It was in 1982, while languishing in a prison cell, that Mohamed Aden Sheikh, a cardiologist and Somalia’s then-health minister, realized that something had gone terribly wrong with his country. It had just been defeated in a war with Ethiopia, hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees had arrived from territories Somalia had tried to annex, the economy had flatlined and inflation rates were on their way to the moon. But it was his own imprisonment, along with that of several other senior Cabinet members in a major purge, that really drove the message home.
In his 1994 memoir, “Arrivederci a Mogadiscio” (“Goodbye Mogadishu”), written in the language of his exile, Sheikh recalls asking himself “questions that I had been avoiding for years. … How could that regime that I dedicated 12 years of my life to have degenerated so badly?”
That very question has continued to haunt Somali intellectuals, writers and activists to this day, many of whom trace the roots of Somalia’s present turmoil to the collapse in the 1990s of the socialist military regime that Sheikh had served. The military came to power in a coup in 1969, sweeping away a feckless and corrupt civilian administration with promises of development and modernization. But despite what was widely perceived as a promising start by the country’s new rulers, Somalia’s story was not a Singapore-like rise. Instead, the country became a dictatorship, and then descended into one of Africa’s longest and most ruinous civil wars after armed opposition groups brought down the regime. More than 30 years on, the country is still fragmented and at war, and the state is fragile. Somalia is now a cautionary tale of how badly managed transitions of power can lead to chaos rather than democracy when dictatorships collapse without a viable alternative or consensus among elites.
The situation at the end of the 1990s stood in stark contrast to the enthusiasm with which Siad Barre’s military takeover had been welcomed by the public in 1969. The Indian theorist Ashis Nandy has described this sudden feeling of postcolonial agency as “the romance of the state” — the belief that a state of its own, under the control of competent locals, would be enough to redeem the country from the problems of colonial rule.
But within a decade, the military government was in the process of transforming from a revolutionary mixed civilian-military regime into a full-blown military dictatorship that was to turn murderously against its own people. After his arrest in 1982, Sheikh would spend the next six years in Somalia’s gulag, Labatan Jirow, between Mogadishu and the Ethiopian border, with other senior officials whose formerly glittering careers also ended in jail. “I really was in trouble,” Sheikh writes, as he sat and “waited for the light of day to illuminate the future,” a future which at that point was all but lost.
The civil war in Somalia has gained sustained media and scholarly attention in the years since it started, but as James Barnett has written, it “periodically assumes different forms.” If we want to understand the state of Somalia today, it is necessary to go further back in the country’s history and look at the features of the newly independent state that underpinned the later violence. The political system the country inherited simply wasn’t elastic enough to bind the country’s complex, clan-based social structures together, and regional and international dynamics did not help the nascent state. An increasingly autocratic leader, a disastrous war with neighboring Ethiopia and Soviet and American turf wars all played a role in bringing the country to its knees.
In the years immediately following its independence in 1960, Somalia experienced a brief flowering as a flawed but relatively open multiparty democracy. Two presidential elections were held in that first decade, and the country’s founding president, Aden Abdulle Osman, stepped aside after his defeat in the second of those, in 1967. (The next African leader to follow his precedent and relinquish power peacefully was Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, in 1991.) Abdi Ismail Samatar, now a senator in Somalia’s Parliament and an academic, writes in his 2016 book “Africa’s First Democrats” that Somalia was an “African democratic pacesetter.”
Osman was candid in his diary about the fact that his government didn’t have a series of achievements — economic or otherwise — that it could boast about, but defended the democratic character of the government, saying: “at least the people do not have a master.” Samatar writes elegiacally about Osman’s period at the helm of the Somali state, blaming the incoming politicians in 1967 for the corruption and maladministration that provided the military with an excuse to overthrow the civilian government.
Mohamed Isa Trunji, a historian and author of “Somalia: The Untold History,” told me that while Somalia wasn’t repressive during Osman’s reign, it was less a democracy than a “clanocracy” — a term which reflected the reality that it was Somalia’s numerous patrilineal clans, rather than classes or ideas, that really ruled the roost. “Everyone exploited the situation, and every clan wanted a deputy in Parliament. There were over 60 parties representing a population of a few million,” Trunji said, with frustration in his voice. In his preface to Sheikh’s memoir, British journalist Basil Davidson outlines that without a sufficiently developed private sector, “what was at stake” with access to public office “were the fruits, or rather the spoils, of political power” for each clan.
