to divine intervention).
One of the greatest difficulties I encountered was carrying out research in a highly charged and politicized setting. Oral history is often endorsed as a means of democratizing history and giving “ordinary” people a voice.91 Yet various Kenyan and Somali political thinkers have used history to incite ethnonationalist and religious divisions, which in turn shaped the way ordinary people came to view their neighbors. Some Kenyan citizens regarded Somalis with suspicion and resented their presence in the country. By the same token, some Somalis had internalized derogatory views of other Kenyan ethnic groups and perpetuated the chauvinistic idea that they were not fully “African.” It is important, however, to recognize that such sentiments were far from universal. Since the start of the Somali civil war, Kenya has taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees—far more than any Western nation. While the country is not immune from anti-immigrant sentiments that plague nations throughout the world, it has also served as a refuge for people across the region and has often succeeded in accommodating very diverse ways of life.
Understanding these complex dynamics requires deconstructing the Manichaean division between colonizer and colonized. As Eve Troutt Powell reminds us, scholars must remain attentive to colonial forms of othering, while at the same time recognizing that colonized African subjects were also capable of excluding fellow Africans, reinforcing hierarchical forms of domination, and perpetuating colonial modes of racialization. African states like Egypt and Ethiopia have engaged in practices that have led some to label them as internal colonizers.92 Members of the Somali community have, at times, harbored racist views toward other East Africans, promoted the idea that they themselves were not “African,” and expressed religious chauvinism against Christians or other “inferior” Muslims. In the case of Kenya, however, discriminatory thinking has not always mapped onto political power. While some Somalis hold derogatory views of “Africans,” they also face marginalization and are often subjected to discriminatory treatment by the Kenyan state. By showing the ways in which prejudiced thinking intersects with structures of power, this book reveals the sometimes-blurry line between victim and victimizer, while remaining attuned to important distinctions between institutionalized racism and bigotry.93
Conducting oral history was also challenging because the past was a highly emotive topic for many people. After independence in 1963, Somalis endured significant trauma at the hands of Kenyan officials, who often acted with the tacit and sometimes explicit support of the British and the US governments. Many were eager to speak to me about these painful memories of state violence and repression. Though some were suspicious of my intentions or simply unwilling to revive such painful memories, others saw me as a potential mouthpiece for highlighting their stories of suffering and marginalization, or an advocate who could connect their stories to an international human rights agenda. Rather than simply “compiling a record of horror, a kind of case for the prosecution,” however, this book tries to uncover the logic that facilitated violence and made the relationship between Somalis and the Kenyan state so fraught and complicated.94 It focuses not simply on the ways in which people imagined community, but also on moments and gestures of antimembership, rejection, and refusal. This study traces the reasons why Somalis have come to hold such an enigmatic, liminal status within Kenya, where they are often regarded as both locals and foreigners, citizens and strangers.
1
“Carrying the History of the Prophets”
About 800 or 900 years ago the Horn of Africa was politically and commercially more closely related to Arabia than it is at the present day, and it was at that date that the Somali race was first formed by numerous emigrants from Southern Arabia intermingling with, intermarrying with, and proselytizing the indigenous tribes, who were probably of Galla stock. Since then they have extended in all directions along the lines of least resistance.
—L. Aylmer, “The Country between the Juba River and Lake Rudolf,” 19111
FOR CENTURIES, GROUPS ACROSS Northeast Africa, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean had migrated, traded goods, exchanged cultural technologies, and intermarried. For Captain Aylmer, a British officer who policed the Northern Frontier District (NFD), this cultural mixing could be explained only through reference to the impact of a supposedly superior immigrant Arab race. Historical dynamism was tied to obliquely sexualized stories of a continent penetrated by foreign infiltration. British authorities came to believe that through conquest, they were hindering a seemingly inexorable invasion by Somalis, whose ancestors had emigrated from Arabia and slowly spread across Northeast Africa. Constructing a distinction between “indigenous” Africans and “foreigners,” protectorate and colonial officials came to see the Somali as a racially ambiguous people who were neither fully African nor fully Arab.
Among Cushitic-speaking people at the turn of the century, however, different discursive formations governed talk and thought about what it meant to be “Somali.” By the nineteenth century, Oromo- and Somali-speaking people had developed a range of social, intellectual, and cultural techniques well suited to the cosmopolitan Indian Ocean world and to the loose relationship with land that facilitated a pastoral economy in the Horn of Africa. On the eve of colonial conquest, many groups were engaged in complex arguments about the boundaries of who did and did not belong to the Islamic umma (community) and broader Somali lineages. In the nineteenth century, the stakes of these debates heightened as the region experienced an increase in foreign trade, an intensification of slavery, and the expansion of Ethiopian and European imperial power.
This chapter reconstructs the ways in which Somali and Oromo speakers in Kenya were redefining “Somaliness” on the eve of colonial conquest. It also examines how British protectorate and colonial officials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constructed the Somali as a quasi-foreign people whose movement into and within the East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) needed to be carefully controlled. Doing so requires sifting through a historical record that is ineluctably incomplete, fragmented, and riddled by the effects of power. By bringing oral and documentary sources and African and colonial narratives into conversation, however, it is possible to generate richer and, in some cases, more subversive histories.
RACE AND COSMOPOLITANISM UNDER EMPIRE
Scholars have tended to conceptualize colonialism in Africa as the culmination of a long process of European expansion overseas. In the mid-nineteenth century, Western explorers began to travel deeper into the interior of the African continent, which shaped how they understood race and difference. European missionaries and surveyors who explored the East African interior often viewed themselves as pioneers “discovering” a new land. However, they frequently drew upon the knowledge and expertise of locals, many of whom were seasoned travelers in their own right. As David Northrup has shown, people from both sides of the Continental Divide traveled and came to “discover” the other.2
In 1854, Sir Richard Francis Burton arrived in Zeila, on the northeastern tip of the Horn, to embark on an ill-fated expedition to Harar, Ethiopia. Burton gained acclaim for his alluring travel memoirs. Often overlooked, however, are the African translators, soldiers, gun-bearers, and navigators who guided Burton and his companion, John Hanning Speke, through the Horn of Africa. One of Burton’s recruits, Mohammed Mahmud (whom he referred to as al-Hammal, meaning “the porter”), was an experienced voyager who had begun his career as a coal trimmer aboard an Indian war steamer. According to Burton, Mahmud went on to rise up the “rank to the command of the crew” and “became servant and interpreter to travelers, visited distant lands—Egypt and Calcutta,” before finally settling in Aden.3 Prior to formal colonialism, people living in port cities along the Gulf of Aden had encountered European travelers and voyaged through mercantilist and capitalist circuits.
Burton was a prolific writer and linguist, whose translations and travel accounts became fodder for the Western appetite for the exotic. In one of his most famous memoirs, Burton described the Somali as one of
