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Cultural Migration in Autobiography Grundtvig Partnerships 2009-2011

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

e-mail: kszia@komesnet.com.pl http://cma.internetdsl.pl

61

A ‘Medicine Man’ Omar Giama

Incredible! The man in front of me, a successful doctor wearing jacket and shirt, a light grayish shadow, kind of Nelson Mandela, which makes black people look like old wise men, well, he used to run in the savannah one day. And this man is telling me a very singular story, more than a story a crossroads of identities, of families lost and regained a story which mixes up with History taught in western books and the History orally handed down from African fathers to sons and the sons of sons. So this is the story of Omar Mohamud Giama, an Italian citizen, whose Italian descendants decided one day to go back and retrace to the root of their mixed up, unique identity.

Omar was born in southern Somalia in 1957, in a village called Bulo Yak, inhabited by the Wasigua, a Bantu minority tribe of Tanzanian origin, deported to Somalia as farm laborers in the 19th century. Five hundred people managed to break free and settled down along the river Jubba. That’s where Omar was born, the son of the tribal chief Mohamud Giama. He was the third of nine brothers, named Omar after the second of the four ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’ of Islamism, to which the family had converted even if retaining animistic traditions and ancient rituals. And the unfathomable divine plans decided for Omar “the wise man”, son of a ‘medicine man’, to become a doctor himself. - In 1966 a terrible famine prostrated my village Bulo Yak. The wise old men of my tribes gathered to discuss, encouraged by a missionary priest: who should be sent to Italy, who should be offered a different opportunity? Certainly not the first-born of the tribal chief and not the second born…to avoid bad luck! What about the third? Yes, they could make an attempt. And so they did, careless of my Mum crying. I can’t say I myself agreed with all this. I fled away into the forest towards a nearby village. I was easily found out: ‘Why did you flee away? You’ll be much better in the place you’re going to’.

‘If so… why’s Mum crying?” “ Women can’t do anything good. They just cry” –

Omar Giama was born in Bulo Yak, Somalia, in 1957. He lives in Faenza, is married and has got two daughters.