Sonic Geography and City Making: The Case of a Somali Song, “Old Days”

Abstract

This article examines how sonic practices, particularly dialogic musical performance and exchange, function as infrastructures of urban life in Somali cities. Through a close reading of “Beri Hore” (‘Old Days’), a song composed in 1967 by Mohamoud Mohamed Yasin ‘Dheeg’ and continuously revoiced across radio broadcasts, majlis gatherings, tea shops, and contemporary digital platforms, the article conceptualises sound as a civic medium through which belonging is articulated, moral authority negotiated, and memory carried forward. Drawing on interviews, a focus group discussion, and a media review of the song’s circulation across YouTube, TikTok, and Somali broadcasting, the analysis treats the duet’s dialogic structure as itself a mode through which urban publics reason. The article argues that Somali cities are sonically, as well as materially, constituted, and that under conditions of post-conflict institutional fragmentation, oral and sonic traditions sustain civic discourse, historical transmission, and spatial claim-making in ways that more conventional infrastructures of memory have not. The study positions voice as both method and resource for indigenous knowledge enacted in cities where oral repertoires carry civic weight.