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In “my salad days when I was green in judgment” and thought of courage what immediately leapt to my mind were JFK and his Profiles In Courage; and Papa Hemingway whose definition of courage, “grace under pressure”, JFK cited on the first page of his book.

Mrs. Dorothy Grove taught me that there was another kind of courage that had nothing to do with Bwana Hemingway, with guns, with lions, with sorehead suicidal Somalis whose saying he quoted with admiration as an authority on courage, on lions in his story, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: “a brave man is always frightened of a lion three times; when he first sees his track, when he first hears him roar and when he first confronts him.”

Last year when it became impossible for me to winter in Somalia, my friend, John Fidow, second in command of the nascent Mogadishu Police force, drove me to the airport; his parting shot was: “Togane, for the fifth time, Somali goons with guns are forcing you to beat it like a poltroon. What this proves beyond the shadow of a doubt, what no two Somalis will ever argue over, is that you are no lion! You can compel a lion to quit the shade of an umbrella acacia tree three times. No more. The fourth time you try he either kills you or you kill him. My friend, tutti Mogadishu now knows that you are no lion. ”

Of course, I am happy to be now a live chicken rather than a dead lion. As cynical Somalis say, if you are dead, even your shoes are better than you for they are more useful.

Dorothy Grove’s kind of courage is not about tracking down or hunting down lions or about emulating lions.

In 1960 she and her husband, Merlin Russell Grove, and their children: Bruce, Pauline and David upped and left their fat farm in Markham, Ontario, to help in the education of the youth of the then young Somali nation-state that had just achieved independence. They taught and ran the Mennonite Mission Boarding School for boys by the bend of the Shabelli river, in the bush of the village of Mahaddei Wayn. I was one of their lucky students.

Life in Somalia then was not only an ideal; it was an idyll to boot for then life in Somalia was as peaceful as life could be this side of paradise. There was joy then in the brilliance and in the warmth of the Somali sunshine. It was before the advent of Somali madness, before the land became awash with madmen: the gypsies say, “One madman makes many madmen, and many madmen make madness.”

It was before the advent of the mad and the mulish mullahs of Mogadishu: “Paradise is where there is no mullah”: mad or otherwise. Life then was such a peach or as we Somalis say, it was peace and plenty of milk; and JFK was as popular in Mogadishu as he was in Boston. It was when we Somalis were really human to each other and not wolves to each other as we are right now.

“Being human is difficult. Becoming human is a lifelong process. To be truly human is a gift,” Abraham Heschel observed. That is why we Somalis find it so easy right now to be predatory and prey upon one another.

Somalia then was not shamefully naked as she is now; she was then wearing and sporting what William Blake called the human dress: Peace. It was before Somalia fell among thieves and became hostage to niman belaya: dukes of disaster and degradation leading the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence and death to our homeland. It was when Somalia had politicians instead of the mindless morticians who now pose as politicians.

It was before we Somalis became the “useful idiots”, the dummies of clannish ventriloquists; it was before we Somalis became worshippers of the warlords’ weltanschauung: their worldview. It was before we Somalis put out the light and let the curtains of chaos, confusion, anarchy fall, so universal darkness & despair could bury all of us Somalis, so we could become what our neighbors always called us, Shifta: bandits and a bandit nation, beyond the pale, even beyond the tyranny and the terror and the kleptocracy of Papa Doc Afwayne.

It was before Keith Richburg of the Washington Post (who prefers to be called a black American rather than an African-American) could report in his book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, that we are the “dumbest” nation on the Dark Continent. It was before Serbs and Somalis brought Kipling, the poet of Anglo Saxon attitudes & imperialism, back into vogue. I suppose now without embarrassment we can all urge the Yankees to “Take up the White Man’s burden. . ./ Go send your sons to exile. . .” to civilize Serbs and Somalis, “the lesser breeds without the law. . . ” half devil and half child. . . .”

That idyll—when Somalis were enjoying unity in the bonds of peace, when Dorothy Grove and her Mennonite colleagues were able to bring together, educate together, boys from every clan in the Somali Devil’s dictionary of clans—was a time when to ask a Somali which clan he or she belonged to, was the most shameful faux pas, the most egregious, the grossest gaucherie one could commit.

The clannish iron curtain that now daily descends to diminish or destroy Somali ties wherever two or three Somalis gather together was then totally nugatory and remains so to this day as far as the Mennonite mission boys of yesteryear are concerned who love to hang out together whenever they can and reminisce about what we have meant to each other throughout all these long years and about those JFK days and the Somali Camelot:

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a Mennonite Somali spot by the Mahaddei Shabelli river
For one brief, shining moment
That was known as the Somali Camelot.

