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Begin New Search Political Geography Somalia Journal Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies

1. Global Remittances: Update on the UK-Somali Corridor

Author:
Mohamed Aden Hassan and Giulia Liberatore
Publication Date:
01-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
In May 2013 Barclays Bank in the UK announced it was shutting down the accounts of four Somali Money Service Businesses (MSBs) includ- ing Dahabshiil, the largest remittance company operating in the Somali regions. Following international uproar, and a Somali diaspora-led grassroots campaign, the UK government took on the task of setting up an Action Group on Cross Border Remittances and a Somali-UK Safer Corridor Pilot Project with the aim of finding a durable solution to the problem. Two years later, however, the Safer Corridor Project has collapsed. Legal remittance flows persist, albeit in a fragile and precarious environment. This paper provides a brief update on the Safer Corridor Initiative, its challenges, and how the money transfer sector has been adapting to the process.
Topic:
International Cooperation, International Trade and Finance, Diaspora, and Legal Theory
Political Geography:
Africa, United Kingdom, Europe, and Somalia

2. Economic Recovery in Somalia

Author:
Timothy Wilson
Publication Date:
01-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
There were high hopes for a brighter future. After more than two decades of conflict, political uncertainty, multiple droughts and Soma- lia’s worst famine in sixty years, the landscape began to change. The Federal Government lost its transitional status and became officially of State, John Kerry. It appeared that the recovery was not just political. Economic for- tunes were improving as well. Trading activity began to increase again. Shops reopened, rising numbers of diaspora started return- ing and investment firms began opening in Mogadishu. The national post service resumed operations. The Central Bank Act was passed, which simultaneously gave the institution a stronger mandate as well 3 as preclude it from lending to the Government. A veritable construc- tion boom kicked off in Mogadishu, the city received its first ATM cash machine and in June 2015, an agreement between MasterCard and a Somali bank launched the first ever domestic issuance of debit cards. The Wall Street Journal wrote of ‘glimmers of hope’4 while Afri- can Development Bank wrote of a ‘turning point’ due to the ‘positive political and security developments as well as the commitment of the international community.’5 Emerging from the clamour of countless conferences, consultations, summits and high-level meetings, a belief was emerging that this time, something was different. This time, Soma- lia was recovering. Or was it? What turn did Somalia take? As the Federal Government approaches its fifth year, new developments have raised concern over the trajectory and pace of progress. The Prime Minister was dismissed by a no-confidence motion in December 2014. The new Prime Minister, Mr Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmake, took three attempts to success- fully appoint a new cabinet endorsed by parliament. Concerns about corruption have threatened the steady flow of development finance. High profile attacks by Al Shabaab, both within Somalia and beyond, have raised questions about whether the organisation can be con- tained. Meanwhile, instability in Yemen has led to large numbers of refugees arriving into Somalia. It seems timely, therefore, to reassess the pace of progress and trajectory of recovery in Somalia. More than that, it is essential to examine whether economic recovery is occurring at the same pace and align- ment with political and social recovery. If this is not the case, as we will argue, peace-building gains may be temporary. The roots of conflict are grown in the fertile soil of economic desperation. The contribution of this article is to provide an overview of economic recovery in Somalia that is largely absent from the academic litera- ture. We collate and summarise the most recent quantitative statistics available and match these against qualitative information, including government reports and economic analysis. Our primary conclusion is a positive one; for the first time in more than two decades, Soma- lia’s economy is finally beginning to recover. Growth has returned. New market opportunities are being generated. The trade structure is diversifying and confidence is rising among investors, the diaspora and donors. To be clear, this trajectory is fragile. Political uncertainties and the looming arrival of oil exploration are threats that we discuss in this regard. Nonetheless, our primary thesis is that the five years since the establishment of the Federal Government has been, on balance, a positive period for economic reconstruction in Somalia. Our paper is structured as follows. We first make the case for the importance of economic development despite the massive social and political challenges that prevail in Somalia. We then outline the path- way to recovery that has been delineated by the Federal Government. We assess progress along this route and then identify some of the major threats to further progress.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Foreign Direct Investment, and Recovery
Political Geography:
Africa and Somalia

