Somalia races to save Radio Mogadishu’s fading archive
A small team is racing to digitise decades of Somali history from its main public radio station Mogadishu, Somalia – Thousands of reel-to-reel tapes sit
A small team is racing to digitise decades of Somali history from its main public radio station Mogadishu, Somalia – Thousands of reel-to-reel tapes sit in an air-conditioned room in the archive of Somalia’s public radio, Radio Mogadishu, stacked on steel shelves and lined up like old manuscripts beneath a thick layer of dust. Each reel contains a small fragment of Somalia’s 20th-century history, from news bulletins to speeches, music and voices that were once beamed out across the nation’s airwaves, some dating back to the early 1950s. Abdiqadir Geedi Robleh, an archivist at Radio Mogadishu, threads a reel onto an old tape machine, connects it to a computer, and records the contents of each tape. A tape with a love song by Mohamed Mooge Liban, a prominent singer fills the room, and Robleh is transported, he says, to his youth. He is working with a small team to digitise and methodically order approximately 400,000 hours of broadcasts, officials here say, before the magnetic tape deteriorates beyond recovery, taking with it a crucial 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 tells Al Jazeera. “We’re working to preserve it but also open it up in future to the public.” Founded in 1951 during the Italian colonial era, Radio Mogadishu would grow into Somalia’s largest and most important public broadcaster. It initially broadcast in Italian and Somali before introducing foreign language services, including everything from Swahili and Oromo to English and Arabic. In its heyday, it was among the most influential and distinctive voices in East African media, reaching audiences as far afield as Tanzania, Ethiopia, and the Middle East with a style of radical pan-African broadcasting reminiscent of Radio Cairo in the Nasser years. With the exception of a brief hiatus in the 1990s, when it fell under the control of a warlord, it has served not only as a key source of news for Somalis and audiences across the region, but also as a vital repository of the country’s collective memory. The effort to preserve its archives has gathered new momentum this year. In early June, Somalia’s information ministry and the UNESCO regional office for Eastern Africa – the UN’s heritage agency – brought archivists from across the country to a workshop in Mogadishu, aimed at eventually registering its contents with UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme, which catalogues archives of important historical value.
“Protecting this knowledge isn’t just relevant for Somalia, but it is relevant for everyone,” said Guilherme Canela, a senior UNESCO official who is overseeing the project. An expert assessment carried out in April counted roughly 45,000 tapes and reels, representing an estimated 400,000 hours of material recorded since the station’s founding. More than 85 percent remain playable, but around one in 10 has deteriorated with age, and more than 5 percent has been destroyed or severely damaged, according to UNESCO. Radio Mogadishu’s collection was recognised both for its size and because so much of what it holds exists nowhere else. Some were damaged in an electrical fire in 2018, Robleh says, while others were lost during fighting in 1992, when US forces battled Somali militias in the streets of Mogadishu. During the worst of the civil war, police colonel Abshir Hashi Ali risked his life to prevent the contents of the archives from being looted. When fighting engulfed Mogadishu following the 1990 collapse of the government, he said he ran back “with the aim of conveying to Somalis the wealth that is stored here”. Abdi Jeite, the station’s director, says the digitisation drive began as early as 2012, but has been held back for years by a lack of resources. By his estimate, only approximately 10 percent of the archive has so far been converted. “We’ve got some new tools, and more training for our archivists, but there is still a lot of support needed,” he says. To understand why the archive matters so much, it helps to understand what radio once meant in Somali life. “Radio Mogadishu was arguably the preeminent media institution in post-independence Somalia,” Iman Mohamed, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and historian of Somalia, tells Al Jazeera. “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 adds. Though Somali audiences could also access BBC Somali, Radio Hargeisa, and opposition stations when the government began to deteriorate in the latter part of the 20th century, it was Radio Mogadishu that dominated the “soundscape of urban Somalia”, Mohamed said. That dominance made Radio Mogadishu a national factory of talent.
The BriefWire