Authors: Hibo Wardere
I stared at her, still uncomprehending.
‘. . . I tore badly and I caught an infection, that’s why I was in hospital.’
Everything around me just crashed, that’s the only way I can describe it.
‘They cut us to make sure the men find us like that.’
And then, horrifyingly, the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. My mother had told me that she wanted to preserve my virginity, that our family were known for being clean, and I
hadn’t understood properly what virginity was, until now.
I let go of Fatima’s hand then, and I staggered to the other side of the room. I sat on the floor in the corner and put my head between my knees. I rocked there, back and forth, praying a
million times over that the same thing wouldn’t happen to me.
I’d rather die than go through that
, I thought. And in that split second I hated men.
‘The pain hasn’t finished,’ Fatima was saying. ‘There is more to come.’
Why was it my fate to be born a woman? I was in a nightmare and there was no escape. By now I was only catching the odd few words, as my thoughts ricocheted off the walls of my mind –
‘Lying on the bed in a pool of blood . . . Making noises like a wounded animal . . . His family dancing around the bed . . . Congratulating him on how pure you are . . .’
I looked up at her, my face aghast as the horror of it washed over me in waves. This is what was waiting for me, to be torn open all over again, by someone else? I had survived the cutting, only
to be served a second punishment? The fear had taken hold of my brain and with its grasping spindly fingers it was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. Please God, I begged. I don’t want to be in
pain anymore. I pleaded, I bargained, I begged. I prayed.
‘Hibo . . .’ I felt my cousin put her arm around my shoulders, as she sat down gingerly beside me again. ‘You said you wanted to know.’
And I did, I did want to know. We were kept pure for men, and then broken in by them. And what happened to us in the meantime was completely irrelevant in the pursuit of their pleasure, or their
integrity, their masculinity. Were females really valued so little? Would my own daughters face the same fate?
I was back in that hut, on that raging river of pain and unable to get off because this was my life, this was my destiny. I would be married to one of my scruffy cousins – I will have been
deformed, defiled, kept pure for him, so he can open me up again, and then my daughter will be chopped and maimed for her own husband and, just like my mother told me, there would be nothing I
could do about it because it has happened to every woman before us. I sobbed and sobbed – for myself, for my daughters, for all the women and girls in Somalia, past, present and future.
If only I could have vowed then that I would change the future, that I wouldn’t let what befell Fatima happen to me, but I knew it was out of my hands; it was what I was born into. And so
I decided in that moment that I would rather die than face the same fate, endure more pain, and that I would protect any daughters of mine from the same.
And this was a promise I intended to keep.
7
F
rom up in the clouds, the lights below twinkled a starry welcome to me. My forehead had been stuck to the tiny window of the aeroplane
since we’d taken off from Nairobi. As the plane had lifted up from the ground, I’d waved goodbye to the arid land beneath me, and watched the eight-hour movie that whizzed by at my
window. We’d soared up above the clouds into the deep blue sky, each hour bringing me closer to Britain, to freedom. I hadn’t slept for the flight like most of my fellow passengers;
instead, I’d kept upright in my seat, not wanting to miss a minute of the journey that would change my life.
I was eighteen when that plane took off from Kenya. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined ever leaving Somalia, but then civil war had broken out in our country and our president was
overthrown. None of the tribes could agree on a replacement for him, and fighting between rival factions meant that the country could not deal with natural disasters like drought and therefore
famine. The stories of homes that were broken into during the night, girls who were raped in front of their parents by militia, had grown increasingly loud and increasingly close in the months that
preceded my father sending my mother, my brother and sister and me to Kenya. He thought it would be just until the country settled down, and we’d gone into Kenya illegally and without
paperwork. Our villa had been the only home I’d known, life in Mogadishu was all that I’d ever known, but the day I was told we were leaving the country that had brutalised me was one
of the best of my life. Who would have thought that out of such destruction could come the freedom I’d longed for?
