Nowhere has African adjustment to the postcolonial period entailed more destructive
consequences than in the Horn. The conflict over Ethiopian claims to the Somali-inhabited
Ogaden, an extensive inland area between the Ethiopian mountains and the Somali rangelands, is
rooted in the specific conditions of a region where an African empire and an African nation pursue
irreconcilable objectives. Ethiopian rulers vow to maintain the territorial integrity of their
empire-state and repudiate the notion that Somali-speaking people, regardless of their current
jurisdiction, should be allowed the right of self-determination. Somalis insist that empirical
criteria, not the juridical ones preferred by Ethiopia, objectively establish the socio-economic and
cultural orientation of the Ogaden Somalis that forms the basis for their nationalist identification
with Somalia.
With historical antecedents derived from events of the past century, Somali-Ethiopian confrontations over the Ogaden have invited intervention from abroad by major powers, encouraged the introduction of sophisticated weapons to the region, and in recent years have torn asunder domestic economies to spawn the "wretched of the Horn" - a refugee population in excess of one million. a e Somali-Ethiopian conflict is, of course, much more than a "boundary dispute." Somalis believe that unification of Somali-inhabited lands is essential for sustaining the connections between territoriality and their ability to survive as a people without which regional peace and political stability remain unattainable. The Somalis cannot realize their objective of territorial restoration without fundamental alterations to Ethiopia, changes which twentieth-century Ethiopian regimes have consistently regarded as a dangerous threat to their own survival. An Ethiopian state whose rulers permitted Somali self-determination would implicitly consent to its own territorial disintegration, an improbable policy for any Ethiopian government, whether feudalist or revolutionary socialist, to adopt in the foreseeable future (l).
This article attempts to explain why Somalis persistently refuse to accept Ethiopian claims to the Ogaden. While a comprehensive periodization of Somali nationalist development from the 1880s to the 1980s awaits investigation in terms of breaks, transitions, and continuities, my research on the British Somaliland Protectorate (now northern Somalia) and the adjacent Ogaden before 1950 suggests ecological, commercial, and cultural reasons why Somalis came to consider both political independence and territorial reunification essential for their social and economic improvement. The anticolonial dimension of Somali nationalism reflected intense dissatisfaction over the partition of Somali rangelands by multiple colonizing powers who tried to intimidate, coerce, and conquer its primarily nomadic inhabitants. During the first half of the twentieth century, the tactics, methods, and organization of Somali resistance shifted from a religious-military basis to secular political forms. The article also highlights salient economic and commercial conditions in the eastern Horn, drawing attention to Somali entrepreneurship exemplified by a petit-bourgeoisie of trade truck drivers, coffee shop owners, livestock dealers, colonial clerks, teachers, and interpreters. This embryonic class did not control the means of production, but it did play a key role in helping to establish political organizations that appealed to the concerns of urban and rural Somalis by the late 1940s, notably a broad Somali opposition to the continued presence of Ethiopian state forces in the Ogaden. There have been few efforts made to study Somali class structure and explaining class formation in a pastoralist economy presents special challenges (2). Since documentary sources are either inadequate or cover a variety of unrelated issues, the latter sections of the article draw heavily from orally transmitted materials for historical reconstruction.
The advent, spread, and triumph of nationalist organizations across twentieth-century Africa hastened the liquidation of European colonial regimes. Africans articulated demands for decolonization within the boundaries of individual colonial units where nationalists opposed self-determination for ethnic groups within an existing state, but militantly demanded its broader application to eliminate European colonial rule (3). The retention of the colonial territorial legacy in postcolonial Africa legitimized inherited frontiers as a critical way to define and distinguish one national state from another. Territorial integrity and present boundaries form a symmetrical linkage which accords international juridical recognition - a critical measure of stability and continuity - to empirically weak postcolonial states (4).
Throughout the eastern Horn the empirical properties of states are especially variable with boundaries as rigid as they are artificial. Rather than promoting stability, "frontier fetishism (5) in this region has only provoked constant Somali opposition, particularly over the Ogaden where the correlation of ethnicity and class sustains one of the oldest irredentist movements in Africa. African states are reluctant to consider postcolonial boundary adjustments anywhere, fearing the dire consequences from a multiplicity of claims stimulated by such a precedent. Such changes in the Horn, however, (their implicit "demonstration effect" aside) would fundamentally alter - some would say "dismember" - the empire-state of Ethiopia, the polity at the heart of this volatile region and yet one which enjoys a mystique unique among African states.
With its ancient written languages, Solomon and Sheba mythology, early state systems beginning with Aksum (250 B.C.), court conversion to Christianity after 350 A.D., victory over Italian imperialists in 1896, invasion by fascist forces in 1935, the triumphant restoration of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1941 as "the first to be freed from fascism," and headquarters for the Organization of African Unity since 1963 making Addis Ababa the unofficial "capital of Africa," Ethiopia was long considered a progressive symbol of African independence, "a prestige and recognition which gives [it] a special place in the contemporary African scene (6). Recent scholarship, however, has delineated a dialectic of modern Ethiopian history to explain how the state's expansive policies and colonial practices towards various nationalities (including the Ogaden Somalis) have provoked furious internal struggles throughout the country. Indeed, the central paradox of contemporary Ethiopia is the simultaneous search for self-determination by both the Ogaden (its most underdeveloped, unintegrated, and unincorporated territorial sector) and Eritrea, its most politically advantaged and economically integrated province (7).
Until the 1950s, at least according to the writings of many politically conscious Caribbeans, black Americans and Africans living far from the Horn, Ethiopia enjoyed symbolic significance as "a solid island of freedom in the stormy waters of colonial aggression (8). The novelist Daniel Thwaite rhapsodized that Ethiopia was the "shrine enclosing the last sacred spark of African political freedom, the impregnable rock of black resistance against white invasion, a living symbol, and incarnation of African independence (9). West Indians saw its invasion by Italian fascists and their eventual expulsion in apocalyptic terms, another indication that the world was divided into good and bad, black and white, in which a black state had survived the onslaught of evil. Isaac Wallace-Johnson, the Sierra Leonean nationalist who led the West African Youth League, acknowledged that "the long resistance of the Ethiopians to Italian imperialists [was] a source of inspiration and hope for a West African struggle for emancipation (10). Edward Roux cited a similar impact which the Italian-Ethiopian war had in South Africa when Africans "realized for the first time that there existed still in Africa, an independent country where the black man was master and had his own king. They were inspired by the idea of black men defending their own country against white aggressors (ll). Traditional Ethiopian chroniclers also depicted wars of attempted conquest as struggles between good and evil, light and darkness, attributing their victories to the might of God and describing Ethiopia's enemies as guided by Satan.
