Somalia races to digitize Radio Mogadishu's crumbling archive before history vanishes

In a climate-controlled room in Mogadishu, thousands of reel-to-reel tapes sit stacked on steel shelves, each one a small fragment of Somalia's twentieth-century story. Some date back to the early 1950s. They contain news bulletins, speeches, music, and voices that once traveled across the nation's airwaves. They are also slowly dying.

Abdiqadir Geedi Robleh, an archivist at Radio Mogadishu, threads one of these reels onto an old tape machine, connects it to a computer, and records what it holds. When a love song by Mohamed Mooge Liban fills the room, Robleh is transported back to his youth. He is part of a small team working to digitize approximately 400,000 hours of broadcasts before the magnetic tape deteriorates beyond recovery. An expert assessment in April counted roughly 45,000 tapes and reels. More than 85 percent remain playable. Around one in ten has deteriorated with age. More than 5 percent has been destroyed or severely damaged. "This is the world's largest store of Somali language music, culture, dramas and everything else, and at the moment it is locked away from the public," Robleh told Al Jazeera. "We're working to preserve it but also open it up in future to the public."

Radio Mogadishu was founded in 1951 during the Italian colonial era and grew into Somalia's largest and most important public broadcaster. It initially transmitted in Italian and Somali before adding foreign language services—Swahili, Oromo, English, Arabic. In its heyday, it was among the most influential voices in East African media, reaching audiences as far as Tanzania, Ethiopia, and the Middle East. Its style of radical pan-African broadcasting echoed Radio Cairo in the Nasser years. With the exception of a brief period in the 1990s when a warlord seized control, it served as both a key news source for Somalis and audiences across the region and as a vital repository of the country's collective memory.

To understand why the archive matters, one must understand what radio once meant in Somali life. "Radio Mogadishu was arguably the preeminent media institution in post-independence Somalia," said Iman Mohamed, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and historian of Somalia. "In a society that prizes orality above the written word, radio was uniquely effective at creating a common public sphere through which ordinary people could feel bonded to one another and to a shared sense of nationhood." The station dominated the soundscape of urban Somalia. If you were a musician, poet, playwright, or producer, Radio Mogadishu was the platform you wanted. It made Somalia's stars. Many BBC Somali journalists who went on to distinguished careers first cut their teeth there. Hassan Dahir, a former journalist at the station, recalled that for years it was virtually the only source of news for millions. "Its reach was so extensive that even nomadic herders followed events as far afield as the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights Movement," he said.

Under Siad Barre, the military officer who seized power in a 1969 coup and ran Somalia for two decades under a self-styled socialist government, the station became an instrument of state ideology. It mixed news, drama, and religious programming with nationalist and anti-colonial content. The station beamed pan-African songs like "Oh Africa, still asleep" by Halimo Khalif Magool, which urged the continent's inhabitants to awaken and take charge of their own destinies. Mahamud Abdullahi Sangub's "Reject the Color of Imperialism" was another popular song of the era, with lyrics declaring: "Africans listen to each other, reject the colour of imperialism, reject it, reject it, reject it!" Its news coverage focused on anti-colonial wars in Mozambique, the struggle against apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. One of the station's most important projects was supporting Somalia's mass literacy campaign, when the government sent students to rural areas in 1972 to teach the newly developed Somali script. The campaign led to a dramatic increase in literacy across the country. The station also became deeply entangled with Somalia's regional foreign policy, dedicating airtime to Ethiopia's marginalized ethnic communities and armed rebel movements, particularly those from Eritrea. Among its most notable initiatives were broadcasts in Oromo and Sidama—the first-ever radio programmes in either language, both of which had been suppressed for many years in Ethiopia under policies that privileged Amharic.

The station's role in Somali life has shrunk dramatically since. The collapse of the central government in 1991 broke the state's grip on broadcasting, opening space for private radio, television, and online outlets. It has lost most of its foreign-language programming and much of its revolutionary edge. The Somali state remains constrained by limited resources as it rebuilds after decades of conflict. In November 2021, al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-affiliated armed group waging a long rebellion against Somalia's government, assassinated the station's then-director, Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled, in a suicide bombing in Mogadishu.

The effort to preserve the archives has gathered new momentum this year. In early June, Somalia's information ministry and the UNESCO regional office for Eastern Africa brought archivists from across the country to a workshop in Mogadishu, aimed at eventually registering the contents with UNESCO's Memory of the World programme. "Protecting this knowledge isn't just relevant for Somalia, but it is relevant for everyone," said Guilherme Canela, a senior UNESCO official overseeing the project. Abdi Jeite, the station's director, says the digitization drive began as early as 2012 but has been held back for years by lack of resources. By his estimate, only approximately 10 percent of the archive has so far been converted. "We've got some new tools, and more training for our archivists, but there is still a lot of support needed," he says. Some tapes were damaged in an electrical fire in 2018. Others were lost during fighting in 1992, when US forces battled Somali militias in the streets of Mogadishu. During the worst of the civil war, police colonel Abshir Hashi Ali risked his life to prevent the contents of the archives from being looted, running back with the aim of conveying to Somalis the wealth stored there. Iman Mohamed, the historian, says that with the civil war now in its third decade, preserving the archive has become more urgent. "The destruction of archives during the civil war has left an enormous gap in Somalia's documentary record, which means that anyone researching the country's history is almost entirely reliant on foreign archives or oral history," she said. "That is especially problematic for young people. Recovering what we can matters for the youth who will never have known the world that Radio Mogadishu broadcast in its heyday."