By Faisal A. Roble

The late Said Samatar

On 14^th of March in 1883, Fredrick Engels eulogized Karl Marx: “the greatest living thinker ceased to think.” Likewise, on February 24, 2015, Said Sheikh Samatar, Somalia’s reputed historian ceased to tell Somali stories. Our own “waayeel,” or sage, in the tradition of the late Muse Galaal and Aw-Jamac, will no longer be here to indulge us in his lucidly crafted tales of distant pastoral memories. Said was both a trained historian and a product of nomadic culture that he so ably narrated with endearment. The twin forces of town and bush shaped Said into a “segmented” persona of Arnold Toynbee (historian) and Macalin Dhoodaan (an eminent bard of nomadic culture) in one.

He so fondly without shame talked and wrote about his impoverish background. In 1992, I heard him telling a well groomed white American something that most Somalis will never share. Answering to a casual question by a concerned American friend regarding Said having knee pains when getting up, he told his friend that such a mishap is due to the severe malnutrition he had sustained as a child growing up in Qari Jaqood, part of the Ethiopian administered Somali region, where kids walk miles without eating during torturous camel tracking. He quickly added: “There wasn’t much to eat after all, except an occasional camel milk.”

Despite early childhood hardships and a father that abandoned him, Said had gained success in life and had a colorful career; at the height of the Somali civil war, he advised ABC’s coveted news magazine “Nightline” hosted by the incomparable journalist, Ted Koppel; he contributed to a UNSESCO historical encyclopedia; he was an invitee as an “eminent scholar” to the convention of the drafting of the Eritrean constitution.

Ironically, he was never invited to the Somali constitution-making process at any time. I don’t know if he would have accepted such an invitation since the scars of the trauma he had sustained from hiding in a US military tank to scape a death threat from a powerful warlord in Mogadishu in 1991 never left him.

A Man of Scholarship

Owing to his extraordinary intelligence and an early memorization of the Qoran and the Fiqi (Islamic law and jurisprudence), Said, the son of a Sharia magistrate, defied the odds of not starting school at the tender age of six; as matter of fact he started at about 16 years old, but completed his entire primary and secondary schooling in about six years. For college, he attended “Goshen, then followed Master’s and PhD at Northwestern, then assistant professor of the humanities at Eastern Kentucky University (1979-81), and now,” that is until February 24, 2015, “at Rutgers University, serving time as professor of African history since 1982.”

Being a consummate and serious researcher, he crisscrossed (in the 1970s) the Somali region administered by Ethiopia (his birth place), thereby spending time with nomads. He gathered massive data on the oral history surrounding the poetry and political struggle of Sayid Mohamed Abdile Hassan. His research later on took him to Mogadishu, interviewing prominent Somali sages including but not limited to the late Muse Galaal, Mohamed Maygag Samatar (no relation with Said Samatar), Aw-Jaamac, Aw-Dahir Afqarshi, and Caaqib Boon who was known for his Saar songs.

During his stay in Mogadishu, Said skillfully exploited rare documents he found at the then Somali National Academy. His acclaimed book, “Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism: The Case of Sayid Mahammed Abille Hassan” (Cambridge, 1982), an offshoot of that exquisite and expansive research, is today hailed as a classical book on the political, social and cultural construct of post-colonial Somali society. In it, Said presented to us a revolutionary narrative about the Sayid. By painstakingly reconstructing the hitherto maligned “mad mullah’s” image, a distinction unfairly bestowed on this nation-maker and a philosopher by the colonialists, Said changed the way Somali history of that particular epoch was read. Today, when one reads Said’s brilliant treatise, one can’t help but only compare the Sayid with the Towedros of Ethiopia and the Usman dan Fodio (Fulani) of Nigeria.

Read more: Remembering Said Remembering Said S. Samatar

Faisal A Roble
Email: faisalroble19@gmail.com