The Making of Somalia’s Political Class, 1925–1960: Colonial Mediation and the Selection of Leadership-
Part I
By Abdisaid M. Ali
This essay is the first in a three part series on three decisive episodes in Somalia’s modern history and the conduct of the leaders, politicians, and policymakers who shaped each of them. The first examines the making of the political class from 1925 to independence. The second turns to the independence era from 1960 to 1990 and asks how that class governed in practice. The third examines the post-collapse era and the reconstitution of political authority under conditions of prolonged fragmentation. Taken together, the three parts study the Somali state across successive historical orders through the evolving relationship between leadership, institutions, sovereignty, and the conduct of politics.
The central argument is clear. The political class that stood at independence in 1960 arose through colonial mediation, selective access to institutions, and the elevation of a narrow intermediary stratum into public authority. Decolonization then transferred office faster than it consolidated governing depth. The result was a state that entered independence with juridical sovereignty, a defined national purpose, and a politically conscious elite, while authority, institutions, and power had yet to be brought into a stable governing relationship. That imbalance entered the republic at birth and shaped the course that followed.
The period between 1925 and 1960 therefore established the terms of Somalia’s modern political order. It is often presented as a progression from resistance to nationalism and from nationalism to independence. That sequence captures the visible arc. The deeper process concerned the restructuring of power. Earlier centers of Somali authority were broken or absorbed. Colonial administrations, towns, courts, commercial nodes, and schools became the new sites through which political relevance was organized. These developments closed a longer cycle of Somali political authority rooted in sultanates, religious mobilization, and localized systems of command. By the mid 1920s, the political field had been reorganized around colonial supremacy.
This reorganization removed rivals and redirected governing experience. Members of ruling families, scribes, mediators, and others seasoned in governance moved into Mogadishu and other towns. They brought practical experience in taxation, diplomacy, adjudication, and political organization. The future political class took shape where two inheritances met: colonial institutions and the residual statecraft of earlier Somali polities, now subordinated to a new hierarchy of power.
By 1925, the road to authority ran through colonial offices, municipalities, trading centers, schools, and administrative routine. Power gathered in towns and institutions, where recognition by the colonial state became the gateway to influence. This changed the meaning of advancement. It defined where authority could be reached, what skills carried value, and how status could be converted into office.
Out of this setting emerged the intermediary. Clerks, teachers, junior officials, traders with administrative access, and early political organizers linked local society to state structures. Their importance lay in proximity, fluency, and translation. They could move between vernacular life and bureaucratic procedure, between local standing and official recognition. Those who gained access to schools, colonial languages, towns, and the habits of administration found the path upward open before them. These opportunities reached some regions and communities far more than others. Over time, they produced a small intermediary class with the confidence, connections, and official standing to become the future leadership of the country.
Modern Somali nationalism took organized form within this same corridor. The Somali Youth League, founded in 1943, became the principal vehicle through which political mobilization was articulated in national terms. It gave structure, discipline, and emotional range to the idea of unity across divided Somali territories. Its historical importance extended beyond rhetoric. It selected, organized, and elevated a cohort already moving through the institutional spaces opened by colonial rule. Nationalism gave that cohort a moral horizon and a public claim larger than office itself.
The trusteeship period turned this corridor into a pipeline. Independence required a governing apparatus. Schools expanded. Administrative training widened. Representative institutions took shape. A generation learned the practical work of files, budgets, assemblies, procedures, and political organization. Somalia reached independence with a cadre able to staff ministries, speak the language of government, and occupy public office.
The transfer, however, carried a clear limit. What passed to the new elite was sovereignty in formal outline more than sovereignty in full governing substance. Ministries could be staffed, assemblies convened, and flags raised, while the deeper alignment between authority, institutions, and power still awaited consolidation. This is the strategic core of the problem. Juridical sovereignty can be granted by law and recognition. Governing sovereignty grows through revenue, regular administration, disciplined coercion, territorial reach, and accepted hierarchy. The first political class saw the nation more readily than it saw the state as a practical necessity. It treated independence as culmination before it treated administration as destiny.
This mattered because a latecomer state survives through routines that come slowly and at political cost. Revenue must reach society through rules rather than episodic bargaining. Coercion must become public, disciplined, and subordinate to law. Administration must extend beyond the capital in regular form. Authority must rest on working institutions as well as symbolism and recognition. Somalia approached independence with real gains in the language and symbols of sovereignty and only partial consolidation of the machinery that would sustain it.
