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“Carrying the History of the Prophets”

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

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

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

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

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

RACE AND COSMOPOLITANISM UNDER EMPIRE

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

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

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

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

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

The formalistic nature of oral and written genealogies and hagiographies can easily obscure the manifold ways in which people have interpreted, reworked, and subverted claims of foreign descent at different moments in time. It is, nevertheless, heuristically useful to contrast an idealized model of “European” and “Somali” notions of descent. For European explorers, Muslim genealogies were evidence that the coastal towns of North and East Africa were “products of a Persian and Arabian diaspora that had spread around the Indian Ocean.”⁸ Combining new forms of scientific racism with an older Christian metaphysics, European thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century reinterpreted the biblical story of Ham. The myth of Ham, as Mamdani explains, posited the existence of a superior alien race and “explained away every sign of civilization in tropical Africa as a foreign import.”⁹ Somalis, in the eyes of many European explorers, were a product of intermarriage between a foreign people (posited to be either Hamitic or Semitic) and the indigenous populations of Northeast Africa. Somalis in the nineteenth century, however, did not conceptualize descent through the same racial and geographic categories. For many people in Northeast Africa, being “Somali” very likely meant participating in the theologically defined space of the wider Islamic umma.¹⁰ Descent was not conceptualized through a continental understanding of geography, a secular conception of historical time, or an essentialized “racial binary” between indigenous Africans on one hand, and nonindigenous foreigners on the other.¹¹

Though Burton constructed racial barriers between himself and the inhabitants of the Horn, he was much celebrated for his intimate and often controversial appreciation of the cultures of the “Orient.” The philosopher Anthony Appiah paints Burton as an unusual combination of cosmopolitan and racist misanthrope who was often nihilistic in orientation. Adventurous and linguistically adept, he successfully passed as a Pathan from India’s North-West Frontier in order to attend the hajj in Mecca.¹² Few others possessed the linguistic skills and the recklessness to flit so easily between various cultural milieus. However, many of Burton’s hagiographers have overlooked the fact that he conducted most of his travels within an international Islamic space.¹³ The Indian Ocean was a well-traveled region in which populations mixed and where foreigners, as Engseng Ho elegantly notes, “settled and sojourned in towns big and small and entered into relations with locals that were more intimate, sticky, and prolonged than the Europeans could countenance.”¹⁴ Immigrants were by no means an unusual presence, and this climate no doubt facilitated his ability to assimilate. Appiah traces the genealogy of cosmopolitanism back “to the Cynics of the fourth century.”¹⁵ However, this lineage neglects forms of cosmopolitanism that derive from neither Hellenic nor imperial origins.

Map 1.1. Some sites of Somali residence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Note: This map shows modern political boundaries.)

If being “cosmopolitan” is understood as a kind of stance aimed at navigating across cultural, religious, and linguistic differences and finding ways to “belong” to multiple worlds, then it is clear that the Horn of Africa had its own traditions of cosmopolitanism. Coastal cities such as Berbera and Mogadishu were major ports of call for the region as well as centers for cultivating these cosmopolitan sensibilities. Monsoons brought dhows (lateen-rigged ships) across the Indian Ocean, which enabled locals to take advantage of long-distance trade and forced foreigners to stay until the winds reversed. Somali speakers developed social technologies to incorporate these strangers and bridge the parochial divides of language, culture, and geographic origin. Unlike European traditions, which were predicated on overcoming the narrow limitations of citizenship, Somali forms of cosmopolitanism were aimed at assimilating migrants, forging ties of kinship to neighbors, and making claims to spiritual universality.¹⁶

