In addition, Ahmed Maalin Abdalle’s story shows how quickly mobilizations of clan could change. After claiming the ivory, the husband went to the market in Bardera to purchase a large bull. He had the misfortune, however, of returning to Habasweyn after a period of drought. According to Abdalle’s account, members of the Muhammad Zubeir clan stole the man’s newly purchased bull to replenish the herds killed off by the drought. Members of the Abd Wak lineage, who claimed a common descent with the Abdalla in this era, retaliated for the theft. This triggered the series of battles known today as the Kalaluud.74 After the struggles between the Ogaden subclans subsided, such a way of conceptualizing kinship fell out of favor.75 This story serves as a reminder to contemporary observers of Somalia, who have tended to view recent mobilizations of clan as ancient and natural, that one cannot accept the present as traditional or given.
As the Kalaluud conflict indicates, the early twentieth century was a tumultuous time for nomadic groups living in the NFD, who struggled over control of land and resources. British accounts depoliticize the Kalaluud and paint it as an unexceptional “tribal” conflict against which the supposedly stabilizing, neutral colonial state could be deployed. Ahmed Maalin Abdalle, on the other hand, embedded this conflict within regional dynamics, local power struggles, and control over pastoral resources and trade routes. Relying on oral histories of this nature thus helps to counteract the depoliticizing effects of the archives and recenters Somali knowledge production.
Correspondence suggests that many lower-ranking officials were aware of the complex struggles and thorny reconfigurations of lineage ties, but simply found the complexity overwhelming. Actionable administrative discourse required officials to cut through this intricacy. Gradually, many protectorate and colonial administrators came to accept the myth of southward Somali expansion and perpetuated the idea that they were hindering a timeless conquest by a Muslim race of foreign extraction.76 This view of history eventually became ingrained in administrative logic. By 1963, R. G. Turnbull, provincial commissioner (PC) of the NFD, argued: “There can be no doubt that had it not been for European intervention the Somalis, pushing before them the Galla and the remnants of other displaced tribes, would, by now, have swept through Kenya; the local Bantu and Nilotes could scarcely have held them for a day.”77
This narrative of conquest painted Somali nomads as foreign encroachers whose movement needed to be closely contained. By the early twentieth century, protectorate officials had come to see the Somali nomad as an administrative problem as well as a threat to the safety of white settlers and the functioning of the colonial economy. Rarely could protectorate or colonial administrators fully control nomadic movement. However, in transforming migration into a legible problem of governance, protectorate officials stigmatized long-standing patterns of transhumance and equated the “Somali” with unregulated and dangerous mobility.
2
“Kenya Is Regarded by the Somali as an El Dorado”
I am not an anthropologist, but I believe that I am correct in saying that Somalis have been in Africa hundreds of years or even thousands of years, and I am not at all sure how far one has to be back in order to determine the origin of a race. Surely if an Imperial Act were to refer to a person of British origins it would not be competent for that person to allege that he came from Normandy in 1066.
—Attorney General of Kenya, 31 May 19341
IN 1934, THE ATTORNEY GENERAL of Kenya intervened in a much wider debate over the legal classification of the Somali population. Construing of race and nation as natural categories and approaching the issue through a positivist epistemology, he suggested that careful anthropological investigation could ultimately resolve the matter of Somali origins. He nonetheless speculated that the foreign roots of the Somali people were vestiges of a distant past, drawing an analogy with British people who could claim “Norman” ancestry. His comments prefigured a broader crisis in the late 1930s, when the status of the Somali came under increased scrutiny.2
For decades, historians neglected the history of Somali subjects. Nationalist historians overlooked their experiences because they did not fit into conventional definitions of indigeneity and seemed to embody a tragic liminality.3 Scholars have only just begun to explore the subjectivities of those who were not governed so explicitly as “natives.” Labor historians also tended to elide the histories of Somali traders and nomadic pastoralists, who did not fall within the category of “workers.”4 Yet the lives of Somalis in Kenya have much to teach us about the range of colonial subjectivities as well as the social and political horizons beyond the territorial confines of the state. This chapter examines how empire facilitated certain kinds of diasporic and regional engagement, and how these possibilities began to unravel in the years leading up to World War II.
Throughout early colonial rule, Somalis in Kenya maintained a loose affiliation with territory that sustained models of membership that did not conform to colonial or juridical logics. Despite being confined to the north, northerners continued to see pastoralism as a viable, sustainable strategy; avoided becoming deeply incorporated into the colonial labor economy; and frequently crossed the porous boundaries between Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland, and Kenya with little regard for their authority. Unwilling to invest significant funds or manpower in the NFD, authorities regularly yielded to these forms of transhumance. By enlisting Somalis from Aden and British Somaliland in the imperial project, colonial authorities also enabled them to form horizontal solidarities that stretched across colonial boundaries. Members of the Isaaq and Harti community often claimed non-native status and saw themselves both as imperial citizens and as dispersed members of a wider Islamic and genealogical community.
Bringing the metropole and colonies into a single framework, this chapter analyzes some of the fundamental tensions at the heart of the imperial political economy. Colonial economies demanded flexibility for the movement of laborers, soldiers, traders, and capital between continents and across territorial borders. However, colonial and British authorities also sought to restrict the mobility of colonized subjects, including Somali nomads, traders, and seamen. While British and colonial administrators at times imagined Britishness in terms of a global imperial subjecthood, they also remained committed to an ethnic and racial understanding of African identity. As these tensions heightened in the interwar period, British officials began to erode the legal status of the Somali people.
IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP
Although they left various kinds of “ethnographic” traces, Somali travelers who arrived in Kenya in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced few written records themselves. Archival records contain Somali “voices,” but are often mediated through colonial discourses, which defined a limited terrain of communication. Postcolonial nationalism has so shaped contemporary testimony that it is also difficult to reconstruct the thinking of early generations of Somali immigrants through oral history alone. Many of my Isaaq and Harti interlocutors described their patriarchs as Kenya’s pioneers. Through proud, patriarchal narratives, second-, third-, and fourth-generation Somalis emphasized their long-standing roots in the country, highlighted their community’s contributions to Kenyan history, and countered widespread perceptions that they were “alien” to the country.
Given the fragmented nature of the historical record, it is difficult to determine how newly arrived Somali migrants conceptualized their relationship to British power and the locals living in East Africa. Studies of other immigrant communities nevertheless enable some tentative conclusions to be drawn. Throughout the nineteenth century, Indian traders, moneylenders, and laborers had flocked to East Africa—creating economic and political inroads for British colonialists.5 In addition, British officials initially toyed with the prospect that East Africa would become an “America for the Hindu.”6