Mogadishu, Somalia, 1975
‘Come with me,’ I told the military director of Medina Hospital, seconds after bursting into his office unannounced. ‘I need you to shoot a baby.’
The colonel, sitting at his desk in uniform with gold braid and pips on his epaulettes, looked up at me aghast. ‘What?’
Spotting a weapon lying on his desk, I grabbed it and waved it at him. ‘Is this your pistol? I presume it’s loaded?’
‘Y-yes, Edna,’ he faltered, as his lieutenant drew his own gun and stepped forward protectively. ‘B-but…’
‘Then bring it with you, follow me back to the maternity ward, and shoot a premature baby,’ I repeated. ‘Isn’t that what you carry a gun for – to kill people?’
‘I don’t understand,’ he pleaded, palms turned to the ceiling.
Leaning across his desk and staring straight into his eyes, I told him, ‘Then let me explain. I haven’t slept for the last three days. I’ve been caring for a premature baby in the only incubator I possess, a generous gift from a patient. I’ve been feeding this tiny infant through a pipette. She’s a fighter and she’s trying to stay alive but the oxygen level on the incubator is running out. I sent a nurse to you twice this morning to ask for a replacement cylinder. Half an hour ago it was returned unfilled with the message that we’re using too much oxygen and putting your hospital in the red.’
I paused to watch him squirming in his seat. ‘When the oxygen runs out in less than an hour,’ I continued, ‘that little baby weighing less than a kilo will gasp painfully for her final breath as I watch helplessly with her mother. If you’re really planning to murder this baby then I must insist you come with me now and end it quickly. Then you can show the whole world how brave you really are.’
The colonel’s face froze. He didn’t move or speak. Seething, I grabbed the document he’d been reading, flipped it over and scribbled on the back the following promise: ‘If I don’t receive oxygen within the next fifteen minutes and – without question – every time that I ask for it thereafter, I, Edna Adan Ismail, herewith declare that I will take no more responsibility for the patients in my care at this hospital.’ I signed and dated my declaration and, before anyone could stop me, I picked up a bottle of Superglue, squirted it generously over the back of the piece of paper, and stuck it with force to the door on my way out.
Still fuming, I drove back as fast as I could in my little Fiat to the maternity ward that was at the far end of the vast hospital grounds. The facility had been built by the Italians when my husband, Mohamed Egal, was Prime Minister. I’d attended its grand opening and visited as First Lady. There were still photos of me hanging on the walls. Since 1972, I’d been a mere employee – the head of the maternity department until today, when I looked set to quit for the sake of a premature baby.
I didn’t much care about the consequences at that point. I was far too weary to worry. I’d empty my desk and walk away. After all, what more could the regime do to me? They’d already taken my home and my belongings; they’d broken up my marriage; they’d imprisoned, harassed and interrogated both my husband and me. They’d even shot my beloved cheetah. My only concern was for the three-day-old girl fighting for her life in an incubator.
I hurried to the ward where the baby’s mother was waiting anxiously for news. Her hands in supplication, she asked, ‘Will they send more oxygen?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t honestly know, but let’s prepare to take your baby to the Martini Hospital just in case. The doctors there won’t let your daughter die.’
Before we could unplug the machine and wrap the baby in a blanket with a portable oxygen mask, a breathless soldier appeared carrying the cylinder I’d requested. ‘The director sent me,’ he said, wiping the sweat from his brow as he put down the heavy canister.
‘About time,’ I said, pointing to where I needed it to be rolled so that I could connect it to the machine. ‘You can tell him from me that he must never, ever refuse me anything like this again. This oxygen isn’t for me, it is for a sick little baby and I never want to fight about this again.’
The soldier agreed to carry my message but then stood around sheepishly.
‘Yes?’
‘The director says to tell you one last thing,’ he added, looking ready to make a run for it. ‘He asks that next time you promise not to use Superglue.’
Turning away to hide my smile, I nodded and waved him away.
Erigavo, British Somaliland, 1950
It was twenty-five years earlier, in the Year of Red Dust, known as Siigacaase, that my journey to nursing really began. The April rains in our part of Africa had failed again and the desert winds had dried the land to a powdered rust that choked and stifled. We were well accustomed to the dry season or jiilal from December to March each year; it was a time of thirst and suffering. In this our worst drought in years, though, more than seventy per cent of the livestock had perished and our nomadic people were penniless and starving.
I would turn thirteen that autumn, but even at such a tender age I saw for myself what famine and malnutrition did to the human body. As the eldest daughter of Adan Ismail – the most senior Somali medical professional in the country and its so-called ‘Father of Healthcare’ – I accompanied him every day of that long, hot summer to the forty-bed hospital where he worked tirelessly to treat people and try to save lives. Hour after hour I’d follow him on his rounds, taking instructions to feed a weak child or making sure that an elderly patient had their saline drip renewed. I cut up old sheets for bandages, washed syringes, and sterilized instruments long blunted. Although the city of Erigavo was the capital of the Sanaag region and part of the British Somaliland Protectorate, it was – as Dad said – ‘too far from the cooking pot’ – which translated to limited supplies and little support from the authorities based in Hargeisa.
As the man in charge of health services for the entire region, my father often had to leave town and drive long distances alone in his ex-British Army Bedford ambulance to tend to destitute families in the outlying refugee camps. In his absence he had no choice but to entrust the running of his hospital to the largely illiterate auxiliaries, only a few of whom were qualified. Fearing for his patients, he’d ask me to oversee them until his return. I was still only a child but his hospitals had always been my playground and I knew my way around. Whenever he was away, he’d leave me little notes telling me what to do so that I wouldn’t forget. ‘Make sure they remove the catheter from that patient tomorrow, Shukri,’ he’d say using the name only he called me. Or he’d remind me, ‘That mother’s sutures need to come out on Monday… and don’t forget to change the dressings on the child with burns in Ward 3.’
Known to all as ‘Adan Dhakhtar’, my father had been trained as a medical assistant by the British in the Crown Colony of Aden before the Second World War, and then later in England. He’d hoped to become a doctor, but a medical degree was never open to someone like him because it would have taken too long and cost the British taxpayer too much money. Instead, he was sent back to his country to take on the full responsibilities of a doctor (on a fraction of the salary), in a series of postings around the country that generally only lasted two years before he was moved on to a new home and a new hospital and new patients to treat. In each new city he was expected to do all this seven days a week and run an entire hospital compound in a role designated as a Compounder.
Far more revered than any British doctor and a versatile all-rounder, Dad treated every patient he encountered– no matter how poor, dirty, smelly or sick – with the utmost dignity and respect. I remember being enlisted by him once to hold a bowl under the face of a hawk-faced old man with an infected abscess in his jaw. The patient was elderly and unclean and my disgust at the pus my father lanced must have shown in my expression because once the old man had been cleaned up and left the room, Dad closed the door and turned on me.
‘Don’t you ever show such an ugly face to any of my patients again!’ he said, his eyes