Transport in Mogadishu

 In Mogadishu, water transport remains fundamental to the city's existence. As Ibn Battuta noted:

[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).

Since the time of Ibn Battuta, relationships with the Indian Ocean and the interior have enabled Mogadishu to thrive. When the Ajuran Empire came to power, the relationship between the city and the Shebelle and Jubba Rivers. The Empire built dams and control systems and enacted taxation schemes to build the empire, and the control of the agricultural areas around these rivers enabled the further growth of Mogadishu. 

The Italians capitalized on this system, building a railway from Afgoye, in the Shebelle River, where the river seasonally runs dry, requiring land transport to the ports. The vestiges of Italian Somaliland laid the groundwork for a transportation portfolio that the Barre Regime used in the mid-to-late twentieth century for the production of a national Somali identity. Somali Airways became a powerful symbol of the new nation, a further inculcation into the notion of the nation. While Somali Airlines collapsed with the fall of the Barre regime, it's been used as leverage for national reconstruction. 

In the meantime, a desire for increased security has created privatized enclaves within the city to ensure safety and security for those who can afford it. Currently, hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people live on the outskirts of the city where there's an incredibly high density of people. Semi-formalized and informal bus systems operate around the city, but this operation comes with the emergence of a Somali diaspora and Turkish government investing heavily in profit-oriented development schemes that provide little for the IDPs around the city.