Sada Mire Quotes

Sometimes the cattle are represented as necks or horns, a pictorial shorthand that was evidently sufficient to convey meaning.

It was an incredible feeling just to stand in front of the paintings. Then I lay down to take photos and heard a snake breathing in my ear. My assistant told me he was thinking how he would cut off my arm, leg, or wherever to stop the poison if it attacked. I believe he would have done it. I didn’t tell my mother.

I believe that our practical cultural heritage helped us survive the war, even though we were city dwellers. When the war broke out in Somalia, we had to flee. We found ourselves in the desert with nothing. Only through our innate skills did we know how to find water sources, how to make tools from materials found in the field, how to build a house from acacia trees and where to find healing herbs.

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.

First of all, I make sure I have a good driver-mechanic. That's the most important thing in the desert. I always have simple archaeological equipment ready for research in the trunk: recording equipment, chargers.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

My parents tried to provide me and my siblings with a normal childhood, but we had to study in a school for orphans because other schools discriminated against us.

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.

I try not to travel with armed people - I don't like weapons after my war experience. But many of the people who work with me are former soldiers who used to drive tanks. They are walking GPSs. They cope very well both on the road and with people.

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.

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.