“Imagination is a political battleground”: Dabindid Yusuf on why we need to rethink Somali life and politics

At an age too early to remember, Dabindid Yusuf encountered a large image that loomed in his father’s study. In a shiny frame, the image stared down at him from the wall—huge and heavy. The man’s eyes seemed to know things. Grown-up things. Yusuf didn’t understand the words beneath the name, but the picture always made his stomach tighten. “It was too big to ignore,” he tells Geeska. 

It was a portrait of the esteemed African historian and polymath Cheikh Anta Diop, a figure his father revered. “I remember wondering why my dad had a random guy in his study,” Dabindid told me over the phone. What followed, he said, was a monologue—a meandering lesson in African history and Pan-Africanism. “Hardcore history for a young lad,” he added, a tender laugh on the other end as he remembered. 

Yusuf was born and raised in west London, in a multi-ethnic neighbourhood. The streets he walked, the homes he visited, the friends he made—all these contributed to a layered, “sometimes uneasy understanding of identity.” The question of who he was, and how a Somali ended up in the UK—a nation entangled in the colonial history of his ancestral homeland—haunted him early. “I kept wondering,” he said, “about heritage, about how that story was told and taught to us.” 

One lecture by Somali scholar, Ahmed Ismail Samatar—he can’t quite remember which—left such a mark on him that he began collecting the speaker’s works. “I wish I could recall exactly what it was,” he said, taking a breath, his voice momentarily trailing off. “But it inspired me.” 

Like many children of the diaspora, Yusuf grew up wrestling with a world that often felt unwilling or unable to tell the full story of where he came from. He was “disillusioned” with “how the history of Somalis was presented” to him. That disillusionment didn’t discourage him, but it unsettled him into inquiry—into study, into asking harder questions about empire, identity, and belonging. 

One of the projects to emerge from this searching curiosity is the political, cultural, and literary journal Gobanimo. On its website, Gobanimo says: “The platform aims to foster Somali discourse free from narrow clan interests and a nostalgic, caustic nationalism for a bygone era in Somalia that has marred much of the discourse we hear.” They announced the publication of the second issue last month, under the theme Power, Politics, Belonging. It offers everything from interviews with Somali academics, to analyses of Somali poetry and historical reflection. (You can order it here). 

Yusuf speaks with Geeska to discuss the journal’s bold mission, his work on Somali politics, and his critique of contemporary Somali political discourse and politics.  

Mahbub M. Abdillahi: Gobanimo takes its name from the concept of freedom or independence. Why is this concept the journal’s north star, and why do you believe it holds particular importance for Somalis today? 

Dabindid Yusuf: Hadraawi, in his commentary over Gudgude, perhaps explains it best: “gobanimo (freedom) is nothing else, it’s a journey amidst the journeys of life. When a person’s ambitions and needs outgrow the confines of their current societal structures (be it clan systems or the subsequent colonial regimes, etc.) and their aspirations and intelligence become larger than that way of life, they move towards freedom, towards gobanimo. The time they move towards it, fight for it, sacrifice their life for it, it’s done for a purpose – he’s searching for it so as to live by it, he’s not worshipping it, it’s not a nice picture he just looks at…” 

In this there is an appeal to gobanimo as a movement, a journey sparked when one’s aspirations rupture the limits of their current reality that only an active, conscious subject of history will realise. In gobanimo we see a guiding principle that insists on the struggle for an alternative world, built upon the wounds, memories and resistance that mark Somali social life. Gobanimo demands a total reorientation, foregrounded by an epistemic, political and existential commitment to liberating Somali futures from the suffocating grip of a world system that has long treated the Horn’s most dispossessed as objects of extraction, intervention and experimentation. 

And this is particularly important because we’re at a critical juncture marked by an enforced political stasis managed by social forces working against the interests of the Somali people. To be in movement, as Hadraawi gestures towards, is to engage in a revolutionary praxis which rejects the current neocolonial hegemonic project of subordination that has pacified, alienated and stripped people of historical agency. We’re talking about the internally displaced people reduced to mere bodies counted and managed, disillusioned youth risking death through tahriib in search of dignity elsewhere, to the urban precariat forced into daily survival, caught in cycles of informal labour, dispossession and despair. All fundamentally disconnected from any meaningful collective political horizon, all of whom whose lived experiences we use as our anchor at Journal Gobanimo. 

And thus gobanimo emerges for us as a radical remedy in its call to recover the capacity to imagine otherwise, reclaim agency, and build futures rooted in justice and dignity. Gobanimo, within this context, is an orientation, an ethic, and our struggle. 

To generate a different kind of discourse beyond scripts of crisis narratives begins with acknowledging the fundamental right and capacity of Somali people to theorise their own conditions, articulate their own priorities, and define their own paths forward.  

MA: What does a more generative, open Somali discourse look like to you? Who are you hoping to reach – or challenge – with the journal’s work? 

