A Man of good hope

In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu (the capital of Somalia), two-thirds of the city's population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother was murdered by militia and his father was somewhere in hiding. He was swept along in the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world. Betrayed by the people he thought would care for him, he lived his childhood in an adult world he was wary and skeptical of. He lived in the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi and the desert towns deep in the Ethiopian hinterland. By the time he was on the cusp of adulthood, he had a wide array of talents. At the age of seventeen, he was adept at being a street hustler, brokering relationships between hard-nosed businessmen and Somali refugees. He courted a famous beauty and married her. Buoyed by his success so far, he went to Johannesburg, South Africa. There he began an adventure in a country richer and more violent that he could possibly ever imagined.