A Modern History Of Somalia

Nation And State In The Horn Of Africa, Revised, Updated, And Expanded Edition

I.M. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429712821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This latest edition of A Modern History of the Somali brings I. M. Lewis's definitive history up to date and shows the amazing continuity of Somali forms of social organization. Lewis's history portrays the ingeniousness with which the Somali way of life has been adapted to all forms of modernity. "By far the most penetrating of the works on Somal

Chapter 1
The Physical and Social Setting

The Land

WITH A POPULATION numbering perhaps four and a half million, the Somali-speaking people can scarcely be regarded as a large nation. Yet they form one of the largest single ethnic blocks in Africa, and though sparsely distributed on the ground, live in continuous occupation of a great expanse of territory covering almost 400,000 square miles in the north-east comer, or 'Horn', of the continent facing Arabia. From the region of the Awash Valley in the north-west, this often arid territory occupied by the Somali stretches round the periphery of the Ethiopian highlands and along the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean coasts down to the Tana River in northern Kenya. This region forms a well-defined geographical and ethnic unit which Somalis see as a natural base for a sovereign state, although today it is split up into four separate parts. In the ex-French Republic of Jibuti, which became independent in 1977, Somalis make up about half the local population (c. 200,000 in 350,000); in the adjoining country of Ethiopia (mainly in Harar and Bale Provinces) they number probably almost one million; in the Somali Republic itself their strength is approximately 5,250,000;¹ and finally, in the North-Eastern Region of Kenya,² they number about 250,000. Outside this region, other Somali are settled as traders and merchants in many of the towns and ports of East Africa (e.g. in Nairobi); in Aden, in whose history they played an important role; and throughout Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Farther afield, the roving existence which life at sea affords has led to the establishment of small and fluctuating immigrant Somali communities in such diverse European ports as Marseilles, Naples, London, and Cardiff.

In their dry savanna homeland, the Somali are essentially a nation of pastoral nomads, forced by the exigencies of their demanding climate and environment to move with their flocks of sheep and goats and herds of camels and cattle in an endless quest for water and pasturage. The northern coastal plains (Guban, from gub to burn) which extend from the lava-strewn deserts of the Republic of Jibuti along the Gulf of Aden shore to Cape Guardafui axe especially arid. Here the annual rainfall rarely exceeds three inches and is concentrated in the comparatively cool months from October to January. In the hot months between June and September, the Guban fully lives up to its name; and except for the urban populations of such ports as Jibuti (pop. 180,000), capital of this territory, and Berbera (pop. 60,000) in the Somali Republic, at this season is generally deserted by the nomadic tribesmen for the cooler and greener hills which rise behind it. Despite its often torrid heat and low rainfall, however, the run-off from the mountains behind ensures that water is usually easily obtainable only a few feet below the Cuban's characteristically sandy soil. With these water resources, and the sometimes surprisingly generous pastures which spring up after the autumn rains, this region provides the winter quarters for the most northerly Somali clans.

The Golis and Ogo mountains, with their magnificent and often dangerously precipitous escarpments, which rise behind the coast dominate the whole physical structure of the region. This range achieves a height of almost 8,000 feet at points to the east; and, in the west where it joins the Ethiopian Highlands, rises as high as 9,000 feet near the ancient Muslim city of Harar (pop. 60,000). To the south, the mountains descend into a great tilting plateau which has an average elevation of 3,000 feet in the centre, and embraces most of the Somali hinterland. On the hills and in the north of the plateau, which includes the important centre of Hargeisa (pop. 60,000), capital of the former British Somaliland Protectorate, the rainfall is sometimes as high as twenty inches, especially in the northwest where, between Hargeisa and Harar, sorghum is cultivated. Here water is generally abundant, and the perennial wells excavated often at great depth in the dry waddies provide the winter watering-places of many of the central clans of the north. To the south of Hargeisa, the northern plateau opens into that vast wilderness of thorn-bush and tall grasses known as the Haud. In northern Somali the name 'Haud' means simply 'south'; and the region, which contains no permanent water, is of indeterminate extent. The northern and eastern tips He within the Somali Republic, while the western and southern portions (the latter merging with the Ogaden plains) form part of Harar Province of Ethiopia.

