By Isha Qarsoon
Oh, snap! Not the ghosts of Halloween haunt Somalis, but their own. Like many African nations once warned by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, Somalia has long been haunted by its own ghosts and refused to confront them. Fanon warned that the newly independent African state could become an evil imitation of the power it replaced. In Somalia, the imitation took another form. The colonizer’s machinery vanished, but his logic remained — the hierarchy without the discipline, the authority without the institution, the command without the craft.
Somali governments do not build; they perform. And in that performance, they have often done more harm to the idea of a state than the empire that once ruled them. Mbembe later called this the “theatre of power,” where rulers reenact the gestures of authority while the substance quietly disappears, a stage haunted by forms without life.
When I started to feel comfortable with the writings of African thinkers, a wicked ghost whispered in my ear, “add Dante to the discussion.” To which my soul says, “no — Dante is an evildoer, a hater of Islam, and knows nothing about Somalia.” To which my second soul replies, “perhaps, but he is a genius, and his limbo describes the ghost that haunts us.” The whispering continues, “have you heard Dante’s ‘place of endless waiting and unfulfilled hope’?” Oh that! Yes. It describes Somalia perfectly — a nation suspended between what it once dreamed of becoming and what it refuses to confront.
Somalia has not only lived with its ghosts; it handed them the key to its government. What Fanon described as a danger has become a design in Somalia. The country no longer remembers where the haunting ends and politics begins. The old spirits no longer linger in the corners of memory; they sit in the chairs of power. The ruux of mimicry and dependency still walks among us, only now it drafts policies, issues decrees, and calls itself reform.
Somalia’s ghosts lead the country in circles, mistaking motion for journey. Each regime declares itself reborn, but the sunrise reveals the same shadows — only darker, heavier, and harder to name. Plans are drafted, signatures gathered, frameworks announced — rituals performed so the ghost appears alive. Yet with every repetition, something quietly worsens: the will to believe, the meaning of progress, the memory of what change could mean. The country lives in a pause without end, trapped before a bridge it no longer believes can be crossed.
This repetition is not confusion; it is corrosion. Uncertainty has become the country’s excuse. Power hides inside chaos, because clarity would demand responsibility. Federalism remains undefined so Mogadishu can centralize when it wishes and retreat when it must. The constitution stays “under review,” so legality can bend when politics requires it. Elections shift like mirages on the horizon — always close enough to believe in, never near enough to touch.
Behind this theatre lies a cold calculation. A country in permanent transition is a country that attracts sympathy, money, and patience. Donors are reassured by visible process; citizens are kept busy debating what will come next. The ruling class understands this dynamic perfectly. They have turned dysfunction into advantage, surviving by managing exhaustion — their own, the people’s, and the world’s.
It is a sophisticated kind of deception, one that does not rely on lies but on half-truths. Leaders do not deny the country’s fragility; they showcase it. They speak the language of urgency, warning that Somalia must not be abandoned just as it nears recovery. That rhetoric keeps the support flowing, but it also keeps the country suspended in a state of becoming, forever “almost ready,” never fully responsible. The system depends on that middle space, where expectations are endless and accountability is nowhere.
The moral cost of this deception is deeper than the political one. It eats away at meaning itself. Words that once united Somalis — midnimo (unity), qarannimo (nationhood), xorriyad (freedom) — have lost their weight. They have been spoken too often without consequence. Citizens still use them, but mostly out of habit, the way one repeats a prayer that has long ceased to comfort. Patriotism has become procedural. We say we love the nation, but we rarely ask what the nation now is.
This collapse of faith is the true haunting. Somalia is not only misled; it is weary. People have grown used to living inside a cycle they no longer believe can be broken. They speak of reform with irony, of elections with resignation, of peace with the tone of someone describing a rumor. That cynicism is understandable. When every reform turns into another performance, trust becomes a form of naivety.
Yet cynicism is also how the illusion survives. It convinces us that nothing better is possible, that those in charge may be self-serving but at least they are predictable. It tells us that a weak, breathing state is safer than a strong one that might bring new dangers. And so the deception continues, not simply because of those who design it but because of those who have adapted to it.
Fanon foresaw this, though he wrote of another time. He warned that national liberation could give birth to an elite skilled at managing dependency, fluent in the colonizer’s language, dependent on his approval, unable to imagine a future outside his gaze. Mbembe expanded that warning: he described the post-colonial subject who learns to live inside the absurd, laughing and enduring at once. Somalia has gone a step further. It has transformed absurdity into routine. What began as the legacy of colonial empire has become the ritual of power.
The international community plays its part. It keeps the lights on, funds the rituals of progress, and mistakes cooperation for success. It measures Somalia by visible activity — plans written, laws drafted, dialogues held — rather than by the invisible substance of trust or justice. The world wants to believe that motion means recovery, and Somalia’s leaders are happy to oblige. The deception works because it satisfies everyone’s need for comfort.
But no country can inhabit its illusion forever; the stage eventually collapses. It is crumbling. Do you hear the noise? Donor patience is thinning, and the younger generation no longer finds comfort in the rituals that placated their parents. They see the ghost for what it is — but if they do not act, they will live inside its story: a tale of motion without meaning, of promises repeated until they turn to dust.
If Dante were to write today, that evil genius would find Somalia not in his Purgatorio but deep down in the bottom of limbo, where a nation deceives itself into oblivion, untouched by purpose, and still calls it progress. Dante wouldn’t put Somalia in Purgatorio, for it neither suffers with purpose nor acknowledges its sins, and knows nothing of the climb toward light.
And that limbo — Dante’s limbo — is a place of calm sorrow, souls neither punished nor redeemed, aware of what they lack yet unable to reach it. That is where Somalia resides: a nation that sees its failures dimly, yet its people hold to the comfort of imagined superiority, mistaking pride for direction. They live suspended between memory and denial, history and possibility. They wait, not because they must, but because waiting has become easier than change.
But limbo is not destiny. The same Dante who consigned souls to sorrow also believed that movement toward redemption begins with recognition. The African writers who saw their nations haunted by imitation spoke not of endurance but of awakening. Fanon called for a new self, purified in struggle. Ngũgĩ urged that the mind be freed, so that words might again serve truth. Cabral pleaded for a return to the source, to rebuild from within what colonization had emptied of soul. They all asked for the same courage — to face the ghosts, name them, and drive them out. Somalia cannot escape its haunting until it does the same.
Salvation will not come from donors or decrees, nor from those who mistake survival for progress. It will come from the few who refuse the performance — the generation that chooses truth over ritual, and light over shadow. When that day arrives, the haunting will end, and the country will stop performing its life and begin to live.
Isha Qarsoon
Email: Ishaqarsoon1@gmail.com