access to women often emerged as a central and overriding trope—especially within stories told by men.
Abdalle did not necessarily tell this story with the intention of condemning any particular group of people. However, this provocative narrative could easily enable one to paint a territorial incursion as a liberating activity and claim the Ajuran, who had long-standing roots in the region, as oppressed kin. The allegation that the Borana had reduced the Ajuran to a state of virtual slavery is particularly ironic given that British officials of the era, as a means of justifying their own conquest, leveled similar accusations against the Somali.36 While one cannot immediately take Abdalle’s account at face value, his story calls into question the assumptions of scholars, such as Günther Schlee, who have described the Pax Borana as a relatively peaceful era. What to Schlee and Shongolo was a nonviolent relationship of clientship, Ahmed Maalin Abdalle described as an oppressive, gendered form of domination.
Others recounted the history of this period in ways that reinforced Somali chauvinism and racial and religious exclusion. A resident of Habasweyn, who was in his early eighties at the time of our interview, also provided an account of this early “conquest” period. “The land,” he explained, “was inhabited by black, ignorant Gallas, who were naked and black.” He described the Somalis as “a people with religion, of the book, carrying the history of the prophets.”37 In his eyes, the Somali were a superior people who helped bring civilization to the “backwards” non-Muslim populations who had been living in the region. For at least some people, these stories helped justify their rights to the land, assert their supremacy over non-Somali and non-Muslim groups, and reinforce the conceptual boundaries between Somali and “other.”
Not everyone from northern Kenya, however, would agree with such a chauvinist depiction of Somali conquest. Adan Ibrahim Ali, for example, argued that the Somali had distant kin in areas as far away as Chad, Egypt, Israel, and Rwanda. He also maintained that other Kenyan groups, including the Maasai and Luo, had hidden Somali roots.38 Ali claimed affinity with a variety of people both within and outside the Kenyan nation-state and appealed to a highly inclusive idea of kinship.39 While one man’s interpretations of the past helped to buttress the conceptual and moral boundaries between Somali and gaal (the non-Muslim “other”), the other incorporated diverse people (including “black” and predominantly non-Muslim groups) into the Somali lineage system.
Trying to tease out the factual elements in any of these accounts strips them of much of their meaning.40 As John Jackson argues, storytelling is often a way for people to cultivate community, not circulate facts.41 In addition, it is important to position oneself (the “scholar”) not as the ultimate authority, but as one of many storytellers. Dwelling upon the constructed nature of oral sources and no less tendentious and partial written records can also be a productive means of gesturing toward a certain unknowability regarding the past and thus avoiding the dangers of a “politically irresponsible historicism.”42
At the same time, oral testimony should not be treated merely as a form of historical memory irreconcilable with the work of guild historians.43 Doing so would deny its utility as a source of factual information about the past. Bracketing certain prosecutorial questions of who is to blame for past conflicts, these stories have much to tell us. They suggest that new immigrants and more established residents were engaged in a reconceptualization of belonging, which enabled “Somaliness” to become an encompassing affiliation for diverse people throughout the region. At the turn of the century, conflicts between Borana and Somalis led to realliances and redefinitions of “us” and “them”—whose effects continue to have reverberations into the present.
Until the twentieth century, identification as Somali was likely neither as widespread nor particularly contentious. Far more significant was one’s status as a Muslim. As one interviewee told the scholar Virginia Luling: “People in those days did not talk of Somali but of Muslims and gaalo (infidels).”44 Throughout the nineteenth century, southern Somalia underwent rapid economic transformation. The European demand for cash crops fueled agricultural production on the plantations along the Juba and Shebelle river valleys of southern Somalia and the island of Zanzibar. This, in turn, fed the market for domestic slavery and transformed the city-states on the southern Somali coast into hubs of international trade.45 The expansion of the slave trade made debates over one’s Islamic status (and, by the same token, one’s ability to be enslaved) more pressing.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, groups throughout southern Somalia and northern Kenya came to equate being Muslim with being “Somali,” and collapsed the distinction between a prophetic and an agnatic genealogy.46 Lee Cassanelli describes this process as the “fusion of Islamic and Somali identities.”47 Those who seized control of the land, asserted their Somali origins, or claimed a status as an independent lineage likely had to draw a strict, and perhaps violent, distinction between people who, only a few years earlier, would have been considered members of shared groups. Certain people, including many Oromo speakers, were able to successfully claim the name Somali. Rather than be absorbed into subordinate relationships, they were incorporated as long-lost kin. Other groups were enslaved or integrated into dominant Somali lineages as unequal clients. Still others were violently expelled. Casting certain people as “gaal” (a derogatory term for a non-Muslim) no doubt helped to limn the boundaries of groups that had a long history of interaction.48
The binary distinction between Somali and gaal became a key conceptual boundary throughout the region—one that has been reanimated over the course of subsequent decades. After new Somali immigrants entered the region, groups in what is today Wajir District, who had once lived under the protection of the Borana, began to rework notions of lineage. For example, oral histories suggest that many Degodia acquired an independent status at this time. This was accomplished when Degodia migrants broke off from the Ogaden, unified with their kin who had been living under the Ajuran, and declared themselves no longer sheegat.49 Oral histories also indicate that many Ajuran, on the other hand, avoided eviction by “reawakening” their Somali Hawiye roots.50 As the historian Richard Waller aptly notes: “What ‘clan’ means in any given context is itself a puzzle.”51 The long history of interaction between “Somalis” and “Borana” was, nevertheless, not so easily effaced. During the colonial period and into today, the question of who was and is a Somali is not nearly as straightforward as many social scientists have assumed.
It is worth noting that the above description of northern Kenya runs counter to certain Somali nationalist versions of history. Nationalisms in general often lay claim to an ancient past or, in some cases, invoke a timeless national identity. In contrast, I have suggested that Somaliness was a product of recent historical and political struggle, rather than a natural or transhistorical category.52 In so doing, I have built upon the scholarship of Ali Jimale Ahmed and others who have examined the “invention of Somalia.”53 Nevertheless, it is also imperative to consider why mythico-histories of Somalia (which continue to provide a basis of unity and an anti-imperialist language) remain so salient for many people.
MYTHS OF CONQUEST
After gaining a foothold in the area, many nomadic groups came into violent conflict with imperial representatives. Archival records from this era provide clues to the escalation of conflicts between Somali leaders in the Jubaland region (which was until 1925 part of the East Africa Protectorate/Kenya) and officials from the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). Like any collection of written records, documents from this period enable certain kinds of historical readings and disable others. The stories they do offer historians, however, were obscured by later generations of colonial officials, who discarded the history of the IBEAC as they produced their own narratives of conquest. Reexamining this history, which was later buried under newer colonial mythologies, provides a means of questioning standard narratives about the isolation of the region.
In the late nineteenth
