of equality under British law was possible. It speaks to both a desire for British justice and a recognition of white settler violence and land expropriation.14
By the second decade of British rule, the protectorate administration had begun to work out a system of spatial and racial segregation in concert with white settlers and in consultation with the Colonial Office. Efforts to codify race and restrict African control over land spurred petitioning from many groups. This included Muslim populations, such as Swahili speakers on the coast, who did not want to lose political or economic ground by being consigned to the status of “natives.”15 Under threat of being removed from Nairobi ostensibly on the grounds of health and sanitation, Somali leaders began negotiations with the Colonial Office and protectorate authorities.16 They also petitioned against legislation that would classify them as natives.17 Having fulfilled many of the crucial economic and political demands of empire, Somalis who had served as guides, soldiers, translators, and porters were well positioned to make claims on the state and mobilize for a higher status within the emerging racial hierarchy.
Eventually, protectorate officials relented to their grievances. In 1919, the governor enacted special legislation exempting certified Somalis from the definition of “native” under certain ordinances.18 Technically, the exemption ordinance had strict qualifications. It required that recipients demonstrate the ability to read and write in either English or Arabic and verify that no fewer than three generations had lived in Asia.19 In practice, administrators were fairly liberal in applying this ordinance to the small minority of Somalis who were urban, comparatively wealthy, and could prove a history of government service. In addition, as one Somali elder humorously pointed out, the law applied to “anybody who looked like Somalis, who could pretend he is a Somali.”20 The ordinance effectively gave the Isaaq and Harti many of the privileges of non-natives. Like the Asian community of Kenya, they could legally reside in the urban centers of the colony, access the special wards of hospitals, and enjoy greater rights to mobility. In addition, they paid higher non-native taxation rates. The Isaaq and Harti (and other similarly positioned Somali urbanites and veterans) were not only exempt from carrying a kipande (a pass card that restricted African movement), but some also possessed British passports for international travel.21
As Carina Ray argues, the color line was not static, but was “transgressed, contested and revised over time.”22 Many Somali migrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aspired for political equality with white settlers, Indians, and other African elites—members of the fairly narrow segment of Kenyan society who could access what Mamdani refers to as the civil side of the “bifurcated” colonial state.23 The entrenchment of white privilege in Kenya, however, undercut more liberal models of imperial membership, which were less explicitly predicated on notions of racial purity. Somali urbanites and town dwellers navigated the construction of racial difference in a variety of ways, but often found the color line difficult to cross.
BETWEEN NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE
The distinction between “native” and “non-native,” which assumed an isomorphism between people, culture, and territory, became central to British colonial thought. Mahmood Mamdani has persuasively argued that protectorate and colonial authorities imagined most Africans as part of “tribes” who could be consigned to defined territories, represented through “native” institutions with limited jurisdictions, and whose spiritual and cultural practices could be confined to the sphere of “customary law.”24 Historians such as James Brennan have qualified these arguments by noting that colonial administrators could not fully police the boundary between “native” and “non-native.” In practice, they used racial and ethnic ideas as convenient abstractions rather than rigid categories, for reasons of both bureaucratic expediency and economic necessity. Colonial racial thought was also internally contradictory (officials, for example, debated whether legal categories, such as non-native status, should be based on cultural or biological difference). Moreover, African subjects selectively appropriated and retooled colonial classifications.25 While one must acknowledge the limits of colonial power, Mamdani’s thesis remains particularly relevant at the level of discourse. Legal debates over the status of the Somali population were increasingly structured through the binary distinction between native and non-native.
Although Isaaq and Harti Somalis were able to secure non-native privileges for themselves, their status was highly tenuous and provisional.26 In 1920, the acting Crown counsel for the attorney general attempted to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the Somali Exemption Ordinance, whose implementation was subject to the discretion of local authorities. Noting that while Nairobi Township Rules had “no definition of the term ‘Native’ in connection with the issue of bicycle tickets,” it was “the practice of the municipal authorities to issue a differently shaped ticket for European, Asiatic, and African.”27 Consequently, Somalis clamored for the “coveted diamond shaped ticket instead of the despised circular one.”28 He joked: “This bicycle dispute is reminiscent of the old Court of Versailles where questions of precedence assumed such an importance that the Duke of St. Simon on coming into power, tells us the first important matter he dealt with was the question of the right of the dukes to wear their hats at a ‘Lit de justice’!”29
This sardonic image of mimicry ignored the possible reasons for placing such weight on so seemingly trivial an issue. Colonialism encouraged a kind of fetishism of paperwork, which often granted its bearers important legal rights. In March 1920, the PC of Nyeri wrote of Somalis who had come into his office, thrown their Non-Native Poll Tax receipts on his office table, and complained “that the government had deceived them by issuing them Receipts marked” in pencil, as though the ease with which one could rub out pencil marks was analogous to the potential erasure of their status.30 The 1920s and 1930s were marked by an enduring debate over paperwork, taxation, and other markers of legal status. Anxiety over losing these symbols illustrates how fragile Somalis perceived their position within Kenya to be, and shows that Somali subjects both participated in and subverted racial hierarchies.
Map 2.1. Colonial Kenya. (Note: This map shows Kenya’s international borders from 1926 to 1963. Though widely known as the Northern Frontier District [NFD] throughout the entirety of British rule, the region was formally renamed the Northern Province [NP] in 1925. Samburu District was separated from the NFD in 1934, and Turkana District was added in 1947 [after which the NP was technically known as the Northern Frontier Province].)
Although the Exemption Ordinance was a temporary provision, the administration never concretized the legal status of the Somali people. Benedict Anderson argues that state officials were notoriously intolerant “of multiple, politically ‘transvestite,’ blurred, or changing identifications.”31 Similarly, Homi Bhabha asserts that colonized subjects with hybrid identities threatened colonial power by destabilizing the line between ruler and ruled.32 Yet ambiguity could also be conducive to colonial power. As Talal Asad contends, radical critics are mistaken to assume “that power always abhors ambiguity”; rather, state authority “has depended on its exploiting the dangers and opportunities contained in ambiguous situations.”33 Officials in Kenya appear to have ruled their “alien” Somali subjects in part by keeping their status undefined, ambiguous, and contestable. They could then selectively reward Somali soldiers and intermediaries without calling into question the broader logic of the color bar or creating a legal precedent that might hold implications for other colonies, regions, or other “ambiguous” populations, such as the Swahili.34
NEW FORMS OF DIASPORA UNDER EMPIRE
Jonathon Glassman has recently argued that racism in Africa was a coproduction between Africans and European officials and has cautioned against underestimating “the role African thinkers played in the construction of race.”35 While Isaaq and Harti
