Somalia races to save Radio Mogadishu’s fading archive
After seizing power in a 1969 coup, Major General Mohamed Siad Barre used Radio Mogadishu as a key instrument for disseminating his regime’s messages [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]Portraits of Somalia’s presidents line a wall at Radio Mogadishu above the entrance to the archive [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]The station was a “mouthpiece of the government”, cautions Mohamed, but took on a crucial role of inculcating “a patriotic and revolutionary ideological orientation in the Somali people”.
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.
An old reel-to-reel machine used to play and digitise tapes at Radio Mogadishu’s archive in Mogadishu begins spinning [Abdimajid Abdillahi Farah/Al Jazeera]To understand why the archive matters so much, it helps to understand what radio once meant in Somali life.
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