thinkers developed an oppositional politics that, at times, troubled the territorial, demographic, and secular politics of the state.
“SOMALINESS” AND ITS CHANGING MEANINGS
It is impossible to write about the history of Kenyan Somali people for an international audience without first addressing the place that Somalis occupy in the Western popular imagination. In the eyes of many analysts, Northeast Africa has come to embody many of the anxieties of the post–Cold War era. Since the early 1990s, the popular press has often treated Somalia as the emblematic failed state, and the Somali people have become associated with warlordism, piracy, and terrorism. Many commentators argue that these problems are now “spilling” into Kenya. After the Kenyan government under the regime of Mwai Kibaki invaded Somalia in 2011, al-Shabaab (a militant group that the United States designated a terrorist organization in 2008) launched a number of devastating attacks on civilian targets in Kenya. While the international community has rightly condemned al-Shabaab’s brutal acts, many journalists, security analysts, and media pundits have sensationalized them, transforming tragedy into spectacle. Often these accounts reflect a fear not of violence per se, but of violence conducted by nonstate actors who operate outside the boundaries of the nation-state and the international norms of secularism.27 At the same time, these popular media narratives mask the violence committed by other actors in the ongoing war in southern Somalia.
Ultimately, concepts such as warlordism, piracy, and terrorism provide a poor lens through which to analyze such complex phenomena.28 As will be explained in later chapters, these paradigms tend to abstract events from their complex regional and transnational causes and reinforce the myopic ideological viewpoints of US policy makers who have drawn dubious connections between “failed” states and global security threats. Many of the popular ideas surrounding terrorism derive from a policy mind-set that consistently advocates military intervention over diplomacy.29 Moreover, such concepts buttress racist tropes and popular prejudices about Africans and Muslims. These stereotypes affect Kenyan Somalis, even though few are directly involved in al-Shabaab’s violent activities or profit from the hijacking of ships. They also serve, as Achille Mbembe argues, to define Africa in terms of “lack”—lack of order, lack of peace, and lack of governance.30 In addition, according to Paul Zeleza, there is a tendency within the field of African studies to treat the continent as a whole as a “development problem.”31
While Somali-identifying people in the region have built forms of community that circumvent state borders and challenge conventional notions of sovereignty, they should not be understood as an inherent threat to national and international security. Scholars on the right (such as Samuel Huntington) have tended to pathologize certain groups of people who operate outside the supposedly stabilizing forces of empire and nationalism.32 Many on the left, however, have simply overlooked types of regional, continental, and global interaction that decenter the importance of Western phenomena, thus reducing what is “African” to mere “local color.”33 Both tendencies reflect ingrained ways of thinking that can be traced to the colonial era. The colonial state, as Talal Asad suggests, played a significant role in defining who and what was “local” and “universal” and classifying those who strayed from either norm as threatening and out of place.34 Many of the transnational networks that emerged in the wake of the Somali civil war, which broke out in the early 1990s, can be understood as contemporary permutations of forms of organization that have much deeper roots in the region.35 Despite their criminalization, they are not unusual when considered within a longer historical perspective.
Two other dominant concepts have shaped scholarship and journalism about the Horn of Africa. Since at least the 1940s, Somali nationalists have projected the idea that Somalis throughout the region were part of a homogeneous and ancient nation. For decades, Somalia was considered an exceptional case on a continent otherwise riddled by “tribal” attachments.36 Revisionist scholars like Ali Jimale Ahmed have questioned the historicity of these narratives: “We cannot really demonstrate that all Somalis saw themselves as one people . . . before colonialism.”37 The outbreak of the Somali civil war in the early 1990s, on the other hand, gave credence to the idea that “clan” was paramount to Somali society. This was a notion popularized by the late pioneer of Somali studies, Ioan M. Lewis.38 According to standard anthropological models, Somali society consists “of six patrilineal clan-families formed by the descendants of mythical Arabic ancestors who arrived in Somali twenty-five to thirty generations ago”; and each clan-family, in turn, encompasses “a set of patrilineally related clans, subclans, sub-subclans, and lineages.”39 Lidwien Kapteijns and Abdi Samatar argue that these anthropological concepts were implicated in the colonial construction of clannism, which became an influential epistemological category in the post–World War II era.40
While seemingly dissimilar, both frameworks are part of a common discursive field. Treating “clan” and “nation” as pre-political categories that preceded the imposition of the colonial state naturalizes an ethnoterritorial paradigm.41 Clan affiliations have long been an important feature of Somali life, and many nomadic livestock-herding groups in the precolonial era organized themselves around kinship idioms. However, “clan” took on a profoundly new meaning in the twentieth century.42 Moreover, Somali speakers have also lived in city-states and agriculturally based confederations, as well as Islamic settlements (typically known as jama‘a or zawiya), where other forms of collective identification frequently took precedence.43 “Somaliness” has also meant different things at different times, and its precolonial manifestations should not be seen as an inevitable precursor to the modern nation-state. Recent innovative research by scholars such as Abdi Kusow, for example, suggests that certain Somali clan names predated the usage of “Somali” as an overarching affiliation.44 By the nineteenth century, many diverse populations in modern-day Yemen, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, and Somalia had come to see themselves as Somali—an identification that was often associated with being a pastoralist, a Muslim, and identifying with a clan or lineage that could trace its descent to a common ancestor (such as the eponymous Arab patriarch Samaale).45
This book focuses on the histories of two intertwined populations: nomadic Somali pastoralists, who have historically lived in northern Kenya on the borderlands abutting Ethiopia and Somalia; and the Somali diaspora community who came to the colony from British Somaliland, Aden, and Kismayo. (On the whole, it is less focused on the lives of more recent refugees who fled to Kenya to escape the violence and instability in neighboring Somalia beginning in the 1980s). Their histories cut across ethnic, national, racial, and continental borders. By the late nineteenth century, Somali immigrants from Berbera, Aden, and other coastal cities were in many respects already “globalized.” This complicates conventional understandings of the Somali diaspora as being a product of the recent Somali civil war. Traveling through the circuits of informal and formal empire, Somali soldiers, seamen, traders, and porters settled in various parts of the British Empire, including Kenya. Most identified as members of the Isaaq or Harti clans.46 Colonial officials in Kenya considered this small, privileged class to be legal immigrants to the colony and often referred to them as the “alien Somali.” At the same time, Somali nomads living hundreds of miles farther south were making their way into what is now northern Kenya. They sought to escape the expanding Ethiopian Empire, gain access to new grazing land, and seize control over the expanding caravan trade. In some cases, newcomers assimilated with local residents whom they viewed as fellow Somali kin. In other cases, Somali nomadic groups enslaved or absorbed locals into subordinate relationships, or expelled those who resisted their encroachment. When imperial powers divided these nomadic populations between different territories in the late nineteenth century, many Somalis—including those who identified as members of the Ogaden, Garre, Ajuran, and Degodia lineages—found themselves living in Kenya.47
The term “Kenyan Somali” is commonly used to refer to these “indigenous” Somali populations. It is, however, an imperfect label. Qualifying Somalis as Kenyan (a convention rarely applied to other transnational ethnic groups in the country) has led some