3. Stability and Security Danish Somali Remittance Corridor Case Study

Author:
Danielle Cotter and Tracey Durner
Publication Date:
01-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
The vast majority of Somalis who have remained in their country con- tinue to rely on remittance money sent from abroad. Although smaller waves of immigration have occurred for many years, prolonged political and economic turmoil coupled with periods of violence and humanitarian crisis have caused the number of Somali immigrants to spike in the last twenty years. This population outflow has resulted in an extensive diaspora network across the globe, with communities established across the Greater Horn of Africa, the Gulf States, North America, and Europe. Estimates on the size of the Somali diaspora range from 1–1.5 million people globally,2 or approximately 14 percent of Somalia’s total population. These diaspora communities have traditionally remained actively engaged on Somali political and economic developments from their adopted countries. One of the diaspora’s primary ties to the homeland comes in the form of remittances—money that is sent on a regular basis to family and friends in Somalia. These funds have often been called a lifeline for the Somali people, covering the costs of needs such as food, education, and health care. Although the exact scale of remittance flows is difficult to pinpoint, estimates have ranged from $750 million to $1.6 billion annually and these funds account for nearly 60 percent of the Somali recipients’ average annual incomes.
Topic:
Security, Diaspora, Political stability, and Immigrants
Political Geography:
Africa and Somalia

4. (Re)claiming the Body of the Somali Woman in Nuruddin Farah’s From a Crooked Rib

Author:
Helmi Ben Meriem
Publication Date:
01-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Nuruddin Farah was born in 1945 in Baidoa, west of Mogadishu. In 1976, he was declared a persona non grata by the Somali president and dictator Siad Barre, who banished Farah into exile because his writings were seen as a rigorous and harsh critique of Barre, especially four of his early eight novels, which attacked the dictatorship in Somalia. However, Farah’s fiction not only attacks the dictatorship in Somalia, but it also criticizes the country’s most cherished traditions, values, and beliefs. For example, in his first novel From a Crooked Rib (1970), he breaks the homosexuality taboo in Somalia by questioning the inabil- ity to think of sex outside of the paradigm of heterosexuality, and in some of his later novels, he brings in the issues of incest, pedophilia, bestiality, and murder. Farah is one prominent figure of Anglophone literature in Africa, along with Achebe, and Soyinka. He is also con- sidered as the next most likely African Anglophone writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature after the Nigerian Wole Soyinka in 1986 and the South African Doris Lessing in 2007. Farah is described, among other things, as the “gift from Africa to contemporary world literature” (Bardolph, “On Nuruddin” 121). Farah’s fiction extends over more than eleven novels and other fictive and non-fictive writings. Most criticism of his fiction focuses mainly on four issues: the writing about Somalia in exile, the intertex- tuality between his fiction and other writers, the poetics of Farah’s fic- tion, and the feminist aspects of his fiction and how it presents a new image of Somalia. Indeed, one of the most interesting readings of Far- ah’s fiction is a gender-based one; the authenticity, with which Farah tackles the issues of womanhood and gender has pushed some of his readers to think of him as a woman, even sending him letters address- ing him as “she.” In this respect, the Nigerian scholar J. I. Okonkwo has argued that Farah is one of few others who have “done the greatest justice to female existence in his writing” (217). In a comparison estab- lished by Okonkwo, Soyinka is seen as depicting women as either a disguised or undisguised prostitute, Achebe depicting women as an appendage to men, and Farah depicting women simply as women, with all the variations and at times contradictions (216). Farah’s feminist attitudes have given him the title of “Africa’s first feminist male writer” by Kirsten Hoist Petersen (249). Indeed, Farah is well aware of his feminist attitudes; he states in his essay “A View of Home From the Outside” that he is interested in those denied their rights, be it women or men, and in the struggle behind it (qtd. in Okonkwo 217). Eventually, the women in Farah’s fiction become instruments to reconstruct Somalia and to reshape society by giving a new meaning to womanhood. In his fiction, women’s struggle for freedom and for the right to voice themselves become an allegory for a nation in search of its voice. New womanhood becomes interchange- able with a new Somalia, and eventually, Somalia becomes once more the mother, as opposed to its status as a father-land in a dictatorial system. His first novel, From a Crooked Rib, seen by Richard Dowden as “a dazzling spark” of light in the dark tunnel of silencing women (Intro- duction, vii), could be regarded as a feminist manifesto. If we were to describe this novel, we would resort to a line from “The Rights of Women” a poem by Anna Laetitia Barbauld: “Injured Woman! Rise, assert thy right” (28). From a Crooked Rib is a third person omniscient narrative about the story of Ebla, a Somali woman defying her society and escaping her family, who were forcing her into an arranged mar- riage. This novel, with its genuine depiction and voicing of oppressed women, has been widely read and acclaimed, and studied as an authentic representation of the Somali society. This paper aims at read- ing From a Crooked Rib from a Foucauldian perspective in order to highlight the forces that shape the lives of Somali women. The empha- sis will be on the relationship between the discourses used to contain the Somali woman and her body. We will try to set a link between the different discourses and the body within the dialectics of writing/(un) writing and silencing/voicing. Thus, this paper is divided into two major parts: first, a concise overview of the Foucauldian approach to discourse and power, and second, an examination of the different discourses that govern the body of the Somali woman. The second part will root the Foucauldian approach in a gender-related reading and will be divided into two sub-parts: the writing and the un-writing of the woman body.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Women, Literature, and Sexuality
Political Geography:
Africa and Somalia

