While Somalis in the United Kingdom sought to diminish the significance of the color bar, those living in the colonies often took actions that reinforced its importance. Panracial and Islamic solidarity existed in tandem with discourses of racial difference. In the colonies, where promises of a universalizing imperial citizenship rang especially hollow, Somali leaders often highlighted their putative foreign descent.
In the 1930s, Somali and Arab representatives fought against colonial efforts to erode their legal status.129 In 1930, leaders of the “Ishaak Shariff Community” wrote to King George V with a list of grievances, among which was the denial of access to the special Asian wards of Nairobi’s hospitals, inequitable treatment in regard to the livestock trade, and lack of political representation. The authors of the petition described themselves as a community “of Asiatic origin and extraction” who were “emigrants of Aden and Southern Arabia” and “Ishaakian Arabs Shariff.”130 In 1932, Isaaq leaders—referring to themselves as “Arabs”—once again petitioned the Kenyan government after being barred from entry into the Asian wards of hospitals.131
These demands took on greater urgency by the end of the decade. In 1937, in an effort to increase the revenue stream, the Kenyan governor implemented a new ordinance that revised the existing taxation system for non-natives. The Non-Native Poll Tax Ordinance introduced a sliding scale for Europeans, Asians, and “other” non-natives. “Others” were defined as Arabs, Swahilis, and Somalis. Presumably, the division between Swahili, Arab, and Somali was too tenuous for the colonial regime to maintain on a legal register. This new legislation also reduced Somali tax obligations from thirty to twenty shillings.132
Out of fear that tendering a lowered tax would lessen their privileges, many Isaaq and Harti Somalis began petitioning the colonial government and—in an unusual reversal of typical forms of tax resistance—demanded to pay the higher, Asian rate of thirty shillings. The community also mobilized around the Ishakia Association, contending that their community was distinct from other “native” Somalis. Due to their comparative wealth, their history of colonial service, their discrete genealogy, and their long-standing connections with the Arab world, the Isaaq were uniquely positioned to protest against the new tax ordinance. In 1937, the secretary of the British Ishak community wrote to the secretary of state for the colonies to explain:
While the definition of a “Native” might appropriately be applied to a majority of the Somalis who have migrated into this Colony from Italian or French Somaliland or other territories, the British Ishak Community is unquestionably distinct from all such Somalis. They are no more Somalis by reason of their long residence in Aden or other parts of British Somaliland than Indians or Europeans could be called Africans because they have lived for generations in various parts of Africa.133
The secretary of the Ishakia community glossed over more complex questions of intermarriage and cultural assimilation and portrayed the Isaaq as foreign migrants on the continent. He also rehearsed the common Western stereotype that saw Africans as rooted in their “native” soil and “civilized” people as more capacious and rootless.
Despite their relatively small numbers (there were no more than a few thousand Isaaq in the colony as a whole), administrators refused to concede to their demands.134 They feared that granting the Isaaq Asiatic status would open the door for all Somalis throughout Kenya and other colonies to claim similar rights. In 1939, Reece cautioned: “There is some evidence that they have already tried to interfere with the Samburu destocking scheme, and to encourage Ogaden Somalis in the Northern Frontier to start a demand for their own non-native status.”135 Richard G. Turnbull, the DC of Isiolo, noted that “the Darod Somalis are watching the situation with interest and would, I consider, join the Ishaak agitation provided they could find a strong leader.”136
It goes without saying that the distinction between “Isaaq” and other Somalis was tenuous at best. Much like race, the abstractness of lineage also made it “effective”—“it is not easily susceptible to empirical disproof, and it can coexist with social relations that belie the premises of different” models of kinship.137 Moreover, it could be traced in multiple ways. The Isaaq had intermarried with fellow Harti immigrants, members of local communities, and Somalis living in the NFD—rendering the line between one lineage and another (as well as between “native” and “non-native”) dubious.138 Yet it is often when social and cultural boundaries are the most ambiguous that leaders mobilize to defend them.139 In order to better position themselves within the racial binaries of colonial thought, Isaaq leaders mobilized around a particular genealogical imaginary.
The poll-tax campaign led to various shifts in rhetorical strategies. Not only did Isaaq representatives (at least within colonial petitions) distance themselves from the term “Somali”; they also began to shed the label “Arab,” which no longer offered them elevated privileges under the new tax legislation. In 1938, in a petition to the colonial secretary, the “Elders of the British Shariff Ishak Community of Kenya Colony” maintained that they “can neither be classified as Arabs or Somalis. Your Petitioners’ Community are a race of Asiatic Origin.”140 Isaaq leaders toyed with the ambiguity of the term “Asiatic,” which colonial authorities had used, often inconsistently, as a legal, geographic, and racial category. Such tactics, as Christopher Lee notes, represented “a kind of folk racism that only oppression could conceive.”141 They also suggest that African subjects did not always internalize the continental theory of race introduced by colonial rule.
In the 1980s, Africanist historians began to interpret cases of this nature as “inventions of tribalism.”142 More recently, scholars have highlighted the “agency” of Africans engaged in a kind of “auto-ethnography”—capable of appropriating the colonizer’s terms for their own purposes.143 These paradigms helped to dismantle rigid, primordialist views of ethnicity. However, they also tended to overstate the reach of colonial power and the centrality of colonial categories, while collapsing the arguments that African elites made about race with underlying social structures and “identities.”144 Moreover, the term “invention” can appear derogative from the point of view of those struggling to prove the validity of their origins and entitlements. The officer in charge of the NFD, Gerald Reece, for example, dismissed the name Ishakia as a mere fabrication: “They have decided to abandon their name of Somali and to call themselves Ishakia—a word which I presume they have themselves invented.”145 Seeking to naturalize and legitimize categories of identity, political thinkers have often treated changes in identification as discoveries rather than inventions.146
The ways that groups reorient themselves toward the past (and future), as Talal Asad argues, is “more complex than the notion of ‘invented tradition’ allows.”147 First, one must consider the role of the archive in shaping the kinds of knowledge available for historical reconstruction. James Clifford notes that while colonial subjects wrote to European authorities, “their voices were adapted to an imposed context” aimed at addressing “white authorities and legal structures.”148 For this reason, it is difficult to determine whether labels such as “Asiatic” ever became popular or folk categories. Second, the efforts of Somali leaders should not be seen as full-fledged appropriations of colonial racial thought. In the case of the Isaaq, newer vocabularies, like “race” and “civilization,” were linked to older concepts, such as qabiil and shariif. As Muslims and imperial subjects, many Somali elites conceived of themselves as members of a “civilized” world linked to both imperial geographies and Islamic notions of the Dar al-Islam. In addition, it would be reductive to see petitions of this nature as simply rational pursuits of greater social and economic gain, as some scholars have suggested.149 Rather, these strategies reflected broader discursive shifts as well as a desire for the constellation of rights and concepts that had come to be associated with “non-native” status.
That Isaaq leaders would reject both their indigenous roots is an uncomfortable reminder that many Africans participated in the segregated colonial order. However, it also shows that empire provided a powerful language for demanding greater civil rights.150 As oppressive as the color bar undoubtedly was, it made global