Lontano da Mogadiscio (1994) by Shirin Ramzanali Fazel: Far from Mogadishu

The book

Lontano da Mogadiscio (Italian for "Far from Mogadishu") is an autobiographical book by Shirin Ramzanali Fazel. It was first published in Rome by the small press Datanews in 1994 and reprinted in 1999. In 2013 the Milan publisher Laurana issued an expanded, revised edition in Italian and English, with an introduction by the scholar Simone Brioni, and an English edition, Far from Mogadishu, followed in 2016 (Simone Brioni, 2013; Geeska, 2025).

The author

Fazel was born in Mogadishu in 1953 to a Somali mother and a Pakistani father, during the years when Italy ran Somalia as a United Nations trust territory. She went to middle and secondary schools run directly from Rome by the Italian education ministry, and Italian was the first language she studied at school. She married an Italian in 1970 and moved to Novara in northern Italy in 1971. Brioni notes that after the 1969 coup the new government ordered people without Somali passports to leave, and that Fazel, as the child of a Pakistani father, did not hold one. She later ran a restaurant in Kenya from 1996 to 2004 and moved to Birmingham in Britain in 2010, where she began writing in English (Simone Brioni; Geeska). The trusteeship years are described on UN trusteeship, 1950 to 1960.

What it recalls

The book remembers a Mogadishu of many cultures living side by side. Fazel recalls learning about Garibaldi and Mazzini at school, and growing up with Italian films, songs, food and literature. It describes her life as a Black woman in small towns in northern Italy, Novara from 1971 to 1976 and later the area around Vicenza, before large-scale African migration to those places. It ends in grief: Fazel was in Italy when war broke out in 1991, and she wrote that seeing her city bombed and reduced to rubble felt like having her identity taken away (Simone Brioni). Fazel has said she wrote it partly because she could not accept how the war was being shown in the media, and wanted to record the city's earlier life (Geeska). See Mogadishu and Somalis in Italy.

Its place in Italian writing

Brioni counts it, together with two works of 1992 and 1993 by women of Eritrean and Ethiopian origin, among the first books to present Italian colonial history from the perspective of the colonised, and among the first Italian-language migration narratives written without an Italian co-author. He describes its "fundamental role" in decolonising the way Italians imagine their past. Later Italian writers took up the same history, among them Cristina Ali Farah and Igiaba Scego, who called Fazel an example that inspired a new generation of migrant writers (Simone Brioni). Novels by both are on this site: Madre piccola and Adua.

Nuruddin Farah paid tribute to the book in his novel Links, where the main character, Jeebleh, reads it and calls Fazel the first to write a book about the civil war from a Somali point of view (Simone Brioni; Geeska).