Kinship and prophetic genealogies, which were typically traced through the paternal line, provided a powerful language for incorporating strangers, neighbors, and migrants. However, they were also social tools that could be used to exclude. There is no pure form of cosmopolitanism unencumbered by exclusionary dynamics. By asserting membership in Islamic lineages, Somali speakers could define themselves as superior in relation to those perceived to live beyond the civilized world of the Dar al-Islam and, thus, legitimize the subordination of slaves. Some groups also distinguished themselves from “casted” lineages, who occupied a stigmatized status that, while distinct from slaves, marked them as socially marginalized from the freeborn.¹⁷ In addition, descent was sometimes invoked to claim superiority over nonpastoral lineages, whose members farmed along the Juba and Shebelle Rivers.¹⁸ Livestock ownership is yet another distinction that has long underpinned hierarchical relations in the region.¹⁹

European encroachment further complicated this cosmopolitan, if unequal, world and facilitated the spread of a Somali diaspora. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, European merchant ships regularly stopped off at the coastal cities bordering the Gulf of Aden (see map 1.1). Berbera was a bustling commercial center at the time, and Aden soon developed into a major port of call—as Faisal Devji notes, in many ways “the Dubai of its time.”²⁰ Due to the accidents of geography, Isaaq and Harti Somalis who lived along the Gulf of Aden were particularly well placed to take advantage of these new opportunities. Somali seamen and stokers recruited from Aden and the surrounding littoral (including regions incorporated into the Aden Protectorate and the Protectorate of British Somaliland in the 1800s) voyaged and settled abroad. Some established small communities in dispersed port cities, such as Cape Town, Cardiff, and Perth. Others served as soldiers for British imperial regiments or as navigators and porters for European explorers. Somalis guided Lord Delamere, who in 1897 launched his now infamous expedition into Kenya. Kenya’s fertile soils and rich economic opportunities attracted many of these male recruits, who came to the colony over the next half century through various waves of emigration from Aden, British Somaliland, and, to a lesser extent, Kismayo (a port city in southern Somalia).²¹ Sometimes they married local women; in other cases, they were joined by women from Somaliland and Aden. Even as protectorate authorities began to hem their subjects into new racial and ethnic categories, many Somali migrants continued to identify with their kin in Aden, Somaliland, and the wider region. They were able to draw upon precolonial cosmopolitan practices, resist the full effects of deracination, and reorient themselves toward the Gulf of Aden and the wider Islamic world in new ways.

BECOMING SOMALI IN THE NORTHERN FRONTIER DISTRICT OF KENYA

Farther to the south, another emigration was taking place. Impelled by a number of economic and political pressures, Somali-speaking nomads who identified as Ogaden and Degodia moved out of the southern regions of what is today Ethiopia and Somalia. By the turn of the century, they had established themselves in what is now northern Kenya (see map 2.1). Not only did shared discourses circulate between the coastal city-states of Northeast Africa and the pastoral interior, but nomadic groups also possessed their own cosmopolitan praxis. As they traveled, they came into conflict with Oromo speakers living north of the Tana River, brought with them new understandings of “Somaliness,” and helped to reconfigure the boundaries of belonging in the north.

In the mid-nineteenth century, members of the Ogaden and Harti lineages began to move into what is today Jubaland (in modern-day southern Somalia). The caravan trade, which wound from the interior and converged upon the coast, attracted many Somali migrants to the region. Economic gain, however, was not the only driver impelling migration southward. Groups also sought to escape internal conflicts as well as the expanding Ethiopian Empire, which by 1906 had extended its state almost to its present-day contours. Many Degodia fled to what is today northern Kenya and, shortly thereafter, other Somali clans followed in their wake.²²

When approaching this history of migration, there is an inherent risk of reifying clan and ethnic labels. Archival documents construct particular objects of knowledge. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, protectorate administrators were quite fixated on determining the “tribal essence” of East African society and often described people exclusively in ethnic terms, conflating communal categories with collectivities. Other kinds of affiliations were obscured, as was the individuality of people in the region. Oral testimony, on the other hand, risks projecting modern communal identifications onto the past. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “The collective subjects who supposedly remember did not exist as such at the time of the events they claim to remember. Rather, their constitution as subjects goes hand in hand with the continuous creation of the past.”²³ A careful reading must attend to the ways in which oral and archival sources give rise to an image of bounded, relatively timeless, and internally homogeneous groups.

