A Modern History of the Somali. I. M. Lewis
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so fecund as to constitute the richest arable zone in the whole of Somaliland. Here the principal crops are sorghum, Indian corn, sesame, beans, squashes and manioc; as well as fruits, and sugar-cane, which, however, are mainly cultivated in the plantations owned by large corporations. The chief export crop is the banana produced by a number of Italian and Somali companies on a quota system controlled by the Somali government. Outside this fertile southern zone between the rivers there are no comparable arable resources, although the north-west of the country now supplies a valuable sorghum harvest and grain production is expanding as well as date cultivation.
Despite this general division in physical features and productivity, both northern and southern Somaliland are subject to a similar cycle of seasons associated with the rotation of the N.E. and S.W. monsoons. Apart from a variety of minor local wet periods, the main rains fall twice yearly – between March and June, and between September and December – throughout the region. The dry seasons are similarly distributed: but while the hottest time of the year on the northern coast falls in the summer, the south is by contrast pleasantly cool at this period. In the volcanic wastes of the Jibuti Republic, this fairly regular cycle of seasons loses most of its coherence, and the weather is generally less predictable except in its torridity. Mogadishu (pop. 350,000), capital of the Somali Republic, and the other ports of the southern Indian Ocean coast have a climate which though often humid is pleasant in the cool season.
The People
Ethnically and culturally the Somali belong to the Hamitic ethnic group. Their closest kinsmen are the surrounding Hamitic (or as they are often called ‘Cushitic’) peoples of the Ethiopian lowlands, and Eritrea – the traditionally bellicose ‘Afar (or Danakil),3 the Oromo (Galla), Saho, and Beja. Their immediate neighbours to the north are the pastoral ‘Afar with whom they share Jibuti and who extend into Eritrea and Ethiopia. To the west, in Ethiopia, the Somali are bounded by the cultivating and pastoral Oromo; and in the south by the Boran Galla of Kenya.
Although there is much variation amongst them, the physical features which immediately strike the eye and seem most generally characteristic of the Somali people as a whole, are their tall stature, thin bone structure and decidedly long and narrow heads. Skin colour shows a wide range from a coppery brown to a dusky black. In their facial features particularly, the Somali also exhibit evidence of their long-standing relations with Arabia; and, in the south, amongst the Digil and Rahanweyn tribes, physical traces of their past contact with Oromo and Bantu peoples in this region. Traditionally, however, Somali set most store by their Arabian connexions and delight in vaunting those traditions which proclaim their descent from noble Arabian lineages and from the family of the Prophet. These claims, dismissed by Somali nationalists today as fanciful, are nevertheless part and parcel of the traditional and profound Somali attachment to Islam. They commemorate the many centuries of contacts between the Somali and Arabian coasts which have brought Islam and many other elements of Muslim Arab culture.
Thus, the Somali language4 contains a considerable number of Arabic loan-words, and Arabic itself is sufficiently widely known to be regarded almost as a second language. Nevertheless, although unwritten until 1972,5 Somali retained its distinctiveness as a separate and extremely vigorous tongue possessing an unusually rich oral literature. Within Somali, the widest dialect difference is between the speech of the northern pastoralists and of the Digil and Rahanweyn cultivators. These differ to much the same extent as Portuguese and Spanish. Yet, since many of its speakers are also familiar with standard Somali, the existence of this distinctive southern dialect does not alter the fact that, from the Jibuti Republic to Garissa on the Tana River in Kenya, standard Somali provides a single channel of communication and a common medium in which poems and songs compete for popularity. Poetry, it should be added, today as much as in the past, plays a vital part in Somali culture, and the extensive use of radio broadcasting has enhanced rather than diminished its significance. Often a poem is not merely the private voice of the author, but frequently the collective tongue of a pressure group, and propaganda either for peace or for war is more effectively spread through poetry than by any other means.6
The distinction between the speech of the Digil and Rahanweyn and their more nomadic countrymen to their north and south is one feature of the wider cultural, geographic, and historical primary division in the Somali nation between the ‘Samale’ or Somali proper and the Sab. The former make up the bulk of the nation, and their name (Samale) has come to include the Sab, perhaps in the same fashion as the word ‘English’ is applied by foreigners to all the inhabitants of the British Isles. This larger fraction of the Somali nation consists of four principal groups of clans or ‘clan-families’. Descent in Somaliland is traced in the male line, and each of these units has a separate founding ancestor from whom, traditionally, its members trace their descent and take their collective name.
The Samale clan-families comprise the Dir, Isaq, Hawiye, and Darod, all of whom are primarily pastoral nomads and variously distributed throughout the land. The Dir clans (‘Ise and Gadabursi) are mainly concentrated in the western part of the northern regions of the Somali Republic (the former British Somaliland), in the Jibuti Republic, and the east of Harar Province of Ethiopia: a smaller nucleus also occurs in the south in Merca District, and between Brava and the Juba River. The Isaq (who in conjunction with the Dir probably number almost three quarters of a million) live mainly in the centre of the northern regions of the Republic, but in their grazing movements extend also into the Ethiopian Haud. To their east, the Isaq mingle with the Dulbahante and Warsangeli divisions of the Darod who, with a strength of perhaps one and a half million, are the largest and most widely distributed of all the Somali clan-families. As well as the eastern part of the former British Somaliland Protectorate, the Darod occupy the Eastern, Nugal and Mudug Regions, most of the Haud and Ogaden; and finally, although interrupted by a large wedge of Hawiye in the centre of the Republic and the Digil and Rahanweyn between the rivers, extend eventually into the North-eastern Region of Kenya. The Hawiye, who boast probably more than half a million persons, live to the south of the Majerteyn Darod in Mudug, Hiran, and round Mogadishu. They extend some way across the Shebelle basin where they mingle with the Sab tribes, and also, like the Darod, are found again in strength in the northern part of Kenya.
With a total population of little more than half a million, the Sab tribes are less numerous, less widely distributed, and contain only the two major divisions already mentioned. Having a stronger cultivating bias than any other Somali group, their habitat is primarily restricted to the fertile region between the two rivers where their pastoral and cultivating sections mingle not only with each other but also with pastoral nomads of the other Samale clans.
In addition to these divisions of the Somali nation whose distribution and relative strengths are vital to an understanding of both past and present events, there are a number of smaller ethnic communities which require to be mentioned. The most numerous (some 80,000 strong) are Somalized Bantu scattered in cultivating villages along the Shebelle and Juba Rivers and in pockets between them. These derive in part from earlier Bantu and Swahili-speaking groups, as well as from former slave populations freed by the suppression of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century. Although they still retain today much of their physical distinctiveness, socially these communities are becoming increasingly absorbed in the wider Somali society. The best-known groups are the Shidle, and Shabelle on the Shebelle River, and the Wa-Gosha (or Gosha) and Gobaweyn on the Juba. Less numerous but economically and politically more important is the immigrant Asian community (some 40,000 in the Republic, about 12,000 in the Jibuti Republic) which consists chiefly of Arabs (many of families domiciled on the coast for centuries) and a smaller number of Indians, Pakistanis, and Persians. Similarly largely occupied in trade and commerce and also in development and technical aid is the small European community, numbering about 5,000 in Somalia and 15,000 in the Republic of Jibuti. The few permanent European settlers live mainly as farmers and estate owners in the south of Somalia.
Mode of life and social institutions
Although the proportion of people who practise some form of cultivation is higher, probably not much more than an eighth of the total Somali population are sedentary cultivators, and these mainly the southern Digil and Rahanweyn tribes. Thus for the majority, in the arid conditions of the north, centre, and extreme south (Northern Kenya) of their country, nomadism is the