Abstract
This chapter historicizes the claims that were made by secessionist movements in the Northern Frontier District (NFD) of belonging to the “Greater Somali” region through their shared pre-colonial history of flourishing city-states and networks of trade, and their homogeneity as people sharing a single language and religion. I analyze these claims to produce a historical narrative that places the moment of political crisis-secession firmly within pre-colonial histories of long-distance trade and migrations that were disrupted during the colonial period but reconstituted on the periphery to create relations of exploitation and divergent class interests. The secessionist movements not only revealed a moment of political crisis but additionally a moment of economic contradiction that could no longer be concealed by the rhetoric of the nation or the centralizing functions of the state. The secessionist movements constituted within them various class interests and only formed a united front insofar as these class interests (between small shop-owners, landowners, peasants and a laboring class) were concealed through pre-colonial relations of dependency, resurrected during colonialism as relations of exploitation and security. This chapter sets the history for the formation of these class interests and the ways they were expressed in a moment of political crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not to posit that nation states are not subject to multiple crises, but secessionism questions the very sanctity of the nation-state as a unified entity bounded by territory with a general conformity amongst its subjects as a single political unit.
- 2.
Collin Sumner, ed. Crime Justice and Underdevelopment. (London: Heinemann, 1982) 39–40.
- 3.
Issa Shivji “Trajectories of Accumulation: How Neoliberal Primitive Accumulation is Planting the Seeds of Suicide” New Agenda, 68 (2017): 36–38. Primitive accumulation relies on extraction without an equivalent exchange value and expanded reproduction (unlike simple reproduction which simply creates a marginal surplus, e.g. merchant capital) uses part of the surplus to reinvest in capital.
- 4.
John Drysdale, The Somali Dispute (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964); David Laitin and Said Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987). Northern Somalia was colonized by the British and it was a central source of livestock production for the British garrisons in Aden, much literature presumes the NFD was similarly a hub for livestock production linked to the needs of the British in Aden.
- 5.
E.R. Turton, “Somali Resistance to Colonial Rule and the Development of Somali Political Activity in Kenya 1893–1960.” The Journal of African History, 13.1, (1972) 119–143; I.M. Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy: A Study of Pastoralism and Politics among the Northern Somali of the Horn of Africa, (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Peter Dalleo, “Trade and Pastoralism. Economic Factors in the History of the Somali Northeastern Kenya, 1892–1948” Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1975; Gunther Schlee and Abdullahi Shongolo, Pastoralism and Politics in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia, (London: James Currey, 2013); Bernhard Helander, The Slaughtered Camel: Coping with Fictitious Descent among the Hubeer of Southern Somalia, (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2003).
- 6.
Turton, “Somali Resistance to Colonial Rule and the Development of Somali Political Activity in Kenya 1893–1960.”; Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy; Hannah Alice Whittaker, “The Socioeconomic Dynamics of the Shift Conflict in Kenya,” The Journal of African History, 53. 3 (2012), 391–408.
- 7.
Archie Mafeje, “The Ideology of ‘Tribalism’” The Journal of Modern African History, 9.2, (1971), 261.
- 8.
A focus on the Isaaq and Harti is to emphasize the role they came to play as traders and merchants in the long-distance trade rather than their clan affiliations.
- 9.
