Somalia through the eyes of a captured spy

Somalia through the eyes of a captured spy



Somali women carry weapons at a demonstration organised by the Al Shabaab on July 5, 2010. Ledgard paints Somalia in evocative broad strokes that leave no doubt as to the fate hanging over the head of the captive Englishman. Picture: File
By Stanley Gazemba (email the author)

The doctrines of the major religions have it that at the end of life what remains of humankind will ascend heavenward.

But science — at least in Jonathan Ledgard’s book Submergence — has it that the disassembled remains of the human species will be washed into the seas and oceans where we will have to accommodate ourselves to realms to which we are not evolved.
To read Submergence is to delve into the unimaginable and at the same time drift into meditation on formless utopia.

It is a heady trip to the netherworld where acid-feeding bacteria and microbial organisms dwell.

And yet it is not science fiction.

It is a love story about James More, an Englishman captured spying on jihadists operating from Somalia and Danielle Flinders, a half-French bio-mathematician preparing to dive 3,000 miles to the bottom of the Greenland Sea to do research on life in the lowest strata.

The story is built around More’s ruminations in the solitude of captivity on the woman he loves.
Share This Story
From wounded angels borne on a litter to the very gates of Hades, the imagery is evocative, haunting even.


No sooner are you embraced in the folds of the masterful narrative bordering on poetry than the page flips to a science lesson 3,000 metres under the sea — doomsday lessons on how oceanography is bound to affect our lives even more than HIV and global warming. The reader is taken through musings on religion and art, djinns, the supernatural and a myriad other subliminal realms; it requires a fairly solid grasp of European literature and culture to keep up.

Ledgard is a political correspondent in Africa for The Economist.

Foreign correspondents covering Africa for the Western media have been accused of overemphasising the continent’s hunger and wars.

Ledgard paints Somalia in evocative broad strokes that leave no doubt as to the fate constantly hanging over the head of the captive Englishman but that nonetheless suggest a well-travelled writer:

“... The famished were all around, pressed in with the animals; weaker than them, more dazed.

They had staggered in from the dead country... some slept under the lorries, or along the coral wall.

Their mouths were full of dust. They were hollow-cheeked; in some faces the narrowness produced a rodent-like expression. Several hundred of them were in the overgrown garden of an abandoned villa, waiting to be fed a meal.

Other fighters were already there, cudgelling them into a line. The food was cooking in a cauldron on an open fire. Some people fainted before they reached the food and there was no one to lift them up. The fruit bats went by, brushing low.

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/Somalia+through+the+eyes+of+a+captured+spy+/-/434746/1256418/-/1fx3r0z/-/
http://samotalis.blogspot.com/