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“Kenya Is Regarded by the Somali as an El Dorado”

I am not an anthropologist, but I believe that I am correct in saying that Somalis have been in Africa hundreds of years or even thousands of years, and I am not at all sure how far one has to be back in order to determine the origin of a race. Surely if an Imperial Act were to refer to a person of British origins it would not be competent for that person to allege that he came from Normandy in 1066.

—Attorney General of Kenya, 31 May 1934¹

IN 1934, THE ATTORNEY GENERAL of Kenya intervened in a much wider debate over the legal classification of the Somali population. Construing of race and nation as natural categories and approaching the issue through a positivist epistemology, he suggested that careful anthropological investigation could ultimately resolve the matter of Somali origins. He nonetheless speculated that the foreign roots of the Somali people were vestiges of a distant past, drawing an analogy with British people who could claim “Norman” ancestry. His comments prefigured a broader crisis in the late 1930s, when the status of the Somali came under increased scrutiny.²

For decades, historians neglected the history of Somali subjects. Nationalist historians overlooked their experiences because they did not fit into conventional definitions of indigeneity and seemed to embody a tragic liminality.³ Scholars have only just begun to explore the subjectivities of those who were not governed so explicitly as “natives.” Labor historians also tended to elide the histories of Somali traders and nomadic pastoralists, who did not fall within the category of “workers.”⁴ Yet the lives of Somalis in Kenya have much to teach us about the range of colonial subjectivities as well as the social and political horizons beyond the territorial confines of the state. This chapter examines how empire facilitated certain kinds of diasporic and regional engagement, and how these possibilities began to unravel in the years leading up to World War II.

Throughout early colonial rule, Somalis in Kenya maintained a loose affiliation with territory that sustained models of membership that did not conform to colonial or juridical logics. Despite being confined to the north, northerners continued to see pastoralism as a viable, sustainable strategy; avoided becoming deeply incorporated into the colonial labor economy; and frequently crossed the porous boundaries between Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland, and Kenya with little regard for their authority. Unwilling to invest significant funds or manpower in the NFD, authorities regularly yielded to these forms of transhumance. By enlisting Somalis from Aden and British Somaliland in the imperial project, colonial authorities also enabled them to form horizontal solidarities that stretched across colonial boundaries. Members of the Isaaq and Harti community often claimed non-native status and saw themselves both as imperial citizens and as dispersed members of a wider Islamic and genealogical community.

Bringing the metropole and colonies into a single framework, this chapter analyzes some of the fundamental tensions at the heart of the imperial political economy. Colonial economies demanded flexibility for the movement of laborers, soldiers, traders, and capital between continents and across territorial borders. However, colonial and British authorities also sought to restrict the mobility of colonized subjects, including Somali nomads, traders, and seamen. While British and colonial administrators at times imagined Britishness in terms of a global imperial subjecthood, they also remained committed to an ethnic and racial understanding of African identity. As these tensions heightened in the interwar period, British officials began to erode the legal status of the Somali people.

IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP

Although they left various kinds of “ethnographic” traces, Somali travelers who arrived in Kenya in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced few written records themselves. Archival records contain Somali “voices,” but are often mediated through colonial discourses, which defined a limited terrain of communication. Postcolonial nationalism has so shaped contemporary testimony that it is also difficult to reconstruct the thinking of early generations of Somali immigrants through oral history alone. Many of my Isaaq and Harti interlocutors described their patriarchs as Kenya’s pioneers. Through proud, patriarchal narratives, second-, third-, and fourth-generation Somalis emphasized their long-standing roots in the country, highlighted their community’s contributions to Kenyan history, and countered widespread perceptions that they were “alien” to the country.

Given the fragmented nature of the historical record, it is difficult to determine how newly arrived Somali migrants conceptualized their relationship to British power and the locals living in East Africa. Studies of other immigrant communities nevertheless enable some tentative conclusions to be drawn. Throughout the nineteenth century, Indian traders, moneylenders, and laborers had flocked to East Africa—creating economic and political inroads for British colonialists.⁵ In addition, British officials initially toyed with the prospect that East Africa would become an “America for the Hindu.”⁶ In the late nineteenth century, it was not yet obvious that white settlers would come to occupy such a privileged place in Kenyan society.

Somalis from Kismayo, Aden, and British Somaliland (much like their Indian counterparts) may have seen the East African interior as a land of opportunity and themselves as purveyors of “civilization.” Over the course of the twentieth century, through various waves of immigration, vibrant Somali communities formed in towns and urban centers throughout the colony. Some assisted the British administration in “pacifying” the interior to make way for the Uganda-Mombasa railway. Others were veterans of early colonial military campaigns who relocated to Kenya after their service. Their numbers were later augmented by Somali veterans of the two World Wars. Protectorate officials relied on Somalis to serve as translators, while many white settlers recruited them to assist in establishing ranches and farms in the Rift Valley and fertile highlands of Kenya. Members of the Somali merchant class of Kismayo also migrated into the Northern Frontier District (NFD) as traders. Isaaq and Harti immigrants established small settlements along the railway and livestock routes.⁷

Somalis arrived in East Africa as a racial hierarchy was still taking shape. Bonds of intimacy with white settlers blurred the divide between colonizer and colonized, while never fully effacing the distinction. Lord Delamere and Karen Blixen cultivated close, personal relationships with members of their Somali staff, whom they allowed to reside on their farms along with their extended families and livestock. On several occasions, Delamere served as an advocate for Somali migrants from British Somaliland and Aden and petitioned colonial authorities on their behalf.⁸ Although Blixen viewed Europeans as the superior race, she also saw her Somali staff as relatively “civilized” people, noting their shared Abrahamic religious traditions.⁹

Settlers like Blixen fabricated ideas of civilization and whiteness through interaction with Somali employees, traders, and shopkeepers. Racial hierarchies did not simply emerge through legal fiat, but rather were constructed via the mundane, daily micropolitics of colonial life. According to some of my interlocutors, white settlers relied on Somali butchers because they considered the halal slaughtering process more hygienic than other local butchering practices.¹⁰ After the outbreak of the plague in the early 1900s, protectorate authorities began to enforce a system of racial segregation in Nairobi—at which point disease became intimately tied to “blackness” in the eyes of many Europeans.¹¹ Somali migrants, many of whom had taken up the role of livestock traders, tried to distance themselves from such associations. They continued to supply cattle to white ranchers in the Rift Valley and sold milk, meat, and other animal products to Indian and European clients.¹²

Proximity to whiteness generated an aspirational politics. Some Isaaq and Harti proudly referenced their relationships to now-famous figures like Blixen, which they also cited as evidence of their long-standing roots and contributions to the country. Hussein Nur suggested that I read Elspeth Huxley’s book about Lord Delamere in order to learn more about “their” history. His father was among the Somalis who had helped guide Delamere into the interior of East Africa.¹³ Speaking to me (a white foreigner), it is quite possible that people were more inclined to portray Europeans in a positive light. However, there was also a tacit acknowledgment that rapport with white settlers, though asymmetric, afforded Somali employees a certain elite status. The relationship between these two immigrant communities, nevertheless, grew increasingly tense as racial lines hardened over the early twentieth century and contests over land intensified. One man in Nanyuki recounted a story of a Somali man who, while out herding his cattle, killed a white farmer. The settler had brandished a gun and shot his animals, which had wandered onto the settler’s farm. A colonial judge gave the Somali herder a relatively lenient sentence on the basis of self-defense. This story conjures up a moment when power was briefly reversed and some measure of equality under British law was possible. It speaks to both a desire for British justice and a recognition of white settler violence and land expropriation.¹⁴

By the second decade of British rule, the protectorate administration had begun to work out a system of spatial and racial segregation in concert with white settlers and in consultation with the Colonial Office. Efforts to codify race and restrict African control over land spurred petitioning from many groups. This included Muslim populations, such as Swahili speakers on the coast, who did not want to lose political or economic ground by being consigned to the status of “natives.”¹⁵ Under threat of being removed from Nairobi ostensibly on the grounds of health and sanitation, Somali leaders began negotiations with the Colonial Office and protectorate authorities.¹⁶ They also petitioned against legislation that would classify them as natives.¹⁷ Having fulfilled many of the crucial economic and political demands of empire, Somalis who had served as guides, soldiers, translators, and porters were well positioned to make claims on the state and mobilize for a higher status within the emerging racial hierarchy.

