Siad Barre, myth and the spectacle of power

Every nation tells stories about itself. For postcolonial nations, those stories often begin with a deep longing for freedom, a struggle to achieve it, a determination to fight injustice, and the dream of ethnic or racial redemption. It’s a familiar narrative. You can change the cast and location — Nkrumah in Ghana, Nehru in India, Kenyatta in Kenya — but the structure of the plot remains. As a result, the larger-than-life figures who often led these anti-colonial struggles represented more than the political authority vested in their offices. In many cases, they had to. People in newly independent nations didn’t just want presidents and prime ministers who designed and executed policy — they wanted figures who could conjure worlds, point to new horizons, and embody what they hoped their country would represent. As Indar, a character in V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, reflects on Nehru, Gandhi, and other heroes of India’s independence movement: “I had admired them. They belonged to me; they ennobled me and gave me some place in the world.” He eventually rebels against that idea, as many do. But for a time, it fulfilled a deep psychological need.

Somalia does not have a founding figure. It does not have a Nehru or a Jomo Kenyatta, a towering individual that looms large in the national imagination. Aden Abdulle Osman, the country's first president, was not a mythic hero. He was a politician. And as Somali historian Mohamed Issa Trunji told me last year, this is why the country “turned paradoxically to figures like Siad Barre in search of this kind of national figure.” Siad Barre was the first Somali president to create and sustain a myth about himself. He appointed himself a hero and not just a hero, but a redeemer. A messianic national figure. And like all redeemers, he had enemies. The West. Imperialism. Clannism. Internal dissent. Siad Barre’s project, at its core, was a mythological one. He inserted himself into a story that Somalis had long wanted to tell about themselves. That they were a people robbed of their dignity. That they had to rise up. That they had to be made whole again. That their dignity had to be restored. “The purpose of the revolution,” he said after his coup, “is to guide us back to our true Somali characteristics; to clearly understand what we are, and what we stand for.” Barre branded himself as the individual who could make that real.

It didn’t quite work out that way, as his rule proved to be a catastrophe for Somalia. But for a time, many Somalis believed in his promise. I’ve been thinking about that tension: how Barre’s power was shaped not only through repressive violence or the efficacy of government policy, but also through myth, symbolism, and his performance of leadership. This reflection is, of course, very experimental, and I don’t claim to have fully worked it out, but I haven’t seen many writers engage with this question from this perspective.

Firstly, I’m not the only one trying to understand how and why these figures could appeal. In his new book A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda, the historian Derek Peterson explores how ordinary Ugandans invested in — and even believed in — the project of Idi Amin’s dictatorship. Uganda under Amin was, by any measure, a site of profound violence and repression. But Peterson shows how this violence was also embedded within a broader narrative, aesthetic and national project which promised to overcome the challenges of colonisation—one that ultimately redeemed Amin and his regime. To oppose him was to oppose his stated aims to remake Uganda. Amin, like Siad Barre, didn’t just rule; he performed, he generated myths, and narrated. If you want to learn more about that, my friend Alex White interviewed Derek Peterson for Geeska, which I encourage you all to read.

My key contention is that Barre similarly addressed a deep need within the Somali public. Somalis wanted to be relevant and important African and global actors. They wanted their state and nation to be admired; they wanted to overcome the injustices of colonial rule—the borders, the imposed languages, and the social, political, and economic structures. That is why I believe examining the stories his regime told about its decisions—and how they were received—is just as important as analysing the more material basis for how a regime gathers, brokers, and deploys the levers of state power.

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To understand how Barre achieved this mythic status, I want to examine how political leaders can embody archetypal narratives that transcend policy—something the French philosopher Roland Barthes explored through an unlikely lens: professional wrestling. In his 1957 essay The World of Wrestling, French philosopher Roland Barthes attempted to conceptualise the way audiences receive and relate to performances — what they seek from what they watch, and how, even if the audience knows the performance isn’t real, it remains invested in the underlying archetypes that appear throughout. In other words, audiences don’t cheer because they’re fooled, they cheer because the wrestlers embody a moral world: one of heroes and villains, justice and punishment, clarity and catharsis. This is definitely a version of Joan Didion’s “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”, and Barthes and Didion would agree on the importance of narratives, but Barthes goes a bit deeper. Didion implies that we need narratives in order to make sense of life, “to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience”; that in order for us to know where we’ve been, who we are, and where we’re going, we need to impose sense on our personal experiences. This insight captures the deep psychological need humans have for coherence and structure in a fundamentally disorderly and disorienting world.

