Nuruddin Farah Hassan (1945), the Somali writer born in the Italian administered South of the country, most often in critical consideration is recognized as the first feminist African male writer. Often Farah’s feminism figures as even more nuanced and complex than the interventions of African women writers. Farah’s more sophisticated feminism is crucially bound with libertarian notions of the individual and the “human” rights attendant upon individualism thus defined. Feminist individualism is articulated through an extended negotiation of the Bildungsroman sub-genre across Farah’s oeuvre. This traces the constitution of the feminist individualist for a gender sensitive reinterpretation of the Habermasian public sphere. The female counter-public sphere thus constituted, in Farah’s most recent novel Knots (2007), represents an “island of hope” amidst what is shown to be patriarchal civil war fracture engendered by “tradition” and religion.