Caado la gooyaa car alle ayey leedahay
(‘The abandonment of tradition calls forth the wrath of Allah’, Somali proverb, quoted in The World’s Most Dangerous Place, page 398)

James Fergusson worked on this book with help from a grant from the Airey Neave Trust, a charity whose objective is to promote research ‘designed to make a discernible impact and to contribute in a practical way to the struggle against international terrorist activity’ (p.447). So at least one of the book’s aims is to provide a background to, and history of, the rise of Islamic terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

But it also explains something else, which isn’t immediately obvious, which is that the book is in two halves and only the first half (parts one and two) are set in Somalia (part one in and around Mogadishu, part two further afield, in Puntland and Somaliland). The entire second half of the book (part three) is not set in the most dangerous place in the world at all, but in the West, first in London, then in Minnesota, then back in London again.

This makes it different from your average reporting-from-Africa book because Fergusson is less reporting from Africa than investigating a problem (Somali Islamic extremism) which has both an African dimension (obviously) and, less obviously, ramifications for the Somali diaspora in the West.

So the title is a little misleading because over a third of the text is not from the most dangerous place in the world but from West London and the American Mid-West and, although he meets lots of politicians, soldiers and locals in Somalia, it is in London and Minneapolis (and, right at the end of the book, in France) that he has his longest and most thought-provoking conversations with Somali emigrants.

Contents

The locations, dates and themes of the book are conveniently indicated by its chapter titles:

Part 1: Living on the Line

1. An African Stalingrad: the war against al-Shabaab (Hawl Wadaag district, Mogadishu, March 2011)
2. At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war (By Aden Adde International Airport, March 2011)
3. The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
4. Aden’s story (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
5. The failure of Somali politics (Villa Somalia presidential complex, March 2011)
6. What makes al-Shabaab tick? (Hodan District, June 2011)
7. The famine (Badbaado refugee camp, Dharkenly district, June to July 2011)

Part 2: Nomad’s Land

8. In the court of King Farole (Garowe, Puntland, August 2011)
9. Galkacyo: Pirateville (Galmudug, August 2011)
10. Hargeisa Nights (Hargeisa, Somaliland, July 2011)
11. How to start a border war (Taleh, Sool, June 2011)

Part 3: The Diaspora

12. The Somali youth time-bomb (London, July 2011)
13. The missing of Minneapolis (Twin Cities, Minnesota, September 2011)
14. ‘Clanism is a disease like AIDS’ (London, February 2012)
15. Operation Linda Nchi: The end for al-Shabaab? (Besançon to Nairobi, March to June 2012)

Postscript to the paperback edition (Edinburgh, November 2013)

Fergusson’s enduring interest in Islamic affairs

Prior to a spell working with the UN, Fergusson was a journalist with a special interest in Muslim affairs, reporting from Algeria, Bosnia and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After serving in several administrative positions (press spokesman for the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, 1998 to 2000) Fergusson returned to journalism and wrote a run of factual books including:

• A Million Bullets (2008), a critique of Britain’s military engagement in Afghanistan
• Taliban – Unknown Enemy (2010), a plea for greater engagement with Nato’s Afghan enemy

This present book follows on from those two, evidence of his long-term engagement with Islamic warriors and terrorism. As Fergusson says in his introduction, it was triggered by the rise of al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa. Members of al-Shabaab came from the same kind of poor, neglected societies as the Taliban, and some of its leaders had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, so it felt like a natural progression to move from covering an Islamic insurgency in one country (Afghanistan) to a closely connected new one (al-Shabaab in Somalia).

Out of date

This book is, alas, 10 years old. A lot of its predictions i.e. that Somalia was turning a corner, the peace deal might stick etc, turned out to be hooey. Somalia now (2023) has an official government but continues to be mired in violence. Al-Shabaab are still there, killing people.

Why do I keep reading these out-of-date books? Well, a) because they’re cheap and the most up-to-date books about these countries are in hardback and very expensive, but b) because there aren’t that many popular journalistic accounts of these countries and conflicts available.

