Sometimes they married local women; in other cases, they were joined by women from Somaliland and Aden. Even as protectorate authorities began to hem their subjects into new racial and ethnic categories, many Somali migrants continued to identify with their kin in Aden, Somaliland, and the wider region. They were able to draw upon precolonial cosmopolitan practices, resist the full effects of deracination, and reorient themselves toward the Gulf of Aden and the wider Islamic world in new ways.
BECOMING SOMALI IN THE NORTHERN FRONTIER DISTRICT OF KENYA
Farther to the south, another emigration was taking place. Impelled by a number of economic and political pressures, Somali-speaking nomads who identified as Ogaden and Degodia moved out of the southern regions of what is today Ethiopia and Somalia. By the turn of the century, they had established themselves in what is now northern Kenya (see map 2.1). Not only did shared discourses circulate between the coastal city-states of Northeast Africa and the pastoral interior, but nomadic groups also possessed their own cosmopolitan praxis. As they traveled, they came into conflict with Oromo speakers living north of the Tana River, brought with them new understandings of “Somaliness,” and helped to reconfigure the boundaries of belonging in the north.
In the mid-nineteenth century, members of the Ogaden and Harti lineages began to move into what is today Jubaland (in modern-day southern Somalia). The caravan trade, which wound from the interior and converged upon the coast, attracted many Somali migrants to the region. Economic gain, however, was not the only driver impelling migration southward. Groups also sought to escape internal conflicts as well as the expanding Ethiopian Empire, which by 1906 had extended its state almost to its present-day contours. Many Degodia fled to what is today northern Kenya and, shortly thereafter, other Somali clans followed in their wake.22
When approaching this history of migration, there is an inherent risk of reifying clan and ethnic labels. Archival documents construct particular objects of knowledge. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, protectorate administrators were quite fixated on determining the “tribal essence” of East African society and often described people exclusively in ethnic terms, conflating communal categories with collectivities. Other kinds of affiliations were obscured, as was the individuality of people in the region. Oral testimony, on the other hand, risks projecting modern communal identifications onto the past. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “The collective subjects who supposedly remember did not exist as such at the time of the events they claim to remember. Rather, their constitution as subjects goes hand in hand with the continuous creation of the past.”23 A careful reading must attend to the ways in which oral and archival sources give rise to an image of bounded, relatively timeless, and internally homogeneous groups.
In addition, histories of migration often dredge up complex stories about intermarriage, assimilation, and expulsion. In the case of northern Kenya, recent conflicts over land, grazing, and political constituencies have reignited debates over the so-called Somali conquest of the region.24 Studying these narratives poses certain problems for historians due to the stakes involved in their interpretation. Without acknowledging the limits of their own authorial power, scholars risk validating a certain representation of history that may reinforce contemporary nativist claims.
While people from the north often provided divergent accounts of this era, their narratives tended to converge upon several common themes that had become fixtures within collective memory.25 As Rogers Brubaker notes, people cannot freely invent history. Certain kinds of pasts, he argues, are “made ‘available’ for present-day use not only by the events themselves . . . but also by their subsequent incorporation into commemorative traditions.”26 What virtually all the sources from this era—whether archival, oral, or scholarly—agree upon is that Somali migrants came into an area where the Oromo had been in some way dominant.
Günther Schlee and Abdullahi A. Shongolo (who have done pioneering work on northern Kenya) describe the period prior to this phase of Somali immigration as one of relative peace and security.27 According to their account, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the Borana, an Oromo-speaking group, had adopted a number of diverse people under an alliance that became known as the Worr Libin, or the People of Libin. Over the centuries, various Somali-speaking groups had gained a foothold in the region by becoming sheegat (which can be roughly translated as “clients”) to these established Borana residents.28 Through sheegat, newcomers could adopt the name and assimilate into another clan or lineage. According to Schlee and Shongolo, this period of “Borana hegemony” led to “a multiethnic political system that was the major unifying factor in the region before the introduction of modern statehood.”29
The Pax Borana, however, came undone in the late nineteenth century. Ogaden and other Somali lineages began fighting ex-slaves for control of the Juba riverbank and pushing farther westward and southward, displacing Oromo speakers. Population pressure, opportunities to monopolize the southern leg of the caravan trade, and internal conflicts likely spurred this move southward. By the 1870s, Somalis had taken control over much of lower Juba and had begun to press farther south into northern Kenya.30 Wajir was one of the major sites of conflict in the first few decades of the twentieth century. This was most likely due to the importance of its water resources and its location along the caravan routes.31 When they reached Wajir in 1906, the Ogaden and their various sheegat met other lineages living under the Pax Borana. They encountered the Ajuran, who spoke Oromo and were almost indistinguishable from the Borana (perhaps because they were, to all extents and purposes, “Borana”). Living among the Ajuran were also more recent Somali immigrants, such as the Degodia, who had fled earlier Ethiopian incursions.32
As Somalis gained control over the area, they displaced many established residents. They also supplanted the importance of the Borana name, instead cementing “Somali” as an overarching affiliation. How exactly this occurred is the main source of disagreement within oral testimony and written accounts. Different sources provide different interpretations of this era. Did established residents forcefully or willingly assimilate into broader Somali ways of life? Did locals “invent” or simply “rediscover” their Somali roots? Was this a liberating foray or an oppressive invasion?
Historical events are overdetermined, riddled by silences in the historical record, and obscured by the retrospective significance conferred on them. It is misleading to imagine that we, as scholars, can peel away the bias in these various accounts or simply triangulate between them to get at a singular, unmediated truth. Events, as Bruno Latour argues, are best understood outside the fact/fiction binary; rather, they are “matters of concern” that inspire a “gathering” of people in debate.33 For Latour, this is not recourse to blunt deconstructionism disinvested from empiricism, but rather a call for a productive and renewed realism that accounts for the ways in which issues become arenas for debate.34
Local political thinkers give rise to new stories, elaborate upon old ones, and keep them in circulation, which in turn helps to reinforce collective representations. Many chroniclers of these stories in northern Kenya were older men, often charged with projecting the public face of the community’s history. This also meant that the history of the region was frequently told with an emphasis on patriarchal and masculine features. One such orator was Ahmed Maalin Abdalle of Habasweyn, who was also one of my main interlocutors. Fluent in multiple languages, Abdalle, a former teacher as well as a community peace builder, was well known for his humor, erudition, and knowledge of local history. Abdalle recounted a narrative about the new Somali immigrants, whom he argued had “liberated” the Ajuran from a state of semislavery to the Borana. According to his account, the Ajuran were forced to distinguish their residences from those of the Borana by inverting the animal hides covering their aqal (huts) and exposing the sides with fur. The Borana were allowed to approach any aqal with exposed fur during the night and rouse the sleeping husband, who was obliged to exit to give the visitor access to his wife. To add insult to injury, the husband was also expected to
