nation Islamized and Semiticized by repeated immigrations from Arabia.”4 He painted the Somali as an admixture of two distinct racial types, which he assumed to be meaningful sociological identities. His writing helped to entrench a belief in the Somalis’ ambiguity: a population that Europeans came to see as neither quite Arab nor quite African.
That Burton saw features of the “Arab” world among the Somali speakers he encountered is hardly surprising. For centuries, people living around the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea had intermarried and traded extensively with one another. It was also common among people living in East Africa to claim descent from putatively more civilized, foreign ancestors. Swahili-speaking people in the coastal city-states of East Africa had inherited a longstanding political tradition, which was widespread among Bantu speakers throughout Central and Southern Africa, of basing rights to rule on origins from exogenous conquerors. With the gradual spread of Islam and the Omani occupation of the coast, it became commonplace for East Africans to assert foreign ancestry in Arabia or Persia. While Swahili speakers on the East African coast often claimed Shirazi (Persian) descent, Somalis living in the Horn of Africa and Aden tended to trace their roots to Arabia. Many groups in Northeast Africa also took pride in reciting patrilineal genealogies to the prophet.5
Groups thus coalesced around a common belief that they were descendants of spiritually empowered sheikhs from the Arab world who had intermarried with local women. The Isaaq lineage, for example, derives its name from the eponymous founding father, Sheikh Ishaq ibn Ahmed al-Hashimi, whose tomb in northern Somalia remains to this day an important site of pilgrimage. According to one of my interlocutors, Sheikh Ishaq originated from Arabia and immigrated to northern Somalia, where he married two local women of Oromo and Amharic descent.6 Hagiographies have been and continue to be important ways through which East African Muslims maintain an orientation toward the wider Islamic world. This is not to suggest that genealogies are part of an unbroken or timeless tradition, but simply that precolonial intellectual and cultural practices continue to have relevance into the present.7
The formalistic nature of oral and written genealogies and hagiographies can easily obscure the manifold ways in which people have interpreted, reworked, and subverted claims of foreign descent at different moments in time. It is, nevertheless, heuristically useful to contrast an idealized model of “European” and “Somali” notions of descent. For European explorers, Muslim genealogies were evidence that the coastal towns of North and East Africa were “products of a Persian and Arabian diaspora that had spread around the Indian Ocean.”8 Combining new forms of scientific racism with an older Christian metaphysics, European thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century reinterpreted the biblical story of Ham. The myth of Ham, as Mamdani explains, posited the existence of a superior alien race and “explained away every sign of civilization in tropical Africa as a foreign import.”9 Somalis, in the eyes of many European explorers, were a product of intermarriage between a foreign people (posited to be either Hamitic or Semitic) and the indigenous populations of Northeast Africa. Somalis in the nineteenth century, however, did not conceptualize descent through the same racial and geographic categories. For many people in Northeast Africa, being “Somali” very likely meant participating in the theologically defined space of the wider Islamic umma.10 Descent was not conceptualized through a continental understanding of geography, a secular conception of historical time, or an essentialized “racial binary” between indigenous Africans on one hand, and nonindigenous foreigners on the other.11
Though Burton constructed racial barriers between himself and the inhabitants of the Horn, he was much celebrated for his intimate and often controversial appreciation of the cultures of the “Orient.” The philosopher Anthony Appiah paints Burton as an unusual combination of cosmopolitan and racist misanthrope who was often nihilistic in orientation. Adventurous and linguistically adept, he successfully passed as a Pathan from India’s North-West Frontier in order to attend the hajj in Mecca.12 Few others possessed the linguistic skills and the recklessness to flit so easily between various cultural milieus. However, many of Burton’s hagiographers have overlooked the fact that he conducted most of his travels within an international Islamic space.13 The Indian Ocean was a well-traveled region in which populations mixed and where foreigners, as Engseng Ho elegantly notes, “settled and sojourned in towns big and small and entered into relations with locals that were more intimate, sticky, and prolonged than the Europeans could countenance.”14 Immigrants were by no means an unusual presence, and this climate no doubt facilitated his ability to assimilate. Appiah traces the genealogy of cosmopolitanism back “to the Cynics of the fourth century.”15 However, this lineage neglects forms of cosmopolitanism that derive from neither Hellenic nor imperial origins.
Map 1.1. Some sites of Somali residence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Note: This map shows modern political boundaries.)
If being “cosmopolitan” is understood as a kind of stance aimed at navigating across cultural, religious, and linguistic differences and finding ways to “belong” to multiple worlds, then it is clear that the Horn of Africa had its own traditions of cosmopolitanism. Coastal cities such as Berbera and Mogadishu were major ports of call for the region as well as centers for cultivating these cosmopolitan sensibilities. Monsoons brought dhows (lateen-rigged ships) across the Indian Ocean, which enabled locals to take advantage of long-distance trade and forced foreigners to stay until the winds reversed. Somali speakers developed social technologies to incorporate these strangers and bridge the parochial divides of language, culture, and geographic origin. Unlike European traditions, which were predicated on overcoming the narrow limitations of citizenship, Somali forms of cosmopolitanism were aimed at assimilating migrants, forging ties of kinship to neighbors, and making claims to spiritual universality.16
Kinship and prophetic genealogies, which were typically traced through the paternal line, provided a powerful language for incorporating strangers, neighbors, and migrants. However, they were also social tools that could be used to exclude. There is no pure form of cosmopolitanism unencumbered by exclusionary dynamics. By asserting membership in Islamic lineages, Somali speakers could define themselves as superior in relation to those perceived to live beyond the civilized world of the Dar al-Islam and, thus, legitimize the subordination of slaves. Some groups also distinguished themselves from “casted” lineages, who occupied a stigmatized status that, while distinct from slaves, marked them as socially marginalized from the freeborn.17 In addition, descent was sometimes invoked to claim superiority over nonpastoral lineages, whose members farmed along the Juba and Shebelle Rivers.18 Livestock ownership is yet another distinction that has long underpinned hierarchical relations in the region.19
European encroachment further complicated this cosmopolitan, if unequal, world and facilitated the spread of a Somali diaspora. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, European merchant ships regularly stopped off at the coastal cities bordering the Gulf of Aden (see map 1.1). Berbera was a bustling commercial center at the time, and Aden soon developed into a major port of call—as Faisal Devji notes, in many ways “the Dubai of its time.”20 Due to the accidents of geography, Isaaq and Harti Somalis who lived along the Gulf of Aden were particularly well placed to take advantage of these new opportunities. Somali seamen and stokers recruited from Aden and the surrounding littoral (including regions incorporated into the Aden Protectorate and the Protectorate of British Somaliland in the 1800s) voyaged and settled abroad. Some established small communities in dispersed port cities, such as Cape Town, Cardiff, and Perth. Others served as soldiers for British imperial regiments or as navigators and porters for European explorers. Somalis guided Lord Delamere, who in 1897 launched his now infamous expedition into Kenya. Kenya’s fertile soils and rich economic opportunities attracted many of these male recruits, who came to the colony over the next half century through various waves of emigration from Aden, British Somaliland, and, to a
