvements. And Harding’s attitude toward his protagonist had shifted from
admiration to ambivalence.
With Nur idle in Mogadishu and contemplating a run for the presidency,
Harding meets a Canadian Somali who oversaw public finances before turning
whistle-blower and fleeing to Kenya. He describes Nur as a “thug” who may have
looted millions from the city’s budget. At the same time, the Canadian admits: “The
guy has guts. He’s lived abroad. He’s enlightened. He’s someone I could . . . accept to
be at the helm of the government.” As Harding’s fine book makes clear, morally
compromised figures like Nur may be the best one can hope for in a country
desperately short of heroes.
Joshua Hammer is a contributing editor at Smithsonian and Outside magazines. His
most recent book is “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.”
A version of this review appears in print on January 8, 2017, on Page BR21 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: His City of Ruins.
Book review: Go inside the world’s most troubled country with The Mayor of Mogadishu
The Mayor of Mogadishu is not just the story of one mercurial politician. It peels back the layers of a proud, intensely troubled country that continues to baffle foreigners.
Justin Marozzi
Justin Marozzi
August 30, 2016
Updated: August 30, 2016 12:00 AM
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Mohamoud Nur, left, was mayor of Mogadishu, and a bit of a national celebrity, from 2010 to 2014. Kathrine Houreld / AP Photo
Mohamoud Nur, left, was mayor of Mogadishu, and a bit of a national celebrity, from 2010 to 2014. Kathrine Houreld / AP Photo
Somalia is one of the most extraordinary places on Earth, its people no less remarkable. In theory it should be the most united country in Africa. Somalis share one language, one religion and one culture. Yet, in practice, they are probably the most divided nation on Earth, doomed to rifts by a clan system exploited by unscrupulous leaders and an apparent inability to agree on anything. It is to Andrew Harding’s credit that he manages to get under the skin of this complicated, perplexing, often maddening country that foreigners struggle to understand.
The story centres on a charismatic protagonist. Nicknamed Tarzan during his childhood in an orphanage, Mohamoud Nur became a Somali celebrity as the mayor of Mogadishu from 2010-2014. To call him a divisive figure would be an understatement. Harding, the BBC’s Africa correspondent, who has been visiting Somalia since 2000, provides a neat summary of the competing views of this most controversial of politicians.
“He’s a thug, a shallow charmer, the only honest politician in town, a useful whirlwind, a slave to his own clan’s interests, a corrupt hypocrite, a cheap populist, Somalia’s future president, a media sideshow, the diaspora’s darling, the city’s saviour.”
Perhaps he was all of the above – a man of and for his time. One of the most admirable traits about Somalis, although it shades into one of their least commendable – the propensity for conflict – is their fearlessness. Nur exhibited it in spades at a time when the terrorists of Al Shabab controlled most of Mogadishu. This is a man who stared down the lens of television cameras and challenged the nihilistic beardies to do their worst. “Don’t disguise yourselves as women. Don’t hide your weapons under your clothes. Come for me in the open and then kill me, if you can.”
They couldn’t.
In many countries, Nur’s hardscrabble backstory would be considered tragic and exotic, with a whiff of romance about it. For Somalis it is utterly unexceptional. Given away by his impoverished mother after the death of his father, he was handed over to an aunt thence to a tough-as-old-boots orphanage. Orphans were looked down on with derision, as the weak and vulnerable often are in Somalia – “They call us bastards. Fatherless bastards”. His escape to the United Kingdom, where he emerged as a combative, can-do community leader, mirrored the flight of one in seven Somalis – perhaps a million – from the chaos of the civil war, which either lasted from 1991 to 2011 or is still ongoing, depending on your view.
Nur can be accused of many things, but a fence-sitting reluctance to speak his mind come what may has never been one of them. At a conference in Morocco for American and Arab mayors, he asked if any city wanted to be a sister to Mogadishu. The room was silent in response. “If you’re poor, they step on your head,” he tells Harding by way of explaining the Arab reaction.
