Читать книгу A Modern History of the Somali - I. M. Lewis - Страница 15

CHAPTER I

THE PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL SETTING

The Land

WITH A POPULATION numbering perhaps four and a half million, the Somali-speaking people can scarcely be regarded as a large nation. Yet they form one of the largest single ethnic blocks in Africa, and though sparsely distributed on the ground, live in continuous occupation of a great expanse of territory covering almost 400,000 square miles in the north-east corner, or ‘Horn’, of the continent facing Arabia. From the region of the Awash Valley in the north-west, this often arid territory occupied by the Somali stretches round the periphery of the Ethiopian highlands and along the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean coasts down to the Tana River in northern Kenya. This region forms a well-defined geographical and ethnic unit which Somalis see as a natural base for a sovereign state, although today it is split up into four separate parts. In the ex-French Republic of Jibuti, which became independent in 1977, Somalis make up about half the local population (c. 200,000 in 350,000); in the adjoining country of Ethiopia (mainly in Harar and Bale Provinces) they number probably almost one million; in the Somali Republic itself their strength is approximately 3, 250, 000;¹ and finally, in the North-Eastern Region of Kenya,² they number about 250,000. Outside this region, other Somali are settled as traders and merchants in many of the towns and ports of East Africa (e.g. in Nairobi); in Aden, in whose history they played an important role; and throughout Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Farther afield, the roving existence which life at sea affords has led to the establishment of small and fluctuating immigrant Somali communities in such diverse European ports as Marseilles, Naples, London, and Cardiff.

In their dry savanna homeland, the Somali are essentially a nation of pastoral nomads, forced by the exigencies of their demanding climate and environment to move with their flocks of sheep and goats and herds of camels and cattle in an endless quest for water and pasturage. The northern coastal plains (Guban, from gub to burn) which extend from the lava-strewn deserts of the Republic of Jibuti along the Gulf of Aden shore to Cape Guardafui are especially arid. Here the annual rainfall rarely exceeds three inches and is concentrated in the comparatively cool months from October to January. In the hot months between June and September, the Guban fully lives up to its name; and except for the urban populations of such ports as Jibuti (pop. 180,000), capital of this territory, and Berbera (pop. 60,000) in the Somali Republic, at this season is generally deserted by the nomadic tribesmen for the cooler and greener hills which rise behind it. Despite its often torrid heat and low rainfall, however, the run-off from the mountains behind ensures that water is usually easily obtainable only a few feet below the Guban’s characteristically sandy soil. With these water resources, and the sometimes surprisingly generous pastures which spring up after the autumn rains, this region provides the winter quarters for the most northerly Somali clans.

The Golis and Ogo mountains, with their magnificent and often dangerously precipitous escarpments, which rise behind the coast dominate the whole physical structure of the region. This range achieves a height of almost 8,006 feet at points to the east; and, in the west where it joins the Ethiopian Highlands, rises as high as 9,000 feet near the ancient Muslim city of Harar (pop. 60,000). To the south, the mountains descend into a great tilting plateau which has an average elevation of 3,000 feet in the centre, and embraces most of the Somali hinterland. On the hills and in the north of the plateau, which includes the important centre of Hargeisa (pop. 60,000), capital of the former British Somaliland Protectorate, the rainfall is sometimes as high as twenty inches, especially in the northwest where, between Hargeisa and Harar, sorghum is cultivated. Here water is generally abundant, and the perennial wells excavated often at great depth in the dry waddies provide the winter watering-places of many of the central clans of the north. To the south of Hargeisa, the northern plateau opens into that vast wilderness of thorn-bush and tall grasses known as the Haud. In northern Somali the name ‘Haud’ means simply ‘south’; and the region, which contains no permanent water, is of indeterminate extent. The northern and eastern tips lie within the Somali Republic, while the western and southern portions (the latter merging with the Ogaden plains) form part of Harar Province of Ethiopia.

