By Abdisaid M. Ali

In recent months Somalis have again heard themselves spoken of with open contempt, in the crude language of Donald Trump and in tones that echo Churchill and other colonial officials who once described Africans as subjects to be ruled. The words change, but the posture does not. It treats Somalis as a problem to be managed rather than a people with a long history of work, trade and self government. The most serious answer to that attitude is not anger. It is knowing our own history and doubling down on the work of building a republic that serves its people.

Somali children and teenagers are coming of age in a country that uses most of its energy just to stay afloat. Public debate turns on security, elections, aid and jobs. These concerns matter, but beneath them lies a harder question. Will the next generation inherit only a fragile apparatus in Mogadishu, or will it also inherit the historical understanding and discipline needed to turn that apparatus into a functioning republic.

History is often treated as background. In schools it appears as a list of dates. In politics it becomes competing narratives. Yet history is one of the few instruments that allows a society to judge itself. It shows how institutions were created, how they faltered and how earlier generations carried burdens so that others might live with greater possibility. That knowledge produces humility and gratitude, the attitudes that make reform sustainable.

History also explains why Somali statehood has been so demanding. Many societies took centuries to extend administration, develop taxation and negotiate authority across their territory. Somalia attempted this sequence in compressed time. The structure could not bear the load. Surviving institutions often struggle to reach beyond major towns. Security forces remain fragmented and political authority leans heavily on personal networks rather than predictable rules. A people with more than a thousand years of movement, scholarship, trade and poetry should know this longer story if it wishes to understand why its modern state looks the way it does.

This is why arguments over federal design, revenue, natural resources and security reform are not technical quarrels. They are efforts to restart the basic work of building a state that can govern its territory. Without historical perspective, each administration repeats familiar errors. Commands exceed capacity. Local autonomy lacks structure. Political competition proceeds without agreed rules. Security campaigns ignore earlier lessons.

The rise of the Somali Youth League shows what clarity and organisation can achieve. Formed in 1943 as a small club, it became the backbone of the independence movement. Its founders refused to organise politics through clan identity and spoke instead of a single Somali nation. They carried mobilisation far beyond Mogadishu, building branches across Somali regions and linking local grievances to global anticolonial currents. They then used this organisation to shape the trusteeship and secure a timetable for independence. By the mid nineteen fifties the trusteeship authorities could no longer govern without Somali cooperation. Institutions opened, elections followed and in 1960 power passed to leaders whose legitimacy came from years of work among ordinary people. Thirteen young men proved what disciplined purpose can do.

Somalia’s first president, Aden Abdulle Osman, absorbed these lessons. He warned that rulers with colonial instincts would betray the citizen and insisted that the state belongs to the people who inhabit it. Institutions decay when leaders treat them as private property.

History gives proportion to these warnings. Somalia has lived through partition, war, state collapse, famine and repeated external interventions. Young people often know these events only as names. Every society has its problems. Recognising what past generations lived through does not romanticise the past. It places today’s pressures in context and keeps attention on the work ahead. The present becomes a difficult chapter, not an endless crisis.

Historical context must be approached with discipline. It requires seeing the wider picture, recognising where interests collide and building consensus where disagreements exist. When internal conflicts harden, external actors move easily into the gaps. Somali politicians should be able to reason together, settle differences through deliberation and take decisions that allow citizens to live in peace and trust that justice is possible. History also shows that those who trade their identity for foreign favour stand on weak ground. They may gain temporary advantage, but they lose the legitimacy on which authority rests. No society honours those who serve outside agendas at the expense of their own.

Historical literacy also protects a country from quieter forms of manipulation. Political projects often enter through language. The terminology introduced by the TPLF led EPRDF government in the nineteen nineties, which labelled Somalis inside Ethiopia as “ye Somali hizib” or people who speak Somali, had no roots in Somali political tradition. It was crafted to reduce a historic people to a linguistic category. When Somali politicians repeat such phrases without reflection, they accept a frame designed to weaken Somali nationhood. It is even more alarming when would be leaders at home speak of“dadka af Soomaaliga ku hadla” as if Somalis were simply language users rather than a people with a shared political destiny. For anyone seeking the highest office in the land, that habit of speech comes close to dereliction.

History also shows the danger of concentrating civic understanding in a small circle. When only a few people know how institutions were built and how they function, speculation grows and trust weakens. That divide is the place where wider civic understanding can give the political order real stability. Expanding historical knowledge is not a scholarly luxury. It is part of the practical work of building a state that can withstand pressure and hold together. Citizens who know their history are harder to divide, easier to mobilise for worthy causes and quicker to recognise when something violates the national bargain.

Somalia’s story is not only one of collapse. It includes episodes of real civic capacity. After independence, leaders debated constitutional design and foreign policy with seriousness. In the nineteen seventies literacy campaigns built a shared public culture. During the years without central authority, communities organised markets, schools, courts and local security. Today teachers, nurses, traders, engineers and migrants sending remittances keep daily life moving when formal institutions fall short. The Somali diaspora is fully part of that history. Its skills, remittances and ideas have carried Somali resilience across continents. All of this is part of the good work of Somalia.

To build on that work, history must be treated as strategic knowledge. Schools and universities should prepare students to grapple with the central problems of public order. How did late forming states build reliable taxation. How did they unify armed groups. When did federal arrangements stabilise politics and when did they deepen division. What happens when public office becomes the main road to private wealth. Citizens must also understand their own role. A state cannot be rebuilt by spectators. It requires people who pay taxes honestly, insist on standards, vote, organise and defend the commons.

Media and civic forums can support this by telling the national story through real lives rather than abstractions. People remember choices, burdens and consequences. Told in that way, history becomes vivid and practical.

For leaders, seriousness about history should guide speech and decision. Borrowed concepts that weaken Somali identity should be treated with care. Policies should be measured against what experience already shows. Before reshaping an institution or launching a campaign, leaders should ask what earlier efforts achieved, why they failed or endured and what they demanded from ordinary citizens. A politician who casually undermines Somali identity either fails to grasp the stakes or chooses to advance other people’s projects at the expense of his own society.

For young Somalis, history widens the horizon of a meaningful life. It ties ambition to a longer arc of struggle and achievement and invites them to be builders of institutions, not only critics of their weaknesses. The republic will be shaped by the work they choose to do. That work begins with naming injustice without hesitation, crafting solutions that can stand in the real world and forming coalitions strong enough to turn ideas into law, action, and practice. It also requires something quieter yet decisive: standing with your people, strengthening your community and helping to build institutions that endure long after you are gone.

History matters for Somalia because it cuts through illusion, deepens gratitude and sharpens judgment. History clarifies who built, who betrayed, who bore the cost and who imagined better. It calls this generation to learn without living in the past, to repair what is broken instead of circling around blame, and to help build a future more dignified than the present. For a country still completing the essential tasks of statehood, that clarity is not optional. It is the foundation of responsible citizenship and the beginning of any serious national revival.

Abdisaid M. Ali
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Abdisaid is the chairperson of Lomé Peace and Security Forum, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and Former National Security Advisor, Somalia. X account @4rukun