These issues had been growing throughout the 1960s, with widespread political dysfunction, corruption and the subversion of democratic politics for personal gain. But the assassination of President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke by a police officer in the northern town of Las Anod on Oct. 15, 1969, marked a watershed moment. The prime minister, Mohammed Haji Egal, was in Las Vegas, the central bank had been plundered by its politicians, a curfew was imposed in the capital and the country seemed to teeter on the brink.
An American diplomat reflecting on Somali politics in 1969 said: “In the arena of African politics, Somalia has fared well. No coups, no civil wars, no internecine splits have marred its nine-year history.” He obviously spoke too soon. On the morning of Oct. 21, 1969, Radio Mogadishu — one of the country’s two media outlets — was broadcasting military music, occasionally interrupted by a voice declaring that the army had stepped in to “save the nation.” It was the first sign that the army had seized power, before later suspending Parliament and the constitution. The station later broadcast a song by the popular singers Mohamed Saleebaan Tubee and Hiba Nura in support of the coup, in which they recited fiery lyrics like “either doomsday death or victory of life.”
After a period of silence, Barre, a former Italian colonial officer and the most senior figure in the army at the time, made his first address to the public explaining what had happened. “Somalia was on the point of collapse,” Barre said, adding that the army felt it could no longer watch as “evil things like corruption, bribery, nepotism, theft of public funds, injustice and disrespect to our religion and the laws of the country” took place in plain sight. The speech was published later by the Ministry of Information in a book entitled “My Country and My People,” and the new leader styled the military takeover a “revolution.”
In this first address to the public, Barre also constructed an enemy, giving Somalis a sense of agency and a mission along with the rough sketch of how his plan would unfold. “The purpose of the revolution is to guide us back to our true Somali characteristics; to clearly understand what we are, and what we stand for,” Barre said. “We will close all roads used by colonialists to enter our country and into our affairs. We will build a great Somali nation, strongly united and welded together to live in peace.”
At first, everything appeared to be going swimmingly. Barre managed to establish himself as the country’s undisputed leader at the head of a 25-man Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC) and then appointed a Cabinet of technocrats who were “untainted” through association with the former government, so they could put together a development agenda.
The project would be called the Somali Revolutionary Process, and its objective was to transform and modernize Somalia, socially and economically. Like many African juntas, socialism was to be the ideology they followed, though they settled on a version fine-tuned to Somalia’s circumstances, intentionally distinct from the varieties espoused on the continent by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, Houari Boumedienne’s Algeria and Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania. They called themselves scientific socialists. The first step required them to become familiar with the new doctrine to which they had bound the fate of their nation. Sheikh, the health minister-cum-prisoner, recalls that they were “self-taught socialists” who were full of enthusiasm, “starting with the president himself.” Barre even suggested that senior officials spend time reading and debating the classical texts of socialist and Marxist literature. According to Fidel Castro, this autodidactic socialism took on a performative tone; he sarcastically remarked of Barre that “He is the greatest socialist; he cannot say 10 words without mentioning socialism.”
Socialism wasn’t the only doctrine that Barre drew inspiration from. In “The Rise and Fall of the Siad Barre Regime,” the Somali historian Mohamed Haji Ingiriis writes that Mogadishu hoped to use “Islam, communism, Arab brotherhood and third world solidarity, all simultaneously.” This was to prove inconsistent and unconvincing, even to Barre’s allies. He joined the Arab League in 1974, yet also had close ties with the Warsaw Pact and Cuba. Somali nationalism always played a big part in his political creed, which made Barre’s socialist allies suspect his priorities, given socialism’s rejection of ethnonationalism. Castro, who reflected deeply on Barre’s character following their fallout in 1977 over Somalia’s invasion of its socialist neighbour, Ethiopia, said: “His principal ideas are nationalism and chauvinism, not socialism.”
