to take any steps to induce or compel the tribes to come to terms. . . . The combatants were left to themselves.”66 Local accounts, however, inflect the Kalaluud with far different significance. Unlike the colonial archives, oral histories attend to the political motivations of these struggles.
While oral accounts of the Kalaluud are hardly straightforward reports, they are nevertheless useful as a means of destabilizing dominant, and no less straightforward, colonial narratives. They do not offer “corrections” to colonial texts, but rather an entirely different framework for understanding the past.67 Ahmed Maalin Abdalle told one of the most evocative versions of the events that triggered the Kalaluud. The conflict began, he explained, when a Muhammad Zubeir woman, who was married to a man from the Abdalla lineage, left home one day to graze her goats. While she was out in the field, the hooves of one of her animals dug into the soil, exposing an elephant tusk. This discovery precipitated a dispute between leaders of the Muhammad Zubeir and the Abdalla, both subclans of the Ogaden. Citing the fact that the woman was their daughter, the Muhammad Zubeir claimed ownership of the tusk. Members of the Abdalla, however, contended that they were the rightful owners, as she was the wife of one of their sons.68
One way to interpret this story is as an allegory for a historical conflict over control of the ivory trade. Such an interpretation is not without historical justification. As the scholar Scott Reese notes, by the second half of the nineteenth century, “population movements, sedentarization and continued hunting” had depleted animals from the coast, which forced merchants and hunters to move farther into the interior.69 If, in fact, the Kalaluud began as a contest over the changing orientation of the ivory trade, then stories of this conflict may have traveled down the generations in the form of a metaphor about a woman, her goats, and the fortuitous discovery of a tusk.
The problem with such methods of interpretation, however, is that they demand that historians differentiate between the “metaphorical” and the “historical” aspects of any given oral testimony. In the absence of some other, more “valid,” corroborating historical source, oral histories tend to be treated as mere metaphor, their historical reliability rendered dubious by the lack of confirmatory evidence.
This has particularly pernicious consequences for the study of women and gender, where evidence outside of oral testimony is often fragmented or entirely nonexistent. Ahmed Maalin Abdalle provides rich insights into the gendered debates surrounding patrilineal inheritance. To resolve the dispute over the tusk, he recounted, the elders of the Muhammad Zubeir and the Abdalla subclans summoned the woman. When asked about how she had come across the ivory, the woman explained that she was walking and had spotted the tusk between her legs. “Anything between her legs is ours,” happily concluded the Abdalla leaders, who claimed ownership over the ivory.
Oral histories of this nature often enable elder men to reinscribe patriarchal norms over the past. By equating the ivory to an offspring, who “belonged” to the father’s lineage, this story plays upon ideas of patrilineal inheritance. In this account, the woman is simply the ground for a larger debate between men over proprietorship (even though Somalis, like many East Africans, have long subscribed to ideas of female property rights).70 While hardly a clear-cut reflection on the way gender relations “really” worked in the precolonial period, this story provides insight into the ways in which gender was animated—often in humorous and provocative ways—to make sense of the past.
There are other ways of interpreting Maalin Abdalle’s creatively ambiguous and polysemic story that are more subversive of patriarchal norms. While the maintenance of lineage ties has frequently turned on the control of female reproduction and sexuality, it would be a mistake, as Christine Choi Ahmed suggests, to assume that Somali women were little more than chattel. To do so would be to reproduce an androcentric and Eurocentric vision.71 Similarly, David W. Cohen argues that historians and anthropologists often miss the important role played by women, because they attend “to the form and play of ‘larger,’ and in a sense ‘masculine’ structures and segmentary processes.”72 He notes that “the ideology of patrilineal segmentation” may not be the “overarching system defining identity and constituency as has been thought,” but simply “one means of conceptualizing and animating complex social activity over time.”73 Another possible reading of Abdalle’s account is to see the conflict emerging not from differing interpretations of patrilineal inheritance, but rather due to the breakdown of ties of xidid (matrilateral relations). Via marriage, women have often played a central role in bringing together families of different clans.
In addition, Ahmed Maalin Abdalle’s story shows how quickly mobilizations of clan could change. After claiming the ivory, the husband went to the market in Bardera to purchase a large bull. He had the misfortune, however, of returning to Habasweyn after a period of drought. According to Abdalle’s account, members of the Muhammad Zubeir clan stole the man’s newly purchased bull to replenish the herds killed off by the drought. Members of the Abd Wak lineage, who claimed a common descent with the Abdalla in this era, retaliated for the theft. This triggered the series of battles known today as the Kalaluud.74 After the struggles between the Ogaden subclans subsided, such a way of conceptualizing kinship fell out of favor.75 This story serves as a reminder to contemporary observers of Somalia, who have tended to view recent mobilizations of clan as ancient and natural, that one cannot accept the present as traditional or given.
As the Kalaluud conflict indicates, the early twentieth century was a tumultuous time for nomadic groups living in the NFD, who struggled over control of land and resources. British accounts depoliticize the Kalaluud and paint it as an unexceptional “tribal” conflict against which the supposedly stabilizing, neutral colonial state could be deployed. Ahmed Maalin Abdalle, on the other hand, embedded this conflict within regional dynamics, local power struggles, and control over pastoral resources and trade routes. Relying on oral histories of this nature thus helps to counteract the depoliticizing effects of the archives and recenters Somali knowledge production.
Correspondence suggests that many lower-ranking officials were aware of the complex struggles and thorny reconfigurations of lineage ties, but simply found the complexity overwhelming. Actionable administrative discourse required officials to cut through this intricacy. Gradually, many protectorate and colonial administrators came to accept the myth of southward Somali expansion and perpetuated the idea that they were hindering a timeless conquest by a Muslim race of foreign extraction.76 This view of history eventually became ingrained in administrative logic. By 1963, R. G. Turnbull, provincial commissioner (PC) of the NFD, argued: “There can be no doubt that had it not been for European intervention the Somalis, pushing before them the Galla and the remnants of other displaced tribes, would, by now, have swept through Kenya; the local Bantu and Nilotes could scarcely have held them for a day.”77
This narrative of conquest painted Somali nomads as foreign encroachers whose movement needed to be closely contained. By the early twentieth century, protectorate officials had come to see the Somali nomad as an administrative problem as well as a threat to the safety of white settlers and the functioning of the colonial economy. Rarely could protectorate or colonial administrators fully control nomadic movement. However, in transforming migration into a legible problem of governance, protectorate officials stigmatized long-standing patterns of transhumance and equated the “Somali” with unregulated and dangerous mobility.
2
“Kenya Is Regarded by the Somali as an El Dorado”
I am not an anthropologist, but I believe that I am correct in saying that Somalis have been in Africa hundreds of years or even thousands of years, and I am not at all sure how far one has to be back in order to determine the origin of a race. Surely if an Imperial Act were to refer to a person of British origins it would not be competent for that person to allege that he came from Normandy in 1066.
—Attorney
