Visual Podcast-Yemen

Mustafa: Since Google did not exist at the time, how was it that you sought information about your next destination?

Tobias: Upon moving to the village from London when I was a child, my father trained to become a geography teacher, so we had quite a few travel books and atlases. I also went to Stanford Bookshop in London. One could not just go to Amazon and order these things, and that bookshop was renowned for its collection of travel books. I managed to find a couple of really good books about Yemen and started to learn.

Mustafa: What was your job there?
Tobias: I started to teach English to adult students. The organization I worked for was trying to expand their educational and cultural operations beyond just the capital in Sana’a. This is in the late 80s and early 90s. Yemen had been two countries during the Cold War, so after the collapse of the USSR, the country underwent a reunification process which was largely peaceful. The president of the North remained in power, the president of the South in their capital Aden became the vice-president.

I travelled to the capital of the South, Aden, and started to investigate how we can open a centre there. It is noteworthy that since the South had been communist, society there was much more liberal in terms of social freedom. The Northerners had maintained their religious conservatism. After a year I travelled yet again to a place called Hudaida back in the North near the Saudi border. There, I worked until 1994 when a civil war broke out between the North and the South. By then, I had progressed in my career to become responsible for managerial aspects of the centres I ran. I made sure our finances were in order and that English language classes ran smoothly.

Mustafa: Tell me of your experience of the civil war.
Tobias: I woke up one morning and there was news that Sana’a and Aden had started bombing each other. The British authorities announced on the radio that we should stay put until they contact us the next day. Everything was very tense. The next day, the BBC World Service announced for British nationals to go to a port on the Red Sea to await a boat which was meant to evacuate us from the country. We did as instructed and got onto a boat to Djibouti.

Mustafa: How was your social life affected by the sudden development?
Tobias: I had to leave my boyfriend behind. We had grown very close and it was a heart break. This was the reality of becoming romantically involved across borders and nationalities. The organization I worked for was very progressive. I did not feel at a disadvantage as a result of being gay, but being gay was definitely not social and legally recognized as it is nowadays, so perhaps if my partner were female, we would have been able to remain together. Who knows? In 2020, my partner and I would be posted in the country where I work as a family unit, but back then it was unthinkable.

Mustafa: Did you ever go back?
Tobias: I did. After the civil war I went back. This time there were protocols to remain vigilant of landmines and such. I suppose it still felt like an overseas adventure to my idealistic young self. It was around that time when Al-Qaeda in Yemen started appearing. I was at the location of a double suicide bombing in a basement at a bar where Americans went to gather. I had been in the basement and when my friends and I went upstairs we found out that there had been a bombing.

Mustafa: Since your nationality was that of a European power which was politically and militarily involved in the region, how did that affect your daily interactions with regular people?

Tobias: Yemen at the time had been the holder of a rotating seat at United Nations Security Council. There had recently also been the Gulf War not very far. Therefore, people such as taxi drivers would bring these topics up if they found out I was British. I decided to say that I was from Poland or something, just in order to avoid speaking about politics.

Some people did behave suspicious with Europeans, but I did not experience much of it. I think I had enough Yemeni friends with whom I could lead an interesting social life. Also I had enough proficiency in Arabic in order to deflect sensitive questions and turn the conversation into a regular one about mundane topics.

Mustafa: Reflecting back as an adult to my childhood growing up in an Arabic-speaking, Muslim society in Oman, which happens to share a border with Yemen, I feel like war was an ever-present phenomenon culturally and socially. This is despite the fact that Oman has developed a national identity which is very averse to war and conflict.

In any case, I do feel like as a child, society brought children up to cling to identity politics. In my opinion I feel like that undermines political pluralism. In a parallel fashion, I feel like people across their political conflicts shared one common thread, and that is blaming foreigners for dividing, patronizing, and conquering. I think that is hypocritical, seeing as how everyone seemed ready to receive foreign support in order to crush the ‘others’ with whom the land is shared, but that is what I think people taught children in the environment in which I grew up.

Europeans to me seemed as people to whom war only existed in black and white footage, and as war broke out in the Middle East, they could always practice their privilege of highly mobile passports across borders. That privilege of safety could harbour bitterness. Did you experience the result of such negativity towards Europeans in your life in Yemen or the Middle East in general?

Tobias: As my position within the organization became more senior, I could sense that some people remained cautious in their interactions with me. However, I conducted myself with the intention of demonstrating humility. Most people, when they saw that my attitude was that of a person who sought to improve himself and learn from them, collaborate with them, and share experience for a common developmental work in cultural relations, I think that they warmed up to me.

When it comes to my personal friends who were locals, I would say that they were willing to protect me from the minority of people who displayed negativity towards me. They would actually stick their own neck out in shield me from that kind of prejudice.

Mustafa: That’s beautiful. You seem to have cultivated friendships that you are very grateful for. How to conclude the chapter of this conversation about Yemen?

Tobias: As I mentioned earlier, I went back after the civil war to finish up on some untied professional and social knots. The organization I worked for would grant its staff the opportunity to move countries every 4 or 5 years, and that is how I ended up living in so many countries over about 30 years of working for them.

When I ended up leaving Yemen that time, I said a proper goodbye to my boyfriend. After that I went back to the UK for a sabbatical to pursue a Master programme in Educational Management.