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“... I have been thinking about Responsibility ever since visiting Mogadiscio last year: the householder’s responsibility to the household, that of the smaller community to the larger, of the larger to the entire nation, and of the nation to the world as a whole. I have thought about all this in reaction to the collapse of several African nations into civil anarchy, Somalia going the way of Liberia, and Rwanda and Burundi moving towards a similar collapse ...”

“... For centuries, Somalis of pastoralist stock have described Mogadishu as justice-blind, whether they are alluding to the Mogadishu of old, ten centuries back, to the Mogadishu of Siyad Barre, or to the Mogadishu of the civil war. If Mogadishu occupies an ambiguous space in our minds and hearts, it is because ours is a land with an overwhelming majority of pastoralists, who are possessed of a deep urbophobia ...”

“... I remember the renegade tears running down the cheeks of my younger sister, who had been among the first boat-loads to arrive in Mombasa. ‘We just escaped,’ she said when I met her in Utange refugee camp, ‘leaving our beds unmade, the chairs in our dining-rooms upturned, our kitchens unswept, our dishes in the sinks, our future undone. We ran as fast as we could, not bothering where we might end up, in the country and among the displaced, or out of it and among the stateless ...”

“... of northern Nigeria, who have adopted the language of the conquered. (It is worth noting that Nuruddin Farah, a Somali with an Indian wife, wrote this novel while living in northern Nigeria. The map of the world in his head is interestingly different from ours.) Askar and Hilaal remember the Goths and the Mongols, called barbarians because they were ...”

“... as an important achievement. Somalian novels are rare birds in this country, and the sardines of Nuruddin Farah’s title are a group of contemporary Mogadishu ‘priviligentsia’. What cramps their cosmopolitan style is the police state in which they live (tyrannised over by an unnamed ‘General’) and the tribal traditions of a recent feudal ...”

“... home environment in which to work’. Replying in the journal Transition, the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah confessed to an ‘elemental distrust of essayists who pull the Western Enlightenment out of their holdall’. In the case of Sierra Leone, doubt and distrust should be redoubled by a cursory knowledge of the country’s history – founded on ...”

“... playing cat and mouse with immigration authorities. In the mid-1990s, the exiled Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah began to investigate the state of his fellow nationals after the fall of Siyad Barre. Many were refugees in Kenya. Others had made it to Europe, North America and the Gulf. Farah spoke to several of the ...”