One Who Dreams Is Called A Prophet by Sultan Somjee

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...