Dr Zakariya Weyrax

Every wounded society invents a language to dull its conscience. Ours perfected one method: the moment clarity threatens the living, the defence is always the same — call the truth ‘binary’.

Every time a Somali writer attempts to articulate a clear moral argument, a familiar accusation emerges: “Your analysis is too binary.” As I argued in The Empty Pedestal of the Somali Academic: A Manifestational Rebuttal, such clarity is essential: it confronts the structures and failures that have allowed Somalia’s collapse to persist.

The word ‘binary’ is deployed as a kind of intellectual sedative — an attempt to dilute conviction, flatten urgency, and shame clarity into compromise. It is the critic’s way of saying: “Speak softly about suffering. Add enough caveats to make the truth unthreatening.” But Somalia is not a country that collapsed into nuance. It collapsed into violence. And to describe violence with the soft vocabulary of ‘balance’ is not sophistication — it is moral evasion.

The demand for ambiguity is never neutral. It comes from a very specific place: those who fear that a clear account of suffering will implicate their tribe, their elders, their political lineage, or the intellectual class to which they belong. When they accuse a writer of being ‘binary,’ what they really mean is: “You are naming things we prefer to leave vague.”

This is why the fetish for nuance becomes dangerous when it is weaponised to obscure truths that must be spoken plainly. Somalia’s collapse is not a metaphor; it is a wound that is still bleeding. The call to add ‘more nuance’ often functions as a demand to look away from that wound.

I reject that demand.

Nuance is a tool of analysis — not a shield against accountability. And when nuance is invoked to defend those who helped build the conditions of collapse, or to avoid confronting the scale of suffering that followed, it becomes nothing more than a sophisticated form of denial.

Not every argument requires symmetrical treatment to be rigorous. It seems to me — and this is a distinctly Somali irritation — that the West has ingrained into Somali intellectual discourse the idea that ‘balance’ equals sophistication. But an argument can be: asymmetrical, morally weighted, historically grounded, and still intensely rigorous. Calling out disproportionate harm does not require pretending both sides are equally responsible.

Some realities are binary:

• There either is a functioning state or there is not.
• A child either has a school or he does not.
• A woman is either safe at night or she is not.
• A people are either protected by institutions or abandoned to warlords.

A country cannot be ‘partially collapsed’ any more than a person can be ‘partially dead.’ Thus, the accusation of binary thinking is not an argument; it is a reflex. It is the intellectual equivalent of smoke — something released to obscure, not to illuminate. In Somali discourse especially, it has become a convenient shield for those who wish to avoid moral clarity without admitting that avoidance.

The problem is not that these critics demand nuance. The problem is that they demand elasticity — a stretching of reality until suffering loses its shape, responsibility loses its owners, and history becomes soft enough to be moulded around tribal sentiment. Rebutting these so-called intellectuals is not the same as critiquing a social media post; their texts hold real power, shaping policy and influencing the lives of millions.

This is why the now well-known, yet tragically under-documented, testimonies of Somalis who endured the collapse — at home and in the diaspora — must be taken seriously. These accounts are not abstractions; they are daily humiliations. Their experiences are not ‘binary’; they are human — and unbearably clear. The moral landscape they reveal does not require nuance to make sense. It requires honesty to be heard.

What is almost never said — because saying it strips every evasive academic defence to the bone — is that the collapse is morally indefensible when judged against what followed. It did not usher in freedom, reform, or renewal. It unleashed the single most degrading chapter in Somali history.

At home, collapse meant women violated with impunity, entire districts carved up by extortionists who called themselves ‘commanders,’ and young men born into a world where the only functioning institutions were militias, checkpoints, and graves. It meant hospitals becoming merciless markets, education becoming a rumour, justice becoming a commodity. It meant children learning to recognise the sound of gunfire before the sound of a school bell. It meant a population forced to negotiate with violence the way one negotiates with weather — as something permanent, indifferent, and lethal.

