Largest somali dictionary ever

[Midas]

Those who weren’t fortunate enough to read would have also been visited by streams of Somali traders and caravans. They would have brought them news of the wider world developments, wars and introduced exotic items. It would have been normal for traders who came back from Yemen, India and beyond to go back to their ancestral villages surrounded by nomads and camels to tell them all kinds of tales. This is the kind of society Burton was surprised by when he found Somali camel herders knowing about conflicts in Crimea.

This is why Somalis have always been culturally unique in a way and you can’t really compare us to some neighbouring inland groups with the lazy title of Cushitic “oral society”. Even those who weren’t literate were connected to ancient trade routes and stories of empires and had first access to luxury items not seen by other Africans in the interior. The ancestors of Somalis were battering and arguing with Greeks on the coast.

Aside from implying a lack of writing, for me , the label oral society also implies a lack of cultural complexity and access to civilisation in the traditional sense. Some omotic tribe use to refer to Somalis with the local name for trousers, as the Somalis were the first they encountered with these items. Somali traders are recorded as the amongst the first to visit the Arbore for trade.

One forgotten aspect of Somali history is the fact we were responsible for introducing many modern items to the Borana, Samburu Rendille and others due to the control/influence of the trade from the coast all the way to Southern Ethiopia. It was Somalis who pioneered and jealously guarded (from foreigners) these deep caravan routes stretching across the Horn. It was Somalis who came up with business arrangements like the Abaan system which many parts of the whole Horn relied on. I even read somewhere about how Ethiopian kings conceptualised their Southern border upon the reach of Muslim traders. Collective Names given to Somalis like Safara( Borana) and Dafara (Rendille) are all related to trade, travel, or items carried for the purpose of. If you go back further in time, it would have been “Barbaroi” who were famous in the ancient times for selling “Misri cloth” to East African tribes. BTW- it is possible some Somalis were fluent in 5-6 different languages if they were traversing the Somali-Swahili-Oromo trade routes.

I’ve digressed slightly to make the point: “oral society” perhaps has other intended interpretations aside from a lack of literacy. Once you put that label on an entire nation, it easy to deny them the building of stone houses (some guys actually claimed that here and they fled when we showed them the evidence) and then as result attribute all signs of civilisation in their land to Arabs/Persians/Swahili etc.

That's why I want us to take the next step and fully formalized all of this into a literary canon. That can be studied and have commentaries written on it. We have hundreds of major poets and people often quote them when giving a speech. But were miss the theoretical angle. Also Who knows what kinds of literary theory we could develop by studying somali literature since it's had a very unqiue historical development. This one of the main areas I hope to see come out in the next few decades. it would lead to a radical shift in how we see somali literature.