By the late 1950s, the conversion of administrative access into political authority was well underway. Party structures provided the vehicle. Representative institutions provided the stage. Nationalism provided legitimacy. Those already positioned within the corridor translated institutional familiarity into public authority. Their biographies differed in detail, but the pattern was clear. They combined religious instruction with partial formal education. They acquired enough literacy to operate within administrative settings. They moved through clerical work, commerce, municipal responsibility, party organization, or public service before entering national prominence.
The political field in which they rose was broader than later nationalist memory allowed. The Somali Youth League gave nationalism its main language, but other formations also pressed regional claims, agrarian interests, and demands for a fairer share of power in the state taking shape. For many constituencies, politics combined liberation from colonial rule with protection of land, autonomy, and social standing within the state to come. The struggle therefore moved both outward against colonial domination and inward toward the future distribution of authority.
By 1960, the political class already carried the imprint of how it had been made. It was more urban than rural, more at home in offices and institutions than across the wider social field, and more fluent in the language and habits of administration than in the full political life of the country. Its nationalism carried conviction. Its social base remained concentrated.
It is here that the sovereignty question comes fully into view. Somalia entered independence with a political class able to claim the nation, while the governing settlement beneath that claim was still being assembled. Sovereignty in such a state has several layers. Recognition is one. Working order is another. Ministries must function as organs of rule. Courts must command obedience. Fiscal systems must operate through law. Citizens must encounter the state as regularity rather than interruption. Authority must hold under pressure through the integration of security, justice, administration, and revenue. The political class formed between 1925 and 1960 entered independence with meaningful gains in administrative competence and nationalist purpose, while the deeper layers of sovereignty still required consolidation.
From that point, the political economy of centralization became clearer. Where governing depth is shallow, the center attracts intense competition. Office becomes a source of leverage before it matures into an impersonal instrument of rule. Control over appointments, customs, aid, security commands, contracts, and external recognition gives the center immediate value. This helps explain why Somalia’s later crises so often revolved around the center even when its effective reach remained narrow.
The same structure also helps explain the recurring suspension of institutions. Where authority depends heavily on the center while governing depth remains thin, leaders face strong incentives to bypass procedure in the name of urgency, unity, or necessity. Rules begin to look expendable when they obstruct concentration. Institutions are asked to carry more authority than their social and fiscal foundations can sustain. The temptation to substitute command for settlement grows accordingly. This pattern belonged to later decades, but its logic was already present in the way sovereignty was first assembled.
The geopolitical posture of the new republic followed from the same formation. Somalia entered independence with real assets. It possessed administrative familiarity, political articulation, and a strong national purpose. It also carried clear limits. Its institutional base was thin, its fiscal and bureaucratic reach uneven, and its integration across regions incomplete. The first political class therefore faced a strategic task larger than routine decolonization. It had to consolidate a governable republic, integrate differently formed territories, and sustain a wider Somali national claim at the same time.
These tasks pulled in the same direction politically, but not institutionally. Every gain in symbolic national breadth placed further pressure on administrative depth. Every effort at internal consolidation required restraint, sequencing, and compromise. This was the central ends and means problem of the independence moment. The republic sought to build a state and carry a wider national mission simultaneously.
Somalia did not enter this environment as a passive object of stronger powers. Its leaders worked to navigate it through diplomacy, regional argument, and selective external alignment. They carried the Somali question into international forums, framed it through anti-colonial principle and self-determination, and sought to convert formal independence into wider strategic leverage. This reflected real political skill and national purpose. It also exposed a central tension. External activism advanced faster than the institutional consolidation required to sustain it. The republic showed agility abroad while the internal foundations of statehood were still being laid.
Comparison with neighboring African states clarifies the scale of this burden. Ethiopia offers the clearest regional contrast. It retained formal sovereignty and converted the imperial age into territorial gain. Under Menelik II, Ethiopian authority advanced into Oromo, Afar, Sidama, and Somali lands while European powers partitioned the continent, fixed borders, and affirmed the arrangements that served their interests. Menelik gave this expansion its own political language, presenting Ethiopia as a Christian island in a surrounding sea of pagans. In the twentieth century, Addis Ababa strengthened this external alignment through strategic utility.
