governor of British Somaliland (and formerly officer in charge of the NFD), informed locals at a meeting at Burao in British Somaliland that “it is to Swahilis that” the Somalis “are properly comparable,” not Indians or Arabs.67 Kittermaster warned his colleagues: “There is frequent interchange of Somali residents in Nairobi with their homes here, and they maintain their roots here even after years of absence. To give them a status in Kenya so different from what they must have here would tend greatly to embarrass the administration of this Protectorate.”68 The Swahili occupied a similar “awkward position” as the Somali, “having neither a recognized African ‘tribal’ identity nor the higher legal status of Non-Native.”69 Irrevocably “impure,” they, too, were part of a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean world whose elements did not conform to the cultural “wholes” to which colonial authorities imagined their subjects belonged.
Although the Isaaq and the Harti had managed to attain many of the rights of Asians within Kenya, colonial authorities were wary of creating any legal precedents that might have empire-wide ramifications. Consequently, officials in Kenya lacked a consistent vocabulary for classifying the Isaaq and the Harti, whom they alternatively labeled “Natives,” “Arabs,” and, in some cases, “Asiatics.”70 The label “Asiatic” was especially fraught, and in many ways reflected the fundamental ambiguities of colonial racial thought. Before World War II, European cartographers often lumped the Arabian Peninsula with “Western Asia”—a geographic concept eventually displaced by the term “Middle East.”71 While it was typically “used to describe people from South Asia,” as James Brennan notes, the terms “Asian” and “Asiatic” “were also shifting legal and political terms that sometimes, but not always, joined Arabs and Indians together, and sometimes Chinese as well.”72 In addition, many Isaaq had originated from Aden, whose inhabitants were subjects of British India until 1937.73 Competing definitions of indigenousness further complicated their legal status.74 However, it also opened the door for Somalis to self-fashion by stretching the boundaries and definitions of what it meant to be native.75
PASTORAL MODES OF TERRITORIAL GOVERNANCE
Though in ways quite distinct from Somali town dwellers, nomadic populations in the north of Kenya also challenged a certain colonial imagination of indigenousness. For the first two decades of protectorate rule, authorities did not so much administer the north as attempt to suppress the southward migration of nomadic peoples. After ceding Jubaland to Italy in 1925 in exchange for its participation in World War I, the colonial government placed the NFD under civilian control and declared it a closed district—movement in and out of which was restricted to holders of a special pass (see map 2.1).76 Protectorate and colonial officials came to see northern nomads as part of a physical and metaphorical frontier, situated on the margins of “civilization.” One of the ways in which the colonial government cultivated an image of British “order” was by projecting an idea of anarchy onto the north.77
The nature of British rule in the NFD can be examined through the colonial archives, which provide selective vestiges of the working operations of power, as well as the ways in which colonial authorities authorized and rationalized that power. There are significant limits to how creatively or subversively these written records can be read.78 Archival records homogenize the passing of time during the colonial era—transforming the history of the north into a recurring, self-fulfilling debate over borders, administrative control, and registration efforts.
Using the archives alone, it is very difficult to reconstruct the practices and beliefs that we anachronistically call “religion.”79 To come to “know” and govern their subjects, authorities had to parse which streams of “local” knowledge were serviceable to empire.80 Many important aspects of Somali and northern life, including Islamic spiritual practices, were often ignored. In 1929, the district commissioner (DC) of Bura District, M. R. Mahony, wrote a report in which he dismissively described the Somali as “a fanatical Mohamedan though ignorant of the true tenets of Islam.”81 In his mind, Somalis were both more fervent and less orthodox than their Muslim counterparts on the coast. The “majority are illiterate,” he noted, and the “bush Sheiks and Sheriffs have only learnt to recite, read, and laboriously write a few of the better known texts from the Koran.”82 Like many Orientalist thinkers of his era, he treated literate Muslims and “Arab” Islam as more authentic and narrowly defined Islamic orthodoxy as textual. In general, colonial officials delved into Somali spiritual practices only when they believed a particular religious thinker or practice might cause discord or held some kind of threatening potential.83 Religious practices largely escaped the colonial gaze and, as a consequence, assemblage within the archives. These silences, however, should not be equated with irrelevancy.84
Historians will, however, find no shortage of sophisticated clan charts or intricate genealogical histories in the archives. Officials took an almost obsessive interest in clans and produced a veritable corpus of anthropological material.85 Preferring to govern through “chiefly” leaders, most colonial officials did not interfere in the religious life of northerners—a policy that also facilitated the broader depoliticization of Islamic thought and practice. In the eyes of most colonial officials, Islam was a belief system that should be confined to the sphere of “customary law.”
Nevertheless, local administrators could never fully disregard Islamic identification or patterns of conversion. In 1929, Mahony complained that the “bar to peaceful intermixture between Galla and Somali is only religion,” and they otherwise “intermarry freely,” and “no gazetting or delimiting of grazing areas will prevent” this.86 As the previous chapter has shown, gaal was not an “ethnic” designation, but rather a derogatory label in local vernaculars for a non-Muslim.87 Nevertheless, colonial officials recoded the distinction between gaal and Somali into ethnoterritorial terms. They also created and loosely enforced a border that cut across the NFD, known as the Somali-Galla line, which each group was ostensibly prohibited from crossing.88 Reading local categories through the epistemology of clan, colonial officials often overlooked the links that cut across collectivities.
Throughout the colony, officials struggled to police mobility and give their subjects singular and unambiguous ethnic labels.89 These difficulties were nevertheless compounded on the borderlands of the NFD. Islamic claims to universality and practices of conversion challenged colonial efforts to neatly demarcate clan and ethnic boundaries. In addition, nomadic populations defied what Liisa Malkki refers to as the sedentarist metaphysics of the modern state.90 Local administrators were beset by the anxiety of indeterminacy—the fear that the Somali were “really” Borana, that one lineage comprised sheegat who “originally” belonged to a different clan, or that Italian or Ethiopian subjects might be “passing” as British. Groups traversed international and regional frontiers in order to use dry season wells, return to their historic grazing lands, visit leaders and kin, or evade government requirements such as taxation and military recruitment.91 Northerners also crossed borders for spiritual reasons—whether to attend the hajj or make pilgrimages to spiritually significant gravesites, join a zawiya (Islamic settlement), or pursue a religious education.92 In addition, the differential price regimes of the Italian, British, and Ethiopian governments allowed a vibrant cross-border economy in livestock, guns, and ivory to thrive.93
Unable to control movement across the porous international frontiers, the administration resigned hope of rendering northerners into countable “populations,” issuing identity cards, or drawing up definitive maps of ethnic “homelands.” In 1930, F. G. Jennings, the DC of Wajir, argued that a census would be both unpopular and expensive to complete, and, “further it would serve no useful purpose so long as the Somali adopts the attitude of moving over the boundary into Italian territory at will.”94 Colonial officials were frequently far more concerned with enforcing some semblance of state control than with rendering their subjects
