Nuruddin Farah on being a true African

Odhiambo: Welcome back to Kenya. What was your impression when you landed at the airport, and when you checked in at the hotel …?

Farah: Well, I should say I was actually kind of welcomed at the airport when I arrived. Welcomed in the sense that the man at the immigration asked me what I would be doing here and I said I would be visiting Nairobi and also giving a talk at the University of Nairobi. I supposed that would be the first time when I was warmly welcomed to Nairobi because he said: ‘Ooh that is my alma mater; that is where, you know, I grew up intellectually...’ So Kenya in a way is changing slightly as if a lesson has been learnt from previous experience. That every time a Somali walks in, a Somali is not always a Shifta. So, that delighted me.

Odhiambo: Nairobi features in your latest book Hiding in Plain Sight. Does that explain partly your attachment to the city or knowledge of the city or purely your imagination of the city.

Farah: Well it is a combination of these things, you see. As a novelist there is a way of writing that sometimes makes it more sociological than literary. I always say that if you actually want to write about any subject, something literary, you have to know a lot about it than can be written on a postcard. Because it is only after you know a lot that, you can turn your knowledge into a metaphor and I think because I have been coming to Nairobi since 1973 and I have lived here occasionally, I have changed with Nairobi. I have begun to accept Nairobi for what it is and that it is no longer a Kenyan city. It has become an African city, and especially an East and Central African city. Nairobi has benefited a great deal in terms of cosmopolitanism from the fact that almost all the countries in the neighbourhood are in political trouble and, therefore, people seek life’s continuity in Nairobi.

Odhiambo: Speaking of that, Nairobi is a host to huge population of people who come from Somalia, and that has been partly a problem, yet you are stressing that Nairobi is fairly now cosmopolitan. Please elaborate.

Farah: Well, there are two Somalis in Kenya. There is a Kenyan Somali and there is a Somali Somali. And I think sometimes out of political short-sightedness, we confuse the two because one group of Somalis are guests in this country and another group of Somalis are as Kenyans as Odhiambo is a Kenyan, even though people look at them in a very different way. I as Nurruddin Farah see Nairobi as my city, as an African city with all the problems that African cities have, with all the problems that the country has, with all the problems that African countries have because citizenship in an African country is a conflicted concept. The idea of becoming a citizen in a country in Africa has to be discussed and talked about and settled once and for all. It cannot remain conflicted. There has to be a debate about citizenship, about nationality, about how to deal with it and about how to be inclusive rather than exclusive.

Odhiambo: Is this your sense of African humanism?

Farah: Yes it is and the reason is: I am the only one I know of who has a Ghanaian passport, a Somali passport and a South African passport. My intention all my life, and I have now reached the age of 70, is a pan-Africanist intention. I am an African and I am a Somali because I grew up with that identity but I see myself, my Somaliness, as indivisible from my being an African.

Odhiambo: And in that sense do you see Somalia as a polity likely to be reconstituted in your lifetime?

Farah: Well, it may not be reconstituted politically. It may not be reconstituted in the sense that the cloth that we call the flag may not be flying in all the areas of the Somali-speaking world. But there is a Somali-speaking world which involve a culture, a humanity; the way of looking at the world, poetry, the sociology of being Somali, even the psychology of being Somali and if I were a Somali-speaking today in Ethiopia or if I were in Djibouti, I see myself as part of all that and in terms of my presence in the Somali-speaking world, I see myself as forming part of  bigger picture which is expanded into the rest of Africa.

Odhiambo: So where does that leave the kind of religious fundamentalism that certain groups for example the Al-Shabaab that hold onto claim a different kind of Somalihood?

Farah: Well Shabaab has nothing to do with Somalia. Shabaab, you know not all dogs suffer from rabies. Shabaab are, if they were dogs and we are all dogs, Shabaab will be suffering from rabies and a dog that suffers from rabies does not represent other dogs. So we have to separate the sick dog from the healthy dog. Shabaab does not represent a Somali view.

They are more non-Somali, the ideas that Shabaab represent, than Somali. And you must know that Shabaab have killed more Somalis than they have killed any foreigner and created more havoc inside Somalia than they have done in Kenya or in Uganda or anywhere else. But Shabaab is the enemy of everyone who loves peace. Shabaab, therefore, is an ideology that is linked to that mad strain of religiosity.

And being secular, and I am saying I Nurruddin, I see myself as a secular Muslim, perhaps not the typical practicing Muslim… As a young man I went to school where I had the Bible as a textbook in a Christian school …

Odhiambo: In Somalia…?

Farah:No, I went to school in Ethiopia, in the Somali-speaking part of Ethiopia. I learnt the Bible as a textbook, the Quran in the afternoon as a textbook and then later on lived in India where I learnt Hinduism as faith and, therefore, my way of looking at the world is inclusive, in which there are many different faiths and I respect each one of them as I respect each person who I meet.

Odhiambo: Is that the basis of a strand of the ethos of tolerance in your writings?

Farah: It is because I see myself, my writings, as being democratic, as having a room, space for almost everybody. As a tolerant strain that allows views different from mine to be expressed, I must say that I am highly disturbed by these narrow minded interpretations of the faith which people practice, of the ideas that people hold.

The world is a richer world because of the differences that are there in our lives. Now, for example, a big difference between myself and members of Shabaab is that I accept that God created people differently for different purposes. 

Odhiambo: Ideas of tolerance and accepting the other are taught through culture, arts and creativity. Do you see your literature as pursuing this?Farah: Well, the idea of the novel is cosmopolitan. It is cosmopolitan in that quite often you have many ideas that advance progress, that advance change; ideas that come out of open discussion. There can be no discussion that is fruitful unless they are open and democratic. In novel writing, you do not see a person as isolated from other humans. In the novel, characters are not divided according to nationality. They are divided according to the kind of people they are: they are good for all or bad. Novels allow democratic debate.

Odhiambo: How do we invoke and provoke a language that celebrates humanity as opposed to the violence, destruction and deaths that we witness every day?

Farah: Well, that obviously is something quite worrying and which the education that we receive or the instructions that we give to students should militate against. It is this continued divisiveness, for political and nationalistic reasons, that makes us glorify violence. The glorification of violence is anti-democratic, antihumanistic. That is quite worrying because every time you define yourself as separate from other groups you are actually inviting some form of inhumanity; you are questioning the dignity of others. The dignity of a human being is supreme and one thing that we all share is that dignity.

Odhiambo: Your latest novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, raises questions of freedom. How do we think creatively around freedoms when politics shrinks our liberties?

Farah: I think, as I said to you, if a city like Nairobi, as I described, is cosmopolitan, my advice is that people who live in a cosmopolitan city must behave in a cosmopolitan way. It would be contradictory for you to live in a cosmopolitan place and not behave in a cosmopolitan manner.

One of the ways we can solve some of these problems is for there to be continuous debates through radio, teaching in universities, schools etc. We must teach civic courses that promote these ideas. The problem, though, starts with the family. My trilogy on dictatorship actually studies the small unit: The father, the mother and the children. The failings are within the family unit.

Odhiambo: So democracy has to begin with the family.

Farah: Democracy has to begin with the father treating his wife respectfully; the mother receiving love from the husband; the mother and the father giving love and openness to their children. That is obviously incorporated into the bigger society and the bigger society teaches this lesson to the entire nation and the nations in Africa teach the entire continent.