LITMIR.BIZ

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      Until the twentieth century, identification as Somali was likely neither as widespread nor particularly contentious. Far more significant was one’s status as a Muslim. As one interviewee told the scholar Virginia Luling: “People in those days did not talk of Somali but of Muslims and gaalo (infidels).”⁴⁴ Throughout the nineteenth century, southern Somalia underwent rapid economic transformation. The European demand for cash crops fueled agricultural production on the plantations along the Juba and Shebelle river valleys of southern Somalia and the island of Zanzibar. This, in turn, fed the market for domestic slavery and transformed the city-states on the southern Somali coast into hubs of international trade.⁴⁵ The expansion of the slave trade made debates over one’s Islamic status (and, by the same token, one’s ability to be enslaved) more pressing.

      In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, groups throughout southern Somalia and northern Kenya came to equate being Muslim with being “Somali,” and collapsed the distinction between a prophetic and an agnatic genealogy.⁴⁶ Lee Cassanelli describes this process as the “fusion of Islamic and Somali identities.”⁴⁷ Those who seized control of the land, asserted their Somali origins, or claimed a status as an independent lineage likely had to draw a strict, and perhaps violent, distinction between people who, only a few years earlier, would have been considered members of shared groups. Certain people, including many Oromo speakers, were able to successfully claim the name Somali. Rather than be absorbed into subordinate relationships, they were incorporated as long-lost kin. Other groups were enslaved or integrated into dominant Somali lineages as unequal clients. Still others were violently expelled. Casting certain people as “gaal” (a derogatory term for a non-Muslim) no doubt helped to limn the boundaries of groups that had a long history of interaction.⁴⁸

      The binary distinction between Somali and gaal became a key conceptual boundary throughout the region—one that has been reanimated over the course of subsequent decades. After new Somali immigrants entered the region, groups in what is today Wajir District, who had once lived under the protection of the Borana, began to rework notions of lineage. For example, oral histories suggest that many Degodia acquired an independent status at this time. This was accomplished when Degodia migrants broke off from the Ogaden, unified with their kin who had been living under the Ajuran, and declared themselves no longer sheegat.⁴⁹ Oral histories also indicate that many Ajuran, on the other hand, avoided eviction by “reawakening” their Somali Hawiye roots.⁵⁰ As the historian Richard Waller aptly notes: “What ‘clan’ means in any given context is itself a puzzle.”⁵¹ The long history of interaction between “Somalis” and “Borana” was, nevertheless, not so easily effaced. During the colonial period and into today, the question of who was and is a Somali is not nearly as straightforward as many social scientists have assumed.

      It is worth noting that the above description of northern Kenya runs counter to certain Somali nationalist versions of history. Nationalisms in general often lay claim to an ancient past or, in some cases, invoke a timeless national identity. In contrast, I have suggested that Somaliness was a product of recent historical and political struggle, rather than a natural or transhistorical category.⁵² In so doing, I have built upon the scholarship of Ali Jimale Ahmed and others who have examined the “invention of Somalia.”⁵³ Nevertheless, it is also imperative to consider why mythico-histories of Somalia (which continue to provide a basis of unity and an anti-imperialist language) remain so salient for many people.

      MYTHS OF CONQUEST

      After gaining a foothold in the area, many nomadic groups came into violent conflict with imperial representatives. Archival records from this era provide clues to the escalation of conflicts between Somali leaders in the Jubaland region (which was until 1925 part of the East Africa Protectorate/Kenya) and officials from the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). Like any collection of written records, documents from this period enable certain kinds of historical readings and disable others. The stories they do offer historians, however, were obscured by later generations of colonial officials, who discarded the history of the IBEAC as they produced their own narratives of conquest. Reexamining this history, which was later buried under newer colonial mythologies, provides a means of questioning standard narratives about the isolation of the region.

      In the late nineteenth century, the IBEAC tried to seize control over Somali caravan routes, whose outlets converged on the Benadir coast. Historical trade routes crisscrossed the region, which at various points in time had been connected to Arabia, India, and even distant China and Indonesia. After declaring a protectorate over the sultan of Zanzibar in 1890, the company claimed much of the East African interior (including Jubaland) to be under its sphere of influence. However, company rule remained largely nominal. Many of the surviving archival records from this period provide glimpses into the enormous strategic and tactical obstacles that the IBEAC faced to making profits in the region.

      T. S. Thomas’s seminal 1917 work, Jubaland and the Northern Frontier District, offers one of the few in-depth, retrospective accounts of the failed attempts by company authorities to capture the profitable trade. Thomas, who served as senior assistant secretary to the protectorate government, drew upon official records to compile an administrative history of the region. According to his account, the company tried, through the use of a river steamer, to redirect the caravan trade away from Barawa and Merca and farther south toward “its natural outlet at Kismayu,” although this enterprise proved a “complete failure.”⁵⁴ Officials also attempted to appropriate title deeds to land around the port city of Kismayo in Jubaland. When the company representative, H. R. Todd, tried to negotiate this transfer with Kismayo residents, the meeting quickly devolved into an open rebellion during which local Somali populations teamed up with the company’s mutinying Hyderabad troops.⁵⁵ In 1895, the Foreign Office took over the administration of the country from the bankrupt company.

      Thomas’s detailed report diverges greatly from the accounts that colonial officials produced only a decade later. Reading them together reveals the working memory of colonial power. By the late 1920s, colonial officials were creating new founding myths, which elided the ignoble failures of the IBEAC to capture the caravan trade. By the beginning of formal colonial rule in 1920, officials in the north had come to internalize a belief in the “civilizing” effects of British rule on an otherwise “barbaric” and anarchic people. As colonial officials came to conceptualize themselves as rulers of a backward and isolated region, they effaced the history of these once-extensive caravan routes. Rather than a conscious or intentional suppression, this elision reflects the ways in which certain kinds of logic became sedimented in colonial thinking.

      By the 1940s, Pan-Somali nationalists had developed their own history of the region. In the eyes of many Somali irredentists, the late nineteenth century was a lamentable period during which four colonial powers—France, Italy, Britain, and Ethiopia—divided the historical Somali nation into five territories. While protectorate and colonial accounts paint a picture of disorderly tribes in need of colonial order, Somali nationalists portray inhabitants of the Northern Frontier District (NFD) as a homogeneous people divided by arbitrary borders. Although Somali nationalist discourse provided an important critique of colonial power, it also did not give much heed to the internal dynamics of the region. Rather, both Somali nationalist elites and colonial officials crafted an image of the NFD that reflected a certain vision of state power.

      While the inhabitants of the Horn may not have been the homogeneous nation that Pan-Somali supporters retrospectively imagined, there is little doubt that imperial powers drew boundaries with little regard for nomadic populations. By the late 1890s, the protectorate regime had claimed a vast territory beyond its coastal garrisons.⁵⁶ In the hope of checking Ethiopian and Italian expansion, the Foreign Office hastily secured its rights to the poorly surveyed terrain stretching west of the Juba River and south of the Ethiopian Empire. The art of cartography was a key technique through which British authorities created a semblance of sovereignty over the interior of the East Africa Protectorate, where they largely lacked effective control. Most of these frontiers were nominal artifacts of imperial diplomacy that cut through communities and partitioned nomadic populations for whom these colonial conventions were largely meaningless.⁵⁷ Labeling these borders “arbitrary,” however,

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