By Fozia Ismail, Tuesday Feb 23, 2021
I have always been interested in the way the Somali Diaspora would send cassette tapes back and forth between Somaliland and the UK, both during the civil war and after.
In my family, tapes would be sent instead of letters and when these tapes would arrive, they would often arrive with Muqalmad- dried camel meat, an important part of Somali nomadic culture. Family and friends would listen to the tapes and share the camel meat.
This was a joyful but also sometimes painful experience, which reinforced a kind-of living in between landscapes. For younger members of the family, there was also anxiety about what to record back to these strangers who were aunts and uncles you may have never met as well as the ability to communicate back in a mother tongue that you were not necessarily fluent in.