By Faisal AliSunday July 19, 2026
For much of the 20th century, Radio Mogadishu was Somalia’s leading public broadcaster [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera] (Al Jazeera)
Mogadishu, Somalia – Behind the doors of an air-conditioned archive at Somalia’s state radio station, thousands of reel-to-reel tapes rest on steel shelving, dusty rows of recordings that hold a fading record of the nation’s past.
The reels preserve fragments of 20th-century Somalia: news reports, political speeches, music and long-silent voices broadcast across the country, with some recordings reaching back to the early 1950s.
At Radio Mogadishu, archivist Abdiqadir Geedi Robleh places a reel onto an ageing tape machine, links it to a computer and captures its contents digitally. When a love song by the celebrated singer Mohamed Mooge Liban fills the room, Robleh says, it carries him back to his younger years.
Robleh and a small group of colleagues are racing to digitise and catalogue an estimated 400,000 hours of broadcasts, officials say. Their task is to save the material before the magnetic tape degrades beyond repair, erasing an irreplaceable account of Somalia’s history.
“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.”
Abdiqadir Geedi Robleh prepares to listen to a tape recording. [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]
Established in 1951 under Italian colonial rule, Radio Mogadishu went on to become Somalia’s biggest and most significant public broadcaster. Its earliest broadcasts were in Somali and Italian, before the station expanded into foreign-language programming in Swahili, Oromo, English, Arabic and other languages.
At its peak, it ranked among East Africa’s most distinctive and influential media voices. Its broadcasts reached listeners in Tanzania, Ethiopia and the Middle East, with a radical pan-African tone that evoked Radio Cairo during the years of Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Apart from a short interruption in the 1990s, when a warlord controlled it, the station has remained both an essential source of news for Somalis and regional audiences and a central archive of the country’s shared memory.
This year, the campaign to safeguard that archive has gained fresh momentum.
In early June, Somalia’s information ministry and UNESCO’s regional office for Eastern Africa, the UN heritage agency, convened archivists from around the country for a Mogadishu workshop. The eventual goal is to register the collection with UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme, which lists archives of major historical importance.
“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.
Rows of tapes in Radio Mogadishu’s archive contain decades of Somali history [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]
A UNESCO-backed expert assessment in April identified about 45,000 tapes and reels, containing an estimated 400,000 hours of recordings made since the broadcaster was founded. More than 85 percent can still be played, UNESCO said, but about one in 10 has deteriorated over time and more than 5 percent has been destroyed or badly damaged.
The Radio Mogadishu archive drew recognition not only for its vast scale, but also because much of its content survives nowhere else.
Robleh says an electrical fire in 2018 damaged some recordings, while fighting in 1992, when US forces fought Somali militias on Mogadishu’s streets, led to the loss of others.
During the height of the civil war, police colonel Abshir Hashi Ali put his life at risk to stop the archive from being looted. As fighting consumed Mogadishu after the government collapsed in 1990, he said he returned “with the aim of conveying to Somalis the wealth that is stored here”.
Abdi Jeite, the station’s director, says efforts to digitise the holdings began as far back as 2012 but were repeatedly slowed by scarce resources. He estimates that only about 10 percent of the archive has been converted so far.
“We’ve got some new tools, and more training for our archivists, but there is still a lot of support needed,” he says.
An old reel-to-reel machine spins as it is used to play and digitise tapes in Radio Mogadishu’s Mogadishu archive [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]
The archive’s importance is rooted in the place radio once occupied in everyday 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.
Somali listeners could tune into BBC Somali, Radio Hargeisa and opposition stations as the government weakened in the latter decades of the 20th century. But Radio Mogadishu still defined the “soundscape of urban Somalia”, Mohamed said.
Its prominence turned the station into a national talent factory. “If you were a musician, poet, playwright or producer, Radio Mogadishu was the platform you wanted to appear on,” Robleh, the archivist, said. “It made Somalia’s stars.”
Robleh indicates the label on a tape containing a love song recorded at Radio Mogadishu in 1974 [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]
Robleh said many BBC Somali journalists who later built distinguished careers got their first experience at Radio Mogadishu. The station became an important route for Somali-language talent to reach the BBC.
Hassan Dahir, a former station journalist, was among generations of Somali children who dreamed of working there. For many years, he said, Radio Mogadishu was almost the only news outlet available to millions of people, serving as “the eyes and ears of the community”.
“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 said.
Under Siad Barre, the military officer who took power in a 1969 coup and governed Somalia for two decades with a self-described socialist, revolutionary administration, Radio Mogadishu became a vehicle for state ideology. Its schedule blended news, drama and religious shows with nationalist and anti-colonial programming.
After taking power in a 1969 coup, Major General Mohamed Siad Barre made Radio Mogadishu a major channel for delivering his government’s messages [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]
The broadcaster aired pan-African songs such as Oh Africa, still asleep by Halimo Khalif Magool, urging Africans to awaken and shape their own futures. Another widely heard song of the period was Mahamud Abdullahi Sangub’s Reject the Color of Imperialism, part of the same tradition of politically charged music, with lyrics including: “Africans listen to each other, reject the colour of imperialism, reject it, reject it, reject it!”
Mohamed says many of these songs have since been covered, sampled or repurposed. Younger Somalis often hear them without knowing the original performers or the political currents that shaped the music.
Its news programming tracked anti-colonial conflicts, including Mozambique’s war against Portugal, resistance to apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa, and the Civil Rights Movement in the US. Coverage ranged from colonial fighting 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”, said Dahir.
Portraits of Somalia’s presidents hang over the archive entrance at Radio Mogadishu [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]
Mohamed cautions that the broadcaster was a “mouthpiece of the government”, while also playing a key part in instilling “a patriotic and revolutionary ideological orientation in the Somali people”.
Among the major initiatives supported by the station was Somalia’s mass literacy campaign. In 1972, the government dispatched students to rural areas to teach the recently developed Somali script, a drive that produced a dramatic rise in literacy nationwide.
The broadcaster also became closely tied to Somalia’s regional foreign policy. The government spent much of the 20th century in conflict with Ethiopia before ultimately invading in 1977.
That rivalry prompted Radio Mogadishu to devote programming to marginalised ethnic communities in Ethiopia and to armed rebel groups, especially Eritrean movements. Its most notable efforts included broadcasts in Oromo and Sidama.
Dahir, the former Radio Mogadishu journalist who reported on Ethiopia, told Al Jazeera that the shows were the first radio programmes ever broadcast in either language. Both had been suppressed in Ethiopia for years under policies favouring Amharic, the language of the country’s elite.
Since then, the station’s place in Somali life has become much smaller.
The collapse of the central government in 1991 ended the state’s control over broadcasting and created room for private radio, television and online platforms, all of which have gained popularity among Somali audiences.
Radio Mogadishu has shed most of its foreign-language output and, with it, much of its revolutionary character. As the Somali state rebuilds after decades of conflict, it remains limited by scarce resources.
The entrance to Radio Mogadishu’s studios. [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]
In November 2021, al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-affiliated armed group that has fought a long insurgency against Somalia’s government, killed the station’s then-director, Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled, in a suicide bombing in Mogadishu.
Mohamed, the historian, says the civil war, now in its third decade, has made the need to preserve the archive for future generations still more pressing.
“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 said.
“That is especially problematic for young people,” she adds. “Recovering what we can matters for the youth who will never have known the world that Radio Mogadishu broadcast in its heyday.”
