More About Sada Mire

Per Wikipedia, Sada Mire is a Swedish-Somali archaeologist, art historian, and presenter who currently serves as to seek an assistant professor in the faculty of archeology, at Leiden University. She is a public intellectual and heritage activist who has argued that cultural heritage is a basic human need in her 2014 TEDxEuston talk. In 2017, the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts selected Mire as one of their 30 international thinkers and writers. She became the Director of Antiquities of Somaliland in 2007. Raised in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, Mire fled the country at the start of the civil war at the age of 15. She then traveled to Sweden to seek asylum. She has since returned to the Horn of Africa as an archaeologist.

“Do not fear failure but rather fear not trying.”

― Roy T. Bennett

She has conducted field research in Somaliland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti, and Egypt, and has worked for the United Nations Development Program. A TED-speaker, she has participated on the editorial boards, including African Archaeological Review.

Motivated to learn the history of Somaliland, her homeland which was once a colonial country in Africa, she took up a fellowship in the department of art and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (also head of the department of antiquities in Somaliland). She launched an ambitious program of archeological explorations in 2007.

Mire, leading a team of 50 helpers, has discovered prehistoric rock art in Somaliland at almost 100 sites; at least 10 of these are likely to receive World Heritage status. The Dhambalin site, which is located approximately 40 miles (64 km) from the Red Sea, contains rock art in sandstone shelters, which are inferred as about 5,000 years old, of horned cattle, sheep, and goats, as well as giraffes, which no longer exist in Somaliland. The NGO, Horn Heritage, partially funds her work for Somali Heritage.