A Mind That Kept Moving: In Memoriam of Professor Ali Jimale Ahmed
I first encountered Ali Jimale Ahmed the way many do — through the books. His work The Invention of Somalia had already settled into my mind well before I met the man himself. It arrived carrying a name I already associated with a rare kind of intellectual seriousness: a scholar who did not merely hold knowledge, but who questioned it.
We met in person in 2017, at the Hargeisa Book Fair, where we had both been invited. A few exchanges were enough to confirm what I had sensed from his writing. This was not a man who wore his learning as a credential or carried it like luggage.
His was a living knowledge — mobile, restless, alive to contradiction. I would go further: he embodied what it truly means to be a scholar, not in the ceremonial sense, but in the epistemological one. The genuine aqoon yahan — the Somali word for a learned person — is not someone who possesses knowledge, but someone who interrogates it. Ali Jimale was that rarer figure: a thinker whose intellectual framework was built for réfutabilité, who remains open to refutation, in Karl Popper’s philosophical meaning — the readiness to have one’s ideas challenged and overturned. That disposition, I came to understand, was the source of his extraordinary breadth. Such a posture is not common. It requires intellectual humility, rigor, and courage. It also creates a mind oriented not toward certainty, but toward continuous learning and expansion.
And yet, paradoxically, such minds are often the least recognized — especially by the masses, and the self-assured voices, and particularly within the political sphere. Here, the Dunning-Kruger effect becomes relevant. This concept, from cognitive psychology, shows that those with lower competence tend to overestimate their abilities, while those with deeper understanding are often more aware of complexity and thus more prone to self-doubt. In such contexts, true knowledge can be overshadowed by confident ignorance. Professor Ali Jimale belonged to that rare category of thinkers whose depth made them cautious, nuanced, and profoundly aware of the limits of certainty. Ali Jimale lived in that productive uncertainty. It made him generous, attentive, and genuinely curious about every intellectual tradition he encountered.
The World as Source
His formation had put him in conversation with thinkers from across the world — North America, Europe, Asia, the Arab-Muslim world, and Africa. In the messages we exchanged over the years, he once wrote to me: “It’s amazing that we are dealing with the same problem and quoting from almost the same sources.” That remark said much about him. He had arrived at his own conclusions through a wide and independent journey, only to discover, with delight rather than surprise, that certain stories are universal.
Those shared stories mattered to him greatly. There was the tale of the three bulls — which I first encountered in a 1955 Italian work on the Somali of Somalia by Moreno — and the old parable of the blind men touching the elephant, as told by Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī in the thirteenth-century Mathnawi. There was also the Sufi story of the man who lost his key but searched for it far from where it had fallen — a parable of the misdirected search that so often passes for inquiry. What mattered was never the origin. Wherever a story came from, Ali Jimale knew it and had made it his own. That was the sign of a genuinely open mind.
On Somalia: Thinking Without Comfort
Politically, his analyses of Somali affairs were as rigorous as they were uncomfortable. He was not interested in the consolations of nationalism. His central argument — developed most fully in The Invention of Somalia and carried through all his subsequent work — was that the Somali state as imagined had been built on premises that were historically false, and that those false premises were themselves a source of its collapse. The country’s population speaks more than one language; its clans do not share a single history; its regions have distinct identities and distinct pasts. To insist on a unity that was, in large part, a construction was not patriotism but a recipe for endless crisis.
He wrote, in one of the papers we exchanged: “A crisis is always arrived at when organisms — individuals, societies, regimes, etc. — come to a sticking point. To extricate themselves from a predicament, organisms must reinvent and reconfigure.” The path forward, as he saw it, required what he called “rethinking Somali studies” — and that rethinking demanded, in his own words, “rereading its past with gimlet/critical eyes guided by empathy, diligence and generosity.”
That phrase deserves to be read slowly. He was not calling for cold demolition but for something more demanding: a science of the human tempered by care. Without that care, he implied, knowledge becomes what Rabelais warned of — science sans conscience, a science that destroys the soul rather than illuminating it.
