Hodan Nalayeh and I only met once. She was a guest speaker at an event that I was involved in to raise awareness about the increasing presence of anti-Somali rhetoric and activity in Kenya. Prior to that, we had been following each other on Twitter, periodically messaging to celebrate each other’s work and engagement with this complicated region. I knew who she was as soon as I saw her: she had an enormous, welcoming smile that I recognized from social media. She only needed a split second to put a face to the name before she hugged me like we had known each other forever.
Nalayeh was the founder of Integration TV, a YouTube channel that highlights positive stories about Somalia and the diaspora – victims of a nearly 30-year civil war that has displaced a million internally and forced two million to leave. Nalayeh was Canadian as a consequence of the war: her refugee family fled and settled in Ontario in the 1990s. Although she grew up with the image of Somalia as a dangerous place, she sensed – through encounters with other migrants and refugees – that there was something more to the Somali story; she set up Integration TV not to sanitize the war, but to ‘change the narrative’ of Somalis as just victims.
