MOGADISHU, Somalia — In the shadow of sandbagged checkpoints and concrete blast walls, the National Theater sits like a survivor. Years after a suicide bomber tore through its auditorium, the stage still glows under hard light. On a recent morning, Hassan Barre stepped forward to offer a different emblem of Somalia: poetry.
“Somalis must be aware of their responsibility to their country and each other,” he recited, his cadence steady and unhurried. The 70-year-old cut a somber figure at the podium, his voice carrying over a mostly empty hall where aging poets in austere suits gather to share verses and recall better days.
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If Somalia is a nation of poets, this is one of its most fragile sanctuaries. Decades of conflict have stripped the country of cultural infrastructure, but not of the oral tradition that outlasts even stone. In the most remote outposts, along dusty roads and in informal settlements, poems still travel by memory and radio—exhortations, pleas, love songs and warnings. Even militants in the bush are known to trade in verse.
Some Somali poets, like Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame, widely known as Hadraawi—the “Shakespeare of Somalia”—achieved global renown. “Hadraawi’s oeuvre includes a broad repertoire, from love songs to laments of war,” Harvard University’s Archive of World Music noted after his death in 2022. His work and that of his contemporaries elevated the oral tradition into a national conscience: pastoral care, communal duty, and the delicate roles that bind a predominantly Islamic society.
The poets flourished under Mohamed Siad Barre, the autocrat whose four-decade rule combined repression with patronage for artists and intellectuals. That era ended in 1991, when Barre’s ouster by clan-based militias plunged the country into civil war, and warlords carved Mogadishu into zones of control. From that disorder rose the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Shabab, reshaping Somalia’s image abroad into one of relentless bombings and besieged institutions.
Those institutions—among them the National Theater and the National Museum next door—are mostly dormant today. Security consumes government budgets, and anything resembling public culture survives on resolve and improvisation. Visiting the theater requires advance clearance with the intelligence agency. Drivers must supply a license plate number, make and even color before approaching the heavily guarded district that includes the presidential palace.
Inside, though, the stubborn rhythm of cultural life persists. The morning Barre performed, a small troupe of young dancers rehearsed a folk routine that exalts farming, kinship and land—traditional values at odds with the convulsions outside. A few poets, including one woman, watched from the seats and traded verses softly, the way one might exchange prayer.
They know the odds. Funding is thin, programming sporadic, and logistics punishing. Yet they say the work cannot wait. Traditional poets still perform at weddings and community gatherings; local radio stations devote daily slots to poems. The art keeps people linked to one another and to a vision of Somalia that is not defined by sirens.
“During Siad Barre’s reign we were treated like kings,” Barre said of the state support that once flowed to artists, including free housing for some. “The present administration, they are not giving much treatment to the poets and singers. We expect them to treat us the way we used to be treated.”
Officials say they are trying. “Poets still play a vital role in Somali society, serving as a foundational pillar for cultural vitality, individual well-being and peaceful coexistence,” said Culture Minister Daud Aweis. He said his ministry provides limited funding for arts programming at the National Theater and that “the long-term goal is to expand support.”
Inaugurated in 1967, less than a decade after independence, the National Theater closed in 1991 as the state unraveled. It reopened in 2012 after African Union peacekeepers pushed al-Shabab out of Mogadishu. Months later, a woman detonated explosives during a speech by the prime minister, killing the head of Somalia’s Olympic committee and at least seven others. The prime minister survived. The crater in the city’s imagination remains.
Still, the poets come. They arrive for open recitals, for quiet workshops, for the solace of familiar faces. Gathering here creates a circle of safety and purpose in a city that measures distance in checkpoints. It also signals, in a way words can, what kind of country the poets still believe in.
“One thing that unites all Somali poets, whether in Eritrea, whether in Somalia, everywhere, we stand for peace,” said Hirsi Dhuuh Mohamed, who chairs the Somali Council of Poets, a network of about 400 members including many in the diaspora. He said the city has recovered from “the worst” years of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when turf wars fractured Mogadishu, and that poets avoid party politics even as their themes—security, good governance, community—are inseparable from it.
Among the theater’s stalwarts is deputy director and poet Maki Haji Banaadir, a curmudgeonly figure with gold-rimmed glasses and a knack for barbed insight. In 2003, he and six other poets crisscrossed Somalia to preach reconciliation—a journey that would be unthinkable now. The federal government’s reach remains limited outside Mogadishu, and at least two semi-autonomous regions are seeking secession.
Maki, known simply by his first name, is one of Somalia’s best-known cultural voices. A decade ago, he composed a blistering song about the apparent uselessness of the Somali shilling as the economy dollarized and ordinary people found their national currency unwelcome at markets. For many, the song was satire and lament, and a reminder that poetry in Somalia is often both mirror and cudgel.
If elders such as Maki and Barre represent memory, their task now is continuity. Are they training successors who can wield words with the same authority?
“We are working day and night,” Maki said, a line that doubles as a mission statement for a city where night often belongs to gunfire and day to rebuilding.
That duality—devastation and defiance—frames every gathering at the National Theater. The stage is modest. The seats are mostly empty. The security rules are intrusive. Yet the act of reciting poetry here, in a hall that has witnessed both revival and carnage, is itself a public claim: that culture is not a luxury for peacetime but a tool for stitching together a nation under strain.
In Mogadishu, where most stories begin and end with violence, the poets insist on a narrative with different punctuation. The verses praise the pastoral and call for civic duty. They extol patience and warn of pride. They remember heroes and mourn the dead. Above all, they insist that words—carefully chosen, fearlessly delivered—can do the slow, necessary work that politics and force have failed to do.
On that quiet morning, Barre finished his recital about good citizenship and stepped down. The dancers returned to their marks. A radio producer checked levels. Outside, the heat pressed down and a soldier waved a car through another barrier. Inside, for a few more minutes, the sound of Somalia was not the boom of a bomb but the steady beat of lines composed to hold a country together.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
