set in Djibouti City, Djibouti
I was just looking outside of my hostel, at the vibrant mosque in front of me, and I was taking a picture, because I liked the contrast of the building’s white walls with the green of the minaret and the roof, and that is when the police officer came up. By instinct I turned around and walked away, and that made it worse. He was running, and shouting something, either in Somali or Arabic or some other language of the region I wouldn’t be able to make out, because I don’t speak anything of this part of the world, just some basic French, and obviously English, a but few people here speak in these languages.
Anyways, he came up and he started yelling at me, and that is when I was scared. He told me to open my phone. I wasn’t willing to do that. I wasn’t born and brought up in a country where police have the right to order me to do such things and without any reason. That is when he got mad, and he really started yelling, and two police officers who were nearby heard the noise and joined him.
I will be honest about one particular thing. The police officer who accosted me wasn’t that intimidating. He had a long face and buck-teeth, and he was significantly shorter than me. When I was taking that picture of the mosque he had been sitting on the stoop cleaning his teeth with his nails. It was only when he suddenly stood up and started walking in my direction that I even noticed him. Otherwise I was looking at the mosque and the piles of trash around it and remembering the people last night who were jostling near the market and the smells of the coffee wafting from the cafes on the other side of my hostel when I was having breakfast with a new friend from Canada the day before.
These two guys came and they were both tall and muscular and built, and one of them could speak broken English. That was the scariest part. He could tell me why I was in trouble.
‘You, open phone. You were taking photo of police officer.’
‘No, no,’ I immediately retorted, defending myself from what I genuinely felt was an incredulous accusation. ‘I was taking photo of the mosque.’
I did open my phone, because I knew what I wanted to take a picture of, and it wasn’t a picture of who I thought of at the time as a random guy doing nothing. But then the police officer snatched the phone out of my hands, and he scrolled through my photos, and he showed that exact same picture to me.
In the frame was the mosque in the centre, with some of the shops to the right, and at the bottom, the very bottom, a blur of black skin and blue uniform, which was only part of the upper half of the police officer.
‘That is the photo you’re complaining about?’ I actually asked. ‘He is barely in the photo! And I wasn’t taking a picture of him! I was taking a picture of the mosque! The mosque!’
I pointed as obviously as I could to what was clearly the focus of the photo, but instead of listening to me the police officer was taking the phone to the other police officers, showing it to them, and they were getting emboldened by what in their minds was proof of a foreigner doing obvious wrong.
‘We are taking you to police station,’ said the police officer.
‘No, no no,’ I was almost shouting, but I had no control of the situation. They were already walking in another direction, happy at having my phone in their hand. If I wanted my phone back I would have to follow them. But if I followed them I was off to a police station in a country where I didn’t know the local language and customs. The police were probably going to ask me for an exorbitant bribe, and if I didn’t pay that, they were probably going to be putting me in a jail. They didn’t care that I was a human who had no idea what was going on. I am sure they got a high at punishing a foreigner, and they were excited to have a chance to make some money off of one too.
I didn’t follow them. I wasn’t stupid enough to do so. Instead I went towards my hotel and I opened the door and shouted for help. It was eight in the morning. There was no one in the lobby. But the guard for the building noticed me. Though he didn’t speak any common language with me he noticed the desperation in my eyes, and ran in the building.
What I did also antagonised the police officers.
‘What are you doing? You come to the police station. You come now!’
‘Just wait! Wait!’
And I prayed and hoped that they did, at least long enough so that the person who owned the hostel would come out to help me.
Luckily she was out within a minute. She was an older Somali woman from Djibouti who had been brought up in Canada. She knew perfect English and asked me immediately, ‘What’s going on?’
‘They think I took a photo of a police officer,’ I explained. ‘They are trying to send me to jail.’
The owner of the hotel took a second to look eyes with me. Though her face and body were completely covered except for the eyes, I could tell she was scanning everything I was thinking and feeling, and assessed that I was telling the truth.
Then she turned to the police officers, and started bartering to them in their local language. I didn’t understand what she was saying, but because the owner of the hotel was significantly older than all of us, possibly in her fifties, as well as a respected member of the city, I could tell they were willing to listen to her properly, unlike how they behaved with me. They shouted at each other for some time but then their tempers cooled and the tones in the voices evened out. She got them to give her my phone, and she looked at the pictures herself. She came to my side and said, ‘Delete every photo you can of Djibouti, immediately, at once.’
