Notes on Language
Kenya is an archetype of linguistic diversity, which to some extent reflects the historical absence of a concerted state project aimed at language standardization. It is not uncommon for people who identify as both Kenyan and Somali to speak at least three languages to varying degrees of fluency (including but not limited to Somali, Swahili, English, Borana—an Oromo dialect, Arabic, Kikuyu, and Luo). Many Somali speakers in Kenya were educated in Swahili and English (or, in the case of Qur’anic schools, Arabic). Having used Somali primarily as a spoken language, people will sometimes accept alternate or multiple spellings of Somali words and names. Moreover, there are multiple dialects of Somali, which itself can be written in more than one script. In order to facilitate reading and simplify this linguistic and orthographic complexity, orally recited poems in this book have been transcribed using the Somali Latin alphabet standardized by the Somali government in the 1970s. In addition, poems have been converted into the most commonly known dialects of Somali (and, in one case, Oromo), with the exception of a few words specific to northern Kenyan vernaculars. Since language is a political matter, opting to use the “standard” dialects of Somali and Oromo was not a neutral decision. Nor was determining the “correct” spelling and translation of certain words. I am indebted to the many people who brought their skills and expertise to bear on the transcriptions and translations. Special thanks go to Ahmed Ismail Yusuf for his help with the Somali poetry. I am resigned to the fact that all translations are ultimately mistranslations.
Map I.1. Colonial Northeast Africa. (Note: All the maps in this book were made by Jacob Riley. Boundary lines and locations are approximate.)
Map I.2. Postcolonial Northeast Africa.
Introduction
“We Don’t Unpack”
Wherever the camel goes, that is Somalia.
—Proverb from the era of Somali independence (late 1950s and early 1960s)1
THERE IS A POPULAR STORY IN WAJIR, a county in northern Kenya that was once part of the British colonial administrative region known as the Northern Frontier District (NFD) (see map 2.1).2 It describes the arrival of the first European to the area. According to this story, the people living in Wajir were very welcoming toward their new guest. When the European visitor asked for accommodations for the night, they provided him with an animal hide on which to sleep. Much to their dismay, his hosts awoke the next morning to find that he had sliced the animal skin into a long rope, which he had used to encircle an area that he claimed as his territory.3
This evocative anecdote (which borrows tropes from oral narratives circulating in other parts of the Horn of Africa) depicts an item of hospitality transmuted overnight into a symbol of state sovereignty and land tenure.4 As the story suggests, the legacy of colonial boundaries is the locus of much contention among the people of northern Kenya. In the late nineteenth century, the Ethiopian, British, and Italian governments divided Northeast Africa into five different territories: British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, French Somaliland (Djibouti), Ethiopia, and Kenya. Over the subsequent decades, the Kenyan colonial officials attempted to further confine the populations of the NFD in an effort to impose their vision of order on the region. Fatima Jellow—a prominent resident of Wajir and wife of the NFD’s first senator—explained that when her father, a member of the Somali Degodia lineage, refused to move to the “homeland” designated for his clan, he was jailed by British colonial authorities.5 At various points over the last century, nomadic populations and their leaders have attempted to circumvent, redraw, or rethink the colonial borders that hindered their mobility and divided them from their kin and pasture. After World War II, Pan-Somali nationalist leaders advocated for unifying Somalis across Northeast Africa into a single nation-state. By the early 1960s, most of the nomadic inhabitants of Kenya’s borderlands (including many people who were not normally considered “Somali”) rallied around the idea of a Greater Somalia, which they hoped would dismantle the territorial borders that crisscrossed the arid north.
Alongside the largely nomadic population of the NFD, Kenya was also home to Somali-identifying people who had immigrated to the colony from coastal cities such as Berbera (in modern-day Somalia) and Aden (in modern-day Yemen) (see map 1.1).6 Like their nomadic kin, they shared a history of skirting colonial boundaries. Mustafa (Mohamed) Osman Hirsi, a third-generation Kenyan, described his community as a people who were “not about boundaries,” whose “umbilical cord was never cut.” His grandfather, an askari (soldier) in the Somaliland Camel Corps, had come to Kenya after serving in the colonial military. Like many Somali veterans, he identified as a member of the Isaaq clan.7 European settlers and British officials had recruited Isaaq men from cities and towns along the Gulf of Aden to serve as soldiers, porters, guides, and translators in East Africa. Under colonial rule, they had enjoyed many of the same privileges as South Asians living in Kenya, who had greater political rights and freedom of mobility than the vast majority of African subjects. Although born in Kenya, Hirsi had not lost touch with the land of his grandfather’s birth. Despite being dispersed throughout East Africa and other parts of the former British Empire, members of the Isaaq diaspora continued to maintain connections to Somaliland. Upon arriving in a new country, Hirsi explained, “we don’t unpack.”8
Whether describing themselves as a people “without borders” or lamenting the colonial frontiers that divided them from their kin and grazing land, many of the people I spoke to invoked the negative effects of boundaries on their lives. This pervasive theme ran across dozens of interviews I conducted with Kenyan Somalis of diverse class, geographic, and clan backgrounds in 2010 and 2011.9 Their shared frustration with borders provides a perfect lens through which to observe how the modern world is not, in fact, becoming increasingly “borderless” for many people.10 Their experiences also show that there are ways of imagining borderlessness that are distinct from neoliberal rationality, which envisions people as market actors operating in a world in which capital and goods flow freely across national boundaries. As their histories indicate, narratives of transnationalism must account for both integration and disconnection, as well as reckon with ways of life and forms of belonging that predate the nation-state. Territorial borders are neither disappearing nor remaining intact; rather, they continue to be fought over, reimagined, and reconfigured.
Understanding this fraught relationship with borders is also key to addressing one of the central questions posed in this book: How did Somalis come to be thought of as only questionably indigenous to Kenya? Unlike studies that have looked at the Somali refugee community and their struggles as stateless people in Kenya, this work concentrates on a minority group whom many consider to be not fully “native” to a country where they have lived for generations.11 Somali-identifying people dwelled in the area known today as Kenya long before it became a protectorate in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they face widespread perceptions that they do not belong within the country. For many decades,