Opinion: Siad Barre — Between Marx’s Dream and Foucault’s Prison | Dawan Africa

By Abdirahman Gure - Somali writer and analyst specializing in Middle Eastern affairs and regional geopolitics.

“Some ideas are born with the promise of changing history, only to discover the limits of their ability to change human nature. Between revolutionary ambition and the realities of power, contradictions often emerge that prove stronger than the slogans themselves”.

Few leaders in modern Somali history pursued social transformation as ambitiously as General Mohamed Siad Barre. During his rule from 1969 to 1991, he believed that revolution could remake society from the ground up and that scientific socialism could uproot the deeply embedded structures of clan identity, kinship, and tradition.

Abdirahman Mohamed Gure is a Somali writer and analyst specializing in Middle Eastern aff

Those ideas echoed through schools, public ceremonies, and state media so relentlessly that, for a time, it genuinely seemed as though the old social order was nearing its end. Barre’s project was therefore more than a governing agenda; it was an attempt to create a new citizen, a new society, and a new vision of the future.

In the beginning, almost anything appeared possible. The state expanded into every sphere of public life, while Marxist rhetoric dominated the national conversation. Somalis were told that traditional divisions would soon disappear and that old loyalties would gradually give way to a higher allegiance to the revolution, the state, and the nation.

An entire generation grew up hearing that clan identity belonged to the past and that a modern socialist future was within reach. Many genuinely believed that history could be directed and that society itself could be reshaped through decisions issued from the Supreme Revolutionary Council.

The project was unquestionably ambitious. The government intervened heavily in education, culture, media, and economic development. It launched mass literacy campaigns and promoted the adoption of a written Somali language.

To many citizens, these initiatives signaled the arrival of a new era. Faith in change was so strong that some imagined clan identity would eventually survive only as a historical memory, discussed in the same way people talk about civilizations that have long since disappeared.

Yet grand ideas always require guardians, and it was at this point that the dream began to change. Citizens were no longer expected merely to obey authority; increasingly, they were expected to think according to the framework prescribed by authority. Once a state assumes responsibility for shaping minds as well as administering institutions, the line between education and control begins to blur.

This is where Michel Foucault enters the story. The broader the promises of liberation became, the broader the mechanisms of surveillance grew. The louder the rhetoric about creating a “new man,” the greater the effort devoted to monitoring the “old man” presumed to exist within every citizen.

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The security apparatus evolved into a permanent presence, observing society as closely as it observed its enemies and monitoring ideas almost as carefully as actions. For those who lived through the period, it often felt as though the state no longer sought merely to govern public life but to occupy its smallest details.

As the years passed, the contradictions became increasingly difficult to ignore. The society that was supposed to free itself from traditional structures often failed to find stable alternatives to replace them. The modern institutions intended to anchor a new national identity proved unable to displace older loyalties. Official discourse spoke of a unified socialist society, yet reality was far more complex than the slogans suggested.

Then reality proved harsher than theory. The regime lost the Ogaden War. Confidence in the grand ideological narrative declined. Economic pressures mounted, and revolutionary language gradually lost its power. The words that once seemed capable of explaining everything became less convincing with each passing year.

As faith in the project weakened, the old social order re-emerged from beneath the surface as though it had never truly disappeared. Clan identity, whose political obituary had been written at the beginning of the experiment, returned not as a relic of the past but as a force more resilient than the ideology that sought to replace it.

The ultimate irony is that the regime eventually relied on the very structures it had once vowed to eliminate. The clan, once portrayed as an obstacle to progress, became one of the principal sources of political and social support for the state. A project that began with an attempt to transcend traditional loyalties ended by depending on them for survival.

And so a long journey that began with Marx’s vision of a new society ended in something closer to Foucault’s world of surveillance and discipline. Along the way, Somalis—like many societies before them—discovered that nations are not blank pages waiting to be rewritten. Ideas, however powerful, cannot simply erase the accumulated layers of history embedded within collective memory.

Perhaps the deepest lesson of the Siad Barre era is that changing slogans is far easier than changing societies. Governments can impose new narratives, but they cannot create new realities at the same speed.

History moves according to its own logic, and societies evolve at their own stubborn pace. More often than not, the past returns through the very door we believed had been permanently closed.

*Abdirahman Mohamed Gure is a Somali writer and analyst specializing in Middle Eastern affairs and regional geopolitics. He writes on politics, art, and philosophy.

** The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Dawan Africa platform.