I.M. Lewis, who has written extensively on Somalia and the clan lineage system, describes Somali lineage in essentialist terms with little consideration to the social relations of production between the different groups. He describes the social and political organization of the traditional pastoral Somali societies as organized according to segmentary units based on lineage groups. Based on patrilineal descent origin he groups the “Somali nation” into five large “clan families”: the pastoral Darood, Isaaq, Dir and Hawiya clan families and the agricultural Digil-Rahanwayn. The major groups that live in the NFD belong to the Darood and the Hawiya. Each clan family is further subdivided into sub-clan units and further each sub-clan unit is divided into the Diya-paying groups. Diya (blood money) refers to the obligation of close kin to share responsibility for crimes committed by or against one of their own. The Diya-paying group generally lived together and protected their livestock and grazing areas against other groups. Both land and large livestock such as cattle and camel were communally owned, by extended families within the Diya-paying groups. The alliance formed by different sub-clans through the Diya-paying group was consolidated by means of contract (heer)—a set of binding customs and traditions that governed the Somali people in the pre-colonial world. Lewis ends his discussion of pre-colonial social organization of the Somali people with the conclusion that, socially, the Somalis were governed by two-principles clan (tol) and social contract or custom (heer). The Diya-paying groups sometimes formed alliances across sub-clan lines to communally protect and maintain livestock and grazing grounds. He has little discussion on the relationship between pastoralists, agriculturalists and traders and relationships of dependency that formed in times of crisis. Furthermore, Lewis pays little attention to the larger context wherein Somali groups were encountering the East African coast and large parts of the Indian Ocean world through trading networks and intellectual networks of Islam in an age of city-state formation and long-distance trading. Tol and Heer did not always determine these social relations. For more on Somali pastoral lineage organization, see Lewis, I.M., “Historical Aspects of Genealogies in Northern Somali Structure,” Journal of African History, 3, 1962, 32–40; Hussein Adam “From Tyranny to Anarchy: The Somali Experience” (Eritrea: The Red Sea Press, 2008), 216–217; “Dia: Blood Money The Impact on East Africa of the Galla and the Somali” PC NFD 4/1/1 Kenya National Archive (KNA); Lewis, “Historical Aspects of Genealogies in Northern Somali structure”; Laitin and Samatar,Somalia: Nation in Search of State.
- 10.
Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); R.J. Barendse, The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2015).
- 11.
Much focus is maintained on the late nineteenth-century migration of the Isaaq to the south as military aid and loyal to British explorers facilitating the subsequent argument that the Isaaq were an isolated clan with special interests with little attention paid to the earlier Isaaq migrations who maintained pastoralism as a means of livelihood. For work on Somali city-state formation, refer to Laitin and Samatar (1987); Virginia Luling, Somali Sultanate: The Geledi City-State over 150 years. (London: Haan, 2002); Lee Cassanelli, The Shaping of Somali Society: Reconstructing the History of a Pastoral People, 1600–1900, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
- 12.
These goods were transported via camel to the Indian Ocean coast where they were either exchanged for beads, porcelain, cloth from China and India or where debt would be accumulated to finance further trading expeditions. The Somali middlemen on the coast (a position that would be taken up by specific ethnic groups only later during the colonial period—the Harti and Isaaq groups as they took on the role of shopkeepers) facilitated exchange with the traders on the coast, predominantly of Yemeni origin in Mogadishu and Shirazi and Indians to the south of the coast would travel with these goods and trade them along the Indian ocean world (see Laitin and Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of State, 16–18; Cassanelli, The Shaping of Somali Society).
- 13.
Expropriation is liked to primitive accumulation in Marx—defined as seizing of surplus labor without appearance of equivalent exchange. Shivji (2017, 36); Karl Marx, “Part 8: Primitive Accumulation” in Capital: A critique of Political Economy, (New York: International Publishers 1967 (1867).
- 14.
The border that divided the NFD from the rest of Kenya.
- 15.
Henry Bernstein, “African Peasantries: A theoretical framework” Journal of Peasant Studies, 6.4 (1979), 421–43; Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo, The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era, Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry, Cape Town, Dakar and NY: Pambazuka Press, 2011); Eric Wolf, Peasants, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966).
- 16.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy, (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
- 17.
Ian R.G. Spenser “Pastoralism and Colonial Policy in Kenya, 1895–1929. In Robert I. Rotberg (ed.) Imperialism, Colonialism and Hunger: East and Central Africa. (Canada: Lexington Books, 1983), 113.
- 18.
This was a patron-client relation that predated the colonial period where economically and militarily weak groups attached themselves to stronger ones for their livelihood and safety.
- 19.
Trouillot, Peasants and Capital, 11 (1988, 11).
- 20.
Mohamed Farah, From Ethnic Response to Clan Identity: A Study of State Penetration among the Somali Nomadic Pastoral Society of Northeastern Kenya. (Uppsala: Academie Ubsaliensis, 1993) 114–116.
- 21.
