Somalia races to save Radio Mogadishu’s fading archive

Somalia's Radio Mogadishu, the nation's primary public broadcaster, houses an extensive archive of historical recordings that spans decades of the country's cultural and political development. Thousands of reel-to-reel tapes, some dating to the early 1950s, are stored in climate-controlled conditions at the station's archive facility, containing news broadcasts, speeches, musical performances, and other audio content that once reached audiences across the nation.

A dedicated team of archivists, led by Abdiqadir Geedi Robleh, is engaged in a race against time to convert these analog recordings into digital formats before the magnetic tape medium becomes unplayable. An expert assessment conducted in April identified approximately 45,000 tapes and reels representing an estimated 400,000 hours of material recorded since the station's establishment. While more than 85 percent of the collection remains playable, deterioration poses an ongoing threat to this irreplaceable historical record.

Radio Mogadishu, established in 1951 during the Italian colonial period, evolved into one of East Africa's most influential broadcasters. The station initially transmitted in Italian and Somali before expanding to include services in Swahili, Oromo, English, and Arabic. At its peak, the station's reach extended across the region to Tanzania, Ethiopia, and the Middle East, establishing itself as a distinctive voice in pan-African broadcasting comparable to Radio Cairo during the Nasser era.

The archive preservation effort has gained institutional support through collaboration between Somalia's information ministry and UNESCO's regional office for Eastern Africa. In June, these organizations convened a workshop bringing together archivists from across the country with the objective of eventually registering the collection with UNESCO's Memory of the World programme, which documents archives of significant historical importance. Guilherme Canela, a senior UNESCO official overseeing the project, emphasized that preserving this collection holds relevance beyond Somalia's borders, contributing to broader global heritage preservation efforts.

The collection represents the world's largest repository of Somali language music, cultural productions, and dramatic works. Despite its historical and cultural significance, the archive remains largely inaccessible to the general public. Archivists involved in the digitization project view the preservation effort as essential not only for maintaining Somalia's collective memory but also for eventually making this material available to researchers and the public.