In 1928, Somali seafarer Ibrahim Ismaa’il wrote an autobiography, extracts from which were published, some forty years later, by British-Ethiopian historian Richard Pankhurst in the journal Africa (32:2, 1977). It is one of the earliest accounts of life as a Somali seaman in Britain and arguably the first work of Anglo-Somali literature. ‘I had heard of a place called Europe,’ Ismaa’il writes, ‘which was the other side of Djibouti, and where life was easier, wages being higher. I now decided to try my luck there.’
It’s an altogether familiar story: the migrant’s longing for better economic opportunities overseas. For the Somali seamen, other than being pioneers of modern African migration to Britain with a presence since the 1880s, their shared experiences have coalesced into their becoming a distinct social group within the Somali polity. A siimaan isn’t just a seafarer with the Merchant Navy or the Royal Navy as it’s historically been the case. He is also proficient, paternalistic, a polyglot and, rather sneeringly, Anglicised.
The seamen’s relationship with that place on ‘the other side of Djibouti’, located beyond the extremity of the Somali’s geographic conception, isn’t as quixotic as Ismaai’l’s words may suggest. Their connection with Britain didn’t fit the émigré trope of an Eden away from the Golgotha of home. Nor did it reflect a wistful patriotism to rebuild the “mother country”. Britain was simply a stop to refuel. It was a practical arrangement devoid of romanticised familial bonds. You tried your luck in England (a lingering exonym for Britain), but you yearned for Somalia. The seamen would often return from their foreign excursions flush with money. Hoodolayaashi – the fortune men – was what their countrymen called them, amazed at their Whittingtonian motivations and newfound capital.
Nadifa Mohamed, The Fortune Men, Viking, 2021.
Nadifa Mohamed has returned to the same theme in her third novel The Fortune Men which was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Her debut The Black Mamba Boy (2010) is a semi-autobiographical account of her now late father’s childhood and life as a seaman. It is also a paean to the ‘Somali Argonauts’ – the many other seamen, like my late father, whose biblical journeys mirrored that of the book’s protagonist. ‘Those fortune men’ she writes, ‘who set their footprints in the sand, fifty, sixty, a hundred years ago, are the prophets who led the Israelites out of the wilderness.’ Consider then Mahmood Hussein Mattan whose life is semi-fictionalised in The Fortune Men. He is a fully-fledged member of the Argonauts’ Club: born in British Somaliland; stoker in the Merchant Navy; (mis)adventures in unfamiliar places (Tanganyika, Southern Africa and the Americas); multilingual (in descending order of fluency: Somali, Arabic, Swahili, English, Hindi); and patriarchal. Unlike his fellow seamen, he tried his luck in Britain and met a tragic end. Mattan was wrongly convicted and hanged for the murder of Lily Volpert. The Fortune Men is an elegy and a seething jeremiad.
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