75th Anniversary of SYL – 15 May 1943
The People of Freedom
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
This article is being published to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the Somali Youth League party, better known as Lega dei Giovani Somali (LGS). In this article I give a brief outline of the emergence of this party, its rise and eventual fall. It is hoped in a second article to examine the activities of other political parties that rivaled the Lega before and after independence.
The first modern Somali social organization, the Somali Youth Club (SYC), was founded in Mogadiscio on May 15, 1943. Somalia was then under British military occupation. At the beginning, the SYC was primarily actively engaged in promoting social and welfare, education and health programmes, targeting particularly the less privileged segments among its affiliates. However, it would be wrong to believe that the promotion of the social welfare of members of the Club could entirely be divorced from political matters. To help improve the new club, the British allowed the better educated police and civil servants to join, thus relaxing Britain’s traditional policy of separating the civil service from political parties “because the new movement was progressive, co-operated with the government, and was anti-Italian.”(I.M. Lewis, 2002)
Two differing narratives explain the genesis of the Club. One explanation suggests that in early 1943, when the Italian community in Somalia was permitted to organize political associations, a host of Italian organizations of varying ideologies sprang up with a view to challenge British rule, and agitate, sometimes violently for the return of the colony to Italy. Faced with growing Italian political pressure inimical to continued British tenure, British colonial officials encouraged the Somalis to organize their political organizations. (I.M. Lewis, 2002)
The second explanation of how the SYC came about, which received wide currency, endorses the notion that, on May 15, 1943 a group of 13 little-known young urban Somalis came together, in a small one-room office in Via Cardinale Massaia in Mogadiscio, to found a club they called Somali Youth Club (SYC). The group included elements hailing from the main Somali clan families. There is no consensus among Somalis over who in the group should be considered to have provided the main inspiration. Some maintain that much of the inspiration came from Yassin Haji Osman Sharmarke, the most erudite element in the group by Somali standards of the time. However, this notion is strongly contested by others who attribute credit to Abdulkadir Sakawa-din and Haji Mohamed Hussein, both of ethnic Benadir. Yassin was an ethnic Majerten who served the Italian colonial administration as a clerk. He received a modest level of education at the ‘Scuola per figli di capi’, a special school for siblings of Somali paramount chiefs during the fascist regime. (Bullotta 1948) Though lacking formal education, Yassin was nevertheless a brilliant man, with sound political awareness. To implement his ideas, he needed two things: First, a vibrant membership of the Club and, second, a programme which could be incorporated in a statute. He had no difficulty in co-opting 12 persons, representing the broader spectrum of Somali clan families. This explains how clan factor always remains a core element in every major political decision, and Yassin was well aware of this reality, which he found hard to ignore. The majority of the co-opted members were semi-literate; they earned their livelihood doing menial jobs as shopkeepers, office cleaners, gate-keepers, interpreters etc, and none of them had ever been outside Somalia or came into contact with Western culture and civilization.As for the second requirement, it is widely believed that Yassin received benevolent support from little known Italian communist elements in Mogadiscio in drawing up the Statute of the Club.
Abdulkadir Sheikh Sakawa-din, grandson of the much venerated religious leader, Sheikh Aweys Al-Qadiria, was elected President of the Club and Dahir Haji Osman Sharmarke became its Secretary. The Club’s political aims were limited to two objectives: firstly, to unite all Somalis, particularly the youth, by eradicating harmful prejudices likely to lead to and frequently cause communal and tribal frictions; and secondly, to educate the youth in modern ideas and civilization through cultural circles and through the establishment and expansion of a formal education system based on schools. Read the rest of this entry »
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