Although the image of Ethiopia as "the only oasis in a desert of rank subjugation from the avaricious hands of foreign domination" contributed to anticolonialist, nationalist, and Pan-Africanist sentiments, there is little indication that Africans on the continent or throughout the diaspora actually knew (or perhaps even cared) much about the inner workings of the Ethiopian state (l2). Yet an analysis of Somali nationalism and its anti-colonialist component is incomplete without an examination of the manner whereby Somalis experienced Ethiopian state institutions since the late nineteenth century. Somalis in the Ogaden and neighboring British Somaliland had no illusions about a symbolic or abstract Ethiopia. As will be shown, to them identification of Ethiopia as a "bastion of prestige and hope to thousands of Africans" was appallingly absurd, contradicted by their adversarial relations with "real" Ethiopians.
The historiography of northeast Africa has long reflected a "kings and things" orientation which emphasized the development of centralized polities in the Ethiopian Highlands but ignored the political economies of transhumant pastoralists to the southeast. Recent historical research has modified this imbalance somewhat but the taxonomy of pre-colonial states in the Horn still rests on elusive, often vague, definitions making it difficult to give precise historical answers to the questions, what exactly was "Ethiopia" before 1900, and what was ''Abyssinia? (l3).
"Abyssinia" refers to a physical entity in the normally well watered northern and central highlands, dominated culturally and politically by the Orthodox Christian, Semitic-speaking Amhara and Tigre and ruled nominally by an aristocratic and ecclesiastical hierarchy based at Gondar after the seventeenth century. Whatever analytical term one uses to characterize Abyssinia - a spatial jigsaw of land holdings, an association of semi-autonomous principalities connected to a political center through sporadic payment of tribute and the reciprocal provision of occasional defenses, or a "class-divided" society presenting the classic trinity of peasant, warrior-ruler, and priest - it was not a compact political unit (l4).
From 1876 to 1916, a conjunction of political, diplomatic, military, and strategic circumstances enabled Abyssinia to remain independent throughout the imperialist partition of Africa. During his reign as Emperor (1889-1913), Menelik II vastly expanded the frontiers of Abyssinia and laid the basis for the modern "Ethiopian" state through a combination of local conquests and international diplomatic maneuvers with European powers. The military success and socio-political dominance of this expansive state by the Amhara feudal class depended significantly on their unrestricted access to modern weaponry guaranteed by Abyssinia's exemption from the Brussels General Act of 1890, which otherwise prohibited the sale of firearms to Africans (l5). By 1916, with its nucleus located in the feudal ruling houses of Gojjam, Tigre, and Shoa (Amhara), "Ethiopia" consisted of a number of loosely federated ethnic groups in the highlands ruled by the Abyssinian landed aristocracy through a shifting web of connections, tacit alliances, and collaborative mechanisms. This core was surrounded by subject nationalities on its southern, southwestern, and southeastern peripheries. As an internationally recognized polity, twentieth-century Ethiopia represented the consolidation, expansion, and transformation of a feudal-military principality (Abyssinia) into a veritable multi-ethnic African empire-state, "the only African state below the Sahara whose boundaries have been determined by an internally induced process of expansion (l6).
The survival of Ethiopian independence remains an important theme in African historiography, but "Ethiopia's existence as a 'modern state' does not ... extend beyond the early 1900s into a limitless and ever-remote millennium (l7). In essence, "Abyssinia" survived the imperialist partition of Africa by transforming itself into one of its participants - as "Ethiopia" - for as Menelik warned in his 1891 circular letter to the European powers, "Ethiopia [sic] has been for fourteen centuries a Christian island in a sea of pagans. If the Powers at a distance come forward to partition Africa between them, I do not intend to remain an indifferent spectator (18).
Living on the southeastern frontiers of the Ethiopian empire state, the Somalis were a national community within culturally and ecologically constructed boundaries. Although they lacked a centralized, hierarchically organized political structure, the unifying factors of a common language and ethnic origins, Islam, egalitarian legal and political institutions to resolve disputes, and nomadic husbandry as their dominant pattern of existence distinguished the Somali way of life and ethos from that of the feudal Christian states of the Ethiopian highlands. The Somali pastoral system alone did not provide an adequate economic base for large-scale political organizations that could, for example, impose stringent land use discipline on its members. The political entities of the agrarian highlands were larger and stronger than any political structure produced by the Somalis before 1900. Nonetheless, the Somalis were a distinct social category, an ethnic nationality. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the intrusive Ethiopian state and several European administrations provided a colonial framework, historical agents, and political styles which Somali culture never accommodated to and against which they reacted increasingly in organized and unified ways.
Gradually, enclosed within Ethiopia as a result of the colonial "shareout" of the 1890s, the Ogaden was encroached upon by armed Ethiopian soldiers before the turn of the century. In 1892, the British Consul for the Somali Coast Protectorate reported that:
In 1901, Captain R.B. Cobbold accompanied an Abyssinian expeditionary force across the Ogaden. The following selections from Cobbold's diary suggest what he witnessed throughout his three month sojourn:
June 5th. (Warandad) The soil of the country we passed through today seemed of unusual richness, being of the ruddy colour so prevalent in Harar and the Ogaden. There was much cultivation of dhourra and traces of a large population but now not a village or a sign of humanity was to be seen. All had fled at the approach of the army, knowing from bitter experience that to stay behind was to be robbed and possibly killed, certainly ill-treated.
June 22nd (Gerlogubi) Singing their hateful songs of murder and rapine and bearing aloft the trophies taken from the bodies of the unfortunate Somalis they had killed. How hateful and disgusting it is to think of these brutes with their rifles, shooting down these poor villagers who cannot defend themselves.... We cannot help thinking that H.M. Government will hardly wish us to continue passive spectators of this horrible carnage going on before our eyes.
June 24th (Gerlogubi) Halted. The camp here now resembles a gigantic farmyard after the late raiding expedition. Dotted about are small herds of camels in zaribas ... numberless cows and sheep and goats.... Strings of raw meat hanging on lines, stretched between the tents and handy trees show that the men have now got plenty of food.
Cobbold's sense of outrage rose markedly day by day until on 11 July 1901, while at Hanemleh in the central Ogaden, he made the following entry in his diary:
All this cruel and barbarous treatment which the Somalis undergo at the hands of the Abyssinians
and which, being unarmed (thanks to the British Government) they have to endure without a
murmur, will some day react on the heads of the Abyssinians. Some day a reckoning up will
come, and with the Somalis armed the possibility of the downfall of Abyssinia would be within the
range of practical politics. For the Moslems who would rush eagerly to arms to exterminate their
hated enemies would run into huge figures. And if ever a war was popular, this one would be so; I
think even women and children would, if permitted, gladly risk their lives in so righteous a
struggle (20).
From the 1890s until the late 1940s, Ethiopian troops seldom ventured far from their
Ogaden garrisons except to conduct haphazard raids to capture Somali livestock as tribute. "The
sovereignty of the Ethiopians over the Somalis was expressed chiefly by means of intermittent
expeditions, not far removed from raids," wrote Margery Perham. "Stock was taken as tribute
from the more accessible groups, who thereupon raided their nearest Somali enemies in order to
recoup their losses. Only in 1934, when the Ethiopians took the neighboring Gerlogubi water
holes ... could the Ethiopian government be said to have occupied the Ogaden, though hardly to
be administering it (21).
