David Axe, on urban life in Mogadishu
David Axe, a good friend and fellow blogger, recently sent me the following guest post from Mogadishu [map, wiki].
Imagine a city with all the usual gripes: a growing population, ethnic tension, strained utilities, crime. Now cut off essentially all spending for 17 years. That’s right: no meaningful investment of any kind. No road repair. No new power plants. No sewerage. No garbage collection. Oh – and fire off a couple million bullets and shells, too.
You’d think such a place would be unlivable, but you’d be wrong.
Welcome to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, still teeming with people despite being the main battleground in a string of conflicts stretching back to 1990. It’s a ghost town that just happens to have a lot of people in it.
There’s no glass in the windows. There are potholes in the roads the depth of moon craters. There are mountainous heaps of garbage where goats and children scavenge for food. And in every former house, apartment, shop and government building, there are squatters that, over time, have more or less become legitimate tenants.
Who’s going to argue with them, anyways? All those buildings’ former owners are dead or living abroad. Beginning in 1990, everyone with money or a marketable skill who could get out of the country left. Meanwhile, drought and economic collapse hit rural communities hard, driving former farmers into a city that, despite being this close to Hellish, is still better than the countryside.
The old Mogadishu was a fairly cosmopolitan place, with hotels and restaurants, industry and nightlife and foreign embassies with their diverse staffs. The new Mogadishu is a sprawling farming village dropped atop a couple hundred square miles of rubble.
There are islands of order and relative luxury: a handful of hotels cowering near the headquarters of an African Union peacekeeping force. They provide most of their own services: generators, cars, heavily armed security guards. All the food is flown in from Ethiopia. One night on a king-size bed, plus three meals and laundry will set you back $100. At night the hotels seal their gates and post the night watch. And that’s when the shooting starts, gunshots echoing off the ruined walls of a city that looks like it’s ten thousand years old, but isn’t.
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