1934, THE ATTORNEY GENERAL of Kenya intervened in a much wider debate over the legal classification of the Somali population. Construing of race and nation as natural categories and approaching the issue through a positivist epistemology, he suggested that careful anthropological investigation could ultimately resolve the matter of Somali origins. He nonetheless speculated that the foreign roots of the Somali people were vestiges of a distant past, drawing an analogy with British people who could claim “Norman” ancestry. His comments prefigured a broader crisis in the late 1930s, when the status of the Somali came under increased scrutiny.2
For decades, historians neglected the history of Somali subjects. Nationalist historians overlooked their experiences because they did not fit into conventional definitions of indigeneity and seemed to embody a tragic liminality.3 Scholars have only just begun to explore the subjectivities of those who were not governed so explicitly as “natives.” Labor historians also tended to elide the histories of Somali traders and nomadic pastoralists, who did not fall within the category of “workers.”4 Yet the lives of Somalis in Kenya have much to teach us about the range of colonial subjectivities as well as the social and political horizons beyond the territorial confines of the state. This chapter examines how empire facilitated certain kinds of diasporic and regional engagement, and how these possibilities began to unravel in the years leading up to World War II.
Throughout early colonial rule, Somalis in Kenya maintained a loose affiliation with territory that sustained models of membership that did not conform to colonial or juridical logics. Despite being confined to the north, northerners continued to see pastoralism as a viable, sustainable strategy; avoided becoming deeply incorporated into the colonial labor economy; and frequently crossed the porous boundaries between Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland, and Kenya with little regard for their authority. Unwilling to invest significant funds or manpower in the NFD, authorities regularly yielded to these forms of transhumance. By enlisting Somalis from Aden and British Somaliland in the imperial project, colonial authorities also enabled them to form horizontal solidarities that stretched across colonial boundaries. Members of the Isaaq and Harti community often claimed non-native status and saw themselves both as imperial citizens and as dispersed members of a wider Islamic and genealogical community.
Bringing the metropole and colonies into a single framework, this chapter analyzes some of the fundamental tensions at the heart of the imperial political economy. Colonial economies demanded flexibility for the movement of laborers, soldiers, traders, and capital between continents and across territorial borders. However, colonial and British authorities also sought to restrict the mobility of colonized subjects, including Somali nomads, traders, and seamen. While British and colonial administrators at times imagined Britishness in terms of a global imperial subjecthood, they also remained committed to an ethnic and racial understanding of African identity. As these tensions heightened in the interwar period, British officials began to erode the legal status of the Somali people.
IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP
Although they left various kinds of “ethnographic” traces, Somali travelers who arrived in Kenya in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced few written records themselves. Archival records contain Somali “voices,” but are often mediated through colonial discourses, which defined a limited terrain of communication. Postcolonial nationalism has so shaped contemporary testimony that it is also difficult to reconstruct the thinking of early generations of Somali immigrants through oral history alone. Many of my Isaaq and Harti interlocutors described their patriarchs as Kenya’s pioneers. Through proud, patriarchal narratives, second-, third-, and fourth-generation Somalis emphasized their long-standing roots in the country, highlighted their community’s contributions to Kenyan history, and countered widespread perceptions that they were “alien” to the country.
Given the fragmented nature of the historical record, it is difficult to determine how newly arrived Somali migrants conceptualized their relationship to British power and the locals living in East Africa. Studies of other immigrant communities nevertheless enable some tentative conclusions to be drawn. Throughout the nineteenth century, Indian traders, moneylenders, and laborers had flocked to East Africa—creating economic and political inroads for British colonialists.5 In addition, British officials initially toyed with the prospect that East Africa would become an “America for the Hindu.”6 In the late nineteenth century, it was not yet obvious that white settlers would come to occupy such a privileged place in Kenyan society.
Somalis from Kismayo, Aden, and British Somaliland (much like their Indian counterparts) may have seen the East African interior as a land of opportunity and themselves as purveyors of “civilization.” Over the course of the twentieth century, through various waves of immigration, vibrant Somali communities formed in towns and urban centers throughout the colony. Some assisted the British administration in “pacifying” the interior to make way for the Uganda-Mombasa railway. Others were veterans of early colonial military campaigns who relocated to Kenya after their service. Their numbers were later augmented by Somali veterans of the two World Wars. Protectorate officials relied on Somalis to serve as translators, while many white settlers recruited them to assist in establishing ranches and farms in the Rift Valley and fertile highlands of Kenya. Members of the Somali merchant class of Kismayo also migrated into the Northern Frontier District (NFD) as traders. Isaaq and Harti immigrants established small settlements along the railway and livestock routes.7
Somalis arrived in East Africa as a racial hierarchy was still taking shape. Bonds of intimacy with white settlers blurred the divide between colonizer and colonized, while never fully effacing the distinction. Lord Delamere and Karen Blixen cultivated close, personal relationships with members of their Somali staff, whom they allowed to reside on their farms along with their extended families and livestock. On several occasions, Delamere served as an advocate for Somali migrants from British Somaliland and Aden and petitioned colonial authorities on their behalf.8 Although Blixen viewed Europeans as the superior race, she also saw her Somali staff as relatively “civilized” people, noting their shared Abrahamic religious traditions.9
Settlers like Blixen fabricated ideas of civilization and whiteness through interaction with Somali employees, traders, and shopkeepers. Racial hierarchies did not simply emerge through legal fiat, but rather were constructed via the mundane, daily micropolitics of colonial life. According to some of my interlocutors, white settlers relied on Somali butchers because they considered the halal slaughtering process more hygienic than other local butchering practices.10 After the outbreak of the plague in the early 1900s, protectorate authorities began to enforce a system of racial segregation in Nairobi—at which point disease became intimately tied to “blackness” in the eyes of many Europeans.11 Somali migrants, many of whom had taken up the role of livestock traders, tried to distance themselves from such associations. They continued to supply cattle to white ranchers in the Rift Valley and sold milk, meat, and other animal products to Indian and European clients.12
Proximity to whiteness generated an aspirational politics. Some Isaaq and Harti proudly referenced their relationships to now-famous figures like Blixen, which they also cited as evidence of their long-standing roots and contributions to the country. Hussein Nur suggested that I read Elspeth Huxley’s book about Lord Delamere in order to learn more about “their” history. His father was among the Somalis who had helped guide Delamere into the interior of East Africa.13 Speaking to me (a white foreigner), it is quite possible that people were more inclined to portray Europeans in a positive light. However, there was also a tacit acknowledgment that rapport with white settlers, though asymmetric, afforded Somali employees a certain elite status. The relationship between these two immigrant communities, nevertheless, grew increasingly tense as racial lines hardened over the early twentieth century and contests over land intensified. One man in Nanyuki recounted a story of a Somali man who, while out herding his cattle, killed a white farmer. The settler had brandished a gun and shot his animals, which had wandered onto the settler’s farm. A colonial judge gave the Somali herder a relatively lenient sentence