In Kenya we had been refugees, travelling from home to home without paperwork, at risk every day we spent in Nairobi of being sent back to possible death, and yet I was never scared, not as
scared as I would have been back in my homeland. That country might have been my home, but, as far as I was concerned, it had betrayed me and every other woman like me.
To be a feminist as an African woman in those days was an unusual thing, but when I look back now there is no other word to describe the person I was. As a child I’d questioned why my
mother was happy to cook and clean for the family, why she had no ambitions of her own. And she would tell me: ‘Those are not jobs for women. Your place is with your husband, with your
children.’ I never understood that as a child, and as a teenager I was appalled by the idea, because I’d known from just a few years old that I didn’t want to be my mother. I
wanted to be something more than her. It wasn’t just because of what she’d done to me; it was the way she viewed womanhood, as if it were only something truly satisfying as long as
there was a man to take you and accept you, someone for you to cook and clean for. It started off as a feeling for me, that desire to be something more than my mother, and over the years as my
hatred for her grew it became a determined act of defiance. I would be more than a wife and a mother. I felt as though each mile that took me further from Somalia would give me the opportunity to
be more than her.
I loved Nairobi. The roads were tarmacked, so different from the dusty, unfinished ones back in Mogadishu, and the houses had an upstairs. I loved the tall buildings, and the green parks where
people took rowing boats out on the lake.
Even though Hadsan was married, my mother had insisted we weren’t leaving Somalia without her. So there was me, Hoyo, Hadsan, two of my cousins and my brother. Hadsan’s husband
followed us out there, and we relied on the generosity of friends and family to keep us hidden from the authorities. Each time the police found us, we managed to send them away with the money they
wanted, but whatever they asked for only bought us twenty-four hours before they’d be knocking again at whatever new door we were then hiding behind. It wasn’t an easy life, but, as far
as I was concerned, it was still better than Somalia.
After we’d been staying with friends in Nairobi for a year, my father phoned my mother in the middle of the night. In the morning, when she sat us down, fatigue had carved deep grooves
beneath her eyes, and she looked older than I’d remembered from the night before.
‘Your father says you are to make your own lives now,’ my mother told us. ‘He said we can’t go back to Mogadishu.’
If I’d shared a closer bond with my mother, if it hadn’t been broken, I might have wanted to stay with her, but when I knew I was free to go wherever I wanted to claim asylum as a
refugee, I couldn’t wait to leave her side. Ninety per cent of Somalians were choosing Canada, my people were leaving on planes in their thousands. But I didn’t want to go there –
there was a name that appealed to me more than anywhere, a word that sounded so different, so intriguing, so interesting: London.
‘I want to go to London,’ I told my mother.
So when my mother heard of a family friend, Zahara, who was flying to London, she agreed I could go with her. Zahara was in her thirties, an older, responsible person for my eighteen-year-old
self to travel with, to be my chaperone as I headed up into the sky on a new adventure. But to me, leaving Africa didn’t just mean safety from the civil war; it meant freedom from my own
culture. It meant saving my life.
The plane circled the airport before making its descent, and then finally I heard the captain address us over the Tannoy: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to London Heathrow.’ I had
arrived. Hibo had arrived, and I knew this was just the beginning. Tears started running down my face.
I was
free
.
I was free.
‘Don’t you want to be here?’ asked Zahara, seeing my tears.
But I wanted it more than anything I’d ever wanted before.
We disembarked, but not to the balmy evening we’d left in Nairobi. Instead, there was a breeze so cold that when I arrived at the plane doors to exit, the shock of it pushed me back into
the aircraft. Goosebumps stood to attention on my arms like they never had before.
‘Are you OK?’ the stewardess said.