In the early 1930s, Colonel (then Major) A.T. Curle served alternately as a British consular official and a political officer with the Somaliland Camel Corps. "The Ethiopians have always had an acute inferiority complex regarding the Ogaden," he recalled in an interview shortly before his death in 1981. "They didn't tax the Ogaden normally; the Governor-General of Harar would go down with a large force every three or four years and collect tribute, which meant seizing camels and cattle. But they've always suffered losses because the Somalis would lead them on to lousy water and then let them die in the desert. So they always went down there with a very strong escort (22).
Curle's private correspondence makes it clear that Ethiopian authorities were unwilling even to discuss with him Somali grievances about animal seizures in the Ogaden and within British Somaliland. "Last week, the Abyssinian Government sent a punitive patrol against some people over the west end of our Somaliland border they killed and burnt everything, 111 men, women, and children were shot regardless of who or what they were (23). After a similar incident nine months later (in September 1930), the Ethiopian commander denied any wrongdoing and disavowed responsibility for the death of eighteen more Somalis. Curle expressed his anger and frustrations in a letter to his father:
Twentieth century Ethiopian attempts to establish superior subordinate social relations with Somalis ranged widely from "indifference to bursts of violence," sometimes difficult to distinguish from "official terror (25). The following incident took place in the northwestern Ogaden in mid-1954, witnessed by a Somali psychologist who was a youngster at the time:
Like European colonial systems elsewhere in Africa, the Ethiopian state had to legitimize its presence in the Ogaden. Its attempts at non-coercive control over a "subject population" were preceded by a long period of sheer intimidation as Ethiopian rulers hardly bothered to fashion an ideological defense of their claims to the Ogaden. Ethiopian efforts to dominate the Somali-inhabited rangelands never sought the conversion or assimilation of Somalis, only their segregation, and not until the mid-1950s did Ethiopian hegemony become bound up with ideas about assimilating Somalis into the Ethiopian empire-state. Emperor Haile Selassie, after complaining about his need to use an interpreter, spoke to Somalis at Gabredarre (central Ogaden) on 25 August 1956:
European colonial infrastructures in Africa included school systems, common language
usage, and the transportation systems and communications networks which provided nationalist
political organizations with a territorial focus and orientation. This facilitated horizontal linkages
among an inter-ethnic class of nationalists who sought to amalgamate class forces across a variety
of cul
complaining about his need to use an interpreter, spoke to Somalis at Gabredarre (central
Ogaden) on 25 August 1956:
European colonial infrastructures in Africa included school systems, common language
usage, and the transportation systems and communications networks which provided nationalist
political organizations with a territorial focus and orientation. This facilitated horizontal linkages
among an inter-ethnic class of nationalists who sought to amalgamate class forces across a variety
of cultural and political mosaics in their struggle to seize state control from Europeans after 1945.
Europeans tried to maintain their control in Africa through political, military, judicial, and
non-coercive means. Colonialist domination based on racial or cultural stereotypes, the alleged
superiority of aliens
over materially inferior indigenous groups - what Fanon called "race and economics" - helped
legitimize subordination, "reinforced by the 'separateness' of the invaders from the invaded, since
their language, culture and forms of social organization were widely divergent (28).
The Ogaden Somalis neither sought nor received support services from Ethiopian
authorities who considered that their own integrity (and that of the state they represented)
depended on safeguarding the center's culture from submersion under culturally inferior but
numerically superior groups. With the veneer of imperial power went a chauvinist vocabulary of
supercilious, condescending terms used by highland residents to contrast the lowlands and its
people with their own cool, mountainous homeland. Somalis were called barias
(slaves), shiftas (bandits), or shiretam ( from shiret - loin
cloth), which inferred a characteristic cowardice or feebleness among men (Somalis) who wore
long cotton garments from their waists. The Somalis were seen as simple despoilers, as unruly
disobedient children (29).
Under the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie (1930-1974), Ethiopia never supplied Somalis
with an embryonic state system as the basis for political identification. For Somalis dealing with
Ethiopians, there was only a sense of cultural disparagement, deep anger over patronizing
attitudes, and contempt for their would-be conquerors. Scarcely integrated into the Ethiopian
empire-state, never considered equals by their Amhara colonizers, Somalis developed no loyalty
whatsoever towards Ethiopia. Amidst the disastrous drought of 1973-1974, a provincial medical
officer again demonstrated Ethiopian disregard for Somali victims when he reasoned that "people
have always starved down in the desert and help has never reached them before (30). Captain
Keseteberhan Ghebre Hiwet, the chief Ethiopian desk officer for Somali affairs in the government
of Haile Selassie and a military intelligence officer in the subsequent revolutionary regime,
summed it up in a candid interview:
The day-to-day lives of the Ogaden Somalis are so attached to Somalia that even if they get
primary education in Ethiopia they then go for higher education to Somalia and get jobs there.
Some even hold very high government posts. They observe rules and regulations
made for the Somali public. They normally cross the border when they need legal help to settle
disputes - or else mediators are sent from Somalia. They do not believe themselves Ethiopians, in
fact the hatred they have for the Amhara is monumental. During the many operations that
Ethiopia conducted to suppress popular revolts in the Ogaden, there was such inhuman treatment
of the population that children grow up with a deeply imbedded hatred of the Amhara (31).
Or as the Somali ambassador to the United Nations remarked in 1978: "colonialism is not a
phenomenon solely identifiable by the accident of geography or the color of a man's skin (32).
The Somalis were not, of course, the only Africans divided by colonialist boundaries. But since
their determination to reunify their partitioned lands reflected cultural, economic, and ecological
necessity, it is important briefly to describe the region in terms of human habitation. Shallow soils,
poor drainage, alkalinity, and rockiness render the gypsum and limestone rangelands of the
eastern Horn largely unusable for agriculture and offer few alternatives to animal husbandry. The
Somali lands contain a series of environmental zones, each with its own properties, and each
contributing to the success of nomadic pastoralism. A functional adaptation to these variable
lands, Somali nomadic pastoralism historically relied upon a system of regional mobility through
the adjacent vegetational zones as Somalis developed ways to use the existing resources (33).
The erratic spacing and timing of rainfall produced the ecological conditions for periodic
movements, while the particular mixture of plant species established the range of herding options.
In the dry seasons, pastoralists concentrated near their home wells, while in the wet seasons they
scattered widely over the rangelands, allowing pasturage near water to regenerate. By means of
this rotating or oscillating pattern, the Somalis adjusted to the rangeland's
seasonal ecology through a series of intricate interactions. Hunt's Report of the Genera1- Survey
of Soma1iland (1944) likened these migrations "to the pumping of a heart - diastole when it rains
and the tribes spread till their grazing needs are satisfied - systole when they contract back to their
permanent water holes in dry seasons. The movement is not really irregular, though measured by
dates on the calendar it may seem so (34).
The Somali nomadic pastoralist economy required adherence to a generally north-south
axis, a fluidity of kinship links, and connections to small towns. To sustain their mode of
production, Somalis relied on trans-border pastures, water resources, feeder roads,
grain-producing areas in the northwestern Ogaden around Jigjiga, and marketing facilities on both
sides of the British Somaliland Ethiopia border. The phrase "ecological integrity of the
rangelands"
aptly describes the salience between forage, plants, water, livestock, and people upon which
Somali life characteristically depends.
