of descent into dialogue with colonial conceptions of race and ethnicity, one must always be attentive to the power dynamics that shaped such claims. Colonial rule frequently set the terms of political debate, which encouraged African subjects to frame their demands for greater rights within a racialized language. Moreover, Somali articulations of their origins did not always align with colonial racial ideas. Common vocabularies could also eclipse diverse and often contrary meanings. What Somali leaders espoused was sometimes closer to a cultural chauvinism (similar to the beliefs of the more liberal contingent of British officials) than racism in the strictly biological sense.36 In addition, their notions of descent and civilization often turned on understandings of culture and patrilineality that prized proximity to the wider Islamic world.
White settler memoirs are an important source of information on the racialized experiences of Somali town dwellers and urbanites. One of the most detailed windows comes from the writing of Karen Blixen, who arrived in Kenya in 1913 to establish a coffee plantation. Her famous memoir, Out of Africa, is replete with references to Farah Aden, a Somali employee whom she met in Aden. Farah Aden helped her establish her coffee plantation outside Nairobi and served as the steward of her household. Several passages of her book are also devoted to Farah Aden’s wife, who traveled from Somaliland escorted by family members after relatives arranged for their marriage.37 According to oral testimony, this was common practice among Kenyan Somalis. Many left deposits with Indian moneylenders when they traveled back to British Somaliland, who then provided short-term loans to other Somalis. Some returned with wives whose unions had been facilitated by relatives abroad.38 The circulation of marriageable women and money set the foundation for a diaspora. Alongside his wife and her relatives, who created a domestic sphere, Farah Aden was able to cultivate a home in a foreign place.
Blixen’s work exemplifies many of the racist assumptions of her contemporaries, but is also unique in that she cultivated a close relationship with elite women from Somaliland and gained a rare insight into their interior, domestic lives. Though her work is deeply exoticized, it would be a mistake to dismiss it offhand.39 Carolyn Hamilton explains that the texts of white settlers and colonial officials often contain traces of indigenous discourses.40 Blixen interpreted her findings through the cultural constructs of her era, but nevertheless drew upon the information provided by her Somali employees, some of whom she knew well. Fieldwork is a useful metaphor in this case. The result was a kind of contingent truth shaped by racialized power dynamics, but also influenced by close “participant-observation” and interactive discussions with her “informants.”
A woman who defied many of the gendered norms of white settler society, Blixen took a particular interest in the lives of Aden’s female relatives and occasionally recoded their voices into her own words. She notes, for instance, how Farah’s relatives confided in her their shock to learn “that some nations in Europe gave away their maidens to their husbands for nothing,” which they deemed profoundly disrespectful of women and their virginity.41 Denying the coevality of Africans, Blixen equated their “maidenly prudery” with an earlier phase of European development.42 This act of distancing also enabled Blixen to define herself as an ostensibly liberated white subject. Her description of this inverted ethnographic encounter, however, also suggests that women could exercise considerable authority, even within the constraints of patriarchy. Some elite Somali women may have seen marital monetary transactions not as an exchange that rendered them into “property,” but as a means of actualizing their worth, labor, and contributions to the household (a topic I will address in greater depth in chapter 6).
Blixen’s description of differing gendered restrictions regarding marriage also touches on an important aspect of Muslim life in East Africa.43 Throughout the Indian Ocean region, groups privileged the idea of patrilineal descent and consanguinity with the prophet’s family. This tended to afford men greater sexual freedom than women. Engseng Ho, writing about the Hadrami diaspora, argues that genealogy frequently “turned on the control of the community’s women, especially daughters, and their marriage choices.”44 Because lineage as well as an Islamic identification were typically traced through the paternal line, Somali men could take a non-Muslim East African wife with some guarantee that ideas of Somaliness would be reproduced in the subsequent generation and their children considered full-fledged members of the Somali (and Muslim) world. Genealogy allowed Somali men to become “locals” in Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, yet remain cosmopolitan in their outlook and connected to their Muslim kin elsewhere.45
Such gendered norms, however, did not go uncontested. There is little doubt that Somalis debated the boundaries of exogamy and endogamy in the colonial era and that there were differences of opinion over marriage that likely fractured around gender and differing theological persuasions, among other issues. In Out of Africa, Blixen noted that some women flouted social restrictions on their behavior. She wrote that while “the honest Somali women were not seen in town,” there were at least “a few beautiful young Somali women, of whom all the town knew their names, who went and lived in the Bazaar and led the Nairobi Police a great dance.”46 How these women positioned themselves within debates about purity, mobility, and miscegenation is unclear. Such issues were rarely discussed by my interlocutors, who tended to describe “immoral” female behavior as a modern vice caused by poverty and the erosion of traditional culture. (And perhaps also chose to avoid such sensitive topics with an outsider like myself.) Blixen’s brief, tantalizing comment gives us only the barest glimpse into these lifeworlds.
Despite their different ways of conceptualizing descent, Somalis, white settlers, and colonial officials shared many overlapping ideas. Both European and Somali women of this era, for example, faced added limitations on their sexuality, while men were more likely to be seen as entitled to sexual access to the “other.” At the same time, Indian Ocean Islamic discourses also differed from Western understandings of race in several key respects. Colonial authorities and settlers tended to think of descent as an inheritable, biological condition and race as a specifically scientific category. Western eugenicists had developed several diverse and often mutually incompatible ideas of race. One was the “pure race model,” in which the world’s populations were imagined to be descendants of three “original” racial strains (a theory derived from the pre-Darwinian biblical story of Noah).47 Given the broad acceptance of men marrying non-Somali and non-Muslim African women, it is unlikely that Somalis subscribed to anything analogous to a biological notion of race or that they imagined themselves as “admixtures” of two or more “pure” racial types.
This is not to say that Somalis were unoccupied with fears of cultural loss through intermarriage (or that Somali men, like their European counterparts, were not anxious about female sexuality). During one interview, I was told about an incident in which several Isaaq subclans in Nairobi fought over women who had recently arrived from British Somaliland.48 Public conversations about descent also became increasingly mediated through the racialized discourses of colonial rule. On more than one occasion, I was told that during a colonial trial to determine their legal status, Somali leaders brought forth the lightest-skinned members of their group in order to “prove” their foreign origins. In the 1940s, Somali leaders in Uganda professed to colonial authorities that they had not intermarried with local women and thus should not be relegated to the status of “natives.”49 Ann Laura Stoler argues that racial difference in the colonial era was constituted through the management of intimate sexual relations.50 By denying the practice of exogamy, which was clearly widespread, Somali leaders tried to better approximate colonial ideas of racial purity.
The ways that Somalis understood their descent did not quite map onto European racial categories. Yet Somali intermediaries and European settlers were able to form a mutually beneficial, if asymmetric, relationship around a set of similar ideas. These working misunderstandings enabled settlers and colonial officials to cultivate a new notion of Somaliness, which painted Somalis as a more civilized “race” within an imperial theater of territories.
To
