With all the the sad or violent news coming from Somalia in recent years, I’ve been interested in learning more about the history of the place. Besides spawning economies based on piracy and kidnapping and a seemingly never ending civil war, how do the people there get by? What sort of complicated colonial history lead them to this point. Anyway, this research lead me to two very interesting troves of compelling historical printed ephemera from the region. The first is a preservation project called: Mogadishu: Images from the Past. This site is one-person attempt to, “provide a cartographic and photographic record of Mogadishu, Somalia, from the late 18th century to 1990, using materials I have collected over the years, and which I am still collecting”. It’s primarily a collection of beautiful, archival photographs, post cards and some archival audio and video, which are made strange by the meta-links to ariel view google satellite images of depicting the ruins there now.
This site is complimented by a click-trip to the Somali Poster Preservation Project, an unexpectedly large archive of Somali political posters.
It struck me as so odd, I wanted to include a brief history of the Somali Poster Preservation Project :
In recent years much of Africa has been involved in political turmoil, and Somalia is no exception. Because of the civil war there, the threat to written and recorded information has dramatically increased. As one of three institutions holding the largest Somali collections in the world, Indiana University has made a commitment to preserving and providing access to these materials many of which came to the university from the collections of the noted scholar of Somali language and culture, B. W. Andrzejewski. Most of the posters which appear at this site were deposited at Indiana University between 1979 and 1981 by the Somali Studies International Association.
For those of you who did not major in geography, here’s a map of Somolia and another of Africa to provide some spatial context.
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