To the south of the Haud, the plateau inclines gradually from the west as it reaches out towards the south-eastern coast of the Indian Ocean. Here it is intersected by low-lying plains and valleys, lined with welcome vegetation, which are more widely spaced than in the precipitate north. The most important of these southerly valleys are those traversed by the Shebelle and Juba Rivers as they flow from their sources in the Ethiopian Highlands towards the coast. Both rivers contain water in all seasons and together make up the main river system of the whole Somali area north of the Tana.

The Shebelle or ‘Leopard’ River extends for some 1,250 miles but does not enter the sea; after crossing the southern part of the Ogaden it flows eastwards as far as Balad, twenty miles from the Indian Ocean coast, where it veers to the south to cover a further 170 miles before disappearing in a series of marshes and sand-flats close to Jelib on the Juba. Only with exceptionally heavy rains does the river join the Juba and thus succeed in reaching the sea. To the south of the Shebelle, the Juba River descends much more directly from the Ethiopian Highlands to the sea which it enters as a strong stream some 250 yards wide near the port of Kismayu (pop. 60,000). It is navigable by shallow draft vessels from its mouth to the rapids a few miles beyond Bardera, in which the German explorer von der Decken’s steamship Welf perished in 1865. In contrast to the wide belts of scrub-bush and grassy plains, interspersed with lonely tall acacias, which cover so much of the country, these two rivers are lined in places by narrow lanes of attractive high forest. Here elephant and hippopotamus replace the multitude of antelope species and smaller game which are so abundant elsewhere.

In comparison with the north, the southern part of the Somali Republic between the Shebelle and Juba Rivers is relatively well-watered: and, indeed by local standards, so fecund as to constitute the richest arable zone in the whole of Somaliland. Here the principal crops are sorghum, Indian corn, sesame, beans, squashes and manioc; as well as fruits, and sugar-cane, which, however, are mainly cultivated in the plantations owned by large corporations. The chief export crop is the banana produced by a number of Italian and Somali companies on a quota system controlled by the Somali government. Outside this fertile southern zone between the rivers there are no comparable arable resources, although the north-west of the country now supplies a valuable sorghum harvest and grain production is expanding as well as date cultivation.

Despite this general division in physical features and productivity, both northern and southern Somaliland are subject to a similar cycle of seasons associated with the rotation of the N.E. and S.W. monsoons. Apart from a variety of minor local wet periods, the main rains fall twice yearly – between March and June, and between September and December – throughout the region. The dry seasons are similarly distributed: but while the hottest time of the year on the northern coast falls in the summer, the south is by contrast pleasantly cool at this period. In the volcanic wastes of the Jibuti Republic, this fairly regular cycle of seasons loses most of its coherence, and the weather is generally less predictable except in its torridity. Mogadishu (pop. 350,000), capital of the Somali Republic, and the other ports of the southern Indian Ocean coast have a climate which though often humid is pleasant in the cool season.

The People

Ethnically and culturally the Somali belong to the Hamitic ethnic group. Their closest kinsmen are the surrounding Hamitic (or as they are often called ‘Cushitic’) peoples of the Ethiopian lowlands, and Eritrea – the traditionally bellicose ‘Afar (or Danakil),³ the Oromo (Galla), Saho, and Beja. Their immediate neighbours to the north are the pastoral ‘Afar with whom they share Jibuti and who extend into Eritrea and Ethiopia. To the west, in Ethiopia, the Somali are bounded by the cultivating and pastoral Oromo; and in the south by the Boran Galla of Kenya.

Although there is much variation amongst them, the physical features which immediately strike the eye and seem most generally characteristic of the Somali people as a whole, are their tall stature, thin bone structure and decidedly long and narrow heads. Skin colour shows a wide range from a coppery brown to a dusky black. In their facial features particularly, the Somali also exhibit evidence of their long-standing relations with Arabia; and, in the south, amongst the Digil and Rahanweyn tribes, physical traces of their past contact with Oromo and Bantu peoples in this region. Traditionally, however, Somali set most store by their Arabian connexions and delight in vaunting those traditions which proclaim their descent from noble Arabian lineages and from the family of the Prophet. These claims, dismissed by Somali nationalists today as fanciful, are nevertheless part and parcel of the traditional and profound Somali attachment to Islam. They commemorate the many centuries of contacts between the Somali and Arabian coasts which have brought Islam and many other elements of Muslim Arab culture.

