A is for Al Shabaab and other misconceptions is a novel that will take you on one character’s soul-searching journey for redemption while experiencing life in the Horn of Africa; eventually winding up in Southern Somalia. The protagonist, Johnny Backinton, will discover what it means to come face-to-face with his own demons, while also discovering that he will play a role that will help to shape the future of all humankind. What will he discover buried deep underneath the bloodstains of war and carnage that lay upon the surface of Mogadishu’s long-forgotten vendor’s rows?
With the funds raised, I will travel [back] to Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia and discover new paradigms of existence. From the deserts of the Garowe to the high seas of Puntland, I will undertake interviews, studies, and long nights of staring at blank pages with little sleep and lots of local coffee. Eventually, as is always the case, there will erupt from the nothingness of those blank pages a written product worthy of consumption via the masses. Enjoy.
PREFATIO
I have survived Hell.
I didn’t know what I was really looking for when I first left for Africa. Perhaps it was absolution. Maybe it was payback. I had spent my entire adult life up to that point as a soldier – a killer – in the company of other killers. The weight of each death that I had caused weighed heavy on me, and every time I closed my eyes I could feel the screaming voices of the dead filling up the empty spaces of my soul. Maybe I had spent one too many nights falling asleep in houses that I didn’t recognize the next morning, waking up under the covers next to absolute strangers. I guess I was probably ready to get my life back on track. It was time for me to stop living in the past and begin to look at life under a different light. It was time to say goodbye to the idealism of the West and embrace a new and entirely different paradigm of the self. It was time for me to go to Africa.
That was probably my greatest mistake of all...