by Mohamoud Ali Gaildon,
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Colonel Ibrahim Rooble Warfaa “Doonyaale” |
The mention of Colonel Donyale, in a piece recently posted by Mr. Mohamed Haji Ingris triggered in me a vivid memory that I wish to share with you. It was one of those times when by a stroke of luck a man’s outer shell cracks open, and his inner sanctum is laid bare for all to see. “This is no time for a short story,” you may want to say. If so, please allow me to argue that at a time all we as a nation once stood for is gone with the wind, memories and stories are all we have left to link with the past and ponder what was and what could have been.
My dimming memory tells me it was early October of 1971 when a devastating cyclone, the second in as many years, hit the northern coast of Somalia. I was in Las Qoray, as I had been the year before when an equally devastating cyclone hit. To the north of the town is the Red Sea. To the south, the magnificent bluffs of the fault-block mountains of Calmadow rise sharply into the sky and bring one oh, so close! to Awrkii Cirka. A torrential rain on the mountains sends flash floods down deep gorges which open into wide and relatively flat watercourses that dump the water into the sea, a sea that is unwilling to lie flat and take it on the cheek. The clash between the fast flowing floods and the raging sea is something to behold. This is when titans, driven by the power of God, duke it out in an epic battle for the ages. Such fury and such power I had never seen before, nor since. And it is in the middle of such a scene that my short story of Donayle begins.
It just so happened that he, at the time manger of the fish factory, along with three of his employees, drove a Russian truck (ironically filled with relief construction material for victims of the previous cyclone) smack into the flood. (To get from one side of the town to the other, in the east-west direction, one has to cross the watercourse.) The previous cyclone had taught the locals a painful lesson: in a storm, much less a cyclone, do not go near the watercourse. What led the colonel and his men into the water we can never know. The fine and war–hardened officer in him would have urged caution. But the colonel, long removed from the events of 1964 and missing the thrill of battle, may have wanted to dance on the edge of danger. Or may be, yet again, he was just being a son of Mudug; and what is a Mudug man without a flare for life and a flirt with death, all at once?
At about a third of the roughly one-mile distance, the overpowering flood turned the heavy truck around. It was night and very, very dark, with nary a star visible through the thick and churning clouds. Downstream, the raging Red Sea, which over the millennia had never parted except for Moses, rose and heaved in a losing battle to block the flood. Amidst the wet, the cold and the deafening roar, the men must have felt the claws of death on their lonely souls.
Not so the Colonel!
The field commander in him awoke. He grabbed a flat piece of wood and ordered his men to do the same; they were all going to jump into the fast flowing water. The men baulked. The next moment, the colonel disappeared. He might have slipped. He might have jumped. But, any rate, he was now gone, and, to his men, dead.
Early in the morning, after quite an eventful night, I saw people flocking to the western edge of the watercourse. I joined them and found them peering into the distance. In the dim light, we could see men hobbling about on a truck in the middle of the raging water. There was a lull in the rain, but with the sky still menacing, there was no way to tell whether this was the tail end or the eye of the storm. The men could be swept to sea or die from long exposure to the harsh elements of the cyclone, or from shear shock and fear. Helplessly, we watched. And who among us watched the most intensely, trying to direct rescue? ….Who, but the colonel, Mr. Donyale, himself!
How did he survive?
Apparently, this was what happened. Holding on tightly to the piece of wood, he was swept to sea. At the border, where the two waters clashed violently, where muddy waves rose to great heights and churned, he must have been thrown and knocked around and twisted this and that way countless times. How could he retain enough wit to hold on to the piece of wood? Surely, it was only by the grace of God that he suffered no twisted neck or a broken back.
Farther and farther into the sea, the colonel went, helplessly dragged by the power of the water, until he found calmer waters too far from the shore. But then on this dark and stormy night, how could he tell which way to go? Stella, the Colonel’s, widow, tells me he pulled himself towards the mountain. Ah, again Sanag’s good old mountain, the home and mythical mother of much of the Somali nation. The colonel must have early in the morning seen the outline of the huge and imperious mountain and, just like many a shipwrecked seafarer before him, dragged himself towards it. He was still holding on tightly to the piece of wood. But even with the piece of wood, excellent swimming skills and extraordinary pluck and grit were called for. So, what had prepared a man from Mudug’s hinterland for such an ordeal?
