Dr Zakariya Weyrax

For many years, I have returned to the same question, unable to leave it alone: why has Somalia’s collapse endured so long? Why has a people once so cohesive, so linguistically unified, so morally literate, remained suspended in fracture for more than three decades—long after other nations ravaged by civil war, genocide, or occupation have found some path, however imperfect, back to themselves?

We are often given familiar answers: colonial borders, foreign interference, clan politics, weak institutions. None of these are false. Yet none feel sufficient. They explain collapse, but not its persistence. They account for how we fell apart, but not why we have remained unable to reassemble.

Lately, I have begun to suspect that the deeper rupture lies elsewhere—not only in politics or governance, but in the disappearance of the shared imaginative life that once held us together. What if Somalia’s prolonged unravelling is also an aesthetic failure? What if we did not merely lose a state, but silenced the very forms through which Somalis once laughed together, learned together, and recognised themselves in one another?

Every society that survives catastrophe eventually turns—consciously or instinctively—to art: to theatre, folk song, literature, and story. These are not luxuries of peace; they are instruments of repair. Art allows a traumatised people to metabolise grief without turning on itself, to critique power without violence, and to recover a shared moral horizon even when institutions lie in ruins. Across history, intellectuals and states alike have understood this: art rebuilds the emotional architecture of a nation before its physical one.

Somalia, uniquely, moved in the opposite direction. In the aftermath of collapse, we did not merely lose our stages and studios—we abandoned them. The expressive, performed, and shared arts that once disciplined clan sentiment, mocked excess, and braided disparate lives into a single moral conversation fell silent. What remained was identity stripped of imagination, belief stripped of embodiment, and grievance left to echo without interruption.

Perhaps this, more than anything else, explains the durability of our fracture. A people who no longer see themselves together—who no longer hear their conscience sung, dramatised, and reflected back to them—will struggle to heal, no matter how many conferences are convened or constitutions drafted.

This was not always the Somali condition.

We were a people built by stories. Our borders were not merely lines on sand but verses in a poem—a geography mapped first in the imagination, then upon the earth. Our laws were not decrees but proverbs whispered from generation to generation—maahmaahyo that distilled justice into rhythm. Our history was not archived in libraries but performed in the cadence of the gabay and the movement of the dhaanto. We once understood a fundamental truth now half-forgotten: a civilisation is only as strong as the story it tells about itself.

Consider the maahmaah. These were not quaint sayings but the sharp, crystalline wisdom of a thousand years—an ethical and practical operating system. A dispute over grazing land could be resolved not with a lawyer but with a proverb: Ninkii geed dheer la mooday, ayaa hoos taagnaa—“A man perceived to be a tall tree, a figure of shelter and greatness, was in reality merely standing beneath one—borrowing stature, not possessing it.” In one line, it taught humility, discernment, and the illusion of borrowed power. Another: Aragti waa aqoon, aqoonna waa nolol—“Sight is knowledge, and knowledge is life”—contained a philosophy of being. Narrative was not separate from life; it was its logic.

And this genius was never carried by men alone. The Somali was so narratively advanced that it forged its own female poetic institution—buraanbur. This was not a decorative flourish of women’s gatherings; it was a civilisational achievement. Through buraanbur, Somali women celebrated, consoled, advised, chastised, recorded genealogy, and passed down entire moral worlds. A single chant from a mother could shame a warrior into courage or reconcile feuding relatives. A bride could receive a philosophy of womanhood through the verses sung around her. In many societies, women were expected to listen. In Somalia, they spoke—publicly, rhythmically, authoritatively. Very few civilisations in human history have woven women’s voices so deeply into the architecture of moral life. Fewer still have given women a poetic weapon of such precision and power.

This was the ecosystem in which the Somali pen moved with clarity—where words were not merely tools but vessels of a people’s conscience. The spoken, sung, and performed word carried moral weight, humour, rebuke, and aspiration all at once. That world has not vanished, but it has changed form; and we, as a people, often speak as though we no longer recognise its new shape.

This erosion coincided with a cataclysm that forced a desperate choice. When the Somali state collapsed, so too did the moral scaffolding that once held the nation upright. Out of that wreckage rose the only structure still standing—faith. It was the scholars, not the politicians, who brought coherence to a people bleeding from the inside. They spoke of repentance, order, and divine mercy when no other authority could. In a land where law had failed, the masjid became courthouse, school, and refuge.

For the first time in our history, vast numbers of Somalis found themselves scattered across foreign lands—surrounded by unfamiliar languages, values, and faiths. In that disorienting exile, religion became both anchor and armour. The scholars, fearing the slow erosion of belief amid alien cultures, prioritised faith over culture—an understandable and deeply human response to displacement and loss. The return to faith was not a rejection of modernity; it was an instinct for survival—the soul seeking the only shelter it could still trust.

Yet in that necessary return to the sacred, something quieter slipped away. The stage fell silent. The ruwaayad—that unique Somali form of poetic theatre, once used to teach virtue, mock vanity, and unite clans through shared laughter—drifted into suspicion. The national songs that once carried resolve, humour, and wisdom—that bridged soldier and shepherd—were cast aside as the language of heedlessness. In our effort to purify, we sterilised our culture and silenced what was noble in our own voice.

