ABDULLAHI MOHAMED HUSSEIN

Provincial administrator and peacemaker who settled disputes over sweet tea and patience

Abdullahi Mohamed Hussein never carried a weapon into a meeting of angry elders. He carried a flask of sweet spiced tea, a notebook and, as he liked to say, 'two ears and one mouth, used in that proportion.' In thirty-five years in the provincial administration of Kenya's north he settled boundary quarrels, water disputes and a camel-theft case that had outlasted three District Commissioners, and he did it, by every account, over tea.

He was born in 1949 outside Wajir town to a family of pastoralists who spoke Somali at home and Arabic at prayer. A schoolteacher noticed him reciting the whole geography lesson from memory and wrote to a school in Garissa; he walked the first stretch of the journey, and a lorry driver carried him the rest. After Garissa High School and the Kenya Institute of Administration at Kabete, he joined the provincial administration in 1974 as a District Officer, and was posted to Marsabit, Isiolo and Mandera before retiring in 2009 as Deputy Provincial Commissioner for North Eastern Province.

In retirement he settled in Eastleigh, where he chaired the Eastleigh Muslim Welfare Society and mediated family and business quarrels in a small back room that always smelled of cardamom. He liked anjero with ghee on Fridays, listened to the BBC Somali Service at dusk, grew hibiscus in old paint buckets, and read the Daily Nation from the back page forward. He married Halima Farah in 1975, and she survives him with their six children. He prayed at Masjid Al-Noor for twenty-four years and never once arrived after the first takbir.

Abdullahi died in Nairobi in December 2020 after a short illness, aged seventy-one. He leaves a wife, six children, eleven grandchildren and a great many people who were once at odds and are now friends because of him. Allaha u naxariisto.

“A quarrel is just two people who have not yet finished their tea.”