What I Learned at Gunpoint in the Somali Desert

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The first gun, a heavy-looking rifle, was leveled at us as soon as we crossed the border into Somalia. My American companions and I had visas but there was no border checkpoint in sight, only the dusty, rock-strewn desert stretching out for miles around us.

It was 1986 and although the country was yet to be declared a failed state, Somalia was no backpackers’ paradise. The desert nation had few natural resources and was ruled by a suspicious authoritarian regime.

The tall lean man had appeared out of nowhere, swathed in tattered cloth against the sun. He stood in the middle of the dirt road, sizing us up down the barrel of his weapon. Pete shifted the ancient VW van into neutral and we stared out through the windshield, sweating.

Pete had been on previous trips to the region to buy crafts from villagers. He cautiously guessed that the man belonged to the security forces and we relaxed a little when he slid himself into the passenger seat, pointed towards the horizon, and said, “Police.” Gears crunched and we moved forward.

I had arrived in Kenya a few months earlier, a 24-year-old looking for adventure. I knew there was famine in the region and imagined (oh, the arrogance) that, being a nurse from a fancy London hospital, I might help save the world while I was there.

I reached the drought-stricken area in the north of Kenya and discovered quickly that my training in neurosurgical care was of no use to people with no food. Worse, I was a drain on the meager resources that were available. However, at a refugee mission there, I met Ellen, an American who was finishing up a year of teaching and we decided to do some traveling together before she headed home.

We eventually arrived at the Somali border control to complete the immigration formalities and deposit our gun-toting escort. It took several more hours to reach the tidy village where we would stay in a compound for aid workers.

The Somalis there held themselves differently than the Africans I had met elsewhere; sharp-eyed and self-possessed. Somalia had dispensed with colonization by the Italians, though they kept a taste for spaghetti and fashionable sunglasses. Then they dispatched their Russian occupiers, whose legacy was secret police and Kalashnikovs. These were proud, warrior people, and there were guns everywhere.

The next morning, Pete drove off in search of artifacts to trade while Ellen and I shopped the scant offerings at the market and tried to make a meal. After a few days of this, Ellen and I had had enough and began looking for a ride to the capital, Mogadishu, a six-hour drive away.

A Japanese aid worker called Hiroshi offered to take us and we found him next day, soon after sun-up, standing by a beaten-up Toyota 4Runner and speaking in Somali with its driver. Yusuf had a lot to say and seemed excited, Hiroshi was staring at the ground, looking doubtful.

Hiroshi wasn’t much older than Ellen and me but he deliver the news in a fatherly tone. There had been a bandit attack on a government convoy the night before and the District Commissioner, his wife, and some others had been killed.

Shifta attacks against government vehicles weren’t uncommon but the high profile of the victims had raised tensions in the area and everyone was braced for reprisals. Still, Hiroshi and Yusuf had decided to go ahead with their journey. Ellen and I would have to decide for ourselves if we were willing to risk it.

We didn’t know what the risks were and I don’t remember us giving it much discussion. We threw our backpacks into the back of the SUV and climbed in after them.

Leaving the village behind, the impact of the previous night’s attack was immediately apparent. Usually, an African road was a town unto itself, with four-wheeled and four-legged vehicles — all filled to capacity, kids herding goats or cows, and mothers with babies on their backs, carrying firewood or huge containers of water. Even in such a drought-stricken area, it was eerie to see no one at all as we drove along a major thoroughfare.

About 30 minutes into the journey, we came across the District Commissioner’s Landcruiser and a couple of army jeeps. The vehicles were black with char, their tires still smoldering. As we drove by, we saw blood pooled on the road.

Ten minutes later, we still hadn’t seen anyone about when we stopped to tend to a small electrical fire in the dashboard. Yusuf extinguished it with a flourish but we had barely picked up pace before, around the next bend, we stopped again. The road ahead had been blocked with heavy branches of thorn scrub.

For the first time, Yusuf was quiet and serious. He had a rapid discussion with Hiroshi that ended with them both nodding as Yusuf revved the engine. Hiroshi turned to us with an update.

They had seen movement in the thick scrub beside the barricade—there were men but they couldn’t tell how many, who they were, or what their intentions might be. The army would surely be flooding the area any moment to look for Shifta and, if they had not yet left the area, the bandits would be looking for an escape vehicle. In short, there was a good chance we were about to be hijacked.