Journalists can dismiss the Ogaden as a "wasteland" or an "endless expanse of sand and
bush ... a dead country where nothing happens," and Ethiopians may routinely scorn it as a
"pigpen fit only for hyenas, infidels, and Somalis (35). Even Somalis seem ambivalent about their
land. Sometimes they allege that when "the Prophet, angry and without shoes, passed through our
land, he cursed it; hence the scourges of drought, stones, and thistles." Other times, Somalis
wistfully refer to it as a "blessed land teeming with mystic herds of camel attended by benevolent
genies who lavish gifts of stock on the impoverished (36). Such extravagant prose aside, Somali
self-confidence - even haughtiness - springs from a belief that no matter how desolate and forlorn
it may appear to outsiders, this is their land, including the wells, pastures, and intermittent streams
of the Ogaden which form an integral part of it. "British Somaliland tribes must graze over in
Abyssinia," wrote Curle in 1940, "and nothing short of a wire fence will keep them out (37). A
Somali elder once explained to me simply that "the wells of the Ogaden provide the 'petrol' for
our animals (38). Or as the late Musa Haji Ismail Galaal, a pioneer of written Somali, collector of
oral texts, and poet once put it: "if you must know where the Somali lands end and Ethiopia
actually begins then observe the movement of our camels (39). In other words, camels - the
essence of Somali nomadic pastoralist life - cannot thrive in the cool well-watered upland areas of
the central Ethiopian highlands where the vegetation, affiliated climate, and disease environment
renders it inimical to penetration by them.
Maintaining a usable plant cover was always a feat of environmental manipulation.
Camels, sheep, and goats have different biological needs, so conditions appropriate to one species
may be quite disadvantageous to another. Europeans facetiously described the Somali as a
"parasite living on the camel from which he gets his milk and transport when it is alive and his
meat when he dies," although in fact the camels, sheep, and goats were dependent upon the
herders' expertise, endurance, and skills (40). "The Habr Yunis of the Burao District," according
to The General Survey Report (1944), "have been known to have watered not less than 116,000
camels in a given 14 days, and the figure of 220,000 is not unlikely (41).
Camels can retrieve water from vegetation directly and store it for several months, but the
realization of this capacity required a mixed diet of trees, shrubs, and grasses without which
camels simply cease to thrive. The Somali herders by virtue of their strategic treks over hundreds
of miles annually were able to achieve the diverse seasonal forage conditions necessary for their
animals survival. After a rain, scouts (sahan )(42) would go out and note the
distribution and amounts of the new rainfall along with the positions of unfriendly lineage groups.
"These scouts 'lie scientifically, "' quipped a British geologist, "in order to obtain the best grazing
first for their own sections; it is not unusual for a whole village to move one hundred miles in sixty
hours (43). About 25 percent of a camel's food intake should be from a species of plant which
takes up salt occurring in the soil, and in northern Somalia these small shrubs are called
daraan. When daraan was not abundant in the Ogaden, Somalis carried
salt-laden soil called carro to the camels. Nomads can identify (and in fact prefer) the
saltier taste of meat from a camel which has eaten a quantity of carro soil (44). Life in
Somaliland is balanced on a knife's edge," acknowledged a British veterinarian who spent 25 years
there, "and how many of the Somalis' European advisors could take livestock into the bush and
bring them (and himself) back alive and have lush stock to peddle in the markets of Aden to boot?
(45).
At the end of the nineteenth century, while Menelik expanded his claims to Somali-occupied
territory southeast of the Ethiopian highlands, British suzerainty was extended over the northern
Somali coast ostensibly, as Lord Curzon claimed, "to safeguard the food supply of Aden, just as
the Roman Protectorate was extended over Egypt to safeguard the corn-supply of Rome (46).
Somaliland was no Nile Delta. The country provided no "corn." What Somaliland offered the
merchants, soldiers, seamen, and functionaries at the vital imperial entrepot of Aden was livestock
- the sheep, goats, and camels that had been shipped across the Gulf of Aden since ancient times
(47). The inland boundaries of the British Somaliland Protectorate were defined by agreements
with Italy in 1894 and Abyssinia in 1897 when Britain surrendered to Menelik (without Somali
consent) "the most fertile grain producing regions in the west of the Protectorate and the
important spring and autumn pastures in the south (48).
Farah Nur composed a memorable poem warning Somalis about the implications of this
partition:
Another Somali who understood the meaning of colonialism was Sayyid Muhammad Abdille
Hasan (the so-called "Mad Mullah"). From 1899 to 1920, his religious-military movement to
expel alien rulers dominated events in the eastern Horn. A militant member of the Salihiyya
brotherhood and staunch opponent of Christian colonialism, he sought to overcome northern clan
affiliations (and southern ones as well) through a novel political structure to unite Somalis using
Islam as the cementing force. Sayyid Muhammad fought to create a secure enclave where his
followers (Dervishes) could practice Islam and safeguard their culture. His activities initially were
in self-defence against Ethiopian attacks, but after 1900 Britain and Italy mobilized large forces to
defeat him.
In an "open letter" to the English people in 1903, Sayyid Muhammad explained his
motivations, simply but firmly:
An independent entity organized to provide Somalis with an alternative political
identification within the confines of a colonial state was intolerable to imperial powers. Britain
subsequently launched a series of costly campaigns against the Dervishes, including a policy of
wide-spread distribution of firearms to "friendly" Somalis. This, in turn, ignited a massive civil war
of cruel inter-clan reprisals among northern clans. Sayyid Muhammad and his supporters managed
to hold off the colonialist armies until 1920 when, in an unprecedented assault operation, the
British used airplanes to coordinate a combined aerial, naval, and ground attack in one of the
earliest applications of the doctrine of "air power (51).
In tracing the origins of nuclear strategy, Lawrence Freedman gives considerable credit to
strategists of the 1920s who insisted that the destructive power of aerial bombardments could by
itself end a war in a matter of days, thereby enabling a nation that possessed such a capability to
deter aggression from any quarter (52). That same set of assumptions about aerial bombings - its
element of surprise, great demoralizing effect, mobility to achieve a quick decisive victory, and
promise of cost-effectiveness - had persuaded the British government to test its applicability and
effectiveness against an acknowledged "rebel of the Empire," Sayyid Muhammad. The
role of the airplane in the defeat of the Dervish partisans was the sort of success that
"strengthened the claims of ambitious airmen for a separate and autonomous service commanding
a major share of the military budget," especially in Britain where, according to Freedman, "much
of the RAF's confidence in strategic bombing derived from its apparent efficiency in controlling
wild tribesmen in Somalia....(53).
