Читать книгу A Modern History of the Somali - I. M. Lewis - Страница 16

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 tracing the sustained surge southwards which displaced most of this Zanj population, and led eventually to the present distribution of peoples in the Horn of Africa and indirectly in part to those in Ethiopia, it is necessary to consider first the early phases of Arab settlement along the coast. This is essential since Arab colonization introduced a more diversified technology, and a more centralized system of government, which, however restricted its influence, undoubtedly made itself felt even in nomadic areas. Finally and most important of all, the new immigration brought Islam, the unifying force which played so significant a part in the sixteenth-century conquest of Abyssinia, and which remains the living faith of the Somali and of many of the peoples of present-day Ethiopia. At the same time, indirectly if not always directly, the absorption of Arab settlers seems to have given an impetus to, or to have precipitated, the movements of expansion of the Somali and Oromo.

There is little doubt that Arabian penetration along the northern and eastern Somali coasts is of great antiquity. It probably antedates the Islamic period; and certainly shortly after the hegira Muslim Arabs and Persians were developing a string of coastal settlements in Somaliland. From their condition today, from traditional sources, and from such documentary evidence as is available, it is clear that in these towns Arab and Persian merchants and prosyletizers settled usually as local aristocracies, bringing the faith, marrying local women, and eventually merging with the local inhabitants to form a mixed Somali-Arab culture and society. This new culture representing varying degrees of mixing and blending at different periods, and by no means uniform throughout the coastal ports, is the Somali counterpart to the more extensive Swahili society of the East African coast to the south.

Typical of these centres of Arab influence in northern Somaliland are the ancient ports of Zeila and Berbera. Zeila first appears in the record of the Arab geographers at the end of the ninth century when it is mentioned by Al-Ya‘qubi, and later writers describe it in increasing detail. Berbera, which conserves the name given in classical times to the northern coast as a whole, is probably of similar antiquity, but its history is much more obscure: it is first mentioned by the Arab geographers in the thirteenth century. Thereafter, beyond the fact that during the period of Portuguese domination in the Red Sea the town was sacked in 1518 by Saldanha, little is known of its history until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similar obscurity surrounds most of the history of the ancient port of Mait, on the eastern coast in Erigavo District, and one of the principal centres of early Somali expansion.

Thus at present, of the northern ports as a whole, most is known of Zeila. This town was politically the most important of the Arab settlements in the north and owed its economic prosperity, at times considerable, to its geographical position as one of the chief ports of the Abyssinian hinterland in the trade with Arabia and the Orient. Through Zeila local Somali produce, consisting chiefly of hides and skins, precious gums, ghee, and ostrich feathers, and slaves and ivory from the Abyssinian highlands, were exported: and cloth, dates, iron, weapons, and chinaware and pottery imported. Politically, Zeila was originally the centre of the Muslim emirate of Adal, part of the state of Ifat, which lay in the plateau region of eastern Shoa. From the time at which the port enters Islamic history, it had apparently a mixed Arab, Somali, and Danakil (‘Afar) population. In the course of time, no one knows exactly when, these three separate elements to some extent fused to form a distinctive Zeila culture and Zeila dialect which was a blend of Arabic, Somali, and ‘Afar. No doubt other minor ethnic elements were also represented; Persians and Indians seem to have settled in the port at an early period, but the main elements in the Zeila culture were Arab, Somali, and ‘Afar.

While these northern coastal centres were developing, Arab settlers were opening, or consolidating, a similar series of ports in the south. Of these the most important were Mogadishu, the present capital of the Republic, Brava, and Merca – all commercial towns largely dependent for their prosperity upon the entrepôt trade between Abyssinia, Arabia, and the markets of the East. The evidence of the Arab geographers and local inscriptions and documents indicate that by the first half of the tenth century Arab and Persian colonizers had established themselves at Mogadishu in considerable numbers, some years prior to the foundation of Kilwa on the East African Coast. Similar sources suggest that Merca and Brava are of comparable antiquity. Thus, in both the north and south, by the tenth century a ring of coastal emporia had been created, largely as a result of Arab enterprise, and through these ports Islam and Arab trade had gained a foothold which, consolidated and strengthened in succeeding centuries, was to become the foundation for Muslim expansion in North East Africa.

The first wave of Somali expansion

About the tenth century while these developments were proceeding on the coast, some areas of southern Somaliland were still occupied by the Zanj, while the land in the centre and north was occupied first by various Oromo tribes and then by the Somali. From Somali oral tradition and other local evidence it seems that Galla communities occupied part of northern Somaliland prior to the Somali, and that about the tenth century, the Dir Somali, universally regarded as the oldest Somali stock, were already in possession of much of the northern coastal strip and exerting pressure on the Oromo to their south.