Richard Waller “‘Clean’ and ‘Dirty’: Cattle Disease and Control Policy in Colonial Kenya, 1900–40,” The Journal of African History 45.1 (2004), 47. On the eventual decline of prices of Somali owned cattle, see the petition made by Isaaq and Harti traders. Through their lament in the drop of prices, it is apparent that the Somali owned livestock by virtue of being marketed to ALMO did not receive the same prices as the European owned livestock. Provincial Commissioner Northern Province, “Petition from Isaaq and Harti Somalis”, 27/10/1950, DC ISO 3/6/26, KNA.
- 22.
Scheele and Shongolo, Pastoralism and Politics in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia, 11; Farah, From Ethnic Response to Clan Identity, 47; “Mombasa District Annual Report”, 1952, DC/MSA/1/6, KNA.
- 23.
Cassanelli, Somalia: Nation in Search of State.
- 24.
Turton, “Somali Resistance to Colonial Rule and the Development of Somali Political Activity in Kenya 1893–1960,” 123–124.
- 25.
“Re-organization of the Northern Frontier Province 1925–30,” PC NFD 4/1/4, KNA.
- 26.
Cap 104, Laws of Kenya.
- 27.
The Republic of Kenya, Kenya Law Reports, The Outlying Districts Act, Cap 104, 1902 (repealed in 1997). National Council for Law Reporting, Kenya.
- 28.
“Status of Nairobi Somalis 1930,” CO 533/402/6, TNA. There were some Isaaq who resided in Isiolo in the NFD, who were considered “native,” despite the designation of “Aliens” of the Isaaq who lived outside the NFD as traders. The Isaaq in Isiolo had come to the NFD during the earlier migrations starting from the ninth century, unlike the Isaaq who migrated to Kenya in the nineteenth century with the British.
- 29.
DC Marsabit to PC, Isiolo (letter), DC WAJ 5/2, 1948, KNA.
- 30.
Hernando De Soto a Peruvian economist coined the patronizing term in the early 2000s to describe assets that cannot be easily succumbed to market factors. He considered these assets “dead capital” that needed to be identified, commoditized and formalized. I take liberty in using this term retrospectively. I disagree with DeSoto’s formulation as it proposes that all forms of livelihood can be commoditized to create a market value. In the case of the Somali pastoralists, livestock was a form of subsistence with a use value rather than a market-oriented commodity for exchange.
- 31.
Annual Colonial Report, Report for 1924, No. 1282, Majesty’s Stationery Office, London.
- 32.
Waller, “Clean and Dirty”, 52.
- 33.
Annual Colonial Report, Report for 1924, No. 1282, Majesty’s Stationery Office, London.
- 34.
Farah, From Ethnic Response to Clan Identity, 54.
- 35.
Dixey, Kenya water problems, 1929, PC NFD 5/2/6, KNA.
- 36.
Jonathan Hansen, “Development at the margins: Missionaries, The state and the transformation of Marsabit, Kenya in the Twentieth Century” Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2015.
- 37.
Northern Province Annual Report (Moyale district), PC/NFD/1/10/4, 1956, KNA; Northern Province Annual Report, PC/NFD/1/1/12, 1958–1960, KNA; Mandera Annual Report (Mandera District), C/NFD/1/3/2, 1950, KNA.
- 38.
Wajir District, Northern Province Annual Report, PC/NFD/1/10/4, 1956, KNA; Gunther Schlee, Identities on the Move: Clanship and Pastoralism in Northern Kenya. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).
- 39.
Oromo and Somali are distinct languages but they are related as members of the Cushitic language spoken in the Horn.
- 40.
Farah, From Ethnic Response to Clan Identity, 71.
- 41.
Some Isaaq Harti had formed an attachment to the Rendille in the North when they were brought to Kenya as British aids.
- 42.
Lewis, “Pan-Africanism and Pan-Somalism,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 1, no. 2 (1963): 147–161; Dalleo, “Trade and Pastoralism”; and Helander, “The Slaughtered Camel” engage with Sheegad as a patron-client relationship, but they have little to say on the role it played and the changes it underwent as a social network during the colonial period.
- 43.
Northern Province, handing over report, 1950, PC/NFD/2/1/3, Kenya National Achieves (KNA).
- 44.
Turton, “Somali Resistance to Colonial Rule”, 135–136.
- 45.
Northern Province Annual Report, Letter from Mr. John Cusack to Mr. N.F. Kennaway, 1953, PC/NFD/1/1/12, KNA; Turton, “Somali Resistance to Colonial Rule”.
