A profile from Africa speaks4 Africa:
More here
In 1991, young Mire and her mother fled the civil war in Somalia and ended up in Sweden. In 2007, she returned to her country of birth for the first time. Upon her return, she began to discover that Somalia had a lot of archeological heritage but was unexplored and disregarded; furthermore, it didn’t have a department organized for cultural heritage or antiquity. It was then that she set up and headed Somaliland’s Department of Antiquities, a branch of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. She’s currently the director of tourism for Somaliland and the executive director of Horn Heritage Organisation (established since September 2011). Concurrently, she’s conducting post-doctoral research at University of Leiden specializing in the archaeology, ethnography and history of the peoples of North-East Africa, particularly Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Kenya. Her work focuses on the indigenous institutions and pre-Christian and pre-Islamic belief systems, material culture, (rock) art, rituals, practices and landscapes.
When asked why she chose to pursue a career in archeology, Mire explains how her career was aspired from a need to understand and learn African history. “After my study in Scandinavian prehistory, I started to wonder and wanted to learn my own history so I went on to study archeology,” she says. While in school in Sweden, she recalls how while searching for books on African history, which was rare, she came across a sentence in one book that changed her life: “In order to write African history, we need to do archeological research”. Six years later she enrolled in archeology school in England.