But the first major impetus to Somali migration which tradition records is the arrival from Arabia of Sheikh Isma ‘il Jabarti about the tenth or eleventh century and the expansion of his descendants, the Darod clans, from their early seat in the north-east corner of Somaliland. This cannot be dated with certainty, but the period suggested here accords well with the sequence of subsequent events. It was followed perhaps some two centuries later by the arrival from Arabia of Sheikh Isaq, founder of the Isaq Somali, who settled to the west of the Darod at Mait where his domed tomb stands today, and who like his predecessor Darod, married with the local Dir Somali. While present evidence, or to be more precise, its lack, suggests that much of the very detailed tradition which surrounds these two patriarchs is legend, it appears likely that it should be interpreted as reflecting the growth and expansion of the Darod and Isaq clans about this time. For while Darod and Isaq themselves may be legendary figures, there is no doubt about the authenticity of the movements of their descendants.

On this interpretation, by the twelfth century the Dir and Darod, and later the Isaq, were pressing upon their Oromo neighbours and the great series of movements which finally disestablished the latter may be said to have begun. Folk tradition today offers little information as to the causes of this movement. It would not be unreasonable to conjecture, however, that mounting population pressure, augmented by continued Arab immigration, and perhaps exacerbated by a series of severe droughts, prompted a general Somali movement in search of new pastures. And this was no doubt furthered by the messianic and militant fervour of early Islam.

If the motives which inspired this great movement of population are still a matter of conjecture, its general direction is fortunately well-established. The traditions of migration indicate that in their gradual and by no means co-ordinated movement towards the south the Somali followed two main routes: they descended from the north down the valley of the Shebelle and its tributaries, or along the line of coastal wells on the Indian Ocean littoral. These vital water-lines were traversed by group after group as the Somali as a whole moved forward.

As the Darod and Isaq grew in numbers and territory, the Dir vacated the north-eastern region of Somaliland, striking off westwards and to the south. In the west, the powerful ‘Ise and Gadabursi clans pushed gradually, and not without many set-backs, into what is today Harar Province of Ethiopia and the Jibuti Republic, leaving the graves of their ancestors several hundred miles behind them in the Erigavo District. To anticipate for a moment; it seems that by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these movements by the Dir, Darod, and Isaq, had proceeded to the point where the two last groups of clans had taken over much of northern Somaliland and the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. Thus, probably by the close of the seventeenth century, the clans of northern Somaliland had assumed approximately their present distribution, although the gradual drift of population from the north still continued.

In step with these Somali movements in the north, the Oromo were increasingly thrust westwards and southwards and ultimately into Ethiopia, where, however, their main invasion did not take place until the sixteenth century.² As the Galla withdrew, not without fierce resistance, the Bantu Zanj were in turn driven farther south. At the same time, the Somali were maintaining their pressure and, in the early stages of their expansion, some groups managed to infiltrate through the main mass of the Galla. In this way, by as early as the thirteenth century, some sections of the Hawiye had established themselves close to the Arab settlement of Merca. The occupation of this region by the Hawiye at this time is recorded by the geographer Ibn Sa‘id, and this is the earliest known mention of any Somali group.³ Local tradition throws further light on the position and suggests that these Hawiye intruders had already been preceded by other Somali groups including several sections of the Digil. These earlier pioneers had apparently settled for a time on the Shebelle River, and had then crossed the river to move towards the coast. Thus, in the thirteenth century, the position apparently was that the coastal region between Itala and Merca was occupied by the Hawiye Somali: farther south and towards the interior lay the Digil; and finally to the west the Oromo were still dominant.

In this general area local tradition has most to say of the Ajuran, a clan tracing descent from a noble Arabian patriarch on the same pattern as the Darod and Isaq, but related maternally to the Hawiye. Under a hereditary dynasty, the Ajuran consolidated their position as the masters of the fertile reaches of the lower Shebelle basin and established a commercial connexion with the port of Mogadishu where some of their own clansmen were also settled. The fortunes of this Ajuran Sultanate thus appear to have been closely linked with those of Mogadishu, and the Ajuran reached the summit of their power in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century when Mogadishu was ruled by the Muzaffar dynasty,⁴ an aristocracy related to the Ajuran if not actually of Ajuran stock. Later, the two centres declined about the same time; but this is again to anticipate.