- 46.
Northern Province Annual Report, Letter from N.F. Kennaway to M.E.W. North, 1955, PC/NFD/1/1/12, KNA.
- 47.
Turton, “Somali Resistance to Colonial Rule”.
- 48.
E.R. Turton, “The Isaq Somali Diaspora and Poll-Tax Agitation in Kenya, 1936–41,” African Affairs, 73.292, (1974) 328.; Peter Dalleo, “The Somali Role in Organized Poaching in Northeastern Kenya, c 1909–1939,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 12, 3 (1979): 472–82; Abdi Sheikh-Abdi, Divine Madness: Mohamed Abdulle Hassan (1856–1920), (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1993).
- 49.
Letter from the Shariff Ishak community to Officer in Charge NFD, “Alien Somali Activities”, 1939, Isiolo, PC/NFD 4/7/2, KNA.
- 50.
Turton, “The Isaq Somali Diaspora and Poll-Tax Agitation in Kenya, 1936–41”.
- 51.
Letter from Turnbull, DC to Officer in Charge NFD, “Alien Somali Activities”, 1940, Isiolo, PC/NFD 4/7/2, KNA; Ibid., Speech 1938 by “British Isaaq Community”, PC/NFD 4/7/2, KNA.
- 52.
Letter from W. Riggs, Director of Intelligence and Security, Nairobi. 1942, PC/NFD 4/7/2, KNA.
- 53.
As quoted in Turton, “The Isaq Somali Diaspora and Poll-Tax Agitation in Kenya, 1936–41”, 327.
- 54.
“Status of Harod [Harti] Somalis in NFD” CO 533/447 TNA.
- 55.
Alien Somali Activities, 1938–1943, PC/NFD/4/7/2, KNA; Letter from DC, Marsabit to DC, Wajir, 1948, PC/NFD 4/7/2 KNA; Letter from DC, Wajir to DC, Marasbit, 1948, PC/NFD 4/7/2, KNA.
- 56.
CO 533/402/6, TNA.
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Archive Material
“Dia: Blood Money The Impact on East Africa of the Galla and the Somali” PC NFD 4/1/1 Kenya National Archive (KNA).
“Re-organization of the Northern Frontier Province 1925–30” PC NFD 4/1/4 KNA.
The Republic of Kenya, Kenya Law Reports, The Outlying Districts Act, Cap 104, 1902 (Repealed in 1997). National Council for Law Reporting, Kenya.
Letter from DC Marsabit to PC, Isiolo, 1948, DC WAJ 5/2, KNA.
Annual Colonial Report, Report for 1924, No. 1282, Majesty’s Stationery Office, London.
Dixey, “Kenya water problems,” 1929, PC NFD 5/2/6, KNA
Northern Province Annual Report (Moyale District), PC/NFD/1/10/4, 1956, KNA.
Northern Province Annual Report, PC/NFD/1/1/12, 1958–1960, KNA.
Mandera Annual Report (Mandera District), C/NFD/1/3/2, 1950, KNA.
Wajir District, Northern Province Annual Report, PC/NFD/1/10/4, 1956, KNA.
Northern Province, Handing Over Report, PC/NFD/2/1/3 1950, KNA.
Northern Province Annual Report, Letter from Mr. John Cusack to Mr. N.F. Kennaway, PC/NFD/1/1/12, 1953, KNA.
Northern Province Annual Report, Letter from N.F. Kennaway to M.E.W. North, PC/NFD/1/1/12, 1955, KNA.
Alien Somali Activities, Letter from the Shariff Ishak Community to Officer in Charge NFD, Isiolo, PC/NFD 4/7/2, 1939, KNA.
Alien Somali Activities, Letter from Turnbull, DC to Officer in Charge NFD, Isiolo, PC/NFD 4/7/2, 1940, KNA.
Speech 1938 by “British Isaaq Community” PC/NFD 4/7/2, KNA.
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——. Letter from DC, Wajir to DC, Marasbit, 1948, PC/NFD 4/7/2, KNA.
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Shivji, N.I. (2020). Circuits of Production and Channels of State: Pastoralists and the State in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya (1910–1958). In: Oloruntoba, S.O., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Political Economy. Palgrave Handbooks in IPE. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38922-2_19
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