Mogadishu

They called Mogadishu the pearl of the Indian Ocean, and the name was earned: a thousand years of trade built a white coral-stone city on the water — Hamar Weyne's carved doors, the old lighthouse on its point, mosques among the oldest on the continent's east coast — where Somali, Arab, Persian and Indian ocean-worlds met and bargained in the shade. Half a century of hard history has broken much stone; it has not broken the name, and the city's people have carried it with a stubbornness that humbles.

This postal is written in the house's most careful hand: decades of conflict have made Mogadishu unreachable for the ordinary traveller, and though the city rebuilds — the diaspora returns, the markets never stopped, and on Fridays Liido beach fills with families swimming as if joy were a muscle that refuses to forget — the chancelleries' counsel remains unanimous, and the Guide does not argue with it. What we counsel is respect from afar: read the Somali poets — this is a nation of poets before all else —, learn the history, and retire the clichés.

The Guide's honesty, which here is a vow: this page waits with its lamps lit. The Friday swimmers of Liido have already written its first line — a city that goes to the beach through everything intends to live. When the harbor's mornings are ordinary again, these doors will fill: the coral lanes first, the lighthouse point at dusk, the camel milk and the banana with rice that Somalis will explain proudly. The pearl keeps her name; the Guide keeps her page.