DY: Journal Gobanimo emerged from a deep dissatisfaction with the dominant discursive landscape that surrounds the Somali crisis, in its failure to interrogate the root causes of social and political problems from historical and critical perspectives. In the context of the last 30 years (perhaps longer), this is far from coincidental or random, but rather the outcome of the systematic destruction of civil society, eroding voices committed to national reconstruction, collective healing, and political imagination rooted in justice. The mantle has instead been handed to forces that have entrenched Somalia’s structural dependence and geopolitical subordination to the world system. 

Somalia, in this phase of enforced and managed fragmentation—of which such an order is maintained through the naturalisation of imperialist intervention—is not a sovereign state in any substantive sense. And how we ultimately think about and engage with this neocolonial condition, beginning with the correct identification of the forces at work which constitute this reality, becomes the starting point in relation to imagining what a more generative, open Somali discourse looks like. 

To generate a different kind of discourse beyond scripts of crisis narratives begins with acknowledging the fundamental right and capacity of Somali people to theorise their own conditions, articulate their own priorities, and define their own paths forward. This means making space for historically marginalised perspectives and political traditions grounded in the society’s own immanent logics—ways of knowing and being that have long been sidelined by local elites and international actors. If achieved, these reductive binaries that seek to reduce the totality of the social experience to ‘state vs statelessness’ or ‘clan vs nation’ cease to yield any explanatory power, as the full complexity, plurality, and historicity of Somali social life (its contradictions, solidarities, and capacities for self-renewal) become apparent. 

Through the work of our journal and related projects, our mission can, in sum, be animated by an existential, political desire to challenge the gatekeepers of Somali discourse—reshaping conversations entirely. We aim to open up the discursive space such that Somalis no longer imagine themselves within the constraints of crisis management or donor frameworks, but within an emancipatory framework of justice, autonomy, and radical possibility. 

 It seems apparent to me that conflict occurs when an actor or group attempts to claim a disproportionate share, or when there appears to be a fissure in prior agreements to ensure ‘equitable’ distribution of state rents. And if we move past what may appear as struggles over constitutional interpretation or federal balance, what you find instead is a struggle over who controls the gate to those resources and means of coercive force. 

MA: In your essay “There’s a Logic to Somali Politics,” you argue that what appear as contradictions in Somali politics are, in fact, expressions of a deeper structural logic related to Somalia’s place in the global economy—not just individual failings. Can you explain why you prefer to examine Somali politics through a material and structural lens, and what this perspective contributes to your assessment of the current moment? 

DY: I’d like to use recent tensions in Mogadishu surrounding President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s ‘consolidation of power’, as it were, and the ensuing backlash from some federal member states (FMS) as a case in point for this question. What I’ve long found troubling in much mainstream commentary is the tendency to reduce complex political processes to the actions, decisions, or moral failures of individual actors. In this view, crises are the result of ‘bad’ leaders making ‘bad’ choices, with federalism being a neutral, inherently rational institutional framework, to which its breakdown becomes the failure of politicians who happen to ‘overreach’, act ‘irrationally’, or fall prey to personal ambition. 

This might hold short-term explanatory power for understanding a politician and/or an administration, but it collapses entirely under historical scrutiny. How do we make sense of the fact that Somalia’s political reconstruction since 1991 has followed a strikingly consistent pattern across successive ‘reconciliation’ conferences and administrations, regardless of who is in office? And this is where the structural, materialist critique becomes apparent—in that recurring collapses of elite consensus cease to be anomalies or errors in leadership; they’re symptoms of a broader political economy rooted in a systemic logic. 

To see HSM’s current power centralisation merely as a ‘mistake’ or an act of authoritarianism misses the point entirely, when it is in fact a logical move within a system in which federalism operates as an elite bargaining platform—there to distribute power (the capacity to wield violence) and facilitate access to state-mediated wealth (international aid, control of trade routes, externally mediated capital flow, etc.). It seems apparent to me that conflict occurs when an actor or group attempts to claim a disproportionate share, or when there appears to be a fissure in prior agreements to ensure ‘equitable’ distribution of state rents. And if we move past what may appear as struggles over constitutional interpretation or federal balance, what you find instead is a struggle over who controls the gate to those resources and means of coercive force. 

In using this lens, we’re compelled to ask different questions. What are the deeper historical and material forces shaping Somali political life? What are the underlying logics producing these cyclical breakdowns? Who benefits from the state’s dysfunction? How has the international order incentivised fragmentation, and what would it take to break from this logic entirely? 

There must be a fundamental reorientation of thought around the question concerning what the state is for, as opposed to who merely occupies it.  

MA: And in a system where even self-described reformists are shaped by those same structures, what would a meaningful transformation actually look like? 

DY: This is quite a sizeable question because, as I’ve tried to briefly outline, one of the key prerequisites to any meaningful transformation involves directly confronting the systemic logic in which political actors (regardless of intent) find themselves incentivised to operate within: a rentier state model deeply embedded in structures of external patronage, aid dependence, and a general political economy that rewards fragmented elite competition. It encourages a fight for the breadcrumbs at the bottom of the international aid pipe. 

A meaningful transformation, with this in mind, must begin at the level of imagination. There must be a fundamental reorientation of thought around the question concerning what the state is for, as opposed to who merely occupies it. This radically repositions political imagination towards a more normative inquiry of justice, sovereignty, and the material conditions of freedom. 

