NOVEMBER 30, 2012, MOGADISHU: As always, the long, slow descent into Mogadishu feels something like falling. Nothing you can do but watch that scorched flat land, with all its war and white heat, come up at you. We land next to the sea, turning at the end of the runway right in front of the pink, single-story complex which houses the CIA. I’ve always wondered about that. The very first thing you see when you arrive in Somalia. Pink.
In six years of coming to Mogadishu, I’ve generally stayed at the Peace Guesthouse, where the owner, Yusuf Bashir, does an all-in package including a room with a fan, Wi-Fi, Al Jazeera on the TV, shared showers, three meals a day and security, all for $300-$1,200 a day, depending on how well Bashir knows you and, more specifically, how well he knows your finances. This time I’m trying something different. In August 2011, African Union troops pushed Islamist militants from al-Shabab out of Mogadishu and 13 months later, a new Somali parliament chose a former teacher, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, as its first permanent president for 20 years. I’m here to profile Hassan but I also want to see the city, which is said to be experiencing a revival. So I’ve cut our security to three guards and we’re staying in the center of town, at an old journalists’ favorite, the Shamo, for $100 a night. In October 2009, to make the point that learning is seditious, al-Shabab killed 25 people at the Shamo in a suicide attack on a university graduation ceremony. As the Shamo’s 12-foot high steel gates part and we pull into the forecourt, I see the meeting hall has been repaired. Still, the management deems it prudent to keep its reception deep inside the building. As I check in, I notice the cash desk is wall-papered with yellowed business cards from Western correspondents from the 1990s—legends included. Several of them, I note, are dead.
DECEMBER 1, 2012, MOGADISHU: The changes in Mogadishu are real and dramatic. Shop-owners have patched up their broken walls, repaved their sidewalks and thrown open their doors once more. They are being joined by a mass of returning Somali expatriates from Britain, Canada, the U.S., Australia and Scandinavia who fill the city’s hotels and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars to fix up their homes and invest in new businesses. Seafront property has quadrupled in price. A queue of ships arriving with concrete, televisions, cars and mobile phones, and taking away camels, mangoes and bananas, now sits at anchor outside Mogadishu’s suddenly inadequate port – an indication of both more business and less piracy. The empty streets we used to race down for fear of gunfire are now filled with thousands of Somalis, working, shopping, sipping coffee and smoking shisha pipes late into the night at roadside cafes. In a former al-Shabab stronghold we eat grilled lobster in a beach restaurant. Coca-Cola has re-opened its factory. There’s even street lighting.
But the old rules to moving around Mogadishu still apply. You need two cars: a pick-up in front for your gunmen, then a second closed cab behind for you. You wear a vest. You vary your routes. You make vague arrangements for an interview but try not to be specific, even for a president. You drive fast but you don’t crowd other cars, particularly ones with their own gunmen. Outside the car, you minimize your exposure, never stopping more than 20 minutes. The strategy is to show yourself as little as possible and, when you have to, to try to look like too much trouble for anyone to mess with. Our guards have the look – the way they fan out, the way they extend their forefingers above their trigger guards, the way they never smile – and no one does.
We take a tour through the city center. I’ve covered 35 conflicts but Mogadishu always makes them feel like preparation. The city’s destruction is so complete in some areas that life itself can seem inconsistent. Every facade is blasted with a thousand bullets. Whole crescents of houses have spilled their stone guts into the street. The ash from a thousand fires and a million ruins coat the city with a funereal dust. In this monochrome, tropical Dresden, the colors of life – an overgrown pink bougainvillea, the turquoise of the sea, a scarlet headscarf half-buried under rubble – can be a shock. Even the act of living takes on strange forms. In the city center, 250,000 people survive in egg-shaped pods of brushwood and plastic tied together with string. Inside the skeleton of the seafront Uruba Hotel, Ugandan AU peacekeepers eat barbecued beef and spicy cabbage in shabby green tents erected over broken tile floors under chipped corniced ceilings. On my last trip here, visiting the frontline to the west of the city, I found a riverfront palace belonging to a long departed Arab prince, within whose walls, through war, famine and intermittent occupation, the staff had cared for a lone giant ostrich in a lush garden of date palms and mango trees.
