homelands and instead divided the wells in the district between the major clans. This approach, as Schlee notes, was a precolonial governance strategy common among the Borana.96 Capitulating to nomadic patterns of transhumance, beleaguered administrators developed techniques that had far more continuity with precolonial practices of governance than with Weberian ideals of bureaucracy.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the administration worked out a hybrid form of sovereignty that blended territorial governance with nomadic forms of mobility.97 One might be tempted to portray colonial power as weak, incapable (as Jeffrey Herbst suggests) of broadcasting its power across this arid, northern expanse.98 Yet conceding to nomadic practices and cultivating an image of the north as “ungovernable” proved to be commensurate with broader colonial goals. Eschewing assumptions that governments seek only to inhibit their subjects’ movement, Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk argue that “mobility makes states.”99 In defining certain kinds of movement as a problem, colonial officials worked out ideas concerning the reach and scope of their own authority. Administrators often recoded their failures as new strategies of governance—reframing Somali and Borana initiatives in terms decipherable to administrative logic. Such an approach enabled officials to justify the financial and administrative neglect of the region, naturalize its isolation from the rest of the colony, and keep governance in the NFD as cost-effective as possible. It also allowed for overlapping notions of sovereignty, space, and authority to flourish on the borderlands of the state.
THE SOMALI “EL DORADO”
The British Empire brought Somalis from diverse lineages and lands together under a single territory. Mobile and spatially dispersed, both the nomadic populations in the NFD and the “detribalized” urban traders living in Nairobi disrupted colonial efforts to police spatial and racial boundaries. Segregationist policies, however, always existed in tension with the needs of the colonial economy, which was dependent upon the mobility of Africans, including Somali traders.100 Managing this tension was key to the colonial project.
By the early 1920s, a tenuous project of racial segregation was taking shape in Kenya’s capital. In 1921, the colonial government gazetted the township of Eastleigh. Though technically reserved exclusively for Indian residence, Eastleigh incorporated several neighborhoods already inhabited by Somalis. Failure to invest funds in maintaining the area deterred wealthier and higher-caste Indians from settling there. Somalis from Ngara (and, later, veterans of World War II) also moved into the neighborhood, where they lived alongside Goans, Indians, and Seychelloise.101 The creation of Eastleigh was part of a much larger, colony-wide process of land alienation and racial segregation, which developed in tandem with the commercial economy.
Eastleigh embodied many of the contradictions of the migrant labor system. Colonial authorities enforced racial segregation by, in part, naturalizing the idea that Africans belonged in rural areas. The urban economy, however, was predicated upon the exploitation of African laborers, many of whom had been forced onto their supposedly “traditional” homelands.102 Soon after its establishment, Africans from the countryside took up residency in Eastleigh, since (unlike squatter residences that lacked legitimacy) the police “did not enter houses” in the neighborhood “searching for illegal residents.”103 Somali traders in Nairobi also troubled colonial ideas of spatial and racial order by maintaining a circulation of livestock between rural areas and the city. Elder Somalis wistfully recalled that Eastleigh and the Nairobi Commonage had once had ample grazing land, on which their community used to pasture their animals.104
Many of the tensions of the migrant labor system were mirrored in the colonial livestock economy, which also unsettled the line between urban and rural (a distinction central to colonial projects of segregation and visions of modernization). Recognizing their skills as livestock brokers, colonial administrators had given Somali and Arab traders special permits to enter the NFD, move across tribal grazing boundaries, and bring restricted numbers of livestock from the north into the rest of the colony. Unlike nomadic inhabitants, who were largely barred from settling in town, these “alien” traders were allowed to own commercial plots in the townships of the north.105 Somali traders provided pastoralists with cash to pay colonial taxes and enabled animals from the north to be circulated into the commercial livestock economy. These policies ensured that nomadic populations were confined to the north, excluded from southern grazing land, and barred from competing with white ranchers.106 Livestock smuggled in by Somali traders also served as foundation stock for white ranchers, and were essential to African squatters, who provided inexpensive labor on white commercial farms.107
Gradually, Somali traders began to accumulate animals along the stock routes in towns as dispersed as Rumuruti, Naivasha, Gilgil, and Kitale, where they came into conflict with white settlers (see map 2.1). Their trading and residence privileges also enabled them to take advantage of the illegal poaching and game trade, transgress quarantine regulations, and covertly bring animals into African native reserves.108 By moving onto land speculated by white farmers and ranchers and amassing “so great an accumulation of stock,” Somali traders became a threat to white interests and supremacy.109 Conceptual and political categories were also at stake.
This issue reached a head in the mid-1920s, when settlers demanded the forced removal of Somalis living and grazing animals on white farms and Crown land in Laikipia.110 In 1924, the resident commissioner of Rumuruti complained of former Somali traders:
who have settled down by permission of the farmers themselves on payment of grazing fees, and are now beginning to breed stock in competition with Europeans. . . . They are responsible for cattle running, they are continually in trouble with their Kikuyu herdsmen, and the danger of infecting the District with cattle diseases is great.111
Portraying Somalis as encroachers and parasites on the land ignored the pivotal role they had played in establishing the white farms and townships of Central Kenya and the Rift Valley.
Officials found a solution in the underutilized livestock quarantine of Isiolo, which had been created when the government envisioned a large livestock trade from the NFD. Throughout the 1920s, the administration compelled Somalis in many of the townships, including Rumuruti, to sell their cattle or move onto the Isiolo quarantine.112 Although the quarantine had once been home to the Samburu, who had been removed by the colonial state, administrators redefined the area as the primary, if not official, homeland of the “alien” Somali.113 Notions of who was “native” were continually unmade and remade. Even as they alienated land, however, colonial officials could not fully efface memories of prior occupancy—memories that would later generate an array of competing land claims.114
In moving Isaaq and Harti traders and their families onto the Isiolo leasehold, the colonial regime hoped to govern them more effectively as a “tribe.” This desire for administrative order, however, was undercut by paranoia about the dispersed and unregulated nature of Somali kinship networks. Fearful of encouraging overpopulation and overgrazing, the administration decided to reserve Isiolo solely for those who had a long history of military or colonial service.115 They also stopped short of creating a formal native reserve. In its 1934 report, the Kenya Land Commission (KLC) cited an ominous warning from the district commissioner of Isiolo. A few years earlier, he had cautioned that “Kenya is regarded by the Northern Somali as an El Dorado” and that if “infiltration from Northern Somaliland” was not controlled, “the area set apart for the Somalis would” prove “insufficient, and the Somalis, having obtained political rights and power, would then again demand consideration of their claims.”116 For the next thirty years, as colonial officials debated the status of the Isiolo leasehold, they constantly cited this passage—projecting fears that any attempt to codify Somali rights to the land would open a floodgate of immigration into this “El Dorado.”117 Colonial authorities worked to ensure that tenure rights in Isiolo remained tenuous