It is a quintessentially Somali remark. If there is one thing that binds this fractured nation together, it is the complete conviction that Somalis are the greatest people on Earth. Other Muslims are second-class citizens. Black Africans are jeered at and called names. Whites are beyond the pale. That the superiority complex owes nothing to reality is besides the point. Somalis are the toughest people in the world and therefore the best. As a communications adviser to the prime minister and president, based in Mogadishu from 2013-2014, I was often introduced to ministers and senior officials as “my White Nigger” by one of my more high-spirited colleagues.
Somalis are extremely hard on each other. It is one of the main reasons the country is in such a mess. Discussing their astonishing proclivity for argument over the most minor matters, Harding writes: “No topic was too small to trigger a row”. He describes a meeting of Mogadishu’s 16 district commissioners torpedoed by a furious row over biscuits.
Harding writes with great empathy about Somalia and its people, eschewing the lazy generalisations common to much western journalism about Africa, which is either “doomed to fail or rising like a phoenix”. Foreigners who live among Somalis tend to experience the full gamut of emotional reactions – from exhilaration and frustration to disbelief, angst, anger and affection. Harding cites the verdict offered by Gerald Hanley, author of Warriors, one of the finest books on Somalia in the English language, that “of all the races of Africa there cannot be one better to live among than the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest: the Somalis.” Those who know the country would tend to agree.
Power corrupts as much in Somalia as anywhere else and Nur is no exception to the rule. “Anyone against me is a bad person,” he tells Harding after he has been sacked as mayor. “Whoever is on my side is in the right. Whoever is against me is wrong.” There in three sentences is a microcosm of so much that is wrong about politics in Somalia. One can imagine the same words from Siad Barre, the dictator from whose stubborn misrule the country is still suffering a quarter of a century after he was forcibly removed from office.
The Mayor of Mogadishu is much more than the story of one ambitious Somali politician. It is the modern history of one of the world’s most troubled country, told with sensitivity, wisdom and compassion – and a rollicking good read besides.
Justin Marozzi is a freelance journalist and author of Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, winner of the 2015 Ondaatje Prize.
Book review: The Mayor of Mogadishu by Andrew Harding
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Foreign Correspondent Andrew Harding has covered 25 wars, yet his first book is an uplifting and redemptive tale set in Mogadishu, writes Sue Leonard.
ANDREW HARDING has worked as a foreign correspondent for the past 25 years. He has covered the world’s hotspots in Russia, Asia and Africa, and, since the year 2000 has made many trips to Somalia.
And it’s this country — often described as the most dangerous in the world — that has won his heart.
In his introduction to the life of Mohamoud ‘Tarzan’ Nur, who, in 2010, returned from exile to become the Mayor of Mogadishu, Harding describes a stunning city, set beside a turquoise sea.
The beleaguered country was in a state of optimism back then, yet, Harding writes, ‘the same beasts still prowl. Terror, corruption, clan conflict, extremism, and chasing at their tails, the lingering fear that Somalia is merely flirting with stability.’
Taking us to the events of February 21, 2014, Harding details a terror attack on the mosque in Villa Somalia, home to the Somalia Government, where Tarzan, continuing to pray whilst the bullets flew, escaped an attempt on his life.
What follows is a dramatic story, which, whilst examining the violence, chaos and corruption of Somalia, manages to be uplifting and redemptive. Written in brilliantly stylish prose, the author structures his narrative in a way that makes this book both informative and highly readable.
Harding describes his meetings with Tarzan, a complex man, with an extraordinarily happy marriage, but a difficult past. From nomadic beginnings, Tarzan was abandoned in a state orphanage. A natural survivor who became a basketball star, he was an activist, before escaping Somalia’s civil war, to build a life in North London.
When Harding made the decision to write a book about Tarzan, he imagined it would concentrate on the present.
“I thought I would stick to what I knew,” he says, on the phone from London. “But when I started delving into his past, I realised I was far more interested in the stuff I didn’t know. I realised his time as an orphan, and the state of Mogadishu prior to the country’s collapse was much more gripping than just his awkward time as mayor.”
