On the evening of Friday, 17 August 2007, under heavy and thunderous skies of Columbus city in Ohio, one of Somalia’s eminent scholars [and one of ROAPE's longest-serving editors], Dr. Hussein M. Adam, was honoured by the Somali Studies International Association (SSIA) for his sustained contributions to Somali Studies.

Professor Said S. Samatar of Rutgers University, who skillfully served as the MC, organised a by-invitation-only dinner; it was to be an exclusive banquet, or so we thought, until a horde of uninvited individuals crashed in, prompting Professor Samatar to snap at them, in order to shame and eventually steer them into paying up, but to no avail. A la Somali culture, they quickly transformed themselves into hard-to-ignore guests, just like the nomad who for the first time came to a city and, when ignored by its pedestrians, retorted, Magaaloy waligaaba i dhaaf dhaaf, haddee aduun baa marti laguu yahay.

In its thirty years of existence, founded in 1978, the Association did not give such an honour until now to anyone of its elders or founding members. As a founding president and the inventor of the very name of the association, Said eloquently delivered an engaging tribute, with which he entertained us during the course of a delicious dinner, that introduced Hussein the author, the activist and the extraordinary intellectual to a captive audience.

In honouring Hussein, or, as he is nicknamed, ‘Hussein Tanzani,’ Professor Samatar hit a home-run for his effort to familiarise us with Hussein the prodigious child, the man, and the soon-to-be senior citizen. In between was a long narrative of his survival, the premier learning institutions he has attended, a range of contributions to a nation-building campaign. But above all, we came to know the stick-to-it and loving husband that he is to his ailing wife, Fadumo Abulsamad.

With his unparalleled command, and, may I say, agility, to tap dance around and massage the written word, thence mincing at each line that he artfully weaved into a tasty and pertinent text, the master of ceremony of the night took us to the foothills of Kilimanjaro and the environment that shaped Hussein’s childhood, a child longing for returning to his forefathers’ landscape in exchange for East Africa’s alienating society. Born to and raised in a mosaic world of a Somali father, a Masai and Indian mother, Hussein, we came to know, had been an outsider and has always defied categorisation for most of his 63 years; he longed for a social and political space of Somali dominance, to mainly embrace its values and in turn be embraced.

I first met Dr. Hussein in 1978 when I was a junior at Lafoole College, Somali National University, where Dr. Hussein’s footprints are hard to erase. My early impressions about his intellectual prowess and his leftist orientation were cemented at the wake of the 1979 Annual International Frantz Fanon Conference, held in Mogadishu, Somalia. The ‘who’s who’ of Pan-Africanism (Amiru Baraka, Granga, founder of the ‘Kwanza’ tradition, Claudia Mitchell-Kernnon, Vice Chancellor of UCLA, who was instrumental in my admission to that institution in 1982, thanks to her unbridled love for Somalis after that conference, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, yes, that Abdulkarim Jabar! et al.) descended into the Mogadishu of 1979, a city of peace and prosperity.

It is fitting here to add that Dr. Hussein wrote his dissertation for his Harvard Ph.D. (in Political Science) on The Social and Political Thoughts of Frantz Fanon – a manuscript that I devoured (in 1978) at the then bustling but modestly stocked Lafoole library. As a young Marxist, or so I thought of myself, who fled Ethiopia’s oppressive conditions, Hussein’s dissertation, a comprehensive review of Marxism in the tradition of Fanon, left me with lasting impressions.