SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2019 47Hodan Nalayeh and I only met once. She
was a guest speaker at an event that I was
involved in to raise awareness about the
increasing presence of anti-Somali rheto-
ric and activity in Kenya. Prior to that, we
had been following each other on Twitter,
periodically messaging to celebrate each
other’s work and engagement with this
complicated region. I knew who she was
as soon as I saw her: she had an enor-
mous, welcoming smile that I recognized
from social media. She only needed
a split second to put a face to the name
before she hugged me like we had known
each other forever.
Nalayeh was the founder of Integra-
tion TV, a YouTube channel that high-
lights positive stories about Somalia
and the diaspora – victims of a nearly
30-year civil war that has displaced
a million internally and forced two
million to leave. Nalayeh was Canadian
as a consequence of the war: her refugee
family fled and settled in Ontario in the
1990s. Although she grew up with the
image of Somalia as a dangerous place,
she sensed – through encounters with
other migrants and refugees – that there
was something more to the Somali story;
she set up Integration TV not to sanitizethe war, but to ‘change the narrative’ of
Somalis as just victims.
I use the past tense because, on Friday
12 July 2019, al-Shabaab militants killed
a heavily pregnant Nalayeh and her
husband during an attack on a hotel in
the Somali town of Kismayo. At least 26
people died. Today, the war in Somalia is
synonymous not with a conflict of ideolo-
gies but with well-armed young men paid
by shadowy figures to create chaos for
the sake of chaos in attacks such as this.
There was no logic to Nalayeh’s killing –
she was simply out enjoying a cup of tea- and it underscores the darker turn that
the war has taken.
It is likely that Nalayeh and her
husband were in the wrong place at
the wrong time. The hotel where she was
enjoying that cup of tea was also the site
of a meeting by high-level politicians
who were discussing upcoming elec-
tions. Negotiations are a distinct part of
Somali elections in the region, and elders
of various clans in Somalia, Kenya, Dji-
bouti, Ethiopia – really wherever there is
a substantial Somali community – often
come together to narrow the electoral
playing field before any votes are actually
cast. In this context, the run-up to the
regional elections in Jubaland, the Somali
region bordering Kenya where the attack
took place, proved particularly tense.
Nalayeh’s killing has been a devastat-
ing blow to a generation that has been
using their creativity to will Somalia
out of chaos. She was one of the better
known of a group of bloggers, writers,
photographers, filmmakers, musicians
On Hodan Nalayeh
VIEW FROM
AFRICA
and artists using creativity and social
media to reclaim their complexity from a
bog-standard narrative. These independ-
ent content creators and curators use
social media to exist in the public sphere
on their own terms.
By the time she moved to Kenya
(she later returned to Somalia) Nalayeh
had an international audience of thou-
sands. It matters that her second-to-last
post on Twitter was taken at the third
Kismayo Book Fair, one of five book fairs
that take place in Somalia and Somali-
land every year despite the conflict.
The stream of tributes toward Hodan
Nalayeh, in the wake of her death, reflects
the major impact that she had on how
people saw and interpreted Somalia. May
she rest in peace. O
NANJALA NYABOLA IS A POLITICAL ANALYST
BASED IN NAIROBI, KENYA. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF
DIGITAL DEMOCRACY, ANALOGUE POLITICS: HOW
THE INTERNET ERA IS TRANSFORMING KENYA (ZED
BOOKS).ILLUSTRATION:^KATECOPELAND