In any case, images of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin soon appeared alongside Barre’s long, angular face and toothbrush mustache on government posters and buildings. New monuments rose across the capital, commemorating figures who had resisted colonial rule — like Hawo Tako, a Somali activist who met her death at the hands of Italian colonial authorities, and Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan (remembered in the U.K. as the “Mad Mullah”), an anti-imperial Somali religious leader, and later nationalist icon, who founded a ministate in the early 20th century. One Western diplomat remarked that Somalia had become a country of “three Ms”: the Prophet Muhammad, Marx and the Mad Mullah. “I leave it to you to decide which ‘M’ is the most powerful,” he told The New York Times.
The concentration of power in the hands of a small group allowed it to land a few successes in its early years, as socialist governments often do. Infrastructure improved with new roads and ports, barriers to female participation in society were lifted and a host of sports were introduced. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the African-American NBA legend, even visited Mogadishu in 1972 to coach an orphanage basketball team.
The army was made larger and better equipped, the country’s bureaucracy became more efficient, health care and education were extended further across Somalia and a new Latin script was introduced for the Somali language. A government-led, student-mobilized campaign took the new alphabet to the farthest corners of the country to tackle illiteracy. The script is still in use today in Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti. Barre also sought to break the social influence of clans, the old bete noire in forming a national identity for Somalis, as the government saw it. If “all Somalis are to go to hell, tribalism will be their vehicle to reach there,” Barre once remarked. The government banned questions about clan affiliations, replaced familial terms for addressing others with “jalle” (comrade) and burned effigies representing clannism across the country. The internal enemies were disease, underdevelopment and a culture that was holding the country back, and the Somali public was mobilized to fight them.
But Somalia’s sweeping domestic changes were unfolding against an unstable regional and international backdrop. Its long-standing territorial dispute with Ethiopia was taking on an added Cold War dynamic. The U.S. had a signals intelligence base for the Middle East in Ethiopia — Kagnew Station — and as a result, Henry Kissinger believed Ethiopia was America’s “closest friend” on the continent. Kissinger also said Ethiopia was “a bulwark against a Communist-Moslem thrust into the Horn of Africa.” This was reflected in U.S. aid to Ethiopia, which from 1955 to 1969 accounted for 70% of the total given to Africa. For Somalia, this was more than just an annoyance; having fought a war in 1964 with Ethiopia (in which the U.S. backed the latter), its comparatively large neighbor posed a potentially existential threat to the young republic.
When Somali leaders made a formal request for U.S. military support in 1964 (allowing them to claim they tried before turning to Moscow), they were given “six jeeps mounted with six anti-tank guns.” A U.S. diplomat serving in Mogadishu at the time conceded that the offer was “pretty punk,” and said Prime Minister Abdirashid Shermarke took one look at the package and told him, “We’re off to Moscow.” Nikita Khrushchev opened his arsenals for them, Sheikh recalls in his memoir; training, money and arms began to flow. Shermarke was still pro-West, however, despite Moscow’s growing influence in the military, leading Ingiriis to remark that Sherkmarke “flirted with the U.S.” during the day “and slept with the Soviets at night.”
The jury is still out on whether Moscow instigated the 1969 coup, but in 1974, Somalia signed a friendship treaty with the USSR, cementing its position as the Soviet Union’s main partner in Africa. Somalia also became increasingly hostile to the U.S., causing Kissinger, then-U.S. secretary of state, to later protest to a Somali official that on almost “every issue” Somalia opposed his government. “We can’t be wrong all the time,” Kissinger said, “the law of averages does not work that way.”
Somalia’s dispute with Ethiopia was primarily a territorial conflict, in which both parties sought military support from Moscow and Washington, respectively. But in 1974, a Marxist junta overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie, then 82, strangling him to death in his bed the very same year that Somalia signed the treaty with Moscow. The Kremlin had a chance to peel away the “closest friend” of the U.S. in Africa and create a vast “Pax Sovietica” across the Red Sea, from Ethiopia to communist South Yemen.
Barre had different priorities from the Soviet Union; his own problems with his neighbor trumped Moscow’s foreign policy goals and the broader aim of spreading socialism. Despite his proposal to both Selassie and Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia’s post-coup leader, for a Somali-Ethiopian federation, the border issue remained intractable.