In the diaspora, the collapse followed us like a shadow that no passport could dissolve. It manifested as boys stabbing each other in alleyways because the rites of adulthood they should have inherited were buried under the rubble of 1991. It manifested as families disintegrating under pressures they were never culturally designed to absorb. It manifested as divorce becoming normalised, elders losing moral authority, and an entire generation growing up spiritually unsupervised. And the ultimate humiliation: Somali men — once the custodians of honour, religion, and family — now dying alone in geriatric care homes, abandoned by children they never raised, wives they neglected, and communities that dissolved. No Somali civilisation, no pastoral code, no Islamic ethic ever produced such a scene. Only collapse did.

Never — in any era of Somali history — has the Somali been this stripped of dignity, this fractured, this scattered, this disoriented. Never has the Somali walked the earth with so much loss on his shoulders and so little structure beneath his feet. What is also almost never said — because saying it removes every convenient excuse — is that Somalia did not fall apart merely because politicians were corrupt, or militias were brutal, or tribes were short-sighted. Every society has those. What Somalia uniquely lacked was the one thing that could have prevented, interpreted, or guided recovery from this very suffering: an intellectual class capable of its duty.

Our collapse is not explained by authoritarianism; similar political systems across Africa, the Gulf, and the wider Global South have endured without dissolving into statelessness. Nor is it explained by foreign interference; Somalia has weathered external pressures for centuries without losing its internal coherence. Nor by politicians; no political class can rise above the intellectual soil that forms and legitimises it.

The decisive failure — the one that prolonged and normalised this suffering — belongs to Somali academia. It was scholars, PhDs, analysts, and ‘experts’ who bore the responsibility to provide the moral vocabulary and structural critique that could make sense of this chaos. It was they who were supposed to distinguish between reformable flaws and civilisation-ending catastrophes. It was they who should have warned, recorded, analysed, documented, theorised, resisted.

They did none of it.

This absence of guidance left a vacuum — a space where moral judgment should have existed, but did not. The consequences are simple and devastating. Strong nations assert moral clarity the moment catastrophe strikes — they establish the borders of right and wrong immediately. They say: “There is no justification.” “There is no moral equivalence.” They draw a hard moral line because human dignity demands it, and because clarity prevents a society from dissolving into the chaos of personalised grievances and revenge.

Somali academia never understood this. They recoil from clarity. They replace moral proportion with jargon — ‘balance’, ‘nuance’, ‘binary’ — as if human suffering were an academic puzzle rather than a moral emergency. But morality requires clarity. Without it, cruelty becomes negotiable, and collapse becomes merely another ‘interpretive event’. Even thirty-five years later, we Somalis cannot say the collapse was wrong, immoral, or unjustifiable. We cling instead to a borrowed language of ‘nuance’, ‘balance’, and ‘binary’ — inherited from failed academics who have erased moral responsibility. How can God lift a people from catastrophe if we ourselves refuse to recognise our condition? How can we seek justice, mercy, or renewal when we insist on rationalisations that excuse the ongoing violation of human dignity? By failing to assert moral clarity, we not only perpetuate collapse — we risk becoming inhumane ourselves.

Here is the truth everyone runs from: we now defend the narrative of ‘abstract theories’ more fiercely than we defend the living mothers breaking in front of us. So let me ask the question no one dares: how many more years must pass before we stop pretending that a man who has been in the soil for three decades is responsible for the crimes living men continue to commit? Another thirty years? Fifty? A century? At what point do we finally admit that today’s humiliation is ours — not inherited, not imposed, not historical — but manufactured, protected, and enforced by us?

And one must ask — because the question is unavoidable — who introduced the knee-jerk reflex to call this clarity ‘binary’? Who taught us to treat moral proportion as an error? Who benefits from a framework in which this scale of collapse becomes just another ‘interpretive possibility,’ rather than a moral crime?
The answer is the same: the intellectual class that failed in its duty. Calling this clarity ‘binary’ is not analysis. It is the final, desperate attempt of that class to tranquillise a nation before it wakes up to their negligence. It is the last shield between them and the unforgiving mirror of history.