When it was over, Great Britain had spent 6 « million pounds to defeat the Dervishes, an
estimated 200,000 lives had been lost, livestock devastated, "all available Government funds [had]
been expended on the maintenance of military forces [and] nothing [had] been left for education,
for the encouragement of agriculture, for the development, or even a survey, of the country's
mineral resources.... It was Somaliland's misfortune that her twenty-one years' war left her with
nothing but a few ramshackle Ford cars that have seen better days (54). Although Sayyid
Muhammad left behind a vital legacy of national resistance to colonialism, the northern Somalis
were unable to offer sustained physical opposition to the British after 1920, as clans struggled for
the next twenty years to replenish their herds and human population.
The effects of the "Dervish legacy" on the British colonial administration have been
summed up by I.M. Lewis:
Somali informants who watched the British government allow the Protectorate to stagnate
through lack of financial aid labeled the
administration "a deaf government" whose only policy was "to have no ideas and spend no
money (56). Somalis complained even in the 1950s that "for seventy-five years you have been in
this land and there is not a chimney or a rail to show for it (57). The British really did nothing for
our country," recalled Sheikh Hasan Gheele in 1979, "except to give portions of it away (58).
British colonial policy in Somaliland during the interwar years was guided by a belief that
retrenchment and stern frugality were also ways to counteract the effects of financial collapse that
spread over the world in the 1930s. Although the political administration in Somaliland numbered
less than fifty officers and civil servants - one of the smallest in the Empire - its annual military
expenditures represented 25-33 percent of the total Protectorate budget.
It was the nature of capitalist colonialism to absorb noncapitalist systems into the
international market economy and in the process to modify the "penetrated" systems by gradually
removing control over the means of production from most members of the colonized society. The
diversity of pre-capitalist social formations, organizations of production, and environments
obliged colonial powers to try various methods of accomplishing this incorporation (59). In
British Somaliland, however, there was little experimentation. The scorched plains, erratic rainfall,
and general desiccation of the region precluded the population density needed for the production
of export cash crops as the basis for tax collections, customs revenues, or capital accumulation.
Somaliland was barren of mineral wealth. Its commercial value lay in the production of livestock
and their byproducts. Until the mid-twentieth century, pastoralist productivity remained under the
control of herders who, for the most part, were free to maintain the mobility required for their
social and biological reproduction.
To gain access to Somaliland's internally-generated surplus livestock and to assure its
perpetuation for export, Somali traders and livestock brokers (dilaals ) learned to
co-exist with
both capitalist and non-capitalist social formations. The commodities trade and most livestock
shipments were controlled by Parsi family firms (Cowasji Dinshaw, Premji Brothers, K. Pitamber)
and a few European companies, notably Antoine Besse Company (60). The raising, droving,
and procuring of the animals themselves remained a traditional Somali enterprise that operated
through a network of intermediaries who travelled between coastal markets and interior villages
where they secured goats, sheep, and camels from pastoralists. Somalis who capitalized on lineage
connections, overseas experiences, and knowledge of stock routes, pasturelands, and water
resources became guides and protectors ( abbaan ) for non-Somali firms.
In terms of the overseas experience just mentioned, it is important to note that Somalis
have been parties to a far flung monetary trading network for centuries, with ancient commercial
ties to Asia. Livestock was raised for sale and the trees of Somaliland, which produced scented
gums and resins (frankincense and myrrh), were exploited for export long enough ago so that the
region was known to the Romans as terra aromatica (61). With the development of
shipping from India through the Suez Canal during the nineteenth century and the expansion of
the bunkering business at Aden, Somalis travelled abroad in search of seasonal or short-term
employment heaving coal on the wharves at Aden or working as stokers and seamen aboard ships
trading between Europe and the subcontinent. By the twentieth century, Somalis had formed
small immigrant communities in Aden, Liverpool, Manchester, and Cardiff. Ali Mirreh and Ali
Noor for example, opened boarding houses and restaurants which catered to black American
soldiers stationed in England during the Second World War (62). Hersi Egeh and his lineage
from Berbera who participated in the 1895 Crystal Palace Exposition on "Somaliland in London,"
were subsequently employed by Carl Hagenbeck's Tierpark Exposition in Hamburg. They
accumulated considerable wealth in Germany and then returned to Somaliland in the 1920s and
1930s where they invested heavily in town properties (63).
These are but a few examples of individuals whom the Somalis call the tacabbir
("the crosser of the sea"), the intrepid migrant who ventures abroad. Some tacabbir
were never heard from again of course, but others managed to accumulate money which they
remitted through insured money orders to relatives in Somaliland. Some
returned home wealthy, as prestigious entrepreneurs, and others resumed the pastoralist life.
Somalis were renowned for their ability to pursue advantages wherever they found them and for a
willingness to respond to incentives that demonstrated pragmatic or survival-directed qualities. It
may have been the precarious nature of nomadic pastoralist life - the intense competition for
pastureland, prevalence of animal predators, uncertainties of rainfall - which encouraged their
independence of action, aggressiveness, bravery, and mobility (64).
Forty years ago, the British journalist Gordon Waterfield offered a caricature of the
returned tacabbir with a poignancy that applies even to this day:
We still know little about the mechanics and decision-making processes that motivated the
tacabbir, and we lack ethnographic details on the creation of a Somali trading class. This is a
fruitful area of inquiry, since the shifting between desert and sea played an important part in the
evolution of modern Somali political expression.
It is difficult to trace in thorough detail all the trade connections among pastoralist
production, the trekking to market for exchanges, the exchanges themselves, and the eventual
export from coastal towns (66). Among the Somalis, the procedures for exchanging animals
involved an intricate bargaining process that sometimes was
hidden (literally and figuratively) from nomadic producers (67). Animals available for trade were
collected from nomadic herding groups and moved to a market town by hired drovers known as
sawaaqi. These hardy drovers - "the Somali equivalent of a cowboy" (68) - were experts at
herding
upwards of three hundred to four hundred animals over a hundred miles to market within a week.
The best of them enjoyed a widespread reputation among nomads and traders alike. The
sawaaqi were usually employed by a coastal merchant or livestock broker (
dilaal) who paid him a
percentage of the final price received for all animals satisfactorily trekked to their coastal
destinations. Agreements were made in advance, stipulating how many sheep a
sawaaqi and his assistants were permitted to slaughter en route for their subsistence and the value
of any additional "missing animals" was deducted from the sawaaqi's payment.
The dilaals who moved between interior market towns and the coastal ports kept track
of available cargos of rice, dates, sugar, cotton cloth, and assorted imports from Aden, giving
them an advantageous position as intermediaries between livestock export firms and the nomadic
producers in the determination of import-export prices. In times of drought, which are reckoned
to occur at approximately seven-year intervals, (69) the nomads would readily exchange hides and
skins at lower prices for essential supplementary foods like dates and rice. Somali dilaals and
merchants would speculatively buy skins and hides at depressed prices, hold them off the market
for up to a year, and then attempt to sell them at higher prices.
The sale of sheep, goats, and camels between dilaals generally took place at primary
wells near the towns of Burao, Ainabo, Odweina, and Hargeisa. To commence the exchange, the
dilaals would grasp hands under a small cloth and conduct a series of offers and counter-offers
involving the assignment of monetary values to each digit. The top digit equaled 100, the middle
one 200, and the third digit was worth 300. The prices were established by alternatively grasping
each other's digits until an agreement was reached and the two brokers then shook hands. The
seller received cash and commodities which he disbursed to the nomadic producers after
deducting his share. The buyer, in turn, relinquished the animals to his sawaaqi who proceeded to
drove them to the coast for export.
