Abdi Ismail Samatar

Professor, geography and global studies

Education

Ph.D., U of California Berkeley

M.C.R.P., Iowa State U

B.A., U of Wisconsin-La Crosse

His books:

The African State: Reconsiderations (Heinemann, 2002) (co-editor) a finalist for the Herskovits Award for scholarship on Africa

An African Miracle: State, Class Leadership and Colonial Legacy in Botswana (Heinemann, 1999).

His heroes:

"I derive a lot of energy from the tenacity of people who never give up, who are fighters, those who refuse to give in to how others define them."

His students might say...

"I am a task master. My hope is that some day they would say I have made a difference in their lives."

If he could live anywhere...

"I'd have to divide the answer into two parts: a place of mind and a place of territory. The best job on the planet is being a professor in a research University. That's the mental place. I don't feel cold here because despite the weather, the spirit of public service and generosity makes Minnesota a great place to live. On the territory side, if I were to live outside the U.S., it would be East Africa. It's a lovely part of the world in terms of geography, people, and the rhythm of life."

He believes passionately that...

"...What divides people is not where they come from but what they carry in their heads."

Unlocking the system

by Mary Shafer

Ask Abdi Samatar a question, and he'll pause, and pause some more. When he does answer, his thoughts emerge in neat paragraphs with topic sentences.

Samatar's reflective, analytical style can be disconcerting to Americans used to clipped, rapid-fire conversation. Yet this assured and elegant man is anything but formal or taciturn. Ask him about his professional life, or about anything he cares about, and he speaks with the passion of a committed activist.

"There are three things I'm excited about," he says after the requisite pause. "I'm excited by the ideas that attracted me to academia and the possibility of staying mentally young forever; by public service using what we learn here to make our communities better; and by the opportunity to use my position as a scholar and teacher as a platform to speak about injustice."

An East-African native, Samatar is a geography professor who came to the U by way of academic backgrounds in Wisconsin, Iowa, and California. On the faculty since 1992, he studies the political and economic struggles of Third-World countries, particularly Somalia and Ethiopia.

Samatar has been a Fulbright scholar in Ethiopia, has done field work on governments and institutions in Botswana, and spent two years in South Africa in the immediate aftermath of apartheid. With all of that, he says, he is positive that universities are pivotal in making a difference to Third-World countries.

"For good or ill, the United States has interests all over the map," he says. "If that interest is to serve both this country and others, it should be informed by seriously grounded scholarship with an excellent grasp of problems and prospects overseas. That way, we can have a positive-sum game. In the past, it has been zero-sum: We've won; they've lost."

Despite his concerns about the state of the world, Samatar calls himself an optimist. That's because, he says, he has seen first-hand the determination of people in Third-World countries.

In the early 1990s, Samatar was invited to South Africa to work for an organization called the Human Science Research Council (HSRC). With nearly 1,000 employees, says Samatar, the HSRC had been "the social science think tank of the apartheid government. The agenda was to use the social sciences to justify dehumanization of South Africa, to give a scientific gloss to apartheid, to train South Africans to become servants and aides to white folks.

"If you looked at the institute's old research, it was all about reinforcing segregation, and finding ways to justify it. That had to come to an end."

Confronting global injustice

"My job was to help change this," says Samatar. "We trained researchers, worked to revamp the institute's research agenda. It meant not only changing the curriculum but also changing the culture of the institution. To do that, we had to attract young people, nurture them, and use the institution to build up their skills."

Samatar, who calls the experience his "way of confronting global injustice concretely," says it helped nurture his own optimism: "I was inspired by what I saw in those young men and women who had been locked into a system designed to make them mentally blind.

"They were my role models rather than the other way around. These were people who could have left but chose instead to stay and fight."
Accentuating the positive
Samatar notes that most research on Botswana and South Africa has focused on the negative.

"I found some of the work on certain issues wanting," he says. "There seemed to be an attitude of ÔThis is the way things are; there's not much can do.' I try to demonstrate that Botswana, for example, is a vibrant country. We cannot homogenize these people in a pessimistic way. Africans have done their own work and competed very well."

Samatar who was teaching a new course on Islam on September 11, 2001 says 9/11 was a watershed for universities: It "elevated the intensity of what we study; and it created a focus for Islamic studies."

It also, he adds, highlighted the need for more resources for Islamic scholarship. "There are not many here who can deal with the Islamic world," he says. "But students are interested, and we must cultivate that interest. They need to be well-prepared for a global political and economic world, both to live in it and to serve others in it."

So how does a warm-climate guy live in Minnesota? Despite winter temperatures to which he has never quite acclimated, Samatar says he's been happy in Minnesota.

"If you put all 50 states on a spectrum, from open to closed, Minnesota is first or second," he says, "so it's good."

That openness could account in part for the rapid growth of the local Somali community, the largest in the nation. With all of his other commitments, Samatar who is proficient in Somali as well as in Arabic finds time to be an ad hoc adviser to some of the "close to 200" Somali students on campus.

Of his department, Samatar says, "I have colleagues who are first-rate human beings. Most important, though, the best graduate students in the discipline are here.

"From Cape Town to British Columbia to Ireland they come from all over the map. They are the jewels of the department. They make this place challenging and exciting."

"Students need to be well-prepared for a global political and economic world, both to live in it and to serve others in it."

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