Word: mogadishu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only slightly less adept at the appropriate hand gestures. Italian influence also remains in the crumbling old arches and seaside villas, the pasta and Italian wines served in restaurants and the 1934 Fiat trucks that disgorge angry clouds of billowy, greasy smoke in the streets of the capital of Mogadishu...
Instructions for cannibals who have literary ambitions? Hardly. That grim promise is simply one dose of the tough talk that is familiar fare on Radio Mogadishu, the official voice of the Republic of Somalia. For the past four years, Somalia has been working over time to keep Somali guerrillas, who are called shifta (bandits), in revolt against the government of Kenya...
...Instead, election officials traditionally dab each voter's hand with indelible ink to discourage indefatigable repeaters. But the ink always proved delible, the voters not so easily defatigable. In one previous election, the obscure hamlet of Aden Yaval racked up twice the votes of the capital city of Mogadishu with 150,000 inhabitants. When municipal elections came around last fall, Mogadishu's voters prepared for their battle against indelibility by emptying the stores of nail-polish remover and other ink-deleting fluids days in advance of elections. But determined experimenters soon discovered that the allegedly indelible inks could...
...headier gargle. Well-meaning foreigners who stroll into their quaint, collapsible villages (stick-and skin aghals that can be packed onto camelback in a matter of minutes) often find themselves on the receiving end of accurately thrown stones as the Somalis scream, "Out with the infidel!" Even Mogadishu, Somalia's sunny, somnolent capital (pop. 150,000), has a perennial air of impermanence, particularly in the rainy season, when some of its mud buildings show a disconcerting tendency to melt into the gutters...
Despite the heat and squalor, Mogadishu is a center of political and intellectual ferment. Politicians representing one or another of Somalia's ten parties argue vociferously in gritty coffee shops -a rare sight in a New Africa that is moving steadily toward one-party government systems. There is spirited debate in Parliament, and although the commonest sound on the streets is still the beggar's cry for "Baksheesh!," there is plenty of free and strident speech to counterpoint...