The holy wars against Abyssinia

Before pursuing these Somali migrations, we must refer briefly to the prolonged struggle further inland between the expanding Abyssinian Kingdom and the loose congeries of Islamic states including Ifat, Dawaro, Bale and Hadiya, lying to the south-east of the Christian Amhara Highlands. Here our reconstruction of events from oral tradition is supplemented by written records from both Christian and Muslim sources. These show that by the thirteenth century the Muslim state of Ifat which included Adal and the port of Zeila was ruled by the Walashma’, a dynasty then claiming Arab origins. Early in the fourteenth century, Haq ad-Din, Sultan of Ifat, turned the sporadic and disjointed forays of his predecessors into a full-scale war of aggression, and apparently for the first time, couched his call to arms in the form of a religious war against the Abyssinian ‘infidels’. At first the Muslims were successful. Christian territory was invaded, churches razed, and Christians forced to apostasize at the point of the sword. In 1415, however, the Muslims were routed and the ruler of Ifat, Sa‘d ad-Din, pursued and eventually killed in his last stronghold on the island off the coast of Zeila which to this day bears his name. From this period the Arab chroniclers refer to Adal as the ‘Land of Sa‘d ad-Din’. This crushing defeat, and Sa‘d ad-Din’s martyrdom, for his death soon came to be regarded in this light, took place in the reign of the Abyssinian Negus Yeshaq (1414–29) and it is in the songs celebrating his victories over the Muslims that the name ‘Somali’ is first recorded.

The Abyssinian victories and the temporary occupation of Zeila itself dealt a severe blow to the Muslim cause: Sa‘d ad-Din’s sons fled to Arabia where they found refuge with the King of Yemen. Yet they were able to return after a few years; and the Walashma’ dynasty then assumed the title of Kings of Adal, and moved their capital to Dakkar, to the east of Harar, farther from the threat of Abyssinian attack. After almost a hundred years of tranquillity Adal had recovered sufficiently for a new onslaught against the Christians, and in Imam Ahmad Ibrahim al-Ghazi (or ‘Gran’) (1506–43), the Muslims had at last found the charismatic leadership they sought. The origins of Ahmad Gran, ‘the left-handed’ as he was known to Muslims and Christians alike, are appropriately obscure.⁵ But under his leadership resounding victories were won. Equipped with cannons imported through Zeila, his armies penetrated eventually into the heart of Abyssinia after a series of savage battles which are still vividly recalled today.

Somali contingents played a notable part in the Imam’s victories and Shihab ad-Din, the Muslim chronicler of the period writing between 1540 and 1560, mentions them frequently.⁶ Most prominent were the Darod clans of the Harti faction who were now in possession of the ancient port of Mait in the east, and expanding westwards and southwards from this centre. This Darod support was reinforced by ties of marriage, for the Imam was related by marriage to one of the Darod leaders. The Isaq Somali are not mentioned by name, but one branch of them appear to have participated in the Imam’s campaigns; and some Dir groups were also involved. Yet the bulk of Gran’s Somali forces were drawn from the Darod clansmen, one of whose leaders was his namesake and often confused with the Imam himself. It was probably about this period too, that the Majerteyn Darod clan developed their sultanate which came to control much of the coast of north-east Somalia and whose later history consequently belongs to that of the coastal settlements generally.

The effective participation of these pastoral Somali nomads, renowned ‘cutters of roads’ in the words of the Muslim chronicler, indicates the greatness of the powers of leadership – spiritual as well as temporal – of the Imam. For the northern Somali have never had strongly developed hierarchical government and were certainly not accustomed to joining together in common cause on so wide a front. Few indeed are the occasions in Somali history when so many disparate and mutually hostile clans have combined together with such great effect, however ephemeral their unity.

As might readily have been anticipated, this extraordinary outburst of Muslim enterprise was not long sustained. Both sides invoked foreign aid; the Abyssinians turning to the Portuguese now at the height of their power in the Red Sea, while the Muslims sought support from the Turks. After some further successes, Imam Ahmad unwisely dismissed his Turkish contingents and in 1542 was routed near Lake Tana by Galawdewos, the reigning Emperor of Abyssinia. The Imam was killed and Galawdewos’s victory marked the turning point in the fortunes of Abyssinia. Although the Muslims, with Harar as their new headquarters, continued the struggle, they were unsuccessful, and the glorious victories of the Imam were never repeated. Both sides had now to contend with a new menace in the form of the massive Oromo invasion from the south-west. In these circumstances Adal declined rapidly, and from Harar the capital was transferred in 1577 to the oasis of Aussa in the scorching Danakil deserts where it was hoped to be secure from further Abyssinian attack. Here, however, it was regularly harried by the Galla invaders who by this time had swept through Abyssinia; and it was ultimately overthrown by the local nomadic Danakil (‘Afar), its ancient dynasty disappearing towards the end of the seventeenth century.