Let’s take a brief look at his early life.
Mr. Mohamed Haji Ingiris says this of the Colonel:
“Raised in Ceelbuur, he soon emerged to be a self-trained swimmer. During the rainy seasons of the 1940s, the city of Ceelbuur was known to have been carved into two separate quarters by torrential floods. According to Ahmed Suleyman Dafle, the rationale of why Doonyaale was nicknamed ‘Doonyaale’ was his invention of a boat in Ceelbuur at the age of 13 in order to cross the water.”
According to Stella, the colonel’s swimming skills were further honed in the Soviet Union, which shows us that although he was neither from the coast nor a naval officer, he had a lifelong attraction for the sport of swimming. Call it luck; call it preparation; call it what you may. I have the inescapable feeling that this was the hand of God guiding him from an early age for one singular moment that was to happen in a town he may have never dreamed of ever seeing.
Finally, after what to him must have seemed an eternity, the colonel came ashore quite a distance from the town. He was tired and shivering from the cold. And what do you think the first thing he did was? He buried the piece of wood for retrieval at a later date! By the grace of Allah alone, the man had just survived what was practically un-survivable, and he had the presence of mind and the audacity to think of a piece of wood intended for poor Somalis!
He dragged his feet some distance before he was found by an elderly lady (always a woman in such instances! Ever heard Gbadhi waa meel xun joog?) The lady provided him with a place to rest and kindled fire for him only to see him, as soon as he regained strength, set off in search of his men. He joined the crowd and watched them. When I saw him, he was wearing a heavy coat, doubtless provided to him by someone in the crowd. In my mind, I still see him standing erect as a good officer should, and looking into the distance intent and focused on his men, much like an officer surveying the battle raging in a valley below him. What a difficult moment! Unable to save his men, He must have burned inside. He had been trained to fight men who had robbed Somalis of their land. This was different. This was the power of God at work!
Many in the crowd were his employees. And the inability to rally his troops and save his men must have bothered him immensely. Upon seeing the Russians, on the other side of the watercourse, attempt a rescue by dropping a huge floating block upstream into the flood, he lamented: Waxaan ka baqayaa inay geesiyaal noqon waayaan oo bahalkaa qabsan waayaan. I was in awe!
No, the colonel could not have noticed the dark, short, and frail boy (who as Abdirahman Hosh would like to say, was blessed with the owlish look) that was me. Back then, I was a student in Dayaha Intermediate School, and I only saw Donyale when I visited my folks. I have since heard that in 1964, when Ethiopia attempted to crush the young but proud and burgeoning nation that was Somalia, it was he that gave the first war cry, some Italian word that I don’t know how to write or utter. Unless I am mistaken, I remember him with a mark on the side of his face, at the level of the cheekbone (please correct me if I am wrong). The mark, I was told, was from a wound sustained in the War of 1964.
Stella again shares with me that after the event, the colonel’s superiors, Generals Kulmiye and Samater, gave him the nickname Xabaaldiid.
The irony of how the daredevil, the born survivor, and the war hero, all in one, met his end is not lost on me. But I want to tell you that Allah has given me a mind and a heart that celebrate the good in men and women. And I can never forget a man who exemplified courage and uttered the first cry to defend the Motherland and defend me when I was but a child.
Of the three men, two survived, one barely.
Acknowledgments:
I thank Colonel Donyale’s widow, Ms. Amina Abdul-Qader (nicknamed Stella), and his only child, Mohamed Donyale, for sharing with me their recollections of what the colonel had told them of those events. I am also grateful to Mohamed Haji Ingiris for illuminating the colonel’s early life and connecting me to his family.
Thank you, and may the spirit Soomaalinnino come back,
Mohamoud Ali Gaildon,
Medical Physicist
USA
[email protected]