Somali informants insisted that before the 1950s, dilaals and sawaaqi could amass considerable
profits through their respective functions as brokers and drovers, a claim substantiated in a report
written by M.H. French of the Imperial Institute after his inquiry in Somaliland in 1948 (70).
Although the livestock export business was by no means vertically integrated, by the late 1930s
dilaals were found throughout the Protectorate and in the Ogaden conducting sales transactions in
rural trade settlements, channelling individual herds into their own under the care of abbaans and
sawaaqi. Since the British colonial authorities customarily collected a sariibad grazing
tax on animals while at market, it was not unusual for the dilaal to advance this money on credit
to pastoralists.
In the 1930s and 1940s, following a court conviction for a criminal offense and the levying
of a fine, district commissioners would frequently take two dozen armed irregular troops
(Illaloes) and seize camels from the guilty party. The animals were collected at the
district headquarters where the owners were required to arrange for payment of the fine in cash (
rupees). Usually there would be available a handful of prosperous lineage patrons who, as "bank
loan officers," would be willing to lend their kinfolk the currency to pay the fine. The animals
would then be returned and immediately sold through the normal channels to recoup the loan
(71).
Except for the provision of a few dressing stations, sporadic veterinary services, and
irregular subsidies for intrapial and pleuro-pneumonia vaccines, British colonial rule in Somaliland
brought no transformation of pastoralist productive techniques. In the inter-war years, roads were
improved and maintained through the use of pauper and convict labor, enabling at least one
district commissioner to drive over 4,500 miles a year across the "reasonably well-maintained"
tracks (72).
The meat from Somali black-headed Persian sheep "compared favorably to the best Welsh
mutton" (73) and thanks to shade drying and quicker transport by trucks, Somali kidskin were
particularly prized in Switzerland, England, and America, where they were made into fashionable
women's gloves and luxury leather goods (74). The following table gives some idea of the extent
and value of this trade:
Number [Declared Value Number]
1937 85,000 45,000
1942 160,000 130,000
1947 150,000 140,000
1950 119,000 186,000
Sheep & Goat "Skins"
Number Declared Value (British Pounds)
1937 1.5 million 150,000
1942 1.6 million 122,500
1947 1.9 million 236,000
1950 1.5 million 463,000
Table 1: Livestock and Skins Exported from British Somaliland Ports, compiled from Somaliland
Protectorate, Annual Colonial Reports.
By the Second World War, the Somaliland Protectorate depended on pastoralist products
for over 72 percent of its annual customs revenue, and its status as an adjunct to Aden was firmly
established.
The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the subsequent war provided Somalis with
opportunities for trans-frontier trade when the "general shortages of foodstuffs in the territories
occupied by the Italians encouraged a number of retail traders - Arabs, Indians, and Somalis - to
take supplies to those areas from British territory (75). In February 1937, the Anglo-Italian
Transit Trade and Grazing Rights Agreement was concluded by which Somaliland clans would
enjoy grazing and watering rights in the Ogaden in return for which the Italians acquired trading
rights and facilities in and through British Somaliland. The agreement was for two years and
would then be up for review and renewal. Somalis were so eager to share in this trade that "when
Jigjiga was first occupied by the Italians every small trader who could obtain goods and the
wherewithal to transport them, rushed to Jigjiga and sold them to the troops at enormous profits."
Within a year, many small traders who were poor had become comparatively rich, and "many
people who never thought of trading previously were taking caravans across the border and doing
very well. A sign of the prosperity was a brisk demand for building plots in Hargeisa town (76).
By 1940, an entire street in Hargeisa was lined with substantial houses and shops built of stone, a
strip known today as the segeta liira, "the street of the lira (77).
In 1933, 6 private cars and 49 commercial vehicles had been imported into the
Protectorate; in 1937, the figures jumped to 16 and 237 when a total of 51 private and 316
commercial vehicles were licensed to operate, and the number of Somalis directly engaged in the
"conduct and maintenance of these vehicles cannot number less than 600 (78). Although they
faced stiff competition from experienced Parsi firms, at least 150 Somali-owned trucks (primarily
Bedfords, Dodges, and Chevrolets) were operating through British Somaliland before 1940, and
there were "many instances of stock-owners having sold the bulk of their livestock to invest in
motor vehicles (79). Ahmed Haji Abdullahi "Hashish," Haji Jamaa Mohamed "Miateyn," and
Yusuf Odowa Armiye were among the more prominent owners who ran profitable enterprises
which transported skins, sheep, and goats to Berbera and then returned carrying merchandise,
mail, foodstuffs, and passengers (80).
Somalis who had taken advantage of employment opportunities and occupational
alternatives emanating from Aden took jobs as government clerks, interpreters, butchers, teachers,
and petition-writers at the garrison-entrepot. For younger males, these enterprises offered escape
from the hardships and subordination in the pastoralist sector. Others became coffee shop owners
in Somaliland, the so-called geedeeye ("one who puts up trees," in other words, a bush
restaurant), and by 1942, itinerant Somali traders could be found in virtually every village and in
the vicinity of livestock where they bartered tea, cloth, dates, rice, and sugar to pastoralists
grazing herds in the Haud and Ogaden (81). Although some goods still moved by camel caravans
from the lands of one clan to another under the guarantees of the protectors (abbaan), the
substantial increase in trade truck traffic was evident throughout the eastern Horn.
During the Italian occupation of Somaliland (August 1940 - March 1941), Somali truck
owners cleverly avoided confiscation by dismantling their vehicles, separately burying the engine,
wheels, and other parts in the sand. When British forces re-occupied the Protectorate, the Somalis
dug up the parts, reassembled them, and the so-called "out-of-the-earth" trucks resumed
operation. An eyewitness likened the spectacle to "seeing a dusty corpse get out of the grave and
drive off (82). With spare parts and garages nonexistent in the Protectorate, "the Somalis had to
tie their old trucks together with bits of rope," reminisced a district commissioner, "and plugged
radiator leaks with dates (83).
Traders, truck owners and drivers, and town-dwellers generally welcomed the British
return to Somaliland, since the Protectorate had suffered destruction, devastation, and insecurity
under the Italians. Somalis recalled the fascist occupation as a time of increased livestock
confiscations, arbitrary beatings, the burning of several jamaaca (the settlement areas
for tariqas) and severe food shortages due to a British coastal blockade. The nomadic
producers evidently experienced less privation, since 1940 and 1941 were years of above-average
rainfall, although some nomads insisted that when the Italians ruled the Protectorate "there was
not even enough cloth available to wrap the dead (84). The Italian "interlude" created additional
opportunities in the retail trade for an emergent Somali petit-bourgeoisie when several Parsi and
Banyan traders abandoned their shops and fled the Protectorate for good (85).
