How Somalia embraced socialism: notes from a minister's memoir
Mohamed Aden Sheikh served in the civilian component of Siad Barre's socialist government as a health minister. He was a key part of the governing machine.
The passage I’m sharing today is from a memoir written by Mohamed Aden Sheikh, a cardiologist and health minister in the government that took power following Siad Barre’s military coup in 1969. The book is titled Back to Mogadishu: Memoirs of a Camel Herder and was published as a series of transcribed and edited conversations Sheikh had with the Italian journalist Pietro Petrucci, who had made his name covering much of Africa as a foreign correspodent, with a particular focus on Somalia and who was a lifelong friend of Sheikh.
Sheikh was part of the civilian component of the junta, recruited because of their technical ability to administer and begin rolling out the regime’s revolutionary agenda to rid Somalia of “hunger, ignorance and illness”. Sheikh was among the first generation of young Somali professionals who were sent abroad to study and were expected to be the new elite shepherding Somalia’s postcolonial state. They were known for their small goatees which marked them out. Petrucci compared the role this cohort had taken in Somalia to the function Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Gamal Abdel Nasser, along with their followers, had in Türkiye and Egypt respectively. “The result was an original and audacious ‘African revolution’,” Petrucci wrote in the foreword to the book. He would later turn on Barre who turned into a dictator.
Interestingly, Farah Aideed was the intermediary between the civilians in the government and the soldiers, who were gradually stripped of their power and cornered until many were either arrested or resigned for not following orders. Sheikh himself was imprisoned more than once for being to charitable with his views, sharing them frequently with the ruling soldiers. Aideed has his own incredible character arc which eventually ends with him overthrowing the government and then declaring war on US troops in Mogadishu in the early 1990s. Disclaimer, Sheikh takes a very dim view of Aideed.
I’m still reading it, and I can’t recommend this book enough. Sheikh was an outspoken and independent-spirited member of Siad Barre’s government, who was either a participant in or an important witness to the key events in the early post-independence years of the Somali government. He is also a truly insightful, intelligent, and self-critical guide, taking you through what the government did, why it did it, and how things eventually went awry in the Barre-era.
For example, reflecting on the authoritarian creep in the Barre regime, he echoes Hannah Arendt, noting that evil is banal. Sheikh says that it isn’t difficult for an aspiring autocrat “determined to maintain power at any price” to create a culture of repression from nothing. All you need is a small group who are prepared to “practise the illegality of the state”, and “others will follow”. He says that most bureaucrats, soldiers, and police officers involved in the enterprise of repressing Somalia’s population weren’t themselves “young men wet behind the ears; nor were they nationalist activists driven by lofty ideals. They were professionals”. To summon Arendt again, they were “neither perverted nor sadistic” but were “terrifyingly normal”. He recalls one conversation with a soldier who had been made president of a court designed to prosecute dissidents. Sheikh inquired about a case in which a man had been sentenced to execution, to which the court judge responded: “I have to apply these laws. I didn’t make them.”
Sheikh was a utopian and an acolyte of what one Somali writer called a “broken revolution.” I encourage anyone who is curious to go further to read her review of his book here.
Getting back to what we’re here for today, Sheikh describes the process from when Siad Barre declared Somalia a socialist state and how it played out among the country’s political elite. Sheikh says they were all “self-taught socialists and full of enthusiasm; just like all newcomers are. Starting with the president himself”. The intellectuals and professionals mentioned above tended to have a socialist bent in any case and generally appeared to welcome the zeitgeist that had arrived in Mogadishu, but for others, they were learning on the go. Here is the passage. He picks up after the 1969 coup, when the new government needed to make a choice about how it would manage the cold war and what its ideological future would be:
The alliance with Moscow, an unavoidable choice
In the meantime, two salient choices made by the new regime had taken shape and been made public: the establishment of socialism internally and an alliance with the Soviet camp at an international level. And from what I said I here so far, it isn't easy to explain either one or the other.
