We Do Not Have Borders. Keren Weitzberg
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assumes that people innately belong to fixed territories.58 Transhumant groups, however, have not always imagined community in ways predicated on territorial boundaries (which is not to say that nomads did not have links to certain lands and geographies).
In the late nineteenth century, imperial representatives had recognized that northern Kenya and southern Somalia were interconnected to a much broader regional and global economy. By the turn of the century, however, British officials had turned their attention to the construction of the Uganda-Mombasa railway farther south, which was completed in 1901. The IBEAC’s experience in Jubaland revealed the inviability of capturing pastoral trade networks as well as the challenges of seizing control over nomadic regions. Rather than attempt the task of redirecting capital flows or securing effective administration over the sparsely populated, arid northern expanse, the thinly staffed protectorate regime concentrated instead on halting the southward migration of the area’s armed, nomadic people into the fertile central highlands and Rift Valley, which soon became the focus of the government’s commercial interests.59
By the early twentieth century, the East Africa Protectorate regime had come to see the region as an extremely challenging area to govern best thought of as a buffer zone, analogous to the North-West Frontier of India. To hinder Somali migration into Central Kenya, in 1902 the administration applied the Outlying District Ordinance to the north, which effectively made the region a closed area; movement in and out was restricted to holders of a special pass.60 In 1910, the protectorate government appointed the first “officer in charge” of the newly formed Northern Frontier District (NFD) (see map 2.1). It would take another decade, however, before the protectorate regime could claim effective control over the area.61
In 1913, the explorer Ignatius N. Dracopoli encapsulated colonial sentiments when he described the region as “the outskirt of civilization, on the frontier, as it were, of a fertile and well-watered land, beyond which lie the arid and sun-scorched wastes of a great desert.”62 More than two decades of periodic combat with Somali groups only nourished this image.63 The concept of the frontier enabled officials to incorporate the area into the protectorate, while simultaneously emptying it of its own “cultural significance” and obscuring the alternative geographies of its inhabitants.64 Although colonial officials naturalized the north’s status as a buffer zone, which marked the outer limits of imperial control, its isolation and marginalization were neither natural nor inevitable. Rather, they were the by-product of shifting imperial strategies as well as decades of struggle between Somali nomads, company representatives, and protectorate officials.
“ANYTHING BETWEEN HER LEGS IS OURS”
Officials and officers charged with securing the frontier, as George Simpson notes, often “imagined themselves impartial arbitrators who were bringing a more enlightened system of governance to a people so caught up in narrow and parochial disputes that they could not recognize the blessings that were being bestowed upon them.”65 The protectorate regime lauded itself on the suppression of slavery and claimed to be safeguarding weaker populations from southward Somali aggression. They also attributed the causes of conflicts in the north to a “tribal” culture left unchecked and suggested that solutions lay in the civilizing effects of British rule.
This attitude surfaced in the way protectorate officials treated a series of disputes between subclans of the Ogaden. While protectorate authorities tried to contain Somalis and limit their migration southward, Ogaden leaders fought one another for hegemony over the eastern portion of the NFD. This conflict culminated in the killing of Ahmed Magan, the sultan of the Muhammad Zubeir, in 1914. People in Garissa District often refer to this series of conflicts as the Kalaluud, which can be roughly translated as “stalemate.” For the British, however, the Kalaluud was not a historical moment to be named, but simply one of many administrative headaches. In official correspondence, this complex political struggle was treated as a timeless cultural aspect of nomadic life, which highlighted the ungovernability of the Somalis: “The fighting between these two tribes was throughout of the most savage description. . . . It was impossible for the Government, engaged as it was with the Marehan Expedition, to take any steps to induce or compel the tribes to come to terms. . . . The combatants were left to themselves.”66 Local accounts, however, inflect the Kalaluud with far different significance. Unlike the colonial archives, oral histories attend to the political motivations of these struggles.
While oral accounts of the Kalaluud are hardly straightforward reports, they are nevertheless useful as a means of destabilizing dominant, and no less straightforward, colonial narratives. They do not offer “corrections” to colonial texts, but rather an entirely different framework for understanding the past.67 Ahmed Maalin Abdalle told one of the most evocative versions of the events that triggered the Kalaluud. The conflict began, he explained, when a Muhammad Zubeir woman, who was married to a man from the Abdalla lineage, left home one day to graze her goats. While she was out in the field, the hooves of one of her animals dug into the soil, exposing an elephant tusk. This discovery precipitated a dispute between leaders of the Muhammad Zubeir and the Abdalla, both subclans of the Ogaden. Citing the fact that the woman was their daughter, the Muhammad Zubeir claimed ownership of the tusk. Members of the Abdalla, however, contended that they were the rightful owners, as she was the wife of one of their sons.68
One way to interpret this story is as an allegory for a historical conflict over control of the ivory trade. Such an interpretation is not without historical justification. As the scholar Scott Reese notes, by the second half of the nineteenth century, “population movements, sedentarization and continued hunting” had depleted animals from the coast, which forced merchants and hunters to move farther into the interior.69 If, in fact, the Kalaluud began as a contest over the changing orientation of the ivory trade, then stories of this conflict may have traveled down the generations in the form of a metaphor about a woman, her goats, and the fortuitous discovery of a tusk.
The problem with such methods of interpretation, however, is that they demand that historians differentiate between the “metaphorical” and the “historical” aspects of any given oral testimony. In the absence of some other, more “valid,” corroborating historical source, oral histories tend to be treated as mere metaphor, their historical reliability rendered dubious by the lack of confirmatory evidence.
This has particularly pernicious consequences for the study of women and gender, where evidence outside of oral testimony is often fragmented or entirely nonexistent. Ahmed Maalin Abdalle provides rich insights into the gendered debates surrounding patrilineal inheritance. To resolve the dispute over the tusk, he recounted, the elders of the Muhammad Zubeir and the Abdalla subclans summoned the woman. When asked about how she had come across the ivory, the woman explained that she was walking and had spotted the tusk between her legs. “Anything between her legs is ours,” happily concluded the Abdalla leaders, who claimed ownership over the ivory.
Oral histories of this nature often enable elder men to reinscribe patriarchal norms over the past. By equating the ivory to an offspring, who “belonged” to the father’s lineage, this story plays upon ideas of patrilineal inheritance. In this account, the woman is simply the ground for a larger debate between men over proprietorship (even though Somalis, like many East Africans, have long subscribed to ideas of female property rights).70 While hardly a clear-cut reflection on the way gender relations “really” worked in the precolonial period, this story provides insight into the ways in which gender was animated—often in humorous and provocative ways—to make sense of the past.
There are other ways of interpreting Maalin Abdalle’s creatively ambiguous and polysemic story that are more subversive of patriarchal norms. While the maintenance of lineage ties has frequently turned on the control of female reproduction and sexuality, it would be a mistake, as Christine Choi Ahmed suggests, to assume that Somali women were little more than chattel. To do so would be to reproduce an androcentric and Eurocentric vision.71 Similarly, David W. Cohen argues that historians and anthropologists often miss the important role played by women, because they attend “to the form and play of ‘larger,’ and in a sense ‘masculine’ structures and segmentary processes.”72