In addition, histories of migration often dredge up complex stories about intermarriage, assimilation, and expulsion. In the case of northern Kenya, recent conflicts over land, grazing, and political constituencies have reignited debates over the so-called Somali conquest of the region.²⁴ Studying these narratives poses certain problems for historians due to the stakes involved in their interpretation. Without acknowledging the limits of their own authorial power, scholars risk validating a certain representation of history that may reinforce contemporary nativist claims.

While people from the north often provided divergent accounts of this era, their narratives tended to converge upon several common themes that had become fixtures within collective memory.²⁵ As Rogers Brubaker notes, people cannot freely invent history. Certain kinds of pasts, he argues, are “made ‘available’ for present-day use not only by the events themselves . . . but also by their subsequent incorporation into commemorative traditions.”²⁶ What virtually all the sources from this era—whether archival, oral, or scholarly—agree upon is that Somali migrants came into an area where the Oromo had been in some way dominant.

Günther Schlee and Abdullahi A. Shongolo (who have done pioneering work on northern Kenya) describe the period prior to this phase of Somali immigration as one of relative peace and security.²⁷ According to their account, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the Borana, an Oromo-speaking group, had adopted a number of diverse people under an alliance that became known as the Worr Libin, or the People of Libin. Over the centuries, various Somali-speaking groups had gained a foothold in the region by becoming sheegat (which can be roughly translated as “clients”) to these established Borana residents.²⁸ Through sheegat, newcomers could adopt the name and assimilate into another clan or lineage. According to Schlee and Shongolo, this period of “Borana hegemony” led to “a multiethnic political system that was the major unifying factor in the region before the introduction of modern statehood.”²⁹

The Pax Borana, however, came undone in the late nineteenth century. Ogaden and other Somali lineages began fighting ex-slaves for control of the Juba riverbank and pushing farther westward and southward, displacing Oromo speakers. Population pressure, opportunities to monopolize the southern leg of the caravan trade, and internal conflicts likely spurred this move southward. By the 1870s, Somalis had taken control over much of lower Juba and had begun to press farther south into northern Kenya.³⁰ Wajir was one of the major sites of conflict in the first few decades of the twentieth century. This was most likely due to the importance of its water resources and its location along the caravan routes.³¹ When they reached Wajir in 1906, the Ogaden and their various sheegat met other lineages living under the Pax Borana. They encountered the Ajuran, who spoke Oromo and were almost indistinguishable from the Borana (perhaps because they were, to all extents and purposes, “Borana”). Living among the Ajuran were also more recent Somali immigrants, such as the Degodia, who had fled earlier Ethiopian incursions.³²

As Somalis gained control over the area, they displaced many established residents. They also supplanted the importance of the Borana name, instead cementing “Somali” as an overarching affiliation. How exactly this occurred is the main source of disagreement within oral testimony and written accounts. Different sources provide different interpretations of this era. Did established residents forcefully or willingly assimilate into broader Somali ways of life? Did locals “invent” or simply “rediscover” their Somali roots? Was this a liberating foray or an oppressive invasion?

Historical events are overdetermined, riddled by silences in the historical record, and obscured by the retrospective significance conferred on them. It is misleading to imagine that we, as scholars, can peel away the bias in these various accounts or simply triangulate between them to get at a singular, unmediated truth. Events, as Bruno Latour argues, are best understood outside the fact/fiction binary; rather, they are “matters of concern” that inspire a “gathering” of people in debate.³³ For Latour, this is not recourse to blunt deconstructionism disinvested from empiricism, but rather a call for a productive and renewed realism that accounts for the ways in which issues become arenas for debate.³⁴

