Nuruddin Farah’s guiding compass, Tayeb Salih’s reflection, Ngũgĩ’s reclaimed language

Nuruddin Farah’s Honorary Degree Is Also a Map of Where African Letters Are Headed

On a damp London morning, SOAS, University of London, conferred an honorary doctorate on the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah — an author whose life’s work has been to rescue a country by rebuilding it on the page. The honor feels tidy and ceremonial; Farah’s novels are anything but. Over nearly five decades, from the dictatorship of Siad Barre to the age of global exile, he has written Somalia into visibility with an unblinking steadiness. You don’t read Farah to escape politics; you read him to understand what politics does to the human heart.

A novelist of afterlives

Farah’s early trilogy on dictatorship brought a nation’s suffocation into intimate rooms; later works like “Maps,” “Secrets,” and “North of Dawn” framed the diaspora’s long road back to itself. He has lived the years of Somalia’s unraveling largely from abroad, teaching and writing across continents, yet remaining stubbornly anchored to Mogadishu’s memories — the fishermen’s sing-song of the market, the smell of dust and salt, the grief that does not end. That insistence is why the degree matters. It signals what many readers have known for years: that African literature is not a footnote to global letters but one of its engines.

Farah’s recognition arrives at a moment when the Horn of Africa is again struggling through overlapping crises — war in Sudan, economic shocks from climate extremes, the long insurgency in Somalia. In such seasons of uncertainty, it is tempting to mistake literature for luxury. Farah, and others of his generation, demonstrate the opposite. In their hands, novels are an archive, a courtroom, a lighthouse.

The mirror and the mother tongue

It is impossible to speak of Farah without sensing his neighbors on the shelf. There is Tayeb Salih of Sudan, who in “Season of Migration to the North” turned the Nile into a river of reckoning, forcing readers to confront the psychological violence that lingers after empire. Few novels have looked more clearly at desire and domination, or made the postcolonial encounter feel so private and so cruel. That book still startles because it understands a truth the news cycle often misses: history lives in the body.

And then there is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o of Kenya, whose essays and novels made language itself a battleground. When Ngũgĩ chose to write in Gikuyu and argued that “language carries culture,” he was not simply making a stylistic choice; he was insisting that freedom is unthinkable if your imagination has to borrow a passport. Imprisoned for his politics in the 1970s, he composed a landmark novel in his mother tongue on prison paper. The gesture reverberates: today, translators across the continent are building bridges at scale. East Africa’s Jalada collective, for example, has carried stories into dozens of African languages, one of the most hopeful literary projects of the last decade.

Together, Farah, Salih, and Ngũgĩ forged a path: the exile who refuses forgetting, the mirror that refuses flattery, the language that refuses surrender. If you want to understand why the SOAS ceremony felt larger than a campus event, it’s because it saluted that tradition’s stamina.

What the silence holds

But the story is not complete. The literature of the Horn of Africa is expanding into rooms that earlier generations could only glimpse. Women’s inheritance — legal, cultural, poetic — is now a vibrant conversation. Sudanese-British writers like Leila Aboulela and poets like Safia Elhillo are mapping inner geographies of faith, migration, and class. Somali-British poet Warsan Shire brought the world into the kitchens and corridors of displacement, making the language of home—its questions, its ghosts—global speech. Ethiopian-American novelist Maaza Mengiste, with “The Shadow King,” insisted that we remember women as combatants, not just witnesses. And from the Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah to British-Somali novelist Nadifa Mohamed, new work is testing form and history at once.

If the past generation taught us that novels can withstand censorship and war, the emerging one is showing us what domestic spaces carry: the ritual of tea in a refugee flat, the lullabies spoken in two languages, the chant at a protest where grief becomes rhythm. This is where the region’s renowned oral tradition — the gabay and the women’s buraanbur — meets digital life. Spoken word clips travel faster than any book launch; WhatsApp poems keep time with a family’s remittance. It’s an old lesson, newly amplified: culture survives because people repeat it to each other.

Publishing, translation, and the problem of reach

For all this energy, the pipelines remain narrow. Many African languages still struggle to find publishers with distribution muscle. Translations into and out of Somali, Tigrinya, Amharic, Oromo, and Afar are growing but still a sliver of the global market. This is not just a matter for the arts pages; it is a question of memory infrastructure. Which libraries collect Horn of Africa literature? Which school curricula make room for it? Which festivals — from Hargeysa to Mogadishu, Addis Ababa to Nairobi — can count on visas and visas on time?

There are bright spots. The Hargeysa International Book Fair has become a fixture on the cultural calendar; the Mogadishu Book Fair reclaims a city once synonymous only with war; small presses in Nairobi, Kampala, and Addis are making daring bets. These are feats of stamina as much as creativity.

Why this matters far beyond the Horn

In a global information economy that rewards outrage over understanding, literature is slow journalism — the kind that lets you enter a stranger’s street and stay long enough to notice the light at four in the afternoon. Farah’s new honor brings this into relief. You can read his Somalia and then watch a news bulletin about a market bombing and realize both are part of the same narrative arc: a people trying to keep their institutions, and their inner lives, intact.

There is a practical lesson too. Diasporas from the Horn of Africa do more than wire home remittances; they send back an imagination of the future. That future includes public libraries, translation fellowships, and literary prizes judged by readers who know the region from the inside. It includes seeing Arabic, Somali, Gikuyu, Amharic, and Tigrinya on bookstore tables in Berlin, Dubai, Nairobi, and Minneapolis — not as curiosities, but as current.

The work ahead

Farah walked out of Somalia decades ago and kept carrying its streets in his sentences. Salih taught the world to look at the afterlives of empire without blinking. Ngũgĩ insisted we call things by their names in our own voices. Their shadows are long, but they are not meant to eclipse. They are shade for new saplings.

So the questions that follow the SOAS ceremony are practical as much as poetic: What stories are still trapped between languages? Which “small” narratives — of a grandmother’s inheritance dispute, a fisherman’s debt, a student’s visa spiral — will be the next books that help us think? And what can institutions far from the Horn do to ensure that when readers go looking, the shelves are not empty?

For now, an honorary doctorate will do what ceremonies do at their best: it will pause the rush. It will let us thank a writer who made a country legible when the news could not. It will remind us that the Horn of Africa has never been marginal to the human story. It has been one of the places where that story is being rewritten, in the languages people dream in and the ones they learn to speak to the world.

And it will, if we’re attentive, nudge us toward the work of widening the circle — translating, publishing, teaching — so that the next Farah does not have to wait for a quiet morning in London to be seen.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.