By: Salah Abdi Sheikh
I am an amateur historian specializing in the recent history of Somalis in Kenya. I have interest in the history of the Somali people. The Somali Nation is an important African tribe, among the most populous and visible inside and outside Africa.
The history of the Somali State however, is replete with disaster after disaster. Revisionists of history want to present Somalia before the war as paradise; far from it. Somalia before the war was a guinea pig for failed ideas just like it is today.
There was no time for peace— if Somalia wasn’t fighting Ethiopia; it was bombing the clans in the North to smithereens. No wonder the people of Somaliland hate the South so much. Evidence abounds that the Somali government colluded with Moi to massacre Somali population in the North Eastern Province of Kenya.
The Somali government had no idea on how to develop a country, create an economy and develop people. They didn’t know which ideology to adopt, so they faced West with Capitalist ideas in the morning and East with Communist experiment in the evening. They experimented with secularism and sentenced its opponents to the firing squad. They did everything they could to adopt Westernization even enforcing it with guns and whips. All these efforts came to naught.
Somalia had two notable successes; literacy of over 60% and the written Somali language. All other sectors were nothing to write home about. They moved away from their culture and surprisingly even from Islam which was left to some old Sheikhs scared to speak out and modernised charlatans with ancestor worship and exorcism as their entire stock.
The war was a tragedy but it rescued Somalia from ignominy. Today, Somalia is becoming a guinea pig for failed foreign ideas from the United Nations, Africa Union and other interests. The history of Somalia as a directionless ship being blown all over by the waves continues. One day, it may discover the shores and get a trained captain, if it survives the pirates on its deck who are holding the population hostage.
As for the people of Northern Kenya, we should move away from dependence on Somalia as a State but be closer to the unity of the Somali Nation, meaning common purpose for the Somali people regardless of the paper citizenship they hold. The people are more important than the geographical Somali State.
~Salah Abdi Sheikh is the author of Blood on the Runway, a book that chronicles the horror of Wagalla Massacre
