Somalia's Lord of the Fly

Unsworth, Tessa. "Somali displaced flee violence." Reuters, May 25, 2009: http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=105154&videoChannel=1

Women may do only so much.

The men want to fight, especially 62-year-old Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who has been leading the al-Shabaab militia in its fight against the newly installed government of Presdient Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.

One may see what good effects come from continuing armed struggle in the name of God: 60,000 more Somalis made uncomfortable enough in Mogadishu to flee their homes for camps plainly unprepared for the weather.

At an allegorical level, the main theme is the conflicting impulses towards civilization (live by rules, peacefully and in harmony), and towards the will to power. Other themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, forms a major subtext of the story. [1]

Wikipedia's description proves apt: there is the countryside of latent rural elegance, complete with folk ways and seaports, and if rough, then so by its own medieval organization and an impoverishment driven in no small part by nature herself, and there arrive "the youth" bound to despoil its people and its treasures, such as they may be, while making themselves less the army of God and more the hosts of death and destruction.

In Golding's book, the navy arrives with its forthright officers to return the children to order.

For Somalia, there is mostly talk: my talk, American talk, UN talk, European talk, NGO talk, academic talk, journalists's talk.

However, there is President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a young officer arrived by cunning to spare Somalia its deepening misery, and as a once perhaps uncompromising Islamist himself, he and his troops seem to be taking an object lesson in the intractability of an old man and his divisions of young ones bound for ignominious glory.

Reference

1. Wikipedia.  "Lord of the Flies": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies

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