Horsed and Heegan basketball players challege for the ball during their game in the Abdiaziz district of Mogadishu
Three years ago I visited the Somalia capital, Mogadishu.
It was a different Mogadishu from what it was today, and as foreign journalists we had to go in under the security wing of the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia (Amisom).
We stayed at the living quarters of the media centre inside the heavily fortified Amisom compound near Aden Adde International Airport – a kind of “green zone” near most international organisations and missions in Mogadishu.
We drove around the city and the outlying areas in Amisom armoured cars. Clearly the Amisom operation was a product of an international effort; the investments in its base and operations would not have been possible if they had been dependent on resources from only African governments.
At that time, the Amisom presence comprised mainly Ugandan and Burundi troops, and a much smaller Djibouti contribution. The Kenyan Defence Force (KDF) had entered southern Somalia some months back to hunt down and destroy Al-Shabaab militants, but hadn’t formally been re-hatted as an Amisom force.
Ethiopia, which had previously entered Somalia independently and withdrawn, hadn’t yet returned as part of Amisom.
Invariably, the story of war, guns and military exploits was the more exciting for us. However, later, one couldn’t help but think that they weren’t the most important.
Amisom’s Somalia campaign said something about how both Africa had changed, and what the AU had done, in ways that I for one hadn’t appreciated before.
While the soldiers of each Amisom contingent had the individual flags of their country on their shoulders, they all wore AU armbands. There were many soldiers, and many AU armbands, more than I had ever seen in a single place.
I had seen UN berets and badges, and nothing in the past had prepared me for such a vast AU branding exercise, or even the subordination of the pan-African to the national in that way.
War and conflict mean refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). It soon became clear that there was a pattern to the IDP camps around Mogadishu – they were all located near an Amisom outpost or roadblock.
Over the years, those of us who have covered conflicts on the continent had come to expect that IDP camps are traditionally located near international humanitarian agencies. Yet here, despite the criticisms of its shortcomings, Amisom represented the safer bet for Somalis.
At the officers’ canteen, there were women soldiers (and men too) in the kitchen cooking. We kind of rolled their eyes at that, thinking: “Oh, they have replicated the patriarchal structures and brought female soldiers to Mogadishu only as cooks.”
Yes and no, because a couple of the folks driving military buses and trucks in Mogadishu were female combatants.
But the most far-reaching thing the AU was doing then in Mogadishu, was the one that had hardly been reported on. On the shadow side of the vast base, sheltered from the rifles of militant snipers, was an “economic zone”, a series of neat shops built from shining new sheets.
Its evolution was fascinating. Early in the first years of Amisom’s arrival in Mogadishu, the poor women of the city would come to the entrance of the base to hawk cigarettes, sweets and basic household items.
However, the area was vulnerable to Al-Shabaab snipers, and on several occasions soldiers coming to buy items from the women were shot.
The typical securocrat would have chased the women away. Amisom didn’t. It reasoned that it was worthwhile community- and security-building to give the women an opportunity to sell things to the soldiers, and good for morale of the troops if they were able to purchase petty items conveniently and safely.
And so the idea of the economic zone was born. What followed was an interesting social and political experiment. Because of Somalia’s clan fissures, the women from rival clans refused to have shops next to each other. There were fights and disharmony.
The AU insisted that they would not have a clan-segregated business zone, and their officers worked to convince the women to co-exist. The changes that had happened two years earlier held up hope for a Somalia.
The trading zone was among the most clan-diverse areas in Mogadishu. And while at the start the traders were at war over their differences, they had come to a point where, if there was a death in the family of a shop owner, despite their clan, everyone closed their shops and went to the funeral.
But perhaps the most far-reaching change of the AU mission brought was the cultural shift. The first Amisom troops in the country had a problem. The Ugandans had English as their national language. The Burundians spoke French — so did the Djiboutians later, who also spoke Arabic.
They had one language in common — Kiswahili. Many Somalis speak some Kiswahili, and they were the ones who found success getting jobs as interpreters and translators for Amisom.
So, accidentally, one outcome of the AU mission could be the Swahilisation of Somalia. It would be the first time that an African — rather than European or Middle Eastern — language had been the legacy of a peacekeeping mission or military expedition on the continent.
There are more threads than this of the Africa story today. Nigeria this week will have a political transition that many thought impossible six months ago, after opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari defeated incumbent Goodluck Jonathan in the March elections.
Jonathan’s grace in loss was as remarkable as the failure of the Boko Haram to stop the vote.
But there was something else. In the past, population was a nightmare in Africa. Big populations meant more people who could go hungry, and be affected by famines.
Yet today two of the most populous African nations have pulled off something special — they have both population and growth, together.
Nigeria is not just Africa’s most populous nation, but also managed to become its largest economy last year. Ethiopia, the continent’s second most populous country, and once synonymous with famine and war, has posted the fastest growth of any sub-Saharan economy in recent years, and is on course to be a continental industrial power in 10 years.
And in North Africa, Tunisia has proved that it possible to have a conventional democratic election and government in an Arab and Muslim country, contrary to the popular view.
However, we choose the Somalia example, because it reveals how far out of a deep hole Africa can climb; and also that the “African solutions to African problems” proposition works in small, unexpected ways, outside the headlines. These things are changing Africa. In the next generation, it will be a different continent, remade — this time — by its own people.