Nevertheless, local administrators could never fully disregard Islamic identification or patterns of conversion. In 1929, Mahony complained that the “bar to peaceful intermixture between Galla and Somali is only religion,” and they otherwise “intermarry freely,” and “no gazetting or delimiting of grazing areas will prevent” this.86 As the previous chapter has shown, gaal was not an “ethnic” designation, but rather a derogatory label in local vernaculars for a non-Muslim.87 Nevertheless, colonial officials recoded the distinction between gaal and Somali into ethnoterritorial terms. They also created and loosely enforced a border that cut across the NFD, known as the Somali-Galla line, which each group was ostensibly prohibited from crossing.88 Reading local categories through the epistemology of clan, colonial officials often overlooked the links that cut across collectivities.
Throughout the colony, officials struggled to police mobility and give their subjects singular and unambiguous ethnic labels.89 These difficulties were nevertheless compounded on the borderlands of the NFD. Islamic claims to universality and practices of conversion challenged colonial efforts to neatly demarcate clan and ethnic boundaries. In addition, nomadic populations defied what Liisa Malkki refers to as the sedentarist metaphysics of the modern state.90 Local administrators were beset by the anxiety of indeterminacy—the fear that the Somali were “really” Borana, that one lineage comprised sheegat who “originally” belonged to a different clan, or that Italian or Ethiopian subjects might be “passing” as British. Groups traversed international and regional frontiers in order to use dry season wells, return to their historic grazing lands, visit leaders and kin, or evade government requirements such as taxation and military recruitment.91 Northerners also crossed borders for spiritual reasons—whether to attend the hajj or make pilgrimages to spiritually significant gravesites, join a zawiya (Islamic settlement), or pursue a religious education.92 In addition, the differential price regimes of the Italian, British, and Ethiopian governments allowed a vibrant cross-border economy in livestock, guns, and ivory to thrive.93
Unable to control movement across the porous international frontiers, the administration resigned hope of rendering northerners into countable “populations,” issuing identity cards, or drawing up definitive maps of ethnic “homelands.” In 1930, F. G. Jennings, the DC of Wajir, argued that a census would be both unpopular and expensive to complete, and, “further it would serve no useful purpose so long as the Somali adopts the attitude of moving over the boundary into Italian territory at will.”94 Colonial officials were frequently far more concerned with enforcing some semblance of state control than with rendering their subjects “legible.”95 In Wajir, local authorities were unable to create ethnic homelands and instead divided the wells in the district between the major clans. This approach, as Schlee notes, was a precolonial governance strategy common among the Borana.96 Capitulating to nomadic patterns of transhumance, beleaguered administrators developed techniques that had far more continuity with precolonial practices of governance than with Weberian ideals of bureaucracy.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the administration worked out a hybrid form of sovereignty that blended territorial governance with nomadic forms of mobility.97 One might be tempted to portray colonial power as weak, incapable (as Jeffrey Herbst suggests) of broadcasting its power across this arid, northern expanse.98 Yet conceding to nomadic practices and cultivating an image of the north as “ungovernable” proved to be commensurate with broader colonial goals. Eschewing assumptions that governments seek only to inhibit their subjects’ movement, Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk argue that “mobility makes states.”99 In defining certain kinds of movement as a problem, colonial officials worked out ideas concerning the reach and scope of their own authority. Administrators often recoded their failures as new strategies of governance—reframing Somali and Borana initiatives in terms decipherable to administrative logic. Such an approach enabled officials to justify the financial and administrative neglect of the region, naturalize its isolation from the rest of the colony, and keep governance in the NFD as cost-effective as possible. It also allowed for overlapping notions of sovereignty, space, and authority to flourish on the borderlands of the state.
THE SOMALI “EL DORADO”
The British Empire brought Somalis from diverse lineages and lands together under a single territory. Mobile and spatially dispersed, both the nomadic populations in the NFD and the “detribalized” urban traders living in Nairobi disrupted colonial efforts to police spatial and racial boundaries. Segregationist policies, however, always existed in tension with the needs of the colonial economy, which was dependent upon the mobility of Africans, including Somali traders.100 Managing this tension was key to the colonial project.
By the early 1920s, a tenuous project of racial segregation was taking shape in Kenya’s capital. In 1921, the colonial government gazetted the township of Eastleigh. Though technically reserved exclusively for Indian residence, Eastleigh incorporated several neighborhoods already inhabited by Somalis. Failure to invest funds in maintaining the area deterred wealthier and higher-caste Indians from settling there. Somalis from Ngara (and, later, veterans of World War II) also moved into the neighborhood, where they lived alongside Goans, Indians, and Seychelloise.101 The creation of Eastleigh was part of a much larger, colony-wide process of land alienation and racial segregation, which developed in tandem with the commercial economy.
Eastleigh embodied many of the contradictions of the migrant labor system. Colonial authorities enforced racial segregation by, in part, naturalizing the idea that Africans belonged in rural areas. The urban economy, however, was predicated upon the exploitation of African laborers, many of whom had been forced onto their supposedly “traditional” homelands.102 Soon after its establishment, Africans from the countryside took up residency in Eastleigh, since (unlike squatter residences that lacked legitimacy) the police “did not enter houses” in the neighborhood “searching for illegal residents.”103 Somali traders in Nairobi also troubled colonial ideas of spatial and racial order by maintaining a circulation of livestock between rural areas and the city. Elder Somalis wistfully recalled that Eastleigh and the Nairobi Commonage had once had ample grazing land, on which their community used to pasture their animals.104
Many of the tensions of the migrant labor system were mirrored in the colonial livestock economy, which also unsettled the line between urban and rural (a distinction central to colonial projects of segregation and visions of modernization). Recognizing their skills as livestock brokers, colonial administrators had given Somali and Arab traders special permits to enter the NFD, move across tribal grazing boundaries, and bring restricted numbers of livestock from the north into the rest of the colony. Unlike nomadic inhabitants, who were largely barred from settling in town, these “alien” traders were allowed to own commercial plots in the townships of the north.105 Somali traders provided pastoralists with cash to pay colonial taxes and enabled animals from the north to be circulated into the commercial livestock economy. These policies ensured that nomadic populations were confined to the north, excluded from southern grazing land, and barred from competing with white ranchers.106 Livestock smuggled in by Somali traders also served as foundation stock for white ranchers, and were essential to African squatters, who provided inexpensive labor on white commercial farms.107
Gradually, Somali traders began to accumulate animals along the stock routes in towns as dispersed as Rumuruti, Naivasha, Gilgil, and Kitale, where they came into conflict with white settlers (see map 2.1). Their trading and residence privileges also enabled them to take advantage of the illegal poaching and game trade, transgress quarantine regulations, and covertly bring animals into African native reserves.108 By moving onto land speculated by white farmers and ranchers and amassing “so great an accumulation of stock,” Somali traders became a threat to white interests and supremacy.109 Conceptual and political categories were also at stake.
This