Adal’s confines have thus a shifting and fluid history, and although Somali played so striking a part in the sixteenth-century conquest of Abyssinia, it is not yet clear to what extent they formed part of this Muslim state at other periods. Since, however, in addition to Zeila, Berbera, and Mait, at least twenty other Muslim towns flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Somali hinterland, it seems that at this time at any rate the Muslim state must have exerted some influence on the Somali of these regions.⁷

The aftermath of the holy wars with Abyssinia

Ahmad Gran’s campaigns had at least two major effects on the history of Abyssinia and the Horn. First, Ahmad’s appeal to the Turks led to the Turkish occupation in 1557 of Massawa and Arkikio in what is now Eritrea. And although the initial Turkish attempt to extend their authority into Abyssinia was defeated to the extent that in 1633 the Turkish garrison was withdrawn from Massawa, and a local Beja chieftain installed as Ottoman representative, Turkish pretensions to the coast lingered on to become extremely important again in the nineteenth century. Secondly, and more immediately, Ahmad’s campaigns seem to some extent to have prepared the ground for the great Galla invasion from the south-west which followed his death. The Oromo in conquering hordes thrust far up into northern Abyssinia where they became an equal scourge to Muslims and Christians alike. This new factor, the subsequent recovery of Abyssinia, and the decline of Adal appear to have effectively closed the gateway to further Somali expansion in the west, thus causing the Somali to press increasingly upon their southern Galla neighbours and hence sustaining, and even reinforcing the latter’s massive invasion of Abyssinia.

By this time some Darod and Dir groups had apparently installed themselves in the Harar–Jigjiga region. And in the south, as the Oromo withdrew on one front to attack on another, northern Somali settlers gathered in increasing numbers. New groups of Hawiye immigrants fought their way to the Shebelle and began to challenge the authority of the Ajuran, eventually overwhelming them. The city of Mogadishu was also invested and the ancient Muzaffar dynasty overthrown. Both documentary and oral evidence place these events early in the seventeenth century.⁸ After their defeat the Ajuran and their allies the Madanle – to whom so many striking wells and stone works are attributed – were harried south eventually into what is today the North-Eastern Region of Kenya where they appear to have been amongst the earliest recorded inhabitants. Here they were joined later by the Boran and Warday Galla who established a local ascendancy which was only finally overcome by the massive wave of Somali migration in the nineteenth century. But this is to anticipate.

About the time of the overthrow of the Muzaffar dynasty in Mogadishu, it appears, again from local tradition, that much of the zone between the Shebelle and Juba rivers, including Bur Hacaba, was still mainly in Galla hands. Thus the situation was now that, from the coast about Mogadishu westwards towards the hinterland, the country was occupied first by the Hawiye, then by the Galla, and finally by the Rahanweyn Somali.⁹ Farther north, in Majerteynia, a strongly entrenched party of Galla at Galkayu were finally dislodged about the middle of the century.

In the following decades the Rahanweyn continued their pressure and, probably about the end of the seventeenth century, succeeded after hard fighting in driving the remaining Galla from their stronghold at Bur Hacaba. These Galla withdrew westwards, eventually crossing the Juba and moving on to its right bank. This, of course, increased the pressure upon the Zanj whose traditional capital, Shungwaya, was at this time in the Juba region. Thus by the turn of the century, the Oromo, whose strength must have been very greatly reduced by their massive drive into Abyssinia, had lost to the Somali all their former territory in Somaliland to the north of the Juba River. Of their former presence, however, they left behind firm evidence in the many minority groups of Oromo origin which are found today in various degrees of absorption amongst the Rahanweyn and Digil Somali of the Shebelle and Juba regions.

Finally, groups of Dir Somali whose displacement from the east and centre of northern Somaliland must by now have been almost complete, reached the south. Their most important representatives here are the Bimal who, encountering the Digil, fought and overcame them, and eventually established themselves near Merca where they are today. Thus by the eighteenth century southern Somaliland as far south as the Juba River had assumed more or less its present ethnic complexion.

But the main Somali advance did not long halt at the Juba. Darod from the north and Ogaden continued to push south, often against the fierce resistance of those who had preceded them.¹⁰ Eventually these new northern invaders reached the Shebelle, and began to press heavily upon the Digil of the region early in the nineteenth century. Their progress was arrested, however, by the Rahanweyn, from about 1840 onwards under the strong leadership of the Geledi clan based on the Shebelle. This opposition forced these new Darod immigrants to move up to the Juba and brought them into contact with the Galla on the right bank of the river. Although so much of their territory had been lost in Somaliland, the Galla were still tenaciously clinging to what land was left to them, and from their centre at Afmadu, launched occasional raids across the river into what was now Somali territory. Their power in this region was thus by no means yet broken; and from time to time their raiding parties menaced the Somali religious centre at Bardera, founded in 1820 on the middle reaches of the Juba. Thus the new Darod invaders encountered a formidable neighbour whom, for the present, it was more expedient to appease than to provoke. Hence having gained their protection, parties of Darod clansmen crossed the river as clients and allies of the Oromo. The trans-Juban Oromo seem to have welcomed this new support and to have turned it to advantage in their relations with the turbulent Akamba and Masai to their west.

