British Somaliland, a protectorate from which Christian missionaries were excluded, opened its first government-run school in 1938. The intention of the new director of education, Randall Ellison, was to use written Somali in preference to Arabic. This drew intense criticism from local religious leaders, and had to be abandoned. Accused of being a missionary in disguise, Ellison's work led to a riot in the town of Burao in 1939 in which three people were killed. Although the school at Berbera functioned for just two terms, the opposition it aroused forms a link in an anti-Western chain of events that stretches from the 1899-1920 revolt of Sayyid Muhammad 'Abdille Hassan up to the Al-Qaeda-linked killing of two British teachers in 2003. This paper is based on Ellison's letters to his family and on official and other sources.