Fergusson’s book is very people-focused. It goes long on the people he meets and interview and hangs out with and gets to know, from as many walks of life as he can, from as many parts of the country as he can. I really liked Paul Kenyon’s book, ‘Dictatorland’, because it includes interviews and whatnot in it, but each chapter is focused on just one country, and pared back to give you the essential info. Fergusson’s is much more chatty, diffuse and long, at 464 pages including index.

Somalilands

It’s important to understand that ethnic Somalis live scattered across five countries, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia and northern Kenya, and that, during the colonial era, there were no fewer than three colonies named Somaliland. At the north-west was the small French colony of French Somaliland. This won its independence from France in 1977 and called itself Djibouti. Next door to it was British Somaliland and, in the territory containing the actual Horn of Africa and then round to the south, was Italian Somaliland.

British Somaliland was granted independence in June 1960, with the name of Somaliland, and promptly united with the former Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic. However, at the overthrow of the Somali dictator Siad Barre in May 1991, representatives of the leading clans and Somali National Movement proclaimed Somaliland an independent state. Almost no other states accepts it as an independent nation; the West, the United Nations etc all regard it as an autonomous province of Somalia.

Spanning the actual Horn of Africa is another statelet, the province of Puntland, which has its own elections, assembly, prime minister and president, but remains a part of Somalia. Spanning the Horn, Puntland is the epicentre of Somali piracy, as Fergusson discovers when he goes to meet the president, and then is introduced to actual pirates via local fixers and contacts.

As to the Somalis across the border in Ethiopia, in 1977 Somalia’s dictator, Siad Barre, invaded the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia in a bid to claim it and its ethnic Somali population for Somalia, but was badly defeated by the (Marxist) Ethiopian regime, backed by the Soviet Union.

Tension between the two neighbours remains. In 2006 Ethiopia, with the backing of the US, invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union. This, as you would expect, triggered a wave of Somali patriotism, which the newly formed al-Shabaab exploited to the full. The war lasted from 2006 till 2009 when Ethiopia withdrew, having thoroughly destabilised Somalia, yet again.

When Fergusson goes to America to explore the largest Somali community there, sited, incongruously enough, in wintry Minneapolis, he finds a lot of anger at how America supported Ethiopia in invading their country, and at the three years of fighting which left Mogadishu even more destroyed and displaced hundreds of thousands. All things considered, it seems to have been a very bad move.

So, the complex colonial heritage of badly conceived administrative regions has been a central contributor to Somalia’s collapse.

• Simplified map of the Horn of Africa showing the locations of Djibouti, Somaliland, Puntland and Somalia

Somalia’s clans

Somali culture is dogged by its clan system. Every single Somali is born into a clan, sub-clan and sub-sub-clan, and these have been at war with each other forever. There are an estimated 140 clans, sub-clans, and sub-sub-clans, but there are five major clans which sit at the top of the tree:

• Hawiye, 25%
• Isaaq, 22%
• Darod, 20%
• Rahanweyn, 17%
• Dir, 7%

This map gives a good sense of how the Somali people and clans spill over the borders imposed by European colonialism and inherited by modern states.

(However, in London Fergusson interviews the founder of the Anti-Tribalism Movement, and makes the point that the younger generation of Westernised Somalis consciously reject the tribalism of their elders and tradition, p.379.)

The Somali civil war

Nobody agrees exactly when the Somali Civil War started. It grew out of resistance to the military junta which came to power in 1969, and came to be dominated by General Siad Barre, resistance which grew during the later 1980s. Numerous rebel groups formed, generally structured around Somalia’s very strong clan structure. The Siad Barre regime fell in 1991 and no central authority replaced it, instead the start of a multi-sided civil war.

In the chaos of civil war, during the 1990s, local Islamic courts were established amid the chaos to enforce basic law and order. When warlords attacked them, they united in around 2000 to form the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Although fractious and disagreeing among themselves, the Islamic courts offered pretty much the last remaining source of authority and justice in a ruined society.

