Sada Mire Quotes

My professors also said that I should be a model, and not think about a PhD. It always irritated me. There are more important things in life than beauty. I had other plans, I wanted to get an education and help people. I became an archaeologist to study the history of Africa before colonialism and the slave trade. But many of my friends thought I was stupid because I rejected the opportunity to earn a lot of money.

We never planned to live like that, later, as it happened, we became refugees and ended up internally displaced in what would have otherwise seemed like barren landscapes.

These are among the best prehistoric paintings in the world.

The child that tiire doesn't give you, God won't give you either.’ The role of Rotheca myricoides in Somali fertility practices

Yes, but we didn't have a chance to study them erly. We just recorded them and secured them. I don't excavate because there's not even a museum in Somaliland where these objects could be stored and properly studied.

When you are not a member of the United Nations, you cannot sign many legal acts, such as the World Heritage Convention. Funds that are available to other countries are unobtainable for us. In addition, we do not have a law on the protection of national heritage that would allow us to secure sites.

It is eminently uplifting to construct your home as a way of dealing with loss.

A man came to my office in Hargeisa [capital of Somaliland]. He took me to a place a few kilometers from his village. The paintings appeared before me suddenly, on a rock shaped like an old TV. It was unbelievable.

Yet Somaliland is a country whose history is totally hidden. With wars, droughts and piracy in Somalia, hardly anyone has researched the archaeology until now. But it's absolutely full of extraordinarily well-preserved rock art.

In 2007, I was in the Sanaag region, where the largest archaeological robberies in the country were taking place. They were ordered by a wealthy Somali living in one of the oil countries of the Persian Gulf. He came and tried to intimidate me. But the local elders sided with me. We managed to stop him. He had connections with a French organization posing as a non-profit institution to protect Somaliland's heritage. In reality, these people were looting antiquities.

A Somali woman in trousers, boots and with men is a strange sight for them. And a woman leading a team of men is something absolutely unacceptable. Some are happy to see it, but they wouldn't want their daughters to do it.

I first learned to construct nomadic huts with my grandmother in the summer holidays – spent, whether I liked or not, living in Dayniile, near Mogadishu.

Yet despite boasting a stable, grass-roots democracy, the country has

Beautiful Somali buildings are rising up in a former war zone. It gives me hope.

Being a Mogadishu girl, living in a comfortable villa, I hated it at first so my father sent, as a surprise, a tiny battery-run TV, which transformed our evenings at the nomadic camp.