PhD defence by Fartun Mohamed
This thesis analyses Somali memories of Italian colonialism across three generations, in Somalia and the diaspora. The guiding question is: how was Italian colonialism experienced, remembered, transmitted and reinterpreted by Somalis across generations, and what forms has this memory taken across different Somali communities, both at home and in the diaspora?
The primary sources are of two kinds. The first is the unpublished handwritten autobiography of Aden Abdulla Osman, Somalia’s first president: 34 pages covering the years 1908–1938, analysed here for the first time within an Italian academic context. The second corpus consists of forty-two interviews conducted between 2020 and 2024 in Somalia, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States.
The theoretical framework draws on three traditions: Latin American decoloniality (Quijano, Mignolo, Wynter), Black Studies and African diasporic thought (Du Bois, Fanon, Gilroy, Hall), and Subaltern Studies (Spivak, Chakrabarty, Guha). The research proposes an original analytical distinction between direct memories, lived in first person, transmitted memories, inherited through silences and family practices by the independence generation, and transformed memories, critically reworked by the contemporary diaspora, which the thesis calls the Say Wallahi Generation.
The three empirical chapters show that Italian colonialism did not end in 1960. It continued to operate through the educational structures inherited from the AFIS trusteeship, through the Italian language as an instrument first of domination, then of resistance, through the strategic silences with which families sought to shield subsequent generations, and finally in the diaspora, where that history encountered new forms of marginalisation and produced a generation that now interrogates it with unprecedented critical tools.
The thesis’s main contribution is to address a structural gap in Italian historiography: restoring epistemic centrality to Somali voices, which Italian academic production had systematically excluded as legitimate sources of historical knowledge.
Register