I’M A PROUD Somalian and am actively involved with the Somali community in Ireland. At events, I help present aspects of Somali culture, including native dress such as the coantino. I also show pictures of Somalia before and after the war, which is still ongoing.
At one such event, people came to talk to me, asking: “Hey Ifrah, how about the Somali pirates?” It made me a bit sad, and I didn’t find it funny. Not every Somalian is a pirate, and not everybody is in a gang. I don’t really know anything about these groups.
Sometimes people say: “Ifrah, you’re speaking out against FGM, you’ll be in trouble with these gangs in Somalia, they’ll see your picture!” People say I’ll go to Somalia and they’ll kill me. Sometimes I get afraid, but I don’t want to get too paranoid. I live here in Ireland now, and I’m not going back to Somalia.
There’s Somali people living in Ireland since the 1990s, but a lot of them just get on with their lives and don’t really care about doing something for the Somali community. However, I really want to make sure we present the best of who we are and where we’re from.
I helped organise the first Somali Independence Day in Ireland – we wore Somali clothes and talked about the war and everything. I’ve also tried to increase outward displays of pride.
At big international sports events, I see how much the country’s flags mean to their people, but when I first came to Ireland, I couldn’t find the Somali flag in Ireland at all – so I ordered some.
Now when we stage an event, the place is full of blue and white. the colours of the Somali flag. I love my country; it’s part of who I am.
It is very tough for people back home – there are no rights, plenty of suffering, and little food and water. I wish I could do something for my country. Yet I’m here now, integrating with the Irish and have learned a lot about myself.
In a way, being in Ireland has helped me understand how much my country means to me. In Somalia, I saw people dying in the streets – you’d cross the bodies and you’d run, because you wanted to live. Here it’s different: you can see the ambition, the kindness. the happiness.
Sometimes I’ve spoken out against certain practices in Somalia, namely FGM (female genital mutilation), which I suffered twice as a young girl. In Ireland, I started participating in workshops aimed at highlighting the dangers of FGM to the Somali community in Ireland. In 2008, Metro Éireann did a report on this, quoting some of my concerns that Somalis in Ireland could be thinking of sending their children to Somalia for FGM.
Some of the community responded very badly. I had problems with a lot of people saying I shouldn’t be talking about this, and even now they give me a bad name and compare me to this woman in the Netherlands who abused the name of the Prophet Muhammad, even though I have never, and would never, say a bad word about Islam. It’s my religion and I respect it. And while Somali culture and my religion are beautiful, FGM is not – nor is it really cultural or religious.
After this controversy, I wondered what I was doing. But somebody changed my mind, and encouraged me to keep doing what I needed to do.
While participating in an RTÉ programme on adults trying to improve literacy, I met the late Darren Sutherland. He talked about when he went back to school when was 21 and that he’d had to wear a school uniform.
He also told me: “If you have an ambition, go for it.” It made me think, why am I stopping because of what people think about me?
Ifrah Ahmed is originally from Mogadishu in Somalia. She is an active promoter of Somali culture and campaigns against female genital mutilation (FGM)
