This week, six years ago, I took my last rickety flight out of Wajir aboard one of those bumpy miraa planes that rattled even the clouds. I had been in northern Kenya so long that my uncle began whispering there was a bui-bui-clad woman patiently cooking anjera for me. Relatives will always have their theories.
I had felt at home all those years, though. My time in the north was a slow drift between wind-brushed townships, each with its own scent and rhythm. Habaswein was the windy township with white-turbaned minarets. I loved Dadaab, the city of thorns and resilience. There was Mansa, where thousands of guinea fowls darted like beads of quicksilver. In Arbajahan, for every human being there were ten watchful camels and the bells of a thousand camels were music in the air.
In Eldas, a snow white mosque shimmered in the sun -the most beautiful I have ever seen. I discovered places that no map bothers to name, because the best places are rarely drawn. And in those places, I met the kindest hearts.
Leaving the north was not planned. By then, I had been collecting keepsakes -talismans of memory. One was a koor, the wooden bell hung around camels’ necks, carved with patience so herders could find them in the thorny wilderness. I had a low Somali cooking stool, polished by years of use. And I had the leather stool for men, dignified and slightly flamboyant, for sitting in the shade of their dash. These were pieces of a place I had claimed, and that had claimed me in return.
At Wajir airport, an official pulled me aside. “You cannot carry these on the plane,” he said. I explained they were harmless wooden artifacts. He eyed the camel bells and asked if I had camels at home. I told him I did not, but I could not leave behind what would keep the north alive in my mind. I had not yet learned that leaving a place can make the memory of it ache even more sharply than staying ever did.
I landed in Nairobi without my treasures. But friends from Wajir, with the quiet loyalty that only real friends possess, sent them to me by bus via Eastleigh.
Some months later, my cousin Kamaley visited. He spotted a camel bell in my study and chuckled. “What’s the use of carrying camels to a place with no camels?”
It was then I realized the north had not just filled my shelves with souvenirs. It had changed me in ways that still ring, soft and steady, like the sound of a camel bell in the wind.
And now, when the wind blows, the camel bell still ring.
PS:
You can read more about camel bells and Somali traditional stools here: