By John Drysdale

AT NIGHTFALL, a long way south of the Bab-al-Mandab Straits - that narrow, dangerous, shipping lane at the southern end of the Red Sea – a group of Somali surveyors and I were within walking distance of our new workstation by the sea. We were on Somali soil. The year was 2003. We bivouacked around an old rest house. It had a dilapidated veranda facing a shallow lagoon. Beyond the lagoon, far away in the direction of Mecca, the waters of Bab-al-Mandab connected the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. This vast Gulf, with Yemen and Djibouti to the north and Somaliland on its southern littoral, shared the waters of the Indian Ocean. On that night, the Gulf was a disappointing, endless black void - save for a distant flickering light of a ship at sea. It was sailing northwest to the narrows, bound evidently for the Suez Canal.

It was a hot and sticky night. Sand clung to the sweating pores of my sandaled feet. My moistened torso had received the spinning end of a wicked sand devil. My bald head echoed the feel of sandpaper at the tip of my fingers. I was ready for a bath.

There was only one hurricane lantern between us. My boys needed it slung over an antique bended tree in a sand dune near the waters’ edge. I was content with the unpolluted light of a full moon. Its shadows were black but the tired-looking, whitewashed walls of the Rest House came alive and gleamed in the face of the moon, throwing the white light onto an otherwise dull and dirty concrete floor.

There was a chill in the air, blowing lightly off shore. Naked, I sheltered against the veranda wall grasping my damp towel and a change of clothing. I slung them over the back of a wobbly chair; the only piece of furniture around. The chair lodged my spare camel-hide sandals, a large sponge, a bottle of shampoo and disinfectant.

Instead of the dark water in my plastic bucket rippling in the breeze and distorting the images of the moon, a suffused white cloud crept through the smelly water as I poured a dash, and then another dash, from a bottle of Dettol, followed by liquid soap. Standing upright beside the bucket, with sponge to hand, I made the impure water, which was now powerfully scented with chemical wellbeing, cascade onto the floor from head to foot. A brisk rundown with the towel left me far from refreshed however. I felt sticky all over from the salt in the air. The soft breeze had veered round and blew disconcertingly from the sea. I shivered and sneezed as I rapidly put on a fresh pair of shorts and a clean, perforated vest. I feared a stinking cold ahead.

The neighboring Somali fishing village called Lughaya, meaning “grab a lady by the thigh”, suggested romance was somewhere in the air. The villagers certainly had a silver beach of near perfection, albeit with an oil slick here and there, and the picturesque lagoon could shimmer invitingly under the purest of moonlit, starry skies. The villagers claimed to possess a romantic foreshore, fit for tourists. There were no tourists in sight. The heat and high humidity, the contradiction of a runny nose, the barren outlook of oil slick and sand-dune, the horrendous mud-slide of unknown origin at the bottom of the lagoon, saline drinking water, presented a poor picture.

In reality, without a word said, the villagers harbored a not improbable notion that they were sitting on an oil field. That is why we were there - to carry out theodolite mapping and land registration of the area. The villagers, whose perforated fishing boats lay stranded at high water, were there to profit one day from the riches beneath the sands. Romance was knocked squarely on the head.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*John Drysdale, a former advisor to three Somali Prime Ministers in post independence Somalia and to three successive UN special envoys to Somalia during the 1992-1993, is an authority on Somali history and culture. Three of his books about Somalia < Somali The Peninsula,>and Whatever Happened to Somalia, written during or about major landmarks in the nation's history, have become standard reference works. Drysdale was a regular British army officer serving with Somali soldiers in Burma during World War II. Later he was in the British Colonial Service and the Foreign Service, with assignments in Ghana (then the Gold Coast) and in Mogadishu. He is an accomplished speaker of Somali. During his long career as diplomat, businessman, and publisher, Drysdale has been a prolific writer and analyst of political events in Africa and Southeast Asia.

As a publisher, Drysdale founded and edited the Africa Research Bulletin in Britain and the Asia Research Bulletin in Singapore in collaboration with the Straits Times Group. He was also founder of the Asean Economic Quarterly in Singapore. His book Singapore: Struggle for Success is a recommended reading for all young Singaporeans. Returning to Somaliland in mid 1990s, Drysdlae worked as an advisor to the Somaliland government under the later President Mohammed Ibrahim Egal for sometime before pioneering the very important project of Surveying and Mapping for Rural and Urban Cadastre in Somaliland. His NGO has been surveying and mapping hitherto non-existent farm boundaries in the Gabiley and Dilla Districts of South West Somaliland over the last four years.

Source: Awdalnews Network