As Somalis moved to townships before 1940, they formed social clubs and welfare
societies to assist themselves and destitute people without regard for clan attachments. Known as
the Nadi Hadiyat ar-Rahman ("Gift of God Club") in Berbera and Burao and the Khayriya
("Blessed Association") in Hargeisa, these clubs, whose
members included a number of tacabbir, were not uniformly antagonistic to colonialism, but did
criticize the British for their meager support of social services, confronting the colonial secretary
with a petition for redress of grievances when he visited the Protectorate in 1936 (86). Club
members actively promoted an interest in secular education while they simultaneously supported
Koranic schools and exhorted Somalis to overcome clan divisiveness in the name of Islamic unity.
Yet with several club members drawn from the administrative salaries, there are suggestions that
they were beginning to see themselves as a class apart. "We were anxious to erect better meeting
places than the geedeeye," recalled a prominent Nadi member, "and insisted on appropriate
privileges as government civil servants such as better allowances, shorter time in rank, and
provision of better lighting for our buildings. We were also concerned to find suitable servants to
serve us tea at our club functions (87).
In the towns, traders, coffee shop owners, personal servants of British government
officials, truck drivers, and tacabbir demonstrated new interests and aspirations. Young townsmen
began chewing qaad (catha edulis), a shrub whose leaves and shoots contain weak
d-amphetamines (cathine and cathinone) which produce a euphoric, stimulating, exciting but
finally depressing effect when chewed (88). Truck drivers carrying goods and passengers to and
from towns as far west as Jigjiga (adjacent to a major qaad-growing district in eastern Ethiopia)
began to rely on qaad-chewing to keep them awake during the long trips, so fresh sprigs were
more readily available to town-dwellers. In 1928, approximately 750 bundles were identifiably
imported into the Protectorate, and by 1936 the "known" amount had increased five-fold to
4,000 (89).
Chewing qaad became especially popular among small groups of poets known
alternatively as the buugaan buug or qaraami, who emphasized social solidarity and
community of purpose through their poems (often recited with instrumental music); their themes
included romance, extra-marital flirtations, consumer expectations, and political matters. Chewing
qaad for hours became an important ritual of friendship and mutual trust which engendered social
cohesion through the custom of chewing together from a common bundle of twigs. Before the
War, nomads sometimes referred to these residents collectively as the Kabacad
("white shoes," in other words, their European shoes and trousers), or occasionally, more
pejoratively, as nasraani("Christians"). By the late 1940s, when Governor Gerald
Reece tried to proscribe qaad -chewing, his efforts simply stimulated its consumption as
"chewing" became symbolic of one's refusal to accept colonialist authority (90).
Conditions in British Somaliland began to change dramatically in the 1940s. The allied
powers expelled the Italians from northeast Africa and placed Italian Somalia, the British
Somaliland Protectorate, and Somali-inhabited areas of Ethiopia (the Haud and Ogaden) under a
loosely-unified military administration. In the Protectorate, nearly all documents from the pre-War
period had been destroyed either before the British evacuation or during the Italian occupation, so
when military officials interviewed civil servants and officers who had worked in Somaliland
before 1940, they were forcefully reminded about an essential fact of Somali life: livestock which
grazed in or were exported from the Somaliland Protectorate were bred, sustained, and herded
through ecological zones far across the Protectorate's southern and southwestern boundaries, the
lands under Ethiopian jurisdiction since the late nineteenth century.
Throughout an extensive tour of the Protectorate shortly after his arrival in 1943,
Governor G.T. Fisher appreciated the links between open boundaries, access to wells and
pastures, and the livelihood of the pastoralists. "Somali products, if freely exchanged throughout
the region," he observed, "go far to meet the people's food requirements ... and from a social and
economic point of view the only hope of improving the living standards of the nomads is to create
a united Somalia (91). A comprehensive study of grazing area deterioration ( The
Glover-Gilligand Report) revealed that "grazing facilities in the British Somaliland Protectorate
were insufficient for the people's needs for the greater part of the year," and that without assured
access to other areas, pastoralist life was threatened whenever herding groups were compelled to
use the dry season reserves of other groups during the rainy season (92). "To anyone versed in
desert pasturage," warned another official, "that is economic suicide."
Fisher admitted that British Somaliland "was never either an economic, ethnological, or
administrative entity, merely a geographical expression which it would be a mistake to revive,"
and advised that "the pressing need for improvement of land use by controlled grazing will only be
possible if it embraces the other trans-border areas (93). There was already evidence that animals
were destroying the young grass as soon as it appeared, allowing "no respite from grazing [which]
accounts for the extensive denudation in the vicinity of the wells (94). When John Hunt conducted
an exhaustive survey of the geomorphology, stock wealth, place names, grazing areas, and clan
positions in the Protectorate in the mid1940s, he acknowledged that while rising livestock
numbers might be considered a sign of prosperity in a colony whose major exports were animals,
the concomitant deterioration in grazing conditions threatened to approach the point of
diminishing returns (95). A pasture officer reported that "sheep in droving herds are among the
main causes of surface pulverization, especially in gypsum soils which can lead so quickly to soil
erosion (96). The agricultural department's Annual Report for 1947 was explicit and prescient: "it
cannot be stressed too strongly or repeated too often that pastures in the widest sense form the
crux of these problems in a country whose soil and vegetation are on the brink of irretrievable
ruin" [emphasis added](97).
The British had re-invested very little state revenue into Somaliland so that "after fifty
years of colonial rule there [were] no great commercial undertakings, few expansive installations,
no concentrations of capital," and, cracked Fisher, "remarkably little except sun, sand, and
Somalis." The civil affairs branch of the military administration doubted "whether any British
territory has benefited so little in the provision of social services as Somaliland has under British
rule: educational, medical, agricultural, and veterinary services exist merely on a token basis (98).
The British had made a nominal attempt to develop Somali collaborators in indirect rule through a
system of stipendiary elders called cuqaal (singular, caaqil). Until the early 1930s, the qualities
of "bravery, hospitality, and verbal eloquence" usually distinguished an caaqil among Somalis, but
by the Second World War they were being selected simply on hereditary lines, exerted little
influence in towns, and lacked credibility among the nomads (99). Most administrative posts were
monopolized by immigrant Indians in a Protectorate whose entire budget for education never
exceeded 1,800 (pounds) before 1941 and where, by 1949, there were only 306 Somali bank
deposits in a Protectorate whose economy was still largely based on livestock,
not money (100).
The anti-colonialist agitation in British Somaliland after 1945 was not a spontaneous
expression of shared grievances by a homogeneous group. "Community of language and culture
does not necessarily give rise to political unity," reasoned Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, "any more
than linguistic and cultural dissimilarity prevents political unity." It was more important to find
out "the relation of political structure to the whole social structure (101) Effective political
mobilization depends upon the solidarity and consciousness of a group with shared interests and
concerns. If inequalities exist between individuals who interpret this inequality as part of a pattern
of collective discrimination, if the group maintains an adequate communications network, and if it
also possesses a social awareness that leads them to define the situation as illegitimate, then that is
the stratum most likely to contemplate collective political action.
