Fozia Ismail has clear memories of being summoned to the living room where the rest of her family sat on the floor huddled around a cassette player. When her mum pressed play, the voice of relatives in Somalia filled their north London flat. “I had to listen to people that I hadn’t met: uncles and aunties, and then record an awkward message back,” says Ismail, whose family comes from Somaliland, a region that later became autonomous.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, before mobile phones, letter tapes were one of the main forms of communication between Somalis in the diaspora and their families back home.
