Yussef Muya: a Somalian survivor

Born during a firefight in the middle of a brutal civil war, Yussuf Muya did not have a permanent home for the first 12 years of his life.

By Andrew Wichrowski

Staff Writer

Born during a firefight in the middle of a brutal civil war, Yussuf Muya did not have a permanent home for the first 12 years of his life.

Now, as a senior at Taylor Allderdice High School, Muya has recently completed a manuscript for his autobiography that he hopes to eventually publish. entitled “Life has Changed from Somalia to Here”, Muya chronicles his life as a refugee and a Pittsburgh transplant.

“Life is hard, but you never know when it’s going to change,” Muya says about his book.
Before moving to the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Lawrenceville six years ago, Yussuf Muya, now 18 years old, was born in Comsagirow, Somalia, at the beginning of the ongoing Somali Civil War.

“We want [the Somali Bantu] to get out of the war; we don’t want to fight back,” Muya says, referring to his people.

Muya’s heritage lies with the Wazigua people from Tanzania, but he is considered part of the modern-day designation of Somali Bantu.

“They used to call us bad names, so Bantus is better,” Muya explains, “they used to call us ‘slave’.”

Somali Bantu is the name given to several different groups of ethnic minorities that can trace their ancestry back to people brought to Somalia from different parts of Africa by Arab slave traders.

“We all got the same hair, color, everything; so that’s why they call us Bantu,” Muya says.
Though slavery was abolished in Somalia by occupying Italy in the 20th Century, as Muya states, most of the colloquial (and often derogatory) names that the Somali have for the Bantu people translate to “slave”.

After the fall of the Somali dictator Siad Barre in 1991, fighting broke out between local tribes for control of the country. Several warring factions descended on the area where Muya was born, leaving chaos in their wake.

“They take our land, they take our food, everything,” Muya says. “So if you don’t have anything, how can you live?”

So to escape the conflict, soon after Muya was born, his mother carried him on her back to Kenya with his older sister. The trip took 15 days by foot.

“And when we got to Kenya, we got help by the Swahili people,” Muya explains. “They took us, our people, and said you are welcome to Kenya.”