5. Magool: The Inimitable Nightingale of Somali Music

Author:
Bashir Goth
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
True to these seminal lines of Yusuf Xaji Adan Qabile, Magool has blossomed ever since, destined to enthrall the Somali-speaking peoples of the Horn of Africa and beyond with her captivating voice over the next forty-plus years…never to be silenced as long as a person who speaks Somali lives on the face of the earth.
Political Geography:
Africa and Somalia

6. Young Somali Women's Individual and Collective Understanding of Cultural and Religious Identity through Narrative Participatory Photography

Author:
Ruth M. Smith
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Dumarka Soomaaliyeed Voices Unveiled (DSVU) is a narrative participatory photography project that engaged young Somali women in photography and storytelling to create an exhibit exploring participants' experiences of being Muslim Somali women in the diaspora. This method was developed by participants throughout the course of the project and has roots in participatory action research methodology as well as other arts initiatives within the Somali diaspora. This article will define narrative participatory photography and offer a framework for future arts-based research initiatives within the diaspora. I will situate this project among other arts initiatives in the Somali diaspora as important sites for the research of Somali experiences of diasporic identity. Finally, a photo-essay of selected work from the exhibit offers an example of this methodology at work and presents the way in which this research study engages cultural and religious identity amongst young Somali women in the diaspora.
Political Geography:
Somalia