I looked down at the long trousers I had on and the thin shirt, and she immediately seemed to understand I was too terrified of the cold to step outside. She kept me on board until all the other
passengers had filtered off, and then Zahara gave me her denim jacket and one of her big scarves. But even as I walked carefully down the stairs, seeing the lights of the night shimmering against
the tarmac, my teeth were chattering. Inside the airport terminal, out of the cruelty of the wind, I asked Zahara if I could stop to use the first toilet we saw, and in there I burst into tears
again. A million thoughts raced through my mind: this is freedom, this is my life now. I will choose who I love; I will choose who I marry. But, most importantly, I would choose not to have my own
daughters cut. Just by arriving in this country, I had saved future babies from mutilation and I cried because there was no other feeling of freedom like it. I knew from that moment on I would
decide everything and be in charge of my life in this new land, with these pink people who call themselves white. And even then, I knew one of the first things I was going to ask for: to be
opened.
When I came out of the toilet, Zahara was waiting for me.
‘Why are you crying again?’ she asked.
‘I’m just so happy,’ I told her.
We followed the last of the crowds from the plane towards a large area where a huge queue of people snaked its way round the room. There, two police officers came towards us, and we handed them
the fake passports with which we’d travelled and embarked the plane. We told them the word we’d been taught to say back in Kenya, the only English word we knew then:
‘Asylum.’ And they indicated for us to follow them. They took us to a room and motioned for us to sit. It was difficult to know whether I was shaking with nerves or from the cold, but
one of the police officers saw I was shivering and handed me his jacket, then he came back with two steaming coffees for us. They were so kind, right from the start, and although I realised that my
life was in their hands until we made it out of the airport, I never worried they’d send us back to Kenya.
Eventually a woman called Margaret appeared – she was an older woman, maybe fifty, and her face was lined with kindness. She spoke a few words of Somali, enough to ask our names and how
old we were. She asked if we were hungry and I nodded so hard I felt sure my head might roll straight off my shoulders. She left the room and returned with a tuna sandwich and a banana, which I ate
quickly. A few moments later she reappeared, this time with a man who would be our translator. The immigration officers sat in front of us, with Biros and serious set faces, and wrote down on a
form everything our translator reported back to them. They wanted to know everything about us: where we were from, why we left, where our parents were, if we had any siblings.
The questions were exhausting and endless, and when eventually they’d finished the translator explained to us that Margaret would be taking us to a hostel in London. There we would receive
income support – £25 a week – while they processed our application for asylum. Finally, after a whole day spent in the airport, we were on our way, and I sat in the back of
Margaret’s small car, watching the lights of London loom bigger and brighter towards us. I was here in this city which sounded so wonderful, and to me everything about it was beautiful and so
different from anything I’d ever seen. It was December when we arrived in the UK and as we got out of the car, snow crunched under my feet. I looked down at it, mesmerised by the whiteness of
it, and when I bent down and picked it up between two fingers, the delight on my face must have been obvious because Margaret laughed before beckoning me to follow her into the hostel.
Cecil House was right in the centre of London, in an area called Holborn; it was a dark-brown brick tenement building with white sash windows. Anyone else might have thought it was an
ugly-looking place, but to me it represented the first bed that I’d slept in without my mother on the other side of my door, and for no other reason than that I thought it was wonderful. But
I was tired, so tired, and when Margaret showed me the room I’d be sleeping in with another Somalian girl, which had two single beds and our own toilet, I crawled straight on to one of the
beds. I cuddled myself up within the duvet, the first I’d ever seen in my life, and, wrapped up in this warm cloud, I stopped shivering for the first time as sleep took me far away in my
dreams, to the only place they knew, the dusty streets of Mogadishu that had once been so familiar.
Margaret returned the next day and took me shopping, and I fell in love with London that day as we walked down Oxford Street, Margaret pointing out all the Christmas decorations that twinkled
and shimmered above my head. I’d never seen anything so beautiful before. In London, as if to embrace this new sense of freedom, for a time I abandoned the headscarf I’d worn since I
was a little girl.