To the south of the Haud, the plateau inclines gradually from the west as it reaches out towards the south-eastern coast of the Indian Ocean. Here it is intersected by low-lying plains and valleys, lined with welcome vegetation, which are more widely spaced than in the precipitate north. The most important of these southerly valleys are those traversed by the Shebelle and Juba Rivers as they flow from their sources in the Ethiopian Highlands towards the coast. Both rivers contain water in all seasons and together make up the main river system of the whole Somali area north of the Tana.

The Shebelle or 'Leopard' Rivet extends for some 1,250 miles but does not enter the sea; after crossing the southern part of the Ogaden it flows eastwards as far as Balad, twenty miles from the Indian Ocean coast, where it vefers to the south to cover a further 170 miles before disappearing in a series of marshes and sandflats close to Jelib on the Juba. Only with exceptionally heavy rains does the river join the Juba and thus succeed in reaching the sea. To the south of the Shebelle, the Juba River descends much more directly from the Ethiopian Highlands to the sea which it enters as a strong stream some 250 yards wide near the port of Kismayu (pop. 60,000). It is navigable by shallow draft vessels from its mouth to the rapids a few miles beyond Bardera, in which the German explorer von der Decken's steamship Welf perished in 1865. In contrast to the wide belts of scrub-bush and grassy plains, interspersed with lonely tall acacias, which cover so much of the country, these two rivers are lined in places by narrow lanes of attractive high forest. Here elephant and hippopotamus replace the multitude of antelope species and smaller game which are so abundant elsewhere.

In comparison with the north, the southern part of the Somali Republic between the Shebelle and Juba Rivers is relatively well-watered: and, indeed by local standards, so fecund as to constitute the richest arable zone in the whole of Somaliland. Here the principal crops are sorghum, Indian corn, sesame, beans, squashes and manioc; as well as fruits, and sugar-cane, which, however, are mainly cultivated in the plantations owned by large corporations. The chief export crop is the banana produced by a number of Italian and Somali companies on a quota system controlled by the Somali government. Outside this fertile southern zone between the rivers there are no comparable arable resources, although the north-west of the country now supplies a valuable sorghum harvest and grain production is expanding as well as date cultivation.

Despite this general division in physical features and productivity, both northern and southern Somaliland are subject to a similar cycle of seasons associated with the rotation of the N.E. and S.W. monsoons. Apart from a variety of minor local wet periods, the main rains fall twice yearly – between March and June, and between September and December – throughout the region. The dry seasons are similarly distributed: but while the hottest time of the year on the northern coast falls in the summer, the south is by contrast pleasandy cool at this period. In the volcanic wastes of the Jibuti Republic, this fairly regular cycle of seasons loses most of its coherence, and the weather is generally less predictable except in its torridity. Mogadishu (pop. 350,000), capital of the Somali Republic, and the other ports of the southern Indian Ocean coast have a climate which though often humid is pleasant in the cool season.

The People

Ethnically and culturally the Somali belong to the Hamitic ethnic group. Their closest kinsmen are the surrounding Hamitic (or as they are often called 'Cushitic') peoples of the Ethiopian lowlands, and Eritrea – the traditionally bellicose 'Afar (or Danakil),³ the Oromo (Galla), Saho, and Beja. Their immediate neighbours to the north are the pastoral 'Afar with whom they share Jibuti and who extend into Eritrea and Ethiopia. To the west, in Ethiopia, the Somali are bounded by the cultivating and pastoral Oromo; and in the south by the Boran Galla of Kenya.

lthough there is much variation amongst them, the physical features which immediately strike the eye and seem most generally characteristic of the Somali people as a whole, are their tall stature, thin bone structure and decidedly long and narrow heads. Skin colour shows a wide range from a coppery brown to a dusky black. In their facial features particularly, the Somali also exhibit evidence of their long-standing relations with Arabia; and, in the south, amongst the Digil and Rahanweyn tribes, physical traces of their past contact with Oromo and Bantu peoples in this region. Traditionally, however, Somali set most store by their Arabian connexions and delight in vaunting those traditions which proclaim their descent from noble Arabian lineages and from the family of the Prophet. These claims, dismissed by Somali nationalists today as fanciful, are nevertheless part and parcel of the traditional and profound Somali attachment to Islam. They commemorate the many centuries of contacts between the Somali and Arabian coasts which have brought Islam and many other elements of Muslim Arab culture.

