Somalia rushes to save historic Radio Mogadishu | Media News

Mogadishu, Somalia – Thousands of tapes sit in an air-conditioned storage room at Somalia’s radio station, Radio Mogadishu, stacked on metal shelves and lined up like ancient scrolls beneath the dust.

Each piece contains a piece of Somali history of the 20th century, from stories to speeches, songs and voices that were heard during the national violence, some from the early 1950s.

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Abdiqadir Geedi Robleh, an archivist at Radio Mogadishu, attaches a tape recorder to an old machine, connects it to a computer, and records the contents of each tape. A tape with a love song by famous singer Mohamed Mooge Liban fills the room, and Robleh is transported, he says, to his youth.

They are working with a small team to digitize and quickly order about 400,000 hours of broadcasts, officials here say, before the magnetic tape was destroyed, and capture the nation’s history.

“This is the biggest store in the world for Somali language music, culture, theater and everything else, and at the moment it is locked in a kind of prison,” Robleh told Al Jazeera. “We are working to preserve it and to open it up to the public in the future.”

Radio Mogadishu, founded in 1951 during the Italian colonial rule, has grown to become the largest and most important broadcaster in Somalia. It first aired in Italian and Somali before launching into foreign languages, including everything from Swahili and Oromo to English and Arabic.

During its heyday, it was one of the most popular and well-known voices in East African radio, reaching people as far away as Tanzania, Ethiopia, and the Middle East and broadcasting across Africa. Radio Cairo in the years of Nasser.

Apart from a brief hiatus in the 1990s, when it fell under military rule, it has not only served as a major source of news for Somalis and audiences across the region, but also as an important center of the nation’s collective memory.

Archival efforts have increased significantly this year.

At the beginning of June, the Ministry of Information in Somalia and the UNESCO office in Eastern Africa – the United Nations’ heritage organization – brought archivists from all over the world to a meeting in Mogadishu, the purpose of which was to register the contents of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program, which documents the most important historical documents.

“Protecting this knowledge is not only important for Somalia, but it is important for everyone,” said Guilherme Canela, the senior UNESCO official in charge of the project.

An expert review conducted in April counted approximately 45,000 tapes and reels, representing approximately 400,000 hours of material recorded since the station’s inception. More than 85 percent remain playable, but about one in 10 have been damaged by old age, and more than 5 percent are damaged or severely damaged, according to UNESCO.

Radio Mogadishu’s collection was noted for its size and the fact that many of its contents do not exist anywhere else.

Some were destroyed in an electrical fire in 2018, Robleh says, while others were lost in the war in 1992, when US troops clashed with Somali troops on the streets of Mogadishu.

In the midst of the worst of the civil war, the chief of police, Abshir Hashi Ali, risked his life to prevent the looting of the archives. When the war broke out in Mogadishu after the fall of the government in 1990, he he said he rushed back “with the intention of giving to the Somalis the treasure that has been stored here”.

Abdi Jeite, the director of the station, says that the digital operation started in 2012, but it has been kept for many years due to the lack of resources. According to his estimates, only about 10 percent of the ancients have been changed so far.

“We have new equipment, and more training for archivists, but we still need help,” he says.

To understand why the archives are so important, it helps to understand what radio meant in Somali life.

“Radio Mogadishu was without a doubt the media house in post-independence Somalia,” Iman Mohamed, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and a Somali historian, told Al Jazeera.

“In a society that values ​​spoken word over written content, radio has been very successful in creating a space where ordinary people can feel a sense of belonging and belonging to a country,” adds Mohamed.

Although Somalis could still find BBC Somali, Radio Hargeisa, and opposition radio stations as the government began to disintegrate in the late 20th century, it was Radio Mogadishu that dominated “Somalia’s history,” Mohamed said.

That dominance made Radio Mogadishu a global talent factory. “If you were a singer, poet, playwright or producer, Radio Mogadishu was the platform where you wanted to be seen,” said Robleh, a veteran writer. “It made Somali stars.”

Robleh, the archivist, added that many of the BBC’s top Somali journalists had cut their teeth at Radio Mogadishu, which became the most important medium for the BBC’s Somali language expertise.

Mr Hassan Dahir, who was a former journalist at the station, was one of many Somali children who dreamed of working there. For years, he recalled, Radio Mogadishu was the only source of news for millions, “the eyes and ears of the community”, he told Al Jazeera.

“His reach was so great that even traveling pastors followed events as far away as the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights Movement,” Dahir said.

Under Siad Barre, the military man who seized power in 1969 and ran Somalia for twenty years under a self-proclaimed socialist, revolutionary government, the station became an instrument of government ideology, mixing news, drama and religious programs with nationalist and anti-colonial elements.

The station focused on pan-African music Oh Africa, you are still sleeping written by Halimo Khalif Magool, which inspired the people of this continent to wake up and take charge of their future. Mahamud Abdullah Sangub Reject this form of Imperialism was another popular song of the time in the same tradition of political music, with lyrics like: “Africans listen to each other, reject imperialism, reject, reject, reject!”

Many of these songs have since been published, edited or adapted, and young Somalis often encounter them without knowing who made the originals, or the politics behind them, Mohamed said.

His stories included anti-colonial wars in places like Mozambique against Portugal, the struggle against apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa and the Civil Rights Movement in the US. It covered everything from the colonial war in Guinea-Bissau to the arrest of African American politician and author Angela Davis.

“We were telling the stories of people who were against their oppressors”, said Dahir.

The radio station was “the mouthpiece of the government”, warns Mohamed, but it played an important role in promoting “patriotism and changing the mindset of the Somali people”.

One of the most important projects that radio supported was the mass education campaign in Somalia, when the government sent students to rural Somalia in 1972 to teach them the new Somali script. This campaign led to a significant increase in literacy across the country.

It also became heavily involved in Somalia’s foreign policy, as the government spent the rest of the 20th century fighting Ethiopia before it invaded in 1977.

The competition led to Radio Mogadishu giving airtime to Ethiopians, as well as terrorists, mainly from Eritrea. Some of his most famous activities were broadcasting in Oromo and Sidama.

Dahir, a former reporter for Radio Mogadishu that broadcasts Ethiopian news, told Al Jazeera that these were the first radio programs in both languages, both of which were suppressed for years in Ethiopia under policies that made Amharic, the language of the elite.

The train itself has played a very small role in Somali life since then.

The fall of the central government in 1991 undermined the government’s control over radio, opening up radio stations, television stations and online shopping sites, which have become popular with Somalis.

It has lost much of its foreign language programs, and with it, a large part of its reform. Somalia continues to struggle with limited resources as it rebuilds after years of conflict.

In November 2021, the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Shabab, which has been fighting against the Somali government for a long time, killed the station’s director, Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled, in a bomb attack in Mogadishu.

Iman Mohamed, a historian, says that with the country’s civil war, which is in its third decade, the preservation of archives has become very urgent.

“The destruction of the archives during the civil war has left a huge gap in Somalia’s records, which means that anyone researching the history of the country relies heavily on foreign archeology or history,” said Mohamed.

“That is especially difficult for young people,” he adds. “To restore what we can be important to young people who would not know the whole world that Radio Mogadishu broadcasts at the time of its popularity.”