Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT In pre-colonial traditional Somalia, education was dispensed through informal systems of communal interaction. With the arrival of colonialism in the mid-late 19th century, formal programmes of learning were slowly but steadily established. These were limited in scope and were essentially designed for the purposes of colonization. With independence in 1960, the education sector developed very quickly with pre-1991 civilian and military governments building hundreds of schools, training tens of thousands of teachers, adopting the Latin script for the writing of the Somali language, and successfully implementing nation-wide literacy programmes. But with the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, all modern systems of learning in the country were destroyed by the fighting factions, and Somalia has since been a country without any formal programmes of education. This paper first looks at the history of education in Somalia, then it describes and analyses the nature as well as the magnitude of destruction, and ends with an urgent appeal to the international community to come to the rescue of Somalia's children, and help resuscitate and reconstitute the country's structures and forms of learning.
Introduction
The entire fabric of the Somali society has been damaged, the existence of the whole nation has sunk into a deep, dark sea of unimaginable human and material disaster, and the communal mind of the people is in a coma. (Afrax, 1994, p. 233)
Since the collapse of the Somali state in January 1991, Somalia has been a country without any level of organized systems of learning. This is obviously the result of the division of the country into clan-based fiefdoms (Samatar,1991b) the secession of the northwest from the rest of the country (Samatar, 1992), and the ensuing civil war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Somalis (Michaelson, 1993; Sahnoun, 1994). In this process of social disintegration, schools, technical training centres and university facilities and resources became among the first casualties of the senseless mass destruction of the country's total infrastructure. The physical destruction of the facilities was, at times, peculiarly coupled with the targeting of the educated cadre among the warring factions. As a result, underdeveloped Somalia seems to have embarked on the treacherous road of de-development, defined in this sense as reversing the limited trend...