Jama’s journey is difficult – he is still a boy – as it is very hot and very dirty and food is hard to come by but Mohamed gives a wonderful account of his epic journey. Some Somalis welcome this as do some Eritreans. The Italians have occupied Eritrea and are fighting in Abyssinia. Much of the novel is about his journey to Sudan and then what happens afterwards.

One day, he decided that he was going to find his father in Sudan, having no idea how to get there nor how far it was, and so he set out for Sudan. He returned to Hargeisa but there was nothing there for him either, though he was looked after by his relatives. When had a row with Abdi and Shidane, he returned to his mother, only to find her very ill. When his mother had a row with the Islaweynes, he left and lived on the streets with the boys, Abdi and Shidane. He made friends with two other boys and they roamed the streets together, stole and misbehaved. Jama, still only six when they arrived, spent the day roaming the streets, getting up to mischief but also learning languages. The Islaweynes, distant relatives, with whom they were staying did not make them welcome. She found hard, badly paid work in a coffee factory but it meant working twelve hours a day. Ambaro then set off to Aden, with Jama, to find work. He finally agreed with Ambaro that he would go off to Sudan where there was a possibility of work but he seemed to disappear. He seemed to improve when his daughter was born but when the girl died, things got worse. While Guure was an attractive man, he was not a reliable husband and provider as Ambaro, his new wife, found out. Jama’s parents were not meant to marry and eloped, to their parents’ disgust.

This is the a story of Jama, his story obviously based on the story of Nadifa Mohamed’s grandfather, who was also called Jama Mohamed and, as she tells us, had a series of adventures, some of which he exaggerated. This novel deals with one of the many unpleasant previous periods, the late 1930s and 1940s, when Somalia (or British Somaliland as it then was) was occupied by the British and Italian Somaliland occupied by the Italians, who, for a while, also occupied British Somaliland. Somalia has not had a happy history in recent years, at least since the European colonisers started the Scramble for Africa. Home » Somalia » Nadifa Mohamed » Black Mamba Boy Nadifa Mohamed: Black Mamba Boy

Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed