Mogadishu: a city that won’t love us back

In the early morning, I take a Bajaj from the road in Bondheere, central Mogadishu. Less than five minutes later, I’m at Lido Beach. I send the driver the fare, offer him a smile and a goodbye. He’s usually listening to a song by Somali rapper, Sharma Boy; the beat trails off with the breeze as I step away.

The morning light here is always between dark and bright; never empty, never still. Young people gather along the shore, sometimes with their elders, brothers, or grandmothers. I take off my shoes and run, like a child, straight into the waters of the Indian Ocean as its waves break along the coast. My feet sink deep into the sea, and I breathe again.

In these moments, I forget what I am, where I came from, what this city has done to me. To everyone who has called it home for the last thirty years. The problems I carry dissolve. With my eyes closed, I hear only the waves colliding, and for a while, the unstable reality vanishes.

Mogadishu was not the place of my earliest memories. It was, at first, a possibility. I was a third-grader in Syria when I overheard the adults in my family whispering about returning to Somalia.

And as I taste the salt on my lips, I think of friends who have always lived here, for whom this shore is not a fleeting escape but the only land they have ever known.

Mogadishu was not the place of my earliest memories. It was, at first, a possibility. I was a third-grader in Syria when I overheard the adults in my family whispering about returning to Somalia. A small Somali communitybegan to form in Damascus, the capital of Syria, in the early 2000s, with estimates placing the population at around 8,000. Until then, I had never imagined belonging to any country other than the one where I was born – a place where children at school called me “chocolate”.

When my parents began speaking of the move, I asked with genuine curiosity: “Are all the people in the streets Black?” The idea of being in a place where I would not stand out felt fascinating.

But my first encounter with Mogadishu was nothing like my childish daydream. We didn’t even land at the main airport – instead, we touched down on a distant runway and drove for hours through unfamiliar terrain. Men carried guns. Trucks rolled by loaded with weapons. When we reached the house, the conversations about the city weren’t about welcome or warmth. Everything was heavy, unsettling. Everyone was alert.

School came next, and with it, the soundtrack of gunfire. It was late 2005. The civil war was in one of its many tense phases. The colours of the city seemed faded. Terrifying noises became our background music. People moved with a quiet readiness, always prepared to flee if violence flared nearby.

In the school hallways, we ran an unspoken programme of survival. Each morning, we asked one another: Where are you going today? We switched bus routes without warning, anticipating what might happen on the streets. Sometimes, we decided not to travel together at all. Saving our lives was never just an individual act – it meant thinking for the group, protecting each other as if survival itself was a shared responsibility.

In the midst of that, we carved small moments to quietly redefine what mattered, dreaming of happiness, of endings wrapped in love and gentleness.

From 2005 to 2017, some things improved, others worsened. No path felt fully safe or stable. A whole generation grew up without the full space to explore, to dream, to expand.

I asked myself more than once: Why did we leave Syria? Yet over time, that question blurred. The recess at school, the games I was learning to play, and the raw energy of children’s laughter softened the edges. A girl once tried to teach me a game with a circle of stones. I didn’t understand it and laughed: “What about wrestling instead?” It felt more honest than the fragile rituals of the game.

From 2005 to 2017, some things improved, others worsened. No path felt fully safe or stable. A whole generation grew up without the full space to explore, to dream, to expand. And yet, we did. Despite the losses haunting our homes, our university halls, and our sidewalks, we endured. We carried our dreams inside tired chests.

The bridge between our people and ourselves was the city – the one we expected so much from, the one we believed could hold all our hopes.

Mogadishu became like a lover who would never truly love us back. A city that carved wounds into us – some permanent. And yet we clung to her: her bullet-marked homes, her chaotic streets, the beach at Lido that we sang for.

We didn’t know how to separate the city from society, or the society from family, or the family from ourselves. This was where the real fracture began: we could no longer tell which pain was ours, and which was inherited.

We learned emotional shutdown. Our senses dulled. Our feelings were muted – sometimes by choice, more often by necessity. We moved through life with a strange lack of direction. Where were we going? What did we want? And why?

We were the bearers of a new Somali identity, shaped by exile, by violence, and by a return that was not quite a homecoming.

War and grief etched a private, invisible map of confusion into us. Disoriented, we struggled to imagine the life we wanted or the selves we could become. We were the bearers of a new Somali identity, shaped by exile, by violence, and by a return that was not quite a homecoming.

And yet, as we reached adulthood, new questions began to rise. Now that we have survived, what is next? What could make our lives valuable beyond staying alive? What could we give ourselves – or to others – genuinely, from a place of love, not fear or guilt?

Looking at the younger generation born during or after the war, I see a deep wound. Many dream of leaving home in search of belonging, a longing so strong that they risk their lives in tahriib – illegal migration across dangerous routes. Others remain trapped, unable to see a way out, numbing their pain with drugs.

Some, like me, pour their focus into solving problems. But once those problems are addressed, a void opens: What now? What does a meaningful life look like when survival has been the only goal for so long? These questions form a new kind of war – not one fought with guns, but waged silently in the mind.

In these inside wars, we often recreate reality from a perspective shaped by fear, by survival, by scarcity. The city itself has seen changes; business is thriving, new buildings rising faster than in decades. Some even point that this has negatively impacted the city’s “aesthetic identity”. But for many of us, the war is not over yet.

Behind the curtain of necessity, one is forced to confront oneself without the collective. Each left with his single life, its memories, its own quiet, solitary story.

For a young man graduating from university in his early twenties, the only visible option might be to take up driving a Bajaj (three-wheeled taxi). The money he earns supports his family – a mother, a sister, younger siblings – and for a while, that brings joy. Making him feel that the past really passes, and all that he had seen, heard and borne witness to is washed by the advent of a better day.

But it’s often just a short, transient state. And the emptiness returns, and he reaches for whatever is within arm’s length – anything to fill the void.

For a young woman, the story might unfold differently but with the same ache. Perhaps she is trapped in a loop of unrequited love. Perhaps she dreamed of going to university but abandoned her studies as hope faded. One day, she finds herself on a boat to nowhere, surrounded by endless water, chasing an escape that feels safer than staying.

When I see all this, I remember that I also have my share of it; I do feel how the shadows in my mind grow larger than the reality before me. I wake up in the night, or early mornings for no reason, my chest tightens with worry, my mind uncertain which direction life could take.

We are a generation shaped by the legacy and surreal imagination of the Somalia inside our parents’ memories, but seen only through the lens of a country frozen in a haunted time.

Most youth gatherings fail to feed my generation’s hunger for meaning. Cultural and artistic spaces are scarce, often collapsing under fear and fractured politics. We hesitate to be seen, to stand on our own. We fear naming ourselves outside the definitions that war and survival have given us.

Every day, we make choices to survive: silence over speaking out, conformity over individuality, inherited paths over self-made ones. These choices keep us alive, but they also keep us small. Still, survival is not the end of the story.

And slowly, as if risking the possibility of being punished – or worse, killed – we ask ourselves who we really are, beyond survival. Are we ready to live a life that is truly ours?

We are a generation shaped by the legacy and surreal imagination of the Somalia inside our parents’ memories, but seen only through the lens of a country frozen in a haunted time. We are stirred awake by the weight of our own decisions, but recognised only for the echoes of the past we carry. We are learning not to apologise for our desires, to imagine a future that reflects our truth – but too often, we are still defined by the kind of love, or the kind of pain, that once shaped us.

Sitting at Lido, the thoughts that once felt calm before the sea now seem to race faster than the Nile. And though part of me dreams of beginnings and longs to shape a new reality, I wonder: how do I change? How can I take a path different from the one carved for me by history? And the question thickens when I remember that I’m not the only one asking it, but a whole generation.