Welcome Jimce Barkhadle” or Good Friday

Jimce Barkhadle........By  Ahmed H Nur

Welcome Jimce Barkhadle" or Good Friday or Pascua or Paques or Påske (pronounced: pooske) or Eostre and many other names of the occasion. The following is not about the Christian tradition of celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is about a little startling discovery I made this morning! I felt stupid as I realized the connection. Stupid because I knew well of the events, each in its way, but never saw the link. The revelation came to me from a conversation between a mother and a daughter in the back seat of my car. It is early Wednesday morning, the 20th.of April 2011. There is little traffic on the roads as many had already travelled out of the city to the mountains or elsewhere. In Easter Holidays, Norwegians traditionally follow the receding snow and go to the mountains for skiing and relaxation. Recently, many choose travel to the sun in the South. Skjærtorsdag (Thursday before Good Friday) marks the beginning of a week-long holiday-break.

My wife and I were driving my mum-in-law to an early appointment with her doctor. There, in the calm of the misty morning, cruising on Ring 3, the women in my company struck this conversation. It started off with whether the senior mother called home (Hargeisa) lately. "Yes", the response came and added that most of the family members in Hargeisa were already in Aw Barkhadle, awaiting the "Jimce Barkhadle". "It falls on the coming Friday as you know", she continued.  Aw Barkhadle is a little village, about 30 km to the East of Hargeisa, on the Hargeisa – Berbera Road. And Jimce Barkhadle is an annual religious festival which takes place in the village. The origin of the festival and why it is arranged in this particular place has most definitely some historical connotations but this is long lost and forgotten.

Flashback:

I all of a sudden realized that "Jimce Barkhade" which is so passionately celebrated in Somaliland, is the same as the Christian Easter. Not only do the observed dates coincide, the meaning of the "day" and the manifestitations of the celebration are also the same. Modern-day Easter is known as the moveable feast since it falls on different dates each year. In The West, Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday following the full moon after the vernal equinox on March 21. Easter is therefore observed anywhere between March 22 and April 25 every year and this coincides perfectly with the Jimce Barkhadle observations in Somaliland. Good Friday, which is the Friday before Easter Eve, fully corresponds to Jimce Barkhadle, meaningwise. Barkhadle means the Good One, the Virtuous, the Righteous or the Pious.

During the Jimce Barkhadle Festival people, especially the young, used to paint a white Cross on their foreheads. This reflects the remains of the Christian traditions. Perhaps even pagan traditions before Christianity and Islam. In modern-day, Somali context, Jimce Barkhadle is believed to be an Islamic religious celebration. Popular believe has that partaking in 2 Jimce Barkhadle Festivals would amount to one Hajj Visit. I do not know how the occasion is celebrated these days, but in the past, this used to be a great fun festival, especially for the young people. There used to be a bounty of food and mesmerizing religious chanting under every tree. The small hills on both sides of the Doox echoed the beat of the drums – The Noor Qani as we called them. There was the corner for infertile women to sit on "Miracle Stones". This costed the women one shilling per sitting. Some of the stone-owners charged more, promising quicker results or the firstborn to be a boy. The infertility healing is an important relationship between our Jimce barkhadle and the believed originions of the Easter. Read about the origins of the Easter on the internet. There were many other "Barako" experiences, whether in this world or in the other, as the learned sheikhs used to say. For the kids, it was an occasion for running away from home. Staying up late with no parent supervision, playing in the Doox the whole day and sleeping in the open was fun, I remember.

Two central figures

Jimce Barkhadle has two central historical men: Sheikh Yusuf Al-Kawnayn and Bucur Bacayr. The former is said to have been a good guy (a Moslem) who saved the people from the evil rule of the latter. While the existence of these men is very strong in Somaliland folk believes, I found no written literature on these mythological figures. If you know something about them, or know about a resource of reliable literature, please share!

Ahmed H Nur
e-mail: ahnur@online.no