same extent as Portuguese and Spanish. Yet, since many of its speakers are also familiar with standard Somali, the existence of this distinctive southern dialect does not alter the fact that, from the Jibuti Republic to Garissa on the Tana River in Kenya, standard Somali provides a single channel of communication and a common medium in which poems and songs compete for popularity. Poetry, it should be added, today as much as in the past, plays a vital part in Somali culture, and the extensive use of radio broadcasting has enhanced rather than diminished its significance. Often a poem is not merely the private voice of the author, but frequently the collective tongue of a pressure group, and propaganda either for peace or for war is more effectively spread through poetry than by any other means.6
The distinction between the speech of the Digil and Rahanweyn and their more nomadic countrymen to their north and south is one feature of the wider cultural, geographic, and historical primary division in the Somali nation between the ‘Samale’ or Somali proper and the Sab. The former make up the bulk of the nation, and their name (Samale) has come to include the Sab, perhaps in the same fashion as the word ‘English’ is applied by foreigners to all the inhabitants of the British Isles. This larger fraction of the Somali nation consists of four principal groups of clans or ‘clan-families’. Descent in Somaliland is traced in the male line, and each of these units has a separate founding ancestor from whom, traditionally, its members trace their descent and take their collective name.
The Samale clan-families comprise the Dir, Isaq, Hawiye, and Darod, all of whom are primarily pastoral nomads and variously distributed throughout the land. The Dir clans (‘Ise and Gadabursi) are mainly concentrated in the western part of the northern regions of the Somali Republic (the former British Somaliland), in the Jibuti Republic, and the east of Harar Province of Ethiopia: a smaller nucleus also occurs in the south in Merca District, and between Brava and the Juba River. The Isaq (who in conjunction with the Dir probably number almost three quarters of a million) live mainly in the centre of the northern regions of the Republic, but in their grazing movements extend also into the Ethiopian Haud. To their east, the Isaq mingle with the Dulbahante and Warsangeli divisions of the Darod who, with a strength of perhaps one and a half million, are the largest and most widely distributed of all the Somali clan-families. As well as the eastern part of the former British Somaliland Protectorate, the Darod occupy the Eastern, Nugal and Mudug Regions, most of the Haud and Ogaden; and finally, although interrupted by a large wedge of Hawiye in the centre of the Republic and the Digil and Rahanweyn between the rivers, extend eventually into the North-eastern Region of Kenya. The Hawiye, who boast probably more than half a million persons, live to the south of the Majerteyn Darod in Mudug, Hiran, and round Mogadishu. They extend some way across the Shebelle basin where they mingle with the Sab tribes, and also, like the Darod, are found again in strength in the northern part of Kenya.
With a total population of little more than half a million, the Sab tribes are less numerous, less widely distributed, and contain only the two major divisions already mentioned. Having a stronger cultivating bias than any other Somali group, their habitat is primarily restricted to the fertile region between the two rivers where their pastoral and cultivating sections mingle not only with each other but also with pastoral nomads of the other Samale clans.
In addition to these divisions of the Somali nation whose distribution and relative strengths are vital to an understanding of both past and present events, there are a number of smaller ethnic communities which require to be mentioned. The most numerous (some 80,000 strong) are Somalized Bantu scattered in cultivating villages along the Shebelle and Juba Rivers and in pockets between them. These derive in part from earlier Bantu and Swahili-speaking groups, as well as from former slave populations freed by the suppression of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century. Although they still retain today much of their physical distinctiveness, socially these communities are becoming increasingly absorbed in the wider Somali society. The best-known groups are the Shidle, and Shabelle on the Shebelle River, and the Wa-Gosha (or Gosha) and Gobaweyn on the Juba. Less numerous but economically and politically more important is the immigrant Asian community (some 40,000 in the Republic, about 12,000 in the Jibuti Republic) which consists chiefly of Arabs (many of families domiciled on the coast for centuries) and a smaller number of Indians, Pakistanis, and Persians. Similarly largely occupied in trade and commerce and also in development and technical aid is the small European community, numbering about 5,000 in Somalia and 15,000 in the Republic of Jibuti. The few permanent European settlers live mainly as farmers and estate owners in the south of Somalia.
Mode of life and social institutions
Although the proportion of people who practise some form of cultivation is higher, probably not much more than an eighth of the total Somali population are sedentary cultivators, and these mainly the southern Digil and Rahanweyn tribes. Thus for the majority, in the arid conditions of the north, centre, and extreme south (Northern Kenya) of their country, nomadism is the prevailing economic response, and mode of livelihood and social institutions in general are tightly adjusted to the scant resources of an unenviably harsh environment. In these regions, with their home-wells as a focus of distribution, the pastoralists move over many miles in the year, driving from pasturage to pasturage and water-point to water-point their flocks of sheep and goats and herds of camels, and, in some southern areas particularly, of cattle also.
Of this mixed patrimony, although the Somali pony remains the prestige beast par excellence, it is their camels which Somali most esteem. These are carefully bred for milk and for carriage. Milch camels provide milk for the pastoralist on which alone he often depends for his diet; burden camels, which are not normally ridden except by the sick, transport his collapsible hut or tent and all his worldly possessions from place to place. Camel-hide is used to make sandals to protect his feet on the long treks across the country. But these uses do not in themselves account for the way in which the pastoralists value their camels or, despite the longstanding and wide use of money as a currency, explain why it is primarily in the size and quality of his camels that a man’s substance is most tellingly measured. This striking bias in Somali culture is best expressed briefly by saying that in their social as well as economic transactions the pastoralists operate on a camel standard. Thus the exchange of substantial gifts of livestock and other wealth which cements a marriage between a man and a woman and their respective kin is ideally, and often still in practice, conducted in the medium of camels.7 It is also in camels that the value of a man’s life and the subordinate position of women are expressed in material terms. Generally the blood-compensation due when a man is killed is rated at one hundred camels, while a woman’s life is valued at half that figure. Lesser injuries too are similarly compounded in a standard tariff of damages expressed in different amounts of camels. Although in these traditional terms sheep and goats are regarded as a sort of small change, they evoke none of the interest and attention which men bestow on their camels and indeed are considered primarily as the concern of women.
This difference in attitudes is consistent with the fact that the milch camels and sheep and goats usually form two separate herding units. A man’s wife, or wives, and children move with the flocks which provide them with milk and the few burden camels necessary for the transport of their tents and effects. With their much greater powers of endurance and resistance to drought, a man’s milch camels are herded by his unmarried brothers, sons and nephews, moving widely and rapidly about the country far from the sheep and goats which, in the dry seasons especially, have to cling closely to sources of water. Particularly in the dry seasons, when long and frequent treks back and forth between the pastures and wells are required, camel-herding is an arduous and exacting occupation and one well calculated to foster in the young camel boys all those traits of independence and resourcefulness which are so strongly delineated in the Somali character.
With this dual system of herding the nomads move about their country with their livestock in search of pasture and water, ordering their movements to conform as closely as possible to the distribution of these two necessities of life. Pasturage is regarded as a gift of God to man in general, or rather to Somalis, and is not considered to belong to specific groups. Generally, people and stock are most widely deployed after the rains when the grazing is fresh and