In 2006 ICU forces defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the US and established a period of peace and security for the first time in a generation. This was wrecked after just six months when Ethiopian forces, backed by the US, invaded, leading to the 2006 to 2009 civil war. As a result of the war, much of the leadership fled abroad, leaving the youthful and most zealous members, who set up the party they called al-Shabaab, ‘the Youth’. These called for jihad against the Ethiopian invaders and their US sponsors, and this cry was answered not only inside the country but by small numbers of young men in the West’s Somali diaspora, notably in the UK and USA.

In 2009 a former chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, became president of Somalia and replaced the Transitional Government with the Federal Government of Somalia. In 2012, the country adopted a new constitution that declared Somalia an Islamic state with Sharia as its primary source of law.

Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab, also known as Ash-Shabaab, Hizb al-Shabaab, and the Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations (PRM). In Arabic, al-Shabaab simply means ‘the youth’ so Hizb al-Shabaab simply means ‘the Party of Youth’.

Numerous interviewees tell Fergusson that al-Shabaab’s mindset, dogmatic Islamism and violence are alien to Somali traditions. Somalis have traditionally been Sufis, a peaceful, spiritual version of Islam. They reverence their saints and build shrines to them. It is well-known that the top rank of al-Shabaab is dominated by foreigners, hard-liners from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Saudi, who impose a brutally puritanical version of Islam. For example, in areas they hold al-Shabaab has embarked on programmes of blowing up shrines to Somali Sufi saints, to the horror of the locals; but their punishments are so extreme and violent that no-one dare speak out. Fergusson meets many Somalis who says Islam is a religion of peace and forgiveness and so al-Shabaab, with its doctrine of unrelenting violence and vengefulness, are not Muslims.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb or AQIM is an Islamist militant offshoot of al-Qaeda Central that is engaged in an insurgency campaign in the Maghreb and Sahel regions. AQIM raises money by kidnapping for ransom and is estimated to have raised more than $50 million in the last decade.

Osama bin Laden put off a closer alliance with al-Shabaab. But after his assassination in May 2011, his successor as leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahari, agreed to a merger between Al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda (p.128).

Islam, identity and purpose

Fergusson cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, making a related and broader point:

‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)

Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens, citizens of states so obviously failed and impoverished compared to the wonderlands of the West which they can see via the internet or in the astonishing wealth of UN and Western and aid agency staff, fabulously well fed, living in air-conditioned bases and hotels, swanning round in their big white land cruisers like new imperialists.

Militant Islam offers a source of identity and self-respect in the face of all the batterings young men are subject to in these kinds of impoverished chaotic societies.

This long book contains contributions from numerous interviewees about why Islamic terrorism arises, flourishes and spreads, but this is an important one of them.

The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)

Fergusson’s narrative opens in March 2011. A UN-approved force raised by the African Union is fighting its way through Mogadishu, trying to restore order. Most of the soldiers came from the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). They were fighting for the Transitional Federal Government or TFG, which was established in 2004. The AU mission as a whole was called the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Fighting had been fierce. AMISOM’s casualty rates were worse than those of NATO in Afghanistan.

Fergusson is effectively a guest of AMISOM, and stays in an air-conditioned portakabin on the military base at Mogadishu airport (p.37).

The problem of young men

Early on Fergusson makes a profound point which is relevant to all developing countries, to some extent all states. In his opinion, the problem with all these (developing) countries is what to do with the young men.

‘I just don’t know what we’re going to do about our young men,’ [says an elderly man, Abdulkarim, who’s been injured by a stray bullet]…Abdulkarim was expressing the despair of a patriarchal society that had lost all control of its successor generation. With the traditional bonds broken, the young men were rudderless, and now, exploited by foreigners and misled by extremists, their mad and endless violence was slowly destroying Somalia…(p.64)

Their corrupt dictators have run failing or rentier states with little interest or understanding of how to invest across all sectors of their economies in order to grow and develop them but people have kept on breeding at rates appropriate to pre-industrial societies. Lots of babies who grow up into lots and lots of unemployed young men hanging round on street corners.

