I visited two colleges today

After 16 years of war and civil strife in Somalia, I have today visited the college of Education and that of Agriculture in Afgoi district of Lower Shabelle region. The College of Agriculture is remembered for the major role it had played in the improvement of agriculture and the expansion of farm production techniques by building the capacity of farmers’ knowledge and skills while the College of Education is famous for turning over thousands of teacher each year to be relocated in the various districts and regions of the country.

College of Education which is commonly known as Lafole is the institution where I had spent most of my educational life. Apart from supplying the nation with competent educationists, Lafole has been the nerve center of intellectual and literary movements in the country.

It is where many plays were clandestinely composed and hatched by Hadrawi, Gaariye Saeed Salah and other poets with exceptional literary capabilities. It is where Sangub and his troupe had first met and discovered the talents of Seynab Cige (later a famous singer) in a drum-beating exercise inside the camp.

It is where Sharif Abdi-Noor, a great religious man and a well respected teacher and preacher at the College of Education, has been picked and subsequently detained in unknown bunkers by Barre's secret police at the peak of the military regime's reign of terror. With me please share this poem which I wrote shortly after visiting these two fallen sisters