Thus, the Somali language⁴ contains a considerable number of Arabic loan-words, and Arabic itself is sufficiently widely known to be regarded almost as a second language. Nevertheless, although unwritten until 1972,⁵ Somali retained its distinctiveness as a separate and extremely vigorous tongue possessing an unusually rich oral literature. Within Somali, the widest dialect difference is between the speech of the northern pastoralists and of the Digil and Rahanweyn cultivators. These differ to much the same extent as Portuguese and Spanish. Yet, since many of its speakers are also familiar with standard Somali, the existence of this distinctive southern dialect does not alter the fact that, from the Jibuti Republic to Garissa on the Tana River in Kenya, standard Somali provides a single channel of communication and a common medium in which poems and songs compete for popularity. Poetry, it should be added, today as much as in the past, plays a vital part in Somali culture, and the extensive use of radio broadcasting has enhanced rather than diminished its significance. Often a poem is not merely the private voice of the author, but frequently the collective tongue of a pressure group, and propaganda either for peace or for war is more effectively spread through poetry than by any other means.⁶

The distinction between the speech of the Digil and Rahanweyn and their more nomadic countrymen to their north and south is one feature of the wider cultural, geographic, and historical primary division in the Somali nation between the ‘Samale’ or Somali proper and the Sab. The former make up the bulk of the nation, and their name (Samale) has come to include the Sab, perhaps in the same fashion as the word ‘English’ is applied by foreigners to all the inhabitants of the British Isles. This larger fraction of the Somali nation consists of four principal groups of clans or ‘clan-families’. Descent in Somaliland is traced in the male line, and each of these units has a separate founding ancestor from whom, traditionally, its members trace their descent and take their collective name.

The Samale clan-families comprise the Dir, Isaq, Hawiye, and Darod, all of whom are primarily pastoral nomads and variously distributed throughout the land. The Dir clans (‘Ise and Gadabursi) are mainly concentrated in the western part of the northern regions of the Somali Republic (the former British Somaliland), in the Jibuti Republic, and the east of Harar Province of Ethiopia: a smaller nucleus also occurs in the south in Merca District, and between Brava and the Juba River. The Isaq (who in conjunction with the Dir probably number almost three quarters of a million) live mainly in the centre of the northern regions of the Republic, but in their grazing movements extend also into the Ethiopian Haud. To their east, the Isaq mingle with the Dulbahante and Warsangeli divisions of the Darod who, with a strength of perhaps one and a half million, are the largest and most widely distributed of all the Somali clan-families. As well as the eastern part of the former British Somaliland Protectorate, the Darod occupy the Eastern, Nugal and Mudug Regions, most of the Haud and Ogaden; and finally, although interrupted by a large wedge of Hawiye in the centre of the Republic and the Digil and Rahanweyn between the rivers, extend eventually into the North-eastern Region of Kenya. The Hawiye, who boast probably more than half a million persons, live to the south of the Majerteyn Darod in Mudug, Hiran, and round Mogadishu. They extend some way across the Shebelle basin where they mingle with the Sab tribes, and also, like the Darod, are found again in strength in the northern part of Kenya.

With a total population of little more than half a million, the Sab tribes are less numerous, less widely distributed, and contain only the two major divisions already mentioned. Having a stronger cultivating bias than any other Somali group, their habitat is primarily restricted to the fertile region between the two rivers where their pastoral and cultivating sections mingle not only with each other but also with pastoral nomads of the other Samale clans.

