Top 15 Sada Mire Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

These are among the best prehistoric paintings in the world.

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.

She didn't have much to say. Since I left Somalia, I've been in control of my own life. I was raised by my mother and grandmother. They were very beautiful and hard-working. They were also always in favor of women's emancipation. My mother was with me on my first trip in 2007. She didn't know anything about archaeology, but she was very helpful.

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.

Cultural heritage is a basic human right and need, like water, food, health and safety. In times of conflict, culture helps people not to lose their humanity. And in times of poverty, archaeological and cultural wealth can help create jobs, for example in tourism.