what Nancy Rose Hunt refers to as the cliché of the colonial encounter—the tendency to reduce historical agency to an “epic-like meeting” between “colonizers and colonized.”81 Speaking to Kenyan citizens who identified as Somali revealed that loyalties and connections that took place outside the state’s bureaucratic surveillance—connections to people in Somaliland, the wider diaspora, and the broader Muslim community—were of no less significance. It also brought to the fore dynamics that are otherwise occluded by state archives’ reliance on the epistemologies of clan and ethnic belonging. It showed, for example, that many non-Somalis, including members of the Borana, Rendille, and Sakuye populations, had at times participated in the construction and development of Somaliness.
It is hard to disentangle the networks through which I traveled as a researcher—which were shaped by the forms of power inherent in my passport, my race, my institutional affiliations, and my comparative affluence—from the networks I was trying to study. These were shaped by some actors who were comparatively powerful, but many of whom were relatively powerless. I began my fieldwork in Nairobi, where I interviewed elders who could recall the late colonial and early postcolonial periods and met younger community leaders who put me in touch with many of my key interlocutors in other parts of the country. These social connections facilitated my movement across different regions. The checkpoints and miles of untarmacked road that I crossed moving between Nairobi and Northern Kenya were stark reminders of both my own privileged freedom of movement and the everyday barriers to mobility that many Somalis and northern Kenyans face. The very global structures of power that enabled me to move to Kenya to conduct research often inhibited the mobility of my Somali interlocutors and friends. Thus, my fieldwork became a means of meditating upon differential mobility and the policing of different transnational practices.
To conduct interviews, I traveled to various towns, including Nakuru, Isiolo, Naivasha, and Garissa. I also occasionally spoke with Kenyans who originated from other areas such as Mandera, Moyale, and Marsabit. However, most of my fieldwork was concentrated in two main sites. One was Nairobi—Kenya’s bustling, cosmopolitan capital and the country’s largest city. The other was Wajir—a very marginalized (but in certain respects, no less cosmopolitan) rural area and one of the three districts (now counties) in the North Eastern Province (NEP), which had once been part of the Northern Frontier District (NFD). Examining Wajir and Nairobi together revealed the importance of multidirectional links between the countryside (often assumed to be the site of “traditional,” “authentic” Africa) and the putatively modern city. It enabled me to see the ways in which people from different geographic, clan, occupational, and class backgrounds reproduced and redefined what it meant to be Somali. Individuals and groups constituted themselves through “the continuous creation of the past.”82 By accumulating archives, sharing personal memorabilia, and drawing upon collective representations of the past, people were able to publicly define themselves as “the” Somali, “the” Isaaq, or as “Africans,” “Arabs,” and so on. The past weighed heavily on current generations, serving as both a resource for imagining new futures and a threatening reminder of dissident, outdated, or embarrassing subjectivities.
Moreover, carrying out interviews in different locations allowed me to let go of ideas that people naturally belong to specific “lands,” that fieldwork gives a scholar privileged access to “local knowledge,” or that one can simply enter or exit a defined “zone” of culture.83 Moving to such diverse sites was challenging (each time I traveled to a new area, I had to gain people’s trust anew and get accustomed to new cultural and linguistic norms). However, this productive disorientation also led to a heightened awareness of the missteps, misunderstandings, and negotiated power dynamics that color any research encounter.84
Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that “lived inequalities yield uneven historical power.”85 One way this manifested itself was in the gendered nature of my interviews, which were skewed toward men. Despite my best efforts, I had a difficult time speaking to women. Unless they were recognized community leaders, older women often directed me to elder men, who were widely seen to be the bearers of public history. Men also tended to have more experience with the performative aspects of history telling and more familiarity with the narrative expectations of being interviewed by a white foreigner. When I did speak to women, they sometimes told me stories that foregrounded the accomplishments of their male predecessors, thus reinforcing the widespread notion that it is men that make history. To some extent, such responses stemmed from the limitations of my own methodology and approach. Over time, I became much better at approaching women and asking questions that motivated them to talk about their experiences and understandings of the past. However, no feminist methodology can fully overcome the power imbalances that shape the interview encounter or the patriarchal dynamics that influence how women relate to narrative history (problems that are hardly exclusive to Africa or the Islamic world).86 In order to reconstruct the lives and experiences of women, I often had to turn to texts written by Europeans or oral testimony by men, which I have analyzed with attention toward traces of female authorship.
While oral testimony plays an important role in my analysis, this book also draws upon extensive archival research at the British National Archives and the Kenya National Archives. The bulk of my source material came from a range of low- to high-ranking bureaucrats in the East Africa Protectorate and, later, the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. I also relied upon records from officials in neighboring territories, such as the Protectorate of British Somaliland, and administrators in the Colonial, Foreign, and Home Offices in the United Kingdom. Africans wrought their influence on these archives in various ways, whether by writing letters and petitions directly to government officials or by affecting the knowledge and understanding of British administrators. Archival documents (and the scholarly work that draws upon them) also made their way into people’s hands, shaping oral testimony. Thinking about distinct oral and written domains or distinct “African” and “European” spheres of knowledge (a dichotomy that becomes even less relevant for the postcolonial archive) obscures their mutual imbrication.87 Treating sources (both oral and written) as situated performances (with different rules of inclusion and exclusion, privileged informants, and stylistic and rhetorical strategies) proved more analytically meaningful.88
Dispensing with the notion that there exists an authentic, objective, or unmediated voice, I instead focused on amassing a diversity of narratives.89 Woven throughout this text are multiple archives comprising colonial documents, transcribed oral histories, poetry, memoirs, and other sources. For more recent decades (when government archival records were either closed or less substantial), I relied more heavily on newspaper articles and human rights and NGO reports. Using such varied materials brought important methodological and political questions to the fore. How do people invoke the past in everyday life to comment upon and intervene in the present? Whose narratives do you privilege when writing a scholarly historical account? How does one read sources for hidden silences and elisions? In what ways did my race, comparative privilege, and disciplinary training shape the production of knowledge? Each chapter grapples with these questions and others. The structure of this book thus follows a traditional narrative and builds up an argument about epistemology.
Many of the chapters serve as mediations on the limits of historicism. Chapter 4, for instance, draws upon oral poetry, showing that Pan-Somali nationalism was not merely an elite project, but rather one shaped by and oriented toward rank-and-file nomadic people. Such sources resist easy historicism, as it is sometimes difficult to determine their exact date of production and authorship. They thus challenge certain scholarly conventions, including the commitment to liberal agency and historical time. However, these poems and songs also provide very important insight into idioms, metaphors, and discursive practices that cannot be easily grasped through the archives alone. Communities record and transmit the past in ways that may unsettle scholarly epistemologies, which require that historians consider the disciplinary limitations under which they operate.90 A number of chapters also examine the problems of politically irresponsible historicism. Acknowledging the dangers in authorizing a singular version of the past, this book points to different