(In his book The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński says that in West Africa these unemployed hopeless young men are called bayaye. He uses the example of Samuel Doe, president of Liberia from 1986 to September 1990, who started life as an unemployed peasant without a future, who trekked from a remote impoverished village though trackless jungles to the capital, Monrovia, in search of work, food and a purpose:

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. But nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye – that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the chief causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organising coups, fomenting civil wars. (‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński, page 244)

Mind you, when I googled bayaye one of the first results is from the Oxford Dictionary of African politics, which defines it as: ‘A Bantu term that has come to refer to idle youth or ‘street thugs’ in Uganda, i.e. people who are unemployed and can be seen hanging out on street corners’. So it looks like a commonly used term across central Africa. )

The West tries to broker peace deals, to oversee ‘democratic’ elections and continues to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and all the aid adverts you ever see will feature either young children, girls and women because these are the sentimental, wallet-opening faces of poverty. But no development in any Third World country can take place until you stop the fighting. And the fighting won’t stop until you give unemployed, aimless young men roles and goals which give them more dignity, self-worth and camaraderie than joining an Islamic militia.

Somalia had always been riven by clan rivalry and warfare. But over the years a system had evolved of controlling and limiting the violence, known as xeer, an ancient and sophisticated system of customary laws traditionally administered by the elders of rival clans who would meet and agree compromises and solutions to disputes and feuds. The dictator Siad Barre deliberately ran down this system while promoting his socialist revolution, thus helping to eliminate ancient ways of controlling or moderating clan violence.

In the old days, said Aden, the young men of al-Shabaab would have been brought into line by their elders and betters. The problem was that the war had destroyed that system. ‘It is not possible to convene a council of elders because there are no elders,’ he said (p.90)

Fergusson makes a striking visit to a camp for reformed or defecting al-Shabaab fighters. He expects to find ideologically hardened fanatics so is taken aback to encounter a group of boys, 15, 16 and 17 year olds, who lark around and take the mickey, pulling faces and giving sarcastic answers, like any other gang of unruly lads.

Everywhere he goes Fergusson sees ‘unemployed young men one saw in every Somali town, hanging about on street corners’ (p.220). The bayaye.

A criminologist named Daniel LeDouceur explains that the entire situation in Somalia needs to be seen through the prism of gang culture and gang psychology: the clans are really extended gangs; the pirates are formed in gangs; the people smugglers (across the Red Sea to Yemen) work in gangs; and al-Shabaab is really another congeries of gangs. So the solution is not ‘democracy’ etc etc, but the same approach to solving gang culture anywhere, which is to give young men, the bayaye, meaningful work and prospects (p.146).

‘Every man who has nothing will try something to get money.’
(Abdi-Osman who tried life as a pirate before being recruited to al-Shabaab, p.147)

Poverty

Poverty is one cause. Recruits to al-Shabaab, like recruits to the Taliban in Afghanistan, were attracted by the simple promise of pay; no matter the risks, it was better than being utterly unemployed and penniless. When the famine hits in spring 2011, Fergusson comes across three lads who were in a school classroom when an al-Shabaab recruiter asked for volunteers and stuck up their hands. ‘Why?’ Fergusson asks. Because they were paid a piece of fruit per day. That’s all it took (p.176).

Or the extended story told by Dahir Kadiye of the family who make $48 from each sheep they sell which will feed the family for three weeks, or a million dollars from one successful pirate hostage which will mean the entire family of eight never has to work again (p.401).

Ignorance

No schools and a very primitive nomad existence for the majority of the population explain the high levels of illiteracy and ignorance. (The literacy rate in Somali adults is currently estimated to be 40%.)

The root problem he [AMONO Chief Medical Officer, Colonel James Kiyungo] thought, was lack of education. ‘The fighters here learn to read the Koran, but they have no skills. There are no carpenters, no cooks, no plumbers – only the gun.’ (p.69)

Ignorant boys are easily led, specially by glamorous older boys with guns and money, and food.

