Cali Shucaac and the poetic politics of resistance

There are deaths that grieve a family, deaths that grieve a community, and then there are deaths that compel an entire society to confront and reflect upon the unresolved political violence embedded in its history and collective experience as a people.

The passing of Xaaji Cali Cabdille Fiixiye, known to generations of Somalis as Cali Shucaac, in Nairobi on 10 July 2026 clearly belongs to the third category. What died with him was not simply a veteran, a poet, or an elder and orator of the Somali oral tradition, but one of the last living witnesses to a history of resistance stretching from the Dervish wars of the early twentieth century to the political liberation campaigns that have periodically convulsed Soomaali Galbeed—the Somali-inhabited region absorbed through Ethiopian imperial expansion and which successive Ethiopian governments, monarchical, military, and federal alike, have struggled ever since to hold through coercion and collective violence.

Cali Shucaac was born in 1948 in Naasa Hablood, in the Qabridahar district, into a household that still carried the physical and psychological wounds of an earlier war. His father had fought alongside the Dervishes of Sayid Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan, whose two-decade liberation struggle against British, Italian, and Ethiopian encroachment remains, whatever the disputes surrounding revisionist interpretations of it, the foundational episode in modern Somali anti-colonial consciousness and mobilisation. That his biography began in the shadow of this struggle situated him within a generation for whom the Ethiopian “conquest” of the Ogaden under Menelik II, formalised through boundary arrangements negotiated with European colonial powers at the turn of the century, was understood not as an internal administrative matter, but as an act of colonial annexation.

The Walwal incident of 1934, in which Ethiopian and Italian forces clashed over wells deep within Somali grazing territory and which helped precipitate the Italian invasion of Ethiopia the following year, is itself a reminder that the borders drawn around Soomaali Galbeed were never accepted by the communities that had inhabited the land for generations. They were imposed upon them, and repeatedly renegotiated over their heads, by competing empires and political forces that denied them meaningful political agency.

The realities and experiences of externally imposed sovereignty continued across the Somali territories even as colonialism crumbled throughout the African continent. The 1954 withdrawal of British administration from the Hawd and the so-called Reserved Area, restoring the territories to Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, triggered renewed Somali resistance and liberation campaigns. The political uprising led by Sheekh Bashir Sheekh Salaax in 1945, crushed with the killing of its leader near Burao, and the recurring waves of unrest that followed the 1954 handover established early on that Ethiopian sovereignty over the Ogaden region would be maintained through sanctioned state violence rather than popular consent.

It was precisely this history that the oratorical tradition inherited by Cali Shucaac was built to hold and give expression to. He belonged to a category of Somali oral intellectuals for whom the poet is simultaneously a historian, moral authority, and political actor—a role occupied before him by Sayid Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan himself, and by figures such as Wiil Waal, Yuusuf Dheere, Maxamed Sugaal, Hadraawi, Cabdulqaadir Xirsi Yamyam, and Cabdullaahi Dhoodaan. Together, they constitute an archive of a people’s dispersed sovereignty: a body of memory that persisted precisely because the political sovereignty of Soomaali Galbeed had been partitioned away, leaving oral performance as one of the few spaces in which a fragmented people could rehearse a collective political identity denied to them by the modern state system, both on paper and on maps.

His formation—from the Qur’anic school of Sheekh Cali Suufi to military training in Russia and North Korea, and eventually to service in the Somali National Army during an era when the dream of Soomaaliweyn still seemed within reach—placed him at the centre of the 1977 Ogaden War, of which he was both a veteran and a prisoner of war. The failure of that war did not end the Somali claim to the territory governed by Ethiopia; it merely displaced the confrontation from the battlefield onto the terrain of everyday life within Soomaali Galbeed itself.

What followed, first under the Derg and later under the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), was a decades-long pattern of collective punishment. Human Rights Watch’s 2008 investigation into the Ethiopian military’s campaign against the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) documented village burnings, the killing of civilians, systematic sexual violence, and a humanitarian blockade that cut the region off from food and medical assistance at the height of a brutal counterinsurgency. Under the regional security apparatus commanded by Cabdi Maxamuud Cumar, widely known as Cabdi Iley, the Liyu Police became notorious throughout the 2010s for extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detention, and torture carried out in facilities such as the central prison in Jigjiga, which former detainees came to call simply Jail Ogaden.

Even the political “opening” that followed Abiy Ahmed’s rise to power in 2018, and the subsequent removal of Cabdi Iley from office, did not sever the region’s relationship with state coercion so much as reconfigure it. Reports of detention, displacement, and political repression in the Somali Region have continued to surface in the years since.

It is within this long and layered pattern—stretching from Walwal through the 1954 transfer, the Ogaden War, and the counterinsurgency years into the present—that the persecution endured by Cali Shucaac and his family belongs. For many Somalis, it represents not an aberration, but the ordinary operation of a state that has treated Somali political expression in the Ogaden as an existential threat, rather than as a legitimate grievance or an expression of political agency.

What makes his death significant beyond the personal loss suffered by his family and community is the disappearance it signals: the rapid erosion of a generation formed simultaneously by Islamic learning, oral literary creativity, anti-colonial memory and consciousness, and the lived experience of state repression. It was a generation that understood these elements as a single ethical formation, in which knowledge existed to serve the collective and individuals existed to serve society. Such individuals were custodians of the memory of a violent past and of an injustice whose persistence within the collective consciousness the modern nation-state system has never adequately redressed. Their passing leaves an obligation that now falls upon scholars, journalists, and the Somali public alike: to record this poetic-historical archive before it disperses along with the men and women who carried it.

Cali Shucaac’s own poetic counsel, that Somalis should refuse to mistake immediate circumstances for permanent realities and resist the seduction of short-term political gain, reads today less as a eulogy than as an analytical challenge directed at how Somalis narrate their relationship with Ethiopian state power going forward.

Ethiopia is a country whose political class continues to live amid illusions and grandiose political fantasies. The supposed transition of 2018 towards a substantive democratic dispensation instead gave way to a genocidal war in Tigray, while brutal violence today continues to rage across the Amhara and Oromia regions. History, contrary to the Fukuyamian political imagination, has not ended in Ethiopia. The state remains a violent machine capable of unleashing extraordinary brutality in response even to genuine political grievances.

In memory of Cali Shucaac, and of all those who paid the ultimate price with their lives, bodies, and psyches, the pursuit of Somali political agency, unity, prosperity, and self-determination must never be abandoned—particularly at a time when democracy is in retreat and violence remains the dominant language of politics in Ethiopia.