Book Review: A Brief History of Formal Education in British Somaliland Protectorate (1884–1960) by Dr Abdullahi Deria

At independence in 1960, Somaliland had produced only two university graduates, not a single qualified doctor or nurse, and just one secondary school for boys in the entire territory. It is with statistics as stark as these that Dr Abdullahi Deria builds his case in A Brief History of Formal Education in British Somaliland Protectorate (1884–1960), a book that is at once a history and an indictment. Deria does not merely narrate the colonial record; he interrogates it, and few Somali authors have done so with such precision or such evident authority.

Published in 2025 by Maple Publishers in Milton Keynes, UK (an earlier edition appeared in 2022 through Lost Coin Books in London), the 386-page book is organized into four principal sections: a short account of the author's own life, an introduction, a selective history of British rule in the Somaliland Protectorate, and, at its core, the history of formal education itself. An annex containing the author's personal “manifesto for a tribeless Somaliland” follows the main text; it falls outside the scope of this review.

The Author

Dr Abdullahi Deria belongs to the first generation of Somalilanders to benefit from formal education under British rule. He entered the first class of the newly opened Sheikh boarding elementary school in 1944, completed his secondary education at Hantoub Secondary School in Sudan, and went on to study medicine at Aberdeen University in Britain. He returned to the Somali Republic in 1968, after British Somaliland's 1960 merger with Italian Somalia, and spent several years in the health sector, where he played a critical role in the eradication of smallpox. In 1982 he joined the World Health Organization, serving as staff member and later consultant until 2006. Now in his nineties, he lives in the UK.

A Sharp Reading of Colonial Rule

When Deria turns to the colonial administration, his critical perspective comes through most clearly — arguably more so than in any comparable work by a Somali author. He does not dwell long on the colonial period as a whole, but the episodes he selects are enough to convey his verdict.

He shows, for instance, how little value the British Empire placed on the Protectorate, treating it chiefly as a financial burden: on more than one occasion, London floated proposals to abandon the territory outright, merge it with neighboring colonies, cede it to another power, or hand it to the League of Nations.

Britain's reluctance to defend the territory during the Second World War receives similar scrutiny. Deria quotes the record directly: “In July 1939, the British government allotted the miserly sum of £900 for the defence of Berbera. That was the measure of how much Britain valued Somaliland!” (p. 101). Given this, he argues, it should come as no surprise that Somaliland was the first territory in the empire to be evacuated — briefly occupied by Italy before Britain reclaimed it.

The absence of a just legal system draws equally pointed criticism, with Deria citing cases of colonial administrators, lacking any legal qualification, passing death sentences and other severe judgements. “The magnitude of injustice perpetrated against the people of Somaliland during British colonial rule is difficult to imagine,” he writes (p. 97). On Britain's later decision to cede significant Somali territory to Ethiopia, he is blunter still, calling it “the betrayal of the century” (p. 48). Deria's judgment of British rule, in short, is severe, and it sets the tone for what follows in his treatment of education policy.

The History of Formal Education

Education is the heart of the book, and this review can only offer a glimpse of it. The earliest form of formal schooling was introduced by Roman Catholic missions, which ran limited facilities between 1894 and 1910 before withdrawing amid policy changes driven largely by Mohammed Abdulle Hassan's Dervish movement and its armed struggle. Quranic and Arabic schools filled the gap that followed, the first opening in Berbera in 1898; this model of schooling would dominate education in the Protectorate for decades.

Formal, government-style education owes its beginnings to a group of Somali students who had studied in Sudan. In 1942, they succeeded in opening three elementary schools, in Hargeisa, Berbera, and Burao, with government support following soon after. Five Somali teachers stand as the undisputed founding figures of formal education in Somaliland: Mohamoud Ahmed Ali (their leader, who would go on to become the most senior Somali official in the education system), Yusuf Haji Adan, Mohamed Shire Gaab, Yusuf Ismail Samatar, and Abdisalam Hassan Mursal. By 1947, elementary schools had opened in Borama, Las Anod, Erigavo, and Zeila, while the first boarding primary school opened in Sheikh in 1944.

Because all these schools were reserved for boys, girls' education was largely neglected in this early period, although community initiatives established co-educational and girls' schools in Burao and Las Anod during the 1940s. The first government girls' elementary school did not open until 1953, in Burao.

Sudan's role in shaping Somaliland's education system was considerable. Secondary students were sent there until Somaliland's own first secondary school opened in 1953 (initially in Sheikh, moved to Amoud in 1954, and returned to Sheikh in 1960, just weeks before independence) while others pursued teacher training, agriculture, commerce, forestry, and religious studies. Beyond Britain, Somali students also travelled to Aden, Beirut, and Mombasa for further education.

A Deliberately Limited System

Two arguments recur throughout this section. First, Deria is unsparing in his criticism of colonial education policy, contending that the British administration never genuinely intended to educate the Somaliland population. By 1952, only 0.2 percent of the population had access to formal education. “The government limited formal education in the country to producing mainly clerks,” he writes (p. 277), adding elsewhere that “the government's policy on education, if there ever was one, was so erratic that it verged on the ridiculous!” (p. 298).

Second, he firmly rejects the administration's repeated mischaracterization of Somali attitudes toward education. Somalis, he insists, never rejected formal education itself; what they resisted was the Latinization of the Somali script which was driven by fears of Christian conversion, the displacement of Arabic, and the erosion of Somalis' Arab identity.

The scale of what colonial education ultimately achieved is captured starkly in the government's 1958 Annual Report on Education, the last such report published. It records 49 elementary schools, 14 intermediate schools, one secondary school, one teacher-training center, and one trade school across the entire Protectorate, with total enrolment of 1,898 pupils at elementary level, 914 at primary level, 81 at secondary level, 22 in teacher training, and 71 at the trade school (p. 319).

Assessment

Dr Deria's book is a significant contribution to the history of Somaliland and of Somalis more broadly, particularly for the pre-independence period, whose written record includes few Somali voices. The history of education, too, remains a largely neglected field in Somali scholarship. The book's character is worth noting in its own right: the narrative voice is personal and reflective, yet the underlying argument rests on credible, well-documented evidence. If anything, “a brief history” undersells the work — the account it offers is not brief at all, but rich, detailed, and close to comprehensive.

No work of this kind is without room for improvement, and Deria's is no exception. While the scarcity of written sources by Somalis themselves may partly explain it, his heavy reliance on colonial archives is a genuine limitation, one that tells the story largely from a single vantage point. Further primary research would have strengthened the account considerably.

A related weakness is the treatment of education somewhat in isolation from the broader economic and political context of colonial rule. As Jama Mohamed argues in his unpublished doctoral dissertation, Constructing Colonial Hegemony in the Somaliland Protectorate, 1941–1960, the military administration introduced a wider policy of “social development, welfare services and education.” Situating education policy within this larger framework would have deepened the book's analysis.

A Final Word on the Author

It is a measure of how little his story is known that most of Somaliland's younger generation, myself included, only learned of Dr Abdullahi Deria when he launched this book in Hargeisa a few weeks ago, at over ninety years of age. Leaving such a legacy at this stage of life is a remarkable achievement in itself. Yet Deria was among the fortunate few of his generation to receive a formal education, and one might have hoped that his first priority would have been to return that knowledge directly to his own people. Instead, aside from roughly a decade, he spent most of his career abroad — a reminder, among many others, of how brain drain has long shaped, and constrained, Africa's development.

All told, this is an excellent read for anyone interested in the history of Somaliland and Somalis, and more broadly in colonial Africa — particularly its education policies.