For Barthes, stories don’t just offer comfort. They stage moral dramas that help people decide who’s right, who’s wrong, and why and in doing so, they embed political and ideological messages into emotional spectacles. A person or group in a myth isn’t coded or labelled as evil in a story as an inherent characteristic—they become or represent evil because of certain qualities or actions. And vice versa about good. Our myths then do not simply help us make sense of ourselves in the Didionian sense; it tells us how to live, who to revere, and what to believe and why. This distinction, I think, is key when considering how Siad Barre’s regime crafted and performed narratives that were not just anti-colonial or nationalist, but mythical, in Barthes’ terms: designed to naturalise his rule, elevate him as a redemptive figure, and offer the Somali people a structured, morally charged story in which to locate themselves after the rupture of colonialism. To put it differently, after the coup, as the military regime began excavating Somali history and constructing narratives (or myths) from those experiences, it positioned itself to determine who and what was evil, why, and who the heroes were in the Somali story – and predictably, the military were the heroes. I hope you’re following so far, because next I’ll move on to how leading Somali thinkers and cultural figures were reflecting on the past and their place in the world, how Somalis felt, and how Barre was able to exploit that to legitimise his rule.

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Somalis were, and to some extent still are, basically fixated on two perennial evils which they hold responsible for the problems their state and society suffer from. You’ll all note that Somalia is frequently referred to (even by some Somalis) as a failed state, and according to the New Yorker, the “most failed state”. I’ll use various pieces of evidence to demonstrate this. Those two evils are clannism and imperialism, which are seen as the chief internal and external culprits for their current fallen state.

Poetry, which is hugely popular in Somalia, is a great place to begin. Mohammed Abdulle Hassan was a prominent anti-colonial fighter and an incredibly skilled poet who left an important political and artistic legacy. Through his poems, which today have been heard by many Somalis, he railed against European imperial rule, which he cast as a slieght to the religous sensibilites of the Somali people. In fact, he began his career in British Somaliland as an agitator and later leader of the Dervish movement after he saw Somali children converted to Christianity. He was a reliable opponent of the British through his political before he was eventually defeated. “It was I who rejected again and again the infidel’s offer to buy me out; it was I who refused to sell my faith to gain the gates of hell; and it was I who desired no status in the first of the two Worlds,” he wrote stubbornly in his poem Dardaaran, or The Will.

The first song by Abdullahi Qarshe, a Somali musician, playwright, and poet who had an immeasurable impact on Somali culture, was titled “Ka Kacaay! Ka Kacaay!” (Wake up! Wake up!) and served as an anti-imperial anthem. He wrote it shortly after hearing that Gerald Reece had treated Somalis in the Northern Frontier District (NFD)—a Somali-populated region in what is now northern Kenya—oppressively during his time there and was being transferred to British Somaliland. Mohamed Aden Sheikh, a late former health minister and cardiologist who played a prominent role in the Barre regime, referred to Somalis in his memoir, Back to Mogadishu, as the “most unfortunate victims” of European imperialism in Africa. What he meant was that the Somali peninsula — a Horn-shaped landmass jutting into the Indian Ocean — was divided by four imperial powers, who, in addition to partitioning the territory, played Somali clans off against each other to maintain their rule. The Somali Youth League (SYL), the first major Somali political party, held a similarly pan-Somalist view—both in how it imagined the political arena in which it had claims, and in who it believed it represented.

The SYL also provides a useful starting point for thinking about how Somalis viewed the scourge of clannism in their society. This was more of a social issue than an ideology as such, but it led to discrimination against people from smaller or less prominent clans and has historically been seen as an obstacle to forging an inclusive national identity for Somalis. The SYL aimed to address this issue and was so committed to it that it was explicitly mentioned in the party’s oath of membership:

“I will become the brother of all other members. I will not reveal the name of my tribe. In matters of marriage I will not discriminate between the Somali tribes and the Midgan, Yibirh, Yaha and Tomals.”

It didn’t succeed at mitigating and managing this problem after Somalia became independent. The clans became the main political actors in the country, with each seeking political representation for itself, leading to the emergence of some 60 parties, all working to serve the clan constituencies rather than push forward a strong national or ideological agenda as parties are meant to. “It [Somalia] was unfortunately more of a clanocracy in that sense. Ideas weren't a big part of the game,” Mohamed Isa Trunji told me. Corruption was rife and the country struggled.

Barre’s regime built on this moral universe in which these two forces (clannism and imperialism) weren’t just political problems, they were mythic antagonists. Like the villains in a wrestling ring, they were made more visible by his government and emotional, and morally unambiguous enemies. Barre’s regime did not treat colonialism and tribalism as material forces with real historical and economic roots. It elevated them into a moral and metaphysical fault which was holding the Somalis back. It was the army’s job to solve that. Radio Mogadishu, for example, began touting the virtues of the Somali soldier who was supposedly immune to such ills: “The refuter of (clan) genealogies, who knows no nepotism.”

