Interview: Jay Bahadur, The Man who Chronicled the Somali Pirates

“My point was always, ‘Look, this is the hook.’ Piracy is the hook, if you want to get people interested in Somalia’s problems and the region’s problems; you’re not going to get them to read a World Food Programme treatise.”

Jay Bahadur became famous for, at age 24, traveling alone to Somalia to document the lives of the pirates raiding ships in the Gulf of Aden. He previously had little journalistic experience, no degree in the subject, and was on a tight budget. Nevertheless, his reports on the day-to-day lives and actions of the Somali pirates would appear in the world’s most widely-circulated newspapers from The New York Times to The London Times. He would later publish a book on the topic, which would inspire the Al Pacino film The Pirates of Somalia. On May 4th, he joined Merion West’s Erich Prince to discuss his experiences and thoughts on both the situation in Somalia and on journalism itself.

Jay, good morning from Philadelphia and good afternoon to you in Nairobi. How are you?

Very good, hi, how are you?

Doing well, and thank you for joining us today for this interview. I’m looking forward to hearing your perspectives.

Great, very happy to be here.

To start off, I want to ask you about how you chose Somalia when you were considering destinations to pursue your first journalist project. You mention in your book some of the various conflict zones that were active at that time, places in the Middle East, including Afghanistan. I know you mentioned in one interview that you had been interested in Somalia since college, but what made you pull the trigger and decide to cover the Somali pirates once and for all?

So as you said I studied [the piracy situation] in school, and I was really fascinated. This is going to sound very nerdy, but I was fascinated by the outcome of one election in Somaliland, which is sort of the north-west of Puntland: a state that had declared independence, and they had held a presidential election. The president-elect won by eighty votes, and this result was disputed obviously and went to the Supreme Court of Somaliland. Somehow, it resolved peacefully, and that just stuck in my head as something that wouldn’t happen anywhere else in Africa—and really not very many places in the world: where you have a result that was completely peacefully respected.