It is a rainy Sunday afternoon in Peckham, south-east London, and if recent sensational reports are to be believed, I am shortly going to risk my life. Behind a blue door on an otherwise unremarkable residential street is a mafrish – the name given to the houses-cum-social clubs devoted to the chewing of khat. I am about to go inside.
Khat is a green-leaved plant grown predominantly in the Horn of Africa, and consumed in the diaspora by emigrants from the region – Ethiopians, Kenyans, Yemenis and most notably Somalis – who report a mild, amphetamine-like high. Khat is legal in the UK, as are mafrishes, but spirited campaigns to outlaw it on health and social grounds have been galvanised in the past year by claims that terror cells are operating wherever khat is chewed, and that al-Shabaab is focusing its recruitment efforts on disenfranchised Somali youth with khat-addled minds. CNN said that reporters have been attacked while trying to enter mafrishes; the Huffington Post said that it had been advised not even to attempt access. A reporter with Vice magazine said he tried khat, washed it down with beer, and "got all hyper and threw a chair".
My sources were less certain of the dangers. "The most radical thing I've ever seen at a mafrish is a group of old men watching porn on the telly," said one anthropologist. And apprehension dissipates rapidly in Peckham, despite a finger jabbed into my chest on the street outside, accompanied by the question: "What are you?" Hastily abandoning a flimsy cover story, I admit that I am a reporter with this magazine. My interlocutor appears baffled. "But what football team are you?" he says.
