outlets converged on the Benadir coast. Historical trade routes crisscrossed the region, which at various points in time had been connected to Arabia, India, and even distant China and Indonesia. After declaring a protectorate over the sultan of Zanzibar in 1890, the company claimed much of the East African interior (including Jubaland) to be under its sphere of influence. However, company rule remained largely nominal. Many of the surviving archival records from this period provide glimpses into the enormous strategic and tactical obstacles that the IBEAC faced to making profits in the region.
T. S. Thomas’s seminal 1917 work, Jubaland and the Northern Frontier District, offers one of the few in-depth, retrospective accounts of the failed attempts by company authorities to capture the profitable trade. Thomas, who served as senior assistant secretary to the protectorate government, drew upon official records to compile an administrative history of the region. According to his account, the company tried, through the use of a river steamer, to redirect the caravan trade away from Barawa and Merca and farther south toward “its natural outlet at Kismayu,” although this enterprise proved a “complete failure.”54 Officials also attempted to appropriate title deeds to land around the port city of Kismayo in Jubaland. When the company representative, H. R. Todd, tried to negotiate this transfer with Kismayo residents, the meeting quickly devolved into an open rebellion during which local Somali populations teamed up with the company’s mutinying Hyderabad troops.55 In 1895, the Foreign Office took over the administration of the country from the bankrupt company.
Thomas’s detailed report diverges greatly from the accounts that colonial officials produced only a decade later. Reading them together reveals the working memory of colonial power. By the late 1920s, colonial officials were creating new founding myths, which elided the ignoble failures of the IBEAC to capture the caravan trade. By the beginning of formal colonial rule in 1920, officials in the north had come to internalize a belief in the “civilizing” effects of British rule on an otherwise “barbaric” and anarchic people. As colonial officials came to conceptualize themselves as rulers of a backward and isolated region, they effaced the history of these once-extensive caravan routes. Rather than a conscious or intentional suppression, this elision reflects the ways in which certain kinds of logic became sedimented in colonial thinking.
By the 1940s, Pan-Somali nationalists had developed their own history of the region. In the eyes of many Somali irredentists, the late nineteenth century was a lamentable period during which four colonial powers—France, Italy, Britain, and Ethiopia—divided the historical Somali nation into five territories. While protectorate and colonial accounts paint a picture of disorderly tribes in need of colonial order, Somali nationalists portray inhabitants of the Northern Frontier District (NFD) as a homogeneous people divided by arbitrary borders. Although Somali nationalist discourse provided an important critique of colonial power, it also did not give much heed to the internal dynamics of the region. Rather, both Somali nationalist elites and colonial officials crafted an image of the NFD that reflected a certain vision of state power.
While the inhabitants of the Horn may not have been the homogeneous nation that Pan-Somali supporters retrospectively imagined, there is little doubt that imperial powers drew boundaries with little regard for nomadic populations. By the late 1890s, the protectorate regime had claimed a vast territory beyond its coastal garrisons.56 In the hope of checking Ethiopian and Italian expansion, the Foreign Office hastily secured its rights to the poorly surveyed terrain stretching west of the Juba River and south of the Ethiopian Empire. The art of cartography was a key technique through which British authorities created a semblance of sovereignty over the interior of the East Africa Protectorate, where they largely lacked effective control. Most of these frontiers were nominal artifacts of imperial diplomacy that cut through communities and partitioned nomadic populations for whom these colonial conventions were largely meaningless.57 Labeling these borders “arbitrary,” however, is misleading. It suggests as a corollary the possibility of a “natural” border, which assumes that people innately belong to fixed territories.58 Transhumant groups, however, have not always imagined community in ways predicated on territorial boundaries (which is not to say that nomads did not have links to certain lands and geographies).
In the late nineteenth century, imperial representatives had recognized that northern Kenya and southern Somalia were interconnected to a much broader regional and global economy. By the turn of the century, however, British officials had turned their attention to the construction of the Uganda-Mombasa railway farther south, which was completed in 1901. The IBEAC’s experience in Jubaland revealed the inviability of capturing pastoral trade networks as well as the challenges of seizing control over nomadic regions. Rather than attempt the task of redirecting capital flows or securing effective administration over the sparsely populated, arid northern expanse, the thinly staffed protectorate regime concentrated instead on halting the southward migration of the area’s armed, nomadic people into the fertile central highlands and Rift Valley, which soon became the focus of the government’s commercial interests.59
By the early twentieth century, the East Africa Protectorate regime had come to see the region as an extremely challenging area to govern best thought of as a buffer zone, analogous to the North-West Frontier of India. To hinder Somali migration into Central Kenya, in 1902 the administration applied the Outlying District Ordinance to the north, which effectively made the region a closed area; movement in and out was restricted to holders of a special pass.60 In 1910, the protectorate government appointed the first “officer in charge” of the newly formed Northern Frontier District (NFD) (see map 2.1). It would take another decade, however, before the protectorate regime could claim effective control over the area.61
In 1913, the explorer Ignatius N. Dracopoli encapsulated colonial sentiments when he described the region as “the outskirt of civilization, on the frontier, as it were, of a fertile and well-watered land, beyond which lie the arid and sun-scorched wastes of a great desert.”62 More than two decades of periodic combat with Somali groups only nourished this image.63 The concept of the frontier enabled officials to incorporate the area into the protectorate, while simultaneously emptying it of its own “cultural significance” and obscuring the alternative geographies of its inhabitants.64 Although colonial officials naturalized the north’s status as a buffer zone, which marked the outer limits of imperial control, its isolation and marginalization were neither natural nor inevitable. Rather, they were the by-product of shifting imperial strategies as well as decades of struggle between Somali nomads, company representatives, and protectorate officials.
“ANYTHING BETWEEN HER LEGS IS OURS”
Officials and officers charged with securing the frontier, as George Simpson notes, often “imagined themselves impartial arbitrators who were bringing a more enlightened system of governance to a people so caught up in narrow and parochial disputes that they could not recognize the blessings that were being bestowed upon them.”65 The protectorate regime lauded itself on the suppression of slavery and claimed to be safeguarding weaker populations from southward Somali aggression. They also attributed the causes of conflicts in the north to a “tribal” culture left unchecked and suggested that solutions lay in the civilizing effects of British rule.
This attitude surfaced in the way protectorate officials treated a series of disputes between subclans of the Ogaden. While protectorate authorities tried to contain Somalis and limit their migration southward, Ogaden leaders fought one another for hegemony over the eastern portion of the NFD. This conflict culminated in the killing of Ahmed Magan, the sultan of the Muhammad Zubeir, in 1914. People in Garissa District often refer to this series of conflicts as the Kalaluud, which can be roughly translated as “stalemate.” For the British, however, the Kalaluud was not a historical moment to be named, but simply one of many administrative headaches. In official correspondence, this complex political struggle was treated as a timeless cultural aspect of nomadic life, which highlighted the ungovernability of the Somalis: “The fighting between these two tribes was throughout of the most savage description.