As time passed, the Darod movement continued and further Darod clansmen entered the area, sought alliance with the Galla, and crossed the river to join their kinsmen. Thus the strength of the Darod immigrants under Oromo protection gradually increased. This situation of uneasy Darod-Galla alliance, however, continued for some time and is that described by the French explorer Charles Guillain when he visited the southern Somali coast in 1847. Much the same position is recorded also by the ill-fated German traveller, von der Decken, who, in 1865, made history by sailing up the Juba River in his shallow-draught steamship Welf, only to founder in the rapids above Bardera.¹¹ It was apparently in this same year that a severe epidemic of smallpox amongst the Galla provided the opportunity for which their Darod, neighbours had obviously been waiting. Almost immediately, the Darod fell upon their Galla hosts on all sides and inflicted very heavy losses. The few Oromo who survived fled to the south; and, by the turn of the century, most of the southern Galla had been cleared from the area, retaining footholds only at Wajir and Buna. A new factor now made itself felt in the form of desperate Ethiopian raids into the Ogaden and down the Juba. This, with further waves of new Somali immigrants – some of whom had sailed down the coast by dhow – maintained and even increased the Somali pressure. Indeed, by 1909, parties of Darod immigrants had pressed as far south as the Tana River with livestock estimated to number as many as fifty thousand beasts.

By 1912, when administrative and military posts were opened by the British in this turbulent northern part of the East African Protectorate, the situation was still fluid. The Darod were still on the move and were now seeking to dominate completely the whole region from Buna in the west, through Wajir, to the Tana in the south-east. Many of those non-Hamitic WaBoni hunters who had survived the tides of migration and battle had now become the serfs of the Darod, and most of the Warday Galla who remained had to be moved across the Tana River to prevent their extinction by the Somali. A good number, however, chose to stay with their former Darod subjects as clients, thus completely reversing the earlier position when the Oromo had been masters of Jubaland. To the west, the once powerful Ajuran, who after their defeat in the seventeenth century had been so ignominiously harried south-wards, had now lost much of their cohesion and were rapidly being infliltrated by other Somali. Finally, the southern Boran Galla were being thrust north-west by the continued Darod pressure.

By 1919, feeling between the Darod and those Warday Galla who had been moved across the Tana River reached such a pitch that it was again necessary for the British authorities to intervene. The consequence was an undertaking by both sides, known as the Somali–Orma (Galla) agreement, which allowed the Galla who remained with the Darod on the left bank to choose finally between accepting the formal position of serfs, or of moving across the river to join their free kinsmen. Those who decided to cross the Tana were obliged to leave behind them with their Somali patrons half the cattle which they had acquired during their bondage. Under these conditions it is perhaps not surprising that few of the Warday Galla moved.

Some twelve years later, further unrest broke out among the Galla subjects of the Darod, and a rumour began to circulate that the Somali were about to disregard the 1919 agreement. Whether on this account, or for other reasons, about eight hundred Oromo dependents with ten times as many head of livestock made a forlorn bid for freedom, trekking towards the Tana River at the very height of the dry season. The result was disastrous; nearly half their number perished, and the few who survived were ignominiously returned to the left bank of the river. In 1936, the agreement ended and the government of Kenya tacitly recognized that, except for those on the right bank of the Tana, the Warday Galla with whom the Somali had so long been struggling had been finally assimilated. Of the Oromo who had once occupied so much of this territory, only the Boran and Gabbra remained.

Thus ended the great series of migrations which, over a space of some nine hundred years, had brought the Somali from their northern deserts into the more fertile regions of the centre and south and finally into the semi-desert plains of northern Kenya. These movements had far-reaching social repercussions. Through contact with the Oromo and the absorption of those Galla who remained behind, and with an added leaven from the earlier Bantu communities, the Digil and Rahanweyn tribes emerged with their distinctive characteristics. From the Bantu they adopted cultivation, and from the Galla temporarily adapted their system of age-grades to their expanding military needs. In much the same way, the Darod who later crossed the Juba briefly assumed the Galla warrior age-grade system, and like the Rahanweyn, later discarded it.

At every stage in their expansion the tactics employed by the Somali were based upon their traditional evaluation of political power in terms of military strength. While at various times and places, small family groups and lineages, the spear-heads of the greater clan migrations, accepted the protection of their numerically dominant Oromo hosts, as soon as they were sufficiently strong they overthrew their patrons and made them their subjects. Wherever by force of numbers and arms they could, the Somali triumphed. Both sides seem to have relied on similar weapons, mainly spear and leather shield sometimes reinforced perhaps with bow and arrow. The Somali may, however, have enjoyed superiority in the use of a few matchlock guns, although it is doubtful if this was very significant. Probably, more significantly, their warriors were sometimes mounted on horseback, a technique which the Oromo later adopted and used to good effect in their massive migration into Abyssinia. Yet it was probably above all their overwhelming numerical superiority, and the dynamism which their movement acquired, which enabled the Somali to conquer so much territory at the expense of the Oromo. This and other considerations suggest that those Galla whom the Somali smote and put to flight – mainly Akishu, Raitu, and Arussi in the north, and Warday and Boran in the south – did not represent the main mass of the Oromo nation,¹² but were rather sparsely distributed outlying groups far from their traditional homelands in the south-east of Ethiopia. Finally, in considering the character of the Somali expansion, it should be remembered that this was not a concerted operation under a single direction: it was a disjointed series of clan and lineage movements in which there were many cross-currents of migration as group jostled group in the search for new pastures. Nor does this sequence of Somali and Oromo movement exclude the possibility that the ultimate origins of both peoples may be traced to the same area on the upper reaches of the Juba river.