Contrary to what many believed, the decision to enter the Soviet sphere had already been set in motion by nationalist leaders who governed the country before the coup. The Somali Republic was formed in 1960 amid territorial disputes caused by the proclaimed intention of the new state to strive for the reunification of the entire Somali nation that had been divided up by European and African colonisation. It was simply unacceptable that entire areas inhabited by Somalis remained under the control of Ethiopia, Kenya or France. In 1964 we fought a short but bloody war against Ethiopia, which came to an end thanks to the mediation of Organisation of African Unity. The prime minister at the time and future head of state, Abdirashid Ali Shermarke decided to appeal to international solidarity to reequip the army. It had only been in existence for a few years and had been subjected to the devastating impact of armed conflict with Ethiopia. The Italian government wasn't interested in providing Somalia with weapons, so Shermarke turned to the Americans. He imagined that as true leaders of Nato and the west, they would have been freer hand. He went to Washington to ask John Kennedy for help just a few months before he was killed. But Kennedy dismissed him, saying that he didn't want to kindle regional conflicts. "Then don't give weapons to Ethiopia either," replied Shermarke. The answer he then received was that the United States considered Ethiopia one of their strategic allies in Africa. And that it was an alliance sanctioned by political, economic and military agreements.
At that point, our prime minister, a devout Muslim, who was certainly not to be suspected of sympathising with cultures unrelated to Islam, decided on the spot that he would fly to Moscow to see Khrushchev without even going back to Mogadishu first. He went to the Kremlin and explained the dispute between Somalia and the Ethiopian empire, the attack we suffered, the risk that it could happen again, and the disinterest of the west. Khrushchev didn't play hard to get. He placed his arsenals and military academies at Somalia's disposal. He also loosened his purse strings and provided us with unexpected aid. From that moment on, nearly all our officers who had been trained in Italy or elsewhere in Europe attended refresher courses in the USSR. Many young people went to universities in the Soviet Union.
It has been said that Siad Barre, as commander in chief of the army, had played no small role in pushing Shermarke in the direction of Moscow. The fact is that the special relationship with the USSR was formalised, developed and strengthened by the military in power in the 1970s.
Given this context, the politico-ideological transition from rejecting neocolonialism to asserting the socialist way of development was in the normal course of events. And so during a heated internal debate involving the group of civilian and military leaders about possible ways to fight under-development, the choice of 'scientific socialism' came up. Why 'scientific'? For my part, I support the use of the term. Despite the criticism and irony that it provoked. Our intention was to clearly differentiate ourselves from the excessive number of 'socialisms' that had sprung up north and south of the Sahara. We wanted to distance ourselves from the so-called Arab socialism (Nasser's Egypt); or the African version (Nyerere's Tanzania); or the Islamic one (Boumedienne's Algeria). Faced with that terminology, which in our opinion concealed hypocrisy, vagueness and failure, we declared that we had chosen 'Socialism, full stop'. We could have defined ourselves as 'Marxists, full stop', but we risked causing incomprehension and alarm inside the country, as well as with our relations with Africa and the Arab-Islamic world. So we declared that we had chosen 'scientific socialism' as the ideology to inspire our model of development.
This choice didn't give, as I will say, 'added value' to our relationship with the Soviet Union as some hoped it would. But neither did it do any harm, as some feared, to our relationships with powers in the west. International diplomacy accepted our choice as unquestionable and justified by our desired to not upset the geo-political balance in our region.
It's true that from 1972, after signing its first 'Multi-year Treaty of Friendship' with the USSR, Somalia established formal and cordial relationships with all the governments most detested by the west; East Germany, North Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba and even Peru, which was governed at the time by strongly anti-American Nasserian generals. But even this step was taken not so much due to political inclinations, but to a strong sense of frustration brought on by the indifference and incredulity with which the west reacted to our fears about an Ethiopian attacks.
But not everything happened because of the state or as a result of diplomatic calculating. Moscow was the main defender of peoples fighting for self-determination. And Somali national interest, above all the liberation of Somali populations that we considered still colonised, seemed to coincide with principles that Moscow claimed it was defending. Those were the years of the cold war and Africa was one of the settings of this strong contrast between east and west. Many Africa governments tried to take advantage of this by becoming allies with one side or the other.
Strange thought it might seem, neither the USSR, nor the Communist party of the Soviet Union had solicited our 'socialist choice'. And the didn't support it once it had been formalised either. Moscow just exploited it to the extent that was necessary.
From the speeches made by some of the leaders of the PCUS who came to Mogadishu, and from signs from the pro-Soviet government in Aden (South Yemen), we understood that Moscow preferred those who chose the path to nationalist, democratic and popular revolution; not 'scientific' socialists like us. And so much so that when the time came for us to nationalise, I'm referring to the nationalisation of vital infrastructures like SNAI (the national company for agriculture and industry managing the ex Duca degli Abruzza village), the USSR was startled. Some of our economic ministers were warned by the Soviet ambassador in Mogadishu that nationalising these infrastructures could turn out to be a mistake because the Somalis would have to take on considerable responsibility in order to run them. He suggested that we share the task of management with technicians who were already there. And so decisions taken in the field alongside the USSR, and our ideological choice, developed independently of each other.