In addition to these divisions of the Somali nation whose distribution and relative strengths are vital to an understanding of both past and present events, there are a number of smaller ethnic communities which require to be mentioned. The most numerous (some 80,000 strong) are Somalized Bantu scattered in cultivating villages along the Shebelle and Juba Rivers and in pockets between them. These derive in part from earlier Bantu and Swahili-speaking groups, as well as from former slave populations freed by the suppression of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century. Although they still retain today much of their physical distinctiveness, socially these communities are becoming increasingly absorbed in the wider Somali society. The best-known groups are the Shidle, and Shabelle on the Shebelle River, and the Wa-Gosha (or Gosha) and Gobaweyn on the Juba. Less numerous but economically and politically more important is the immigrant Asian community (some 40,000 in the Republic, about 12,000 in the Jibuti Republic) which consists chiefly of Arabs (many of families domiciled on the coast for centuries) and a smaller number of Indians, Pakistanis, and Persians. Similarly largely occupied in trade and commerce and also in development and technical aid is the small European community, numbering about 5,000 in Somalia and 15,000 in the Republic of Jibuti. The few permanent European settlers live mainly as farmers and estate owners in the south of Somalia.

Mode of life and social institutions

Although the proportion of people who practise some form of cultivation is higher, probably not much more than an eighth of the total Somali population are sedentary cultivators, and these mainly the southern Digil and Rahanweyn tribes. Thus for the majority, in the arid conditions of the north, centre, and extreme south (Northern Kenya) of their country, nomadism is the prevailing economic response, and mode of livelihood and social institutions in general are tightly adjusted to the scant resources of an unenviably harsh environment. In these regions, with their home-wells as a focus of distribution, the pastoralists move over many miles in the year, driving from pasturage to pasturage and water-point to water-point their flocks of sheep and goats and herds of camels, and, in some southern areas particularly, of cattle also.

Of this mixed patrimony, although the Somali pony remains the prestige beast par excellence, it is their camels which Somali most esteem. These are carefully bred for milk and for carriage. Milch camels provide milk for the pastoralist on which alone he often depends for his diet; burden camels, which are not normally ridden except by the sick, transport his collapsible hut or tent and all his worldly possessions from place to place. Camel-hide is used to make sandals to protect his feet on the long treks across the country. But these uses do not in themselves account for the way in which the pastoralists value their camels or, despite the longstanding and wide use of money as a currency, explain why it is primarily in the size and quality of his camels that a man’s substance is most tellingly measured. This striking bias in Somali culture is best expressed briefly by saying that in their social as well as economic transactions the pastoralists operate on a camel standard. Thus the exchange of substantial gifts of livestock and other wealth which cements a marriage between a man and a woman and their respective kin is ideally, and often still in practice, conducted in the medium of camels.⁷ It is also in camels that the value of a man’s life and the subordinate position of women are expressed in material terms. Generally the blood-compensation due when a man is killed is rated at one hundred camels, while a woman’s life is valued at half that figure. Lesser injuries too are similarly compounded in a standard tariff of damages expressed in different amounts of camels. Although in these traditional terms sheep and goats are regarded as a sort of small change, they evoke none of the interest and attention which men bestow on their camels and indeed are considered primarily as the concern of women.

This difference in attitudes is consistent with the fact that the milch camels and sheep and goats usually form two separate herding units. A man’s wife, or wives, and children move with the flocks which provide them with milk and the few burden camels necessary for the transport of their tents and effects. With their much greater powers of endurance and resistance to drought, a man’s milch camels are herded by his unmarried brothers, sons and nephews, moving widely and rapidly about the country far from the sheep and goats which, in the dry seasons especially, have to cling closely to sources of water. Particularly in the dry seasons, when long and frequent treks back and forth between the pastures and wells are required, camel-herding is an arduous and exacting occupation and one well calculated to foster in the young camel boys all those traits of independence and resourcefulness which are so strongly delineated in the Somali character.

With this dual system of herding the nomads move about their country with their livestock in search of pasture and water, ordering their movements to conform as closely as possible to the distribution of these two necessities of life. Pasturage is regarded as a gift of God to man in general, or rather to Somalis, and is not considered to belong to specific groups. Generally, people and stock are most widely deployed after the rains when the grazing is fresh and green; while in the dry seasons they are forced to concentrate nearer the wells and make do with what grazing can be found in their proximity. Only the herds of milch camels with their attendants to some extent escape from this seasonal curtailment of movement, and even they must also be placed in areas where they can conveniently satisfy their less frequent but more substantial watering needs. Rights of access to water depend primarily upon its abundance and the ease with which it can be utilized. Only where water is not freely available, and where the expenditure of much labour and effort is required before it can be used, are exclusive rights asserted and maintained, if necessary, by force. And while in the general nomadic flux there is no rigid localization of pastoral groups and no appreciable development of ties to locality, the ‘home-wells’ regularly frequented in the dry seasons, and the trading settlements which spring up all over Somaliland wherever people congregate even temporarily round water, provide some check to a more random pattern of pastoral mobility.

