About SRHC

A CENTER FOR RESOURCE AND HERITAGE SINCE 1995

The Somali Resource & Heritage Center was founded in the year 1995 here in Ottawa, Canada. The aim of the SRHC is to raise world-wide awareness about Somali cultural heritage and pre-history. It presents the extensive collection and research, preservation and capacity building work carried out by the President and Executive director of the SRHC, Mohamed Hussein Hadi. Somalis possess a rich cultural heritage and pre-history. The aims and the vision of the Center are to provide unique information about the current status of Somali cultural heritage in all the Somali territories. It is also a source of information for those who are interested in Somali Literature, History, and Culture.

Our cultural heritage should be a human right. Somali heritage should be researched, preserved and protected in order to develop the quality of life of the young Somali generation in the Diaspora. The center also develops a lot of Somali Language books, literature, history and social structure. The center also does a lot of services for the community here in Canada, especially in Ottawa the capital city, and they are:
• Saturdays and Sundays heritage school for children age 6 – 13 years
• Pre marriage counseling
• Marriage (nikah) and the license
• Family issues
• Youth counseling
• Somali languages courses for adults
• Certifying and translating Somali documents
• Publishing Somali language books
• Organizing events for the community
• Somali Books ( language, storytelling, poetry, history and social structure)
Due to the Somali people’s passionate love for and facility with poetry, Somalia has often been referred to as a “Nation of Poets” and a “Nation of Bards”, as, for example, by the Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence. Somalis have a story-telling tradition. Somali art is the artistic culture of the Somali people, both historic and contemporary. Somali art is characterized by its unionism, partly as a result of the vestigial influence of the pre-Islamic mythology of the Somalis coupled with their ubiquitous Muslim beliefs.
It was on the 13th century that came to the light, in Horn of Africa, one of the strongest Empires that existed in East Africa. Adal Empire had its origin in the city of Zeila, situated until today in the Awdal region of the Federal Republic of Somalia.
Zeila has been identified with what was called in Classical Antiquity the city of the Avalitae. According to Richard Pankhurst, the city first appears under its own name at least as early as 891, when the geographer al-Ya’qubi mentions Zeila in his Kitab al-Balden (“Book of the countries”). Zeila is described by successive geographers who include al-Mas’udi, who wrote his Murugal al-Dahab wa-Ma’adin al-Guwahir (“Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Stones”) c. 935; and Ibn Hawqal who described it as the port of embarkation from Ethiopia for Hijaz and Yemen in his Kitab Surat al-‘Ard (“Configuration of the Earth”), which he completed in 988.