We were self-taught socialists, and full of enthusiasm; just like all newcomers are. Starting with the president himself. During those early days, Siad Barre would sometimes suggest, either to the Council of the Secretaries or to the two joint councils, that we "spend a bit more time reading Marxist texts". And these reading could go on for hours, especially when we read the "classics" that addressed matters of vital importance to us, like nationalism or certain economic problems we were faced with. The texts themselves were summaries and manuals published in Italy or taken from Novosti. They were written in English or Italian. Sometimes it occurred to me, and I smiled to myself when I thought this, that Siad Barre was unknowingly following in Napoleon's footsteps. Our meeting room reminded me Orient, the French flag ship on the Egyptian expedition, where the emperor loved to bring together generals, scientists and men of letters to discuss almost anything: economics, politics, government and religion. Even the question of whether the earth should be considered the only inhabitable planet.
It must be said that only a minority among the civilians and military officers involved considered this type of activity useful. Most of them suffered in silence. Some of them had a hard job hiding their irritation, especially the ones we called 'pipe smokers', because their three most prominent exponents were three officers who had studied at the not very Marxist Royal Military Academy Sandhurst: General Ahmed Suleyman, head of security services; General Ismail Ali Abokar, vice president up until his arrest in 1982; and the best of the three, Colonel Mohammed Ali Shire, who had been entrusted with the highly sensitive role of head of the public body that was responsible for buying and distributing foodstuffs.
Ahmed Suleyman and his notorious vice, Colonel Jibril, didn't hesitate to use every repressive means at their disposal to target those who, being caught up in the fervour of those early years, wanted to 'study socialism'.
I remember about twenty young people, most of them working at my ministry, who came to ask me for somewhere they could meet in the evenings to study and talk. And I let them use the very obstetrician's school where they did double shifts to train nurses; it was in the centre, near where they worked. Less than two weeks after they had started their meetings, men from the NSS (National Security Council) arrived and forced them to close down the club. Some of them were even put in prison for 'counter-revolutionary' activities. It was a disaster. I tried to explain that those young men were discussing the reforms that were being carried out from a Marxist perspective. And I understood that it was precisely this open discussion that had caused the security to take action. Because that was how you made executive managers who learnt to think for themselves. Some of those young men were arrested again a year later; and I myself, at the time of my first arrest in February 1975, was accused of having 'inspired' that school. Just as well I never even set foot in it.
Despite these difficulties, we decided to consolidate the socialist choice presenting it as the most efficient way to relaunch the ideals and values of the Somali Youth League, which had always been our 'motherland'. The task was entrusted to a provisional organisation that would later become one party. But six years earlier, in 1970, we called it the Political Office for the Masses. Its primary undertaking was to inform the population about the program of the revolution and mobilise them accordingly. We chose the people we thought were best suited to the job and they began to prepare the ground for social projects. These included teaching the masses to read and write (made possibly by the written form of our national language), urban and rural self-subsistence programs, as well as healthcare and veterinary educational campaigns.
The democratic model we pursued via the Political Office was to give every Somali the chance to really take part in the development of the country. Our project was exciting because it was visionary. What we had in mind was to construct something particular and different from what real socialism parties were doing. It would be different from the work of the communist parties in the west and also from certain socialistic experiments in Africa. What was original about our party had to be this: a special bond of national, Somali solidarity that could at last win people away from the appeal of tribal clans.
During those years, something interesting must have been happening in Somalia, given that our experiment caught the attention of observers from half the world. They then showed affinity towards it: books were written and documentaries made about what we did. Journalists, intellectuals and artists from all over the globe visited the 'Somali socialist laboratory', attracted by the curiosity and optimism it generated. There were American celebrity journalists such as Arnaud de Borchgrave; avante-garde sociologists like the Egyptian Samir Amin; historians of African and postcolonialism like the Englishman Basil Davidson and the Frenchman Jean Lacouture; famous artists like Ugo Attardi (who painted a large fresco in the hall of the National Parliament); and professional revolutionaries like Regis DeBray. None of them lacked experience, so they must have found something that aroused their interest. Mind you, nearly all of the enthusiastic witnesses of those years later distanced themselves from Siad Barre, and long before the dictator fell.