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)

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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:

The Guardian on the Hargeisa Book Fair

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Hargeisa on Kapchits.Online

Scholars in the Country of Poets

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The Guardian on the Hargeisa Book Fair