Radio Mogadishu served as Somalia’s primary public broadcaster for a significant portion of the 20th century.
In Mogadishu, Somalia, thousands of reel-to-reel tapes are housed in an air-conditioned room within the archives of the nation’s public radio station, Radio Mogadishu. They are stored on steel shelves, covered in a thick layer of dust, resembling ancient manuscripts.
Each reel holds a piece of Somalia’s 20th-century history, encompassing news reports, speeches, music, and voices that once resonated across the country’s airwaves, with some recordings dating back to the early 1950s.
Archivist Abdiqadir Geedi Robleh carefully threads a reel onto an old tape machine, connects it to a computer, and begins to record its contents. As a love song by the renowned singer Mohamed Mooge Liban plays from a tape, Robleh says he is transported back to his youth.
He is part of a small team tasked with digitizing and systematically organizing approximately 400,000 hours of broadcasts. Officials indicate this effort is crucial to prevent the magnetic tape from deteriorating beyond repair, which would result in the loss of a vital record of the country’s past.
“This is the world’s largest store of Somali language music, culture, dramas and everything else, and at the moment it is locked away from the public in a kind of prison,” Robleh told Al Jazeera. “We’re working to preserve it but also open it up in future to the public.”
Established in 1951 during the Italian colonial period, Radio Mogadishu evolved into Somalia’s most prominent and important public broadcaster. Initially, it broadcast in Italian and Somali, later expanding to include foreign languages such as Swahili, Oromo, English, and Arabic.
During its peak, it was one of East Africa’s most influential and distinctive media voices, reaching audiences as far as Tanzania, Ethiopia, and the Middle East. Its broadcasting style was characterized by a radical pan-Africanism, reminiscent of Radio Cairo during the Nasser era.
With the exception of a brief interruption in the 1990s when it was controlled by a warlord, the station has consistently functioned not only as a key broadcaster but also as an essential repository of the nation’s collective memory.
The initiative to preserve its archives has gained renewed impetus this year.
In early June, Somalia’s information ministry and the UNESCO regional office for Eastern Africa, the UN’s heritage agency, convened a workshop in Mogadishu for archivists from across the country. The workshop aimed to prepare for the eventual registration of the archive’s contents with UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme, which documents archives of significant historical value.
“Protecting this knowledge isn’t just relevant for Somalia, but it is relevant for everyone,” stated Guilherme Canela, a senior UNESCO official overseeing the project.
An expert assessment conducted in April identified approximately 45,000 tapes and reels, representing an estimated 400,000 hours of material recorded since the station’s inception. Over 85 percent of these are still playable, but about one in ten has degraded with age, and more than 5 percent has been destroyed or severely damaged.
Radio Mogadishu’s collection has been recognized for both its sheer volume and the fact that much of its content exists nowhere else.
Some recordings were damaged in an electrical fire in 2018 while others were lost during conflicts in 1992, when U.S. forces engaged Somali militias in Mogadishu
During the most intense periods of the civil war, Police Colonel Abshir Hashi Ali risked his life to protect the archive’s contents from being looted. He recounted returning to the station during the fighting that erupted after the government‘s collapse in 1990, with the intention of safeguarding the valuable materials stored there for Somalis.
Abdi Jeite, the station’s director, mentioned that the digitization effort commenced as early as 2012 but has been hampered for years by a lack of red
“We’ve got some new tools, and more training for our archivists, but there is still a lot of support needed,” he commented.
To grasp the archive’s significance, it is helpful to understand the role radio once played in Somali life.
“Radio Mogadishu was arguably the preeminent media institution in post-independence Somalia,” explained Iman Mohamed, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and a historian of Somalia.
“In a society that prizes orality above the written word, radio was uniquely effective at creating a common public sphere through which ordinary people could feel bonded to one another and to a shared sense of nationhood,” Mohamed added.
