This sardonic image of mimicry ignored the possible reasons for placing such weight on so seemingly trivial an issue. Colonialism encouraged a kind of fetishism of paperwork, which often granted its bearers important legal rights. In March 1920, the PC of Nyeri wrote of Somalis who had come into his office, thrown their Non-Native Poll Tax receipts on his office table, and complained “that the government had deceived them by issuing them Receipts marked” in pencil, as though the ease with which one could rub out pencil marks was analogous to the potential erasure of their status.30 The 1920s and 1930s were marked by an enduring debate over paperwork, taxation, and other markers of legal status. Anxiety over losing these symbols illustrates how fragile Somalis perceived their position within Kenya to be, and shows that Somali subjects both participated in and subverted racial hierarchies.
Map 2.1. Colonial Kenya. (Note: This map shows Kenya’s international borders from 1926 to 1963. Though widely known as the Northern Frontier District [NFD] throughout the entirety of British rule, the region was formally renamed the Northern Province [NP] in 1925. Samburu District was separated from the NFD in 1934, and Turkana District was added in 1947 [after which the NP was technically known as the Northern Frontier Province].)
Although the Exemption Ordinance was a temporary provision, the administration never concretized the legal status of the Somali people. Benedict Anderson argues that state officials were notoriously intolerant “of multiple, politically ‘transvestite,’ blurred, or changing identifications.”31 Similarly, Homi Bhabha asserts that colonized subjects with hybrid identities threatened colonial power by destabilizing the line between ruler and ruled.32 Yet ambiguity could also be conducive to colonial power. As Talal Asad contends, radical critics are mistaken to assume “that power always abhors ambiguity”; rather, state authority “has depended on its exploiting the dangers and opportunities contained in ambiguous situations.”33 Officials in Kenya appear to have ruled their “alien” Somali subjects in part by keeping their status undefined, ambiguous, and contestable. They could then selectively reward Somali soldiers and intermediaries without calling into question the broader logic of the color bar or creating a legal precedent that might hold implications for other colonies, regions, or other “ambiguous” populations, such as the Swahili.34
NEW FORMS OF DIASPORA UNDER EMPIRE
Jonathon Glassman has recently argued that racism in Africa was a coproduction between Africans and European officials and has cautioned against underestimating “the role African thinkers played in the construction of race.”35 While Isaaq and Harti political thinkers helped to perpetuate exclusionary politics by bringing their own notions of descent into dialogue with colonial conceptions of race and ethnicity, one must always be attentive to the power dynamics that shaped such claims. Colonial rule frequently set the terms of political debate, which encouraged African subjects to frame their demands for greater rights within a racialized language. Moreover, Somali articulations of their origins did not always align with colonial racial ideas. Common vocabularies could also eclipse diverse and often contrary meanings. What Somali leaders espoused was sometimes closer to a cultural chauvinism (similar to the beliefs of the more liberal contingent of British officials) than racism in the strictly biological sense.36 In addition, their notions of descent and civilization often turned on understandings of culture and patrilineality that prized proximity to the wider Islamic world.
White settler memoirs are an important source of information on the racialized experiences of Somali town dwellers and urbanites. One of the most detailed windows comes from the writing of Karen Blixen, who arrived in Kenya in 1913 to establish a coffee plantation. Her famous memoir, Out of Africa, is replete with references to Farah Aden, a Somali employee whom she met in Aden. Farah Aden helped her establish her coffee plantation outside Nairobi and served as the steward of her household. Several passages of her book are also devoted to Farah Aden’s wife, who traveled from Somaliland escorted by family members after relatives arranged for their marriage.37 According to oral testimony, this was common practice among Kenyan Somalis. Many left deposits with Indian moneylenders when they traveled back to British Somaliland, who then provided short-term loans to other Somalis. Some returned with wives whose unions had been facilitated by relatives abroad.38 The circulation of marriageable women and money set the foundation for a diaspora. Alongside his wife and her relatives, who created a domestic sphere, Farah Aden was able to cultivate a home in a foreign place.
Blixen’s work exemplifies many of the racist assumptions of her contemporaries, but is also unique in that she cultivated a close relationship with elite women from Somaliland and gained a rare insight into their interior, domestic lives. Though her work is deeply exoticized, it would be a mistake to dismiss it offhand.39 Carolyn Hamilton explains that the texts of white settlers and colonial officials often contain traces of indigenous discourses.40 Blixen interpreted her findings through the cultural constructs of her era, but nevertheless drew upon the information provided by her Somali employees, some of whom she knew well. Fieldwork is a useful metaphor in this case. The result was a kind of contingent truth shaped by racialized power dynamics, but also influenced by close “participant-observation” and interactive discussions with her “informants.”
A woman who defied many of the gendered norms of white settler society, Blixen took a particular interest in the lives of Aden’s female relatives and occasionally recoded their voices into her own words. She notes, for instance, how Farah’s relatives confided in her their shock to learn “that some nations in Europe gave away their maidens to their husbands for nothing,” which they deemed profoundly disrespectful of women and their virginity.41 Denying the coevality of Africans, Blixen equated their “maidenly prudery” with an earlier phase of European development.42 This act of distancing also enabled Blixen to define herself as an ostensibly liberated white subject. Her description of this inverted ethnographic encounter, however, also suggests that women could exercise considerable authority, even within the constraints of patriarchy. Some elite Somali women may have seen marital monetary transactions not as an exchange that rendered them into “property,” but as a means of actualizing their worth, labor, and contributions to the household (a topic I will address in greater depth in chapter 6).
Blixen’s description of differing gendered restrictions regarding marriage also touches on an important aspect of Muslim life in East Africa.43 Throughout the Indian Ocean region, groups privileged the idea of patrilineal descent and consanguinity with the prophet’s family. This tended to afford men greater sexual freedom than women. Engseng Ho, writing about the Hadrami diaspora, argues that genealogy frequently “turned on the control of the community’s women, especially daughters, and their marriage choices.”44 Because lineage as well as an Islamic identification were typically traced through the paternal line, Somali men could take a non-Muslim East African wife with some guarantee that ideas of Somaliness would be reproduced in the subsequent generation and their children considered full-fledged members of the Somali (and Muslim) world. Genealogy allowed Somali men to become “locals” in Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, yet remain cosmopolitan in their outlook and connected to their Muslim kin elsewhere.45
Such gendered norms, however, did not go uncontested. There is little doubt that Somalis debated the boundaries of exogamy and endogamy in the colonial era and that there were differences of opinion