Doctor who defied jihadis and saved thousands of lives in war-torn Somalia

Hawa Abdi, who has died aged 73, was a pioneering Somali doctor whose one-room clinic grew into a 400-bed hospital; she provided sanctuary to 90,000 displaced people during her country’s brutal civil war, offering life-saving treatment to malnourished children while facing down marauding militiamen.

When families of refugees started turning up at her door, she sold her family gold to buy bags of sorghum to feed them. She refused to turn those in her care over to gunmen from rival clans and was once beaten with a rifle after rescuing one of her nurses.

‘‘Our only security were two guards and our band of boys – eight, 10 and 12 years old,’’ she later wrote.

‘‘Theywere the first ones to hear the crackle of gunfire in the distance or the sound of a car cascading into the area, its light and motor off as away to be undetected: someone coming to us in search of money, of food, of children to rape.’’

In May 2010, Hawa Abdi’s hospital was overrun by 750 jihadi fighters from Hizbul Islam, an al Qaeda-affiliated group. They trashed the wards and demanded that, as a woman, she relinquish control. When she refused, they imprisoned her. The act provoked outrage among the Somali diaspora, and Hawa Abdi defied her captors by giving clandestine telephone interviews to journalists.

After several days, the jihadis decided to release her. However, she refused to leave their custody until they wrote her a formal letter of apology, which they duly furnished in both Somali and English.

‘‘I told the gunmen: ‘I’m not leaving my hospital’,’’ she said. ‘‘I told them: ‘If I die, I will die with my people and my dignity’.’’ When one militant said to her, ‘‘We are men, we are in control,’’ she responded: ‘‘You are aman – you have two testes. A goat also has two testes. What have you done for society?’’

Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe was born in 1947 and raised in a two-room house in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. Her father worked in the city’s port; her mother died after giving birth to her seventh child when Hawa was 12. Caring for her mother made her want to be a doctor, and she later won a scholarship to study medicine in Kiev, where her Soviet classmates often mistook her for a Cuban.

She returned from Ukraine in 1971 and took a job at the Digfer Hospital in Mogadishu. Somalia had only 60 doctors at the time, nearly all men; she decided to specialise in gynaecology. The next year she enrolled at law school, doing ward rounds in the morning while attending classes in the afternoon, and she frequently argued with her professor about women’s rights and Sharia law.

Later she taught gynaecology and obstetrics at the Somali National University. Hawa Abdi opened her own clinic in 1983 in the Afgooye Corridor, 32km from Mogadishu, using money from the sale of some land she had bought years earlier.

Initially she planned to deliver the babies of rural women while still working part-time in Mogadishu; within two months she was receiving 100 patients a day and was soon treating everything from cholera and measles to bullet wounds and diarrhoea.

Those who could not afford to pay she treated for free, while the wives of businessmen and government ministers were charged extra. When she could no longer afford to finance the hospital, she took amedical job in Nairobi and sent back $1500 amonth.

As famine gripped the country during the civil war of the 1990s, refugees fleeing the fighting in Mogadishu flocked to Hawa Abdi’s hospital. She recalled: ‘‘I took them in and I gave them whatever I had: cool water, a place to sleep, a portion of our farm’s harvest.’’

Despite her efforts, nearly 10,000 people died at the hospital of starvation. With international help it was expanded; as well as providing food, Hawa Abdi set up a school for

800 students and began classes teaching women how to sew, read and cook nutritious meals. The camp’s population swelled to 90,000.

She did not like handouts, believing that aid by itself can breed dependency. Instead, she set up farming and fishing collectives so that people could feed their families while earning a small income. She often repeated the mantra: ‘‘Do not give a person a fish; it’s better to teach that person how to fish.’’

In return, she only had two rules. The first was that the inhabitants of the camp, who dubbed her ‘‘Mama Hawa’’, must forgo the clan divisions that were tearing Somalia apart. Secondly, men were forbidden from beating their wives. She even had a storeroom that doubled as a jail for domestic abusers.

When famine struck Somalia again in 2011, the hospital once more became a haven for the destitute. Hawa Abdi managed to keep it running despite receiving little help from foreign donors, who would not operate in the area as it was under Islamist control.

In 2010, Hawa Abdi was named as one of Glamour’s women of the year and the magazine flew her to New York for a glitzy award ceremony. She particularly enjoyed her business class flight. While in the US she received invitations from Somali migrant communities in various cities and spent several weeks touring the country.

In 2012 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and feted by the actress Angelina Jolie at the Women in the World conference.

Hawa Abdi’s first marriage was arranged by her family when she was 12. She married her second husband, Aden, in 1973; they later separated. She is survived by two of her four children, Amina Mohamed and Deqo, who are both doctors. Her son, Ahmed, died in a car accident aged 24; her first daughter, Faduma, died, aged 2, when Hawa Abdi was a teenager.

‘‘Do not give a person a fish; it’s better to teach that person how to fish.’’ Favourite mantra of Hawa Abdi