I

WAS sitting in the back seat of a car in Mogadishu, peering through tinted glass at the gunmen blocking our way, and wondering if maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all. I’ve been visiting Somalia regularly over the past 15 years, reporting on the extravagant supply of bad news — famines, pirates, warlords, militants and endlessly shifting frontlines. I’m used to the queasy experience of driving through Mogadishu’s ruins, braced for trouble.

But this time was different. I’d come not as a journalist, but as a guest speaker at the city’s fledgling book fair. I’d just written my book, The Mayor of Mogadishu, and launching it in Somalia seemed like the proper thing to do.

Except that I was on my own this time. No BBC News team beside me in the car. And Mogadishu was going through an upsurge in car bombings, assassinations, and co-ordinated attacks on hotels by the Islamist militants of al-Shabaab.

To add to my unease, the local media and the book fair’s organisers had publicised the timing of my speech at a downtown hotel. No chance of slipping in under the radar. My guards made no secret of their anxieties.

Then there was the book itself. My initial plan to write a traditional “journalist” book about my experiences in Somalia had been sideswiped by a chance encounter with a man known as Tarzan.

I first met him in 2010, days after he’d returned from 20 years in London, to take on the seemingly impossible job of Mogadishu’s mayor. He seemed an almost cartoonish figure. Brash, brave and thuggish. Picture Boris Johnson spliced with Gwede Mantashe.

But then I dug into his past and came to realise there was more to Tarzan. That his story was also Somalia’s. Born into a nomadic family, dropped off in an orphanage during a famine, he was a ruffian who fell in love with an upper-class girl and took her on dates to open-air cinemas. Then came Somalia’s collapse, escape to London, and, two decades and six children later, Tarzan’s determination to come “home”.

Today Tarzan is a profoundly divisive figure. A hero to some Somalis. But others have jabbed me in the chest to demand why I have chosen to write a book about “a scumbag like that”. He’s accused of corruption, and worse. And now he’s campaigning to be president in elections due later this year.

And so, as our convoy finally made it safely through the security cordon outside the book fair, I was braced for a different kind of hostility. Not just the “why should we listen to yet another foreigner, telling us about our country?” sort. But also the suspicion that I was trying to help Tarzan’s election campaign. Those questions came, but politely. The crowds at the book fair were young, huge, exuberant — relishing the chance to celebrate their city’s progress and culture, and to push back against the bleak brand of a “failed state”.

“What do you like best about our city?” An earnest student stood in front of me, my book clutched in his hand, awaiting my signature. He was proud of Mogadishu, and I was glad I’d come back.

‘The Mayor of Mogadishu’ is published by St Martin’s Press, R285.