No Home is Really Home for the Somali Youth in 21st Century.
Dr. Adam Aw Hirsi, Director of Foresight for Practical Solutions.
They were born into a country that had already vanished from their parents’ hands. The Somali Democratic Republic collapsed in 1991, and the idea of one meaningful and cherished shared home collapsed with it. Thirty-four years later, the state still hasn’t come back—not in any way that feels solid. In fact, for the Somali state, the past is the vision; the revival of services taken for granted under Revolutionary Somalia is the ultimate, almost unattainable goal for federal government planners and policy practitioners in Mogadishu.
What’s left of the nation-state that once rightfully prided itself in the words of YamYam, the poet, “no nation can rise above me,” is today a loose patchwork: federal states, recognition-aspiring regions, UN-mandated but actually self-serving foreign military bases, and wide stretches of bush where Al-Shabaab runs the only administration that shows up on time.
To be fair, Mogadishu has traffic again, with new hotels, glass, and neon along the coast, but the passport that a Somali person carries opens almost no doors, and the white star on its cover feels like a sticker from somebody else’s childhood.
The war that started when they were babies—or before they were born—never really ended effectively. It just changed uniforms. Clan militias who overpowered the military government turned into warlords, warlords gave way to militants killing in the name of religion, which in turn attracted foreign armies, US drones, and heavy Turkish involvement.
Even though millions, if not billions, of dollars were spent in their fight for the last umpteen years, Al-Shabaab does not seem to be abating. If anything, they are adopting and advancing. They still collect taxes in the villages, snatch teenage boys at dusk, and burn schools that dare teach the curriculum they have not designed. In half the countryside, they’re the only ones who keep the books and the guns.
Every year, another cousin disappears: recruited, killed, or simply gone across a border. For the Somali boys and girls, it is death or departure—those are the two clearest futures on offer.
In the cities, people talk about “reconstruction and rebirth.” What they see are foreign cement mixers and beachfront villas behind blast walls. The owners are either diaspora who somehow struck it rich abroad or politicians who learned how to make donor money vanish before it reaches hospitals, drought-stricken villages or feeding centers in IDP camps.
Corruption isn’t a scandal anymore; it’s the engine. The youth laugh bitterly that the real national industry is flattering some politicians and dissing others. Stay honest past twenty-five, and they call you a wimp. Want to get ahead? Learn whose signature goes on which fake receipt.
Then there’s the Rest of the World
The youth embark on the suicidal journey dubbed as Tahreeb because staying means picking up a gun too young, spending time and money in unaffordable and unaccredited educational institutions, or watching the last goats die and the farms wither while the riverbeds turn to dust.
Climate change isn’t a graph on a screen in Somali lands; it’s why the Shabelle sometimes never arrives, why Jubba is one day dry, and the following day knocks off solid bridges over it, as well as why most children in the country fall asleep counting their own ribs with their fingers.
On the fateful evening they finally climb into the Libya-bound pickup, they’re more in escape from the ghost that is Somalia than going anywhere in particular.
For the luckiest ones who survive the brutal finder (ma-gafe) and reach the West, the Western street isn’t waiting with welcome signs. Overnight, they become “a Somali”—shorthand for pirate, terrorist, welfare case, or potential threat. In Columbus, Minneapolis, Birmingham, Oslo, or Ottawa, let alone the newcomers, even those who were born there stay the eternal newcomers.
The name is too long, the scarf too visible, and the story too heavy for small talk. People smile politely and ask, “No, where are you really from?”—as if the word “Somali” were visibly written across their faces.
Even when they make it—degree, business, money flowing home every month—they remain on probation. One bombing halfway across the planet, and every beard, every hijab, every brown face gets the same sideways glance on the train. The label doesn’t ever scrub off.
So they live split in half. Body in Toronto or Helsinki, salary wired to Garowe or Hargeisa, dreams or nightmares cast in Mogadishu or Kismayo. WhatsApp pings and TikTok clips can connect all night with cousins scattered across six continents. They speak perfect English, good Arabic, heavily accented Somali, and scraps of Swedish or Norwegian, but belong fully to none of them. Survival is the only language they’re completely native in.
Home stopped being a place. It lives now in fragments: their grandmother’s laugh before she departed, the smell of canjeero on a morning when no rounds were heard around the neighborhood, the promise—always pushed to next year—that things will finally settle. Deep down, they suspect the Somalia their parents mourn will never come back, and the one rising now has no real room for anyone unwilling to cheat, shoot, or leave again.
Home became a verb without an object. They hunt for it in airport lounges, in Friday prayers, in the Dahabshil and Amal Express lines, in the meaningless welcoming ceremony of an empty suit they were supposed to sue, in conferences to liven the Somali common heritage that seems to have sought asylum abroad, in start-up pitches, and in late-night poetry threads. It keeps slipping away.
They were raised on goodbyes. They can pack a life into one suitcase before sunrise, hug their mother—in what they both know could be the last time—without shedding a drop of tears, and they can smile for the immigration officer while mapping the nearest exits in their head.
No place ever feels completely like home. Still, they keep building one anyway—out of spite sometimes, out of love most times, and out of a quiet, stubborn refusal to let anyone else close the book on their unique heritage. That refusal to lose hope, battered but unbroken, the Somali chutzpah, and those unmistakable marks across their foreheads are the only homeland they have managed to carry intact.
As history teaches us, the aspirations that refuse to die almost always materialize. To the Somali youth worldwide, yes, the darkness can be at its worst, but the dawn is certainly at hand; keep fighting.
This article first appeared on WardheerNews Website