Hargeisa

Hargeisa grew from a watering place and religious settlement on the Maroodi Jeex watercourse, where a Qadiriyya religious teacher established a community in the nineteenth century and pastoralists brought their herds to water. Its position on the plateau, on the caravan routes between the Ethiopian highlands and the Gulf of Aden port of Berbera, made it a trading stop, and under the British protectorate it became an administrative centre, taking over from Berbera as the seat of government in 1941.

After British Somaliland's independence on 26 June 1960 and union with former Italian Somalia five days later, the town became a provincial capital of the Somali Republic, and many northerners came to feel that power and investment had moved south. From the late 1970s the Somali National Movement fought a guerrilla war against the government of Siad Barre. In 1988 government forces bombarded and bombed Hargeisa, destroying most of the city and killing very large numbers of civilians; the surviving population fled, much of it to camps across the Ethiopian border.

People returned from 1991 onwards, after the fall of Barre and the declaration of the Republic of Somaliland at a conference in Burao, and rebuilt on the ruins, largely without outside aid and with money sent home by relatives abroad. Hargeisa became the seat of the Somaliland administration, which Somalia regards as part of its own territory. Since then the city has grown quickly, with new concrete buildings, universities and a spreading ring of suburbs on the plateau.

Hargeisa is a Somali city, Sunni Muslim and organised by clan, with the Isaaq clans predominant. Elders carry real authority: the councils that ended the fighting of the early 1990s grew into the upper house of the Somaliland parliament, and disputes are still often settled between families rather than in court.

Poetry is the prestige art. Somali verse is composed, memorised and judged closely, and it has long carried news, argument and political criticism; the city has produced and hosted many of the best-known modern Somali poets and singers, and the songs of the independence period remain widely known. Since 2008 the Hargeisa International Book Fair has brought writers and audiences from across the Somali world and the diaspora to the city each year, one of the few literary festivals of its kind in the Horn of Africa.

The diaspora shapes daily culture as much as anything. Families in Britain, Scandinavia, the Gulf and North America send money, return in the summer, build houses and open businesses, and their children bring back accents and habits from abroad. Dress is conservative, Ramadan is widely kept, and the two Eids and 18 May, the anniversary of the 1991 declaration, are the great public occasions. English is more widely used in education and administration here than in southern Somalia, a legacy of the British period.

An estimate for 2019 put the population at about 1.2 million people, though no census settles the figure, and the city has grown outwards across the plateau with each drought and each return of families from abroad. The day starts early, before the heat, with markets and offices busy through the morning; in the afternoon much of the male population gathers to chew khat brought in by road from Ethiopia, and business slows until the cooler evening.

The economy runs on trade, livestock and remittances. Goats, sheep and camels are bought in the city's markets and exported through Berbera to the Arabian Peninsula; traders import food, fuel, vehicles and consumer goods through the same port; and money sent by relatives overseas sustains a large share of households. Money-changers on the main streets sit behind walls of banded Somaliland shilling notes, and mobile money has replaced cash for most purchases. Several universities and the offices of the administration and of aid organisations are significant employers.

Water is short, electricity expensive and largely generated privately, and the lack of international recognition limits banking, lending and travel. Youth unemployment is high, and many young people attempt the journey to Europe or the Gulf. Displaced people from drought-hit rural districts live in settlements on the edge of the city.

Breakfast in Hargeisa is canjeero, also called laxoox, a soft fermented flatbread cooked on a griddle and eaten with ghee and sugar, with liver and onions, or dipped in tea boiled with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves. Lunch is the main meal and usually means bariis iskukaris, rice spiced with cumin, cardamom and cloves and served with goat, camel or chicken, or baasto, pasta with a rich meat sauce, often with a banana alongside.

Camel meat is the city's speciality. Grilled over charcoal or slow-cooked, it appears on restaurant menus across Hargeisa in a way it does not in most Somali cities, and camel milk, fresh or soured, is sold at the markets and drunk through the day. Muqmad, meat cut small, dried and preserved in ghee, is the traditional travelling and pastoral food and is still made at home.

Sambuusa, fried triangular pastries filled with spiced meat, are the standard evening snack and are everywhere during Ramadan. Sweets mean xalwo, a dense confection of sugar, ghee and spices cooked in large pans and served at weddings and on Eid. Dates, imported in quantity, are eaten to break the fast. Fresh fish comes up from Berbera on the Gulf of Aden. No alcohol is sold; tea and soft drinks accompany every meal, and coffee is far less common than in Ethiopia next door.