The author knows that Tarzan was complex; that he was not without fault, and that he had many enemies. Yet it’s an affectionate portrait, showing a great deal of empathy for the mayor. And that’s because Harding felt that, in many ways, he had much in common with him.
“I don’t want to romanticise the idea of his being a nomad, but the fact is, that he and his brother grew up travelling. I went to boarding school and was an expat child so I understand something of that.” And, like Tarzan, the author is no stranger to danger; he has covered many wars, mostly for the BBC.
“I didn’t set out to do wars,” he says. “Though I must have done at least 25. My first war was the Chechen, and I got drawn into that. Living in Georgia I was reporting as a stringer, in great depth. I would spend weeks there, and by the time the war started, I felt incredibly invested in it.”
Nothing he has experienced since, has matched the terror of that time.
“I’ve had plenty of drama since then, but being with the rebels of Grozny, being bombarded by a superpower army, meant I got the worst over on my first outing.” Back then, Harding coped by being ambitious and focused on his work.
“I was excited by it, but over the years as I’ve got married and had my three sons, who are now teenagers, I have felt the weight of responsibility. It came to a head in Libya. I was standing on a non-existent trench on the front line being shelled by tanks and I thought, ‘this is unfair on my family’.” But how does Harding’s wife, left at home in Johannesburg, cope with it all?
“She has not felt she can intervene. If she felt she could, that would have opened a door, and for every trip she would be weighing up the danger. We would be pondering it as a family. So she has left it to me, and I have just got on with it. It’s my job.”
That even applied with the Ebola outbreak, when there was a danger that the infection could be carried home to affect the whole family.
“A lot of wives were saying, ‘you can’t go,’ but my family were wonderful, and trusted me when I came home and said, ‘I am fine.’ I took steps to avoid catching Ebola, and I didn’t catch it.”
What about his own health though? Surely, putting himself in constant danger must be stressful over time?
“I’ve had issues, and the secret for me is being open with friends, and talking to people who have been through the same thing.”
But it’s not the wars that cause the most stress.
“I remember waiting for Nelson Mandela’s death. It felt like we were on the starting blocks. For months, every day, the bosses were calling, checking. We could not go anywhere. We could not do anything else. That was more stressful than the stuff I was used to. When you go into a war, you go in, do what you need to do, then get out.”
The Mayor of Mogadishu tells Tarzan’s story, warts and all. And there were many, in Somalia, who denigrated Harding for lionising a man they considered unworthy.
“One Somali said, ‘How dare you write about that scumbag.’ And there is dirt in there, and there are question marks about him, but he had the courage to say to me, ‘just do it.’ He said, ‘I am not going to control you. I am not going to demand any sort of right of censorship. You write my story, I trust you.”
However, there was a moment when Harding feared his subject might change his mind.
“There was a time when I couldn’t get hold of Tarzan; and then I had to challenge him, because he had lied to me about the circumstances of his birth, and confront him with all kinds of allegations. Would he say, ‘I don’t want this book to happen?’ But it was fine. And I realised he was the kind of guy who would say, ‘let’s sort this out with a few punches on the street,’ if it came to that, but otherwise he wouldn’t care. He was not somebody who was bothered by a mere book.”
Writing the book, Harding says, has been a learning experience. He has had to undo some of his journalistic instincts and to apply novelistic skills. It works brilliantly as a mixture between a history and a yarn. And it has given Harding an inkling of what it would be like to write fiction.
“My next book is the true story of a double murder in a South African farming town, and all the repercussions of that. But I’ve thought about writing a detective novel set in Mogadishu. I have got so much of the city in my head that did not get onto the page and the City has everything. History; culture; pirates, you name it. It has not been comprehensively covered so, maybe.”
Harding launched the book recently at a book fair in Mogadishu, and found it an amazing experience.
“I was on holiday, trying to relax but worried about security. Then you arrive and all that melts away. You are faced with young Somalis who have been starved of culture, and they are thronging to this small book fair, clinging to something that is not war, yet represents their country.
“They approached me, gave me a hug, asked me to sign their book and took a million selfies. I was pleased that the first people to buy the book were Somalis. It felt right.”
The Mayor of Mogadishu
Andrew Harding