ways, to be a collective project. Abdi Billow Ibrahim, Terje Østebø, Abdul Adan, Abdullahi Abdinoor, Abdullahi A. Shongolo, and Ali Jimale Ahmed all helped in some capacity with issues relating to orthography and translations. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Ahmed Ismail Yusuf for his assistance with translating and transcribing the poems in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Jacob Riley produced all of the maps in the book. Richard Reid and Keith Breckenridge, two of the editors of the Journal of African History; James De Lorenzi and Lee Cassanelli, editors of the Journal of Northeast African Studies; and Michael Mwenda Kithinji, Mickie Mwanzia Korster, and Jerono P. Rotich, editors of the volume Kenya after Fifty, helped me refine many ideas contained in several of the chapters. In addition, I am grateful to the editorial team at Ohio University Press, including Derek Peterson, Jean Allman, Allen Isaacman, and Gillian Berchowitz, and the two anonymous readers of my manuscript. Special thanks also go to Cawo M. Abdi, Scott Reese, Pete Tridish, and Susan Alice Elizabeth Brown for providing feedback on drafts of my manuscript.
Over the course of my training, I have benefited from excellent Swahili and Somali teachers, including Regina Fupi, Sangai Mohochi, Jamal Gelle, Abdifatah Shafat Diis, Deo Ngonyani, and Abdi Ahmed Ali. In addition, my training, research, and completion of this text were generously supported by fellowships and financial support from Stanford University (including grants from the Center for African Studies, the Department of History, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the School of Humanities and Sciences); the US Department of Education; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Joseph H. Lauder Institute for Management and International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Finally, thank you to Brenda, Moshe, and Oran Weitzberg for all their support over the many years leading up to the publication of this book. My family history also played an important role in drawing me to this topic. As a Jewish Israeli American and the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, I grew up with an awareness of the difficulties faced by minorities stretched across multiple countries, an understanding of the ease with which indigenous people can be rendered into foreigners, and a cognizance of the dangers of exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism. While the experiences of Somalis in Kenya differ in many respects from those of European Jews or Palestinians, their histories refract shared twentieth- and twenty-first-century predicaments. With this in mind, I hope my book can contribute to broader conversations about the interrelationship between border crossing, reactionary nativism, and hatred of the internal stranger. While many people deserve credit for helping me to develop my ideas, any errors or omissions in this text are my fault alone.
Notes on Language
Kenya is an archetype of linguistic diversity, which to some extent reflects the historical absence of a concerted state project aimed at language standardization. It is not uncommon for people who identify as both Kenyan and Somali to speak at least three languages to varying degrees of fluency (including but not limited to Somali, Swahili, English, Borana—an Oromo dialect, Arabic, Kikuyu, and Luo). Many Somali speakers in Kenya were educated in Swahili and English (or, in the case of Qur’anic schools, Arabic). Having used Somali primarily as a spoken language, people will sometimes accept alternate or multiple spellings of Somali words and names. Moreover, there are multiple dialects of Somali, which itself can be written in more than one script. In order to facilitate reading and simplify this linguistic and orthographic complexity, orally recited poems in this book have been transcribed using the Somali Latin alphabet standardized by the Somali government in the 1970s. In addition, poems have been converted into the most commonly known dialects of Somali (and, in one case, Oromo), with the exception of a few words specific to northern Kenyan vernaculars. Since language is a political matter, opting to use the “standard” dialects of Somali and Oromo was not a neutral decision. Nor was determining the “correct” spelling and translation of certain words. I am indebted to the many people who brought their skills and expertise to bear on the transcriptions and translations. Special thanks go to Ahmed Ismail Yusuf for his help with the Somali poetry. I am resigned to the fact that all translations are ultimately mistranslations.
Map I.1. Colonial Northeast Africa. (Note: All the maps in this book were made by Jacob Riley. Boundary lines and locations are approximate.)
Map I.2. Postcolonial Northeast Africa.
Introduction
“We Don’t Unpack”
Wherever the camel goes, that is Somalia.
—Proverb from the era of Somali independence (late 1950s and early 1960s)1
THERE IS A POPULAR STORY IN WAJIR, a county in northern Kenya that was once part of the British colonial administrative region known as the Northern Frontier District (NFD) (see map 2.1).2 It describes the arrival of the first European to the area. According to this story, the people living in Wajir were very welcoming toward their new guest. When the European visitor asked for accommodations for the night, they provided him with an animal hide on which to sleep. Much to their dismay, his hosts awoke the next morning to find that he had sliced the animal skin into a long rope, which he had used to encircle an area that he claimed as his territory.3
This evocative anecdote (which borrows tropes from oral narratives circulating in other parts of the Horn of Africa) depicts an item of hospitality transmuted overnight into a symbol of state sovereignty and land tenure.4 As the story suggests, the legacy of colonial boundaries is the locus of much contention among the people of northern Kenya. In the late nineteenth century, the Ethiopian, British, and Italian governments divided Northeast Africa into five different territories: British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, French Somaliland (Djibouti), Ethiopia, and Kenya. Over the subsequent decades, the Kenyan colonial officials attempted to further confine the populations of the NFD in an effort to impose their vision of order on the region. Fatima Jellow—a prominent resident of Wajir and wife of the NFD’s first senator—explained that when her father, a member of the Somali Degodia lineage, refused to move to the “homeland” designated for his clan, he was jailed by British colonial authorities.5 At various points over the last century, nomadic populations and their leaders have attempted to circumvent, redraw, or rethink the colonial borders that hindered their mobility and divided them from their kin and pasture. After World War II, Pan-Somali nationalist leaders advocated for unifying Somalis across Northeast Africa into a single nation-state. By the early 1960s, most of the nomadic inhabitants of Kenya’s borderlands (including many people who were not normally considered “Somali”) rallied around the idea of a Greater Somalia, which they hoped would dismantle the territorial borders that crisscrossed the arid north.
Alongside the largely nomadic population of the NFD, Kenya was also home to Somali-identifying people who had immigrated to the colony from coastal cities such as Berbera (in modern-day Somalia) and Aden (in modern-day Yemen) (see map 1.1).6 Like their nomadic kin, they shared a history of skirting colonial boundaries. Mustafa (Mohamed) Osman Hirsi, a third-generation Kenyan, described his community as a people who were “not about boundaries,” whose “umbilical cord was never cut.” His grandfather, an askari (soldier) in the Somaliland Camel Corps, had come to Kenya after serving in the colonial military. Like many Somali veterans, he identified as a member of the Isaaq clan.7 European settlers and British