We could turn around but we were probably already cut off from behind, so the plan was for Yusuf to get up as much speed as the road allowed and we would try to blast our way through the barricade.

Yusuf told Ellen and me to get down on the floor. He wanted us out of sight of the windows that ran the length of both sides but, for some reason we never discovered, the floor was filled with sacks of grain. There was no place to hide.

I held my breath, jaws clamped as we rattled along the pot-holed track. Hijack. My mind sped past the question of if I was going to die and began calculating the odds of dying here now—or death somewhere else later when I was more trouble alive than I was worth to my captors.

As we drew level with the makeshift roadblock, my capacity for thought shut down completely. I was hyper-focused on what I could see through the window behind Ellen’s shoulder. The people among the scrub trees didn’t register, my eyes and brain were looking only for guns.

I was still straining to hear if shots were being fired when Yusuf’s voice cut through, saying, “We go back.” I spun round to Hiroshi, who looked resigned and said something about an injured man.

I couldn’t make any sense of what I was hearing. Having made it past the gunmen once — and lived, it was pure insanity to roll the dice again. As we reversed back towards the ambush, I looked over at Ellen. Her elbows were on her knees and her face was in her hands. I reached out and touched her arm and her hands came down, she was laughing. Then I realized that I was laughing too, a mirthless, disbelieving laughter.

The injured man was the District Commissioner’s driver. He had a bullet wound in the fleshy part above his elbow, a ‘through and through’ as the police on TV call it. There was also a long, deep gash on his thigh but he wasn’t concerned about his injuries. The man was paralyzed with fear.

The men who had arranged the roadblock were also terrified. They were subsistence farmers and when the injured man had approached their homes asking for help, they had no idea if he was one of the Shifta, or if the Shifta were right behind hunting for him. They also had no way of knowing who we were as we barreled towards them from the direction of the attack. The guns were for self-defense, and we were all relieved to see them set aside.

The injured driver was loaded into our vehicle and we started back towards the village. I had no supplies to dress his wounds, not that he showed any interest in them. He had more serious problems.

Drivers in the region who survived road accidents were frequently blamed for failing in their responsibilities. I’d seen several newspaper reports of fatal crashes in Kenya where the driver had been pulled from the wreckage only to be beaten to death by an angry mob. In this case, a high-ranking official had died, and it hadn’t been an accident. The driver could only hope for the chance to plead his case that he had not been part of the plot , and he hadn’t taken a bribe.

He clung to his seat as we drove. The gash cut almost to the bone and extended from above his knee to just below his groin, fortunately missing the major blood vessels. From its position, I guessed it was self-inflicted, probably to prove he was a victim and not Shifta. It must have hurt like hell.

Back at the burnt-out vehicles, we found soldiers examining the wreckage. Their faces were grim and their hands were on their sidearms. They ignored us foreigners and spoke with Yusuf, who looked nonchalant, but he kept one hand on the wheel, and his foot tapped at the accelerator. We found out later that he had tried to keep the driver with us so we could bring him to people he knew in the village, but the soldiers insisted that they would take care of him. The driver could barely hide his alarm as we handed him over.

As we drove on toward Mogadishu, my thinking began to unfreeze itself and I tried to wrap my mind around what had happened. I wish I could report an epiphany or at least a dent in my monumental naivete but that didn’t begin to happen until years later.

It took less time for me to appreciate the extraordinary courage of ordinary people caught in circumstances they could have chosen to ignore. The farmers would have undoubtedly been safer if they had sent the injured man away. Yusuf could have chosen self-preservation and focused on his duties as our driver.

So much of our lives depends on choices of character, faith, and tradition made by people who happen to be nearby when we need them. The 24-hour news cycle blasts us with a different story but I am convinced that the essence of human nature is goodness.

The greatest lesson though was about death, specifically my own. When I believed my life was about to end, I had found myself in a ‘time outside of time’. While my reptilian brain was in full-on, adrenaline-fueled survival mode, another part of my consciousness was calm, clear, and unafraid. I felt liberated somehow, as if the heaviness of the world had fallen away and I was free to fly wherever I chose. I had lost all fear of death, permanently as it turns out.

I can only describe what I experienced as transcendence or grace. It changed me in ways that continue to shape my life and I am forever grateful — for what I lived through, and for the indulgences of saints.

(The names of my companions have been changed for privacy.)

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