Subject to the vagaries of the seasons and the very variable distribution of rain and grazing, there is some tendency for the clans, which are the largest effective political units with populations ranging from 10,000 to over 100,000 persons, to be vaguely associated with particular areas of pasturage. Clans are traditionally led by Sultans (in Somali: Suldan, Boqar, Garad, Ugas, etc.). This title, which evokes something of the pomp and splendour of Islamic states, ill accords with the actual position of Somali clan leaders, who are normally little more than convenient figureheads and lack any firmly institutionalized power. Indeed for the majority of northern Somali clans, the position of Sultan, though often hereditary, is hardly more than an honorific title dignifying a man whose effective power is often no greater, and sometimes less, than that of other clan elders. It is in fact the elders – and this in its broadest connotation includes all adult men – who control clan affairs. With a few special exceptions, a hierarchical pattern of authority is foreign to pastoral Somali society which in its customary processes of decision-making is democratic almost to the point of anarchy. It must at once be added, however, that this markedly unstratified traditional political system does recognize a subordinate category of people known as sab who fulfil such specialized and to the nomad degrading tasks as hunting, leather- and metal-working, and haircutting. The sab who practise these occupations form a minute fraction of the total population and, traditionally, were separated from other Somali by restrictions on marriage and commensality. Today the enfranchisement of these Midgans, Tumals, and Yibirs, is far advanced and most of their traditional disabilities are disappearing.⁸

With the absence of institutionalized hierarchical authority, Somali pastoral groups are not held together by attachment to chiefs. This principle of government which is so important in so many other parts of Africa is here replaced by binding ties of patrilineal kinship. Somali political allegiances are determined by descent in the male line; and, whatever their precise historical content, it is their lineage genealogies which direct the lines of political alliance and division. Although Somalis sometimes compare the functions of their genealogies to a person’s address in Europe, to understand their true significance it has to be realized that far more is at stake here than mere pride of pedigree. These genealogies define the basic political and legal status of the individual in Somali society at large and assign him a specific place in the social system.

While descent in the male line (tol) is thus the traditional basis of Somali social organization, it does not act alone but in conjunction with a form of political contract (her). It is this second, and scarcely less vital principle which is used to evoke and give precise definition to the diffuse ties of descent. As recorded in the genealogies which children learn by heart, descent presents the individual with a wide range of kinsmen amongst whom he selects friends and foes according to the context of his interests. Thus, sometimes he acts in the capacity of a member of his clan-family, sometimes as a member of a constituent clan, and sometimes as a member of one of the large number of lineages into which his clan is divided internally. But, within this series of diffuse attachments, his most binding and most frequently mobilized loyalty is to his ‘diya-paying group’. This unit, with a fighting strength of from a few hundred to a few thousand men, consists of close kinsmen united by a specific contractual alliance whose terms stipulate that they should pay and receive blood-compensation (Arabic, diya) in concert. An injury done by or to any member of the group implicates all those who are a party to its treaty. Thus if a man of one group is killed by a man of another, the first group will collectively claim the damages due from the second. At the same time, within any group a high degree of co-operation and mutual collaboration traditionally prevails.