New European interest in the coast

While this great upheaval was taking place, with the exception for a time of Adal in the north and of states such as those of the Ajuran and Geledi in the south, it was only on the coast that any degree of centralized government was established and maintained, however irregularly, over long periods of time. It is now necessary to revert to this theme and to examine the final fortunes of the coastal centres before the partition of the Somali region.

Afrer the decline of the Adal state, Zeila retained its commercial position as the main outlet for the ancient caravan routes from the hinterland, particularly those descending from the Abyssinian highlands through Harar, although in the sixteenth century trade was severely disrupted for a time by the Oromo invasions. In the following century Zeila, and apparently to some extent Berbera also, fell under the authority of the Sharifs of Mukha and both ports were thus nominally incorporated in the Ottoman Empire. And this was still the position when Sir Richard Burton visited the coast in 1854 in the course of his celebrated expedition to Harar which, in contrast to Zeila, was still an independent Muslim principality.

Zeila’s governor was now a Somali, Haji Shirmarke ‘Ali Salih (of the Habar Yunis clan), who had begun his remarkable career as the captain of a training dhow. Having acquired wealth and reputation, the Haji obtained the office of governor about 1840 from the hereditary holder Sayyid Muhammad al-Barr, representative of the Ottoman Pasha of Western Arabia. His success was also apparently facilitated by the gratitude which he had earned from the British government of Bombay for protecting the lives of the crew of the Mary Ann, a British brig attacked and plundered by the local Somali at Berbera in 1825. Notwithstanding Haji ‘Ali’s intervention, this incident had led the British to blockade the coast regularly until 1833, when £6,000 in compensation had been recovered from the Somali. In the meantime, in 1827, a commercial treaty had been signed between the British East Africa Company and the local Habar Awal clan.

In 1854, Burton records that Haji Shirmarke, tall and, despite his sixty-odd years, strong and active, had not forgotten the military exploits of his youth and contemplated the conquest of Berbera and Harar. He lived modestly, however, in an indifferent mud and wattle ‘arish, and not in one of the grander double-storeyed stone houses of the town. His ‘secretary’ was a Swahili slave; and although he was himself illiterate, his eldest son Muhammad, married to an Arab woman, had been educated at Mukha and proved to be something of a scholar. The town, Burton found, Haji ‘Ali governed with a light hand, and the aid of a tough Hadrami soldier and forty mercenaries from Hadramaut, Mukha, and Aden, all armed with matchlock and sword. The Kadi administering Islamic law was at this time a Hawiye Somali whose predecessors, from about 1670, had been Sayyids from Arabia.

The dimensions of Zeila Burton compares to Suez, sufficient to hold a few thousand inhabitants, and provided with six mosques, a dozen large white-washed stone houses, and two hundred or more thatched mud-and-wattle huts. The ancient wall of coral rubble and mud defending the town was no longer fortified with guns, and in many places had become dilapidated. Drinking water had to be fetched from wells four miles from the town. Yet trade was thriving: to the north caravans plied the Danakil country, while to the west the lands of the ‘Ise and Gadabursi clans were traversed as far as Harar, and beyond Harar to the Gurage country in Abyssinia. The main exports were slaves, ivory, hides, horns, ghee, and gums. On the coast itself Arab divers were active collecting sponge cones. And provisions were cheap.

Burton soon found that this orderly town life at Zeila did not extend far beyond the gates of the city. The nomadic clans, through whose pastures Burton and his companions passed on their way towards Harar, recognized no political dependence upon Zeila. Indeed raids and skirmishes occurred under the very walls of the city.

While in 1855 Zeila thus continued the coastal tradition of instituted authority under a Somali governor, although its political influence was a mere shadow of what it had once been, at Berbera the position was very different. Here Burton found that the process of nomadic encroachment had gone much further and the town was in fact no longer politically distinct from its nomadic hinterland. In February 1855, when Burton, having successfully completed his exploration of Harar, entered Berbera he discovered that the Habar Awal clan were in possession, but divided as to which of their sections should control the port. At the same time, the Habar Yunis clan was also advancing claims to the lucrative trade which the town commanded.

