Remembering Said S. Samatar

Abstract

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.