In British Somaliland, it was a town-based petit-bourgeoisie, the beneficiaries of
inter-territorial commercial expansion making the mast of the opportunities that did exist, who
came to understand that the threatened re-partition of the Somali lands (instead of the proposed
re-unification) could reduce material resources under their control. Relatively speaking, they were
Somalis with higher incomes, status occupations, a better education, and wider ranges of
experiences, and yet whose lineage connections obliged them to maintain a stake in livestock
production and in the prosperity of the pastoralist society. They were a diverse occupational set -
neither bourgeois, proletarian, nor nomadic - with petty productive property which they worked
alone or with assistance from family members or hired laborers (
The Second World War provided them with a more favorable milieu for broadening their
concerns and exchanging political ideas through a network of inter-territorial linkages sustained
by the truck drivers whose camaraderie and rapport with Somali policemen facilitated their
movement throughout the eastern Horn. Impatient, aggressive, "well-organized and disciplined to
an unexpected degree," the new breed of Somali political leaders was a far cry from the effete,
ineffectual cuqaal of the prewar era (l03). Drawing financial support from traders, merchants,
truck owners, a small number of Sudanese-trained Somali teachers, and social and political action
groups of tacabbir in England and Aden, they soon demanded a leading part in the transfer of
power.
Initially calling themselves the Somaliland National Society (SNS) after their takeover of
buildings abandoned by the moribund Khayriya and Hadiyat ar-Rahman in 1944-45, they changed
their name three years later to the Somaliland National League. In 1946, they merged with the
truck drivers of the two-year-old Somali Transport Company (STC), a self-help organization led
by Mohamed Jamaa "Urdooh," a boisterous ex-customs official with a reputation for intimidation
tactics that included constant demands to administration
officials that they make full disclosures to explain their annual expenditure of Protectorate funds.
The appeal of the STC accelerated at the end of the War, owing to the disbandment of Somaliland
military units and reduced requests for movement of troops and provisions. "There are now some
2,000 drivers without regular employment," read one report, "and they are in a political body
modelled along the lines similar to the SNS (104).
Local British officials in the Horn vigorously supported postwar boundary rectifications to
create a "United Somalilands," but the Foreign Office encountered stiff opposition to such plans.
France and the Soviet Union denounced it as a simple scheme to expand the British Empire.
Ethiopia demanded restoration of its authority over the Ogaden and drew decisive American
support for its "territorial integrity" after Sinclair Oil Company signed an exclusive concessionary
agreement with Haile Selassie in 1946 that permitted oil drilling in the Ogaden. Fisher was
resigned thereafter to the demise of a "United Somalilands" since "the mere suspicion of the
presence of oil in the Ogaden must make it unlikely that the Emperor will agree to any exchange
of territory until he is quite certain that he is not giving away any potential source of revenue
(105).
The fears and alarm about the possible return of Ethiopian rule to Somali territory spread
throughout the eastern Horn. "Under the Ethiopian government influence we are still suffering the
worst enslavement," said a group of Ogaden Somali elders in a petition to the civil affairs officer.
"We are fed up with the Ethiopians and want to be rid of them," they added. "We mean them to
leave our country. If the powerful nation Great Britain does not take necessary steps in subject
[sic], it means we shall be compelled to lay our souls for peril in purpose of self-defence (106). In
southern Somalia too, the Central Council of the Somali Youth League considered the matter
very seriously, and warned "in case you decide that Ogaden returns to Abyssinia the people in that
province are ready to fight until the last man (107).
With Britain's financial status reversed from creditor nation in 1939 to debtor in 1946,
Parliament had another good reason not to allocate funds for an expanded colonial
commitment (108). In 194748, when the most militant members of the Somaliland National
League
became convinced that Britain would capitulate and allow the Somali lands to revert to their
status quo antebellum, they formed an underground faction called the Anti-Partition Party which
was prepared, if necessary, to assassinate British officials to make their anger and frustrations
most emphatic and unambiguous. Their concern over the future status of all Somali territories,
including the historical grazing (and now putatively mineral endowed) lands of the Ogaden and
Haud claimed by Ethiopia convinced them that any form of alien rule was unacceptable, unjust,
and perpetuated through duplicitous means (l09).
British officials disliked these activists whose sworn oaths not to reveal their clan
affiliations caused "worry to civil affairs officers in their capacity as judicial officers as it is
necessary in court cases to record the tribe [sicl of the accused and witnesses. When asked for
their tribe [sic], members now state simply that they are Somalis (ll0). The Protectorate
administration tried unsuccessfully to undermine the spread of nationalist consciousness through
subsidies to rump political "parties" based exclusively on narrow clan affiliations.lll In 1947,
Major E.H. Halse, the deputy commissioner of police, alarmed at the rapid growth of the SNS
whose Berbera chapter already boasted 1,000 members and "intended to open a banking
account," reiterated that the Society sought "to stamp out all tribal influence and amalgamate all
Somalis." Some members promised Halse that someday they would take over the government,
although one member, a Haji Yassin Mohamed, reassured him that "perhaps our children's
children will be the government." Unconvinced, False warned that "other elements consider it will
be much sooner than that (112).
The historical context from which a politically-conscious stratum developed in British
Somaliland suggests an emergent class linked to international demands for livestock and its
by-products, and inter-territorial transportation opportunities in the eastern Horn. Born in the
pastoralist nomadic sector (for the most part), but with subsequent commercial, urban, and
overseas experiences, the Somali petit-bourgeoisie was an amalgam of truck owners, traders,
clerks, teachers, drivers, and livestock brokers. Living in the still puritanical atmosphere of British
Somaliland, this stratum has been alternatively called "the new intelligentsia," "the urban
sophisticates," or "the transitional generation (ll3). They were another example that "the
petit-bourgeoisie
is like a chameleon, taking its color from its environment (ll4). The small size of the Somali
proletariat and the predominance of the urban petit-bourgeoisie with its relative - never absolute -
isolation from pastoralist production created the circumstances in which a tradition of class
struggle in Somaliland was far weaker than nationalist politics. By 1950, this northern Somali
petit-bourgeoisie was not a dominant class whose members owned and controlled the means of
economic production. At least, not yet.
Copyright (c)1985 the Board of Trustees of Boston University, all rights reserved. Single copies
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Working Papers from the B.U. African Studies Center on Somalia, Somaliland and the Horn of
Africa, see the B.U. African Studies Center web-page at
International Journal of African Historical Studies, v18 (1985), pp.1-32.
Sheep & Goats "On the hoof"
*I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Social Science Research Council,
National Endowment for the Humanities, and Council for International Exchange of Scholars.
Critical assistance was provided by the Somali National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
Ministry of Culture and Higher Education in Somalia, and by the Anglo-Somali Society of Great
Britain. My sincere thanks to I.M. Lewis, B.W. Andrzejewski, David Laitin, and David William
Cohen for helpful comments on earlier drafts. A shorter version was presented at the University of
Paris conference on "Enterprises and Entrepreneurs in Africa" (December 1981).
Notes
Salahdin Maow
Last modified: Tue Mar 16 17:24:03 MET