This has implications for both theory and praxis. At the level of theory, for starters, there needs to be a complete disarming of hegemonic knowledge which has naturalised a certain set of assumptions concerning Somali society—assumptions which present themselves as ‘common sense’ but are in fact deeply ideological. Chief among these is the naturalisation of the ‘4.5’ system that has now reified clans into fixed political units, essentialised identities—a model of governance ultimately masquerading as ‘inclusive’ but which has for decades functioned as a mechanism for elite consolidation, effectively muting class antagonisms. 

And at the level of praxis, therefore, any emancipatory project must entail a rejection of externally imposed governance templates that privilege external security agendas and donor interests over popular sovereignty. It really is quite clear: our grammar of state-building must reflect a radical and autonomous articulation of the very lived realities and historical struggles of Somali people. This necessitates a type of delinking from the ideological and financial scaffolding of imperialism, which has long sought to close the door on a return to a politics rooted in endogenous priorities, mass mobilisation, and radical pedagogy. 

MA: In your piece, you call for a shift away from personality-driven analysis and towards a more structural critique of Somali politics. What role can Somali scholars—especially younger academics, analysts, and media practitioners—play in reshaping public discourse to reflect this shift, particularly in a media landscape often dominated by factional or personalised narratives? 

DY: They play a significant role, no doubt, but being absolutely clear on what that role is and what it entails is even more important. Epistemology is important here. Thinking about epistemology urges us to look at the foundations of our knowledge—how certain ideas come to be accepted as truth, whose perspectives are legitimised, and which ways of knowing are marginalised or dismissed. What we’re talking about is reshaping the entire epistemic terrain upon which politics is understood, narrated, and contested—and as Walter Mignolo once coined, this becomes a project of epistemic disobedience. So it isn’t merely about critiquing the content of Somali political discourse, but rejecting its epistemic foundations altogether; foundations which have made certain narratives about clans, discussions about aid and how we relate to each other as Somalis currently appear as common sense. 

Take the recurring reduction of Somali political life to clan rivalries, moral failures, or a culture of violence. Engaging with these narratives while leaving their core assumptions unchallenged produces analyses that accept these framings as natural and culturally embedded. You see this perhaps most clearly in the popular refrain that ‘Somalis just need to move beyond clan’—often presented as a progressive critique of the current condition. This, however, leaves the dominant discourse intact, along with the continuation of colonial tropes portraying Somali society as dysfunctional by nature, rather than asking why the clan has been politicised in the way it has, how power is structured through it, and who benefits from these arrangements. In doing so, it ultimately obscures the structural and historical processes that have entrenched and weaponised the clan as a political tool. 

So this is where the imperative of creating entirely new terms of engagement stems from. Scholars, analysts, and media practitioners must be asking different questions, stemming from different assumptions, within a political project that centres sovereignty, justice, material inequality, and the long arc of struggle. This is where the departure point from critique to construction lies—where the real meaning of their role emerges as active participants, subjects of history in a broader struggle over meaning, memory, and the future of Somali political life. 

Any serious exploration of alternatives begins with the understanding, however uncomfortable, that imagination itself is a political battleground.  

MA: There’s a growing critique among Somalis of the uncritical adoption of the modern nation-state model and the imposition of Eurocentric political frameworks on Somali society. Why do you think there’s been so little serious exploration of alternatives in mainstream Somali discourse? 

DY: When, for so long, the question of knowing Somali society has been shaped by forces external to Somalia and Somalis themselves, the absence of serious alternatives stems from how the terrain of legitimacy has been historically constructed and policed. The recovery of suppressed histories, and the articulation of new vocabularies for power, justice, and ethics outside inherited Eurocentric models and regimes of thought, is a deeply political and disruptive venture. 

To envision and begin laying the foundations for political formations that are more just, grounded, and responsive to Somali historical realities requires confronting the entire imperial machinery that has both managed and profited from Somali fragmentation. Didn’t the experience of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) make that painfully clear? Whatever its contradictions, the ICU represented a locally grounded and broadly supported attempt at creating a new political order—not scripted by donors, not structured by warlords, and not mediated through the usual international frameworks. Its violent dismantlement was assured because it defied the political interests of external powers and their partner domestic comprador class, who deemed Somali self-determination a threat. 

Any serious exploration of alternatives begins with the understanding, however uncomfortable, that imagination itself is a political battleground. It’s one thing to criticise existing models, but it’s another thing entirely to ask: who gets to imagine? Whose visions are funded, broadcast, legitimised? And whose are silenced, erased, or crushed? Political imagination is a site of struggle. It means creating space, language, and legitimacy for alternative visions rooted within the historicity of today’s condition. The issue is not a lack of political imagination or production among Somalis—there has been, and will continue to be, transformative, inspirational work produced in and outside the academy. The issue is that these imaginations are constantly disciplined, marginalised, or rendered illegible by structures of power that determine what counts as acceptable: a narrow, pre-approved menu of options calibrated to uphold the interests of those who see in Somalia a place for enrichment and experimentation.