Eventually, protectorate officials relented to their grievances. In 1919, the governor enacted special legislation exempting certified Somalis from the definition of “native” under certain ordinances.¹⁸ Technically, the exemption ordinance had strict qualifications. It required that recipients demonstrate the ability to read and write in either English or Arabic and verify that no fewer than three generations had lived in Asia.¹⁹ In practice, administrators were fairly liberal in applying this ordinance to the small minority of Somalis who were urban, comparatively wealthy, and could prove a history of government service. In addition, as one Somali elder humorously pointed out, the law applied to “anybody who looked like Somalis, who could pretend he is a Somali.”²⁰ The ordinance effectively gave the Isaaq and Harti many of the privileges of non-natives. Like the Asian community of Kenya, they could legally reside in the urban centers of the colony, access the special wards of hospitals, and enjoy greater rights to mobility. In addition, they paid higher non-native taxation rates. The Isaaq and Harti (and other similarly positioned Somali urbanites and veterans) were not only exempt from carrying a kipande (a pass card that restricted African movement), but some also possessed British passports for international travel.²¹

As Carina Ray argues, the color line was not static, but was “transgressed, contested and revised over time.”²² Many Somali migrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aspired for political equality with white settlers, Indians, and other African elites—members of the fairly narrow segment of Kenyan society who could access what Mamdani refers to as the civil side of the “bifurcated” colonial state.²³ The entrenchment of white privilege in Kenya, however, undercut more liberal models of imperial membership, which were less explicitly predicated on notions of racial purity. Somali urbanites and town dwellers navigated the construction of racial difference in a variety of ways, but often found the color line difficult to cross.

BETWEEN NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE

The distinction between “native” and “non-native,” which assumed an isomorphism between people, culture, and territory, became central to British colonial thought. Mahmood Mamdani has persuasively argued that protectorate and colonial authorities imagined most Africans as part of “tribes” who could be consigned to defined territories, represented through “native” institutions with limited jurisdictions, and whose spiritual and cultural practices could be confined to the sphere of “customary law.”²⁴ Historians such as James Brennan have qualified these arguments by noting that colonial administrators could not fully police the boundary between “native” and “non-native.” In practice, they used racial and ethnic ideas as convenient abstractions rather than rigid categories, for reasons of both bureaucratic expediency and economic necessity. Colonial racial thought was also internally contradictory (officials, for example, debated whether legal categories, such as non-native status, should be based on cultural or biological difference). Moreover, African subjects selectively appropriated and retooled colonial classifications.²⁵ While one must acknowledge the limits of colonial power, Mamdani’s thesis remains particularly relevant at the level of discourse. Legal debates over the status of the Somali population were increasingly structured through the binary distinction between native and non-native.

Although Isaaq and Harti Somalis were able to secure non-native privileges for themselves, their status was highly tenuous and provisional.²⁶ In 1920, the acting Crown counsel for the attorney general attempted to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the Somali Exemption Ordinance, whose implementation was subject to the discretion of local authorities. Noting that while Nairobi Township Rules had “no definition of the term ‘Native’ in connection with the issue of bicycle tickets,” it was “the practice of the municipal authorities to issue a differently shaped ticket for European, Asiatic, and African.”²⁷ Consequently, Somalis clamored for the “coveted diamond shaped ticket instead of the despised circular one.”²⁸ He joked: “This bicycle dispute is reminiscent of the old Court of Versailles where questions of precedence assumed such an importance that the Duke of St. Simon on coming into power, tells us the first important matter he dealt with was the question of the right of the dukes to wear their hats at a ‘Lit de justice’!”²⁹

This sardonic image of mimicry ignored the possible reasons for placing such weight on so seemingly trivial an issue. Colonialism encouraged a kind of fetishism of paperwork, which often granted its bearers important legal rights. In March 1920, the PC of Nyeri wrote of Somalis who had come into his office, thrown their Non-Native Poll Tax receipts on his office table, and complained “that the government had deceived them by issuing them Receipts marked” in pencil, as though the ease with which one could rub out pencil marks was analogous to the potential erasure of their status.³⁰ The 1920s and 1930s were marked by an enduring debate over paperwork, taxation, and other markers of legal status. Anxiety over losing these symbols illustrates how fragile Somalis perceived their position within Kenya to be, and shows that Somali subjects both participated in and subverted racial hierarchies.

Map 2.1. Colonial Kenya. (Note: This map shows Kenya’s international borders from 1926 to 1963. Though widely known as the Northern Frontier District [NFD] throughout the entirety of British rule, the region was formally renamed the Northern Province [NP] in 1925. Samburu District was separated from the NFD in 1934, and Turkana District was added in 1947 [after which the NP was technically known as the Northern Frontier Province].)

Although the Exemption Ordinance was a temporary provision, the administration never concretized the legal status of the Somali people. Benedict Anderson argues that state officials were notoriously intolerant “of multiple, politically ‘transvestite,’ blurred, or changing identifications.”³¹ Similarly, Homi Bhabha asserts that colonized subjects with hybrid identities threatened colonial power by destabilizing the line between ruler and ruled.³² Yet ambiguity could also be conducive to colonial power. As Talal Asad contends, radical critics are mistaken to assume “that power always abhors ambiguity”; rather, state authority “has depended on its exploiting the dangers and opportunities contained in ambiguous situations.”³³ Officials in Kenya appear to have ruled their “alien” Somali subjects in part by keeping their status undefined, ambiguous, and contestable. They could then selectively reward Somali soldiers and intermediaries without calling into question the broader logic of the color bar or creating a legal precedent that might hold implications for other colonies, regions, or other “ambiguous” populations, such as the Swahili.³⁴

NEW FORMS OF DIASPORA UNDER EMPIRE

Jonathon Glassman has recently argued that racism in Africa was a coproduction between Africans and European officials and has cautioned against underestimating “the role African thinkers played in the construction of race.”³⁵ While Isaaq and Harti political thinkers helped to perpetuate exclusionary politics by bringing their own notions of descent into dialogue with colonial conceptions of race and ethnicity, one must always be attentive to the power dynamics that shaped such claims. Colonial rule frequently set the terms of political debate, which encouraged African subjects to frame their demands for greater rights within a racialized language. Moreover, Somali articulations of their origins did not always align with colonial racial ideas. Common vocabularies could also eclipse diverse and often contrary meanings. What Somali leaders espoused was sometimes closer to a cultural chauvinism (similar to the beliefs of the more liberal contingent of British officials) than racism in the strictly biological sense.³⁶ In addition, their notions of descent and civilization often turned on understandings of culture and patrilineality that prized proximity to the wider Islamic world.