The United States established its radio facility at Asmara in 1943, later formalized as Kagnew Station, and Ethiopia’s position in American security planning deepened from there. By 1951, American thinking on the Ogaden region was already being shaped in part by Sinclair Petroleum’s Ethiopian oil interests. Ethiopia thus entered the mid twentieth century from a far stronger strategic base. It possessed an established center of authority, borders that carried external recognition, powerful international support, and a wider order prepared to protect that settlement. Kenya entered independence with a different advantage, a denser colonial inheritance and a heavier fiscal and administrative apparatus. Tanganyika aligned nationalist organization more closely with territorial consolidation. Sudan shared more of Somalia’s problem of a narrow elite operating across a wider uneven field. Somalia’s distinct burden lay in combining stronger ethnonational cohesion with a thinner institutional base and a revisionist horizon that exceeded its state capacity.
These comparisons also illuminate the alternatives. One path would have treated independence as consolidation first, extending fiscal reach, administrative penetration, security discipline, and interregional settlement before pressing the wider national question with full force. Another would have accepted a looser internal political architecture in order to preserve breadth through negotiation. The path with the greatest political appeal, however, fused national purpose with immediate statehood. It offered moral clarity and strategic direction. It also placed heavy demands on institutions still being assembled.
Somalia retained agency throughout this process. Colonial rule shaped the field, but Somali actors interpreted, inhabited, and acted within the possibilities available to them. They formed parties, assembled coalitions, set the hierarchy of national priorities, and invested the future state with a distinctly Somali political purpose. This history therefore reflects more than the residue of colonial rule. It is equally a history of Somali agency, Somali strategic judgment, and Somali choices made within the limits of a constrained inheritance.
That is the deeper significance of the period from 1925 to independence. It was the interval in which Somali leadership was recast from dispersed authority into a structured political class shaped by colonial mediation, residual indigenous experience, and nationalist mobilization. The state that followed reflected that process. Its strengths lay in the seriousness, competence, and national clarity of its leadership. Its vulnerabilities followed from the narrow and uneven pathways through which that leadership had been produced, from the incentives attached to the center, and from the partial consolidation of governing sovereignty beneath juridical independence.
Somalia entered independence with juridical sovereignty, a politically conscious leadership, and a compelling national horizon. What remained in formation was the state itself as a regular instrument of rule. The first political class could claim the nation and staff the state. Its harder burden was to build the routines that make authority durable. That work required revenue, administration, coercive discipline, hierarchy, and institutional settlement. It required seeing the state as the practical condition of sovereignty as much as the symbolic reward of independence. The formative period locked in a recurring tension. National ambition moved faster than institutional consolidation, and control of the center carried greater immediate value than the slower work of extending rule bound authority across the republic.
A fuller understanding of these tensions belongs to the independence era itself. The period from 1960 to 1990, before state collapse, was the decisive test of the republic. It was in those years that one could see how this political class used power, whether institutions grew into real instruments of rule or began to thin under pressure, and how far the sovereignty gained at independence was turned into a functioning state. In that sense, these three decades were not just another phase in Somali history. They were the years in which modern Somalia was made, strained, and ultimately revealed.
Across those three decades, the founding generation faced the burdens that begin once political victory has been secured. Independence had to be turned into government. Authority had to extend beyond Mogadishu. Power had to be turned into institutions. National ambition had to be brought into line with governing capacity. The republic had to maintain political cohesion while centralization deepened, rivalries sharpened, war expanded the claims of necessity, and power gathered ever more tightly at the center.
These were years of real possibility, but they were also the years in which the burdens of rule began to accumulate. The generation that inherited the republic entered office with intelligence, conviction, and a serious sense of national purpose. It soon discovered that national purpose alone could not carry a state through the hard disciplines of government. It faced, however, a harder political landscape than its early confidence fully allowed for. Yet rule demanded more than purpose. It required patience, administrative depth, fiscal reach, and institutions strong enough to restrain those who held them. It was in this period that the strengths of the founding generation were tested and its limits became visible. The deeper character of the Somali state emerged in the process.
The next part follows that trajectory through civilian rule, military government, regional conflict, and the gradual weakening of the institutional foundations on which the republic depended. It is in that period that both the promise and the vulnerability of the Somali state can be seen most clearly.
Abdisaid M. Ali
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Abdisaid is the chairperson of Lomé Peace and Security Forum and Former Somalia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Somalia. X:@4rukun
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