Out of Africa

Black Jesus wraps a bony arm around another kid's neck in a reverse headlock. Black Jesus lifts him off the concrete once, twice, three times. All around them, two dozen Somali boys are waging their own battles, their arms flailing as they punch each other. One darts among them, taking pictures with his cell phone and laughing. His unwilling subjects chase him through the melee. Their taunts, spoken in a mix of Somali, Arabic and English, echo through the park, a Greek-theaterlike depression just outside one of the gates to Cliff Drive.

Black Jesus releases his quarry's neck and extends a hand. "Are you OK?" he asks. The boy rubs his Adam's apple and swallows. His expression shows pain, then anger -- before his fist narrowly misses the wispy beard on Black Jesus' chin. Two other kids step between them.

Before long, Black Jesus is after someone else. The others laugh as he chases a young, short, pudgy boy across the grass. Running out of park, the boy turns around and avoids Black Jesus' menacing arms to run in another direction. Elbows and knees flying, stringy beard and disheveled hair flapping, Black Jesus cannot close the gap. The laughter grows loud. "That fat boy can move," someone shouts over the guffaws.

Giving up, Black Jesus saunters, smiling, back to the forgotten basketball court. His prey collapses in the grass near the road. Someone collects the basketball, and a three-on-three game resumes. Black Jesus' team has yet to be beaten.

The fights play out nightly just off Olive Street a few blocks north of Independence Avenue. During games, the players throw up ugly but effective jump shots. Between games, the teens scrap; their roughhousing is brutal. Amazingly, no one bleeds.

The park doesn't have much of a basketball court, just a triangle of concrete with one hoop. Before it became the hangout for Kansas City's Somali teens, it probably was ignored by serious basketball players, who would rather play full-court games. Now it's theirs.

When darkness ends the game, the kids drift away in groups, piling into a Mustang convertible or a white Toyota as the sunlight fades behind the tall trees and houses of Kansas City's northeast. Black Jesus wanders into the wooded ravine across the road.

There are only four guys hanging around when Majak Riak pulls up in a black Honda. Unlike the teens in the park, Majak is Sudanese. He's a little taller, darker and about twice as broad as most of the Somali kids, muscular rather than sinewy. He walks across the grass to the court and talks briefly to the remaining players. He tells them he's still looking for the men who almost killed his father.

Majak walks back near the road and settles down in the grass. As his father was leaving a Sudanese party at the Della Lamb Community Services center the Saturday before, a bullet blew through his windshield and shattered the passenger-side window -- glass is still glistening in his father's right forearm. The gunman and three companions -- all of them Somali -- then stormed into the party, scattering children and scaring everyone.

Majak was out of town at the time, but he's spent most of the last eighteen hours trying to decipher the various versions of the story and looking for the men who had the gun. They were once his friends.

Majak lights a cigarette.

"These guys, somebody has got to get them really quickly," he says. "These guys are not a joke. They are serious. They are scared of nothing but God."

There is a lot at stake, Majak says. If no one punishes these men, the kids who play ball and wrestle and punch in the evening will think it's OK to walk into a peaceful party firing an AK-47. That it's OK to bring a little of Somalia to Kansas City.

Somalis started coming here in 1992. Their country, which follows the curve of Africa's arid east coast, was in turmoil. Longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre had been thrown out in January 1991, and the country was up for grabs, a prize for feuding tribes.

Mohamed Nur, who lives in Kansas City now, remembers the country before the war. "I remember when Somalia was a paradise," he says. "Now it is a Mad Max movie. Over there, there is no way out."

Nur's paradise imploded, drawing soldiers from the United States to help with a United Nations security detail and to escort food shipments into the starving country. Tribal leaders didn't appreciate the effort and waged guerrilla war on the uniformed Marines who fought back. In October 1993, eighteen U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Somalis were killed in a Mogadishu street battle, the story of which became the basis for the book and movie Black Hawk Down. In the movie, hordes of armed and angry Somalis converge on two downed helicopters. But most of the country's people ran from the conflict rather than toward it.

They fled to Kenya and Ethiopia, where they waited in camps and appealed to refugee organizations for help. Hoping to qualify for relocation, they suffered a battery of bureaucratic tests. United Nations officials searched their backgrounds for serious crimes, doctors poked at them, and interviewers sought proof that they would be jailed or killed if they returned to Somalia.