The Somali donkey: A beast so burdened

Donkeys in Somalia do anything ranging from carrying cargo, the sick and dead, to being used in suicide bombing missions and machine gun firing posts, writes Joshua Kato

 

It is mid-morning at the X-control Afgoye junction. There is a bevy of activity as residents of northern Mogadishu go about their work. Although there are cars here, including vintage ones, the commonest and most affordable means of transport is the donkey.

 

Ahmed Nor, 35, owns several donkeys. On this day, he had ridden a donkey all the way from Elisha Biyaha, 12km away, to Bakara Market. He moved through X-control, before heading southward to the famous market, where he picked merchandise.  

 

The Somali donkey is not your ordinary donkey. It is so submissive that it takes every trash thrown at it in its stride and quietly too. It is not confrontational and never gets into brutal engagements. It carries out one task after another, some very heavy and dangerous. It looks like the donkeys carry the Somalis’ entire burden. A typical Somali citizen is a hardliner who, for 20 years, has borne the brunt of the civil war. 

 

From Afgoye to Baidoa, from Mogadishu to Johawar and in the south in Afmadow — all over the country, the donkey carries the burden of Somalia. On many occasions, donkey owners are seen lashing them heavily, but the submissive animals do not kick back, the fact that they have very powerful muscles notwithstanding. Nodding their heads left and right, they simply walk on, looking on the ground most of the time, pulling their burden. 

 

“It is my source of income, it is my mother and father. It does all my work and earns me money,” Nor says. Asked how much the donkey gives him daily, he says: “100,000... Somali currency.”

 

This is the equivalent sh10,000 a day. But how much does Nor give back to his ‘money machine’ — the faithful donkey? “It is a very simple servant to manage. It takes no money, just some grass and water,” he says. 

 

 

Donkeys have been part of Somalia’s history for thousands of years. They first existed as wild asses, before they were domesticated thousands of years ago. 

 

While Somalis have got clans that they fight and die for, the donkeys do not belong to any clan, a reason why they do not engage in animosity.

 

When you observe them as they carry out their tasks, they even seem to be distant from each other, with the only uniting factor being the loads they carry.

 

Donkeys are some of the most powerful domestic animals in the world. However, their docile nature means that this power is used by man to carry and pull many heavy loads. This is why donkeys are referred to as beasts of burden.  

 

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On the streets of Mogadishu and perhaps other Somali cities, there are more donkeys than bikes and in some cases, more donkey-driven carts than cars! 

 

Going by the evidence on the streets, the donkey carries anything, including household property that can fit in a five-tonne cart, fruits,  pregnant women, the sick, agricultural produce, bombs and other weapons. And outside the capital, especially in the agriculture Lower Shabelle region, donkeys have been drafted to engage in farming. 

 

For 20 years, the Somali donkey has been perhaps the most effective Somali ‘national’. Most of the current generation of donkeys were born during the course of the war — just like millions of Somali young men and women.

 

“Today, I brought mangoes from Bakara Market to this market, yesterday I carried 10 bags of rice from the market to Maslah,” says Mohamed Omar Abid, one of the traders. Abid says he has carried on his donkey-driven cart everything there is to carry — including pregnant women and dead bodies.  

 

“I was recently paid 500,000 Somali money ($20) to carry a body from Medina Hospital to Ill-fitir, 12km away,” Abid says.  

 When a massive general cleaning of Mogadishu city was carried out late last year, it was the donkeys that played the leading role of carrying the garbage to collection centres. The city had not been cleaned for at least 20 years. 

 

“Heaps and heaps of garbage were loaded on donkey-driven carts, before they were taken away,” Abid says. During last year’s famine, donkey-driven carts provided the most reliable transport for carrying relief items to refugee camps around the country.

 

While there are boda boda stages across Uganda, there are tens of donkey cart stages across Mogadishu. 

“You do not just park anywhere,” Abid says. He adds that hundreds of Somalis are earning from them. 

 

 It is hard to determine the value of merchandise that the donkey carries in Somalia. However, a trader in Bakara Market estimated it to be in millions of US dollars daily. And of course, according to Abid, with every load put on the cart, the donkey pays a fee to the authorities.

 

The al-Shabaab had roadblocks from which they would collect fees from donkey-driven carts operating in their areas. Such fees upped the militants’ earnings.

 

 

In October 2011, after Kenyan forces joined the war against the al-Shabaab, the donkeys were forced to join the fray. Apparently, after the Kenyan army attacked and destroyed al-Shabaab’s supply trucks, the militants turned to the donkeys.  

 

“We have received impeccable information that the al-Shabaab are using donkeys to carry weapons into Somalia. We shall consider large groups of donkeys as legitimate military targets,” Kenyan army spokesman Cyrus Oguna said. What a burden. It is not known whether the Kenyan army carried out their threat.  

 

In Mogadishu, the donkeys were again sent for an even more dangerous mission late last year. Instead of the normal cargo of agricultural produce, pregnant women, water or dry grass for camels and goats, it was loaded with explosives and led towards the famous, but notorious KM4 junction — to kill as many Somalis as possible and die in the process too.

 

“One day, a donkey was brought and stationed near the most populated area of the market with a timed bomb. However, we managed to spot it before the bomb went off. It was a big bomb that would have killed so many people,” a security official said.

 

Donkeys in Somalia have been used as machine gun firing posts, as gun pods are elected on the carts.

Under internationally recognisable rules of engagement, animals are not supposed to be put in the line of fire under any circumstances. 

 

Even if they are engaged, the other side is not supposed to kill them intentionally. But Somalia is another kind of war and putting donkeys in the line of fire is common.

 

And for this, the donkey continues to carry the huge burden, one of propelling the devastated country back to sanity.