Dorothy and her kind, the Mennonite missionaries, “a peculiar people zealous of good works”, created for good works, are not what many dismissively call do-gooders; for Mennonites heed the admonishing words of Christ who taught them, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: therefore, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”

Our Christian teachers, doctors and nurses, practiced and lived out what they could not preach in Muslim Somalia: Christ’s gospel and his ministry of joy, peace and reconciliation. It was the most difficult and the most challenging and at the same time the most effective way that they could convey to Somalis with whom they came into contact, what they were really about; what they really believed; what they really valued; what they really collected, cultivated and cathected; what they really regarded as their chief joy for they were then compelled to preach with their lives instead of with their lips.

For all Somalis to see, they put their lives where their mouths were.With the example of their lives they simply taught us not only the common decency of how to live and let live but also how not to fall victims and captives of our crazy concoction of clans; how to befriend each other; how to get along with each other; and indeed how to value and validate each other as fellow Somalis, not giving even a continental damn about the cursed, cussed clans.

Dorothy and her kind wrought a miracle then, the miracle of freeing us from the bondage, from the obsession that we Somalis now daily collect, cultivate and cathect: clanism, the most insidious sort of racism which is based on the insanity of, on the inanity of

Me and my clan against the world;
Me and my family against my clan;
Me and my brother against my family;
Me against my brother

According to Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor, this is “the hierarchy of priorities, as ordered by a Somali proverb”.

Stubbornly, fanatically we still live by this mindless mantra, while claiming falsely to be Muslims, while behaving like brutes, totally ignoring the basic decency of any religion, let alone Islam whose prophet, Muhammad, taught: “Avoid stubbornness, avoid fanaticism, for both begin in ignorance and end in regret.” This fanatic faith in “Our clansmen, right or wrong!” is what led us Somalis to destroy our homeland and our Somali nation-state.

No wonder then that the late Arthur Miller concluded, “The ultimate mystery may not be anything more than the claims on us of clan and race, which may yet turn out to have the power, because they defy the rational mind, to kill the world.”

They have most certainly killed the peaceful and the civilized Italianate Somali world in which I had come of age and had happily encountered Dorothy and her fellow Mennonite missionaries.

Dorothy and her kind were so effective in combating the clannish obsession among us that only decades later when I would meet in Canada, or in the USA, one of the Mennonite mission boys, could I ask casually with impunity, with aplomb, without embarrassment, “And whose clan are you?

Very much like Alexander Pope’s dog that went around with a sign around its neck that read, “I am his highness’ dog at Kew; / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”

A Somali is not an autonomous free individual; like a dog or a cat, he or she is owned and turned on by his or her KKK. Individuality has yet to be invented by us Somalis.

Incidentally, the best and the brightest of Africa were all once mission boys too: Mandela was once a mission boy and so was Jomo Kenyatta and Aden Abdulle Osman, the first democratically elected president of the Somali Camelot, before arguably, the most homogeneous nation on earth, fell victim to the frenzied hysterical horror and folly of what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences”: other people invent myths around which to unite so they can live in peace; we Somalis are so stuck on being so stupid that we daily invent myths around which to create nuclear fission, chaos, confusion, so we can divide and destroy each other.

No wonder then this clannish, fatuous, nuclear fission smashed our Somali Humpty Dumpty into smithereens; and now all the Pooh-Bahs of the UN and all of the factotums of Uncle Sam can’t put the Somali Humpty together again.

That Somali Eton, that Shangri-La by the banks of the hippo-happy Shabelli river where Pauline, Dorothy’s daughter, would parade in the cool afternoons, with her pet monkey, Long-tail; that idyll, that rich, strange, peaceful prelude was too brief for Dorothy Grove, for her family, for Somalia, for all of us Somalis.

On July 16, 1962, in Mogadishu, Dorothy Grove lost her husband, Merlin Russell Grove, then the Director of the Somali Mennonite Mission. He was brutally stabbed to death in his office while registering students for English classes. The murderer was a sicko Somali, a mad Muslim from Mugdi Mudug: from the land of Jalaf & Khalaf: from the land of Hem & Haw: “the sons of sin”; from the land of Tweedledum & Tweedledee; from the clannish land of Scylla & Charybdis: from the most benighted, the most blighted, the most bigoted Somali region where they grow nothing but chaos, confusion, casual cruelty begotten by cocksure ignorance upon arrogance.

After he finished butchering her husband, the murderer attacked Dorothy stabbing her repeatedly, almost stabbing her to death.

