The arguments in this book are influenced by this recent turn of events and by a broader transnational turn that has reached across various disciplines. The rise of transnational studies (and the accompanying skepticism toward the nation-state) has taken the discipline of history in novel directions. Nevertheless, new paradigms can reproduce old mythologies.71 Recent scholarly developments risk perpetuating older modernization theories and obscuring the highly unequal and unevenly connected nature of the “global” world.72 The reemergence of deterritorialized networks in East and Northeast Africa thus should not be seen as simply the latest “stage” within the familiar, progressive narrative of postmodernity—a local analogue to multinational corporations, cosmopolitan elites, and global religious revivals.73 Nor should these trends be interpreted as sounding the death knell for national sovereignty or citizenship.74 In fact, the predicaments faced by nomads on the Kenyan/Somali borderlands, members of historic Somali diasporas, and refugees reveal just how much power state borders and notions of citizenship still have.75 As chapters 6 and 7 show, while Kenyan Somalis have largely turned away from the idea of unifying under a Greater Somali nation-state, many are also trying to fight disenfranchisement and have their minority status fully recognized within the country.
Far from being parochial, the difficulties faced by Kenyan Somalis refract problems of global relevance. Debates over indigeneity have symbolically reordered the world, creating groups of people who do not “fit” into the nation-state. As Liisa Malkki has argued, minorities who do not fall neatly into received categories often become the targets of those who seek to naturalize and maintain established boundaries and classifications.76 Whereas expatriates, aid workers, and international businessmen in Kenya (and across the Global South more broadly) tend to be thought of as worldly and cosmopolitan; nomads, immigrants, and refugees are often identified as “displaced, uprooted, [or] disoriented.”77
Kenyan Somalis have been struggling for decades to find ways to be both “Kenyan” and “Somali” (or, in some cases, “Somalilanders” or “Ethiopians”)—a goal that has been complicated by the Somali refugee crisis and the global “war on terror.” To this day, traders, migrants, and nomads in Kenya cannot freely or easily participate in networks that stretch across territorial boundaries without furthering perceptions that they are alien to the country. Even those who are highly localist in their orientation, speak multiple Kenyan languages, and are considered to be culturally assimilated into Kenya are sometimes perceived as foreign. As Hussein Mohamed Haji complained, “I am 70. I was born in Kenya. I speak six Kenyan languages. But when other Kenyans see me they just make the assumption that I’m a Somali.”78 Kenyan Somalis have become the locus of anxious discussions over who is an “authentic” Kenyan citizen, who has rights to the city and a share in the “national cake,” and what is the “proper” place of religion in political life.79
Contemporary efforts by activists, scholars, and theorists to envision a future politics less tethered to existing nation-state boundaries were, in many ways, anticipated by Somali and northern Kenyan political thinkers. For decades, Kenyan Somalis have looked beyond the horizons of the territorial state and toward alternative kinds of imagined communities (even though such strategies sometimes put them at odds with state authorities and made them vulnerable to political marginalization). As I argue most explicitly in the conclusion, it is possible to grasp the critical resonance between Somali tactics and the current conditions of those most affected by contemporary globalization, while guarding against simplistic revivals of the past. These transnational practices (and the political innovations that preceded and followed the universalization of the nation-state) can offer inspiration for future arrangements within the region and beyond.
METHODOLOGY
In many ways, studying Kenyan Somali networks both conforms to and requires certain departures from trends in African studies. In recent years, historians and anthropologists have begun to question the traditional focus of academic fieldwork: namely, the “local” ethnic group. Many scholars have abandoned this method in favor of multisited research projects.80 At first glance, a study of Somalis living in Kenya may seem an example of the older model of “local” fieldwork. Yet my interviews, though largely (but not exclusively) confined to people who identified as both Kenyan and Somali, did not give rise to a picture of a bounded, local community situated within a delimited culture or territorial homeland. Rather, they revealed how individuals defined what it meant to be Somali in different ways and in dialogue and coordination with people living throughout the region—and, in some cases, across the globe.
Perhaps the greatest value of oral history is how it provides insights into forms of interpersonal connection that lie outside the state/subject and state/citizen relationship. Relying on state archives alone can reinforce what Nancy Rose Hunt refers to as the cliché of the colonial encounter—the tendency to reduce historical agency to an “epic-like meeting” between “colonizers and colonized.”81 Speaking to Kenyan citizens who identified as Somali revealed that loyalties and connections that took place outside the state’s bureaucratic surveillance—connections to people in Somaliland, the wider diaspora, and the broader Muslim community—were of no less significance. It also brought to the fore dynamics that are otherwise occluded by state archives’ reliance on the epistemologies of clan and ethnic belonging. It showed, for example, that many non-Somalis, including members of the Borana, Rendille, and Sakuye populations, had at times participated in the construction and development of Somaliness.
It is hard to disentangle the networks through which I traveled as a researcher—which were shaped by the forms of power inherent in my passport, my race, my institutional affiliations, and my comparative affluence—from the networks I was trying to study. These were shaped by some actors who were comparatively powerful, but many of whom were relatively powerless. I began my fieldwork in Nairobi, where I interviewed elders who could recall the late colonial and early postcolonial periods and met younger community leaders who put me in touch with many of my key interlocutors in other parts of the country. These social connections facilitated my movement across different regions. The checkpoints and miles of untarmacked road that I crossed moving between Nairobi and Northern Kenya were stark reminders of both my own privileged freedom of movement and the everyday barriers to mobility that many Somalis and northern Kenyans face. The very global structures of power that enabled me to move to Kenya to conduct research often inhibited the mobility of my Somali interlocutors and friends. Thus, my fieldwork became a means of meditating upon differential mobility and the policing of different transnational practices.
To conduct interviews, I traveled to various towns, including Nakuru, Isiolo, Naivasha, and Garissa. I also occasionally spoke with Kenyans who originated from other areas such as Mandera, Moyale, and Marsabit. However, most of my fieldwork was concentrated in two main sites. One was Nairobi—Kenya’s bustling, cosmopolitan capital and the country’s largest city. The other was Wajir—a very marginalized (but in certain respects, no less cosmopolitan) rural area and one of the three districts (now counties) in the North Eastern Province (NEP), which had once been part of the Northern Frontier District (NFD). Examining Wajir and Nairobi together revealed the importance of multidirectional links between the countryside (often assumed to be the site of “traditional,” “authentic” Africa) and the putatively modern city. It enabled me to see the ways in which people from different geographic, clan, occupational, and class backgrounds reproduced and redefined what it meant to be Somali. Individuals and groups constituted themselves through “the continuous creation of the past.”82 By accumulating archives, sharing personal memorabilia, and drawing upon collective representations of