LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Carrying the History of the Prophets”

      About 800 or 900 years ago the Horn of Africa was politically and commercially more closely related to Arabia than it is at the present day, and it was at that date that the Somali race was first formed by numerous emigrants from Southern Arabia intermingling with, intermarrying with, and proselytizing the indigenous tribes, who were probably of Galla stock. Since then they have extended in all directions along the lines of least resistance.

      —L. Aylmer, “The Country between the Juba River and Lake Rudolf,” 1911¹

      FOR CENTURIES, GROUPS ACROSS Northeast Africa, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean had migrated, traded goods, exchanged cultural technologies, and intermarried. For Captain Aylmer, a British officer who policed the Northern Frontier District (NFD), this cultural mixing could be explained only through reference to the impact of a supposedly superior immigrant Arab race. Historical dynamism was tied to obliquely sexualized stories of a continent penetrated by foreign infiltration. British authorities came to believe that through conquest, they were hindering a seemingly inexorable invasion by Somalis, whose ancestors had emigrated from Arabia and slowly spread across Northeast Africa. Constructing a distinction between “indigenous” Africans and “foreigners,” protectorate and colonial officials came to see the Somali as a racially ambiguous people who were neither fully African nor fully Arab.

      Among Cushitic-speaking people at the turn of the century, however, different discursive formations governed talk and thought about what it meant to be “Somali.” By the nineteenth century, Oromo- and Somali-speaking people had developed a range of social, intellectual, and cultural techniques well suited to the cosmopolitan Indian Ocean world and to the loose relationship with land that facilitated a pastoral economy in the Horn of Africa. On the eve of colonial conquest, many groups were engaged in complex arguments about the boundaries of who did and did not belong to the Islamic umma (community) and broader Somali lineages. In the nineteenth century, the stakes of these debates heightened as the region experienced an increase in foreign trade, an intensification of slavery, and the expansion of Ethiopian and European imperial power.

      This chapter reconstructs the ways in which Somali and Oromo speakers in Kenya were redefining “Somaliness” on the eve of colonial conquest. It also examines how British protectorate and colonial officials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constructed the Somali as a quasi-foreign people whose movement into and within the East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) needed to be carefully controlled. Doing so requires sifting through a historical record that is ineluctably incomplete, fragmented, and riddled by the effects of power. By bringing oral and documentary sources and African and colonial narratives into conversation, however, it is possible to generate richer and, in some cases, more subversive histories.

      RACE AND COSMOPOLITANISM UNDER EMPIRE

      Scholars have tended to conceptualize colonialism in Africa as the culmination of a long process of European expansion overseas. In the mid-nineteenth century, Western explorers began to travel deeper into the interior of the African continent, which shaped how they understood race and difference. European missionaries and surveyors who explored the East African interior often viewed themselves as pioneers “discovering” a new land. However, they frequently drew upon the knowledge and expertise of locals, many of whom were seasoned travelers in their own right. As David Northrup has shown, people from both sides of the Continental Divide traveled and came to “discover” the other.²

      In 1854, Sir Richard Francis Burton arrived in Zeila, on the northeastern tip of the Horn, to embark on an ill-fated expedition to Harar, Ethiopia. Burton gained acclaim for his alluring travel memoirs. Often overlooked, however, are the African translators, soldiers, gun-bearers, and navigators who guided Burton and his companion, John Hanning Speke, through the Horn of Africa. One of Burton’s recruits, Mohammed Mahmud (whom he referred to as al-Hammal, meaning “the porter”), was an experienced voyager who had begun his career as a coal trimmer aboard an Indian war steamer. According to Burton, Mahmud went on to rise up the “rank to the command of the crew” and “became servant and interpreter to travelers, visited distant lands—Egypt and Calcutta,” before finally settling in Aden.³ Prior to formal colonialism, people living in port cities along the Gulf of Aden had encountered European travelers and voyaged through mercantilist and capitalist circuits.

      Burton was a prolific writer and linguist, whose translations and travel accounts became fodder for the Western appetite for the exotic. In one of his most famous memoirs, Burton described the Somali as one of the “half-castes in East Africa,” who are “a slice of the great Gala nation Islamized and Semiticized by repeated immigrations from Arabia.”⁴ He painted the Somali as an admixture of two distinct racial types, which he assumed to be meaningful sociological identities. His writing helped to entrench a belief in the Somalis’ ambiguity: a population that Europeans came to see as neither quite Arab nor quite African.

      That Burton saw features of the “Arab” world among the Somali speakers he encountered is hardly surprising. For centuries, people living around the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea had intermarried and traded extensively with one another. It was also common among people living in East Africa to claim descent from putatively more civilized, foreign ancestors. Swahili-speaking people in the coastal city-states of East Africa had inherited a longstanding political tradition, which was widespread among Bantu speakers throughout Central and Southern Africa, of basing rights to rule on origins from exogenous conquerors. With the gradual spread of Islam and the Omani occupation of the coast, it became commonplace for East Africans to assert foreign ancestry in Arabia or Persia. While Swahili speakers on the East African coast often claimed Shirazi (Persian) descent, Somalis living in the Horn of Africa and Aden tended to trace their roots to Arabia. Many groups in Northeast Africa also took pride in reciting patrilineal genealogies to the prophet.⁵

      Groups thus coalesced around a common belief that they were descendants of spiritually empowered sheikhs from the Arab world who had intermarried with local women. The Isaaq lineage, for example, derives its name from the eponymous founding father, Sheikh Ishaq ibn Ahmed al-Hashimi, whose tomb in northern Somalia remains to this day an important site of pilgrimage. According to one of my interlocutors, Sheikh Ishaq originated from Arabia and immigrated to northern Somalia, where he married two local women of Oromo and Amharic descent.⁶ Hagiographies have been and continue to be important ways through which East African Muslims maintain an orientation toward the wider Islamic world. This is not to suggest that genealogies are part of an unbroken or timeless tradition, but simply that precolonial intellectual and cultural practices continue to have relevance into the present.⁷

      The formalistic nature of oral and written genealogies and hagiographies can easily obscure the manifold ways in which people have interpreted, reworked, and subverted claims of foreign descent at different moments in time. It is, nevertheless, heuristically useful to contrast an idealized model of “European” and “Somali” notions of descent. For European explorers, Muslim genealogies were evidence that the coastal towns of North and East Africa were “products of a Persian and Arabian diaspora that had spread around the Indian Ocean.”⁸ Combining new forms of scientific racism with an older Christian metaphysics, European thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century reinterpreted the biblical story of Ham. The myth of Ham, as Mamdani explains, posited the existence of a superior alien race and “explained away every sign of civilization in tropical Africa as a foreign import.”⁹ Somalis, in the eyes of many European explorers, were a product of intermarriage between a foreign people (posited to be either Hamitic or Semitic) and the indigenous populations of Northeast Africa. Somalis in the nineteenth century, however, did not conceptualize descent through the same racial and geographic categories. For many people in Northeast Africa, being “Somali” very likely meant participating in the theologically defined space of the wider Islamic umma.¹⁰

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