To grasp the significance of this political and legal entity – whose members do not necessarily camp or move together in the pastures – but which is nevertheless the most clearly defined political unit in pastoral society, it must be appreciated that the nomadic Somali are a warlike people, driven by the poverty of their resources to intense competition for access to water and grazing.⁹ Even under modern administration self-help still retains much force as the most effective sanction for redressing wrongs and adjusting political and legal issues between groups. Hence, with the difficulty under present conditions of adequately policing much of the country, the security of the individual pastoralist’s person and property depends ultimately upon his membership of a diya-paying group. At the same time, the existence of this well-defined social group does not preclude the formation of wider kinship alliances as occasion demands. Thus, within a clan, diya-paying group opposes diya-paying group; but when the clan is attacked by an external enemy, its various sections unite in common cause to protect their interests. Beyond the clan, the widest kinship ties are those which unite kindred clans as members of the same clan-family. In the traditional social system, however, the six clan-families into which the Somali nation is divided (the Dir, Isaq, Hawiye and Darod; and the Digil and Rahanweyn) are generally too large, too widely scattered, and too unwieldy to act as effective corporate political units. But in the modern situation of party political competition, such extended kinship links acquired new vitality and significance.

Cultivation

In the better watered reaches of the western part of the Northern Regions of the Somali Republic and in Harar Province of Ethiopia, where sorghum millet is grown over an extensive area, this pastoral regime has undergone a number of modifications. Here within the past two or three generations, following the example of the neighbouring Oromo farmers, Somali pastoralists have turned to plough cultivation, and stable agricultural villages have replaced the nomads’ temporary encampments. With a growing sense of attachment to territory, ties of neighbourhood are beginning to be acknowledged, which, although no formal change in the traditional political system has yet taken place, constitute a novel principle of grouping. This is evident in the organization on a basis of co-residence, as much as of kinship, of such local agricultural activities as harvesting and the excavation and maintenance of the ponds on which these cultivating settlements depend for their water supplies. With this development goes also a change in the bias of livestock husbandry: here cattle largely replace camels, and oxen are trained to the plough. The transition, however, is by no means absolute for many farmers are either transhumant, or, although themselves sedentary, maintain herds of camels which are sent out to graze in the charge of younger kinsmen. Farmers indeed frequently invest profits from the sale of sorghum in camels; and apart from these distinctions there is little difference in culture or social organization between the pastoral and cultivating sections of a clan.

The influence of agriculture in modifying the traditional pattern of life is taken a stage further amongst the Digil and Rahanweyn cultivators, of the south of the Republic. Here the tilling of the soil, in which a hand hoe is used, has a tradition going back several centuries, and the innovating influence of agriculture has been strengthened and reinforced by such additional factors as the great admixture of peoples and cultures which has taken place in this region. For, besides a small core of the descendants of people of original Digil stock, the Sab represent an amalgam of many different elements of which the most disparate are perhaps those deriving from Bantu and Oromo sources. And despite the fact that the great bulk of the Rahanweyn are today people of northern nomadic provenance, representatives of almost every northern Somali clan being found amongst them, many traits of the old mixed Digil and Rahanweyn culture have survived and are now those characteristic of this group as a whole. Thus it is the Digil-Rahanweyn dialect of Somali, and not that of the majority of more recent settlers, which is often spoken here; although many people speak both this and northern Somali. Similarly, and equally distinctive, however unimportant it may sound, while amongst the northern nomads tea is the universal dish appropriate to every social occasion and in the austere nomadic life synonymous with feasting, amongst the Digil and Rahanweyn the corresponding delicacy consists of green coffee beans cooked in ghee. As the coffee beans are eaten, and passed from guest to guest in wooden dishes, the scalding ghee in which they have been cooked is rubbed over the arms and hair and snuffed up the nostrils with a characteristic and inimitable gesture of satisfaction and pleasure.

More significant for the present purpose, however, is the fact that in contrast to northern nomadic society, there is greater social stratification amongst the Sab. In general three classes of land-holders are recognized: putative descendants of the original groups, long-standing accretions, and finally, recently adopted clients. Those of the first category in every Digil and Rahanweyn clan possess the most secure rights to arable land and play a dominant part in ritual. Those in the other categories, and especially in the last, traditionally enjoy less secure possession of land. Membership in any clan is acquired by a client undertaking to accept all the obligations, including that of solidarity in the blood feud, binding his protectors. Only so long as these duties are fulfilled can a client traditionally continue to cultivate the land which he has been allocated by his hosts. At the same time, as might be anticipated, the institution of chieftainship is more developed, and the traditional lineage structure of the north is not so marked. In some cases, indeed, loyalties based on common residence and common land-holding are more important politically than those defined by kinship. Thus many of the names of clans and sub-sections in this area refer directly to territory and denote what are essentially territorial aggregations. Etymologically, the name ‘Rahanweyn’ itself means simply ‘large crowd’. Finally, while often in the past Galla and Bantu serfs (now almost completely assimilated) provided some of the labour for cultivation and house construction, these and other activities for which collective enterprise is necessary are today entrusted to work-parties of young men recruited on a basis of residence rather than kinship.