White settler memoirs are an important source of information on the racialized experiences of Somali town dwellers and urbanites. One of the most detailed windows comes from the writing of Karen Blixen, who arrived in Kenya in 1913 to establish a coffee plantation. Her famous memoir, Out of Africa, is replete with references to Farah Aden, a Somali employee whom she met in Aden. Farah Aden helped her establish her coffee plantation outside Nairobi and served as the steward of her household. Several passages of her book are also devoted to Farah Aden’s wife, who traveled from Somaliland escorted by family members after relatives arranged for their marriage.³⁷ According to oral testimony, this was common practice among Kenyan Somalis. Many left deposits with Indian moneylenders when they traveled back to British Somaliland, who then provided short-term loans to other Somalis. Some returned with wives whose unions had been facilitated by relatives abroad.³⁸ The circulation of marriageable women and money set the foundation for a diaspora. Alongside his wife and her relatives, who created a domestic sphere, Farah Aden was able to cultivate a home in a foreign place.

Blixen’s work exemplifies many of the racist assumptions of her contemporaries, but is also unique in that she cultivated a close relationship with elite women from Somaliland and gained a rare insight into their interior, domestic lives. Though her work is deeply exoticized, it would be a mistake to dismiss it offhand.³⁹ Carolyn Hamilton explains that the texts of white settlers and colonial officials often contain traces of indigenous discourses.⁴⁰ Blixen interpreted her findings through the cultural constructs of her era, but nevertheless drew upon the information provided by her Somali employees, some of whom she knew well. Fieldwork is a useful metaphor in this case. The result was a kind of contingent truth shaped by racialized power dynamics, but also influenced by close “participant-observation” and interactive discussions with her “informants.”

A woman who defied many of the gendered norms of white settler society, Blixen took a particular interest in the lives of Aden’s female relatives and occasionally recoded their voices into her own words. She notes, for instance, how Farah’s relatives confided in her their shock to learn “that some nations in Europe gave away their maidens to their husbands for nothing,” which they deemed profoundly disrespectful of women and their virginity.⁴¹ Denying the coevality of Africans, Blixen equated their “maidenly prudery” with an earlier phase of European development.⁴² This act of distancing also enabled Blixen to define herself as an ostensibly liberated white subject. Her description of this inverted ethnographic encounter, however, also suggests that women could exercise considerable authority, even within the constraints of patriarchy. Some elite Somali women may have seen marital monetary transactions not as an exchange that rendered them into “property,” but as a means of actualizing their worth, labor, and contributions to the household (a topic I will address in greater depth in chapter 6).

Blixen’s description of differing gendered restrictions regarding marriage also touches on an important aspect of Muslim life in East Africa.⁴³ Throughout the Indian Ocean region, groups privileged the idea of patrilineal descent and consanguinity with the prophet’s family. This tended to afford men greater sexual freedom than women. Engseng Ho, writing about the Hadrami diaspora, argues that genealogy frequently “turned on the control of the community’s women, especially daughters, and their marriage choices.”⁴⁴ Because lineage as well as an Islamic identification were typically traced through the paternal line, Somali men could take a non-Muslim East African wife with some guarantee that ideas of Somaliness would be reproduced in the subsequent generation and their children considered full-fledged members of the Somali (and Muslim) world. Genealogy allowed Somali men to become “locals” in Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, yet remain cosmopolitan in their outlook and connected to their Muslim kin elsewhere.⁴⁵

Such gendered norms, however, did not go uncontested. There is little doubt that Somalis debated the boundaries of exogamy and endogamy in the colonial era and that there were differences of opinion over marriage that likely fractured around gender and differing theological persuasions, among other issues. In Out of Africa, Blixen noted that some women flouted social restrictions on their behavior. She wrote that while “the honest Somali women were not seen in town,” there were at least “a few beautiful young Somali women, of whom all the town knew their names, who went and lived in the Bazaar and led the Nairobi Police a great dance.”⁴⁶ How these women positioned themselves within debates about purity, mobility, and miscegenation is unclear. Such issues were rarely discussed by my interlocutors, who tended to describe “immoral” female behavior as a modern vice caused by poverty and the erosion of traditional culture. (And perhaps also chose to avoid such sensitive topics with an outsider like myself.) Blixen’s brief, tantalizing comment gives us only the barest glimpse into these lifeworlds.

Despite their different ways of conceptualizing descent, Somalis, white settlers, and colonial officials shared many overlapping ideas. Both European and Somali women of this era, for example, faced added limitations on their sexuality, while men were more likely to be seen as entitled to sexual access to the “other.” At the same time, Indian Ocean Islamic discourses also differed from Western understandings of race in several key respects. Colonial authorities and settlers tended to think of descent as an inheritable, biological condition and race as a specifically scientific category. Western eugenicists had developed several diverse and often mutually incompatible ideas of race. One was the “pure race model,” in which the world’s populations were imagined to be descendants of three “original” racial strains (a theory derived from the pre-Darwinian biblical story of Noah).⁴⁷ Given the broad acceptance of men marrying non-Somali and non-Muslim African women, it is unlikely that Somalis subscribed to anything analogous to a biological notion of race or that they imagined themselves as “admixtures” of two or more “pure” racial types.

This is not to say that Somalis were unoccupied with fears of cultural loss through intermarriage (or that Somali men, like their European counterparts, were not anxious about female sexuality). During one interview, I was told about an incident in which several Isaaq subclans in Nairobi fought over women who had recently arrived from British Somaliland.⁴⁸ Public conversations about descent also became increasingly mediated through the racialized discourses of colonial rule. On more than one occasion, I was told that during a colonial trial to determine their legal status, Somali leaders brought forth the lightest-skinned members of their group in order to “prove” their foreign origins. In the 1940s, Somali leaders in Uganda professed to colonial authorities that they had not intermarried with local women and thus should not be relegated to the status of “natives.”⁴⁹ Ann Laura Stoler argues that racial difference in the colonial era was constituted through the management of intimate sexual relations.⁵⁰ By denying the practice of exogamy, which was clearly widespread, Somali leaders tried to better approximate colonial ideas of racial purity.

The ways that Somalis understood their descent did not quite map onto European racial categories. Yet Somali intermediaries and European settlers were able to form a mutually beneficial, if asymmetric, relationship around a set of similar ideas. These working misunderstandings enabled settlers and colonial officials to cultivate a new notion of Somaliness, which painted Somalis as a more civilized “race” within an imperial theater of territories.

To this day, intermarriage is a contentious topic of discussion. Although several elder Somali women explained that girls today have far more choice over whom they will marry, those who choose to wed “African” men continue to face stigma. Many people also debated the degree to which past generations had intermarried with East Africans, and often my interviewees provided me with contradictory information. Some argued that the Isaaq preserved their cultural distinctiveness by not intermarrying with locals, instead bringing marriageable women from British Somaliland.⁵¹ Others emphasized that the Isaaq were more “flexible” and open to other Kenyans precisely because they had intermarried with locals over the years. These debates refract contemporary anxieties over assimilation and belonging and reveal how the specter of colonial-era racism continues to haunt social relations in East Africa.

