There's something quite heartening, even inspiring, about a bunch of rag-tag unemployed Somali fishermen playing Robin Hood And His Merry Men off the east coast of Africa.

It didn't happen without cause.

First, these fishermen had to watch impotently while the Americans and  Ethiopians destroyed their (working) government because it worshipped the wrong god.

Then, enormous foreign factory boats illegally scooped up most of their fish.

Finally - irony of ironies - other foreigners dumped nuclear waste on their beaches and in their waters, thus poisoning whatever was still crawling or swimming.

One has to ask, therefore, if it isn't entirely logical that these same unemployed fishermen then look around for other work so they can feed their families, and notice all those big, fat foreign ships cruising past their villages like ancient Spanish galleons piled high with the treasure of the first world? And setting up a toll system just like the fabled outlaws of Sherwood Forest, to hold some of those big, fat, foreign galleons until appropriate ransom is paid?

It's called stealing from the rich to give to the poor and has a fairly honourable provenance.

And isn't there a certain poetic justice in the Sheriff of Nottingham threatening and sniping and huffing and puffing because the outlaws of Somalia just aren't playing by his rules and he doesn't have the faintest idea how to handle such outrageous behaviour?


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

Dane-geld (Dane tax) was the bribe paid by eleventh-century England to persuade visiting Vikings not to ravish and pillage there (Vikings considered ravishing and pillaging the English a really, really great way to spend vacations) but go ravish and pillage the French instead.

Barack Obama likely was tempted to pay Dane-geld when Somali pirates seized the US-flagged Maersk Alabama. After all, he had much bigger problems (like the future of the known world) heavy on his shoulders. But he is an educated man and probably remembers Rudyard Kipling's poem, Dane-Geld, which reads in part:

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:-
"Though we know we should defeat you,
We have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

Seems a dead, white male can be a lot of use to a live, black male these days.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)