Local political thinkers give rise to new stories, elaborate upon old ones, and keep them in circulation, which in turn helps to reinforce collective representations. Many chroniclers of these stories in northern Kenya were older men, often charged with projecting the public face of the community’s history. This also meant that the history of the region was frequently told with an emphasis on patriarchal and masculine features. One such orator was Ahmed Maalin Abdalle of Habasweyn, who was also one of my main interlocutors. Fluent in multiple languages, Abdalle, a former teacher as well as a community peace builder, was well known for his humor, erudition, and knowledge of local history. Abdalle recounted a narrative about the new Somali immigrants, whom he argued had “liberated” the Ajuran from a state of semislavery to the Borana. According to his account, the Ajuran were forced to distinguish their residences from those of the Borana by inverting the animal hides covering their aqal (huts) and exposing the sides with fur. The Borana were allowed to approach any aqal with exposed fur during the night and rouse the sleeping husband, who was obliged to exit to give the visitor access to his wife. To add insult to injury, the husband was also expected to offer milk, the classic gesture of hospitality, to his guest the following morning.³⁵ Rights to sexual access to women often emerged as a central and overriding trope—especially within stories told by men.

Abdalle did not necessarily tell this story with the intention of condemning any particular group of people. However, this provocative narrative could easily enable one to paint a territorial incursion as a liberating activity and claim the Ajuran, who had long-standing roots in the region, as oppressed kin. The allegation that the Borana had reduced the Ajuran to a state of virtual slavery is particularly ironic given that British officials of the era, as a means of justifying their own conquest, leveled similar accusations against the Somali.³⁶ While one cannot immediately take Abdalle’s account at face value, his story calls into question the assumptions of scholars, such as Günther Schlee, who have described the Pax Borana as a relatively peaceful era. What to Schlee and Shongolo was a nonviolent relationship of clientship, Ahmed Maalin Abdalle described as an oppressive, gendered form of domination.

Others recounted the history of this period in ways that reinforced Somali chauvinism and racial and religious exclusion. A resident of Habasweyn, who was in his early eighties at the time of our interview, also provided an account of this early “conquest” period. “The land,” he explained, “was inhabited by black, ignorant Gallas, who were naked and black.” He described the Somalis as “a people with religion, of the book, carrying the history of the prophets.”³⁷ In his eyes, the Somali were a superior people who helped bring civilization to the “backwards” non-Muslim populations who had been living in the region. For at least some people, these stories helped justify their rights to the land, assert their supremacy over non-Somali and non-Muslim groups, and reinforce the conceptual boundaries between Somali and “other.”

Not everyone from northern Kenya, however, would agree with such a chauvinist depiction of Somali conquest. Adan Ibrahim Ali, for example, argued that the Somali had distant kin in areas as far away as Chad, Egypt, Israel, and Rwanda. He also maintained that other Kenyan groups, including the Maasai and Luo, had hidden Somali roots.³⁸ Ali claimed affinity with a variety of people both within and outside the Kenyan nation-state and appealed to a highly inclusive idea of kinship.³⁹ While one man’s interpretations of the past helped to buttress the conceptual and moral boundaries between Somali and gaal (the non-Muslim “other”), the other incorporated diverse people (including “black” and predominantly non-Muslim groups) into the Somali lineage system.

Trying to tease out the factual elements in any of these accounts strips them of much of their meaning.⁴⁰ As John Jackson argues, storytelling is often a way for people to cultivate community, not circulate facts.⁴¹ In addition, it is important to position oneself (the “scholar”) not as the ultimate authority, but as one of many storytellers. Dwelling upon the constructed nature of oral sources and no less tendentious and partial written records can also be a productive means of gesturing toward a certain unknowability regarding the past and thus avoiding the dangers of a “politically irresponsible historicism.”⁴²

At the same time, oral testimony should not be treated merely as a form of historical memory irreconcilable with the work of guild historians.⁴³ Doing so would deny its utility as a source of factual information about the past. Bracketing certain prosecutorial questions of who is to blame for past conflicts, these stories have much to tell us. They suggest that new immigrants and more established residents were engaged in a reconceptualization of belonging, which enabled “Somaliness” to become an encompassing affiliation for diverse people throughout the region. At the turn of the century, conflicts between Borana and Somalis led to realliances and redefinitions of “us” and “them”—whose effects continue to have reverberations into the present.

