Said S. Samatar

Said Sheikh Samatar (Somali: Saciid Sheekh Samatar, Arabic: سعيد الشيخ سمتر‎) is a prominent Somali scholar and writer. Said was born in 1943 in the Ogaden in Ethiopia to Faduma and Sheikh Samatar. He comes from a large family consisting of fourteen people, including his father's second wife. Samatar spent his early years in a nomadic environment, where he writes that "seasons of plenty" with "fragrant flowers blooming all over the fallowed fields, abundant milk and meat" alternated with the "perennial threat of starvation during droughts, marauding gangs of enemy clans bent on murder and mayhem, stripping you of your livestock, the ever-present danger of ravenous predators." In 1958, Said's father, who had been working for the...