While Somali audiences could also tune into BBC Somali, Radio Hargeisa, and opposition stations as the government weakened in the late 20th century, Radio Mogadishu was the dominant force in the “soundscape of urban Somalia,”
This dominance established Radio Mogadishu as a national incubator of talent. “If you were a musician, poet, playwright or producer, Radio Mogadishu was the platform you wanted to appear on,” said Robleh, the archivist. “It made Somalia’s stars.”
Robleh further noted that many BBC Somali journalists who later achieved distinguished careers began their work at Radio Mogadishu, which served as a crucial pathway for Somali-language talent to reach the BBC.
Hassan Dahir, a former journalist at the station, was among many Somali children who grew up aspiring to work there. For years, he recalled, Radio Mogadishu was virtually the sole
“Its reach was so extensive that even nomadic herders followed events as far afield as the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights Movement,” Dahir stated.
Under Siad Barre, the military leader who seized power in a 1969 coup and governed Somalia for two decades with a self-proclaimed socialist, revolutionary government, the station became a tool of state ideology. It blended news, drama, and religious programming with nationalist and anti-colonial themes.
The station broadcast pan-African songs such as “Oh Africa, still asleep” by Halimo Khalif Magool, which encouraged the continent’s people to awaken and take control of their futures. Mahamud Abdullahi Sangub’s “Reject the Color of Imperialism” was another popular song of that era, embodying a similar spirit of politically charged music with lyrics like: “Africans listen to each other, reject the colour of imperialism, reject it, reject it, reject it!”
Many of these songs have since been covered, sampled, or reinterpreted, and younger Somalis often encounter them without knowing the original performers or the political contexts that shaped them
Its news coverage focused on anti-colonial struggles in places like Mozambique against Portugal, the fight against apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa, and the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. It reported on events ranging from colonial battles in Guinea-Bissau to the arrest of African American political activist and author Angela Davis.
“We were telling the stories of people resisting their oppressors,” Dahir remarked.
While the station served as a “mouthpiece of the government,” Mohamed cautioned, it also played a vital role in instilling “a patriotic and revolutionary ideological orientation in the Somali people.”
One of the radio’s most significant initiatives was the Somali mass literacy campaign. In 1972, the government dispatched students to rural Somalia to teach the newly developed Somali script, leading to a substantial increase in literacy rates nationwide.
The station also became deeply involved in Somalia’s regional foreign policy, as the country engaged in prolonged disputes with Ethiopia throughout much of the 20th century, culminating in an invasion in 1977.
This rivalry prompted Radio Mogadishu to allocate airtime to Ethiopia’s marginalized ethnic groups and armed rebel movements, particularly those from Eritrea. Among its notable efforts were broadcasts in Oromo and Sidama.
Dahir, the former Radio Mogadishu journalist who covered Ethiopia, told Al Jazeera that these were the first radio programs ever produced in either language, both of which had been suppressed for many years in Ethiopia under policies that favored Amharic, the language of the country’s elite.
The station itself now plays a considerably smaller role in Somali society.
The collapse of the central government in 1991 ended state control over broadcasting, creating space for private radio, television, and online outlets that have gained popularity among the Somali public.
It has lost most of its foreign-language programming, and consequently, much of its revolutionary fervor. The Somali state also continues to face limitations in its re
In November 2021, al-Shabab, an armed group affiliated with al-Qaida that has been engaged in a long-standing rebellion against Somalia’s government, assassinated the station’s then-director, Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled, in a suicide bombing in Mogadishu.
Historian Iman Mohamed emphasizes that with the civil war now in its third decade, preserving the archive for future generations has become even more critical.
“The destruction of archives during the civil war has left an enormous gap in Somalia’s documentary record, which means that anyone researching the country’s history is almost entirely reliant on foreign archives or oral history,” Mohamed stated.
“That is especially problematic for young people,” she added. “Recovering what we can matters for the youth who will never have known the world that Radio Mogadishu broadcast in its heyday.”
