The Invention of Somalia (1995), edited by Ali Jimale Ahmed: essays that question the standard story

The book

The Invention of Somalia is a collection of essays edited by Ali Jimale Ahmed, a Somali poet, short-story writer and scholar who teaches comparative literature at Queens College, City University of New York (Wikipedia). It was published by the Red Sea Press in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, in 1995, and is also sold by its sister imprint Africa World Press (Africa World Press). The title echoes an earlier book, The Invention of Ethiopia by Bonnie Holcomb and Sisai Ibssa.

The book appeared four years after the fall of the government of Siad Barre in 1991, when Somali and foreign scholars were asking how a country long described as unusually united had broken apart. The background is on The collapse, 1991 to 2000.

What it argues

For much of the twentieth century, writing about Somalia described it as one of the few African states whose people shared a single ethnicity, language and religion. The contributors to this volume question that picture. They argue that it left out real differences of class, region, status and gender, and that both colonial and post-independence writers had helped to build it (Africa World Press).

Selected essays

• Ahmed Qassim Ali, "The Predicament of the Somali Studies", on how the field of Somali studies was formed and the assumptions it carried.
• Christine Choi Ahmed, "Finely Etched Chattel: The Invention of a Somali Woman", on how the image of the Somali woman was constructed.
• Mohamed Haji Mukhtar, "Islam in Somali History: Fact and Fiction", on how the coming of Islam to the Somali coast and interior has been told. The wider story is on Islam in Somalia.
• A commentary by the political scientist Irving Leonard Markovitz closes the volume.

The essay list is taken from the publisher's description and library records (Africa World Press; Roma Tre University repository).

How it has been read

The volume was one of the first books after 1991 in which Somali scholars themselves questioned the "one nation" description of their country, and it appeared in the same years as other work asking that question. Catherine Besteman's Unraveling Somalia (1999) takes up a similar question through the farming communities of the Jubba valley. Its editor went on to publish poetry, fiction and criticism in Somali and English, and to edit further collections on Somali literature and society (Wikipedia).

Where to read it

• In a library: WorldCat
• From the publisher: Africa World Press

Related pages

• Unraveling Somalia (1999), Catherine Besteman
• Books about Somalis, 1991 to 2005
• Somali authors and their books