Saba was born in Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, to an Ethiopian mother (born in Somalia) and Italian father during the years of General Muhammad Siyad Barre’s corrupt and repressive regime. The perennially suspicious attitude towards Italians ,and the conflict with Ethiopia over the Ogaden region, forced her family to leave the country when she was just 5 years old. Saba recalls, ‘We were a mixed-marriage family: inconvenient, perhaps a threat. I still remember nights at Bolimog (Cape Guardafui, near Alula — the extreme east point of Africa, where my father was working) when policemen came to interrogate my father, as they thought he was a US spy. In reality, he was there because he loved Africa, and my sister and I were born there.’
Saba’s father originally went to Africa to forget the extreme suffering he experienced during World War II, when he was a colonel of the Italian Forces. As a prisoner during the colonial battles in Ethiopia, Saba’s grandfather had been deported to Mogadishu, and it was there that her mother was born.. When Saba’s parents married, their close friends and family considered their union as a symbol of reconciliation and peace — finally forgetting the past conflict of Ethiopia, Somalia and Italy.
At the height of the crisis for Saba and her family, the Somali government gave them forty-eight hours to leave the country, forcing them to migrate to Italy. Since that time, a deep homesickness has always been present. ‘I wanted to learn as much of the Somali language from my mother as possible, particularly the dialect of Xamar Weyne — the quarter were she was born with my uncles and aunts.’
After doing much of her growing up in Italy, Saba studied to become a mosaicist, completing a degree in Art History at the University of Rome La Sapienza, and also became known throughout Italy for her acting roles in some well—known television programmes (La Squadra in particular, in which she played a half-Italian, half-Somali policewoman). However, music was by far her greatest and most constant passion. She recalls, ‘at the age of 8, in Addis Ababa — where we went sometimes to visit my grandmother — I remember my sister and I performing songs and dances to entertain the neighbours’. Growing up, music became her main expression and African music allowed her to mend the broken thread with her homeland.