Africa has been at the receiving end of international politics since the start of the AD era. The muslim invasion and conquest of North Africa in the seventh century (642 AD–648 AD) changed traditional and budding Christian cultures to Islam (Speel II, 2009 Brett, 2008; Gearon, 2011; Nmah, 2018; Cartwright, 2019; Wilkin, 2022; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2023). The growth of the trans-Saharan trade 650 AD–1500 AD fortified these (sometimes repressive) changes (Wright, 2007; Harich et al, 2010; Kanu, 2013), along with the Trans-Atlantic slave trades (Lovejoy, 1989; M’baye, 2007, then the later part that ushered colonialism and its neo-colonial spin-off (Onebunne, 2017; Chowdhury & Sundaram, 2022). All these point to the fact that for close to two thousand years, other races, cultures and ideologies took charge of African affairs such that the continent had no voice of its own, could not decide for itself and had no choice other than to actualise the interest of other regions, races and interests. It was as though, the continent lacked a goal, an agenda of its own. Scholarship in Africa has not been spared this deficit as the majority of discourses tow the dominant narratives. Chimamanda Adichie (2009) termed this phenomenon the dangers of a single story where Africans see the world and tell the continent's story from these dominant western perspectives. This research was based on this ‘Single Story thesis’ hence it X-rayed the sociopolitical deficits created by the dominant narratives on the continent and advocates that indigenous perspectives should be at the fore and more widespread, and local approaches should be developed to address these problems. Supporting this position, Ezekiel (2022) contends that, the narratives of Africa can be changed, not to forget history, but to reflect, learn lessons and develop local strategies to overcome re-occurrence in any form. This book was written to address one of many such single stories on the continent, and no place has such a story been more explicit than in Somalia.

Somalia has witnessed close to forty years of conflict of which its fractional colonial experience and failure of governance have been responsible. The adoption of traditional forms of governance brought the northern regions out of this chaos.