One of the unintended consequences of British rule was to enable Isaaq and Harti voyagers to travel, expand their diaspora, and establish a range of fidelities to communities across the region. Endogamy enforced through restrictions on female sexuality very likely provided (and continues to provide) one of the most important countermeasures against deracination. Robin Cohen points out that diasporic consciousness is not a natural outcome of migration or cultural difference. Rather, diasporas unfold over time and require “a strong attachment to the past, or a block to assimilation in the present and future.”⁵² A much romanticized watchword of the late modern era, the term “diaspora” risks normalizing the idea of a fixed territorial homeland and, for this reason, may not be entirely fitting for Somali migrants in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, emigrants from British Somaliland, Aden, and Kismayo were able to develop a consciousness as a dispersed and translocal people. This was in no small measure due to the racially enforced colonial order. Attaining the privileges of non-native status allowed them to travel and maintain links to their kin abroad. Like white settlers and British colonialists, Somali urbanites also retained a public identity distinct from that of other African populations. British passports from the colonial era, which many children and grandchildren proudly held on to as memorabilia, were testament to this status and freedom of movement.⁵³

In 1920, Somali leaders formed the Ishakia Association, which also facilitated the reproduction of this group identity.⁵⁴ Oral testimony suggests that the Ishakia Association probably began as a welfare society. According to Duthi Jama, the women’s branch required monthly contributions from its members and provided a fund in cases of emergency or death.⁵⁵ Ege Musa, one of the few Kenyan Somalis literate in English, became its president in the 1930s.⁵⁶ According to one of my interlocutors who knew him well, Ege Musa was a well-traveled and worldly individual. Born in British Somaliland and raised in Aden, he took a position on a ship in 1889. After traveling the world, he settled in Durban and worked at a hotel run by two European women, through which he acquired an education in English. Musa parlayed this experience into a position serving as an English-Somali translator for the Kenya colonial government. Once settled in Kenya, he married a woman from British Somaliland.⁵⁷ By traveling throughout the empire, becoming proficient in English, and joining the Somali community in Kenya, Musa embodied a unique cosmopolitanism that owed itself to both British colonialism and the regional practices of Northeast Africa.

Had he stayed in South Africa, his children may not have retained the same relationship with the wider Somali community. Many Isaaq and Harti people juxtaposed themselves with the Somalis who had settled in South Africa, whom they claimed did not “maintain their culture.”⁵⁸ There is reason to be somewhat skeptical of assertions of this nature. Claims to have resisted assimilation were often ways for my interlocutors, as James Clifford puts it, to “stage authenticity in opposition to external, often dominating alternatives.”⁵⁹ In addition, I was unable to speak to those who had assimilated into Kenya and had lost their identity as “Somalis”—thus becoming invisible to my methods of identifying “representative” members of the community.

While many colonial officials and settlers saw Isaaq and Harti subjects as a “hybrid” people—who disturbed the line between settler and native—it is much harder to unearth how Somalis of this era conceptualized ideas of “localness,” “mixture,” and cosmopolitanism. Did Somali immigrants to Kenya understand themselves as people somehow in between cultures? Through what vernacular terms did they debate who was local and foreign, who was uprooted and worldly, and who had lost and who had retained their “culture”? Not all pasts are recoverable, and some questions cannot be answered through a fragmented historical record. What is clear, however, is that claiming non-native status was about more than positioning oneself in a vertical racial hierarchy. It also allowed members of the Somali community to maintain horizontal solidarities that cut across colonial boundaries.

THE TENSIONS OF EMPIRE

Economic circuits had brought the Isaaq and the Harti to far-flung territories, where they fell under the jurisdiction of different legal orders. Perceived to be “out of place” in the various territories in which they settled, Somalis were often the locus of contention over racial boundaries. Battles over racial definitions in the colonies also held implications for the meaning of Britishness in the metropole. The very racialized structures that enabled Somali migrants to occupy a comparatively privileged status in East Africa relegated them to the margins of British society. Race was at the center of the making of metropolitan Britain and the capitalist structures that sustained it.

Somali sailors had been living in London, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and other English port cities since the nineteenth century, when they had first arrived on European merchant ships.⁶⁰ Ostensibly, as emigrants from territories under the sovereignty of the British Crown, they enjoyed formal equality with all other British subjects.⁶¹ In practice, the British government created a tiered citizenship based upon the perceived “whiteness” of their imperial subjects. Moreover, many Somalis were considered protected persons rather than British subjects, since British Somaliland was technically a protectorate, not a colony. While this distinction was often negligible in practice, emigrants from protectorates enjoyed fewer rights and were subject to stricter labor and deportation laws than those from other parts of the empire. Inhabitants of Somaliland who lawfully immigrated to the United Kingdom were defined as aliens.

World War I drew European nations and their colonial subjects ever closer, even as it tested the limits of imperial promises of equality. During the interwar period, the British state took steps to restrict further emigration from the colonies, and deported many of the seamen and munitions workers who had come to England and Wales during the war. After race riots broke out in 1919, the Home Office enacted several pieces of racially discriminatory legislation, including the Aliens Order (1920) and the Coloured Alien Seamen Order (1925). The latter was used, as Kathleen Paul argues, “to harass all ‘coloured seamen,’ ‘aliens and British subjects mixed,’ and to prevent as many as possible from settling in the United Kingdom.”⁶² Such legislation was motivated by fear that uncontrolled migration would entrench a black, urbanized underclass in the heart of European cities, who could claim unemployment benefits, jobs occupied by the white working class, and blur the boundary between black and white. Many colonial subjects, including those who had worked and sacrificed on behalf of the Crown, were denied hospitality within the country.

There has been much theorizing as to why internal difference has so often become the locus of intolerance within otherwise liberal nation-states.⁶³ Part of the answer may lie in the fact that many European nation-states made themselves and their sense of national identity through their expansion and colonization overseas.⁶⁴ Discovering the “other” at home eroded the ability to maintain the separation between colonizer and colonized. Alien Somalis were, to reappropriate Mae Ngai’s elegant expression, a kind of “impossible subject,” “at once welcome and unwelcome.”⁶⁵ They personified many of the key tensions within the imperial political economy, which depended upon colonial labor in various forms.⁶⁶

Government officials in the United Kingdom frequently worked out ideas of race at home, in close collaboration with the Colonial and Foreign Offices. Racial difference was also fashioned through dialogue across different colonial territories. Although the color bar was global in scope, protectorate and colonial regimes often defined and enforced legal hierarchies differently, which was sometimes a cause for concern. In 1926, Sir Harold Kittermaster, governor of British Somaliland (and formerly officer in charge of the NFD), informed locals at a meeting at Burao in British Somaliland that “it is to Swahilis that” the Somalis “are properly comparable,” not Indians or Arabs.⁶⁷ Kittermaster warned his colleagues: “There is frequent interchange of Somali residents in Nairobi with their homes here, and they maintain their roots here even after years of absence. To give them a status in Kenya so different from what they must have here would tend greatly to embarrass the administration of this Protectorate.”⁶⁸ The Swahili occupied a similar “awkward position” as the Somali, “having neither a recognized African ‘tribal’ identity nor the higher legal status of Non-Native.”⁶⁹ Irrevocably “impure,” they, too, were part of a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean world whose elements did not conform to the cultural “wholes” to which colonial authorities imagined their subjects belonged.

