The national archives built from a crumpled napkin

How do you build a national archive for a country that doesn’t exist? 

The same way you build anything here. From the ground up. In this case, quite literally.  

It was 1991, and in the bombed-out ruins of Somaliland’s newly proclaimed capital city, a woman selling camel milk tea and laxoox, spongy Somali pancakes, handed a customer a piece of paper off the ground so that he could wipe the dirt off his hands.

But as Jama Musse Jama prepared to crinkle the paper in his hands, his eyes snagged on the text. These were the trial records from a famous court case a decade earlier that had