Since independence, the political fortunes of all Somalia’s leaders had rested on how they intended to handle the Ogaden question, regarding a Somali-majority region in eastern Ethiopia today. The central aim for Somali leaders at the time was to capture all neighboring Somali-majority territories in Kenya, Djibouti and Ethiopia and absorb them into the newly independent state. Somalis, Sheikh writes, saw themselves as the “most unfortunate victims” of imperialism in Africa, having to contend with three European empires plus a neighboring African one. This gave rise to an irredentist ideology among Somalia’s public (many of whom had relatives across the borders) and its elites. Mogadishu refused to accept the article in the Organization of African Unity that sanctified the colonial borders, leading one Kenyan official to call Somalia “the black sheep of Africa.”
Sheikh referred to the Ogaden under Ethiopian rule as “Somalia’s Palestine,” a nod to the fact that it was in 1948 that the territory was gifted by the British to Ethiopia, the year of Israel’s establishment and the Nakba (a closer, if still imperfect analogy might be Kashmir’s relationship to Pakistan). Ethiopia’s conduct in the region was often brutal, which the Somalis in the republic were well aware of. It wasn’t just Barre’s own caprice that led him to pursue the Ogaden issue like a holy grail; these issues of borders and identity were so influential on Somali foreign policy because they rested on a deep-rooted national narrative.
In July 1977, after a year of escalating tensions, Somalia suddenly sent its forces into the Ogaden to support the Somali insurgent group in Ethiopia, the Western Somali Liberation Front, in their seizure of dozens of towns. It looked like it was going well at the start, but Sheikh, who was also Barre’s unofficial envoy to Ethiopia, recalls that the war was the “beginning of the end, even if the end wouldn’t come for another ten years.” Barre had not informed his Soviet allies, and Sheikh even contends that the civilian members of the government were not made aware of the plans to declare war.
Somalia’s relationship with the Kremlin was already on the ropes because of Mogadishu’s tensions with Addis Ababa, but when Somali troops stormed the Ogaden, the Soviet Union decided to reject a Somali request to halt its support for Ethiopia. Moscow was bizarrely backing both countries at the time in a bout of “Marxist-on-Marxist” violence, as a U.S. soldier put it. Castro and Leonid Brezhnev were engaged in intense diplomacy to halt the fighting, but to no avail. The Kremlin refused to bow to what one of its officials called “expansionist moods” in the Somali capital, prompting Somalia to expel all Soviet officials from the country and repeal its three-year-old treaty.
It was a loss for Moscow, which had cultivated strong ties with the country, but was viewed completely differently in Somalia. “It was celebrated like a second independence day in Mogadishu,” writes Mohamed Osman Omar, a Somali ambassador, in his 1992 memoir, “The Road to Zero.” Shortly after, the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party’s official magazine, Halgan, accused the Soviet Union of attempting to turn Ethiopia into a “client state.”
But it would prove to be a disaster for Somalia. Cuban and Soviet troops, riding high from a popular victory over South Africa in Angola, were free to help rebuild Ethiopia’s collapsing army, while Somalia was left without a superpower patron. Jimmy Carter was reluctant to provide support, despite U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance urging him to consider that Barre viewed the matter as one of Cold War geopolitics, rather than an ideological issue. One Tory lawmaker in the U.K., who saw the issue in much the same light as Vance, put it to the Labour foreign secretary, David Owen, that “surely the Somalis are just as good a customer for British arms as the Salvador Republic?”
Meanwhile, the fighting continued unabated. Sheikh recalls that the civilians in the Barre regime believed that capturing Jigjiga, a large Somali-inhabited city, would suffice, and that without diplomatic cover, the Somali army shouldn’t go further. Barre, however, was “delirious with omnipotence,” writes Sheikh; he “felt like an African Napoleon,” and there was no reasoning with him. Barre was also still hopeful that American help would arrive eventually, but it was not to be, given that Carter viewed Barre as the aggressor. Somalia was left in the lurch, completely isolated, and the Somali army was swiftly routed by the combined forces of the Cubans, Ethiopians and Soviets. The feeling of betrayal left Barre embittered, and he would go on to become one of the most vigorous anti-Soviet leaders in Africa.
Sheikh’s memoir gives the sense from close up that the military defeat, along with the diplomatic failings that helped bring it about, cannot be disentangled from Barre’s own failings as a military figure masquerading as a normal politician. At the time of the coup, Sheikh says his fellow Cabinet members respected Barre, viewing him as a tireless “staunch nationalist, full of good intention.” “He could receive visitors all night and then go to a meeting in the morning where he could talk for five to six hours without seeming tired or confused,” he writes. This tirelessness (or insomnia, as some believed) was coupled with Barre’s flair for a well-turned phrase in Somali and his charisma, qualities that made him one of Mogadishu’s most powerful personalities.