Although the Isaaq and the Harti had managed to attain many of the rights of Asians within Kenya, colonial authorities were wary of creating any legal precedents that might have empire-wide ramifications. Consequently, officials in Kenya lacked a consistent vocabulary for classifying the Isaaq and the Harti, whom they alternatively labeled “Natives,” “Arabs,” and, in some cases, “Asiatics.”⁷⁰ The label “Asiatic” was especially fraught, and in many ways reflected the fundamental ambiguities of colonial racial thought. Before World War II, European cartographers often lumped the Arabian Peninsula with “Western Asia”—a geographic concept eventually displaced by the term “Middle East.”⁷¹ While it was typically “used to describe people from South Asia,” as James Brennan notes, the terms “Asian” and “Asiatic” “were also shifting legal and political terms that sometimes, but not always, joined Arabs and Indians together, and sometimes Chinese as well.”⁷² In addition, many Isaaq had originated from Aden, whose inhabitants were subjects of British India until 1937.⁷³ Competing definitions of indigenousness further complicated their legal status.⁷⁴ However, it also opened the door for Somalis to self-fashion by stretching the boundaries and definitions of what it meant to be native.⁷⁵

PASTORAL MODES OF TERRITORIAL GOVERNANCE

Though in ways quite distinct from Somali town dwellers, nomadic populations in the north of Kenya also challenged a certain colonial imagination of indigenousness. For the first two decades of protectorate rule, authorities did not so much administer the north as attempt to suppress the southward migration of nomadic peoples. After ceding Jubaland to Italy in 1925 in exchange for its participation in World War I, the colonial government placed the NFD under civilian control and declared it a closed district—movement in and out of which was restricted to holders of a special pass (see map 2.1).⁷⁶ Protectorate and colonial officials came to see northern nomads as part of a physical and metaphorical frontier, situated on the margins of “civilization.” One of the ways in which the colonial government cultivated an image of British “order” was by projecting an idea of anarchy onto the north.⁷⁷

The nature of British rule in the NFD can be examined through the colonial archives, which provide selective vestiges of the working operations of power, as well as the ways in which colonial authorities authorized and rationalized that power. There are significant limits to how creatively or subversively these written records can be read.⁷⁸ Archival records homogenize the passing of time during the colonial era—transforming the history of the north into a recurring, self-fulfilling debate over borders, administrative control, and registration efforts.

Using the archives alone, it is very difficult to reconstruct the practices and beliefs that we anachronistically call “religion.”⁷⁹ To come to “know” and govern their subjects, authorities had to parse which streams of “local” knowledge were serviceable to empire.⁸⁰ Many important aspects of Somali and northern life, including Islamic spiritual practices, were often ignored. In 1929, the district commissioner (DC) of Bura District, M. R. Mahony, wrote a report in which he dismissively described the Somali as “a fanatical Mohamedan though ignorant of the true tenets of Islam.”⁸¹ In his mind, Somalis were both more fervent and less orthodox than their Muslim counterparts on the coast. The “majority are illiterate,” he noted, and the “bush Sheiks and Sheriffs have only learnt to recite, read, and laboriously write a few of the better known texts from the Koran.”⁸² Like many Orientalist thinkers of his era, he treated literate Muslims and “Arab” Islam as more authentic and narrowly defined Islamic orthodoxy as textual. In general, colonial officials delved into Somali spiritual practices only when they believed a particular religious thinker or practice might cause discord or held some kind of threatening potential.⁸³ Religious practices largely escaped the colonial gaze and, as a consequence, assemblage within the archives. These silences, however, should not be equated with irrelevancy.⁸⁴

Historians will, however, find no shortage of sophisticated clan charts or intricate genealogical histories in the archives. Officials took an almost obsessive interest in clans and produced a veritable corpus of anthropological material.⁸⁵ Preferring to govern through “chiefly” leaders, most colonial officials did not interfere in the religious life of northerners—a policy that also facilitated the broader depoliticization of Islamic thought and practice. In the eyes of most colonial officials, Islam was a belief system that should be confined to the sphere of “customary law.”

Nevertheless, local administrators could never fully disregard Islamic identification or patterns of conversion. In 1929, Mahony complained that the “bar to peaceful intermixture between Galla and Somali is only religion,” and they otherwise “intermarry freely,” and “no gazetting or delimiting of grazing areas will prevent” this.⁸⁶ As the previous chapter has shown, gaal was not an “ethnic” designation, but rather a derogatory label in local vernaculars for a non-Muslim.⁸⁷ Nevertheless, colonial officials recoded the distinction between gaal and Somali into ethnoterritorial terms. They also created and loosely enforced a border that cut across the NFD, known as the Somali-Galla line, which each group was ostensibly prohibited from crossing.⁸⁸ Reading local categories through the epistemology of clan, colonial officials often overlooked the links that cut across collectivities.

Throughout the colony, officials struggled to police mobility and give their subjects singular and unambiguous ethnic labels.⁸⁹ These difficulties were nevertheless compounded on the borderlands of the NFD. Islamic claims to universality and practices of conversion challenged colonial efforts to neatly demarcate clan and ethnic boundaries. In addition, nomadic populations defied what Liisa Malkki refers to as the sedentarist metaphysics of the modern state.⁹⁰ Local administrators were beset by the anxiety of indeterminacy—the fear that the Somali were “really” Borana, that one lineage comprised sheegat who “originally” belonged to a different clan, or that Italian or Ethiopian subjects might be “passing” as British. Groups traversed international and regional frontiers in order to use dry season wells, return to their historic grazing lands, visit leaders and kin, or evade government requirements such as taxation and military recruitment.⁹¹ Northerners also crossed borders for spiritual reasons—whether to attend the hajj or make pilgrimages to spiritually significant gravesites, join a zawiya (Islamic settlement), or pursue a religious education.⁹² In addition, the differential price regimes of the Italian, British, and Ethiopian governments allowed a vibrant cross-border economy in livestock, guns, and ivory to thrive.⁹³

Unable to control movement across the porous international frontiers, the administration resigned hope of rendering northerners into countable “populations,” issuing identity cards, or drawing up definitive maps of ethnic “homelands.” In 1930, F. G. Jennings, the DC of Wajir, argued that a census would be both unpopular and expensive to complete, and, “further it would serve no useful purpose so long as the Somali adopts the attitude of moving over the boundary into Italian territory at will.”⁹⁴ Colonial officials were frequently far more concerned with enforcing some semblance of state control than with rendering their subjects “legible.”⁹⁵ In Wajir, local authorities were unable to create ethnic homelands and instead divided the wells in the district between the major clans. This approach, as Schlee notes, was a precolonial governance strategy common among the Borana.⁹⁶ Capitulating to nomadic patterns of transhumance, beleaguered administrators developed techniques that had far more continuity with precolonial practices of governance than with Weberian ideals of bureaucracy.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the administration worked out a hybrid form of sovereignty that blended territorial governance with nomadic forms of mobility.⁹⁷ One might be tempted to portray colonial power as weak, incapable (as Jeffrey Herbst suggests) of broadcasting its power across this arid, northern expanse.⁹⁸ Yet conceding to nomadic practices and cultivating an image of the north as “ungovernable” proved to be commensurate with broader colonial goals. Eschewing assumptions that governments seek only to inhibit their subjects’ movement, Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk argue that “mobility makes states.”⁹⁹ In defining certain kinds of movement as a problem, colonial officials worked out ideas concerning the reach and scope of their own authority. Administrators often recoded their failures as new strategies of governance—reframing Somali and Borana initiatives in terms decipherable to administrative logic. Such an approach enabled officials to justify the financial and administrative neglect of the region, naturalize its isolation from the rest of the colony, and keep governance in the NFD as cost-effective as possible. It also allowed for overlapping notions of sovereignty, space, and authority to flourish on the borderlands of the state.

THE SOMALI “EL DORADO”

The British Empire brought Somalis from diverse lineages and lands together under a single territory. Mobile and spatially dispersed, both the nomadic populations in the NFD and the “detribalized” urban traders living in Nairobi disrupted colonial efforts to police spatial and racial boundaries. Segregationist policies, however, always existed in tension with the needs of the colonial economy, which was dependent upon the mobility of Africans, including Somali traders.¹⁰⁰ Managing this tension was key to the colonial project.

By the early 1920s, a tenuous project of racial segregation was taking shape in Kenya’s capital. In 1921, the colonial government gazetted the township of Eastleigh. Though technically reserved exclusively for Indian residence, Eastleigh incorporated several neighborhoods already inhabited by Somalis. Failure to invest funds in maintaining the area deterred wealthier and higher-caste Indians from settling there. Somalis from Ngara (and, later, veterans of World War II) also moved into the neighborhood, where they lived alongside Goans, Indians, and Seychelloise.¹⁰¹ The creation of Eastleigh was part of a much larger, colony-wide process of land alienation and racial segregation, which developed in tandem with the commercial economy.

