A Nation where Poetry shapes Politics
In Hargeysa Somaliland Poets have captured, airwaves, Facebook and Cattle herding, women weaving mats, and hut building to spark National politics for change and calling out corruption.
It was a dark February evening when a young Somali math professor posted a poem on his Facebook page. In keeping with the tradition of his ancestors, who maintained an oral culture until only recently, he spoke it aloud in a rhythmic cadence:
“When I realized
there is neither
wells dug for you,
nor rescuers on the way
and the leaders elected to serve the nation have corrupted the resources;”Then he uploaded the recording to his profile.
In Somaliland, poems were often recited to pass the time by men leading camel trains and by women weaving mats to cover their domed huts. Like the lives of the nomadic people who spoke them, the poems were cyclical. When their speakers moved, they brought their animals and their poetry. At each stop along this annual migration, the women would reuse the verses as they built their thatched homes and the men would recite them as they moved their herds to water.
Current Somaliland poets have harnessed this into National p…
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