The emergence of audiocassette recording technology had an indelible impact on the way that Somali literature was documented and disseminated from the 1950s onwards, making audiocassettes one of the greatest repositories not only of Somali literature, but of Somali history more generally. The need to preserve these sources before they are lost is particularly important today. The Hargeysa Cultural Centre’s (HCC) current effort to collect, catalogue, and preserve these cassettes is one important attempt at documenting this aspect of Somali oral history. The panel reflects on HCC’s efforts of digitizing, preserving, and promoting audio recordings in the ‘Nation of Poets’, and reimagines the concept of the archive restarting from the socio-historical origins of somali cassette tapes.

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