Eastleigh embodied many of the contradictions of the migrant labor system. Colonial authorities enforced racial segregation by, in part, naturalizing the idea that Africans belonged in rural areas. The urban economy, however, was predicated upon the exploitation of African laborers, many of whom had been forced onto their supposedly “traditional” homelands.¹⁰² Soon after its establishment, Africans from the countryside took up residency in Eastleigh, since (unlike squatter residences that lacked legitimacy) the police “did not enter houses” in the neighborhood “searching for illegal residents.”¹⁰³ Somali traders in Nairobi also troubled colonial ideas of spatial and racial order by maintaining a circulation of livestock between rural areas and the city. Elder Somalis wistfully recalled that Eastleigh and the Nairobi Commonage had once had ample grazing land, on which their community used to pasture their animals.¹⁰⁴

Many of the tensions of the migrant labor system were mirrored in the colonial livestock economy, which also unsettled the line between urban and rural (a distinction central to colonial projects of segregation and visions of modernization). Recognizing their skills as livestock brokers, colonial administrators had given Somali and Arab traders special permits to enter the NFD, move across tribal grazing boundaries, and bring restricted numbers of livestock from the north into the rest of the colony. Unlike nomadic inhabitants, who were largely barred from settling in town, these “alien” traders were allowed to own commercial plots in the townships of the north.¹⁰⁵ Somali traders provided pastoralists with cash to pay colonial taxes and enabled animals from the north to be circulated into the commercial livestock economy. These policies ensured that nomadic populations were confined to the north, excluded from southern grazing land, and barred from competing with white ranchers.¹⁰⁶ Livestock smuggled in by Somali traders also served as foundation stock for white ranchers, and were essential to African squatters, who provided inexpensive labor on white commercial farms.¹⁰⁷

Gradually, Somali traders began to accumulate animals along the stock routes in towns as dispersed as Rumuruti, Naivasha, Gilgil, and Kitale, where they came into conflict with white settlers (see map 2.1). Their trading and residence privileges also enabled them to take advantage of the illegal poaching and game trade, transgress quarantine regulations, and covertly bring animals into African native reserves.¹⁰⁸ By moving onto land speculated by white farmers and ranchers and amassing “so great an accumulation of stock,” Somali traders became a threat to white interests and supremacy.¹⁰⁹ Conceptual and political categories were also at stake.

This issue reached a head in the mid-1920s, when settlers demanded the forced removal of Somalis living and grazing animals on white farms and Crown land in Laikipia.¹¹⁰ In 1924, the resident commissioner of Rumuruti complained of former Somali traders:

who have settled down by permission of the farmers themselves on payment of grazing fees, and are now beginning to breed stock in competition with Europeans. . . . They are responsible for cattle running, they are continually in trouble with their Kikuyu herdsmen, and the danger of infecting the District with cattle diseases is great.¹¹¹

Portraying Somalis as encroachers and parasites on the land ignored the pivotal role they had played in establishing the white farms and townships of Central Kenya and the Rift Valley.

Officials found a solution in the underutilized livestock quarantine of Isiolo, which had been created when the government envisioned a large livestock trade from the NFD. Throughout the 1920s, the administration compelled Somalis in many of the townships, including Rumuruti, to sell their cattle or move onto the Isiolo quarantine.¹¹² Although the quarantine had once been home to the Samburu, who had been removed by the colonial state, administrators redefined the area as the primary, if not official, homeland of the “alien” Somali.¹¹³ Notions of who was “native” were continually unmade and remade. Even as they alienated land, however, colonial officials could not fully efface memories of prior occupancy—memories that would later generate an array of competing land claims.¹¹⁴

In moving Isaaq and Harti traders and their families onto the Isiolo leasehold, the colonial regime hoped to govern them more effectively as a “tribe.” This desire for administrative order, however, was undercut by paranoia about the dispersed and unregulated nature of Somali kinship networks. Fearful of encouraging overpopulation and overgrazing, the administration decided to reserve Isiolo solely for those who had a long history of military or colonial service.¹¹⁵ They also stopped short of creating a formal native reserve. In its 1934 report, the Kenya Land Commission (KLC) cited an ominous warning from the district commissioner of Isiolo. A few years earlier, he had cautioned that “Kenya is regarded by the Northern Somali as an El Dorado” and that if “infiltration from Northern Somaliland” was not controlled, “the area set apart for the Somalis would” prove “insufficient, and the Somalis, having obtained political rights and power, would then again demand consideration of their claims.”¹¹⁶ For the next thirty years, as colonial officials debated the status of the Isiolo leasehold, they constantly cited this passage—projecting fears that any attempt to codify Somali rights to the land would open a floodgate of immigration into this “El Dorado.”¹¹⁷ Colonial authorities worked to ensure that tenure rights in Isiolo remained tenuous and that no legal precedent would be set that could grant Somalis permanent rights to the area.

To restrict migration onto the Isiolo leasehold, officials kept a register of legal residents and required that visitors carry passes. Abdullahi Elmi and Hassan Good, two Somali residents of Isiolo, explained that Isaaq and Harti residents would occasionally skirt these measures, especially when it came to hiring Turkana herdsmen.¹¹⁸ Nevertheless, Isiolo inhabitants were often complicit in the enforcement of segregation. Some of the people I spoke to recalled the colonial period as a time when they were ensured access to land, and “outsiders” were kept at bay by colonial powers. What emerged was a fairly workable compromise among Somali veterans, their kin, and colonial officials, who had shared desires to keep the land exclusive. The fact that colonial administrators and Somali town dwellers conceptualized the idea of the “stranger” differently did not preclude the possibility for negotiation and agreement.

Colonial policies in Isiolo had deep implications as they established legal and historical precedents for rights to land. Today, people from five major groups share and are making claims to Isiolo District. According to Saafo Roba Boye and Randi Kaarhus, “These claims seek legitimacy through reference to historical processes, to first-comer status and to former governments’ decisions, to citizenship dues, as well as to ‘tribal’ group rights.”¹¹⁹ Many Somali residents argued that the colonial government had given them the area as a reward for their military service.¹²⁰ At the same time, residents often obscured the participation of their predecessors in colonial policies of segregation.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE COLOR BAR UNDER EMPIRE

Denied definitive non-native status as well as full recognition as “natives,” Isaaq and Harti Somalis had only provisional access to legal rights. By the 1930s, their legal status was coming into crisis. To some extent, this was the result of fundamental tensions within the imperial political economy. On one hand, the British Empire created globally interconnected economies, disseminated a universalizing vision of “civilization,” and provided a language of civil rights linked to British subject status. On the other, colonial regimes remained committed to the belief in a racial and ethnic core to group identity, both by extrapolation from Englishness and as a practical consequence of indirect rule.¹²¹

In the early 1930s, British authorities throughout the empire began to debate how best to shore up the racial order and define the limits of civil rights. A relatively obscure court case in 1929, which involved a “half-caste” in Nyasaland, triggered a much larger debate between the Colonial Office and colonial regimes throughout Africa over the definition of the term “native” and the legal rights of Westernized Africans and “mixed-race” subjects.¹²² British authorities may have been working out ideas of race in the colonies in order to allay anxieties and resolve similar questions at home. The Great Depression heightened debates over the color bar, which was already destabilized by the spread of Western education and the recruitment of soldiers from the colonies during World War I. In 1930, the National Union of Seamen in the United Kingdom, in collaboration with the Shipping Federation, instituted a rota system that restricted the employment of Muslim seamen, most of whom came from Yemen and Somaliland.¹²³ As competition for working-class jobs in the UK intensified, many of the racially charged issues of the past were reignited.