I followed her instructions. I went into my photos, pressed the select all button, and deleted everything, and then went to the deleted photos section, and cleared them fully from my phone. I had a lot of pictures of my family and friends on my phone, as well as a lot of captivating snapshots from my days in Nairobi and Johannesburg, my explorations of Uganda and Rwanda, and even some striking photos from my time here, whether from the salt cakes around Lake Assal or the busy beaches around the coast of Djibouti City. At that moment I didn’t care that everything I did in the last half year was being erased. I wanted to save myself, and only my survival at that moment mattered.
The owner of the hotel showed my phone, completely empty of photos. I could tell she was saying there was literally nothing there. The police looked at the photos, saw there was nothing, and went on their way. They didn’t apologise for bothering me. They didn’t even look me in the eyes.
I thought I was going to go for a walk around town, but after everything that happened I needed to sit down. The sofas in the lobby were empty. I just collapsed onto one with my eyes unable to focus on anything.
Meanwhile the hotel owner scolded me.
‘Why are you taking photos of the police? In no country in the world is it appropriate to take photos of police officers?’
She went on and on, and a part of me wanted to defend myself, reminding her that I didn’t even see the officer, and all I wanted to do was capture a moment of the sun rising a little bit over the mosque, and giving a little bit of a pink and orange flair to the sky.
But honestly in my mind that wasn’t what I was thinking really. What I was thinking was that it had been some time since I had been in Africa. Some of the months I was in Johannesburg, and then I travelled in the south, and after that I went to Nairobi, crashed there. I saw the highlights of Zanzibar and the Masai Mara, and I was just thinking of exploring the horn. Online classes were going well, and I was able to travel while learning an income, but was I enjoying myself?
I was thinking about that then and there, that I really missed how easy life was in London. The job I had barely paid me anything for how expensive London is, but I liked teaching migrants over little kids, and the job was challenging, and rewarding. I didn’t like pointing to slides and talking to children, though the company, based in China, paid far better, especially given my living costs. And then London is such a colourful city, full of people from all over the world. Johannesburg had its highs, and Nairobi is an amazing amalgamation of natural beauty and wildlife with big city feels, but I couldn’t stand either for longer than a month.
I wanted to leave Africa. I thought I wanted to travel and explore and see every country here, but for one country that rewarded me there were five that just challenged me, and not in a good way. There was a part of me that wanted to see the West and the Central parts, but I also knew that the Internet would be as bad in those parts as it is in Djibouti. And most likely I’d get in trouble for this reason or that. I didn’t like the fact that people were targeting me because I looked richer or they looked like they could get something out of me. It didn’t help that I grew up feeling different from others, and was bullied a lot for it, and something about these experiences were rubbing salt on a completely unrelated wound, in a way I was still not able to understand.
I sat for some time and let that woman chew me out. She felt like an auntie for me in a lot of ways, and I appreciated her effort in trying to instruct me. At the same time for the rest of the day my mind refused to waiver on a very particular conclusion that was firming up inside of my head.
I had a job that allowed me to be anywhere in the world I wanted to be. I hadn’t seen all of Africa but I had seen some thirteen countries and I was satisfied with what I saw. If I was free to be anywhere in the world I wanted, why was I still in this part of the world despite every thought urging me to leave? I was trying to satisfy a country count that didn’t matter to me, and there were so many other parts of the world I haven’t touched yet, like Southeast Asia or the Middle East.
The point is that I wasn’t living exactly how I wanted to, despite arranging my life to give me the freedom to do so, and that made no sense. This experience with the police was horrible, just like the phone-snatching I went through in Johannesburg was horrifying, but these things were happening because the universe was telling me to move on, and I wasn’t listening.
I was going to be in Djibouti for a few more days, partly because I wanted to cross into Somaliland and then fly from there towards Addis Ababa. I decided to make a promise to myself. I wasn’t going to let myself be swayed by impulse and excitement. I was going to try to think to myself, really know what I want, and from that, make a decision, one that might involve hopping continents or not, changing jobs or sticking with what I’ve chosen, but one that would fundamentally make me feel happier with the way things were going in my life, and one that would make me feel like I’m finally on track to life life the way I was meant to.