To restrict migration onto the Isiolo leasehold, officials kept a register of legal residents and required that visitors carry passes. Abdullahi Elmi and Hassan Good, two Somali residents of Isiolo, explained that Isaaq and Harti residents would occasionally skirt these measures, especially when it came to hiring Turkana herdsmen.118 Nevertheless, Isiolo inhabitants were often complicit in the enforcement of segregation. Some of the people I spoke to recalled the colonial period as a time when they were ensured access to land, and “outsiders” were kept at bay by colonial powers. What emerged was a fairly workable compromise among Somali veterans, their kin, and colonial officials, who had shared desires to keep the land exclusive. The fact that colonial administrators and Somali town dwellers conceptualized the idea of the “stranger” differently did not preclude the possibility for negotiation and agreement.
Colonial policies in Isiolo had deep implications as they established legal and historical precedents for rights to land. Today, people from five major groups share and are making claims to Isiolo District. According to Saafo Roba Boye and Randi Kaarhus, “These claims seek legitimacy through reference to historical processes, to first-comer status and to former governments’ decisions, to citizenship dues, as well as to ‘tribal’ group rights.”119 Many Somali residents argued that the colonial government had given them the area as a reward for their military service.120 At the same time, residents often obscured the participation of their predecessors in colonial policies of segregation.
CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE COLOR BAR UNDER EMPIRE
Denied definitive non-native status as well as full recognition as “natives,” Isaaq and Harti Somalis had only provisional access to legal rights. By the 1930s, their legal status was coming into crisis. To some extent, this was the result of fundamental tensions within the imperial political economy. On one hand, the British Empire created globally interconnected economies, disseminated a universalizing vision of “civilization,” and provided a language of civil rights linked to British subject status. On the other, colonial regimes remained committed to the belief in a racial and ethnic core to group identity, both by extrapolation from Englishness and as a practical consequence of indirect rule.121
In the early 1930s, British authorities throughout the empire began to debate how best to shore up the racial order and define the limits of civil rights. A relatively obscure court case in 1929, which involved a “half-caste” in Nyasaland, triggered a much larger debate between the Colonial Office and colonial regimes throughout Africa over the definition of the term “native” and the legal rights of Westernized Africans and “mixed-race” subjects.122 British authorities may have been working out ideas of race in the colonies in order to allay anxieties and resolve similar questions at home. The Great Depression heightened debates over the color bar, which was already destabilized by the spread of Western education and the recruitment of soldiers from the colonies during World War I. In 1930, the National Union of Seamen in the United Kingdom, in collaboration with the Shipping Federation, instituted a rota system that restricted the employment of Muslim seamen, most of whom came from Yemen and Somaliland.123 As competition for working-class jobs in the UK intensified, many of the racially charged issues of the past were reignited.
Empire had facilitated the spread of Muslim communities, which offered colonial subjects an alternative form of global membership and a means of mobilizing outside the narrow confines of the color bar. An example can be found in the figure of Lt. Abdullah Cardell-Ryan, a Muslim convert of Irish origin. Having served in Africa and the Red Sea, the lieutenant had taken a personal interest in the welfare of veterans from British Somaliland. Hailing from a land that had also been subject to English colonization, perhaps he felt a special affinity for the plight of his fellow Muslims. Somali veterans likely turned to him in the hope of gaining the ear of the British administration. In response to the discriminatory measures of the Shipping Federation, Cardell-Ryan petitioned the secretary of state for the colonies. In his letter, he protested against the boycott of loyal Somali stokers who had fought in World War I and dismissed the economic rationale for the rota system.124 He also complained that the distinction between protectorate and colony was so dubious that few Somalis anticipated being labeled “protected Subjects (whatever that may mean)” upon arrival in England.125 Oral and written testimony suggests that many Somali sailors and soldiers considered the distinction between “subject” and “protected person” irrelevant. Having fought on behalf of the Crown, Somali veterans became wedded to the idea of being British subjects and often referred to themselves as “British Somalis.”126
Rather than privilege a narrower racialist view that entitled only Europeans to work and reside in the United Kingdom, colonized subjects living and working in the UK argued that the British government should hold true to the tenets of imperial citizenship. Somalis faced an imperial power that, under varying circumstances, favored two incompatible ideas of citizenship: one founded on ideas of racial difference; and another based upon service and loyalty to the Crown. To forestall deportation, many Muslim activists in the UK appealed to the latter concept, highlighting the sacrifice involved in military service. In September 1934, Abdul Majid, who had founded the Islamic Society, wrote to the undersecretary of state for the colonies to protest the proposed deportation of three Somalis, saying: “A great many of such ‘Aliens’ both from India and African Crown Colonies served with great loyalty to the British Crown in the Great War. . . . They wish to be treated in exactly the same way as British born subjects.”127 Figures such as Majid, an Indian barrister, and Cardell-Ryan reveal the possibilities for multiracial and cross-class alliances among Muslims.128 Despite their efforts, however, the British government implemented few reforms to anti-immigrant legislation during the interwar period.
While Somalis in the United Kingdom sought to diminish the significance of the color bar, those living in the colonies often took actions that reinforced its importance. Panracial and Islamic solidarity existed in tandem with discourses of racial difference. In the colonies, where promises of a universalizing imperial citizenship rang especially hollow, Somali leaders often highlighted their putative foreign descent.
In the 1930s, Somali and Arab representatives fought against colonial efforts to erode their legal status.129 In 1930, leaders of the “Ishaak Shariff Community” wrote to King George V with a list of grievances, among which was the denial of access to the special Asian wards of Nairobi’s hospitals, inequitable treatment in regard to the livestock trade, and lack of political representation. The authors of the petition described themselves as a community “of Asiatic origin and extraction” who were “emigrants of Aden and Southern Arabia” and “Ishaakian Arabs Shariff.”130 In 1932, Isaaq leaders—referring to themselves as “Arabs”—once again petitioned the Kenyan government after being barred from entry into the Asian wards of hospitals.131
These demands took on greater urgency by the end of the decade. In 1937, in an effort to increase the revenue stream, the Kenyan governor implemented a new ordinance that revised the existing taxation system for non-natives. The Non-Native Poll Tax Ordinance introduced a sliding scale for Europeans, Asians, and “other” non-natives. “Others” were defined as Arabs, Swahilis, and Somalis. Presumably, the division between Swahili, Arab, and Somali was too tenuous for the colonial regime to maintain on a legal register. This new legislation also reduced Somali tax obligations from thirty to twenty shillings.132
Out of fear that tendering a lowered tax would lessen their privileges, many Isaaq and Harti Somalis began petitioning the colonial government and—in an unusual reversal of typical forms of tax resistance—demanded to pay the higher, Asian rate of thirty shillings. The community also mobilized around the Ishakia Association, contending that their community was distinct from other “native” Somalis. Due to their comparative wealth, their history of colonial service, their discrete genealogy, and their long-standing connections with the Arab world, the Isaaq were uniquely positioned to protest against the new tax ordinance. In 1937, the secretary of the British Ishak community wrote to the secretary of state for the colonies to explain:
