Tag: Decolonization
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Somaliland, Somalia, and the Ethics of Non‑Alignment
Recognition, Reality, and Responsibility in the Horn of Africa The recognition of Somaliland would mark a historic moment—akin to Eritrea or South Sudan—not a geopolitical earthquake, but a shift whose ripple effects could extend far beyond its borders. Global politics has a way of humbling our certainties: the developments we dismiss as peripheral often become
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The Blame Loop Has Expired
Nearly a quarter-century after the ministers of Eritrea were made to disappear into silence on September 18, 2001, a date that split a nation’s hopes, the diagnosis of betrayal has calcified into ritual. In a recent article, Dawit Mesfin revisits this now-familiar script: that President Isaias Afwerki duped not only the Eritrean people but the…
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The River Remembers (Part II): The Archive of the Unsaid
In this installment of The River Remembers, the author dives beneath the surface of colonial history to explore its psychic and linguistic aftermath—what remains unspoken, untranslatable, and unresolved. Through a reflective reading of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, the essay examines how colonialism embeds itself not only in roads and records but…
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What Memory Chooses, and What It Omits
A lyrical excavation of memory, empire, and resistance, Of Trains, Turkays, and Tongues explores how colonial infrastructures—both physical and linguistic—have been reimagined through song, story, and subversion. From the iron rails of foreign-built trains to the surnames inherited from Ottoman administrators, the essay challenges selective nostalgia and interrogates how power, identity, and language collide. This…
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The Disease the Colonizers Left Behind – The River Remembers Series*
This first entry in The River Remembers series lays the foundation for a postcolonial reckoning across Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, and Ethiopia. Blending historical analysis, cultural memory, and theoretical insight, the essay examines how different colonial powers left behind not only borders but ways of seeing—and mis-seeing—ourselves. With reference to thinkers like Fanon, Bhabha, and…