This is where the real danger begins. Confronting these academics is not the same as critiquing a viral video. Their work is not harmless noise. The toxic, performative tribalism visible today — especially in the diaspora — is not some ancient Somali instinct; it is an academic fabrication. A post-1991 storyline engineered, footnoted, and recycled by people who claim expertise while having no relationship with the lived reality of Somali life.

But there is a test their theories cannot survive: contact with the actual people.

Somalis at home and abroad still pray side by side, inter-marry without clan anxiety, and when they move to a new city, they never ask whether their clan lives there — only whether Somalis do. The people themselves have already outgrown the cages academics keep insisting define them.

And when you enter the country — not the imagined Somalia circulating in diaspora PowerPoints, but the living nation — the lie becomes undeniable. During my travels from Hargeisa to Mogadishu, through villages, towns, and cities, not once did anyone ask my clan. Not once was I categorised, interrogated, or sorted into a lineage. Instead, the youth, the women, the elders treated me as kin — as a fellow Somali whose presence demanded generosity, not categorisation. They shared their last meal with me despite having far less than I did, without hesitation, without the slightest trace of the divisions these academics swear are fundamental to us. What the people taught me, simply by how they lived, is this: they have already abandoned the divisions the academics keep trying to resurrect.

Worse still, their failure does not remain local. It travels upward. When policymakers — domestic or foreign — seek expertise, they are forced to consume analysis crafted by an intellectual class that is, at best, unfocused and, at worst, dangerously unserious. I do not blame Somali politicians for the national inertia; how can one expect coherent policy when the knowledge-base feeding them is shallow, evasive, and insulated by its own self-importance? Every functioning nation has serious academics and disciplined think tanks. Somalia has the opposite: an impostor league whose primary output is confusion disguised as complexity.

We must name it plainly: it is the so-called Somali academics — not ordinary Somalis, not tribes, not politicians, not journalists, not social-media commentators — who have prolonged the national limbo. Every actor in Somali public life relies, directly or indirectly, on intellectual input to perform their role. And for thirty-five years, that input has been an empty well. Nothing this academic class has produced has meaningfully altered the life of a single vulnerable Somali — not the mother trapped between predatory clinics, not the child whose school vanished with the state, not the elderly man abandoned because the social institutions that once upheld dignity no longer exist.

This avoidance of real suffering is not an abstract problem. It has consequences so concrete, so brutal, that my generation can no longer remain polite about it. This is why I speak out. This is why I refuse them mercy. When intellect fails its duty, paralysis is not a surprise — it is the only possible outcome.

And so I want you to know this: it is not betrayal to see our collapse clearly. It is not disloyalty to say that our people — whether at home or in the diaspora — do not deserve this level of suffering. Nothing in our faith, our history, or our culture demands that we accept humiliation as inheritance. You are allowed to say: “My people did not deserve this, and nothing justifies what has been done to us.”

I have freed myself from the language of failed academics — from their soft evasions, their fear of clarity, their obsession with ‘nuance’ and ‘balance’ — and I remain loyal to my people, perhaps more loyal than they have ever been. You can do the same.

To recognise that no grievance, no political error, no historical narrative could justify thirty-five years of disintegration is not disloyal. It is moral adulthood. It is dignity. It is the first step toward reclaiming our honour — toward saying aloud that we will no longer excuse what should never have been excused.

Only when we admit this can we begin to rise. Only then can we ask God to lift us from a condition we no longer deny. As the Quran reminds us: ‘Indeed, Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves’(Surah Ar-Ra’d 13:11).

