As Rogers Brubaker notes, people cannot freely invent history. Certain kinds of pasts, he argues, are “made ‘available’ for present-day use not only by the events themselves . . . but also by their subsequent incorporation into commemorative traditions.”26 What virtually all the sources from this era—whether archival, oral, or scholarly—agree upon is that Somali migrants came into an area where the Oromo had been in some way dominant.
Günther Schlee and Abdullahi A. Shongolo (who have done pioneering work on northern Kenya) describe the period prior to this phase of Somali immigration as one of relative peace and security.27 According to their account, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the Borana, an Oromo-speaking group, had adopted a number of diverse people under an alliance that became known as the Worr Libin, or the People of Libin. Over the centuries, various Somali-speaking groups had gained a foothold in the region by becoming sheegat (which can be roughly translated as “clients”) to these established Borana residents.28 Through sheegat, newcomers could adopt the name and assimilate into another clan or lineage. According to Schlee and Shongolo, this period of “Borana hegemony” led to “a multiethnic political system that was the major unifying factor in the region before the introduction of modern statehood.”29
The Pax Borana, however, came undone in the late nineteenth century. Ogaden and other Somali lineages began fighting ex-slaves for control of the Juba riverbank and pushing farther westward and southward, displacing Oromo speakers. Population pressure, opportunities to monopolize the southern leg of the caravan trade, and internal conflicts likely spurred this move southward. By the 1870s, Somalis had taken control over much of lower Juba and had begun to press farther south into northern Kenya.30 Wajir was one of the major sites of conflict in the first few decades of the twentieth century. This was most likely due to the importance of its water resources and its location along the caravan routes.31 When they reached Wajir in 1906, the Ogaden and their various sheegat met other lineages living under the Pax Borana. They encountered the Ajuran, who spoke Oromo and were almost indistinguishable from the Borana (perhaps because they were, to all extents and purposes, “Borana”). Living among the Ajuran were also more recent Somali immigrants, such as the Degodia, who had fled earlier Ethiopian incursions.32
As Somalis gained control over the area, they displaced many established residents. They also supplanted the importance of the Borana name, instead cementing “Somali” as an overarching affiliation. How exactly this occurred is the main source of disagreement within oral testimony and written accounts. Different sources provide different interpretations of this era. Did established residents forcefully or willingly assimilate into broader Somali ways of life? Did locals “invent” or simply “rediscover” their Somali roots? Was this a liberating foray or an oppressive invasion?
Historical events are overdetermined, riddled by silences in the historical record, and obscured by the retrospective significance conferred on them. It is misleading to imagine that we, as scholars, can peel away the bias in these various accounts or simply triangulate between them to get at a singular, unmediated truth. Events, as Bruno Latour argues, are best understood outside the fact/fiction binary; rather, they are “matters of concern” that inspire a “gathering” of people in debate.33 For Latour, this is not recourse to blunt deconstructionism disinvested from empiricism, but rather a call for a productive and renewed realism that accounts for the ways in which issues become arenas for debate.34
Local political thinkers give rise to new stories, elaborate upon old ones, and keep them in circulation, which in turn helps to reinforce collective representations. Many chroniclers of these stories in northern Kenya were older men, often charged with projecting the public face of the community’s history. This also meant that the history of the region was frequently told with an emphasis on patriarchal and masculine features. One such orator was Ahmed Maalin Abdalle of Habasweyn, who was also one of my main interlocutors. Fluent in multiple languages, Abdalle, a former teacher as well as a community peace builder, was well known for his humor, erudition, and knowledge of local history. Abdalle recounted a narrative about the new Somali immigrants, whom he argued had “liberated” the Ajuran from a state of semislavery to the Borana. According to his account, the Ajuran were forced to distinguish their residences from those of the Borana by inverting the animal hides covering their aqal (huts) and exposing the sides with fur. The Borana were allowed to approach any aqal with exposed fur during the night and rouse the sleeping husband, who was obliged to exit to give the visitor access to his wife. To add insult to injury, the husband was also expected to offer milk, the classic gesture of hospitality, to his guest the following morning.35 Rights to sexual access to women often emerged as a central and overriding trope—especially within stories told by men.
Abdalle did not necessarily tell this story with the intention of condemning any particular group of people. However, this provocative narrative could easily enable one to paint a territorial incursion as a liberating activity and claim the Ajuran, who had long-standing roots in the region, as oppressed kin. The allegation that the Borana had reduced the Ajuran to a state of virtual slavery is particularly ironic given that British officials of the era, as a means of justifying their own conquest, leveled similar accusations against the Somali.36 While one cannot immediately take Abdalle’s account at face value, his story calls into question the assumptions of scholars, such as Günther Schlee, who have described the Pax Borana as a relatively peaceful era. What to Schlee and Shongolo was a nonviolent relationship of clientship, Ahmed Maalin Abdalle described as an oppressive, gendered form of domination.
Others recounted the history of this period in ways that reinforced Somali chauvinism and racial and religious exclusion. A resident of Habasweyn, who was in his early eighties at the time of our interview, also provided an account of this early “conquest” period. “The land,” he explained, “was inhabited by black, ignorant Gallas, who were naked and black.” He described the Somalis as “a people with religion, of the book, carrying the history of the prophets.”37 In his eyes, the Somali were a superior people who helped bring civilization to the “backwards” non-Muslim populations who had been living in the region. For at least some people, these stories helped justify their rights to the land, assert their supremacy over non-Somali and non-Muslim groups, and reinforce the conceptual boundaries between Somali and “other.”
Not everyone from northern Kenya, however, would agree with such a chauvinist depiction of Somali conquest. Adan Ibrahim Ali, for example, argued that the Somali had distant kin in areas as far away as Chad, Egypt, Israel, and Rwanda. He also maintained that other Kenyan groups, including the Maasai and Luo, had hidden Somali roots.38 Ali claimed affinity with a variety of people both within and outside the Kenyan nation-state and appealed to a highly inclusive idea of kinship.39 While one man’s interpretations of the past helped to buttress the conceptual and moral boundaries between Somali and gaal (the non-Muslim “other”), the other incorporated diverse people (including “black” and predominantly non-Muslim groups) into the Somali lineage system.
Trying to tease out the factual elements in any of these accounts strips them of much of their meaning.40 As John Jackson argues, storytelling is often a way for people to cultivate community, not circulate facts.41 In addition, it is important to position oneself (the “scholar”) not as the ultimate authority, but as one of many storytellers. Dwelling upon the constructed nature of oral sources and no less tendentious and partial written records can also be a productive means of gesturing toward a certain unknowability regarding the past and thus avoiding the dangers of a “politically irresponsible historicism.”42
At the same time, oral testimony should not be treated merely as a form of historical memory irreconcilable with the work of guild historians.43 Doing so would deny its utility as a source of factual information about the past. Bracketing certain prosecutorial questions of who is to blame for past conflicts, these stories have much to tell us. They suggest that new immigrants and more established residents were engaged in a reconceptualization of belonging, which enabled “Somaliness” to become an encompassing affiliation for diverse people throughout the region. At the turn of the century, conflicts between Borana and Somalis led to realliances and redefinitions of “us” and