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Preface and Acknowledgments

THIS WORK DRAWS UPON MULTIPLE archives. Between 2008 and 2014, I carried out research at the British National Archives (TNA) in London, the Kenya National Archives (KNA) in Nairobi, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford. From all of these places, I collected a wide variety of colonial and postcolonial government documents. In addition, I have made use of non-archival written records, such as newspaper articles, traveler accounts, settler memoirs, and NGO reports. Between September 2010 and September 2011—shortly before the Kenyan invasion of Somalia—I also conducted over one hundred formal interviews in linguistically and culturally diverse sites in the Central and Rift Valley regions of Kenya and the Somalia/Kenya borderlands.

The staff at the Kenya National Archives greatly facilitated my research. Special thanks are due to Richard Ambani, who has generously supported many researchers and scholars over his years working at the KNA. My fieldwork would have been impossible without the help of multiple research assistants in different locations and at different stages of the project. Hassan Kochore and Hassan Ibrahim Hassan aided me during the initial, exploratory stages. Abdi Billow Ibrahim and Ibrahim Abdikarim were indispensable during the main phase of my fieldwork. Together, we conducted interviews during which we collected poetry, genealogies, oral “traditions,” and life histories in Swahili, English, Somali, and occasionally Borana. Many of the poems recounted to me had not previously been put down in writing, to the best of my knowledge. I also had many informal conversations with Kenyan and Somali acquaintances and friends. These conversations informed my thinking in significant ways and left silent traces on my analyses that are difficult to cite or acknowledge directly.

I am deeply indebted to the many people who generously shared aspects of their lives with me, including very painful memories of warfare and state repression. I hope that I have done justice to their history. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the many people in Kenya who extended their hospitality to me and provided me with assistance during my research. They are too numerous to name, but special thanks are due to Hassan Ibrahim Hassan, Fatuma Ibrahim Ali, Ahmed Maalin Abdalle, Abdi Ahmed Ali, Amina Kinsi, Abdi Billow Ibrahim, and Mohamed Ibrahim.

While I interviewed a diverse sample of people, it goes without saying that I cannot tell all possible stories. John Jackson has suggested that rather than thinking in terms of mastery over the “other,” of a complete archive, or of progressively accumulating knowledge, scholars should think in terms of “thin descriptions”—of multiple, sometimes incommensurable, narratives.¹ Not all of the people I interviewed would agree with my analyses. Nor, for that matter, did Kenyans always agree on a single interpretation of historical events. Some of my interlocutors would reflect upon the past differently today than at the time of our interviews. “Memories” were never unmediated recollections, and present concerns figured heavily in people’s explanations of the past. While conducting interviews, I endeavored to collect a wide diversity of narratives and to remain attentive to marginal and heterodox voices. However, structures of power often constrained who could speak and be spoken to. One cannot smooth over the power dynamics involved in any kind of fieldwork. My race, comparative privilege, blind spots, ideological concerns, cultural misunderstandings, and missteps no doubt shaped the fieldwork experience in ways that were often invisible to me. My work is not a definitive or an objective version of Kenyan Somali history, nor is it a historical or ethnographic project intended to exhaust our understanding of “Somali society.” However, my hope is that it will serve as a contribution to the field.

Many people too numerous to name helped me navigate and think through the complexities of the research and writing process. I am deeply thankful to Sean Hanretta, Richard Roberts, and Timothy Parsons for their mentorship. During my time at Stanford University, Siphiwe Ndlovu, Erin Pettigrew, Michelle Bourbonniere, and Donni Wang, among others, provided me with invaluable advice and read through early drafts of my manuscript. At the University of Pennsylvania, I benefited from help and intellectual inspiration provided by Lee Cassanelli, Cheikh Babou, Fred Dickinson, Tsitsi Jaji, Mauro Guillén, Amel Mili, Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Rasul Miller, and Jeremy Aaron Dell, among others. Writing workshops with Alden Young, Amber Reed, Grace Sanders, Oliver Rollins, Clemmie L. Harris, and Dominick Rolle helped me to improve early drafts of my work. My undergraduate and graduate students at Stanford and Penn also deserve special thanks for their wonderful intellectual engagement. In addition, I am indebted to Abdul Adan, Wendell Hassan Marsh, Hassan Kochore, Natasha Shivji, Salah Abdi Sheikh, Mohamed Abdullahi, and Amil Shivji for many productive and invaluable conversations. Attending conferences and workshops with Tabea Scharrer, Neil Carrier, Mark Bradbury, Egle Cesnulyte, Alex Otieno, and Francesca Declich also shaped my thinking.

Writing this book has proved, in many ways, to be a collective project. Abdi Billow Ibrahim, Terje Østebø, Abdul Adan, Abdullahi Abdinoor, Abdullahi A. Shongolo, and Ali Jimale Ahmed all helped in some capacity with issues relating to orthography and translations. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Ahmed Ismail Yusuf for his assistance with translating and transcribing the poems in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Jacob Riley produced all of the maps in the book. Richard Reid and Keith Breckenridge, two of the editors of the Journal of African History; James De Lorenzi and Lee Cassanelli, editors of the Journal of Northeast African Studies; and Michael Mwenda Kithinji, Mickie Mwanzia Korster, and Jerono P. Rotich, editors of the volume Kenya after Fifty, helped me refine many ideas contained in several of the chapters. In addition, I am grateful to the editorial team at Ohio University Press, including Derek Peterson, Jean Allman, Allen Isaacman, and Gillian Berchowitz, and the two anonymous readers of my manuscript. Special thanks also go to Cawo M. Abdi, Scott Reese, Pete Tridish, and Susan Alice Elizabeth Brown for providing feedback on drafts of my manuscript.

Over the course of my training, I have benefited from excellent Swahili and Somali teachers, including Regina Fupi, Sangai Mohochi, Jamal Gelle, Abdifatah Shafat Diis, Deo Ngonyani, and Abdi Ahmed Ali. In addition, my training, research, and completion of this text were generously supported by fellowships and financial support from Stanford University (including grants from the Center for African Studies, the Department of History, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the School of Humanities and Sciences); the US Department of Education; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Joseph H. Lauder Institute for Management and International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Finally, thank you to Brenda, Moshe, and Oran Weitzberg for all their support over the many years leading up to the publication of this book. My family history also played an important role in drawing me to this topic. As a Jewish Israeli American and the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, I grew up with an awareness of the difficulties faced by minorities stretched across multiple countries, an understanding of the ease with which indigenous people can be rendered into foreigners, and a cognizance of the dangers of exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism. While the experiences of Somalis in Kenya differ in many respects from those of European Jews or Palestinians, their histories refract shared twentieth- and twenty-first-century predicaments. With this in mind, I hope my book can contribute to broader conversations about the interrelationship between border crossing, reactionary nativism, and hatred of the internal stranger. While many people deserve credit for helping me to develop my ideas, any errors or omissions in this text are my fault alone.