Aidan Hartley: How Muslim militants and Western jihadis wrecked enchanting Somalia

Wizards inland from the little Somali port of Barawe bewitched a person to come to them by banging a nail into a tree and chanting his name. ‘He comes no matter how far away he may be,’ wrote Gerald Hanley in Warriors, his unrivalled classic about Somalia — for him a place of ‘swirling sandstorms, heat and billions and billions of flies’. But I need no nail in a tree to return to Barawe, which to me is a paradise I once aimed to make my home.

I first saw Barawe from the high, red dunes of the hinterland. It glittered white against the azure Indian Ocean: beautiful houses and mosques, a colonial Italian lighthouse ringed by a necklace of surf. It was 1998 and I had never seen anywhere so exotic, populated by very light-skinned descendants of Portuguese, Arabs and Shirazis. They spoke a northern form of Swahili called Chimbalazi and were full of poetry.