This was the mood music and the political and intellectual climate in the country throughout the 20th century. There were these two great evils (imperialism & clannism) but no heroic figure to vanquish them. It is in this picture that Barre steps. 

Barre cast his regime as a unifier—a force that would bind Somalis together into a single nation and undo the colonial borders that had split them across five regions; the apocryphal dream of recreating a Greater Somalia that had long animated Somali nationalism. This vision was more than policy; it was emotionally and existentially related to the meaning of the Somali state. The five-pointed star on its flag reflected this. It promised to undo the violence of partition and restore wholeness to a fractured people. The regime reinforced this vision using the levers of state: streets were renamed, textbooks rewritten, maps printed showing all Somali territories united as one. People were encouraged to refer to the Somali regions of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti as “occupied territories.” Through maps, language, and daily rituals, the state performed unity with the goal of bringing it into being; translating the emotional urgency of a family torn apart by imperialism into the political urgency of a nation uniting itself. Hussein Bulhan, a Somali psychiatrist and Fanon scholar, put it more strikingly when he said the “dismemberment of Somaliland entailed the dismemberment of the Somali psyche”, and that Somalis have since sought “psychic wholeness”.

Barre saw himself as the visionary leader the Somalis had been waiting for to make this happen. Somalia, as Trunji observed in an interview with me, lacked a “father of the nation” figure, leaving a vacuum that Barre saw an opportunity to fill. Paintings carrying his likeness went up across the country. Just a few years into his reign, Barre was already insisting that government officials gather to discuss the virtues of his “Blessed Revolution” and sing Guul Wade Siad, the song dedicated to the President. He framed himself as a liberator for Somalis and colonised peoples across Africa, adopting grandiose titles such as Light of Africa, Victorious Leader and Brother of Marx. “We are against anybody or any state who oppresses people and refuses their freedom,” Barre once said. “Whatever it costs we always support that principle”. By erecting statues to figures like Mohammed Abdulle Hassan, a Somali anti-colonial leader, and Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, a 16th-century military commander, Barre positioned himself as the latest in a lineage of Somali fighters resisting imperialism. Nuruddin Farah, in his novel Sweet and Sour Milk, saw through that, describing these as “monuments of false hope”. Barre’s self-conception though was that of a historical agent, tasked with redeeming the Somali people. In his first speech as president, he declared: “If people think we have stepped in to gain more power, they are mistaken. We have stepped in to restore the laws of the country, and to return the nation to the place from which it had fallen.”

Barre’s ambitions extended beyond domestic politics. Like the Somali public, he sought global relevance, aspiring to stand alongside contemporary African heavyweights such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Muammar Gaddafi. Domestically, this translated into an official ban on clannism, weekly burnings of clan effigies, and a public culture centered on national unity. In foreign policy, Somalia actively supported liberation movements across the continent, opposed Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, and helped draft the Mogadishu Declaration, which endorsed armed struggle over dialogue to achieve continental emancipation. Mohammed Abdulrahman, a former livestock ministry official, recalled in an interview with me how proud Somalis were of their country’s role in supporting liberation movements in Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Djibouti, South Africa, and beyond. I myself have met many Somalis who bragged about what a headache Hussein Abdulkadir Kassim, a senior Somali official, gave Henry Kissinger when he met him in New York in 1976. “On almost every international issue you oppose us. We can’t be wrong all the time,” Kissinger protested to Kassim. “The law of averages doesn’t work that way.” For the Somali government, the US was wrong, and they were prepared to call the US out.

The myths and archetypes of Barre’s regime—the slighted victim, the underdog, the figure pulling himself up against overwhelming forces—were scaffolds for his worldview. Socialism here is less a guiding set of principles than a host ideology that allowed the Somali leadership, nationalist at its core, to face off with those opposing its goals, i.e. the West and Ethiopia. Through nationalist and anti-colonial messaging broadcast on Radio Mogadishu, Barre acted as the project manager overseeing the construction narrative that sutured the population together and put him at their head. Somalis, and other freedom-loving nations against the world.

Here, Roland Barthes’ framework in his essay on wrestling becomes useful. Wrestling, Barthes argues, is a spectacle in which performers and audiences both understand the make-believe; the pleasure comes from witnessing archetypes of good and evil embodied. Geopolitics, by contrast, is a full-contact sport with real consequences. Barre’s regime borrowed the dramaturgy of wrestling but applied it to life-and-death politics: the archetypes were real, and the stakes were national.

