We Do Not Have Borders. Keren Weitzberg
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Somali-identifying people in the region have built forms of community that circumvent state borders and challenge conventional notions of sovereignty, they should not be understood as an inherent threat to national and international security. Scholars on the right (such as Samuel Huntington) have tended to pathologize certain groups of people who operate outside the supposedly stabilizing forces of empire and nationalism.32 Many on the left, however, have simply overlooked types of regional, continental, and global interaction that decenter the importance of Western phenomena, thus reducing what is “African” to mere “local color.”33 Both tendencies reflect ingrained ways of thinking that can be traced to the colonial era. The colonial state, as Talal Asad suggests, played a significant role in defining who and what was “local” and “universal” and classifying those who strayed from either norm as threatening and out of place.34 Many of the transnational networks that emerged in the wake of the Somali civil war, which broke out in the early 1990s, can be understood as contemporary permutations of forms of organization that have much deeper roots in the region.35 Despite their criminalization, they are not unusual when considered within a longer historical perspective.
Two other dominant concepts have shaped scholarship and journalism about the Horn of Africa. Since at least the 1940s, Somali nationalists have projected the idea that Somalis throughout the region were part of a homogeneous and ancient nation. For decades, Somalia was considered an exceptional case on a continent otherwise riddled by “tribal” attachments.36 Revisionist scholars like Ali Jimale Ahmed have questioned the historicity of these narratives: “We cannot really demonstrate that all Somalis saw themselves as one people . . . before colonialism.”37 The outbreak of the Somali civil war in the early 1990s, on the other hand, gave credence to the idea that “clan” was paramount to Somali society. This was a notion popularized by the late pioneer of Somali studies, Ioan M. Lewis.38 According to standard anthropological models, Somali society consists “of six patrilineal clan-families formed by the descendants of mythical Arabic ancestors who arrived in Somali twenty-five to thirty generations ago”; and each clan-family, in turn, encompasses “a set of patrilineally related clans, subclans, sub-subclans, and lineages.”39 Lidwien Kapteijns and Abdi Samatar argue that these anthropological concepts were implicated in the colonial construction of clannism, which became an influential epistemological category in the post–World War II era.40
While seemingly dissimilar, both frameworks are part of a common discursive field. Treating “clan” and “nation” as pre-political categories that preceded the imposition of the colonial state naturalizes an ethnoterritorial paradigm.41 Clan affiliations have long been an important feature of Somali life, and many nomadic livestock-herding groups in the precolonial era organized themselves around kinship idioms. However, “clan” took on a profoundly new meaning in the twentieth century.42 Moreover, Somali speakers have also lived in city-states and agriculturally based confederations, as well as Islamic settlements (typically known as jama‘a or zawiya), where other forms of collective identification frequently took precedence.43 “Somaliness” has also meant different things at different times, and its precolonial manifestations should not be seen as an inevitable precursor to the modern nation-state. Recent innovative research by scholars such as Abdi Kusow, for example, suggests that certain Somali clan names predated the usage of “Somali” as an overarching affiliation.44 By the nineteenth century, many diverse populations in modern-day Yemen, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, and Somalia had come to see themselves as Somali—an identification that was often associated with being a pastoralist, a Muslim, and identifying with a clan or lineage that could trace its descent to a common ancestor (such as the eponymous Arab patriarch Samaale).45
This book focuses on the histories of two intertwined populations: nomadic Somali pastoralists, who have historically lived in northern Kenya on the borderlands abutting Ethiopia and Somalia; and the Somali diaspora community who came to the colony from British Somaliland, Aden, and Kismayo. (On the whole, it is less focused on the lives of more recent refugees who fled to Kenya to escape the violence and instability in neighboring Somalia beginning in the 1980s). Their histories cut across ethnic, national, racial, and continental borders. By the late nineteenth century, Somali immigrants from Berbera, Aden, and other coastal cities were in many respects already “globalized.” This complicates conventional understandings of the Somali diaspora as being a product of the recent Somali civil war. Traveling through the circuits of informal and formal empire, Somali soldiers, seamen, traders, and porters settled in various parts of the British Empire, including Kenya. Most identified as members of the Isaaq or Harti clans.46 Colonial officials in Kenya considered this small, privileged class to be legal immigrants to the colony and often referred to them as the “alien Somali.” At the same time, Somali nomads living hundreds of miles farther south were making their way into what is now northern Kenya. They sought to escape the expanding Ethiopian Empire, gain access to new grazing land, and seize control over the expanding caravan trade. In some cases, newcomers assimilated with local residents whom they viewed as fellow Somali kin. In other cases, Somali nomadic groups enslaved or absorbed locals into subordinate relationships, or expelled those who resisted their encroachment. When imperial powers divided these nomadic populations between different territories in the late nineteenth century, many Somalis—including those who identified as members of the Ogaden, Garre, Ajuran, and Degodia lineages—found themselves living in Kenya.47
The term “Kenyan Somali” is commonly used to refer to these “indigenous” Somali populations. It is, however, an imperfect label. Qualifying Somalis as Kenyan (a convention rarely applied to other transnational ethnic groups in the country) has led some people to reject the moniker as discriminatory.48 Critical theorists of US race relations have argued that dual and hyphenated identities can serve to normalize whiteness.49 Though not an entirely analogous situation, some argue that marking Somalis as Kenyan marginalizes them from the imagined idea of the nation. Moreover, the term elides the fact that the line between an “authentic” Kenyan citizen of Somali descent and a Somali refugee or “alien” has always been blurry and contested. It is precisely this ambiguity and confusion that makes this case study so productive for examining questions of transnational belonging. In the face of long-term and successive patterns of dwelling, assimilation, conflict, and migration, the very concept of indigeneity becomes difficult to sustain.50 While the book’s narrative arc is intended to show the long-standing roots of Somalis in the country, one of its major goals is to reveal indigeneity itself as a categorical problem.51
Transnational conditions may arise when people cross borders or when borders cross people. A useful analogy for the Somali experience in Kenya can be found in the Mexican-American borderlands. Debates in the United States over illegal immigration and citizenship frequently obscure the fact that “Latina/o” networks, in many cases, long predated the advent of the US/Mexican frontier.52 Comparisons can also be drawn with the Kurdish community, many of whom feel themselves to be a nation divided between four countries.53 In addition, one can draw parallels between Somali citizens of Kenya, who are often deeply connected to Somalia and who have been joined by more recent refugees, and the Jewish and African diasporas. Descendants of African slaves forcefully relocated to the Americas today interact socially and politically with members of the postcolonial African diaspora, who settled in the US and other countries more recently. Relations between both populations are sometimes fraught, but they share in a collective imaginary as “Africans.” Many Jews in the United States and Europe see Israel as a kind of secondary homeland. Like Somalis in the “diaspora,” they participate in a nationalist project from outside its borders.54
In different ways, both Somali pastoralists and urbanites in Kenya have struggled with the implications of living lives stretched across colonial and now national boundaries. Though often treated as aberrant, the Kenyan Somali condition mirrors that of many other populations within the country and continent more broadly.55 Like other nomadic populations, such as the Tuareg of West Africa or the Maasai of Tanzania and Kenya, Somali pastoralists were divided into different territories in the late nineteenth century by imperial powers that disregarded their patterns of mobility and transhumance.56 The experience of Somali urbanites