women explained that girls today have far more choice over whom they will marry, those who choose to wed “African” men continue to face stigma. Many people also debated the degree to which past generations had intermarried with East Africans, and often my interviewees provided me with contradictory information. Some argued that the Isaaq preserved their cultural distinctiveness by not intermarrying with locals, instead bringing marriageable women from British Somaliland.51 Others emphasized that the Isaaq were more “flexible” and open to other Kenyans precisely because they had intermarried with locals over the years. These debates refract contemporary anxieties over assimilation and belonging and reveal how the specter of colonial-era racism continues to haunt social relations in East Africa.
One of the unintended consequences of British rule was to enable Isaaq and Harti voyagers to travel, expand their diaspora, and establish a range of fidelities to communities across the region. Endogamy enforced through restrictions on female sexuality very likely provided (and continues to provide) one of the most important countermeasures against deracination. Robin Cohen points out that diasporic consciousness is not a natural outcome of migration or cultural difference. Rather, diasporas unfold over time and require “a strong attachment to the past, or a block to assimilation in the present and future.”52 A much romanticized watchword of the late modern era, the term “diaspora” risks normalizing the idea of a fixed territorial homeland and, for this reason, may not be entirely fitting for Somali migrants in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, emigrants from British Somaliland, Aden, and Kismayo were able to develop a consciousness as a dispersed and translocal people. This was in no small measure due to the racially enforced colonial order. Attaining the privileges of non-native status allowed them to travel and maintain links to their kin abroad. Like white settlers and British colonialists, Somali urbanites also retained a public identity distinct from that of other African populations. British passports from the colonial era, which many children and grandchildren proudly held on to as memorabilia, were testament to this status and freedom of movement.53
In 1920, Somali leaders formed the Ishakia Association, which also facilitated the reproduction of this group identity.54 Oral testimony suggests that the Ishakia Association probably began as a welfare society. According to Duthi Jama, the women’s branch required monthly contributions from its members and provided a fund in cases of emergency or death.55 Ege Musa, one of the few Kenyan Somalis literate in English, became its president in the 1930s.56 According to one of my interlocutors who knew him well, Ege Musa was a well-traveled and worldly individual. Born in British Somaliland and raised in Aden, he took a position on a ship in 1889. After traveling the world, he settled in Durban and worked at a hotel run by two European women, through which he acquired an education in English. Musa parlayed this experience into a position serving as an English-Somali translator for the Kenya colonial government. Once settled in Kenya, he married a woman from British Somaliland.57 By traveling throughout the empire, becoming proficient in English, and joining the Somali community in Kenya, Musa embodied a unique cosmopolitanism that owed itself to both British colonialism and the regional practices of Northeast Africa.
Had he stayed in South Africa, his children may not have retained the same relationship with the wider Somali community. Many Isaaq and Harti people juxtaposed themselves with the Somalis who had settled in South Africa, whom they claimed did not “maintain their culture.”58 There is reason to be somewhat skeptical of assertions of this nature. Claims to have resisted assimilation were often ways for my interlocutors, as James Clifford puts it, to “stage authenticity in opposition to external, often dominating alternatives.”59 In addition, I was unable to speak to those who had assimilated into Kenya and had lost their identity as “Somalis”—thus becoming invisible to my methods of identifying “representative” members of the community.
While many colonial officials and settlers saw Isaaq and Harti subjects as a “hybrid” people—who disturbed the line between settler and native—it is much harder to unearth how Somalis of this era conceptualized ideas of “localness,” “mixture,” and cosmopolitanism. Did Somali immigrants to Kenya understand themselves as people somehow in between cultures? Through what vernacular terms did they debate who was local and foreign, who was uprooted and worldly, and who had lost and who had retained their “culture”? Not all pasts are recoverable, and some questions cannot be answered through a fragmented historical record. What is clear, however, is that claiming non-native status was about more than positioning oneself in a vertical racial hierarchy. It also allowed members of the Somali community to maintain horizontal solidarities that cut across colonial boundaries.
THE TENSIONS OF EMPIRE
Economic circuits had brought the Isaaq and the Harti to far-flung territories, where they fell under the jurisdiction of different legal orders. Perceived to be “out of place” in the various territories in which they settled, Somalis were often the locus of contention over racial boundaries. Battles over racial definitions in the colonies also held implications for the meaning of Britishness in the metropole. The very racialized structures that enabled Somali migrants to occupy a comparatively privileged status in East Africa relegated them to the margins of British society. Race was at the center of the making of metropolitan Britain and the capitalist structures that sustained it.
Somali sailors had been living in London, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and other English port cities since the nineteenth century, when they had first arrived on European merchant ships.60 Ostensibly, as emigrants from territories under the sovereignty of the British Crown, they enjoyed formal equality with all other British subjects.61 In practice, the British government created a tiered citizenship based upon the perceived “whiteness” of their imperial subjects. Moreover, many Somalis were considered protected persons rather than British subjects, since British Somaliland was technically a protectorate, not a colony. While this distinction was often negligible in practice, emigrants from protectorates enjoyed fewer rights and were subject to stricter labor and deportation laws than those from other parts of the empire. Inhabitants of Somaliland who lawfully immigrated to the United Kingdom were defined as aliens.
World War I drew European nations and their colonial subjects ever closer, even as it tested the limits of imperial promises of equality. During the interwar period, the British state took steps to restrict further emigration from the colonies, and deported many of the seamen and munitions workers who had come to England and Wales during the war. After race riots broke out in 1919, the Home Office enacted several pieces of racially discriminatory legislation, including the Aliens Order (1920) and the Coloured Alien Seamen Order (1925). The latter was used, as Kathleen Paul argues, “to harass all ‘coloured seamen,’ ‘aliens and British subjects mixed,’ and to prevent as many as possible from settling in the United Kingdom.”62 Such legislation was motivated by fear that uncontrolled migration would entrench a black, urbanized underclass in the heart of European cities, who could claim unemployment benefits, jobs occupied by the white working class, and blur the boundary between black and white. Many colonial subjects, including those who had worked and sacrificed on behalf of the Crown, were denied hospitality within the country.
There has been much theorizing as to why internal difference has so often become the locus of intolerance within otherwise liberal nation-states.63 Part of the answer may lie in the fact that many European nation-states made themselves and their sense of national identity through their expansion and colonization overseas.64 Discovering the “other” at home eroded the ability to maintain the separation between colonizer and colonized. Alien Somalis were, to reappropriate Mae Ngai’s elegant expression, a kind of “impossible subject,” “at once welcome and unwelcome.”65 They personified many of the key tensions within the imperial political economy, which depended upon colonial labor in various forms.66
Government officials in the United Kingdom frequently worked out ideas of race at home, in close collaboration with the Colonial and Foreign Offices. Racial difference was also fashioned through dialogue across different colonial territories. Although the color bar was global in
