Somali Community

MINISTER FAUST / ministerfaust@vueweekly.com

He’s five-foot-middling, mild mannered, a restaurateur, a social-entrepreneur, a community activist and a decades-long crusader for international development. His name is Mohammed Maie. To me, he’s the King of Kush.

Back in 1994, I began observing with awe the transformation of 107th Avenue into the city’s Ethiopian, Eritrean, Sudanese and Somali neighborhood. Riffing on Biblical geo-names, I baptized the area “ Kush,” plastering it all over the screenplay I was writing which later became my first published novel, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad. Now it’s Greater Kush, jumping north and then winding like the Nile from 112th Avenue up 95th Street and down 118th. The leading community in this league of nations is, without doubt, the Somali-Canadians. It’s a long, long way from the inverted David-and-Goliath lies of Blackhawk Down. And it’s as unassuming and beautiful as the girl next door.

According to Maie, there are more than 10 000 Somali-Canadians here already, although with typical family kid-counts at around seven, the bulk of the Somali community hasn’t yet been glimpsed by average E-Towners. As those children enter school and the work force over the next decade and a half, E-Town will seem like a different place, and the heart of Kush just might become know as Little Mogadishu.

Maie spent most of his 20 years in Canada in Ontario, and ran for city council in 2007; he’s currently standing as a Green candidate provincially. In 1988, he co-founded a group called African Experience along with African-Canadian leaders in Ontario dealing with immigration, poverty, and homelessness. He points out that the hopeful tale of immigration is different from the harrowing story of escaping national collapse. “We are the refugees,” he says.

Maie is particularly proud of how Somalis have improved 118th Avenue, an area whose previous rep was synonymous with misery. “If you came to the area at seven o’clock, it was almost like a ghost-house,” he says. “Now you can see it’s vibrant until 11 o’clock, sometimes 12 o’clock. You can walk ... it’s becoming safe. So we are helping the safety of the neighborhood. We are trying to bring a new menu, both culturally as well as food. We are making contributions, but not headlines as other groups such as Chinese Canadians or Italian Canadians are.”

In the hyper-yellow walls of 118th Avenue’s Camel Boys Café, Maie’s Somali-Canadian customers sip cups of sweet milk-brewed tea while sharing conversation and chow. The co-ed crowd munches on sambusas—the Somali cousin to or possibly ancestor of the samosa. The co-ed part is noteworthy because, in my years of eating at Somali restaurants, only Maie’s current café and his (being relocated) restaurant, Sharifa’s Sambusa House, have teemed with women. Not in the sense of a singles’ bar; hijabs and pick-up lines, in my experience, are distant cousins who don’t even call on birthdays.

From what I can tell, it’s Maie’s commitment to family and community that helps his countrymen and countrywomen move beyond the gender separation I’ve seen in other Somali joints, where (apparently) single men gather to feast on succulent roasted goat meat and sabayat (chapatti) while watching CNN or Al-Jazeera (“politics is the passion of the people,” says Maie, in answer to why music is so rare at any Somali dining spot). Instead at Camel Boys, men and women gather breezily, sharing laughter and food while Maie tells me of his and his community’s epic of survival and success.

While Canadians over 30 probably remember Somalia more for a Canadian military murder scandal there and for Ridley Scott’s Pentagon-approved “true story,” Somalis would prefer people knew the real history of their ancient nation. The capital city Moghadishu has a lineage echoing back over 2000 years. Fourteenth-century historian Ibn Battuta wrote of the country’s marvels just before Somalia’s trade with China began. When Portuguese and Omanis invaded, they obliterated many of the country’s great trading cities. Somalia has produced award-winning writers such as Nurrudin Farah, and it’s no surprise; scholar Ali Mazrui noted in his landmark series The Africans: A Triple Heritage that Somalis love poetry so much that candidates for public office often addressed their constituents in verse. From personal experience, I’ve never know anyone so capable and so willing to recite poetry as a friend of mine, a daughter of Somalia’s long-ago ambassador to Libya.

According to Maie, Somali culture is also highly entrepreneurial. In Edmonton, the nascent Somali community has already birthed at least six restaurants; then there are boutiques, corner stores, money exchanges, butcher shops, barber shops, CD shops, a newspaper, and, of course, the transport industry, i.e., taxis, not to mention grocers, computer techs, accountants and artists. Elsewhere Somalis have exercised their money-skills across Kenya and Tanzania, and own shopping malls in Toronto, Columbus, Ohio, and Minneapolis, the hub of North American Somaliland. Maie says it’s the nomadic aspects of Somali culture that produce risk-comfortable adventurers who are always flexible enough to move to wherever the literal or metaphorical water flows sweetest. On a recent trip to Grand Prairie, Maie’s coterie of Rwandese and Senegalese youth looked for jobs in the land of opportunity; it was the Somali youth who noticed there was no Somali restaurant and vowed to open one.

Despite their capitalistic strengths, Edmonton’s Somalis still face poverty; according to Maie, $15 000 to $20 000 annually is typical for typically large Somali families, and $40 000 would be considered rich. Then there are the youth who see their often well-educated parents behind taxi wheels, mops or stoves, like Chef Ghal at Xamareey Restaurant who was a commercial pilot (and who’s found that a Muslim-sounding name is a great interview-blocker at Canada’s airlines); teens of such parents often wonder why their parents languish, despite Canada’s multicultural claims, and turn away from education and legal employment in despair.

Still, Maie is optimistic. “Looking back from the last 20 years,” he says, “I can see there is a growing acceptance [of Somali-Canadians], because we never threw away our values. We’re telling everyone, this is who we are; please accept us. Especially in Canada where everyone is trying to showcase their culture, so it’s good for us to display our culture, rather than to melt within the system.”

Read Vue each week in February for columns focusing on African History Month (nbccedmonton.org).

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Source: Vue Weekly