Mogadishu Etymology & Setting

February 08, 2021

Mogadishu Etymology & Setting

The origins of the word Mogadishu are disputed. One theory posits that the word evolved from the Somali words “Muuq” and “Disho,” which means “sight killer” or “blinder,” referring to the city’s natural beauty. Another theory suggests origins from the Persian word “Maq’ad-i-Shah” or “seat of the Shah.”

Regardless, the city is certainly the site of national power in a geography of blinding beauty. Located in the south of Somalia along the Indian Ocean coast, the city has a long history of accommodating to and benefitting from networks of global exchange.

Decentralized proto-Somali city-states dotted the coast around and below the Horn of Africa, represented as being at the edge of the known world in the eyes of the Greeks. Ptolemy’s Geographia from ca. 150 CE briefly mentions the port city of Sarapion, which is believed to be the predecessor to present-day Mogadishu. By the tenth century, Persian and Arab traders negotiated and established a trading port in Mogadishu, although the oldest mosque in the city dates to the seventh century. Over time, this group evolved into an ethnic group called Reer Hamar, or people of Hamar (the Somali language name for the city, and the word for tamarind, which sprinkle the city’s souqs).

In the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta traveled to Mogadishu, writing about the Reer Hamar, saying:

[Mogadishu] is a town endless in its size. Its people have many camels, of which they slaughter hundreds every day and they have many sheep. Its people are powerful merchants. In it are manufactured the cloths named after it which have no rival, and are transported as far as Egypt and elsewhere.
One of the customs of the people of this city is that when a ship arrives at the anchorage, the sunbuqs (small boats) come out to it. In every sunbuq is a group of young people of the town, and every one of them brings a covered dish with food in it. He offers it to one of the merchants of the ship and says ‘This is my guest.’ Each one of them does similarly. When the merchant disembarks from the ship he goes nowhere but to the house of his host from among these young people. But a mean who has frequented the place a good deal and obtained a knowledge of its people may lodge where he wishes. When he lodges with his host, the host sells his goods for him and buys on his behalf. He who buys from him at too low a price or sells to him without the presence of his host—that transaction is considered as rejected. There is profit for them in this custom… (Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, 16–17).

The Reer Hamar occupied the lavish stone buildings in two of the city’s districts, Shangaani and Hamar Weyne, and as the city has grown rapidly since Italian colonial occupation in 1889, many of the remnants of the old city still exist. Major beaches still contain a multitude of sunbuqs and informal economies have grown among the formal ones.

Because of the fragmented colonial history of Somalia and the Mogadishu’s critical role under the Siad Barre regime to create a Somali national identity from a fragmented set of ethnic groups and organizational systems, Mogadishu plays a disproportionate role in figuring the nation of Somalia in any coherent way. The modernist monuments and boulevards serve to establish the nation as such, despite the inconsistent and contradictory modes of governance beyond the city limits.