Empire had facilitated the spread of Muslim communities, which offered colonial subjects an alternative form of global membership and a means of mobilizing outside the narrow confines of the color bar. An example can be found in the figure of Lt. Abdullah Cardell-Ryan, a Muslim convert of Irish origin. Having served in Africa and the Red Sea, the lieutenant had taken a personal interest in the welfare of veterans from British Somaliland. Hailing from a land that had also been subject to English colonization, perhaps he felt a special affinity for the plight of his fellow Muslims. Somali veterans likely turned to him in the hope of gaining the ear of the British administration. In response to the discriminatory measures of the Shipping Federation, Cardell-Ryan petitioned the secretary of state for the colonies. In his letter, he protested against the boycott of loyal Somali stokers who had fought in World War I and dismissed the economic rationale for the rota system.¹²⁴ He also complained that the distinction between protectorate and colony was so dubious that few Somalis anticipated being labeled “protected Subjects (whatever that may mean)” upon arrival in England.¹²⁵ Oral and written testimony suggests that many Somali sailors and soldiers considered the distinction between “subject” and “protected person” irrelevant. Having fought on behalf of the Crown, Somali veterans became wedded to the idea of being British subjects and often referred to themselves as “British Somalis.”¹²⁶

Rather than privilege a narrower racialist view that entitled only Europeans to work and reside in the United Kingdom, colonized subjects living and working in the UK argued that the British government should hold true to the tenets of imperial citizenship. Somalis faced an imperial power that, under varying circumstances, favored two incompatible ideas of citizenship: one founded on ideas of racial difference; and another based upon service and loyalty to the Crown. To forestall deportation, many Muslim activists in the UK appealed to the latter concept, highlighting the sacrifice involved in military service. In September 1934, Abdul Majid, who had founded the Islamic Society, wrote to the undersecretary of state for the colonies to protest the proposed deportation of three Somalis, saying: “A great many of such ‘Aliens’ both from India and African Crown Colonies served with great loyalty to the British Crown in the Great War. . . . They wish to be treated in exactly the same way as British born subjects.”¹²⁷ Figures such as Majid, an Indian barrister, and Cardell-Ryan reveal the possibilities for multiracial and cross-class alliances among Muslims.¹²⁸ Despite their efforts, however, the British government implemented few reforms to anti-immigrant legislation during the interwar period.

While Somalis in the United Kingdom sought to diminish the significance of the color bar, those living in the colonies often took actions that reinforced its importance. Panracial and Islamic solidarity existed in tandem with discourses of racial difference. In the colonies, where promises of a universalizing imperial citizenship rang especially hollow, Somali leaders often highlighted their putative foreign descent.

In the 1930s, Somali and Arab representatives fought against colonial efforts to erode their legal status.¹²⁹ In 1930, leaders of the “Ishaak Shariff Community” wrote to King George V with a list of grievances, among which was the denial of access to the special Asian wards of Nairobi’s hospitals, inequitable treatment in regard to the livestock trade, and lack of political representation. The authors of the petition described themselves as a community “of Asiatic origin and extraction” who were “emigrants of Aden and Southern Arabia” and “Ishaakian Arabs Shariff.”¹³⁰ In 1932, Isaaq leaders—referring to themselves as “Arabs”—once again petitioned the Kenyan government after being barred from entry into the Asian wards of hospitals.¹³¹

These demands took on greater urgency by the end of the decade. In 1937, in an effort to increase the revenue stream, the Kenyan governor implemented a new ordinance that revised the existing taxation system for non-natives. The Non-Native Poll Tax Ordinance introduced a sliding scale for Europeans, Asians, and “other” non-natives. “Others” were defined as Arabs, Swahilis, and Somalis. Presumably, the division between Swahili, Arab, and Somali was too tenuous for the colonial regime to maintain on a legal register. This new legislation also reduced Somali tax obligations from thirty to twenty shillings.¹³²

Out of fear that tendering a lowered tax would lessen their privileges, many Isaaq and Harti Somalis began petitioning the colonial government and—in an unusual reversal of typical forms of tax resistance—demanded to pay the higher, Asian rate of thirty shillings. The community also mobilized around the Ishakia Association, contending that their community was distinct from other “native” Somalis. Due to their comparative wealth, their history of colonial service, their discrete genealogy, and their long-standing connections with the Arab world, the Isaaq were uniquely positioned to protest against the new tax ordinance. In 1937, the secretary of the British Ishak community wrote to the secretary of state for the colonies to explain:

While the definition of a “Native” might appropriately be applied to a majority of the Somalis who have migrated into this Colony from Italian or French Somaliland or other territories, the British Ishak Community is unquestionably distinct from all such Somalis. They are no more Somalis by reason of their long residence in Aden or other parts of British Somaliland than Indians or Europeans could be called Africans because they have lived for generations in various parts of Africa.¹³³

The secretary of the Ishakia community glossed over more complex questions of intermarriage and cultural assimilation and portrayed the Isaaq as foreign migrants on the continent. He also rehearsed the common Western stereotype that saw Africans as rooted in their “native” soil and “civilized” people as more capacious and rootless.

Despite their relatively small numbers (there were no more than a few thousand Isaaq in the colony as a whole), administrators refused to concede to their demands.¹³⁴ They feared that granting the Isaaq Asiatic status would open the door for all Somalis throughout Kenya and other colonies to claim similar rights. In 1939, Reece cautioned: “There is some evidence that they have already tried to interfere with the Samburu destocking scheme, and to encourage Ogaden Somalis in the Northern Frontier to start a demand for their own non-native status.”¹³⁵ Richard G. Turnbull, the DC of Isiolo, noted that “the Darod Somalis are watching the situation with interest and would, I consider, join the Ishaak agitation provided they could find a strong leader.”¹³⁶

It goes without saying that the distinction between “Isaaq” and other Somalis was tenuous at best. Much like race, the abstractness of lineage also made it “effective”—“it is not easily susceptible to empirical disproof, and it can coexist with social relations that belie the premises of different” models of kinship.¹³⁷ Moreover, it could be traced in multiple ways. The Isaaq had intermarried with fellow Harti immigrants, members of local communities, and Somalis living in the NFD—rendering the line between one lineage and another (as well as between “native” and “non-native”) dubious.¹³⁸ Yet it is often when social and cultural boundaries are the most ambiguous that leaders mobilize to defend them.¹³⁹ In order to better position themselves within the racial binaries of colonial thought, Isaaq leaders mobilized around a particular genealogical imaginary.

The poll-tax campaign led to various shifts in rhetorical strategies. Not only did Isaaq representatives (at least within colonial petitions) distance themselves from the term “Somali”; they also began to shed the label “Arab,” which no longer offered them elevated privileges under the new tax legislation. In 1938, in a petition to the colonial secretary, the “Elders of the British Shariff Ishak Community of Kenya Colony” maintained that they “can neither be classified as Arabs or Somalis. Your Petitioners’ Community are a race of Asiatic Origin.”¹⁴⁰ Isaaq leaders toyed with the ambiguity of the term “Asiatic,” which colonial authorities had used, often inconsistently, as a legal, geographic, and racial category. Such tactics, as Christopher Lee notes, represented “a kind of folk racism that only oppression could conceive.”¹⁴¹ They also suggest that African subjects did not always internalize the continental theory of race introduced by colonial rule.

