Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism (1982) by Said S. Samatar: the poetry of Sayid Mohamed Abdullah Hassan

The book

Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism: The Case of Sayyid Mahammad 'Abdille Hasan is by Said S. Samatar (1943 to 2015), a Somali historian born into a herding family in the Ogaden who taught African history at Rutgers University in Newark from 1981. Cambridge University Press published it in November 1982 as number 32 in its African Studies Series, with xii and 232 pages, and reissued it in paperback in 2009 (Rutgers University–Newark; Bulletin of SOAS).

What is in it

After an introduction, the chapters are (Cambridge Core):

1. Elements of Somali pastoral oratory: prose
2. Elements of Somali pastoral oratory: poetry
3. Occupation and resistance: the rise of the Somali Dervishes
4. Poetic oratory and the Dervish movement
5. Myth and the Mullah

The first two chapters describe how prose speech and poetry worked in the public life of Somali herders. The third tells the story of the Dervish rising against British, Italian and Ethiopian rule. The last looks at the legends that grew up around the Sayid, whom British writers called the "Mad Mullah". See Somali poetry and The Dervish movement, 1899 to 1920.

The poet and the war

The fourth chapter is the heart of the book. It treats Sayid Mohamed Abdullah Hassan, whose poetry from the twenty-year Dervish struggle has led many to regard him as the greatest Somali poet. Samatar notes a puzzle: the Sayid was an oral poet, yet no political poem of his is recorded until he was well into his forties. Somali sources date his first poems to 1904, about six years after the movement began, and place many of his major poems between 1905 and 1909, when the Dervishes were based on the eastern coast between the Majeerteen and Hobyo sultanates. Samatar argues that from the early years of the conflict, political poetry was a main weapon of persuasion, used by both the Dervishes and their Somali opponents to win people's loyalty (Cambridge Core). The coastal sultanates are described on Majeerteen and Hobyo sultanates.

How it was received

It was reviewed in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1983, and in the Journal of African History together with Lee Cassanelli's The Shaping of Somali Society, published the same year (Bulletin of SOAS; Journal of African History). Rutgers University's tribute after his death in 2015 listed it among his main works (Rutgers University–Newark).

Where to read it

The paperback is in print from Cambridge University Press, and the book is available online through Cambridge Core in subscribing libraries. The Sayid's poems in Somali were collected by Jaamac Cumar Ciise in his Diiwaanka Gabayadii Sayid Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan (1974). Related reading on this site is A Tree for Poverty, an early English collection of Somali verse.