Intergenerational Dialogue & Memories within a Postwar Urban City

For as long as I can remember, I always envisioned that one day I would be roaming the post-war city of Mogadishu with my mother, asking her questions upon questions about what the city meant to her before she left as a teenager and if she remembered some of the beautiful old architectural ruins and buildings that are still covered in bullet holes scattered across the old parts of Mogadishu.

My mother's visit to Mogadishu at the beginning of January 2024 and the intergenerational conversations that occurred inspired me to reflect on my own experience as a diaspora living and navigating in a post-war city that was still bounded by its old memories and trauma.

Diaspora return to a post-war city

Diaspora returning to their ancestral home is never easy, especially if you are returning to a country that is still trapped in a cycle of instability and violence.

Returning back to where my parents once lived forced me to reckon with mixed feelings. On most occasions, I felt at home as if I had previously experienced living in Mogadishu's golden era of peace and prosperity, a city that was once considered the ‘Pearl of the Indian Ocean’.

On other days, I also felt utterly lost in an unrecognisable place, desperately trying to hang onto the memories of the city before the civil war while making sense of the present reality that was indifferent to the inter-generational memories and storytelling of the past.

Since moving to Mogadishu, I have been trying to establish my connection and perspective of the city but torn between the uncertainty of whether I was living in a post-conflict environment that has worked through its legacy of violence or living in a fragile conflict-ridden society that remains bounded by its deep-rooted social grievances, trauma and memories of violence.

To search for answers and memories of the city, I developed a hobby where I would get on a bajaj, roam through the town, and people watch.

In each journey, I would become so intrigued by every tiny detail about Mogadishu - from the old crumbling architectural ruins that still speak of the beauty that the city once held to the everyday life and the way ordinary people have managed to govern themselves and the invisible social norms and values that guide the functionality of the post-war city and the people living from within.

In one of these many interesting bajaj rides, a young male driver who at first was surprised that I had returned to Somalia expresses that the city of Mogadishu, which only a year ago had been experiencing almost weekly to monthly terrorist attacks was now entering a new phase of peace, linking this recent change to the current government fight against terrorism in the rural side of Somalia.

Ironically, as he spoke about this new phase of relative peace in the city, we had already passed four security checkpoints, seen a young soldier use a gun to disperse traffic, and a few weeks prior, a suicide attack had taken place nearby. So, i asked him what exactly does everyday peace mean to him and if it was the same as what our parents experienced in the pre-civil war era.

Intergenerational memories of Mogadishu before the war

I grew up with an imagination of Mogadishu pre-civil war based on the storytelling of my mother and many other elders, including my grandmother. Their memories, recollections, and countless vintage videos of Mogadishu become my reference point and source for analysing present-day Mogadishu. So, my mother's visit gave me the opportunity for the first time to engage in a joint inter-generational dialogue between three generation, two of whom have experienced Mogadishu in a time where the only sound you could hear is birds, music and not gunfire.

In one of these conversations about Mogadishu's security and the current circumstances that we are in, they highlighted how the social fabric of our society is no longer as it was before the civil war and the collapse of government .

My mother further expanded on this by emphasising that ‘no one in Mogadishu truly knows each other as much as they used in the old days and the values people used to hold pre-civil war had also completely vanished.'

To them, Mogadishu's pre-civil war consisted of closely knitted neighbourhoods and communities with solid principles, values and social norms. For my grandmother that was a time when people rarely ever locked the doors, and for my mother, growing up as a young woman it was an era where they were able to walk freely without the fear of harassment.

Navigating Mogadishu post-war city through the memories of our elders

Mogadishu old lighthouse

As I took my mother and sister on tour around the old town of Mogadishu to explore some of the heritage sites and the buildings of the past, my mothers, in a proud tone of voice, would correct my use of street names, stressing that 'back in the day x street used to be called another name or Y street was looked so beautiful.'

On our way to see the remains of the old parliament, my mother conversed with the young bajaj driver, telling him how much the city she once knew before she left for Europe was no longer recognisable to her.

As she explained her memories of Mogadishu's pre-civil war, I looked around at the streets and space around us, trying desperately to visualize what the city may have looked like in the era of peace, where checkpoints never existed and women dominated public space as much as men.

In a city undergoing rapid urban development, where much of the heritage and reminders of the past are now decaying, my nostalgia of Mogadishu pre-civil war can only be imagined through storytelling and through the lens of those who had lived in the time of social peace. For us diaspora who have decided to return home, the least we can do is try to archive and hold onto these memories, storytelling as a way to reimagine the future of peace in a post-war city.