It is milking time on Mustafa Duale’s farm and the camels are lowing: an eerie groan, like the creak of an old door. A dozen herders strain the milk through a sieve into metal pails. They will sleep here tonight, in the open, beside a pen of thorns. The pails will be loaded into the back of an estate car and reach Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, with the setting sun.

Mr Duale watches over his reading glasses, looking every inch the engineer that he is. The city is his home, and boreholes his trade. But in Somaliland, an unrecognised state on the Gulf of Aden, camels are a form of wealth. “My father and grandfather were herders,” says Mr Duale. “It’s like it’s in my genes.” He is one of a group of entrepreneurs who are turning a longstanding trade in camel milk into a commercial business.

Hargeisa was not always a good place to be a milkman. The Somali air force flattened it in 1988 during a civil war. So total was the devastation that Somalilanders—who had been governed for 31 years as part of Somalia—decided to declare their independence in 1991. One former rebel remembers marching through the streets of the capital that year and finding a single functioning tea shop.

But today Hargeisa is home to 1.2m people and more tea shops than a camel herder could shake his stick at. Half a litre of Mr Duale’s milk goes for $1.30. Cafes sell vanilla and strawberry flavoured camel milkshakes for almost $2. The rejuvenated city is both a ready market and a source of capital, as townsfolk invest their savings in the hinterland. Mr Duale has built a reservoir to irrigate fields where he grows fodder for his 400 camels. Smaller camel herders without any pasture of their own also give him their animals to look after in exchange for a fee.

Other camel farmers have made circuitous journeys, travelling even farther than their nomadic forefathers. Mohamed Isaaq escaped to Canada during the civil war but after three decades there his IT job was giving him the hump. He returned to Hargeisa and started a camel farm. “I thought I could kill two birds with one stone: have a business and drink camel milk,” he says, swearing by the restorative power of his creamy produce.

The industry is not yet ready to export, which would need equipment to pasteurise the milk and keep it cool. But the demand is there. Mr Duale is discussing opportunities with Camel Culture, an American firm that sells camel milk to African and Arab migrants eager for a taste of home. Other markets are growing, too. A Chinese firm hopes to open a factory to make camel-milk powder over the border, in the ethnic-Somali region of Ethiopia. Camelicious, a firm based in Dubai, uses camel milk to make ice cream with flavours such as dates, saffron and cardamom.

Somaliland still struggles to attract investment, despite the go-getting spirit of its people. “Investors will not risk their money because most of them—especially big companies from the West—will say it’s an unrecognised state,” laments Abdirizak Ibrahim Mohamed, the investment minister. But hope is hidden in the very word “Somali” itself. Some folk etymologists speculate it comes from the phrase soo maal: literally, “Go milk!”