Observer

Issue date: 12/9/08 Section: Page One

African studies professor , Said Samatar

What are the essential components of snow? It sounds like a chemistry question, but when one's only frame of reference is the desert climate, the problem is especially difficult.

For professor of African Studies, Said S. Samatar, this was a very real issue as he was writing a letter to his mother from the States and did not know how to explain snow.

He created a "compound Somali word out of the words for sand dune, cold, and wet," he said. This effort to explain and elucidate has characterized much of Dr. Samatar's life from the sand dunes of Somali Ethiopia to the snow of the United States.

"I've lived a life of segmented improbabilities," wrote Samatar in an article he will publish later this year titled "Herdsman, Townsman, American: My Segmented Life."

He was "probably" born in Ogaadeen, the eastern region of Ethiopia that consists mainly of Somalis. It is only "probable" because he is not sure of the exact details of his birth, but he does know it was to Faduma and Sheikh Samatar. His total family consisted of fourteen people, including his father's other wife, Pullo.

Samatar's life in these hamlets was characterized by the "unfettered freedom" of life as a nomad and its "wandering and danger." The "seasons of plenty" brought "fragrant flowers blooming all over the fallowed fields, abundant milk and meat." Stallions, the ubiquitous camels, flocks of sheep and goats, and deer complete the picture.

Oh, and the lions, too. For to ignore the danger of this environment is to deny an important part of it.

Samatar came to know the worries that constantly plagued these herdsmen: "perennial threat of starvation during droughts, marauding gangs of enemy clans bent on murder and mayhem, stripping you of your livestock, the ever-present danger of ravenous predators."

In 1958, Samatar made the first transition of his life, going from nomadic life to town life in Qallaafo. At about 16 years old at the time, his father, an Islamic magistrate for the government since 1948, sent for him to begin schooling.

Having begun relatively late, he was a 16-year-old learning among eight-year-olds. "It was humiliating, but I endured," he remembered.

The boys practiced writing with chiseled twigs and dipped them in ink troughs to scratch out the letters. With this knowledge, they memorized the Quran and learned Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence.

Continued...

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