We Do Not Have Borders. Keren Weitzberg
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South Asia and Sudan, like Isaaq and Harti intermediaries, were able to take advantage of imperial opportunities in order to travel and settle in different parts of the British Empire and were often exempt from the legal restrictions governing “native” subjects.57 A number of Kenya’s “indigenous” ethnic groups, such as the Luo, Luhya, Teso, Borana, Swahili, and Digo, to name only a few, also straddle international borders. By the same token, East Africa has experienced waves of migration over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is now home to many “diasporas.” If such “borderless” conditions are indeed quite common, why are certain populations treated as alien and their lifestyles pathologized? Why have the Somali become the paradigmatic example of the internal stranger within Kenya (and beyond)?
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
In order to answer such questions and contribute to alternatives to methodological nationalism and nativism, We Do Not Have Borders charts the history of a distinctive type of oppositional politics. Examining political alternatives put forward by Somali and Kenyan political thinkers is one means of writing a history of the present. Walter Benjamin famously stated: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”58 Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Somali and northern Kenyan leaders and intellectuals envisioned diverse political futures, which were not always sovereign, territorial, or secular in scope or predicated on ethnic homogeneity. Some of these “past futures” may now appear obsolete, while others may seem to be brimming with unrealized potential.59 Analyzing alternative futures and heterodox political models is a way of upending teleologies, of avoiding a narrative that leads inexorably toward the ultimate triumph of a nation-state built around colonial territorial and institutional structures. It allows one to explore overlooked possibilities and forgotten histories of interrelation that resonate with present-day concerns. Remaining attentive to these histories often requires different practices of reading, listening, and archiving (discussed in the next section).
The first chapter of this book shows that on the eve of colonial rule, conflicts in northern Kenya sharpened the boundary between Muslim and non-Muslim and contributed to a broader reconfiguration of what it meant to be “Somali.” These notions of Somaliness were not predicated on territorial boundaries or structured by the binary racial distinction between “African” and “Arab.” Chapter 2 describes how, in the early decades of British rule, Isaaq and Harti representatives imagined themselves as both imperial citizens and members of a wider Islamic world, developing a geographic and civilizational ethos derived from both colonial and Indian Ocean thought. In the 1930s, when the colonial administration tried to erode the special privileges of the “alien” Somali and treat them functionally as “natives,” Isaaq representatives were able to mobilize through their kin in British Somaliland and the United Kingdom. They also reworked the racial vocabulary of empire by claiming to be a “race of Asiatic Origin.”60 Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine the diverse nationalist imaginaries that emerged from these foundations after World War II. While Somali leaders frequently made claims within the dominant framework of the nation-state, their efforts also reflected the pull of extraterritorial affiliations.61 Placing archival documents into dialogue with political poetry, chapter 4 analyzes the ways in which nonsecular and nonterritorial affiliations were mobilized in the service of a territorial nationalist project. Political thinkers in the Northern Frontier District (NFD) found various ways to “domesticate” the nation-state and transform an elite nationalist project into a popular movement that appealed to many of the region’s transhumant nomadic inhabitants. Finally, chapters 6 and 7 show how the defeat of the irredentist movement, the Somali civil war, and the attendant refugee crisis all sparked renewed debates over the meaning of the past and a profound reconfiguration of the idea of a “Greater Somalia.” In the post–Cold War era, Somaliness has become more deterritorialized and less closely tied to claims on a normative, secular political order.
This book also analyzes how shifting practices of governance affected the ability of Somalis to participate in collectivities that stretched across territorial boundaries. While protectorate and colonial administrators generally sought to restrict African mobility, imperial structures were, by definition, supraterritorial. As chapters 1 and 2 show, colonial economies demanded flexibility for the movement of laborers, soldiers, traders, and capital across territorial borders. Many immigrant communities were able to form horizontal solidarities that stretched across colonial boundaries and to imagine themselves, as Thomas Metcalf notes, “not merely as colonial subjects but as imperial citizens.”62 In addition, nomads regularly crossed imperial frontiers and continued to see pastoralism as a viable strategy throughout much of British rule.
Nevertheless, the tensions of the imperial political economy heightened during the interwar period. Colonial and British officials came to think of Somali nomads and urbanites as a people “out of place” within the colony, who could not be confined to native reserves and who blurred the boundary between “native” and “non-native.” The question of where they “belonged,” already fraught during the early colonial era, became an ever more pressing and violent issue as Kenya transitioned to a developmentalist state (the focus of chapters 3 and 4). Developmental imperialism enabled the late colonial government to intervene much more extensively in the lives of Somali livestock traders and nomads in the 1940s and ’50s.63 Alongside development initiatives, postwar political projects also posed new challenges for Somalis in Kenya. Nationalist campaigns demanded loyalty to an exclusive territorial homeland, which forced states and subjects alike to determine where Somalis in Kenya belonged and to which nation they were “native.” The rise of Pan-African nationalist movements proved problematic for a population that regularly traversed international borders and, at times, cast themselves as non-natives.64
Partha Chatterjee has suggested that nationalist models derived from European precedents never fully “colonized” the imaginations of colonized subjects.65 Yet the universalization of the nation-state as the paradigmatic model of the post–World War II era placed a large number of restrictions on what could be formally implemented.66 While African leaders imagined alternatives to the imperial configuration of territory, contests over the scope and nature of self-determination led to the hardening of colonial boundaries.67 Chapters 4 and 5 examine sovereignty as an enduring problem for colonial subjects and postcolonial citizens. When Kenya achieved independence in 1963, the newly elected government took brutal measures to suppress the Pan-Somali campaign. By the late 1960s, Kenyan Somalis had effectively become foreigners on their own soil, their loyalty deemed suspect and their political activism delegitimized as a criminal revolt known by most Kenyans as the “Shifta War” (ca. 1963–1967).68
Looking back at colonialism and decolonization in the wake of the recent “structural transformations” that “unmade the postwar order,” one gets a sense of vertigo, of history repeating itself.69 From a certain vantage point, it appears that the crisis of the nation-state in Northeast Africa and the erosion of economic sovereignty that attended neoliberal restructuring led to a certain “rebirth” of decentralized networks that flourished prior to World War II. When Somalia became increasingly unstable in the late 1980s, people began to seek refuge in cities as dispersed as Nairobi, Dubai, Minneapolis,