Thus the division between the Sab and Samale, which is the widest cleavage in the Somali nation, depends not only on the different economic interests of the two groups but also upon their cultural divergencies. Traditionally these distinctions are entrenched by the nomad’s assumption of proud superiority and contempt for his southern countrymen, and the latter’s corresponding resentment and isolation. Yet despite this, the gulf between the two communities is not so wide as might at first appear, or as insuperable as each sometimes likes to suggest. As has been said, many of the Sab are in reality of northern pastoral origin; many again speak both dialects of Somali. Moreover there is much that draws the two groups together economically. Many of the southern cultivators not only have pastoral clients, but are also sometimes clients to pastoralists. Nomads moving across the territory of cultivators frequently exchange their milk in the dry seasons for the right to pasture their herds on the farmers’ fields. Similar transactions also regulate the use of water-holes by both parties. In addition the Sab trade much of their grain with the nomads: and many of those pastoralists whose grazing movements impinge on this fertile area have adopted, or are adopting, cultivation, despite their traditional scorn for agriculture, just as in the north-west, where it seems to be profitable, nomads are turning to the plough. Finally, the Swahili riverine communities are also similarly involved in this increasingly ramified network of ties of mutual advantage between pastoralist and farmer.

This sense of a commonality of interests, over and above the cultural and historical features which divide the two halves of the nation, is traditionally represented in the national genealogy in which ultimately every Somali group finds a place. Here Sab and Samale are represented as brothers of common descent from a line of ancestors which eventually links the Somali as a whole to Arabia and proclaims their single origin. The distinction between the cultivating life of the Sab clans, and the pastoral nomadism of the Samale, is fittingly explained by a number of picturesque legends and anecdotes in terms of the different characters attributed to their respective founding ancestors.

Religion and society

Despite the prevalence of war, feud, and fighting, particularly amongst the nomads, not all men are warriors. Those who devote their lives to religion and in some sense practise as men of God are known as wadads or sheikhs, and thus distinguished from the remainder and majority of men who, whatever secular calling they follow, fall into the category of warriors (waranleh, ‘spear-bearers’). This general division still retains validity despite the proliferation of occupations available today. Men of religion, or sheikhs – to use the Arabic title which is usually applied to the more learned among them – fulfil such important tasks as teaching the young the Quran and the elements of the faith, solemnizing marriage and ruling according to the Shariah in matrimonial disputes and inheritance, assessing damages for injury, and generally directing the religious life of the community in which they live. Essentially their rôle is to mediate between men; and, through the Prophet, between man and God – with the help of the many local saints to whom Somali 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.

The features of Somali culture and society which have been briefly touched on here are important for the understanding of what follows. The modern as well as the ancient history of Somalia* cannot be properly understood or appreciated, save in the most superficial terms, unless the progress of events is viewed against this very particular social background. Only in relation to the unremitting struggle for survival in a hostile environment, where men are engaged in a seemingly unending cycle of alliance and counter-alliance, is it possible to interpret both the past and present reaction of the Somali to local and external events. Modern developments have wrought great changes. But, in the absence of far-reaching urbanization, it is only quite recently (since the mid-1960s) that radical or extensive changes have begun to erode the traditional fabric of society. The interplay between these and traditional forces is examined in the final chapters of this book.

Note

* Throughout this book, unless otherwise indicated, the terms ‘Somalia’ and ‘Somaliland’ are used interchangeably to denote the territory occupied by the Somali-speaking people.