7. Disclaiming the Diaspora: Somali Forced Migrants in Cairo and "the Other Abroad"

Author:
Faduma Abukar Mursal
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
The concept of diaspora has attracted much attention in the scholarly debate on migration, and has also entered into public discourse, even being appropriated by migrants themselves. For instance, the term diasborada is now part of the Somali vocabulary, referring not only to a named phenomenon integral to Somali realities but to a particular group of people. It refers specifically to Somali migrants who have mobilized themselves as a political formation under the label “diaspora” to negotiate their role as agents of social change. Further, claims of Somali migrants have gained recognition in Somalia, where people apply this social category to them. This process of claim making and recognition of the diaspora is pervaded with a seemingly universalist discourse which addresses all migrants outside a “homeland.” Yet, naming and claim making processes are situated within power relations, which involve ways of silencing some migrants and making them invisible and which, therefore, require careful attention. The statement quoted above, made by Hassan, a Somali refugee who has been living in Cairo for the last few years, is an example of voice who resist the discourse of “diaspora.” Although Hassan lives outside of Somalia, he denies being a member of the so-called diaspora, a term that he associates more specifically with Somali migrants living in the global North, that is, in “the other abroad.” Drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork among Somali forced migrants in Cairo in 2013, this paper illustrates one way in which the term of diaspora is used by forced migrants and analyzes the meaning it takes in a particular setting. The next section presents briefly ways in which the concept of diaspora has been framed in scholarly discussions, emphasizing the recent trend of conceptualizing the diaspora as a political project. In line with Kleist's (2008a) suggestion that diaspora is a “concept of a political nature that might be at once claimed by and attributed to different groups and subjects” (2008a:307, emphasis in original), this paper explores the construction of the category of diaspora from the perspective of forced migrants. Following that, a brief history of Somali migration to Egypt is provided as a backdrop for presenting varying profiles of Somali migrants living in Cairo today. In this old and densely populated city, the figure of the forced migrant is constructed as the opposite of the “Somali Westerner”—that is, the Somali who has acquired citizenship in a western country. The third section of the paper shows how Somali forced migrants in Cairo earns a living and which solidarity networks they are part of. This will help to explain why Somali forced migrants contrast the precarious conditions of their lives with those of Somali Westerners. The last section explores the ways in which my informants in Cairo, in their everyday practices and encounters with Somali Westerners, refuse to apply the term “diaspora” to themselves. Indeed, the informants established a distinction between them as Somali forced migrants and the diaspora, that are Somali Westerners who are associated with mobility, economic, and social agency. Disavowing any connection to the category of diaspora allows them to exclude themselves from public discourse mobilizing the “diaspora” as part of the country's economic development. Moreover, this distinction allows them to address the Somali state and present themselves as particular group of citizens who have particular needs, for example the improvement of life conditions in Egypt and the negotiation of the conditions for return.
Political Geography:
Egypt and Somalia

8. Local Universities and Employment Opportunities in Somaliland

Author:
Abdirahaman dan Mohamoud
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Every year, a series of graduation ceremonies are organized at the local institutions of higher learning in Somaliland, where hundreds of new graduates emerge from the local universities. The main fields of study at the universities often overlap. Business administration, management, education, law, economics, ICT, and, to a lesser extent, medicine and engineering are the largest concentration areas.
Political Geography:
Somalia

9. Developing a Somali Dictionary Application

Author:
Nick Thieberger and Nadia Faragaab
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
New technologies offer access to unprecedented amounts of information and, while the equitable cost of access has been a major problem for distribution of such information, which is now changing. Mobile devices are becoming cheaper so more people from a wider range of backgrounds and speaking a wider range of languages are using the Internet. Support for the many less commonly spoken languages of the world has become a focus in the academic discipline of linguistics. This includes developing a presence for these languages on the web and in mobile devices. This brief report discusses one such example: the Somali-English Dictionary application (app), released in June 2014 by a Melbourne, Australia, team headed by the Somali artist Nadia Faragaab.
Political Geography:
Australia, Somalia, and Melbourne

10. Editor's Note

Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
I begin this brief note by wishing all of our readers a new year that brings great blessings to all! The contents of this volume range from an arresting and commemorative essay on the life of one of the most mag- nificent of all Somali fannaaniin , Halimo Khalif (Magool), to women in the diaspora, to specific recommendations for addressing the wor- risome issue of job creation for the many young graduates from the universities in Somaliland—the latter a phenomenon so conspicu- ously observable among the Somali youth in every part of the Horn of Africa.
Political Geography:
Africa and Somalia