After reading this book, I hope you will take a look around your own community and notice that there are Freedom Finders everywhere: all sorts of people who push beyond limiting expectations, and create something better. Get curious about the ways people around you seek freedom. Get energised about doing what you can to make sure freedom is extended to all. It’s the only way to save the planet from annihilation and be a genuine superhero.
EMILY CONOLAN, 2018
You’re about to kick the winning goal for Somalia in the World Cup. Your foot is poised above the ball. The crowds in the stands are roaring your name. The only problem is that the guys you are up against are a team of man-sized scorpions carrying AK-47s, and you’re worried that if they lose, they might eat you for revenge.
One voice seems to be shouting your name more loudly than all the others. ‘Wake up!’ it calls. Aunty Rahama shakes your shoulder. The crowds and the scorpions fade away. You sit up groggily.
The three of you – Aunty Rahama, you and your little sister, Jamilah – share a narrow bed in the back room of a grocery shop. Light filters in from the gaps around the edges of the tin roof, and the orange cloth curtain shifts in the breeze. You can hear the shopkeeper preparing for business out the front. Rahama fetches clothes from the cardboard box under the bed, and goes out the back into the alleyway to splash herself under the cold tap.
‘Up you get,’ she calls, businesslike as ever. ‘You too, Jamilah.’
Jamilah’s curly black hair is the only part of her poking out from under the sheet. She groans and rolls like a baby warthog in the dust. Aunty Rahama hauls you both out of bed. You wash, then each kneel on your prayer mat to perform morning prayers. Then Rahama wraps her red hijab over her hair, opens up her backpack from work and, with careful pride, clips a small black microphone to the red fabric near her chin.
‘Whassat?’ asks Jamilah, rubbing her eyes.
‘My new microphone. It’s so much smaller. It records everything on here.’ Rahama lifts up her top a little and points to a black box she has clipped to the waistband of her cotton trousers.
‘I want to come with you two today,’ says Jamilah.
‘Not yet, chickpea. It’s too risky. When you’re bigger.’
Soon you and Rahama step outside into the blazing morning light. Overhead, seagulls from Lido Beach wheel through the blue sky. Cars honk, bicycles weave, and an old man herds goats down the street to market.
A couple of doors down from your place, a young man sits in the doorway with a guitar, strumming some chords and humming. The simple melody gives you goosebumps all over.
A month ago, when the terrorist group al-Shabaab was everywhere in the city, the man could have been killed for daring to do this. Music, dancing and sport were all forbidden. Even now, with al-Shabaab still in control in some northern outskirts of the city, it’s still a brave, defiant thing to do.
You look closely. The man’s face looks ordinary, but now you know he’s a secret hero and that his guitar is his weapon.
Rahama turns back to Mr Jabril, the shopkeeper, who’s standing in the doorway with Jamilah. ‘Thank you for having her,’ she says, and then sternly to Jamilah: ‘Remember to help Mr Jabril all you can.’
Jamilah sticks out her bottom lip and looks mutinous, but to no avail, because today you and Aunty Rahama have a job to do. You’re going out to do your favourite thing: story-hunting.
Aunty Rahama has fought with every bit of courage she has to raise you and Jamilah alone since your hooyo and aabe were killed – and to get her job at the radio station as a journalist.
When you were younger, you hated how she left you to watch Jamilah while she ran off at crazy hours, to follow the sound of shooting, or go to the airport to interview someone important getting off a plane. But now that you’re thirteen and Jamilah is eight, Rahama has started to teach you how she does her job, bringing you along on some of the safer stories to hold her equipment – and you’re hooked.
‘What’s the story today?’ you ask her as you walk down the road together. It’s a busy Saturday morning. The air smells like onion curry from the street vendor on the corner. After you’ve walked a few more blocks, you reach the intersection where a mortar bomb went off two months ago. The main target is still a blackened hole, but some of the nearby shops that were damaged look like they’re about to reopen for business already. The owner of the hot bread shop is giving his freshly laid bricks a bright coat of pink paint.
‘How do you know whether Mogadishu is a safe place to live again?’ asks Rahama. She likes to tease out a story by challenging your thoughts. You look up and down the bustling street. You think of the man playing his guitar.
‘I don’t know,’ you reply, ‘because it’s never been really safe – not since before the civil war started, when Hooyo and Aabe were teenagers and you were just a toddler. Even you don’t remember that.’
‘It seems pretty good now, though, right?’ She nods to an AMISOM peacekeeping soldier in a dappled green-and-brown uniform standing on a corner. His hand rests on a long, black gun. ‘Now that Barcelona is here to protect us.’
You smile. This codename system’s used everywhere in Somalia: people refer to al-Shabaab as the football team ‘Arsenal’, and now AMISOM has been dubbed the rival team ‘Barcelona’. It’s safer to be overheard talking about football than terrorism.
‘It does seem good now,’ you agree, ‘but there have been short times of peace in the past, and then the war has started again. How do we know this isn’t one
