A Modern History of the Somali - I. M. Lewis Eastern African Studies

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look for support in the preferment of their pleas for divine aid and succour. Ideally, whatever their diya-paying and clan obligations, men of religion are assumed to stand outside secular rivalry and conflict, although in practice in the circumstances of Somali life this expectation is rarely if ever fully sustained. What is significant here, however, is that in contrast to the position in so many other Muslim countries, Somali sheikhs are not normally political leaders and only in exceptional circumstances assume political power.

      Although the settled conditions and more hierarchical political organization of the southern cultivating Somali might seem to afford more purchase to the theocratic ordinances of Islam, it would be very mistaken to imagine that Islam rests lightly upon the pastoralists. For if in some respects the circumstances of southern cultivating society conform more closely to the theocratic Muslim pattern elsewhere, there is no distinction between the two communities in their observance of the five ‘pillars’ of their faith – the profession of belief in God and the Prophet, the daily prayers, fasting, alms-giving, and pilgrimage. Nor, certainly, are the nomads any less pious or devout than the cultivators. The true position is rather that each community has adopted Islam in slightly different ways corresponding to differences in traditional social organization.10 Thus, for example, while in the north many lineage ancestors have been accommodated in Islam as saints, in the south where lineage organization is less strong and important, these are replaced by a multitude of purely local figures who have no significance as founders of kinship groups. Hence, notwithstanding these regional variations, for the Somali as a whole, it is not too much to say that in many important respects Islam has become one of the mainsprings of Somali culture; and to nomad and cultivator alike the profession of the faith has the force almost of an initiation rite into their society.

      Thus while the Somali draw many of their distinctive characteristics, especially their strong egalitarianism, their political acumen and opportunism, and their fierce traditional pride and contempt for other nations from their own traditional culture, they also owe much to Islam. And it is typical of their mutual dependence upon these two founts of their culture that the highly pragmatic view of life which nomadism seems to foster is tempered by a deep and, as it must seem to some, fatalistic trust in the power of God and His Prophet. Above all, Islam adds depth and coherence to those common elements of traditional culture which, over and above their many sectional divisions, unite Somalis and provide the basis for their strong national consciousness. Although the Somali did not traditionally form a unitary state, it is this heritage of cultural nationalism which, strengthened by Islam, lies behind Somali nationalism today.

      Note

       CHAPTER II

       BEFORE PARTITION

      UNTIL THE late nineteenth century the history of the eastern Horn of Africa is dominated by the protracted Somali expansion from the north, and the rise and decline of Muslim emporia along the coast. To a certain extent each of these two themes has its own particular history, but at no time over the centuries was one entirely independent of the other. The gradual enlargement of their territory by the Somali was not achieved by movements in the hinterland only, nor were events on the coast without their effect in the interior. About the tenth century, however, when our brief account opens, the pressure of events ran from the coast towards the hinterland. But by the mid-nineteenth century, a state approaching equilibrium had been attained between the outward pressures of movements in the interior and the inward trend from the coast: if anything, indeed, the balance was tipped in favour of the hinterland which had come to exert a dominant political influence over the coastal settlements. For the history of the coast documentary evidence from various sources is available, at least in some periods; but for events in the hinterland the historian has to rely much more heavily upon the testimony of oral tradition. Fortunately, oral records are on the whole sufficiently abundant and consistent in their essentials, to enable the broad outlines of the Somali dispersal to be traced with what is probably a considerable degree of accuracy. Certainly the evidence at present available leaves no doubt that the gradual expansion over the last ten centuries of the Hamitic Somali from the shores of the Gulf of Aden to the plains of northern Kenya is one of the most sustained, and in its effects, far-reaching movements of population in the history of North-East Africa.

      This was not a migration into an entirely empty land. It involved considerable displacements of other populations, and the Somali sphere was only extended by dint of continuous war and boodshed. Those who were mainly involved, other than the Somali, were the ethnically related Oromo peoples – or some of them – and a mixed negroid or Bantu population which, prior to the incursions of the Hamitic Galla and Somali, appears to have possessed part of the south of what is today the Somali Republic.

      This people known to the early Arab geographers as the Zanj, and apparently mainly concentrated in the fertile land between the two rivers, seems to have consisted of two principal elements. The major part was made up of Bantu cultivators living as sedentaries along the banks of the Shebelle and Juba and in fertile pockets between them. They figure in Oromo and Somali tradition, particularly in the folk history of those Digil and Rahanweyn clans who entered this area from the north and settled amongst the Zanj as a kind of aristocracy. Something of their life and social organization is preserved also in a late Arabic compilation known as the ‘Book of the Zanj’.1 These sources are supplemented by more tangible evidence. Remnants, partly Swahili-speaking, reinforced by ex-slaves from the south and from Zanzibar, survive today in five distinct communities along the Shebelle River and in two on the Juba. Others again are found near Baidoa in the hinterland between the rivers, and also in Brava district in whose ancient capital a Swahili dialect, Chimbalazi, is spoken to this day.

      The second component of this pre-Hamitic population, apparently much less numerous than the riverine cultivators, was a hunting and fishing people living a precarious nomadic existence. Their present-day descendants, much affected by Hamitic influence, survive in a few scattered groups in Jubaland and in the south of the Republic where they are generally known as Ribi (or Wa-Ribi) and as Boni (or Wa-Boni). Their mode of life and their physical appearance invite comparison with the Bushmen of other areas of Africa, but their precise ethnic affiliation is still obscure. Politically and economically they seem to have been attached in small groups to the Bantu sedentaries, and still today small hunting communities of this stock are found living under the tutelage of more powerful Bantu groups in the south.

      By about the tenth century it seems that these two peoples, who are not necessarily the autochthonous inhabitants of the area, did not extend north of the Shebelle, and were in contact with the Oromo tribes, who, in turn, were already under pressure from the expanding Somali in the north-east corner of the Horn. This distribution gleaned from oral tradition is supported by the descriptions of the early Arab geographers who refer to the Hamitic peoples (the Galla and Somali) of the north and centre by the classical name ‘Berberi’, and distinguish them in physical features and culture from the Zanj to their south.

       The coastal settlements

      Before

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