Decent and sane Somalis, friends of the Grove family, flew to her defense and stoned the murderer. And finally, one of them, Raghe Rungale, with a shovel knocked out the murderer, off Dorothy, so she could be rushed away to Martini hospital.

The death of Dorothy’s husband, Merlin Russell Grove, was the first death that meant anything to me at all; and now that day of his death, July 16, 1962, is indelibly etched and docketed in my noodle.

This reflects my Somali Moslem upbringing that teaches, just as Christianity does too, that the “the day of one’s death is better than the day of one’s birth.”

It was the first time that I lost someone whom I loved and cared deeply about as my teacher and as my friend. For the first time in my life, for some time, “the brother of death”, that is to say, sleep, which the Bard of Avon called, the “balm of hurt minds, Chief nourisher in life’s feast” refused to feed me rest & relief.

I kept vigil with anguish, shock & shame. My friend, Aden Jima’ale, summed up the sadness of it all, the senselessness of it all, the shock of it all, the grief of it all, for all of us and for the stunned young Somali nation: “In peace, in good will, the Groves came all the way from Canada to dwell among us, to sew shoes for us barefoot Somalis; we paid them back by sewing shrouds for them.”

In 1985, twenty-three years later, after Bruce, Pauline and David grew up and left the nest, Dorothy Grove, now a registered nurse, could not and would not forget suffering Somalia and her tormented people. Again she upped and left Canada for the second time, back to Mogadishu, back to the scene where she had lost her husband, back to the scene where she had almost lost her life, to help the poor and the orphaned.

That is why when I think of courage now, I think of the courage of Dorothy Grove. Her kind of courage is best defined by Stephen Crane who called it, “a temporary but a sublime absence of selfishness.”

It is that kind of rare courage seasoned and sweetened by compassion, which is “the measure of civilized behavior.”

What activated, what motivated, what moved Dorothy Grove, a white woman, to help us heathen, poor, benighted, black, backward, primitive Somalis is: L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle: the same soul force, the same compassion, that Dante says motivates and moves the sun and the other stars: love.

That is the love that Dorothy delights in because it gives her and those whom she helps dignity and delight. And “greater love has no one than this, that one lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

She was ready and willing to do just that for her Somali friends—just like her husband, Merlin Russell Grove, had done, forty-six years ago, on the 16th of July, 1962.

And she came very close to doing just that.

For me her unparalleled life of true grit, gumption & goodness, of selfless love & service exemplifies that old English saying which says, “Fear knocked at the door and faith answered. No one was there.”

I was recently taken aback when Dorothy told me on the phone: “The best years of my life, the happiest years of my life, were the years I had spent in Somalia among the Somali people.”

On second thought I should not have been taken aback for I myself have felt the keenest joy, on the few rare occasions, when I had followed her example, when I had, like our Canadian heroine, Dorothy, put others first, before myself, and served them selflessly.

That is when I had felt most awake, most aware, most alive, most human, most myself.

And right now I feel what we Somalis call baraka: I feel fortunate; I feel blessed; for I was one of the representatives of the Somali-Canadian community, one of the friends of Dorothy, one of the Mennonite mission boys of yesteryear, who was at that especial event, on last Saturday, on June 28, paying homage to her for what she and her family had done for Somalia and for us Somalis and for Canada and for Canadians too.

I know the few foolish, fanatic, fainéant racist ingrates among us Somalis would object, saying, “Why honour a gaal: a honky-kaffir-alien-enemy-infidel, a Christian, a missionary, a crusader, who went to Somalia, a Moslem nation, to convert, to kidnap Somali kids from their creed, from the House of Islam?”

I know they would say that because I was once like them. I was once a Caliban, a cannibal, a Taliban in training, until I had fortunately encountered Dorothy, her kind, her clan, the Mennonites, who helped me educate myself so I could free myself from the fanaticism, from the folly, from the fatuity, from the bigotry, from the blindness, from the boredom, from the burden of cocksure ignorant Somali Islam.

I can only answer those bigoted ingrates by echoing the courageous, still ringing, still resounding, still resonant, still relevant words of Ossie Davis when he celebrated and honoured the life of MalcolmX: In honouring Dorothy Grove, our fellow Canadian friend, who did not hesitate to die for us Somalis because she loves us so; we honor ourselves; we honor our humanity; we honor the very best in the Somali race; we honor the very best in the Muslim umma: the worldwide Muslim community.

Above all, we honor Canada, this land kinder to Somalis than home, the homeland of Dorothy, which we, Somali-Canadians, are now fortunate enough to call our homeland too.

Mahamud Siad Togane
EMAIL: togane@sympatico.ca

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