A personal reflection
This is a personal memory of my friend Virginia Luling, who died on 7 January 2013 in Otley, Yorkshire, and it is with a heavy heart that I write this. Our relationship hinged on the fact of our mutual association with Somalia – an association that goes back to the 1960s when she and I first went there, though in very different circumstances – and thereafter our paths often crossed, sometimes merged.
Virginia was of Anglo-American heritage and the youngest daughter of an artist father and a novelist mother. She read English Language and Literature at Oxford before studying Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) under the tutelage of the renowned anthropologist I. M. Lewis, specializing in the people of the Horn of Africa, most specifically the Geledi of southern Somalia and the Oromo of Ethiopia.
Although her career in academia did not follow an unbroken path, her personal engagement with Somalis and Oromos, and with Africa more widely, continued for the rest of her life. Over the years she maintained a steady output of scholarly writings, contributing articles, papers and book chapters, and writing some educational material for young people. Always her ethnographic pieces were learned, beautifully crafted, free from jargon, and often with tantalizing titles such as ‘The Man in the Tree’, ‘The Other Somalis’ and ‘Fictitious Descent’. Her magnus opus was perhaps the publication of Somali Sultanate: The Geledi City-State Over 150 Years (2002). I had the privilege of being her publisher for this book, and I can say that unlike most other manuscripts that came our way, Virginia's came almost print-ready. Our small publishing company (HAAN) was able to arrange additional distribution for this title with Transaction Publishers in the United States in order to bring it to the attention of a wider academic audience. Somali Sultanate is based on her initial anthropological fieldwork in Afgooye, Somalia, in the mid-1960s, with additions from later years’ visits, including to be present at the investiture of the new Geledi Sultan, Ahmed Abdi Osman, in February 1996 – at a time when Somalia was in deep turmoil and when none but the very brave would have ventured there.
She was, of course, an intrepid traveller to remote corners of Africa – much as one might associate with an earlier age of exploration – except that she was engaged in work that would profile the injustices done to and the rights of ‘tribal minorities’, for which she was a fearless campaigner. Both these qualities are so well confirmed in the tribute to her on the website of her beloved Survival International (http://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3260-virginia-luling).
Virginia was an accomplished linguist, able to work with texts in German, Italian and French, and a fluent Somali speaker. I recall us trawling around Somali Studies and African Studies conferences together, in places like Turku and Aalborg, and her speaking to other delegates in whichever of these languages they felt most comfortable. In 2009 she had a chance to brush up her German when she was invited to spend a few months as visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle, where she worked with another Africanist, Markus Hoehne, on editing the festschrift for her teacher in Somali studies, I. M. Lewis.
Her generosity as a scholar was legendary among Somalists, and these words from Professor L. V. Cassanelli (University of Pennsylvania) will resonate with many later scholars who sought her out: ‘I will always remember that first meeting, her kindness and encouragement to a young, inexperienced graduate student, her willingness to share her research contacts in Afgooye, and the great respect she clearly had for her friends and colleagues in Somalia.’ It will be some compensation, therefore, to know that Virginia arranged for her unpublished research notes and other papers, as well as her archive of photographs, to be left with London University School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where they will be available for consultation.
One must also mention her substantive contribution as an expert witness in Somali asylum cases over the past two decades. Her knowledge and professionalism in the asylum work in which we were both involved meant that she was in constant demand by solicitors and by the courts alike. The great weight that was given to her presentations before the Asylum and Immigration Tribunals led, in some instances, to a change in judicial rulings and official ‘country guidance notes’ for Somali asylum-seekers.
In the last months of her life, Virginia continued to be involved in her academic writing, and was keen to bring earlier research notes to publication. The last paper she was working on was prepared for a Somali Studies conference in Norway in September 2012, which by then she was too ill to attend. But she continued to collect feedback on the draft, and was able to complete the paper for publication before she died. With the working title of ‘Continuity and Change: Marriage in Southern Somalia and the Diaspora’, the paper is expected to be published later this year in the Northeast African Studies Journal (Michigan State University Press). Plans are also afoot for a second edition paperback of Somali Sultanate to be published by Hurst in London.
Virginia was many things to many people, and one's own involvement with her was often quite oblivious of the extraordinary range of her engagements, and I am acutely aware of this as I write. The aspects of life in which I knew her best represent but a small piece of what was the very rich mosaic of a life well lived.
Dr Anita [Suleiman] Adam
Brighton, UK
Virginia Luling's contributions to Somali Studies
Virginia Luling's highly original ethnographic fieldwork on the Somali people (and later also on the Oromo), which I had the privilege of supervising, began in 1966 and continued until her tragic death. Her dedication to these two remarkable peoples over such a long period was a triumph of modern anthropological research and led her to develop an unusual depth of empathy with her subjects in both cultures. This was reflected in and consolidated by various unexpected experiences, as for example when we were both arrested by the Ethiopian authorities and accused of ‘spying’ – a not uncommon experience of innocent foreign anthropologists in Ethiopia.
Virginia had also spent much time researching Somali families involved in asylum applications and was thus very well known to, and appreciated by, Somali asylum-seekers in East Africa. Although she had not herself married, her involvement in other peoples’ marriages and with their children, both personally and professionally, gave her a broad and deep experience of family life which enhanced her understanding of multiethnic family affairs. This contributed much to her sensitive analysis of the Geledi City-State which became her most important contribution to African politics. This was the finely drawn analysis she presented of the state, based on the town of Afgoi in southern Somalia. This provided a powerful analysis of the alternative sedentary structure of Somali politics, the counterweight to the uncentralized non-state model which is so familiar to students of anthropology.
Professor I. M. Lewis, FBA
Virginia Luling's work with the Oromo people
Dr Virginia developed an interest in the Oromo people when she studied the Gadaa system – their ancient democratic method of legal, moral and spiritual regulation of society – for her MA in the mid-1960s. When in 1982 the Oromo scholar Mohammed Hassen (then a student at SOAS, now Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University, Atlanta) established the Oromo Relief Association (ORA) in the UK, Dr Virginia was one of the founding members. She remained a stalwart supporter of ORA throughout her life. It was she who introduced ORA to Health Unlimited, which sent health professionals to train Oromo health workers and midwives among refugee populations in Sudan and within areas of Oromia Region; she later visited the region following the fall of the military dictatorship in 1991. Whilst working for Survival International, she became Chair of ORA, demonstrating her commitment to threatened peoples and refugees in both her professional and her private life.
In April 2010, ORA was on the verge of insolvency. Dr Virginia almost single-handedly persuaded Oromo and their friends, and her own friends and family, to rescue ORA and commit to regular contributions to keep the organization afloat; because of her leadership, the management committee is now able to envisage an expanding role for ORA again. Dr Virginia oversaw ORA's move to new premises in London, and helped ORA to forge a network of relationships with other organizations and charities. She has personally made considerable donations to funds assisting destitute and threatened refugees from Somalia, and to ORA's work of assisting refugees in Eritrea. Dr Virginia has invested her energy in the recent establishment of a secondary school education programme for Oromo refugee girls in Nairobi, and has personally funded one of these students.
Never one to withdraw from a challenge, Dr Virginia opposed injustice whenever confronted by it. She was a true friend and advocate for the Oromo people. She is loved and missed by all Oromo and their friends in the UK.
(For more information and Oromo tributes, see the Gulèlè Post website: http://www.gulelepost.com/2013/01/22/dr-virginia-luling-a-long-time-friend-of-the-oromo-people-passed-away/.)
Leencaa Aba-Gero and Dr Trevor Truman
Oromo Relief Association UK