Five years ago, Yusuf Shegow visited the ruins of the once-grand Al-Uruba hotel overlooking the Indian Ocean on Mogadishu’s waterfront. His grandfather had worked at a nearby hotel in the 1970s, and shared stories with Shegow of the diplomats and dignitaries who stayed there on frequent visits to the country then known as the “Switzerland of Africa”.
After decades of civil war, Al-Uruba’s arched windows and white plaster facade were in tatters. The entire fourth floor was gone, levelled by mortar fire.
For Shegow, a recent graduate of the Manchester School of Architecture, “buildings were an education” that taught him about a country he left for the UK when he was a child. They connected him to the stories of his parents and grandparents. “There were roads and buildings as good as anywhere else,” he says. “It could have been one of the biggest cities in Africa.”