Transcript of Oral History Interview with Ali K. Galaydh

Ali Khalif Galaydh Narrator Ahmed Ismail Yusuf Interviewer February 10, 2014 Shoreview, Minnesota Ali Khalif Galaydh -AG Ahmed Ismail Yusuf -AY AY: I am Ahmed Ismail Yusuf. This is an interview for the Minnesota Historical Society Somali Oral History Project. I am with Ali Khalif Galaydh. We are in Shoreview, Minnesota. It is February 10, 2014. Ali Khalif Galaydh is a talented Somali politician, educator on a professorial level, and at times even a businessman. As a professor he taught at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He was a fellow at Weatherhead Center of International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. In Somalia he had several titles, but the highest office was when he became the fourth-ever Somali prime minister in 2000. In Somali circles Ali is also known for his intellectual prowess and political versatility. Ali, welcome to the interview—third time again. AG: Thank you very much, Ahmed. AY: Okay, I want to start from where were you born and when were you born, even though we don’t actually acknowledge that at all. AG: Somalis normally don’t celebrate birthdays, so there is now quite an always heated discussion about who is older than who. But in my case, my father was in the British Merchant Marine, and he therefore recorded when I was born. There was no birth certificate, but I was born October 15, 1941. AY: Wow, so you do have the recorded date, at least. AG: Yes, yes I do. I can’t change it. I know friends of mine, we attended school together, either elementary school or primary school, and now they keep on reducing their age. I can’t change or fiddle with mine. AY: Well, we are suffering from that disease. All of us, anyway. How did you start school? I mean, at the earliest stage, I think, at that time we didn’t know what education was. How did that come about in your case? 1 AG: Because, again, my father was in the British Merchant Marine, and therefore traveled the world over and realized the importance of educating children. So he asked my mother and my grandmother—who I was staying with in his absence—he asked them to take me to elementary school in Las Anod [Laascaanood], the nearest town. So that’s where I started. And I finished elementary school there—three years—and then moved to Sheikh [Sheekh] for primary education. And, again, Sheikh was the main center of learning or education in what was Somaliland. I pursued my high school also, initially for the first year and a half in Amoud because the only school was there then. Then a bigger school and a beautiful school was built by the British in Sheikh, so I went there. My last two years and a half, I was in Sheikh, so I graduated from Sheikh. AY: So even then, when comes to Amoud and Sheikh High School, you were the cream of the crop. What was the feeling then? Did you know that you could be a leader? Were you just exactly training yourself in that capacity? What were you thinking at the time in Somalia? AG: I don’t think any of us strategized. We were on this sort of road that was metaphorically built by the British. So we finished elementary school, there is a competitive examination nationally, and if you passed that you moved to the primary school. Then the top students— probably twenty, twenty-five of them—moved to the secondary school. We were really not very self-conscious. All we cared about was to be in this boarding school, to hit the books, and when you finish you move to the second level. I don’t think it dawned on any of us, in the minds of us, what we are going to be. At that time where we lived was a British protectorate, and when we graduated, the best we could aim for at that time was to be in the colonial service. Yes, all of us had in mind of attending university—and the university was always in the UK—but I don’t think any of us was self-conscious about what our role will be beyond the British colonial system at that time. Only after independence could one think of being in the newly independent state of Somalia civil service, but we didn’t plan or think anything bigger than that. AY: So once you graduated from secondary school, or what we call secondary school—and I think in the United States it’s called high school—where did you go? I got a word from the wind that somehow or other you came to the United States. AG: I did. My graduating class of Sheikh at that time, we were fourteen. I think out of the fourteen, five or six of us came to the States, and the others went to the Soviet Union with some on a scholarship. So I came with this batch in 1962. AY: 1962. AG: We came here September 1962, actually very close to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we were in Washington, DC. But I think the people who sponsored us did not apply in time for us to attend any of the universities we later went on. So we stayed six months in Washington, DC, purportedly to study English. But we had no problem with English, because the medium of instruction [in northern Somalia] was English. We were not really self-confident in speaking the language, but in written English I think we did very well when we ultimately went to college. But we spent six months from September to January in Washington, DC, and only the spring semester is when we joined the different colleges we were sent to. So I went to Boston 2 University. We didn’t really have a hand in where we were being sent, because we were not directly applying. I think this is State Department money, but there was an Institute of International Education based in New York, which administered the scholarships, and they are the ones who applied for us to different schools. So I went to BU [Boston University], and that’s where I graduated from. AY: So you all went to different universities. AG: Yes. People you would probably—if I give you names you would remember. Gahayr. Mohamed Hassan Aden (Gahayr), who had a very illustrious sort of career in Somalia. He was a brilliant guy, was one of us, and he was brought to Ripon College, Wisconsin. That’s where he graduated from. There was Mohamoud Ismail Samater. There was Hassan Farah. There was Aden Oomar. And then there were two other guys who actually were ahead of us, and they went to England to study. For whatever the reason, they had problems, so they came back to Somalia, and then they came with us. One of them was Hassan Adan (Hassan Huukle) and the other one was Hassan Abdullahi Ahmed-weyd. These two guys came with us and were the same batch, but we were all sent to different universities. I think Ahmed Yassin Buraale, of all places, he was sent to Fresno, California, and others were sent to somewhere in Pennsylvania—Dickinson College. So we were sent to different schools. AY: So did you keep in touch, or was it difficult just to keep in touch—you were a batch that came from Somalia, you were somewhat connected, you were very young? AG: The number of Somali students in the US then were very limited, so all of us knew each other. And in those days telephones were expensive, so we used to write letters to each other. AY: [chuckles] Did you save those letters? AG: No, none of those. AY: None of them. AG: None of them. But these would have been probably archival for purposes—would have told us what we felt. I remember a year or after I started college, the Beatles came to the US, and that was a sensational thing. But more importantly in August of 1963, my first year in college, Martin Luther King, and the march to Washington, and the “I Have a Dream” speech. I was here, right here. AY: In the United States. AG: In Boston at that time. So the whole civil rights movement, the anti-war, the anti-Vietnam, the feminist movement, women’s liberation—there were a lot of things that were happening in the ’60s and early ’70s and actually to the ’70s, middle ’70s. But initially I was in Boston and we had a very sheltered life. We lived either in dorms or close to campus, and really we were not exposed to what was going on in the country other than what we see on television. 3 AY: So you mean when it comes to even racial issues or civil rights movement, you could hear the commotion, but possibly you were not that informed about it, were you? AG: We were not actually that informed. Intellectually, yes, but experientially, we really didn’t come across any of that. Here you live in campus and yes, you sense what is going on. But I remember distinctly summer of 1964, Howard Zinn—the late Howard Zinn, who is a historian, and I took classes with him in Boston University—was an advisor to SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. He was organizing students to go to Mississippi, and I almost went and joined that group.

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