Before this, and prior to the British settlement at Aden in 1839, the Ayyal Yunis and Ayyal Ahmed lineages of the Habar Awal clan had held Berbera and jointly managed its trade, sharing in the profits on all commercial transactions as ‘protectors’ (abans) of foreign merchants from Arabia and India. When under the stimulus of developments at Aden the port’s prosperity markedly increased, the numerically dominant Ayyal Yunis drove out their rival kinsmen and declared themselves commercial masters of Berbera. This led to a feud in which each side sought outside help; the defeated Ayyal Ahmad turned to Haji Shirmarke ‘Ali and his Habar Yunis clansmen for support. With this backing, they were then able to re-establish themselves and to expel the Ayyal Yunis who moved to the small roadstead of Bulhar, some miles to the west of Berbera. By 1846, however, the menace of other clans had led the two rival Ayyal lineages to compose their differences and Haji ‘Ali’s services had been dispensed with: he had been ‘British Agent’ at Berbera in 1842.

This struggle and earlier vicissitudes had left their mark on Berbera, for while the bare ground for about a mile on either side was strewn with broken glass and pottery, the debris of former generations, the area of the town actually inhabited, ‘a wretched clump of dirty mud-huts’, occupied only a fraction of the ancient contours. And the old aqueduct from the wells at Dubar eight miles to the south-east had long ceased to bring sweet water to the town.

Having formed this unfavourable impression of Berbera, Burton and his companions left the Somali coast for Aden which they reached on 9 February, 1855. April of the same year, however, saw Burton back again at Berbera as the leader of a new expedition, with the object of exploring the Ogaden hinterland. In the two months in which he had been absent the appearance of the port had greatly changed. It was now filled with bustle and activity: ‘The emporium of East Africa was at the time of my landing in a state of confusion. But a day before, the great Harar caravan, numbering three thousand souls, and as many cattle, had entered for the purpose of laying in the usual eight months supplies, and purchase, barter, and exchange were transacted in most hurried and unbusiness-like manner. All day, and during the greater part of the night, the town rang with the voices of buyer and seller: to specify no other articles of traffic, 500 slaves of both sexes were in the market. Long lines of laden and unladen camels were to be seen pacing the glaring yellow shore: . . . . . . already small parties of travellers had broken ground for their return journey: and the foul heap of mat hovels, to which this celebrated mart had been reduced, was steadily shrinking in dimensions.’¹³

Burton and his companions were not allowed long to contemplate this scene. On 19 April, 1855, in the early hours of the morning, several hundred Somali spearmen launched a savage attack upon Burton’s camp. In the ensuing mêlée, Lt Stroyan was killed, and Lt Speke (later to gain fame for his explorations of the Nile source) severely wounded: Burton himself received a spear-thrust in the mouth. Yet despite the numerical superiority of their assailants, Burton and his companions managed to escape to Aden, and the expedition was abandoned: Burton never returned to Somaliland. He is still remembered, however, with a mixture of amusement and admiration as ‘Haji ‘Abdallah’, the guise he assumed for his journey to Harar, and as one who regularly led the prayers in the mosques, and could hold his own with any sheikh.

The British authorities at Aden reacted promptly to the incident in the manner of the times. Two vessels of the India command were dispatched to blockade the coast until Stroyan’s murderer and Speke’s attacker were surrendered to justice. The following year the elders of the Habar Awal clan announced that Stroyan’s assailant had been executed by his own kin and offered 15,000 dollars as compensation. Then in November, a treaty was signed with the Habar Awal in favour of British commerce at Berbera and to provide for the eventual appointment of a British Resident. Much the same series of events had followed the plunder of the brig Mary Anne off Berbera in 1825 when Shirmarke ‘Ali had intervened. Now, however, the link between Aden and the northern Somali coast had been strengthened and the basis laid for future British activity. Conditions on this remote coastline were no longer a matter of indifference to the Imperial Powers.

Meanwhile the southern Somali coast had similarly become exposed to new foreign interests. Here, in contrast to Zeila with its long tradition of far-flung connexions between Abyssinia and Arabia, the local ports had generally a narrower sphere of influence. Events in the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia hardly impinged upon them, and the chief external factors affecting their fortunes were the political situation in the Indian Ocean and that in their Somali hinterland.

Thus Mogadishu, which in the tenth century consisted of a loose federation of Arab and Persian families, had by the thirteenth become a sultanate ruled by the Fakhr ad-Din dynasty. Three centuries later these rulers were supplanted by the Muzaffar Sultans and the town had become closely connected with the related Ajuran Sultanate in the interior. In this period Mogadishu was attacked but not occupied by the Portuguese. The true conquerors of the ancient city were those new Hawiye Somali settlers who defeated the Ajuran and brought the downfall of the Muzaffar dynasty in the early seventeenth century. By this time Mogadishu had split into two rival quarters, Hamarweyn, and Shangani in which the new invaders were established.