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

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

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

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

MYTHS OF CONQUEST

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

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

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

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

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

While the inhabitants of the Horn may not have been the homogeneous nation that Pan-Somali supporters retrospectively imagined, there is little doubt that imperial powers drew boundaries with little regard for nomadic populations. By the late 1890s, the protectorate regime had claimed a vast territory beyond its coastal garrisons.⁵⁶ In the hope of checking Ethiopian and Italian expansion, the Foreign Office hastily secured its rights to the poorly surveyed terrain stretching west of the Juba River and south of the Ethiopian Empire. The art of cartography was a key technique through which British authorities created a semblance of sovereignty over the interior of the East Africa Protectorate, where they largely lacked effective control. Most of these frontiers were nominal artifacts of imperial diplomacy that cut through communities and partitioned nomadic populations for whom these colonial conventions were largely meaningless.⁵⁷ Labeling these borders “arbitrary,” however, is misleading. It suggests as a corollary the possibility of a “natural” border, which assumes that people innately belong to fixed territories.⁵⁸ Transhumant groups, however, have not always imagined community in ways predicated on territorial boundaries (which is not to say that nomads did not have links to certain lands and geographies).

In the late nineteenth century, imperial representatives had recognized that northern Kenya and southern Somalia were interconnected to a much broader regional and global economy. By the turn of the century, however, British officials had turned their attention to the construction of the Uganda-Mombasa railway farther south, which was completed in 1901. The IBEAC’s experience in Jubaland revealed the inviability of capturing pastoral trade networks as well as the challenges of seizing control over nomadic regions. Rather than attempt the task of redirecting capital flows or securing effective administration over the sparsely populated, arid northern expanse, the thinly staffed protectorate regime concentrated instead on halting the southward migration of the area’s armed, nomadic people into the fertile central highlands and Rift Valley, which soon became the focus of the government’s commercial interests.⁵⁹

By the early twentieth century, the East Africa Protectorate regime had come to see the region as an extremely challenging area to govern best thought of as a buffer zone, analogous to the North-West Frontier of India. To hinder Somali migration into Central Kenya, in 1902 the administration applied the Outlying District Ordinance to the north, which effectively made the region a closed area; movement in and out was restricted to holders of a special pass.⁶⁰ In 1910, the protectorate government appointed the first “officer in charge” of the newly formed Northern Frontier District (NFD) (see map 2.1). It would take another decade, however, before the protectorate regime could claim effective control over the area.⁶¹

In 1913, the explorer Ignatius N. Dracopoli encapsulated colonial sentiments when he described the region as “the outskirt of civilization, on the frontier, as it were, of a fertile and well-watered land, beyond which lie the arid and sun-scorched wastes of a great desert.”⁶² More than two decades of periodic combat with Somali groups only nourished this image.⁶³ The concept of the frontier enabled officials to incorporate the area into the protectorate, while simultaneously emptying it of its own “cultural significance” and obscuring the alternative geographies of its inhabitants.⁶⁴ Although colonial officials naturalized the north’s status as a buffer zone, which marked the outer limits of imperial control, its isolation and marginalization were neither natural nor inevitable. Rather, they were the by-product of shifting imperial strategies as well as decades of struggle between Somali nomads, company representatives, and protectorate officials.

“ANYTHING BETWEEN HER LEGS IS OURS”

Officials and officers charged with securing the frontier, as George Simpson notes, often “imagined themselves impartial arbitrators who were bringing a more enlightened system of governance to a people so caught up in narrow and parochial disputes that they could not recognize the blessings that were being bestowed upon them.”⁶⁵ The protectorate regime lauded itself on the suppression of slavery and claimed to be safeguarding weaker populations from southward Somali aggression. They also attributed the causes of conflicts in the north to a “tribal” culture left unchecked and suggested that solutions lay in the civilizing effects of British rule.