He also styled himself as an anti-imperialist leader, hyping up Somalia’s important role in the fight against European colonialism in Africa, supporting independence movements from Zimbabwe to Mozambique, which raised the self-esteem and sense of purpose of the Somali people. This was recognized across Africa, too. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s second post-apartheid president, who visited Mogadishu in 1974 for the Organization of African Unity summit, would later remark that the city was a place of “hope for us, a reliable rear base for the total liberation of Africa.”
But there was another side to the man. Sheikh says Barre had a split personality: He was at once a “revolutionary apprentice” working to transform Somalia and a quietly scheming autocrat. Over time, the autocrat in him slowly won out. Barre was a tall man with piercing and heavy-lidded eyes and sunken cheeks; he spoke slowly, with a commanding and stern tone. Yossi Alpher, a former Israeli intelligence officer who met a friendless Barre in the 1980s, likened him to an imposing “mafia chieftain in a Hollywood movie,” on account of his Italian-accented English and coarse voice. Many still wonder whether there was a secret to the sphinx. Patrick Gilkes, an expert on the Horn of Africa, wrote in his obituary of Barre that he was, overall, an average man, owing to his lack of formal schooling and the fact that he never showed great promise during his rise first as a police officer, then as a soldier, but said that he was “adept at political manipulation.”
Barre began to cultivate a cult of personality, using propaganda to style himself as the embodiment of the values he claimed the government upheld. To oppose him was to oppose the revolution — and therefore the state itself. In his 1994 book “Blood and Bone,” Ioan Lewis writes that the state ideology was more scientific Siadism than scientific socialism. A popular song from the era anointed Barre “the father of Marxism” and “the twin brother of Marx.” He gathered even more titles, including Father of the Nation and Light of Africa. Omar, who was a Somali diplomat in Tehran in the mid-1970s, recalls new directives that required officials at the embassy to receive a weekly lecture from the ambassador on the virtues of the “Blessed Revolution,” and sing “Guul Wade Siad” (“Victorious Leader Siad”), at the end of the meeting. “I would have liked to know how serious the ambassador was about this veneration, but I could not ask,” he writes. Asking, he feared, might get you labelled “kacaan diid” (counterrevolutionary), and if you were kacaan diid it usually didn’t end well.
This authoritarian trend gathered momentum after the Ogaden War, when both peaceful and armed opposition emerged. “Everyone realised that Siad Barre was totally unable to manage either the war or what came after it,” Sheikh writes.
The first attempt to overthrow the regime came a year after the failed war of 1978. By 1979, Somalia was hosting 357,388 refugees from the Ogaden in 21 camps across the country, more than 90% of whom were women and children. An unsuccessful (and awkward) meeting with Ronald Reagan in 1982 failed to secure the type of financial and military backing that Barre was getting from the Kremlin, even though Barre oiled the deal by offering the U.S. a base in Berbera. Somalia’s external debt ballooned from just over $500 million at the end of 1980 to more than $1.5 billion by 1985. From 1980 to 1987, Somalia sought five International Monetary Fund loans and was forced into several painful devaluations of the Somali shilling. But somehow, senior government officials, whose salaries were on paper no longer enough to get through a week, “were building house after house or buying farms,” as one former diplomat noted. After a decade-long experiment with socialism, Somalia became a place where everyone “was trying to make money by all possible means,” writes Omar.
The fragility of the Somali economy weakened the regime’s dwindling legitimacy. It also exposed cracks in the narrative that the Somali nation was one and unified. Through the late 1980s, Barre increasingly drew his inner circle from members of his own and allied Somali clans, while excluding and sometimes violently repressing those opposed to his rule.
Plenty of flammable tinder had been laid, but it was the emergence of Ethiopian-backed, clan-based armed groups fighting Barre’s forces that dealt the lethal blow. Mengistu, Ethiopia’s then-leader, would have seen his support for Somali armed groups as retaliation for Mogadishu’s backing of Somali, Oromo, and Eritrean rebels in his own country. Two of those rebel groups were led by Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s late prime minister, and Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s founding president, who has ruled his country to this day. Both were believed to have such close contacts with the Somali government that they traveled for a period on Somali passports.
