Research Portfolio on Kapchits.Online

Scholars in the Country of Poets

Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 +0000

Notes on the 8th International Congress of Somali Studies (Hargeisa, July 3–13, 2001)

I

The Somalis affirm that the ancestors of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin lived in the Horn of Africa. They came from the Arab tribe, and that is why his great-grandfather, brought to Russia when a child, was named Peter the Great’s arap.¹

In Hargeisa I was reminded of it by clever and charming Abdulkadir Haji Ismail Jirdeh, who combines a passionate love of poetry with the prosaic work of the speaker of the local parliament. We met in the house of the Head of Hargeisa University, Sheikh Ali Ibrahim, who arranged a party in honour of the participants of the Congress. Standing on the flat roof and sipping orange juice (there is a dry law in Somaliland) we were talking about everything, and of course, about poetry, which in the country of poets goes without saying. By that time I had spoken enough Somali and was conversing in Russian with pleasure — my interlocutor remembered perfectly well the language he learnt in Odessa once upon a time. It turned out that he paid the highest tribute to the second genius of Russia, Michael Lermontov, and knew his poem “Demon” by heart:

Conferences & Congresses

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Four decades of Somali studies conducted largely from Moscow meant that the field itself was met at congresses — in Mogadishu, Hargeisa, Leiden, Berlin, San Diego. What follows is the documented record of those appearances, with the papers given at each.

Somali Studies congresses

4th Congress of Somali Studies — Mogadishu, 1989. The first visit to Somalia, at the invitation of the Somali Academy of Sciences. Twenty years later the same city was revisited in a series of travel essays written for Voice of Russia.

Research Projects

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Behind the books there are four long-running lines of work. Each took years, and each produced something the field did not have before.

The paremiological experiment

The question sounds simple and had never been answered for any language of the Horn of Africa: which proverbs do Somalis actually know?

Collections tell you what editors have gathered. They do not tell you what is current. The method for finding out was developed by G. L. Permyakov, who established a “paremiological minimum” for Russian of some 300 items — the set genuinely known to most speakers.