The Guardian on the Hargeisa Book Fair

In July 2012 The Guardian reported on the fifth Hargeisa International Book Fair under the title “Somaliland’s Hargeisa book festival celebrates fifth year”.

The festival — founded by Jama Musse Jama and described in the report as the Horn of Africa’s answer to Hay-on-Wye — was held in a workers’ club in the centre of the city, with ribbons in the colours of the national flag, tents selling watermelon, and armed guards at the gate. The report set out what the organisers were trying to do: preserve the oral tradition, fill a cultural vacuum left by two decades of collapse, and give young people something other than khat and recruitment by al-Shabaab. It described the work of setting up reading clubs and libraries across six regions.

One passage was given to Dr. Kapchits: a Russian scholar, then 72, a graduate of Moscow State University who had worked for Moscow Radio, presenting his new book Somalis Do Not Lie in Proverbs — and the detail that many of the proverbs in it had been sent to him by his radio listeners.

That detail is exact, and it is the thread running through this whole archive. The collection has never been the work of one man in a library: the listeners of the Somali service, and later the readers of a 2006 interview, sent in proverbs from their own families and regions in such numbers that the dictionary then in preparation had to be reopened.

The article closed with five Somali proverbs in English translation. It carries a note that it was amended on 17 July 2012.

The book presented at the fair on 14 July 2012 was published by Ponte Invisible; see Monographs. The same visit produced a longer interview with the Horn newspaper — read it here.

Report published in The Guardian, July 2012. Summarised here with attribution; the text of the article remains the property of the newspaper.