Margaret Laurence’s time in British Somaliland between 1950 and 1952 marked a formative period in her development as a writer. Although she is best known for her Canadian fiction set on the prairies of Manitoba, her early years in the Horn of Africa provided the intellectual, cultural, and ethical foundation for much of her later work. Laurence herself described this period as her “literary apprenticeship,” a time when she first learned to observe, listen, and write with cultural sensitivity and depth.

Laurence did not travel to Somaliland as an author, but as the wife of John Fergus “Jack” Laurence, a civil and hydraulic engineer employed by the British Colonial Office. Jack was assigned to oversee the construction of a series of ballehs, large earth dams designed to collect seasonal rainwater in the arid Haud region near the Ethiopian border. The project aimed to provide a more reliable water supply for nomadic pastoralists and their livestock. Because of the remote nature of the work, Laurence lived for extended periods in mobile desert camps, often as the only Western woman for hundreds of miles. This experience immersed her in a landscape of scarcity and resilience........

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