Three years of schooling made Osman among the most literate Somalis

Evidence

Although he had but three years of formal education, he rose to become one of the most literate Somalis by the early 1940s. His fluency in Italian was unsurpassed by many in the colony, and his wide reading in world affairs helped him become the most politically aware Somali in the territory. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 184

Categorization

• QUESTION: This reflects the extremely low baseline of colonial-era formal literacy — worth quantifying how few Somalis had any schooling in the 1940s.