The poverty and ignorance of the young which fuelled the insurgency were genuine grievances and had to be addressed. (p.178)

In fact this theme forms Fergusson’s conclusion. We need to address the problem of bored, rootless, alienated young men if we are to address al-Shabaab and militant Islam more generally, to address it in its heartlands before its violence spreads to Muslim diasporas in the West.

In Western cities, as in the Horn of Africa, sustained engagement with Somalia’s young men is the key to a better future for us all. (p.21)

Mohamed Alin

Somali politicians recognise and try to address the issue. Fergusson meets Mohamed Alin, who had returned from exile in Northolt, Middlesex, to make himself president of the self-declared autonomous region of Galmudug, a small statelet on the border between south Somalia and Puntland in the north. Alin explains that he wants to properly fund schools ‘to educate young men about the perils of piracy’, with skills training to provide livelihoods such as carpentry, electrical engineering and so on (p.226).

But such a thing requires, above all, peace, law and order: security; and then, proper funding, which has to come from abroad. And any link in the fragile chain of requirements can be sabotaged at any moment by outbreaks of clan or Islamic violence.

Thus peace remains elusive, aid donors are reluctant to give money which will disappear in corruption, and so ‘piracy’ remains a viable career for thousands and thousands of young Somali men, many of whom travel hundreds of kilometres from the drought-stricken, famine-stricken interior on the promise of rich pickings which will allow them to splash the cash, buy fancy cars, live high on the hog, take a wife and generally be a man (p.233).

Somalis in Britain

The book includes a long, deeply scary chapter about Somalis in Britain. No-one knows how many Somalis there are in Britain, maybe as many as 200,000. They have a lot of social problems. Only half of Somalis have any qualifications and only 3% have a higher education qualification. With the result that unemployment among Somalis runs at 40%, the highest of any immigrant community (p.299).

What scares various experts, educators, and Somali community leaders Fergusson speaks to is Somalis’ hyper-violence, ‘feral’ behaviour according to a teacher in a state school a third of whose pupils are Somali (p.304). Hundreds are permanently excluded from the education system because of bad behaviour and violence (p.306).

Evidence that Somali gangs have trounced white or Jamaican gangs in immigrant hotspots (Southall, Leytonstone). Some of this is down to having experienced hyper-violence in Somalia before immigrating (p.322). Many lack the restraining influence of a father (pages 306, 319) – ‘the specific Somali problem of paternal absenteeism’ (p.374). (In Minneapolis Fergusson discovers that 90% of the young men who’ve absconded to fight in Somalia grew up in fatherless households, pages 336, 348).

Mothers are failing to discipline their sons (p.307). It doesn’t help that many of these mums can’t read, write or speak English. This feeds into lack of educational achievement and a cycle of alienation and violence. According to a community worker, young Somali men are harder to reach than any other ethnic group, and often this is because they are just thick – stupid, uneducated, violent and proud of it (p.322). Fergusson comes to think it is a distinctive Somali trait, to be pig-headedly obstinate, even at your own expense (p.340)

Some Somali young men, raised in the UK, have travelled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab and become suicide bombers. Fergusson expresses the concern that homegrown Somalis will carry out terrorist attacks like the 7/7 bombings. In fact, of the major terrorist attacks carried out since the publication of his book, none involved Somalis:

• 22 March 2017: Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old black Briton, drove a car into pedestrians on the south side of Westminster Bridge, injuring more than 50 people, four of them fatally, crashed the car into the perimeter fence of Westminster Palace grounds, ran into New Palace Yard where he fatally stabbed an unarmed police officer before being shot dead by an armed police officer. Five dead.
• 22 May 2017: the Manchester Arena bombing carried out by Salman Abedi, a British citizen of Libyan descent, killing 22 people and injuring 1,017.
• 3 June 2017: three men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then attacked shoppers at Borough Market with carving knives, killing eight people and injuring 48. All three attackers were shot dead by armed police. They were: Khuram Shazad Butt, a Pakistan-born British citizen; Rachid Redouane, a failed asylum seeker of Libyan or Moroccan origin; Youssef Zaghba, an immigrant with joint Italian/Moroccan nationality.