Africa, Connectivity, and the Courage to Imagine
But Ali Jimale’s intellectual horizon did not stop at Somalia’s borders. In an essay published by IRICA — the Institut de Recherche Indépendant de la Corne de l’Afrique, an institution he honored with his contribution — he turned his gaze to the broader African condition, revealing a thinker of remarkable political and philosophical ambition. Titled “Limning the Contours of a New Form of Connectivity: African Solutions for African Problems,” the essay opens with the recognition that we live at a crossroads, where old ideas are no longer adequate and the future is still in its inchoate stage. Yet rather than counsel despair, he reframes the very notion of crisis: the apocalyptic, he argues, carries within it its own antiphony — the visionary. Endings, in his reading, are always preludes to new beginnings.
At the heart of the essay is a call for a transformed consciousness — not merely individual, but collective and political. He invokes a Somali proverb to anchor this vision: “Cir tarraaray rag tashaday waa tolikaraa, taako labadeede” — after steep consultations, men of good will could mend holes in the sky. The image is extraordinary in its reach: a community empowered by genuine deliberation, capable of the seemingly impossible. For Ali Jimale, the operative word was “consultations” — discourse conducted in good faith, where participants are free to formulate their views while upholding the rights of others to speak. From such deliberation, he believed, a community could harness its best minds and produce ideas equal to the scale of its challenges.
The connectivity he envisioned was not a passive being-in-touch, but an active, willed engagement rooted in historical awareness. It meant reclaiming one’s narrative, reinterpreting it, and — crucially — reproblematizing its contours. It meant owning one’s research agenda and imbuing it with a locally conceived, locally-tailored epistemology. It meant transcending the mutual suspicions among leaders — and here he recalls once more the parable of the three bulls and the shrewd hyena, that universal story of division exploited by a common predator. It meant understanding, finally, that “it’s only the shoe wearer who knows where the shoe pinches.” What he was proposing, in the end, was nothing less than intellectual and political self-determination: African people, in his vision, were not objects of analysis but agents of their own future, empowered by consciousness and equipped with the courage to act.
A Literature That Pushed Forward
The last dimension of his work that stays with me is his fiction. His final novel, Gaso, Ganuun iyo Gasiin — three words recovered from a vanishing Somali lexicon — was described by the distinguished literary scholar Mohamed Dahir Afrax as something genuinely new in Somali prose writing: a work rich with broad knowledge and dense language, opening new eyes and cutting a new path for Somali literary creativity.
The three words of the title are themselves a statement. Ali Jimale had reached into a Somali that was retreating, words that the living language was losing, and placed them at the very threshold of the book. It was an act at once archival and artistic. The novel also breaks with convention: it dissolves the familiar boundary between the oral storyteller and the writer, between the one who tells and the one who transcribes. It demands effort from the reader — not gratuitously, but because the knowledge embedded in it can only be reached by those willing to work for it. As the old Somali saying goes, a man who does not labor cannot drink the tea.
Closing
Ali Jimale Ahmed was one of those rare intellectuals who make you feel, in their presence, that thought is something to be practiced rather than displayed. He moved between languages, traditions, and disciplines with a naturalness that was never performance. His death leaves a silence in the space where that movement used to happen.
What remains is the work — and the example. An example of how to hold knowledge lightly enough that it can grow, and seriously enough that it means something. How to read the world with, as he put it, empathy, diligence, and generosity. We will not replace him. We can only try to be worthy of the conversation he kept alive.
Dr. Abdirachid M. Ismail
Senior lecturer and researcher
Université de Djibouti
Founding Member of IRICA
Institut de Recherche Indépendant de la Corne de l’Afrique
Member of the Executive Board of AGA
Akadeemiye-Goboleedka Afsoomaaliga
Abdirachid_mohamed_ismail@yahoo.fr
Abdirachid_mohamed@univ.edu.dj