This attitude surfaced in the way protectorate officials treated a series of disputes between subclans of the Ogaden. While protectorate authorities tried to contain Somalis and limit their migration southward, Ogaden leaders fought one another for hegemony over the eastern portion of the NFD. This conflict culminated in the killing of Ahmed Magan, the sultan of the Muhammad Zubeir, in 1914. People in Garissa District often refer to this series of conflicts as the Kalaluud, which can be roughly translated as “stalemate.” For the British, however, the Kalaluud was not a historical moment to be named, but simply one of many administrative headaches. In official correspondence, this complex political struggle was treated as a timeless cultural aspect of nomadic life, which highlighted the ungovernability of the Somalis: “The fighting between these two tribes was throughout of the most savage description. . . . It was impossible for the Government, engaged as it was with the Marehan Expedition, to take any steps to induce or compel the tribes to come to terms. . . . The combatants were left to themselves.”⁶⁶ Local accounts, however, inflect the Kalaluud with far different significance. Unlike the colonial archives, oral histories attend to the political motivations of these struggles.

While oral accounts of the Kalaluud are hardly straightforward reports, they are nevertheless useful as a means of destabilizing dominant, and no less straightforward, colonial narratives. They do not offer “corrections” to colonial texts, but rather an entirely different framework for understanding the past.⁶⁷ Ahmed Maalin Abdalle told one of the most evocative versions of the events that triggered the Kalaluud. The conflict began, he explained, when a Muhammad Zubeir woman, who was married to a man from the Abdalla lineage, left home one day to graze her goats. While she was out in the field, the hooves of one of her animals dug into the soil, exposing an elephant tusk. This discovery precipitated a dispute between leaders of the Muhammad Zubeir and the Abdalla, both subclans of the Ogaden. Citing the fact that the woman was their daughter, the Muhammad Zubeir claimed ownership of the tusk. Members of the Abdalla, however, contended that they were the rightful owners, as she was the wife of one of their sons.⁶⁸

One way to interpret this story is as an allegory for a historical conflict over control of the ivory trade. Such an interpretation is not without historical justification. As the scholar Scott Reese notes, by the second half of the nineteenth century, “population movements, sedentarization and continued hunting” had depleted animals from the coast, which forced merchants and hunters to move farther into the interior.⁶⁹ If, in fact, the Kalaluud began as a contest over the changing orientation of the ivory trade, then stories of this conflict may have traveled down the generations in the form of a metaphor about a woman, her goats, and the fortuitous discovery of a tusk.

The problem with such methods of interpretation, however, is that they demand that historians differentiate between the “metaphorical” and the “historical” aspects of any given oral testimony. In the absence of some other, more “valid,” corroborating historical source, oral histories tend to be treated as mere metaphor, their historical reliability rendered dubious by the lack of confirmatory evidence.

This has particularly pernicious consequences for the study of women and gender, where evidence outside of oral testimony is often fragmented or entirely nonexistent. Ahmed Maalin Abdalle provides rich insights into the gendered debates surrounding patrilineal inheritance. To resolve the dispute over the tusk, he recounted, the elders of the Muhammad Zubeir and the Abdalla subclans summoned the woman. When asked about how she had come across the ivory, the woman explained that she was walking and had spotted the tusk between her legs. “Anything between her legs is ours,” happily concluded the Abdalla leaders, who claimed ownership over the ivory.

Oral histories of this nature often enable elder men to reinscribe patriarchal norms over the past. By equating the ivory to an offspring, who “belonged” to the father’s lineage, this story plays upon ideas of patrilineal inheritance. In this account, the woman is simply the ground for a larger debate between men over proprietorship (even though Somalis, like many East Africans, have long subscribed to ideas of female property rights).⁷⁰ While hardly a clear-cut reflection on the way gender relations “really” worked in the precolonial period, this story provides insight into the ways in which gender was animated—often in humorous and provocative ways—to make sense of the past.