Thus, the Somali language⁴ contains a considerable number of Arabic loan-words, and Arabic itself is sufficiently widely known to be regarded almost as a second language. Nevertheless, although unwritten until 1972,⁵ Somali retained its distinctiveness as a separate and extremely vigorous tongue possessing an unusually rich oral literature. Within Somali, the widest dialect difference is between the speech of the northern pastoralists and of the Digil and Rahanweyn cultivators. These differ to much the same extent as Portuguese and Spanish. Yet, since many of its speakers are also familiar with standard Somali, the existence of this distinctive southern dialect does not alter the fact that, from the Jibuti Republic to Garissa on the Tana River in Kenya, standard Somali provides a single channel of communication and a common medium in which poems and songs compete for popularity. Poetry, it should be added, today as much as in the past, plays a vital part in Somali culture, and the extensive use of radio broadcasting has enhanced rather than diminished its significance. Often a poem is not merely the private voice of the author, but frequently the collective tongue of a pressure group, and propaganda either for peace or for war is more effectively spread through poetry than by any other means.⁶

The distinction between the speech of the Digil and Rahanweyn and their more nomadic countrymen to their north and south is one feature of the wider cultural, geographic, and historical primary division in the Somali nation between the 'Samale' or Somali proper and the Sab. The former make up the bulk of the nation, and their name (Samale) has come to include the Sab, perhaps in the same fashion as the word 'English' is applied by foreigners to all the inhabitants of the British Isles. This larger fraction of the Somali nation consists of four principal groups of clans or 'clan-families'. Descent in Somaliland is traced in the male line, and each of these units has a separate founding ancestor from whom, traditionally, its members trace their descent and take their collective name.

The Samale clan-families comprise the Dir, Isaq, Hawiye, and Darod, all of whom are primarily pastoral nomads and variously distributed throughout the land. The Dir clans ('Ise and Gadabursi) are mainly concentrated in the western part of the northern regions of the Somali Republic (the former British Somaliland), in the Jibuti Republic, and the east of Harar Province of Ethiopia: a smaller nucleus also occurs in the south in Merca District, and between Brava and the Juba River. The Isaq (who in conjunction with the Dir probably number almost three quarters of a million) live mainly in the centre of the northern regions of the Republic, but in their grazing movements extend also into the Ethiopian Haud. To their east, the Isaq mingle with the Dulbahante and Warsangeli divisions of the Darod who, with a strength of perhaps one and a half million, are the largest and most widely distributed of all the Somali clan-families. As well as the eastern part of the former British Somaliland Protectorate, the Darod occupy the Eastern, Nugal and Mudug Regions, most of the Haud and Ogaden; and finally, although interrupted by a large wedge of Hawiye in the centre of the Republic and the Digil and Rahanweyn between the rivers, extend eventually into the North-eastern Region of Kenya. The Hawiye, who boast probably more than half a million persons, live to the south of the Majerteyn Darod in Mudug, Hiran, and round Mogadishu. They extend some way across the Shebelle basin where they mingle with the Sab tribes, and also, like the Darod, are found again in strength in the northern part of Kenya.

With a total population of little more than half a million, the Sab tribes are less numerous, less widely distributed, and contain only the two major divisions already mentioned. Having a stronger cultivating bias than any other Somali group, their habitat is primarily restricted to the fertile region between the two rivers where their pastoral and cultivating sections mingle not only with each other but also with pastoral nomads of the other Samale clans.

In addition to these divisions of the Somali nation -whose distribution and relative strengths are vital to an understanding of both past and present events, there are a number of smaller ethnic communities which require to be mentioned. The most numerous (some 80,000 strong) are Somalized Bantu scattered in cultivating villages along the Shebelle and Juba Rivers and in pockets between them. These derive in part from earlier Bantu and Swahili-speaking groups, as well as from former slave populations freed by the suppression of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century. Although they still retain today much of their physical distinctiveness, socially these communities are becoming increasingly absorbed in the wider Somali society. The best-known groups are the Shidle, and Shabelle on the Shebelle River, and the Wa-Gosha (or Gosha) and Gobaweyn on the Juba. Less numerous but economically and politically more important is the immigrant Asian community (some 40,000 in the Republic, about 12,000 in the Jibuti Republic) which consists chiefly of Arabs (many of families domiciled on the coast for centuries) and a smaller number of Indians, Pakistanis, and Persians. Similarly largely occupied in trade and commerce and also in development and technical aid is the small European community, numbering about 5,000 in Somalia and 15,000 in the Republic of Jibuti. The few permanent European settlers live mainly as farmers and estate owners in the south of Somalia.

