Getting a Handle on Africa

When I was a seventh grader at Anchor Bay Junior High, I had a sadistic geography teacher named Mr. Stevenson. His particular mode of torture involved the administration of the dreaded unannounced test, often called a “pop quiz” by its victims. In case you’ve forgotten all about pop quizzes (or have thankfully pushed them to the perimeter of your memory), they were not called “pop” for the same reason that pop music is. No, it was called a pop quiz because it had a nasty way of popping the bubble of any weekend plans that didn’t involve staying at home and studying geography.

Somalia, located on the eastern coast of Africa, has been in the news this week because Ethiopia, its neighbor to the west, has sent in military forces to defeat Islamic factions which control the southern half of the country.

Mr. Stevenson once gave us the same pop quiz every day for a week—a strategy that oddly enough failed to take the surprise element out of it for many of my classmates. The quiz consisted, simply enough, of the map of the continent of Africa with none of the countries’ names written within their borders. Our job as students was to fill in all the names of the countries in five minutes. Mr. Stevenson vowed that every student in the class would get every answer correct before he stopped giving us this test. This was one area of geography where he was dead wrong.

I can’t remember if I ever got 100% of the countries correct, but I kind of doubt it. It was tough! Sure, it was easy enough to get a handle on the big countries like Egypt, Libya and Algeria in the northern part of the continent. And the country of South Africa was pretty much a “gimme.” But it was in the deepest part of central Africa where most of us 7th grade geography scholars met a fate worse than Mister Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

“Dang, I keep getting all these ‘C’ countries confused. Is that Cameroon, Chad or Congo? Why is there a Niger and a Nigeria?”

By the time I had gotten to the western coast of the continent—where countries like Gambia and Togo are no bigger than Rhode Island—I was completely befuddled on which one was which.

I remember once looking to an African-American classmate for some kind of insight into the quiz. He replied that his family had been stationed at an Army base in Germany for the past three years so I would have to wait for the Europe quiz before he could offer any geographical expertise.

These days I’m still a bit hazy about the location of some African countries, so when one of them is in the news I like to have my World Atlas at the ready. This past week Ethiopia sent soldiers and fighter jets to neighboring Somalia to attack that country’s Islamic movement. Realizing that I had only the vaguest of ideas about Somalia’s whereabouts, I did a little research.

If you look on a map of the world, you might come to the conclusion that Somalia must be some kind of tropical paradise. Located just north of the equator on the eastern coast of Africa, Somalia is a large, peninsula-shaped country between the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Although it is only 246,215 square miles in area (making it slightly smaller than Texas), it has over 1,700 miles of coastline. To put that in perspective, Florida has 1,200 miles of coastline and California has 1,340 miles of coastline. That’s a lot of Somali beaches!

Unfortunately, the Islamic factions who rule the southern half of Somalia don’t quite get what makes a nice beach such a tourist attraction for the rest of the world. In October, an Islamic court banned women from swimming at the main beach in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. It was seen by many as the latest step in an attempt by Islamic leaders to impose a strict “Taliban-style” form of the religion in the country.

“We stopped women from swimming because it is against the teaching of Islam for women to mingle with men, especially while they are swimming,” said Sheikh Farah Ali Hussein, chair of a Mogadishu Islamic court.

Apparently, it’s all there in the chapter on swimming in the Qur’an, along with an emphasis on the buddy system and CPR techniques.

Since sweeping into power this past summer, these same anti-swimming Islamic forces have banned movie viewing, introduced public executions and broke up a wedding celebration because a band was playing and women and men were socializing together.

It is this severe interpretation of Islam that has many international observers concerned about the fate of this week’s dust up with Ethiopia. Although Somalia’s 1,700 miles of coastline might not be the best place to spot a pretty girl in a bikini, it is the perfect setup for al-Qaida forces from other countries to slip in under cover of darkness. American intelligence officials believe that Islamic militants are hiding in the country and none other than Osama Bin Laden has portrayed Somalia as “a battleground in his war on the West.”

This morning (Wednesday) a joint force of Ethiopian and Somali government troops marched to within 18 miles of Islamist-held Mogadishu.

“We are not going to fight for Mogadishu, to avoid civilian casualties,” said Ambassador Abdikarin Farah in Ethiopia. “Our troops will surround Mogadishu until they (the Islamists) surrender.”

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has stated his forces have killed up to 1,000 Islamist fighters and wounded 3,000 in the three-day war. The Red Cross said that more than 800 civilians have been wounded and thousands are now fleeing the combat zones.

For a country which has not seen a stable, non-military government in more than 15 years, the results of this most recent conflict will have a long-lasting impact on whether Somalia becomes more like the western-style democracies of Africa or more like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan of the 1990s.