No Somalis.

Foreign aid

In the 1990s an estimated 80% of foreign aid to Somalia never reached its intended recipients, being stolen by corrupt officials or warlords. In 2010 an estimated 50% of foreign aid was being stolen by contractors, warlords or al-Shabaab (p.170).

Somali snippets

Somalia’s most famous novelist is Nurrudin Farah (p.31).

The very first novel to be published in the Somali language was ‘Ignorance is the Enemy of Love’ by Faarax M.J. Cawl, as recently as 1972 (p.269).

Somalis refer to the civil war period as Burburki meaning, simply, ‘the destruction’.

Everyone in Somalia chews qat which releases a substance which affects the brain like amphetamine i.e. gives you a speedy buzz (p.39).

Warriors of all varieties drove ‘technicals’, the nickname of pick-up trucks with a massive anti-aircraft gun bolted to the back of its load bay. Apparently, ‘the technical’ was invented in Somalia (p.135), although the idea of bolting heavy machine guns on to light trucks actually goes back to the Second World War, according to this article about technicals in The Conversation.

Western contractors nicknamed Somalis ‘skinnies’ (p.161).

Vivid description of Somali piracy (pages 213 to 233).

The ‘Somali rose’ is the nickname for the shreds of plastic that snag on the thorn bushes that grow in all the country’s abandoned urban spaces (p.224).

gaalo is the Somali word for white person or Westerner.

Grim account of female genital mutilation in the Somali community (pages 234 to 238).

Sayid Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan (1856 to 1920), a Somali religious, military and political leader who headed the Somali Dervish movement in a twenty-year struggle against British, Italian, and Ethiopian power in Somalia. Referred to as simply the Sayyid, he is often considered the father figure of Somali nationalism. Fergusson gives a biography of the great man, along with excerpts from his improbable epic poem on the death of a British officer, on a trip to the ruins of his garrison fortress at Toolah (pages 258 to 264).

The importation, distribution and consumption of qat or khat, chewing whose leaves cause stimulation, loss of appetite and mild euphoria (pages 367 to 377). marfish is Somali for qat-chewing den (p.368).

P.S. Black Hawk Down

The Battle of Mogadishu took place nearly 20 years before Fergusson arrived in Somalia. It’s the name given to the ill-fated attempt by American special forces to seize warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, who they blamed for an attack on UN forces, on 3 October 1993. During the attempted abduction of Aidid, two US helicopters were shot down and the marooned soldiers were quickly surrounded by mobs and militias. American reinforcements went in with overwhelming force to rescue their boys, leaving an estimated 700 Somalis dead, but despite their efforts, 18 Americans were killed and some of their bodies dragged through the streets, amid cheering crowds. Home-made footage of these chaotic bloody scenes was widely broadcast with two consequences:

1. President Clinton was horrified and ordered the termination of US involvement in Somalia. Reluctance to risk footage of American boys being treated the same way underlay America’s extreme reluctance to get involved in the Rwandan genocide, which commenced just 6 months later, in April 1994, at exactly the same time that the last US forces were withdrawing from Somalia.

2. In 1999 journalist Mark Bowden published a forensic account of the disaster, titled ‘Black Hawk Down’, and in December 2001 a movie of the book was released, directed by Ridley Scott, featuring an all-star cast. Fergusson talks to people who, at the time of his visit 10 years after the movie release, claim the film had a very negative impact on the image of Somalis, painting them all as fanatical psychopaths, a charge also made by Somali community groups in the US who objected to the way not a single Somali was consulted about the script or filming, and not a single Somali actor appears in it.

Credit

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson was published by Bantam Press in 2013. References are to the 2014 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

• Ethiopia news stories on Africa Confidential

More Africa reviews

• Africa reviews