Mogadishu

Mogadishu was already a wealthy trading city by the thirteenth century, one of the great Muslim ports of the Indian Ocean, minting its own coins and exporting cloth, ivory and hides to Arabia, Persia, India and China. The traveller Ibn Battuta described its sultan, its hospitality and its woven cloth in 1331. The coral-stone mosques of the old quarters — the Fakr ad-Din, named after the first sultan, and the Arba'a Rukun — date from that period, and the Benadiri merchant families of Hamar Weyne and Shingani trace their ancestry to it.

The Sultanate of Zanzibar later kept officials in the town to collect customs, and leased and then sold its rights to Italy at the end of the nineteenth century. Mogadishu became the capital of Italian Somaliland, gaining a cathedral, an Italianate administrative quarter and a seafront promenade. After the Second World War the territory returned to Italian administration under United Nations trusteeship, and in 1960 the city became the capital of the independent Somali Republic, and from 1969 the seat of Siad Barre's government.

The state's collapse in 1991 destroyed much of it. Clan militias fought street by street, the population scattered, and a United Nations and American intervention ended after the battle in the city in October 1993 that became known as Black Hawk Down. The Islamic Courts Union briefly governed in 2006 before Ethiopian forces removed it, and al-Shabaab emerged and was pushed out of the city in 2011 by African Union and government forces, though it has continued to attack it. Since then diaspora money has funded a partial reconstruction of hotels, housing and streets, alongside camps of displaced people.

Mogadishu is the most mixed city in the country. The Hawiye clans predominate, but the old quarters are home to the Benadiri, merchant families of Arab, Persian and Indian descent who speak their own dialect and have their own traditions of trade and craft, and people from the river valleys, including Somali Bantu communities, and from every region have settled here through displacement and migration.

Before the war the capital was known for cinemas, bands, a theatre and a seafront café society, and something of that has returned with the diaspora: restaurants, poetry evenings, music, basketball and football, and in 2013 the first international music festival held in the city in two decades. Sufi orders were long central to religious life along this coast, with shrines that drew pilgrims, many of them destroyed during the insurgency's control of the city.

Life is conservative and observant, with modest dress, gender separation in many settings and strict keeping of Ramadan. Poetry remains the prestige art, and political argument often takes verse form. A handful of Italian words survive in everyday speech, a residue of the colonial period. Above all, the city's culture is shaped by return: families who left in the 1990s send money, build houses, open businesses and come back for the summer, and their expectations and accents are part of the street.

Mogadishu is by far the largest city in Somalia, with an estimated urban population of about 4.1 million, swollen by people displaced from the countryside by drought and conflict who live in large settlements on the edges. The day starts early, slows in the humid middle hours, and comes alive again in the evening along the seafront and around the markets.

The economy is trade, services and construction. Goods land at the port and are distributed from Bakaara market; telecoms, money-transfer firms and mobile money are unusually sophisticated for a country with so weak a state; and building funded by remittances and returning families has raised new hotels, flats and shopping blocks. Fishing supports part of the coast, and the river valleys inland supply fruit, maize and sesame.

Insecurity organises everything. Blast walls, checkpoints, armed guards and closed roads shape routes across the city, and attacks are part of living memory for every household. Water, electricity and schooling are mostly bought from private providers, and clan connections often matter more than paperwork. Flooding after heavy rain, food prices and unemployment are the everyday worries, and many young people look for a way out to the Gulf, Turkey or Europe.

The capital's cooking shows both the Indian Ocean and the Italian past. Fish is eaten more here than inland: tuna, kingfish and shark landed in the morning and grilled over charcoal or fried, served with rice or flatbread and a hot green relish of chilli, coriander and lime. Lobster appears on the seafront tables along the beach.

The standard lunch is bariis iskukaris, rice spiced with cumin, cardamom and cloves with goat, camel or chicken, often with a banana beside it, or baasto, pasta with a heavy meat and tomato sauce, a direct legacy of the Italian period. From the farming country behind the city come soor, a stiff maize or sorghum porridge eaten with stew, and muufo, a maize flatbread baked against the wall of a clay oven. Cambuulo, adzuki beans cooked soft and served with butter, sugar and sesame oil, is a favourite supper.

Breakfast is canjeero, the soft fermented flatbread, with ghee and sugar or with liver, and shaah, tea boiled with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves; coffee, a survival of the Italian years, is drunk in the city's cafés more than elsewhere in the country. Sambuusa, fried pastries filled with spiced meat, are the Ramadan snack, dates break the fast, and xalwo, the dense sweet of sugar, ghee and spices, is served at weddings and on Eid. No alcohol is sold.