to native reserves and who blurred the boundary between “native” and “non-native.” The question of where they “belonged,” already fraught during the early colonial era, became an ever more pressing and violent issue as Kenya transitioned to a developmentalist state (the focus of chapters 3 and 4). Developmental imperialism enabled the late colonial government to intervene much more extensively in the lives of Somali livestock traders and nomads in the 1940s and ’50s.63 Alongside development initiatives, postwar political projects also posed new challenges for Somalis in Kenya. Nationalist campaigns demanded loyalty to an exclusive territorial homeland, which forced states and subjects alike to determine where Somalis in Kenya belonged and to which nation they were “native.” The rise of Pan-African nationalist movements proved problematic for a population that regularly traversed international borders and, at times, cast themselves as non-natives.64
Partha Chatterjee has suggested that nationalist models derived from European precedents never fully “colonized” the imaginations of colonized subjects.65 Yet the universalization of the nation-state as the paradigmatic model of the post–World War II era placed a large number of restrictions on what could be formally implemented.66 While African leaders imagined alternatives to the imperial configuration of territory, contests over the scope and nature of self-determination led to the hardening of colonial boundaries.67 Chapters 4 and 5 examine sovereignty as an enduring problem for colonial subjects and postcolonial citizens. When Kenya achieved independence in 1963, the newly elected government took brutal measures to suppress the Pan-Somali campaign. By the late 1960s, Kenyan Somalis had effectively become foreigners on their own soil, their loyalty deemed suspect and their political activism delegitimized as a criminal revolt known by most Kenyans as the “Shifta War” (ca. 1963–1967).68
Looking back at colonialism and decolonization in the wake of the recent “structural transformations” that “unmade the postwar order,” one gets a sense of vertigo, of history repeating itself.69 From a certain vantage point, it appears that the crisis of the nation-state in Northeast Africa and the erosion of economic sovereignty that attended neoliberal restructuring led to a certain “rebirth” of decentralized networks that flourished prior to World War II. When Somalia became increasingly unstable in the late 1980s, people began to seek refuge in cities as dispersed as Nairobi, Dubai, Minneapolis, and London, creating a new, globalized Somali diaspora. Many drew on long-standing kinship ties with people in neighboring Kenya in an effort to avoid overcrowded and underfunded refugee camps. Chapters 6 and 7 examine how Nairobi developed into a site of asylum and a global hub for Somali business. Islamic and refugee networks also provided important economic and social alternatives for those pushed to the margins of the Kenyan political system.70
The arguments in this book are influenced by this recent turn of events and by a broader transnational turn that has reached across various disciplines. The rise of transnational studies (and the accompanying skepticism toward the nation-state) has taken the discipline of history in novel directions. Nevertheless, new paradigms can reproduce old mythologies.71 Recent scholarly developments risk perpetuating older modernization theories and obscuring the highly unequal and unevenly connected nature of the “global” world.72 The reemergence of deterritorialized networks in East and Northeast Africa thus should not be seen as simply the latest “stage” within the familiar, progressive narrative of postmodernity—a local analogue to multinational corporations, cosmopolitan elites, and global religious revivals.73 Nor should these trends be interpreted as sounding the death knell for national sovereignty or citizenship.74 In fact, the predicaments faced by nomads on the Kenyan/Somali borderlands, members of historic Somali diasporas, and refugees reveal just how much power state borders and notions of citizenship still have.75 As chapters 6 and 7 show, while Kenyan Somalis have largely turned away from the idea of unifying under a Greater Somali nation-state, many are also trying to fight disenfranchisement and have their minority status fully recognized within the country.
Far from being parochial, the difficulties faced by Kenyan Somalis refract problems of global relevance. Debates over indigeneity have symbolically reordered the world, creating groups of people who do not “fit” into the nation-state. As Liisa Malkki has argued, minorities who do not fall neatly into received categories often become the targets of those who seek to naturalize and maintain established boundaries and classifications.76 Whereas expatriates, aid workers, and international businessmen in Kenya (and across the Global South more broadly) tend to be thought of as worldly and cosmopolitan; nomads, immigrants, and refugees are often identified as “displaced, uprooted, [or] disoriented.”77
Kenyan Somalis have been struggling for decades to find ways to be both “Kenyan” and “Somali” (or, in some cases, “Somalilanders” or “Ethiopians”)—a goal that has been complicated by the Somali refugee crisis and the global “war on terror.” To this day, traders, migrants, and nomads in Kenya cannot freely or easily participate in networks that stretch across territorial boundaries without furthering perceptions that they are alien to the country. Even those who are highly localist in their orientation, speak multiple Kenyan languages, and are considered to be culturally assimilated into Kenya are sometimes perceived as foreign. As Hussein Mohamed Haji complained, “I am 70. I was born in Kenya. I speak six Kenyan languages. But when other Kenyans see me they just make the assumption that I’m a Somali.”78 Kenyan Somalis have become the locus of anxious discussions over who is an “authentic” Kenyan citizen, who has rights to the city and a share in the “national cake,” and what is the “proper” place of religion in political life.79
Contemporary efforts by activists, scholars, and theorists to envision a future politics less tethered to existing nation-state boundaries were, in many ways, anticipated by Somali and northern Kenyan political thinkers. For decades, Kenyan Somalis have looked beyond the horizons of the territorial state and toward alternative kinds of imagined communities (even though such strategies sometimes put them at odds with state authorities and made them vulnerable to political marginalization). As I argue most explicitly in the conclusion, it is possible to grasp the critical resonance between Somali tactics and the current conditions of those most affected by contemporary globalization, while guarding against simplistic revivals of the past. These transnational practices (and the political innovations that preceded and followed the universalization of the nation-state) can offer inspiration for future arrangements within the region and beyond.
METHODOLOGY
In many ways, studying Kenyan Somali networks both conforms to and requires certain departures from trends in African studies. In recent years, historians and anthropologists have begun to question the traditional focus of academic fieldwork: namely, the “local” ethnic group. Many scholars have abandoned this method in favor of multisited research projects.80 At first glance, a study of Somalis living in Kenya may seem an example of the older model of “local” fieldwork. Yet my interviews, though largely (but not exclusively) confined to people who identified as both Kenyan and Somali, did not give rise to a picture of a bounded, local community situated within a delimited culture or territorial homeland. Rather, they revealed how individuals defined what it meant to be Somali in different ways and in dialogue and coordination with people living throughout the region—and, in some cases, across the globe.
Perhaps the greatest value of oral history is how it provides insights into forms of interpersonal connection that lie outside
