In 1331, famed Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta arrived in Mogadishu, on the Banaadiri coast, in what is today Somalia. Battuta came across the richest, most powerful port in East Africa, at the fore of the Indian Ocean trade system, then the centrepiece of the global economy. Anchored off the coast, he was greeted by "boatloads of young men … each carrying a covered platter of food to present to one of the merchants on board," writes Ross Dunn in The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century. Such renowned hospitality welcomed seafarers and merchants from across the Arabian peninsula, Persia, India, Southeast Asia, and even China.
Mogadishu derives
from "Maq'ad-i-Shah", Farsi - one of the lingua francas of Indian
Ocean merchants and traders - for "Seat of the King". Its local name,
Xamar, was given by Arab traders, after the Arabic word "ahmar" for
the red soil along Somalia's coastline. The East African coast's role as
multicultural crossroad imbued Somali culture with the traditions of its
biggest trading partners, leaving an indelible mark on language, cuisine,
dress, worldview, and, revealingly - its music.
Indian scales,
Yemeni chord progressions, Sumatran melodies, and the rhythms of Bantu peoples
just to the south created a sound that reveals not only the intermingling of
Somalia's past but of the world's. That rich legacy could be heard in a newly
recovered archive of more than 10,000 cassettes and master recordings we came
across last year in Hargeisa, Somaliland. Radio operators hid this music,
recorded in the 1970s, until 1987, to protect it during the bombardment ordered
by Somalia's then military dictator.
Since Battuta's
arrival, the subsequent sultanates, democratic republics, and collapsed states
occupying continental Africa's longest coastline have suffered often at the
hands of others - Portuguese warships, colonial dealmakers, great power games
during the Cold War, Ethiopian and Kenyan armies, and the US' drones. As a
result, Somali culture has registered little in the global imagination.
The two-decade civil war that began in 1991,
preceded by heavy aerial bombardment of the north three years before,
eviscerated Somalia's cultural revival of the 1970s. A prolific music scene,
both live and recorded, and theatre were the forgotten casualties of the
collapse.
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