By Prof Said S. Samatar
A Somali-related incident recently has aviators and officials of the sky gasping in astonishment. The officials were bowled over by the riveting story of a Somali stow-away who sneaked undetected into the wheel receptacle of a jetliner that took off from San Jose (California) airport for a seven-hour flight to Hawaii. To the mind-boggling realization of the world, he survived to tell the tale. What especially has officials reeling concerns the boy’s belief-defying ability to live through the terrifying combination of three lethal elements: 1. The frigid-frosty altitude of more than 30,000 feet, 2. The near-nil absence of a whiff of oxygen at such a height, and 3. Most incredible of all, when the landing gear was deployed for landing, he didn’t fly out of the vacated receptacle to splatter on the tarmac into bloody parts, as nearly always happens to other triers of his trick. To the contrary, he stayed stowed away, like a hibernating bear in the heavens, till he was pulled out to safety by the startled airport staff. For two-thirds of the perilous trip, he was passed out from lack of breathable air. Why didn’t he die? Because he is a Somali, at once so suicidal and self-destructive but so fortune-favored. Talk about luck of the Somalis!
As it happens, the phrase “luck of the Somalis,” which titles this piece, itself was intentionally employed to invoke the commonplace utterance “Luck of the Irish ,” a cruel ironic aphorism , especially with respect to Ireland’s colonial history with what the Irish refer to as the “Big Island” i.e. Imperial United Kingdom that colonized and ruthlessly exploited the defeated Irish for more than six centuries from Oliver Cromwell’s occupation in the early 1660’s, through the man-made forced starvation that killed an estimated two million Irish men, women and children in the 1840’s, right up to the 1994 so-called “Good-Friday” Agreement that ended the long-simmering destructive Irish-Irish and Anglo-Irish civil war, euphemistically referred to as “The Troubles.” Still, the Troubles are scarcely over, to judge by the recent arrest and detention of Mr. Irish-Face, Jerry Adams, leader of the Irish Republican Army, the anti-British insurgency in northern Ireland that nearly brought mighty England to its knees during the Troubles. Indeed, a tortured tale is the story of Anglo-Irish experience. That explains why Ireland remains the only Western state whose universities offer higher degrees in “Post-Colonial Studies,” much like the universities of the Dark Continent. That is also why the average Irish patriot bristles with rage when the name of the U.K. is casually mentioned. Hence, a piece of unsolicited advice: if you are scheming to do a number with an Irish lass, do not talk of the Brits favorably, or you will forfeit your intended beaver!
Prof Said S. Samatar
Rutgers University
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Dr. Samatar is Professor of African American and African Studies, Department of History and Editor of the Horn of Africa Journal. Prof Samatar is also a regular contributor of WardheerNews.
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