For years I wondered why I loved Mogadishu’s ruins so, guiltily worrying I took a lurid thrill from death and devastation. Then one day I understood. The tools – AKs, RPGs, technicals mounted with .50 cals and anti-aircraft guns – were unconventional. But as every street was destroyed, and then every house, and every wall, and every brick, the city revealed itself as the giant canvas for patient, painstaking work. This was wild war, the most intense I had ever seen. But it was also, in its way, craftsmanship.
DECEMBER 3, 2012, MOGADISHU: It’s been a lot of waiting to see President Hassan, and a lot of checkpoints too. To enter Villa Somalia, where Hassan works and lives with his family, I must pass 10 separate security barricades. At each one, I am asked for my pistol. (To general bewilderment, I don’t have one.) Then the soldiers scan me with walk-through detectors and hand-held wands, squeeze my armpits, my shoes, my ears and my crotch, and progressively relieve me of my phone, my torch, my computer, and finally my entire bag, leaving me with the clothes I stand up in, two pens and a notepad, though there is much grumbling about the extra pen. There are bullet holes in the windows of Villa Somalia. Inside, fresh plaster and paint vainly try to hide more bullet holes in the walls. When I am finally shown into Hassan’s office, the curtains are drawn, even at midday, from behind them comes an intermittent ‘crack-crack’ of AK-47 fire and the occasional, distant ‘boom’. “Every single hour, someone is trying to eliminate me,” says Hassan in the first of our three conversations. “But hundreds of thousands of Somalis have died and if I die, I would be just one of them. It is not that I will live longer if I am not a politician.”
Hassan, 57, is unusual in Somali politics for not being a warlord or a clan leader or a terrorist. He hasn’t even been a politician for very long. He founded his Peace and Development Party only in mid-2010, essentially because he was fed up with the way war kept ripping Mogadishu’s schools apart. “My friends and I realized that until we fixed the political problem, nothing could flourish here in Somalia,” he says.
Hassan’s task is also without precedent. In between assassination attempts, the first on his second day in office, it is his job to stitch back together the world’s most failed state and bring peace and prosperity to a nation that, in the last two decades, has given the world “Black Hawk Down,” an African Al Qaeda affiliate, a hoard of 21st century pirates and recurrent famines that have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and created millions of refugees. Few fresh starts were ever so colored by the past. Hassan is realistic about the task. “We’re starting everything from scratch,” he says. “We lost everything in the war. We’re walking in the dark.” But he’s sure change is irreversible. “I see this very, very old history of conflict changing in the Horn of Africa,” he says. “I dream of a Somalia that is a contributor of ideas, an example to the rest of Africa. I see people demanding to become Somalis.”
DECEMBER 4, 2012, MOGADISHU: I’ve finished my interviews and have a flight out in the afternoon. I’m beginning to agree with Hassan that the changes, at least in Mogadishu, may be here to stay. Hassan has already accomplished something many Somalis never thought they’d see: taking power without killing anyone. I also have the sense of having met someone who, if he survives, may one day figure as one of Africa’s most articulate and impressive voices.
As I take my seat on the plane and check my notes, I realize Hassan is echoing a refrain I’m hearing more and more in Africa. As the continent’s economies gather pace, outpacing India and, five of them, China, African leaders are demanding more control over their own affairs and less foreign influence and intervention – less help, essentially. On the runway, as we taxi and turn for our takeoff, the CIA base once again appears in my window. I can’t help notice it occupies a prime position, just back from the beach. I wonder if, on another trip some day in the future, I might stay there.
Perry was TIME magazine’s Africa bureau chief from 2006-2013, and remains a contributor.