I remember this shift in my own home in the early 1990s. Our family, like so many others, would gather in the sitting room around the single television we owned, the blue glow flickering against lace curtains, a VHS player humming softly beneath it. We’d watch ruwaayado recorded on worn tapes, their spools stretched from overuse. We shared them with neighbours—I’d be sent to deliver one and return with another, a quiet ritual of exchange that bound the whole street together. My sisters would make popcorn, the scent of roasted kernels mingling with sweet, spiced tea. The room would grow warm, filled with the sound of chuckles and the sharp, knowing “Haa!” whenever a character delivered a particularly clever line. We’d sit cross-legged on the floor or lean against worn cushions, everyone talking over each other, laughing, pausing, rewinding—explaining the intricate geeraar and maahmaah we had just heard. In that room, I wasn’t simply being entertained; I was being educated—in language, in history, in the moral rhythm of my own people.

Then, new tapes arrived—recordings of religious muxaadaro from the Somali diaspora in Scandinavia and elsewhere. We watched them with the same devotion, finding discipline and renewal in their words. The scent of popcorn was slowly replaced by the serious quiet of focused listening. But I remember the precise moment the change became irreversible: we began to fast-forward through the singing parts of the old ruwaayad. The very scenes that had once taught us rhythm and joy were now deemed wasteful. Soon, the ruwaayad tapes disappeared entirely, returned to their cases and forgotten on a shelf, gathering dust beside old photo albums. The popcorn and tea remained, but the shared laughter—the communal decoding of our own culture—was gone.

To be clear, much of what faded then needed to fade. Many of those productions had absorbed habits and messages unworthy of a people seeking renewal. Somalia before the war had been open, expressive, liberal—a society that valued art as a mirror of morality. The Somali, free-minded and poetic by nature, learned through performance and story. The ruwaayad worked precisely because it made virtue visible—mocking arrogance, exposing greed, dramatising mercy in ways religious sermons could not. For a people governed by rhythm rather than rule, morality had to be sung before it could be obeyed.

But as society became more religiously conscious, it could no longer respond to that same form of moral theatre. The stage that once taught decency began to feel indecent. The Somali of today is not the Somali of the 1980s. The soul has changed—too devout for the art of yesterday, too human for the silence of today. The same ruwaayad that once stirred laughter and reflection would now provoke discomfort, even rejection. A society grown more conservative—more textual, more cautious of imagery—no longer recognises itself in the liberal mirrors of its past.

Yet this conservatism has not delivered the peace it promised. Literalism has not rekindled the moral imagination we lost. We have become a people disciplined in creed but starved of creative meaning.

Still, to judge that earlier generation too harshly would be unjust. After so much blood, noise became unbearable. The soul needed stillness; restraint became a kind of healing. A generation emerging from war reached instinctively for silence—for certainty, for order, for something unshakeable. The scholars guiding them were not suffocating culture; they were protecting faith. They feared, rightly, that in strange lands and alien tongues the fragile flame of belief might flicker out.

So they prioritised creed over culture—preservation over expression. It was an act of spiritual triage. But this necessary silence created a void not simply of sound, but of a certain kind of imagination. We deprived ourselves of the tools that translate virtue into shared feeling. The result was not greater piety, but a more brittle public mind. A people who cannot harmonise their voices in a shared art soon find it harder to dream together. And a people who cannot dream together will never build together. We became spiritually secure but civically sterile—unable to generate the collective narratives necessary to resurrect a state.

Which brings us to the present: a people too conservative for the old art and too human for pure literalism.

So what is the solution?

The answer is not a return to the 1980s, nor a plunge into iconoclastic austerity.

The answer is a new form of Somali art—one consistent with our renewed religious seriousness, yet faithful to our ancient need for story, rhythm, and symbolic moral teaching. A form where virtue is dramatised, not merely declared; where ethical principles are embodied in characters, dilemmas, and narrative tension; where religious consciousness enriches creativity rather than suffocating it.

A people cannot be held together by rules alone. They need imagination. They need shared mirrors. They need the beauty of their own voice speaking back to them.

The question that haunted the beginning of this reflection was one of time: why has our collapse endured so long? I now understand the answer is not found in the rubble of institutions, but in the silence we allowed to settle over our souls. A nation heals when its people can imagine themselves whole again. For thirty-five years, we have been trying to rebuild a state without first rebuilding the shared imagination that makes a state possible. We have drafted constitutions in a language of forgetting.

I remember the warmth of that sitting room, the flickering blue glow, the shared laughter that was my first education. That was not mere nostalgia; it was the operating system of a people. Its quiet disappearance was not an accident of history, but a choice we made in our collective trauma. We chose survival, and in doing so, we misplaced the very tool we needed to move beyond it—the performed, shared art through which a people recognises itself.

The path forward, then, is not first political. It is aesthetic. It is poetic. It begins where it was lost—in our own homes, in the stories we tell our children. It begins when I, and you, and the neighbour who shares our history, understand that to heal a nation, you must first give it back its story. For a nation, in the end, is not a set of borders or institutions. It is a people who share a story. And right now, we have no story. We only have a diagnosis.

The silent Somali pen is waiting. It is waiting for my hand, and for yours. It is not asking who broke the state. It is asking who is brave enough to write what comes after.