Jonny Steinberg Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Jonny Steinberg shares his experiences meeting and writing about Asad Addullani for his book A Man of Good Hope

When and where did you first meet Asad? What was it about him that intrigued you?

I did not intend to write a book about Asad Abdullahi when I first met him. I had employed him to introduce me to the world of Cape Town Somalis. Early in our association, he and I were strolling through Cape Town's botanical gardens when Asad idly picked up a twig from the ground, snapped it open and drew it to his nose. The smell transported him back more than 20 years. He was six years old, in a madrasa in Somalia, mixing the ink he would use to copy out passages from the Koran. The ink was clearly narcotic; he was reliving an old, forgotten high. I thought to myself, a man who can take me to his childhood so vividly, so intimately, is a man about whom I ought to write a book.

The Somali diaspora is one that many Americans are unfamiliar with. Why is Asad's story a good introduction to the topic?

In January 1990, more than half of the population of Mogadishu, Somali's capital city, fled. The majority never returned. It is a story of such incalculable scale. To get an inkling of what it means, one needs to go up close and look intimately at an individual life, to try, as best one can, to get under an individual's skin. ...