the Gulf of Aden to serve as soldiers, porters, guides, and translators in East Africa. Under colonial rule, they had enjoyed many of the same privileges as South Asians living in Kenya, who had greater political rights and freedom of mobility than the vast majority of African subjects. Although born in Kenya, Hirsi had not lost touch with the land of his grandfather’s birth. Despite being dispersed throughout East Africa and other parts of the former British Empire, members of the Isaaq diaspora continued to maintain connections to Somaliland. Upon arriving in a new country, Hirsi explained, “we don’t unpack.”8
Whether describing themselves as a people “without borders” or lamenting the colonial frontiers that divided them from their kin and grazing land, many of the people I spoke to invoked the negative effects of boundaries on their lives. This pervasive theme ran across dozens of interviews I conducted with Kenyan Somalis of diverse class, geographic, and clan backgrounds in 2010 and 2011.9 Their shared frustration with borders provides a perfect lens through which to observe how the modern world is not, in fact, becoming increasingly “borderless” for many people.10 Their experiences also show that there are ways of imagining borderlessness that are distinct from neoliberal rationality, which envisions people as market actors operating in a world in which capital and goods flow freely across national boundaries. As their histories indicate, narratives of transnationalism must account for both integration and disconnection, as well as reckon with ways of life and forms of belonging that predate the nation-state. Territorial borders are neither disappearing nor remaining intact; rather, they continue to be fought over, reimagined, and reconfigured.
Understanding this fraught relationship with borders is also key to addressing one of the central questions posed in this book: How did Somalis come to be thought of as only questionably indigenous to Kenya? Unlike studies that have looked at the Somali refugee community and their struggles as stateless people in Kenya, this work concentrates on a minority group whom many consider to be not fully “native” to a country where they have lived for generations.11 Somali-identifying people dwelled in the area known today as Kenya long before it became a protectorate in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they face widespread perceptions that they do not belong within the country. For many decades, scholars blamed their predicaments on the arbitrary or artificial nature of colonial boundaries.12 Now frequently invoked by journalists and social scientists to explain virtually any ethnic conflict on the continent, this argument has become almost cliché. While it is certainly true that imperial powers imposed borders in the late nineteenth century with little regard for the nomadic people of the Horn of Africa, the concept of arbitrary borders does little to help us understand how ethnic territorialism came to be thought of as “natural” in the first place.13
The idea that groups naturally belong to homelands to which they are “native” became an increasingly dominant political logic as countries the world over transitioned from colonialism to independence. Mahmood Mamdani has persuasively argued that the colonial state constructed the distinction between native and non-native, politicized indigenousness, and reinforced these divides through spatial segregation and bifurcated legal codes. This had ongoing ramifications in the postcolonial era, when the state redefined citizenship as a right of natives, rather than of non-natives and settlers.14 Yet Mamdani’s work (and much of the academic scholarship that followed in its wake) has been limited by the assumption that the colonial state imposed these categories from above and that African subjects readily internalized them.15 Instead, this book argues that older forms of cosmopolitanism, diaspora, and nomadic life came to coexist and compete with the modern territorial state.
The predicaments faced by generations of Somalis in Kenya (and their lack of a definitive status as an “indigenous” ethnic group) stand as an important challenge to the nativist, nationalist, and area studies frameworks that have long dominated the field of African studies. As Mamdani, Frederick Cooper, and Jemima Pierre have pointed out, Africanist scholars have tended to focus on the construction of national and subnational identities at the expense of regional and extraterritorial forms of social and political affiliation.16 The tendency to approach the continent in particularist terms has obscured the ways in which Africa has been historically integrated into the wider world. Historians have also marginalized the experiences of groups who did not fit into conventional nationalist and nativist histories, including those who actively benefited from the colonial racial order, supported rival nationalist, separatist, or irredentist movements, or identified as non-African or multiracial.17 This has had the effect of reifying racialized boundaries, including the distinction between the “African” and the “Arab” worlds. For many of these reasons, historians of Kenya have, until recently, neglected the history of the Kenyan Somali population.18
Questioning methodological nationalism does not necessitate a wholesale rejection of the nation-state. Nor does recognizing the limitations of area studies entail a decentering of “Africa.”19 Such approaches do, however, call for a greater awareness of the importance of regional and global forms of solidarity in Africa, which went beyond the policed boundaries of empire and nation-state. Prior to European rule, Somali and other Cushitic speakers (as well as many people throughout the region) identified as members of Islamic, nomadic, and lineage communities that spanned Northeast Africa and Arabia.20 The rich cultural and material residue left by centuries of nomadic travel, spiritual interaction, and trade enabled Somalis and other related groups in Kenya to participate in collective lives that stretched across colonial borders and to survive periods of economic downturn and ecological degradation.21 In addition, collective histories and narratives about a past before the advent of immigration controls, border checks, and territorial boundaries have become fertile ground and rich symbolic terrain for envisioning new futures. Kenyan Somali political thinkers have creatively rethought citizenship by engaging both with models derived from Europe and with ideas of community that evolved out of the diverse worlds of Northeast Africa and the Western Indian Ocean. Since the early colonial period, people in the region have challenged dominant definitions of indigenousness and imagined supraterritorial alternatives to the Kenyan state. In the early 1960s, many Kenyan Somalis aligned around a rival form of pan-nationalism, which undermined the hegemony and exclusivity of the Kenyan nation-state. Today, they participate in transnational networks that do not always adhere to the demographic, territorial, and secular logics of the state.
These supraterritorial, pan-national, and transnational affiliations cast doubt on the notion that ethnicity is the overriding political logic in many parts of Africa, thus challenging the ethnic paradigm that has long dominated Kenyan scholarship.22 In the 1980s, Africanist scholars such as John Iliffe, Leroy Vail, and Terence Ranger argued that ethnic identities were neither timeless nor primordial, but rather inventions constructed by missionaries, colonial officials, and African elites.23 In the 1990s, Kenyan historians such as John Lonsdale, Thomas Spear, and Richard Waller took the study of ethnogenesis in more nuanced directions by revealing the limits of colonial invention, the importance of precolonial institutions, and the internal moral debates around which ethnic communities constituted themselves.24 More recently, East Africanists such as Laura Fair, Gabrielle Lynch, and Myles Osborne have expanded our understanding of the gendered, generational, and class-ridden processes that led to ethnic invention.25 While this body of literature has greatly advanced our understanding of ethnic formation (and provided an important corrective to the racist essentialism of colonial-era ethnography), it has also occluded other kinds of political imagination.26 Moreover, while ethnicity has taken on political primacy of late, it is important to avoid the teleology that sees such an outcome as inevitable.
Rather than a study of a “people,” this book analyzes Somaliness as a category and mode of thought, which has changed across time and place. At the risk of overemphasizing the importance of group belonging among Africans, such an approach provides an alternative to the scholarly focus on ethnonationalism. Examining how Kenyan Somalis imagined borderlessness from a position of marginality within the nation-state, We Do Not Have Borders offers new inroads into debates over African sovereignty, the “failed state,” the “resurgence” of religion, and the meanings of being African.