And once you free yourself from that inherited hesitation, something becomes unmistakably clear: our crisis was never only political — it was epistemic. It was the collapse not merely of institutions, but of the very frameworks through which a people discern right from wrong. Everything that followed — the violence, the fragmentation, the disorientation of the diaspora — grew from one foundational failure: the inability to name catastrophe as catastrophe.

This is why reclaiming moral clarity is not an academic exercise. It is the first act of healing.

And when you allow yourself to see without flinching, you realise something else: Somali discourse does not lack nuance. It lacks hierarchy — the ability to differentiate between the flawed and the catastrophic, between a bruised nation and a broken one. The collapse was not ‘just another chapter.’ It was the moral and institutional extinction of a state. To place a functioning order and an abyss on the same moral plane is not nuance; it is nihilism performed as sophistication. It is the intellectual defence mechanism of a wounded ego — a pattern I explored in my essay The Duality of Pride: A Psychological Portrait of the Somali Condition.

A nation emerging from catastrophe requires judgment — the kind of moral clarity that distinguishes between a flawed state and a failed one; governance that protects and chaos that devours; human error and systemic cruelty. A functioning state and anarchy are not two sides of a spectrum. They are two different realities, two different moral worlds. To point this out is not binary. It is the bedrock of recovery.

So let this be the final answer to the accusation of ‘binary’ thinking.

When they say ‘binary,’ they mean inconvenient.
When they demand ‘nuance,’ they demand obscurity.
When they invoke ‘balance,’ they invoke cowardice.

What masquerades as methodological caution is, in fact, a weapon: the term ‘binary’ has been systematically deployed to neutralise moral judgment, diffuse accountability, and normalise a catastrophe that should never have been rendered intellectually tolerable.

Their terminology is not analysis. It is anaesthesia. A genuine nuanced analysis of Somalia must, by definition, include this truth: the scale, depth, and human cost of statelessness dwarf the flaws of the previous state by several orders of magnitude. To refuse this is not sophistication — it is distortion. To obscure this is not nuance — it is moral evasion. To deny this is not academic caution — it is intellectual failure.

Nuance, in their hands, has become a kind of ethical taxidermy: a way to preserve the appearance of rigour while hollowing out its moral core. They have traded hierarchy for equivalence, judgment for jargon, and clarity for a comfortable blur. To equate the catastrophic with the merely flawed is not scholarship — it is moral sabotage. It is the ultimate academic failure: the inability to establish a hierarchy of suffering, and thus, a hierarchy of truth.

Allow me, then, to speak a truth on behalf of the suffering, on behalf of the silenced, on behalf of all Somalis who have waited thirty-five years for this clarity: the debate about nuance is hereby terminated. It was always a diversion. The only question now is whether we will heed the testimony that has been shouting at us from the ruins. That testimony is this: the collapse was not a passage in our story but a rupture in our timeline. It was not politics — it was annihilation. And every year we have spent refining its ‘complexities’ has been another year spent laundering its cruelty.

This declaration leaves us no middle ground. We stand now at the simplest of crossroads.

One path continues the old evasion: we call clarity ‘binary,’ we call cowardice ‘balance,’ and we call our ongoing humiliation ‘history.’ This path ends only in the geriatric ward, among the last men dying of our neglect.

The other path begins with a single, seismic admission: We gave catastrophe a softer name than it deserved. We failed to call it wrong, immoral, unforgivable. We failed to declare that no grievance, no error, no leader, could ever justify the unmaking of a people.

This admission is not a closure. It is the first solid ground we have touched in decades — the return of moral gravity. From here, a future can be built. Not on the swamp of negotiated guilt, but on the hard, immovable surface of a truth finally spoken.

The real world does not fear sharp edges. It is built upon them. The only fragile thing has been our silence. For thirty-five years, we have protected a vocabulary instead of a people. We have negotiated with catastrophe instead of naming it.

So let it end here. Let’s call our catastrophe by its name.

Dr Zakariya Weyrax Warsame
Email:  Aden133@hotmail.com