The first courts were established in 1993 as an emergency response to disorder in north Mogadishu.
I pictured Baghdad as Black Hawk Down's Mogadishu, all claustrophobic and high-contrast gun battles with desperate men in dark alleys, and mostly I heard Ride of the Valkyries, that grim killing opus in Apocalypse Now, retrofitted for our urban assaults and nighttime raids.
Somalia suffered its first outbreak of polio in six years in May 2013, starting with a two-year-old girl in Mogadishu and sparking a nationwide vaccination campaign by the Somali authorities supported by the World Health Organisation and Unicef, the UN children's agency.
My bus broke down before it got to Harar and I finished the journey sharing a car with a group of Somalians who wanted me to accompany them to Mogadishu.
"If Amisom left today," said a Somali journalist who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, "al-Shabaab would take power in the capital Mogadishu tomorrow".
Black Hawk Down, Exodus director Ridley Scott's 2001 dramatisation of the battle of Mogadishu, was taken to task by the president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf for its perceived slights against his nation's troops.
"Here in Lima you can find restaurants to rival Manhattan, but you can also find places that are more like Mogadishu," he said.
Amisom has made headway in recent years – taking Mogadishu from al-Shabaab in 2011 and Kismayo in 2012.
"They are here; they are in Mogadishu.
He has also asked China for loans some say for $3.5 billion.But most of all he is banking on keeping up his friendship with the EU and the United States, whose administration was delighted by the Ethiopian armed forces' recent success in invading neighbouring Somalia, capturing its capital, Mogadishu, and smashing the Somali Islamists who had taken over there.
In the concluding novel, "Crossbones", which has just been published in America, a Somali-American professor named Jeebleh goes back to the capital, Mogadishu.
