This historiography study investigates the Somali Literacy Campaign of 1975, which was implemented to improve the socioeconomic development of the country through literacy. The Somali language did not have orthography until 1972 and the media of administration and education instruction was English, Italian, and Arabic. Moreover, the illiteracy rate was 90% and the use of foreign languages in the country denied the majority of the population access to education, health, employment, and many other vital services.
In 1969, the government took the initiative of devising a Somali language orthography. Subsequently, the government organized a mass literacy campaign to disseminate the reading and writing of the Somali language throughout the country, and this was followed by the Somalization of administration and education. This process was completed between 1973 and 1975.
The study uses oral historiography and/or narratology approaches to examine the objectives and the outcomes of the campaign. Because the history of the rural literacy campaign was lost in the first part of the 1990-1993 Somali civil war, it was important to recover through oral history that which was lost.
The implementers of the campaign were constituted largely of secondary school students, which I have termed “student-teachers,” and their teachers who were together in the field to teach the rural people how to read and write in the new Somali orthography. It is through the experiences of these participants, and especially of student-teachers, that the study attempts to understand the campaign program and its impact on the communities involved. For this reason, through purposive and snowball sampling the study selected thirteen participants for interviews, including student-teachers, teachers, literacy-students, and civil servants. All these participants are members of the Somali community Diaspora in Canada and the United States. The study selected Columbus, Ohio, and Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Windsor, and Kitchener, in Canada as research sites.
Three research questions are designed to guide the study to examine: (1) What were the main anticipated objectives of the Somali Literacy Campaign? (2) Did the campaign successfully realize its set objectives and contribute to the main objective? (3) What were the unexpected political, social, and economic outcomes of the campaign? Data analysis and interpretation of the study are based on the interview transcripts and photographs which are coded into categories to generate themes. Some of these data were recovered during the interview process, others were collected from colleagues who participated in the campaign, and the rest were retrieved from the Internet. During the interview process, participants revealed to me the loss and destruction of the campaign documents in the civil war and the existing grim hope of ever recovering it.
The analysis and examination of these data produced findings, including: the literacy acquisition generated migration by the rural population to the city centers and this in turn generated a sudden increase in school enrollment. After the rural youth became literate, they decided to move to the cities and towns in search of further education and employment opportunities. The new migrants also spurred economic activities which contributed to economic growth. The study further reveals the economic importance of the rural population, which had motivated the campaign. The rural economy of agriculture and livestock supports more than 70% of the Somali population.
Additionally, the study discusses the contribution of the rural population who hosted the campaign and provided food and shelter for the student-teachers and their supervisors for the duration of the campaign. Furthermore, the study reveals the role of the student-teachers and their impact on their students, and how this contributed to the migration to the city centers.
Finally, the study discusses the unexpected outcomes of the campaign. This included political awareness of the rural population, which produced grassroots-level rural community organizations. These organizations facilitated local peacemaking and government/community communication, which lobbied for better services for the communities they represented. The study, supported by literature, shows that the campaign contributed to the rural infrastructure and increased literacy, agricultural and economic productivity.