We Do Not Have Borders. Keren Weitzberg
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through a continental understanding of geography, a secular conception of historical time, or an essentialized “racial binary” between indigenous Africans on one hand, and nonindigenous foreigners on the other.11
Though Burton constructed racial barriers between himself and the inhabitants of the Horn, he was much celebrated for his intimate and often controversial appreciation of the cultures of the “Orient.” The philosopher Anthony Appiah paints Burton as an unusual combination of cosmopolitan and racist misanthrope who was often nihilistic in orientation. Adventurous and linguistically adept, he successfully passed as a Pathan from India’s North-West Frontier in order to attend the hajj in Mecca.12 Few others possessed the linguistic skills and the recklessness to flit so easily between various cultural milieus. However, many of Burton’s hagiographers have overlooked the fact that he conducted most of his travels within an international Islamic space.13 The Indian Ocean was a well-traveled region in which populations mixed and where foreigners, as Engseng Ho elegantly notes, “settled and sojourned in towns big and small and entered into relations with locals that were more intimate, sticky, and prolonged than the Europeans could countenance.”14 Immigrants were by no means an unusual presence, and this climate no doubt facilitated his ability to assimilate. Appiah traces the genealogy of cosmopolitanism back “to the Cynics of the fourth century.”15 However, this lineage neglects forms of cosmopolitanism that derive from neither Hellenic nor imperial origins.
Map 1.1. Some sites of Somali residence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Note: This map shows modern political boundaries.)
If being “cosmopolitan” is understood as a kind of stance aimed at navigating across cultural, religious, and linguistic differences and finding ways to “belong” to multiple worlds, then it is clear that the Horn of Africa had its own traditions of cosmopolitanism. Coastal cities such as Berbera and Mogadishu were major ports of call for the region as well as centers for cultivating these cosmopolitan sensibilities. Monsoons brought dhows (lateen-rigged ships) across the Indian Ocean, which enabled locals to take advantage of long-distance trade and forced foreigners to stay until the winds reversed. Somali speakers developed social technologies to incorporate these strangers and bridge the parochial divides of language, culture, and geographic origin. Unlike European traditions, which were predicated on overcoming the narrow limitations of citizenship, Somali forms of cosmopolitanism were aimed at assimilating migrants, forging ties of kinship to neighbors, and making claims to spiritual universality.16
Kinship and prophetic genealogies, which were typically traced through the paternal line, provided a powerful language for incorporating strangers, neighbors, and migrants. However, they were also social tools that could be used to exclude. There is no pure form of cosmopolitanism unencumbered by exclusionary dynamics. By asserting membership in Islamic lineages, Somali speakers could define themselves as superior in relation to those perceived to live beyond the civilized world of the Dar al-Islam and, thus, legitimize the subordination of slaves. Some groups also distinguished themselves from “casted” lineages, who occupied a stigmatized status that, while distinct from slaves, marked them as socially marginalized from the freeborn.17 In addition, descent was sometimes invoked to claim superiority over nonpastoral lineages, whose members farmed along the Juba and Shebelle Rivers.18 Livestock ownership is yet another distinction that has long underpinned hierarchical relations in the region.19
European encroachment further complicated this cosmopolitan, if unequal, world and facilitated the spread of a Somali diaspora. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, European merchant ships regularly stopped off at the coastal cities bordering the Gulf of Aden (see map 1.1). Berbera was a bustling commercial center at the time, and Aden soon developed into a major port of call—as Faisal Devji notes, in many ways “the Dubai of its time.”20 Due to the accidents of geography, Isaaq and Harti Somalis who lived along the Gulf of Aden were particularly well placed to take advantage of these new opportunities. Somali seamen and stokers recruited from Aden and the surrounding littoral (including regions incorporated into the Aden Protectorate and the Protectorate of British Somaliland in the 1800s) voyaged and settled abroad. Some established small communities in dispersed port cities, such as Cape Town, Cardiff, and Perth. Others served as soldiers for British imperial regiments or as navigators and porters for European explorers. Somalis guided Lord Delamere, who in 1897 launched his now infamous expedition into Kenya. Kenya’s fertile soils and rich economic opportunities attracted many of these male recruits, who came to the colony over the next half century through various waves of emigration from Aden, British Somaliland, and, to a lesser extent, Kismayo (a port city in southern Somalia).21 Sometimes they married local women; in other cases, they were joined by women from Somaliland and Aden. Even as protectorate authorities began to hem their subjects into new racial and ethnic categories, many Somali migrants continued to identify with their kin in Aden, Somaliland, and the wider region. They were able to draw upon precolonial cosmopolitan practices, resist the full effects of deracination, and reorient themselves toward the Gulf of Aden and the wider Islamic world in new ways.
BECOMING SOMALI IN THE NORTHERN FRONTIER DISTRICT OF KENYA
Farther to the south, another emigration was taking place. Impelled by a number of economic and political pressures, Somali-speaking nomads who identified as Ogaden and Degodia moved out of the southern regions of what is today Ethiopia and Somalia. By the turn of the century, they had established themselves in what is now northern Kenya (see map 2.1). Not only did shared discourses circulate between the coastal city-states of Northeast Africa and the pastoral interior, but nomadic groups also possessed their own cosmopolitan praxis. As they traveled, they came into conflict with Oromo speakers living north of the Tana River, brought with them new understandings of “Somaliness,” and helped to reconfigure the boundaries of belonging in the north.
In the mid-nineteenth century, members of the Ogaden and Harti lineages began to move into what is today Jubaland (in modern-day southern Somalia). The caravan trade, which wound from the interior and converged upon the coast, attracted many Somali migrants to the region. Economic gain, however, was not the only driver impelling migration southward. Groups also sought to escape internal conflicts as well as the expanding Ethiopian Empire, which by 1906 had extended its state almost to its present-day contours. Many Degodia fled to what is today northern Kenya and, shortly thereafter, other Somali clans followed in their wake.22
When approaching this history of migration, there is an inherent risk of reifying clan and ethnic labels. Archival documents construct particular objects of knowledge. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, protectorate administrators were quite fixated on determining the “tribal essence” of East African society and often described people exclusively in ethnic terms, conflating communal categories with collectivities. Other kinds of affiliations were obscured, as was the individuality of people in the region. Oral testimony, on the other hand, risks projecting modern communal identifications onto the past. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “The collective subjects who supposedly remember did not exist as such at the time of the events they claim to remember. Rather, their constitution as subjects goes hand in hand with the continuous creation of the past.”23 A careful reading must attend to the ways in which oral and archival sources give rise to an image of bounded, relatively timeless, and internally homogeneous groups.
In addition, histories of migration often dredge up complex stories about intermarriage, assimilation, and expulsion. In the case of northern Kenya, recent conflicts over land, grazing, and political constituencies have reignited debates over the so-called Somali conquest of the region.24 Studying these narratives poses certain problems for historians due to the stakes involved in their interpretation. Without acknowledging the limits of their own authorial power, scholars risk validating a certain representation of history that may reinforce contemporary nativist claims.
While people from the north often provided divergent accounts of this era, their narratives