The first fact was the necessity of principled organization united to defeat colonialism and forge a common national destiny. Second, SYL embodied such a strategy and made some headway in reversing decades-long Italian colonial social engineering to transmute genealogical dif- ferences between Somalis into state-sponsored political discord. The national- ist party attempted to transform Somali cultural commonalities into collective political institutions on a national scale.

Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, loc. 1086