There are other ways of interpreting Maalin Abdalle’s creatively ambiguous and polysemic story that are more subversive of patriarchal norms. While the maintenance of lineage ties has frequently turned on the control of female reproduction and sexuality, it would be a mistake, as Christine Choi Ahmed suggests, to assume that Somali women were little more than chattel. To do so would be to reproduce an androcentric and Eurocentric vision.⁷¹ Similarly, David W. Cohen argues that historians and anthropologists often miss the important role played by women, because they attend “to the form and play of ‘larger,’ and in a sense ‘masculine’ structures and segmentary processes.”⁷² He notes that “the ideology of patrilineal segmentation” may not be the “overarching system defining identity and constituency as has been thought,” but simply “one means of conceptualizing and animating complex social activity over time.”⁷³ Another possible reading of Abdalle’s account is to see the conflict emerging not from differing interpretations of patrilineal inheritance, but rather due to the breakdown of ties of xidid (matrilateral relations). Via marriage, women have often played a central role in bringing together families of different clans.

In addition, Ahmed Maalin Abdalle’s story shows how quickly mobilizations of clan could change. After claiming the ivory, the husband went to the market in Bardera to purchase a large bull. He had the misfortune, however, of returning to Habasweyn after a period of drought. According to Abdalle’s account, members of the Muhammad Zubeir clan stole the man’s newly purchased bull to replenish the herds killed off by the drought. Members of the Abd Wak lineage, who claimed a common descent with the Abdalla in this era, retaliated for the theft. This triggered the series of battles known today as the Kalaluud.⁷⁴ After the struggles between the Ogaden subclans subsided, such a way of conceptualizing kinship fell out of favor.⁷⁵ This story serves as a reminder to contemporary observers of Somalia, who have tended to view recent mobilizations of clan as ancient and natural, that one cannot accept the present as traditional or given.

As the Kalaluud conflict indicates, the early twentieth century was a tumultuous time for nomadic groups living in the NFD, who struggled over control of land and resources. British accounts depoliticize the Kalaluud and paint it as an unexceptional “tribal” conflict against which the supposedly stabilizing, neutral colonial state could be deployed. Ahmed Maalin Abdalle, on the other hand, embedded this conflict within regional dynamics, local power struggles, and control over pastoral resources and trade routes. Relying on oral histories of this nature thus helps to counteract the depoliticizing effects of the archives and recenters Somali knowledge production.

Correspondence suggests that many lower-ranking officials were aware of the complex struggles and thorny reconfigurations of lineage ties, but simply found the complexity overwhelming. Actionable administrative discourse required officials to cut through this intricacy. Gradually, many protectorate and colonial administrators came to accept the myth of southward Somali expansion and perpetuated the idea that they were hindering a timeless conquest by a Muslim race of foreign extraction.⁷⁶ This view of history eventually became ingrained in administrative logic. By 1963, R. G. Turnbull, provincial commissioner (PC) of the NFD, argued: “There can be no doubt that had it not been for European intervention the Somalis, pushing before them the Galla and the remnants of other displaced tribes, would, by now, have swept through Kenya; the local Bantu and Nilotes could scarcely have held them for a day.”⁷⁷

This narrative of conquest painted Somali nomads as foreign encroachers whose movement needed to be closely contained. By the early twentieth century, protectorate officials had come to see the Somali nomad as an administrative problem as well as a threat to the safety of white settlers and the functioning of the colonial economy. Rarely could protectorate or colonial administrators fully control nomadic movement. However, in transforming migration into a legible problem of governance, protectorate officials stigmatized long-standing patterns of transhumance and equated the “Somali” with unregulated and dangerous mobility.