We Do Not Have Borders. Keren Weitzberg
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Somali migrants to occupy a comparatively privileged status in East Africa relegated them to the margins of British society. Race was at the center of the making of metropolitan Britain and the capitalist structures that sustained it.
Somali sailors had been living in London, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and other English port cities since the nineteenth century, when they had first arrived on European merchant ships.60 Ostensibly, as emigrants from territories under the sovereignty of the British Crown, they enjoyed formal equality with all other British subjects.61 In practice, the British government created a tiered citizenship based upon the perceived “whiteness” of their imperial subjects. Moreover, many Somalis were considered protected persons rather than British subjects, since British Somaliland was technically a protectorate, not a colony. While this distinction was often negligible in practice, emigrants from protectorates enjoyed fewer rights and were subject to stricter labor and deportation laws than those from other parts of the empire. Inhabitants of Somaliland who lawfully immigrated to the United Kingdom were defined as aliens.
World War I drew European nations and their colonial subjects ever closer, even as it tested the limits of imperial promises of equality. During the interwar period, the British state took steps to restrict further emigration from the colonies, and deported many of the seamen and munitions workers who had come to England and Wales during the war. After race riots broke out in 1919, the Home Office enacted several pieces of racially discriminatory legislation, including the Aliens Order (1920) and the Coloured Alien Seamen Order (1925). The latter was used, as Kathleen Paul argues, “to harass all ‘coloured seamen,’ ‘aliens and British subjects mixed,’ and to prevent as many as possible from settling in the United Kingdom.”62 Such legislation was motivated by fear that uncontrolled migration would entrench a black, urbanized underclass in the heart of European cities, who could claim unemployment benefits, jobs occupied by the white working class, and blur the boundary between black and white. Many colonial subjects, including those who had worked and sacrificed on behalf of the Crown, were denied hospitality within the country.
There has been much theorizing as to why internal difference has so often become the locus of intolerance within otherwise liberal nation-states.63 Part of the answer may lie in the fact that many European nation-states made themselves and their sense of national identity through their expansion and colonization overseas.64 Discovering the “other” at home eroded the ability to maintain the separation between colonizer and colonized. Alien Somalis were, to reappropriate Mae Ngai’s elegant expression, a kind of “impossible subject,” “at once welcome and unwelcome.”65 They personified many of the key tensions within the imperial political economy, which depended upon colonial labor in various forms.66
Government officials in the United Kingdom frequently worked out ideas of race at home, in close collaboration with the Colonial and Foreign Offices. Racial difference was also fashioned through dialogue across different colonial territories. Although the color bar was global in scope, protectorate and colonial regimes often defined and enforced legal hierarchies differently, which was sometimes a cause for concern. In 1926, Sir Harold Kittermaster, governor of British Somaliland (and formerly officer in charge of the NFD), informed locals at a meeting at Burao in British Somaliland that “it is to Swahilis that” the Somalis “are properly comparable,” not Indians or Arabs.67 Kittermaster warned his colleagues: “There is frequent interchange of Somali residents in Nairobi with their homes here, and they maintain their roots here even after years of absence. To give them a status in Kenya so different from what they must have here would tend greatly to embarrass the administration of this Protectorate.”68 The Swahili occupied a similar “awkward position” as the Somali, “having neither a recognized African ‘tribal’ identity nor the higher legal status of Non-Native.”69 Irrevocably “impure,” they, too, were part of a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean world whose elements did not conform to the cultural “wholes” to which colonial authorities imagined their subjects belonged.
Although the Isaaq and the Harti had managed to attain many of the rights of Asians within Kenya, colonial authorities were wary of creating any legal precedents that might have empire-wide ramifications. Consequently, officials in Kenya lacked a consistent vocabulary for classifying the Isaaq and the Harti, whom they alternatively labeled “Natives,” “Arabs,” and, in some cases, “Asiatics.”70 The label “Asiatic” was especially fraught, and in many ways reflected the fundamental ambiguities of colonial racial thought. Before World War II, European cartographers often lumped the Arabian Peninsula with “Western Asia”—a geographic concept eventually displaced by the term “Middle East.”71 While it was typically “used to describe people from South Asia,” as James Brennan notes, the terms “Asian” and “Asiatic” “were also shifting legal and political terms that sometimes, but not always, joined Arabs and Indians together, and sometimes Chinese as well.”72 In addition, many Isaaq had originated from Aden, whose inhabitants were subjects of British India until 1937.73 Competing definitions of indigenousness further complicated their legal status.74 However, it also opened the door for Somalis to self-fashion by stretching the boundaries and definitions of what it meant to be native.75
PASTORAL MODES OF TERRITORIAL GOVERNANCE
Though in ways quite distinct from Somali town dwellers, nomadic populations in the north of Kenya also challenged a certain colonial imagination of indigenousness. For the first two decades of protectorate rule, authorities did not so much administer the north as attempt to suppress the southward migration of nomadic peoples. After ceding Jubaland to Italy in 1925 in exchange for its participation in World War I, the colonial government placed the NFD under civilian control and declared it a closed district—movement in and out of which was restricted to holders of a special pass (see map 2.1).76 Protectorate and colonial officials came to see northern nomads as part of a physical and metaphorical frontier, situated on the margins of “civilization.” One of the ways in which the colonial government cultivated an image of British “order” was by projecting an idea of anarchy onto the north.77
The nature of British rule in the NFD can be examined through the colonial archives, which provide selective vestiges of the working operations of power, as well as the ways in which colonial authorities authorized and rationalized that power. There are significant limits to how creatively or subversively these written records can be read.78 Archival records homogenize the passing of time during the colonial era—transforming the history of the north into a recurring, self-fulfilling debate over borders, administrative control, and registration efforts.
Using the archives alone, it is very difficult to reconstruct the practices and beliefs that we anachronistically call “religion.”79 To come to “know” and govern their subjects, authorities had to parse which streams of “local” knowledge were serviceable to empire.80 Many important aspects of Somali and northern life, including Islamic spiritual practices, were often ignored. In 1929, the district commissioner (DC) of Bura District, M. R. Mahony, wrote a report in which he dismissively described the Somali as “a fanatical Mohamedan though ignorant of the true tenets of Islam.”81 In his mind, Somalis were both more fervent and less orthodox than their Muslim counterparts on the coast. The “majority are illiterate,” he noted, and the “bush Sheiks and Sheriffs have only learnt to recite, read, and laboriously write a few of the better known texts from the Koran.”82 Like many Orientalist thinkers of his era, he treated literate Muslims and “Arab” Islam as more authentic and narrowly defined Islamic orthodoxy as textual. In general, colonial officials delved into Somali spiritual practices only when they believed a particular religious thinker or practice might cause discord or held some kind of threatening potential.83 Religious practices largely escaped the colonial gaze and, as a consequence, assemblage within the archives. These silences, however, should not be equated with irrelevancy.84
Historians will, however, find no shortage of sophisticated clan charts or intricate genealogical histories in the archives. Officials took an almost obsessive interest in clans and produced a veritable corpus of anthropological material.85 Preferring to