Dr Zakariya Weyrax

When knowledge is divorced from action, society learns to tolerate the intolerable — and power is at its most absolute when it convinces a people that their own hesitation is wisdom.

Right now, the talk is recognition. The performance is gratitude. And beneath it, unspoken but unmistakable, is unease. Across the Somali world, we have just witnessed something that violated our instincts: the ritualised celebration of a geopolitical transaction whose terms are unknown, whose benefactor carries unmistakable baggage, and whose long-term cost has not even been asked, let alone calculated. The applause came quickly. The praise came loudly. The questions did not come at all.

This is not how Somalis have historically engaged with power. Our instinct is scrutiny, not submission; caution, not carnival. We are a people slow to celebrate recognition and suspicious of benefactors bearing gifts. We are allergic to debt without terms. And yet, in public, we performed gratitude — while privately feeling something closer to humiliation.

The confusion is universal. In living rooms and group chats, the same question hangs in the air: What are we doing? We feel it — a deep, instinctual unease — right before we join the performance. To explain this dissonance, conspiracies bloom: secret payments, hidden agendas, external puppeteers. But the truth is more disturbing, and far older. This spectacle is not the cause of our sickness. It is the latest, loudest symptom. The real disease is not in a backroom deal; it is in our minds. It is a condition where we can know something is wrong, feel the danger in our bones, and yet perform the opposite with stunning public cohesion.

To understand this—to understand how a people can violate their own deepest instincts in broad daylight — you cannot start with politics. You must start with epistemology. You must understand how a society’s ability to know truth can be systematically separated from its permission to act on that knowledge.

This essay is that journey. It is the third in a sequence. The Empty Pedestal examined how authority became performance. Against Ambiguity confronted the moral hesitation that excuses obvious wrongs. Here, I will expose the single, root mechanism that makes all of this—including our current spectacle—possible. It is time to stop hiding behind ‘complexity.’ It is time to name the structure that has infiltrated us.

What follows is not a list of accusations. It is a single, slow argument. We will walk together from the intimate spaces of our lives—a phone call, a family dinner, a masjid—to this moment of national performance. By the end, the bizarre celebration will make perfect, tragic sense. You will see it not as an anomaly, but as the inevitable outcome of a structure thirty-five years in the making.

Allow me to guide you on a journey that begins with the confusion you feel now — watching behaviour that violates your instincts — and ends with the structure that trained you to override them. Before we proceed, let me begin by fixing the ground beneath our feet. There are two truths that must be held simultaneously — or nothing that follows will make sense.

First: Epistemology—how truth is recognised, how certainty is established, and how knowing is meant to govern action—is not a foreign or borrowed Western concept. The Qur’an repeatedly distinguishes between hearing and understanding, seeing and perceiving, knowing and acting. It condemns those who possess knowledge yet fail to act upon it, and warns against hearts that comprehend but do not understand. Knowledge is not neutral. It carries obligation. To know and not act is not intellectual failure; it is moral suspension. A society that breaks this link does not merely malfunction—it decays.

Second: The Somali people are not novices to knowledge. We descend from an ancient civilisation, remembered by the pharaohs as the Land of Punt, stretching back four to five thousand years. For millennia, we relied on ourselves—elders, clans, observation, memory, and moral discernment preserved across generations. Self-reliance was not ideology; it was survival. This matters, because it explains why what comes next worked. When a new professional class appeared claiming authority over knowledge, translation, and explanation, Somalis did not resist. We trusted them instinctively. We trusted them because we have always trusted knowledge—and those who present themselves as its carriers.

Hold these two truths together: knowledge carries moral obligation, and Somalis historically trusted knowledge.

Now, let us walk the line together.

The collapse of the Somali state did not only destroy institutions. It created a vacuum of explanation. Violence exploded, order vanished, and terror became daily life. The screams were unmistakable. They required no theory. Mothers mourned children. Elders lamented the absence of law. Young men learned that a gun could replace a future.

This was not complex. It was catastrophic. Foreign agencies arrived quickly. So did diplomats, NGOs, and humanitarian systems. But they could not understand the screams. They needed them translated. This is where the first rupture occurred. Somali professionals—initially translators, later analysts, eventually credentialed academics—stepped into this space. At first, their role was necessary. Someone had to explain Somalia to outsiders. But explanation quietly turned into interpretation, and interpretation into authority. Translation became power.

Read more: Why the Celebration Felt Wrong: The Epistemic Hijacking of Somali Instinct

Dr Zakariya Weyrax Warsame
Email:  Aden133@hotmail.com