@geeljire madaxweyne
@Factz
You guys should buy this book since y'all are obsessed with Geledi
The twins will not be making much of this. Virginia lived in Afgooye for three years, beginning in 1966, returning in 1980, 1989 and 1996. She did for the Shabelli valley what Catherine Besteman did for the Jubba in about the same period. She is highly respected, but has been out of print for years, which made her a target for those falsifying Wikipedia pages. Her name was used as the source for the fake Wiki article used to claim Ahmad Yusuf of Geledi got tribute from the Omanis at Lamu, etc.. The last used copy of City State available at Amazon was $795, so I passed. This new printing is a bargain at $40, with shipping from the UK. Bless Loohpress!
Virginia died in 2013, but her book is a classic. Everybody quotes her. She was Honorary Secretary of the Anglo-Somali Society from 2008-2012, when she was diagnosed with cancer. Lovely lady. Photo also at this site:
http://www.anglosomalisociety.org.uk/documents/AaObituaryVirginiaLuling.pdf
"It was field research for her Ph.D., under the supervision of I.M.Lewis, that took her in 1966 to Somalia where she lived in the town of Afgooye, near Mogadishu, for three years. Lewis had recently visited the town, with its peculiar tradition of an annual ‘stick fight’, and he suggested that an investigation into its background would make a good research project. The photograph shows Virginia in Afgooye in 1967, with friend Faaduma Cusmaan Diine. Completion of the degree was delayed until 1972 by the family circumstances following the untimely death of her mother. During the 1970s she taught for the Open University and volunteered locally for the newly-formed Survival International. Virginia’s Ph.D. thesis plus on-going research was the basis of her book, Somali Sultanate: The Geledi City State over 150 years, published by Haan in 2002. She had returned to Afgooye in 1980 and in 1989. The strangest of her visits was in 1996, after the fall of the Siad Barre régime, when for two days only she was able to drive out from a half-ruined Mogadishu, in a vehicle guarded by young men with AK 47s, to a dreamlike encounter with the people she had known in happier times. The book is a study of life in Afgooye, and of the two clans whose home it has been for three centuries, the Geledi and Wacdaan. Virginia described it as a political entity before the colonial period, a small republic of allied lineage groups with at its head the Suldaan who is both a religious and a political leader, but who works with and is responsible to the elders (akhyaar). She saw how it changed and yet preserved its key institutions under Italian colonisation, then after the independence of Somalia, later under the 'Scientific Socialism’ of Siad Barre, and finally into the violence and political fragmentation that followed his fall."