Mode of life and social institutions

Although the proportion of people who practise some form of cultivation is higher, probably not much more than an eighth of the total Somali population are sedentary cultivators, and these mainly the southern Digil and Rahanweyn tribes. Thus for the majority, in the arid conditions of the north, centre, and extreme south (Northern Kenya) of their country, nomadism is the prevailing economic response, and mode of livelihood and social institutions in general are tightly adjusted to the scant resources of an unenviably harsh environment. In these regions, with their home-wells as a focus of distribution, the pastoralists move over many miles in the year, driving from pasturage to pasturage and water-point to water-point their flocks of sheep and goats and herds of camels, and, in some southern areas particularly, of cattle also.

Of this mixed patrimony, although the Somali pony remains the prestige beast par excellence, it is their camels which Somali most esteem. These are carefully bred for milk and for carriage. Milch camels provide milk for the pastoralist on which alone he often depends for his diet; burden camels, which are not normally ridden except by the sick, transport his collapsible hut or tent and all his worldly possessions from place to place. Camel-hide is used to make sandals to protect his feet on the long treks across the country. But these uses do not in themselves account for the way in which the pastoralists value their camels or, despite the longstanding and wide use of money as a currency, explain why it is primarily in the size and quality of his camels that a man's substance is most tellingly measured. This striking bias in Somali culture is best expressed briefly by saying that in their social as well as economic transactions the pastoralists operate on a camel standard. Thus the exchange of substantial gifts of livestock and other wealth which cements a marriage between a man and a woman and their respective kin is ideally, and often still in practice, conducted in the medium of camels.⁷ It is also in camels that the value of a man's life and the subordinate position of women are expressed in material terms. Generally the blood-compensation due when a man is killed is rated at one hundred camels, while a woman's life is valued at half that figure. Lesser injuries too are similarly compounded in a standard tariff of damages expressed in different amounts of camels. Although in these traditional terms sheep and goats are regarded as a sort of small change, they evoke none of the interest and attention which men bestow on their camels and indeed are considered primarily as the concern of women.

This difference in attitudes is consistent with the fact that the milch camels and sheep and goats usually form two separate herding units. A man's wife, or wives, and children move with the flocks which provide them with milk and the few burden camels necessary for the transport of their tents and effects. With their much greater powers of endurance and resistance to drought, a man's milch camels are herded by his unmarried brothers, sons and nephews, moving widely and rapidly about the country far from the sheep and goats which, in the dry seasons especially, have to cling closely to sources of water. Particularly in the dry seasons, when long and frequent treks back and forth between the pastures and wells are required, camel-herding is an arduous and exacting occupation and one well calculated to foster in the young camel boys all those traits of independence and resourcefulness which are so strongly delineated in the Somali character.

With this dual system of herding the nomads move about their country with their livestock in search of pasture and water, ordering their movements to conform as closely as possible to the distribution of these two necessities of life. Pasturage is regarded as a gift of God to man in general, or rather to Somalis, and is not considered to belong to specific groups. Generally, people and stock are most widely deployed after the rains when the grazing is fresh and green; while in the dry seasons they are forced to concentrate nearer the wells and make do with what grazing can be found in their proximity. Only the herds of milch camels with their attendants to some extent escape from this seasonal curtailment of movement, and even they must also be placed in areas where they can conveniently satisfy their less frequent but more substantial watering needs. Rights of access to water depend primarily upon its abundance and the ease with which it can be utilized. Only where water is not freely available, and where the expenditure of much labour and effort is required before it can be used, are exclusive rights asserted and maintained, if necessary, by force. And while in the general nomadic flux there is no rigid localization of pastoral groups and no appreciable development of ties to locality, the 'home-wells' regularly frequented in the dry seasons, and the trading settlements which spring up all ove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the 1988 Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Dedication
• Chapter I The Physical and Social Setting
• Chapter II Before Partition
• Chapter III The Imperial Partition: 1860-97
• Chapter IV The Dervish Fight for Freedom: 1900-20
• Chapter V Somali Unification: The Italian East African Empire
• Chapter VI The Restoration of Colonial Frontiers: 1940-50
• Chapter VII From Trusteeship to Independence: 1950-60
• Chapter VIII The Problems of Independence
• Chapter IX The Somali Revolution: 1969-76
• Chapter X Nationalism, Ethnicity and Revolution in the Horn of Africa
• Maps
• Notes
• Index