In 1986, Barre had a car accident that left him a shadow of his former self, frequently popping pills just to keep going. Without his more calculated authoritarianism, the government became even more corrupt, repressive and unpredictable. In response to the armed uprising, an Amnesty International report in 1988 found that government forces had engaged in “widespread arbitrary arrests, ill treatment and summary executions.” The repression eventually escalated to indiscriminate aerial bombardment and shelling of urban areas, particularly the northern Somali cities of Hargeisa (dubbed Africa’s Dresden due to the scale of the damage) and Burao. Human Rights Watch reported that more than 400,000 people had been externally displaced by the fighting between the rebels and the army across the country, and 600,000 internally. Tens of thousands of people were killed. Hargeisa would later become the capital of the separatist region of Somaliland, and would turn a fighter jet the rebels had shot down into a public monument.
It is clear from his memoirs that Sheikh’s conscience tugged at him at various points during his time in office, a quiet but insistent discomfort whenever he felt the generals had gone too far. Though the military had initially promised to eventually hand the reins of the state back to civilians, in 1973 he began to notice unsettling trends, small shifts that seemed insignificant at first but, in time, accumulated and became increasingly difficult to ignore. Many of the politicians arrested during the coup in 1969 were still detained, for example, though they no longer posed a meaningful threat to the new regime. Throughout the early 1970s, there was no constitution, no party, no parliament.
Sheikh eventually joined the finance minister, Mohamed Yusuf Weirah, in demanding legislative elections and the other trappings of a normal government — parties, a constitution — but they were sent to jail. “You go to sleep a minister and wake up a political prisoner,” recalls Sheikh. That was 1975 and his first spell behind bars.
After 100 days, Barre visited both Sheikh and Weirah personally, and said he agreed that political changes were needed but that their arrests were for their own good. They were then offered places in the freshly minted Somali Revolutionary Socialist party in 1976, and Sheikh writes that “taking part in this experiment seemed more important than our personal destinies.” He confesses that, during his early years, paying attention to violations of human rights wasn’t his “primary concern.” He felt that the politicians arrested after the coup in 1969 had it coming, on some level, and the violations he knew of were on a small enough scale to justify focusing on the greater good.
But this is where one of his most poignant reflections stands out, as he echoes the ideas of Hannah Arendt about the banality of evil. He notes that most officials involved in the enterprise of repressing Somalia’s population weren’t “young men wet behind the ears,” nor were they nationalist activists driven by lofty ideals. They were professionals, neither “perverted nor sadistic” but “terrifyingly normal.” Following the second purge in 1982, which landed Sheikh and his colleagues in prison, his own role in the construction of that apparatus became clear to him.
When he was released from prison in 1988, he requested his passport for treatment abroad and left for Italy, where he ended up inadvertently in exile. He wanted to return to Mogadishu, even as an interclan war engulfed the country, but the wait for the right moment “lasted for over twenty years and has become a new life for me,” he recalls in his memoir, with equal parts despair and melancholy. He went on to become a doctor in Turin, a socialist councilor and one of Italy’s leading Africanists. In a 1988 interview with the Italian left-leaning daily La Repubblica, Barre blasted senior officials like Sheikh who became dissidents in exile as “jackals.” “I pulled them up from the earth and now they attack me,” he said.
In a way, Sheikh’s story can be read as an allegory of postindependence Somalia’s history. He takes pride in his origin story as a camel herder who, through a combination of fortune, an upstart spirit and hard work, became a doctor and eventually a surgeon who completed his training in Italy. Like the government he would participate in leading, he embraced left-wing ideas to better himself and his community. But like him, the country was imprisoned by a dictator, and it ultimately fell apart like the life he built in Mogadishu. But nations can’t just go into exile when their fortunes turn awry. Attempts to emerge from violence and repair the Somali state have had very limited success 35 years on.
Sheikh’s bitterest line comes as he describes watching the carnage from Turin: “When a Somali writes about what has been happening in his country since 1991, he can only do so with a heart full of sadness, anger, and even a bit of shame.” He eventually passed away in 2010, having watched his life’s work go up in smoke and bullets.
Sign up to our mailing list to receive our stories in your inbox.