Kevin M. Cahill, M.D., on Working Among the Irish of Africa I have worked in the most remote areas of Africa, as well as in Asia and Latin America, but Somalia holds a special place in my heart. Possibly the genes of my Kerry forebears-who survived on bare rocky hills far from the green fields of Eire-influenced this selection. As we all know, Irish genes are most unusual, and, if the attraction to Somalia was purely hereditary, that might explain why I hold so firmly to this isolated and, until recently, forgotten part of East Africa. I have returned there again and again-twelve trips in fifteen years-and traveled all Somaliland, working among the sick, carrying on medical research, rejoicing with my Somali friends as their own new nation evolved. I have relished every hot, dirty, lonely moment of it. It is the people, more than the land, that captured me, for here are “The Irish ‘of Africa.” Sir Richard Burton-not today’s Celtic thespian, but the explorer and linguist who discovered one of the sources of the Nile, mapped much of Africa, and was the first non-Muslim to visit Mecca and survive-left Aden in 1854 and traveled across the Gulf into an unknown land. Five months later, with a Somali spear having pierced his jaw and with one of his companions dead on the beach at Berbera, he returned to “civilization.” Burton had visited the holy city of Harar, had recorded the customs and language of the Somali, and described the people as “a fierce race of Republicans, the Irish of Africa” (see his classic First Footsteps in East Africa).
http://burtoniana.org/books/1856-First%20Footsteps%20in%20East%20Africa/index.htm