It is important to clarify that this use of Barthes does not imply that Somalis were responsible for Barre’s rise because Barthes has a place for audiences in his concept. I also don’t mean that mythmaking directly determined policy. Firstly, Somalia was a dictatorship: dissent carried the threat of imprisonment for those Somalis who didn’t agree with Barre’s decision-making. Myths also shaped perceptions, desires, and legitimacy rather than dictating behaviour.

The Barre regime’s reading of regional and continental politics was not just fantasy either: the United States had cornered Somalia via support for Ethiopia, clannism was a persistent domestic problem, and much of Africa remained under exploitative colonial or settler regimes. What is striking is how Barre manoeuvred within these realities to position himself as the leader, and how that positioning was accepted, legitimising his autocratic rule. He became, in effect, the director, scriptwriter, narrator, and self-appointed hero of the Somali postcolonial story at the end of the 20th century.

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Wrestling, Barthes argues, offers its viewers “an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations.” In the ring, everything is clear. There is good and evil, hero and villain, punishment and redemption. The story is unambiguous and morally satisfying. What Barthes calls the “perfect intelligibility of reality” allows the audience to temporarily transcend the messiness of real life where there are no complex motivations, no moral grey zones, just a spoiler to be vanquished and justice to be done.

Somalis, too, longed for a compelling narrative with that kind of explanatory power — one that made sense of the brutal aftershocks of colonialism, the violence of partition, the hollowing-out of sovereignty, the indignity of underdevelopment. Barre’s regime offered that compelling narrative and said it would show the Somali people how they could overcome the national problems they faced: a story with clear enemies, a historic mission, and a heroic protagonist. But unlike the wrestlers Barthes describes — performers who knowingly inhabit roles within a spectacle — Barre did not play the hero. He believed he was the hero (Guulwade). And that belief, when tethered to power, is where myth ceases to be performance and becomes a totalising worldview.

This collapse of the distinction between myth and reality is crucial. Myth becomes not just a lens for interpreting the world, but a script for how to act within it. With no room for ambiguity, nuance, or critique, the stakes shift from symbolic drama to the blood sport of geopolitics. This is perhaps why, in 1977, as the Cold War superpowers aligned against Somalia during the Ogaden War, Barre couldn’t retreat. I spoke to a colonel in the Somali army last week who told me that when he asked Barre whether Somalia had Soviet—or possibly US, support in the event of a military campaign against Ethiopia, Barre told him that they would place their trust in God. The narrative he had constructed — and the emotional and political investments that came with it — left no space for withdrawal or failure. The public, too, had been caught up in the story. What began as a unifying vision morphed into a trap. Thousands of Somalis lined up to fight in the Ogaden, but none were made aware of the fact that the material basis for a successful war was absent (funding and a supply of arms), and the diplomatic groundwork hadn’t been laid to find a respectable off-ramp for either Ethiopia or Somalia. Barre had become “delirious with omnipotence” and “felt like an African Napoleon”, Mohamed Aden Sheikh, his unofficial envoy to Ethiopia and health minister, said. Mogadishu wanted to change borders by force and force alone. Once the war had started, there would be no other way.

The symbolic investment in Barre as redeemer, and in the military regime as national saviour, not only made his rule seem natural — even inevitable — but also granted him extraordinary licence. While many resisted, and paid dearly for it, others participated in the myth: some out of genuine hope, others out of fear or exhaustion. Myth does not require full belief, only participation. And even as the promise curdled into repression, as dissent narrowed and catastrophe loomed, the myth persisted; too deeply embedded to abandon easily. It was only in 1989 that Siad Barre managed to reach an agreement with Ethiopia to stop arming rebels within the country, as his regime was on its last legs.

Barre’s power, then, was not just material or institutional. It was also deeply narrative, and we still see traces of that on the internet today, where some look back at his presidency with nostalgia: clips of his speeches and events circulate periodically. This enduring belief in a redemptive, visionary leader still holds sway in certain Somali intellectual circles. For instance, Abdurahman Abdullahi Baadiyow, a prominent figure, authored a book about Somalia titled A State in Search of Exceptional Leadership. In this work, Baadiyow reflects a broader sentiment: the idea that Somalia, in its search for stability and direction, requires a heroic, almost mythic leader. Under Barre, he wasn’t merely the head of state — he became the storyteller-in-chief, the self-anointed hero of the Somali postcolonial saga. The tragedy, however, lies not just in what Barre did, but in how power and narrative became so intertwined that retreat, revision, or reflection were rendered nearly impossible. In the end, the myths the regime constructed didn’t just fail to save Somalia — they can be said to have played a key role in breaking it.