Written over a period of fifteen years but really the distillation of four decades of work, One Who Dreams Is Called a Prophet is an extraordinary summation of an extraordinary career.1 The story is about the epic walk of Alama, a pastoralist elder from northern Kenya, who is an alter-ego of the author; his arduous pilgrimage to find the source of peace is a journey that Dr. Somjee has also undertaken. Somjee lived among various pastoralist communities during his field work at the University of Nairobi in the 1970s. He then helped to introduce material culture into the Kenyan school art curriculum as part of the 1985 educational reforms, wrote a guidebook for art teachers on how to teach African material culture, served as Head of Ethnography at the National Museums of Kenya (1994–2000), and from 1994 established sixteen village peace museums based partly on principles derived from the...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Autumn 2023
September 01 2023
One Who Dreams Is Called A Prophet by Sultan Somjee
One Who Dreams Is Called A Prophet
by Sultan
Somjee
Amazon (Create Space Independent Publishing Platform)
, 2020. 641 pp., 12 b/w illus., glossary, appendix. $30.90, paper
Jonathan Shirland
Jonathan Shirland
Jonathan Shirland is Associate Professor of Art History at Bridgewater State University. [email protected]
Search for other works by this author on:
Jonathan Shirland
Jonathan Shirland is Associate Professor of Art History at Bridgewater State University. [email protected]
Online ISSN: 1937-2108
Print ISSN: 0001-9933
© 2023 by the Regents of the University of California
2023
Regents of the University of California
African Arts (2023) 56 (3): 95–96.
Citation
Jonathan Shirland; One Who Dreams Is Called A Prophet by Sultan Somjee. African Arts 2023; 56 (3): 95–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00725
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.
Sign in via your Institution
Sign in via your InstitutionEmail alerts
24
Views
Advertisement
Cited By
Related Articles
Still Looking: Self-Love, Ethics, and Seeing Jewish
TDR/The Drama Review (September,2011)
Breaking the Strategic Glass: The Carter Administration and Oman, 1977–1980
Journal of Cold War Studies (May,2024)
The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (September,2020)
Prophet among Rebels: Henry David Thoreau and the Creation of a Transcendentalist Bible
The New England Quarterly (December,2013)
Related Book Chapters
The Third Court: Layout of the Sultan’s Residence and the Chamber of Petitions
Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
Dreams
Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology
Whose Dream, America?
The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism
The New American Dream
Remaking the American Dream: The Informal and Formal Transformation of Single-Family Housing Cities