relations have argued that dual and hyphenated identities can serve to normalize whiteness.49 Though not an entirely analogous situation, some argue that marking Somalis as Kenyan marginalizes them from the imagined idea of the nation. Moreover, the term elides the fact that the line between an “authentic” Kenyan citizen of Somali descent and a Somali refugee or “alien” has always been blurry and contested. It is precisely this ambiguity and confusion that makes this case study so productive for examining questions of transnational belonging. In the face of long-term and successive patterns of dwelling, assimilation, conflict, and migration, the very concept of indigeneity becomes difficult to sustain.50 While the book’s narrative arc is intended to show the long-standing roots of Somalis in the country, one of its major goals is to reveal indigeneity itself as a categorical problem.51
Transnational conditions may arise when people cross borders or when borders cross people. A useful analogy for the Somali experience in Kenya can be found in the Mexican-American borderlands. Debates in the United States over illegal immigration and citizenship frequently obscure the fact that “Latina/o” networks, in many cases, long predated the advent of the US/Mexican frontier.52 Comparisons can also be drawn with the Kurdish community, many of whom feel themselves to be a nation divided between four countries.53 In addition, one can draw parallels between Somali citizens of Kenya, who are often deeply connected to Somalia and who have been joined by more recent refugees, and the Jewish and African diasporas. Descendants of African slaves forcefully relocated to the Americas today interact socially and politically with members of the postcolonial African diaspora, who settled in the US and other countries more recently. Relations between both populations are sometimes fraught, but they share in a collective imaginary as “Africans.” Many Jews in the United States and Europe see Israel as a kind of secondary homeland. Like Somalis in the “diaspora,” they participate in a nationalist project from outside its borders.54
In different ways, both Somali pastoralists and urbanites in Kenya have struggled with the implications of living lives stretched across colonial and now national boundaries. Though often treated as aberrant, the Kenyan Somali condition mirrors that of many other populations within the country and continent more broadly.55 Like other nomadic populations, such as the Tuareg of West Africa or the Maasai of Tanzania and Kenya, Somali pastoralists were divided into different territories in the late nineteenth century by imperial powers that disregarded their patterns of mobility and transhumance.56 The experience of Somali urbanites also has parallels with that of the Nubian (Sudanese) and Indian diasporas in East and Southern Africa. Immigrants from South Asia and Sudan, like Isaaq and Harti intermediaries, were able to take advantage of imperial opportunities in order to travel and settle in different parts of the British Empire and were often exempt from the legal restrictions governing “native” subjects.57 A number of Kenya’s “indigenous” ethnic groups, such as the Luo, Luhya, Teso, Borana, Swahili, and Digo, to name only a few, also straddle international borders. By the same token, East Africa has experienced waves of migration over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is now home to many “diasporas.” If such “borderless” conditions are indeed quite common, why are certain populations treated as alien and their lifestyles pathologized? Why have the Somali become the paradigmatic example of the internal stranger within Kenya (and beyond)?
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
In order to answer such questions and contribute to alternatives to methodological nationalism and nativism, We Do Not Have Borders charts the history of a distinctive type of oppositional politics. Examining political alternatives put forward by Somali and Kenyan political thinkers is one means of writing a history of the present. Walter Benjamin famously stated: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”58 Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Somali and northern Kenyan leaders and intellectuals envisioned diverse political futures, which were not always sovereign, territorial, or secular in scope or predicated on ethnic homogeneity. Some of these “past futures” may now appear obsolete, while others may seem to be brimming with unrealized potential.59 Analyzing alternative futures and heterodox political models is a way of upending teleologies, of avoiding a narrative that leads inexorably toward the ultimate triumph of a nation-state built around colonial territorial and institutional structures. It allows one to explore overlooked possibilities and forgotten histories of interrelation that resonate with present-day concerns. Remaining attentive to these histories often requires different practices of reading, listening, and archiving (discussed in the next section).
The first chapter of this book shows that on the eve of colonial rule, conflicts in northern Kenya sharpened the boundary between Muslim and non-Muslim and contributed to a broader reconfiguration of what it meant to be “Somali.” These notions of Somaliness were not predicated on territorial boundaries or structured by the binary racial distinction between “African” and “Arab.” Chapter 2 describes how, in the early decades of British rule, Isaaq and Harti representatives imagined themselves as both imperial citizens and members of a wider Islamic world, developing a geographic and civilizational ethos derived from both colonial and Indian Ocean thought. In the 1930s, when the colonial administration tried to erode the special privileges of the “alien” Somali and treat them functionally as “natives,” Isaaq representatives were able to mobilize through their kin in British Somaliland and the United Kingdom. They also reworked the racial vocabulary of empire by claiming to be a “race of Asiatic Origin.”60 Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine the diverse nationalist imaginaries that emerged from these foundations after World War II. While Somali leaders frequently made claims within the dominant framework of the nation-state, their efforts also reflected the pull of extraterritorial affiliations.61 Placing archival documents into dialogue with political poetry, chapter 4 analyzes the ways in which nonsecular and nonterritorial affiliations were mobilized in the service of a territorial nationalist project. Political thinkers in the Northern Frontier District (NFD) found various ways to “domesticate” the nation-state and transform an elite nationalist project into a popular movement that appealed to many of the region’s transhumant nomadic inhabitants. Finally, chapters 6 and 7 show how the defeat of the irredentist movement, the Somali civil war, and the attendant refugee crisis all sparked renewed debates over the meaning of the past and a profound reconfiguration of the idea of a “Greater Somalia.” In the post–Cold War era, Somaliness has become more deterritorialized and less closely tied to claims on a normative, secular political order.
This book also analyzes how shifting practices of governance affected the ability of Somalis to participate in collectivities that stretched across territorial boundaries. While protectorate and colonial administrators generally sought to restrict African mobility, imperial structures were, by definition, supraterritorial. As chapters 1 and 2 show, colonial economies demanded flexibility for the movement of laborers, soldiers, traders, and capital across territorial borders. Many immigrant communities were able to form horizontal solidarities that stretched across colonial boundaries and to imagine themselves, as Thomas Metcalf notes, “not merely as colonial subjects but as imperial citizens.”62 In addition, nomads regularly crossed imperial frontiers and continued to see pastoralism as a viable strategy throughout much of British rule.
Nevertheless, the tensions of the imperial political economy heightened during the interwar period. Colonial and British officials
