Hargeysa Cultural Center's Tape Wall in Hargeisa, Somalia

Somalia has a rich cultural heritage, primarily preserved through oral tradition. Poetry was a significant part of Somali culture, with every man having a recognized position in literature. However, the civil war and genocide in the late 1980s led to the decline of this poetic tradition. The invention of cassette tapes in the 1970s transformed Somali society, becoming a golden age for music and arts. When the Isaaq genocide began, people smuggled or buried cassette tapes to preserve their culture. The Hargeysa Cultural Center has been working to collect and digitize these scattered archives, with thousands of tapes on display. The process of categorizing the tapes is ongoing, and the collection has already been used for PhD theses. A poet who heard an old recording of her work began to cry, realizing it would have been lost forever without the recording. The poetic tradition has begun to return in Somaliland, with a poet named Weedhsame uploading a poem to Facebook that criticized the government for corruption, sparking a chain of response and debate poems. The wall of cassette tapes serves as a success story of preserving cultural heritage despite adversity.