A Revolution of Letters

Abstract Colonialism in Africa was a textual encounter, with writing operating as an essential tool for colonial governance as well as a visual embodiment of Western “rationality” and civilization. Somalis, a predominantly oral people spread out across five colonial territories in the Horn of Africa, resisted Latin-based orthographies for their language because of these associations, while anticolonial nationalism following the Second World War brought the orthography question to the forefront as Somalis vigorously debated the written form Somali should take. Following Somalia’s independence in 1960, the continued use of colonial languages for writing threatened the postcolonial nation-building project and its larger ambitions to unify the partitioned Somali territories into a Greater Somalia, a central objective of Pan-Somali nationalist politics. When General Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in 1969, the adoption of a Somali script became a priority for his socialist military government, as his authoritarian regime used visual practices of statecraft such as mass spectacles and textual production to establish a modern Pan-Somali nationalist identity. This article examines the history of the Somali orthography and the making of a nationalist discourse ecology that brought together text, sight, and spectacle in revolutionary Somalia at a time when the Somali state looked beyond its borders and mobilized for war.