Remembering Said S. Samatar

Professor Said Samatar’s death on February 24, 2015 is an incomparable loss to his family, friends, and fellow scholars. Said was our own waayeel, or sage, in the tradition of the late Muse Galaal and Aw-Jamac, who both represented the finest oral historians in the Somali peninsula. In his own way, Said was a trained historian and at the same time a product of nomadic culture of the forbiddingly scorching Qari Jaqood lowlands of the Ogaden region. The result of these two forces of town-based formal education and bush lifestyle in his formative years shaped Said into what he himself called a “segmented” persona.¹ That “segmented persona” combined the finest attributes of a historian in the tradition of Arnold Toynbee with those of Macalin Dhoodaan, an eminent bard of nomadic culture.

A Man of Scholarship

Owing to his extraordinary intelligence and an early memorization of the Quran and fiqi (Islamic law and jurisprudence), Said, the son of a Sharia judge in the Haud and Reserved Area in the Ethiopian administered region of the Ogaden, defied the odds of not starting school at the tender age of six. As matter of fact, he started first grade when he was about 16 years old, but completed his entire primary and secondary schooling in about six years. He obtained his undergraduate degree at Goshen College, and his Master’s and PhD at Northwestern; and then became Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Eastern Kentucky University (1979–81), and finally Professor of African History at Rutgers University-Newark (1982–2015).

Said Samatar had a colorful career. A tenured professor for over 25 years at Rutgers, in 1992, at the height of the Somali civil war, he advised ABC’s program Nightline with Ted Koppel; and he was an invitee as an “eminent scholar” to the convention of the drafting of the Eritrean Constitution. A consummate and methodical researcher, Said in the 1970s crisscrossed the Haud and Reserve Area, his birthplace, thereby spending time with the very nomads that he belonged to. For over a year, he gathered a massive amount of material on the oral history surrounding the poetry and political struggle of Sayid Mohamed Abdille Hassan, Somalia’s freedom fighter between the periods of 1890 and 1921. His research later took him to Mogadishu, where he interviewed prominent Somali sages and oral historians, including but not limited to the late Muse Galaal, Aw-Jamc, Aw-Dahir Afqarshi, and Caaqib Boon (the last my maternal uncle who was known for his Saar songs and as an incomparable repository of oral history related to the Haud and Reserve Area). During his stay in Mogadishu, Said also skillfully exploited rare documents at the then Somali National Academy. His final destination to complete his research was London, England, where he combed through thousands of colonial documents written in English, Italian, and Arabic, three languages that he mastered equally.

The result of these expansive efforts was his acclaimed book, Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism: The Case of Sayid Mahammed ’Abdille Hasan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), today hailed as a classic study of the political, social, and cultural development of pre-and-post-colonial Somali society. In it, Said presented a new narrative about the political life of Sayid Mahammed Abdille Hasan. To the delight of students of Somali studies, Said succeeded in reconstructing the image of the hitherto maligned “Mad Mullah,” correcting a derogatory portrait unfairly bestowed on this nation-maker and philosopher by the colonialists. Today, one can read Said’s brilliant treatise to find original comparisons of the Sayid with Emperor Tewodros of Ethiopia and Usman dan Fodio (Fulani) of Nigeria.

In Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism, Said introduced into Somali studies scholarship two indomitable but often overlooked Somali institutions. The first is the guurti system of governance through the elders’ council, a useful tool of conflict resolution. Upon reading Said’s book in 1984, I couldn’t fathom at the time the relevance of the guurti concept to modern Somali studies. Once the civil war of 1991 teetered and eventually broke down the foundation of Somali society...