Kenadid grew up in the town of
Galkayo, situated in north-central present-day
Somalia. He served as a leader in the
Majeerteen Sultanate of Hobyo and was the son of the polity's founder,
Sultan Yusuf Ali Kenadid. He is also the father of
Yasin Osman Kenadid. Kenadid hails from the
Osman Mahamuud Majeerteen Darod clan. Also a writer, Kenadid published many works on various subjects related to Somali history and science, including textbooks on the
Somali language,
astronomy,
geography and Somali philosophy. He borrowed significantly from the vast ancient Somali cultural repository, working towards a renaissance of this rich past. In the early 20th century many young Somalis felt it was of utmost importance to have a national script but their nationalism was decidedly non-Arab. In order to assert their sovereignty, many felt that the Somali language, unique in the world, ought to have a unique script, thus in response to a national campaign to settle on a standard
orthography for the
Somali language (which had long lost its ancient script), Kenadid devised a phonetically sophisticated
alphabet called
Osmanya for representing the sounds of Somali. With Kenadid's arrest, all efforts to develop a standard orthography for the Somali language abruptly came to a halt for the next 25 years. The rise of nationalist sentiment that followed the end of the
Second World War – and especially the birth of the
Somali Youth League political party, of which Kenadid was a founding member – brought about a revival of interest in and use of the Osmanya script. ==See also==