At the Hargeisa Cultural Centre Library in Somaliland, Somalia's breakaway region, cassettes archive manager Hafsa Omer is meticulously archiving and digitising a collection of 14,000 cassettes. The tapes contain more than half a century of the music, poetry, political discussions of the self-proclaimed nation which has no global recognition.
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00:00People do not, you know, see this, you know, things,
00:29important, but I see it important because it's holding a whole history of my
00:34country, it's holding a whole history of my people, because my people, they never
00:39write, you know, they never read, all they do is they talk. When we were talking
00:44about the climate change and how we impacted our lives, the trees and
00:48everything it took from us, I just went back to the songs and I've seen how many
00:52trees that just vanished from the environment, how many type of fruits that
00:57we had that are no longer there, how many types of animals that lived here in
01:04Somaliland, in Hargeisa especially, and they no longer exist.
01:09This is just a proof to disprove those who say that Somaliland doesn't exist,
01:30because it shows that it exists. I'm putting these blocks together and making, you know,
01:36the history is made by the people who are witnessing. The failure is that when
01:42we don't document it, someone else creates another narrative. So this is to
01:48give the real narrative for the society, for these people, and it's becoming
01:52fundamental for the young generation who doesn't know anything about it.