In the 1980s, Africanist historians began to interpret cases of this nature as “inventions of tribalism.”¹⁴² More recently, scholars have highlighted the “agency” of Africans engaged in a kind of “auto-ethnography”—capable of appropriating the colonizer’s terms for their own purposes.¹⁴³ These paradigms helped to dismantle rigid, primordialist views of ethnicity. However, they also tended to overstate the reach of colonial power and the centrality of colonial categories, while collapsing the arguments that African elites made about race with underlying social structures and “identities.”¹⁴⁴ Moreover, the term “invention” can appear derogative from the point of view of those struggling to prove the validity of their origins and entitlements. The officer in charge of the NFD, Gerald Reece, for example, dismissed the name Ishakia as a mere fabrication: “They have decided to abandon their name of Somali and to call themselves Ishakia—a word which I presume they have themselves invented.”¹⁴⁵ Seeking to naturalize and legitimize categories of identity, political thinkers have often treated changes in identification as discoveries rather than inventions.¹⁴⁶

The ways that groups reorient themselves toward the past (and future), as Talal Asad argues, is “more complex than the notion of ‘invented tradition’ allows.”¹⁴⁷ First, one must consider the role of the archive in shaping the kinds of knowledge available for historical reconstruction. James Clifford notes that while colonial subjects wrote to European authorities, “their voices were adapted to an imposed context” aimed at addressing “white authorities and legal structures.”¹⁴⁸ For this reason, it is difficult to determine whether labels such as “Asiatic” ever became popular or folk categories. Second, the efforts of Somali leaders should not be seen as full-fledged appropriations of colonial racial thought. In the case of the Isaaq, newer vocabularies, like “race” and “civilization,” were linked to older concepts, such as qabiil and shariif. As Muslims and imperial subjects, many Somali elites conceived of themselves as members of a “civilized” world linked to both imperial geographies and Islamic notions of the Dar al-Islam. In addition, it would be reductive to see petitions of this nature as simply rational pursuits of greater social and economic gain, as some scholars have suggested.¹⁴⁹ Rather, these strategies reflected broader discursive shifts as well as a desire for the constellation of rights and concepts that had come to be associated with “non-native” status.

That Isaaq leaders would reject both their indigenous roots is an uncomfortable reminder that many Africans participated in the segregated colonial order. However, it also shows that empire provided a powerful language for demanding greater civil rights.¹⁵⁰ As oppressive as the color bar undoubtedly was, it made global inequalities explicit and political.¹⁵¹ If properly connected, racialized discourses could also become a powerful tool of redress. Unlike the majority of “native” subjects, Somali leaders could acquire the items of bourgeois political legitimacy and access what Mamdani refers to as the civil side of the bifurcated colonial state. This was the face of the state that “governed a racially defined citizenry” and “was bounded by the rule of law and associated regime of rights.”¹⁵² They were able to hire British lawyers, who sent letters on their behalf directly to the secretary of state for the colonies and King George VI.¹⁵³ Isaaq representatives in Kenya were also able to turn to their kin abroad in order to bypass lower-ranking officials and “internationalize their struggle for Asian status and rights.”¹⁵⁴ They appointed Haji Farah Omar, a prominent anticolonial nationalist, to serve as their representative in British Somaliland and petitioned the Duke of Gloucester through a local agent during his visit to the protectorate. In addition, they selected Abby Farah as their representative in London and requested that he hire a solicitor to represent their interests before the Colonial Office.¹⁵⁵

The goals of alien Somali leaders in Kenya converged, as E. R. Turton notes, “with the interests of their brethren in British Somaliland.”¹⁵⁶ At the same time as the poll-tax campaign in Kenya, religious and political leaders in Somaliland were resisting British attempts to implement a school curriculum that would include Somali written in the Roman, rather than Arabic, script. Opponents of the curriculum—which included Haji Omar and several Qadiriyya sheikhs—feared that rendering their language decipherable to European powers would reduce them to a “Bantu” people and enable the protectorate government to implement a system of registration and direct taxation. They were also concerned that the new curriculum would undermine the authority of religious leaders and hasten Christian proselytizing by allowing for the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. Rumors circulated that the director of education was a priest in disguise.¹⁵⁷

To some extent, the campaign against a Latin script can be understood within an instrumentalist framework—as an effort to avoid taxation, registration, and a reduction in status. Nevertheless, this conflict also reflected differing understandings of education, language, and religion. Influenced by a nineteenth-century view of nationalism, colonial and protectorate authorities saw language as largely coterminous with “culture.” They operated along the premise that their subjects could be similarly subdivided into members of delimited “tribes,” each with a distinct territory and dialect. Many Muslims, however, did not conceptualize Arabic as an “ethnic” language that belonged exclusively to Arabs. Rather, it was a divine medium of instruction.¹⁵⁸

British officials and their Somali subjects also held differing understandings of what constituted proper education. Most Somalis in this era viewed Western schooling as akin to Christian evangelism (not an unwarranted conclusion given how many schools were run by missionaries). One Somali elder, who had been sent to Hargeisa by his parents to be educated, described enduring taunts from his peers in British Somaliland, who called him a Christian.¹⁵⁹ Ali Bule of Garissa explained that people did not want to study in colonial schools because they thought they would become Christian.¹⁶⁰ These sentiments did not reflect a wholesale rejection of education, but rather a repudiation of colonial and secular approaches to schooling. Many Somalis attended dugsi (Qur’anic school) and some furthered their education at Islamic universities or under the guidance of religious sheikhs.¹⁶¹ Moreover, those who did see the value of British schooling often demanded instruction in Arabic and English, a language that offered them obvious benefits within the structures of colonial power. Haji Farah Omar, who was educated in India, where he fell under the influence of Gandhian philosophy, shunned the new curriculum not because it was Western or un-Islamic, but because it was based on an inferior “adapted” curriculum.¹⁶²

Like the Isaaq leaders of Kenya, Somali leaders in British Somaliland fought a reduction in status by asserting their foreign origins and making reference to a broader geographic horizon beyond the colonial state. According to R. E. Ellison, the superintendent of education, the qadi (judge) of Hargeisa informed the administration: “We Somalis are Arabs by origin and we like to consider ourselves as still being of the Arabic race. We can never consent to our being considered as Africans. We are afraid that if our sons are taught to write Somali they will . . . forget that they are really Arabs.”¹⁶³ Omar also argued that Somalis were “Arabs” and that Arabic, the language of religious instruction and legal contracts, could not be considered a “foreign language.”¹⁶⁴ In July 1938, an article appeared in the Arabic newspaper Al Shabaab, which was published in Cairo. According to a government translation, the author (whom protectorate officials posited to be Haji Farah Omar) decried British attempts “to suppress the Arabic language . . . to build an iron wall between the Somalis, the Arab nations and the Moslems, in order that there should not be any connection between them.”¹⁶⁵ The British protectorate administration feared they had inadvertently fostered a Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic nationalism.

Mobilizing through the juridical categories of empire led to a confusing patchwork of different legal identities. Isaaq and Somali leaders in different territories adopted their own localized strategies, which points to the contingent, situated, and strategic nature of identity politics. Yet their tactics also reflected broader discursive changes afoot across the Empire and the Muslim world. The strategies of leaders in Somaliland foreshadow epistemic shifts in Islamic education and reveal the links between colonial racialization and emergent forms of Pan-Arab nationalism. As Talal Asad argues, the idea of an Arab nation represented “a major conceptual transformation by which” the notion of an umma was “cut off from the theological predicates that gave it its universalizing power” and “made to stand for an imagined community that is equivalent to a total political society, limited and sovereign.”¹⁶⁶ These moments thus highlight powerful new ways of mapping one’s place across the region and the globe.

NON-NATIVE STATUS COMING UNDONE