In this week’s issue of the magazine, Xan Rice writes about the Somali chef and restaurant owner Ahmed Jama, whose restaurant the Village, in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, was attacked by the Islamist extremist group the Shabaab on September 7th. Rice writes that in an eighteen-month period in 2007 and 2008, the mounting violence at the hands of the Shabaab caused eight hundred thousand people, including Jama’s mother, to flee the city. But Jama has remained, resolute to grow his business despite the “the sound of gunfire … so regular that Jama came to think of it as a drumbeat—the soundtrack to his new life.”
Today, as the crisis at the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya, unfolds, Jama told The New Yorker, “I’ve been following it on television. At the restaurant, a lot of people are watching the news on CNN. It’s a disaster. Everybody is just watching and praying for those people in Westgate. I feel so sorry for what has happened. I wish I could do something.” Nonetheless, Jama remains hopeful about his business. “We reopened” on Sunday, he said. “Not many customers came, but we had a few people buying coffee. It’s a beginning. I’m not going to give up.”
The South Africa-based photographer Jonathan Torgovnik travelled to Mogadishu in June, to photograph Jama, his restaurants, and the scarred, resilient city of Mogadishu.
Here’s a look.
Photographs by Jonathan Torgovnik/Reportage by Getty Images.