At this time the rise of Omani influence in the Indian Ocean introduced an important new factor into the situation; and by the close of the seventeenth century Mogadishu, with the other East African ports, had come under the protection of Oman. In 1814, however, the governor of Mombasa declared his town independent and sought British support from Bombay. After a delay of nine years, Captain Owen’s fleet arrived off the East African coast and in 1824, Owen established his famous but short-lived ‘Protectorate’. Mombasa’a rebellious example now affected the people of Mogadishu, and in 1825 Owen obligingly visited the port offering British protection against the anticipated Omani reprisal. This was refused, but at the port of Brava to the south of Mogadishu, Owen was more successful.

In the following year the situation changed radically, and with the refusal of Owen’s government to ratify his protectorate, British intervention disappeared as suddenly and almost as inexplicably as it had come. The rebellious towns of East Africa were now left to face their Omani overlords alone. In 1828, Mogadishu was bombarded and compelled to capitulate. But when, shortly after, the Muscat state was divided, Mogadishu and her sister ports of the southern, or ‘Benadir’,¹⁴ Somali coast passed under the jurisdiction of the Sultan of Zanzibar.

Meanwhile, beyond the Benadir Coast to the north, the Majerteyn Sultanate had apprently retained its independence from outside interests. In 1839, however, for an annual allowance of 360 dollars, the Sultan signed a treaty at Aden with the British, guaranteeing to protect the lives and property of ships wrecked off his coast.¹⁶ By this time the Sultanate was also in contact with Oman, though not it seems formally under Omani jurisdiction.

These various centres along the coast were visited by the French explorer, Charles Guillain, captain of the brig Ducouedic, between 1846 and 1848. As a whole the Benadir ports, Guillain found, acknowledged both the authority of the Sultan of Zanzibar and that of the Somali Geledi clan in the hinterland who, as masters of the Shebelle, were now at the height of their power. And while the Sultan of Zanzibar was no doubt potentially more powerful, because better armed, than his Geledi colleague, it was easier for the latter to give direct effect to his authority. Thus it was typical of the delicate distribution of power between the two Sultans that, when in 1870 the Sultan of Zanzibar wished to build a fortress for his representative at Mogadishu, this required the consent and assistance of the Geledi.

At the time of Guillain’s sojourn, however, although the ancient cotton-weaving industry was still profitable,¹⁵ Mogadishu was largely in ruins. A recent scourge of plague and famine had reduced its population to a mere 5,000; and Hamarweyn and Shangani, the two quarters of the city, were at variance and each under a separate leader. The Sultan of the Geledi had in 1842 been invited to mediate and his action then had led to an uneasy truce between the two factions. By contrast, the Sultan of Zanzibar’s authority over the town was slight and hardly more than nominal. In 1843, a Somali had been appointed as governor by the Sultan of Zanzibar and furnished with two soldiers to collect the taxes; but after a short time this official had relinquished his office, and now at the time of Guillain’s visit, the only Zanzibari representative was an old Arab with an Indian assistant as tax collector.

The governor for the Benadir coast as a whole was stationed at Brava which, compared with Mogadishu, impressed Guillain with its prosperity. This city of 5,000 souls, while acknowledging the overlordship of Zanzibar, was effectively led by two personages, one a Somali, and the other an Arab who spoke some English. Finally, between Brava and Mogadishu, at Merca, the Somali intrusion was complete and this port was led by a member of the local Bimal clan; here the only Zanzibar representative was an aged customs official. Recently the town had been devastated by the Sultan of the Geledi in the course of strife between his clan and the Bimal, and the citizens of Brava were now preparing to counter-attack: in this situation Guillain wisely decided not to prolong his visit.

Thus by the middle of the nineteenth century, the southern Benadir coast as a whole recognized the suzerainty of Zanzibar, although the Sultan’s power was vague and uncertain compared with the direct influence exerted by the Geledi who dominated the hinterland. Yet the Geledi did not generally dispute Zanzibar’s position, and the two Sultans were friends rather than rivals maintaining between them a delicate balance of control over the Benadir. Farther to the south the Sultan of Zanzibar’s writ ran more directly, so that, for example, when in 1868 after the rout of the Galla Warday, new Darod reinforcements arrived to swell the further Darod thrust south, and came from the north by sea to Kismayu, they sought and obtained the Sultan’s authority.

To the north beyond the Benadir ports, the Majerteyn Sultanate, while having connexions with Oman, remained politically independent. Zeila, and less definitely Berbera, however, were still formally part of the Turkish Empire, though both were now heavily involved in trade with the British at Aden, and in the case of Berbera linked with Britain by commercial treaties.

Thus by the middle of the nineteenth century the Somali coast was no longer isolated, and locally it was now rather the nomads of the hinterland who controlled the ports than the other way about. To a large extent the coastal and hinterland traditions had merged, and the centre of political pressure had swung from the coast to the interior. The new external links between the coast and the outside world, however, served in the following decades of the nineteenth century to pave the way for a new colonial impact in which the pressure, initially at least, was again mainly from the coast towards the hinterland.