We Do Not Have Borders. Keren Weitzberg
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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