In Out of Africa, Blixen noted that some women flouted social restrictions on their behavior. She wrote that while “the honest Somali women were not seen in town,” there were at least “a few beautiful young Somali women, of whom all the town knew their names, who went and lived in the Bazaar and led the Nairobi Police a great dance.”46 How these women positioned themselves within debates about purity, mobility, and miscegenation is unclear. Such issues were rarely discussed by my interlocutors, who tended to describe “immoral” female behavior as a modern vice caused by poverty and the erosion of traditional culture. (And perhaps also chose to avoid such sensitive topics with an outsider like myself.) Blixen’s brief, tantalizing comment gives us only the barest glimpse into these lifeworlds.
Despite their different ways of conceptualizing descent, Somalis, white settlers, and colonial officials shared many overlapping ideas. Both European and Somali women of this era, for example, faced added limitations on their sexuality, while men were more likely to be seen as entitled to sexual access to the “other.” At the same time, Indian Ocean Islamic discourses also differed from Western understandings of race in several key respects. Colonial authorities and settlers tended to think of descent as an inheritable, biological condition and race as a specifically scientific category. Western eugenicists had developed several diverse and often mutually incompatible ideas of race. One was the “pure race model,” in which the world’s populations were imagined to be descendants of three “original” racial strains (a theory derived from the pre-Darwinian biblical story of Noah).47 Given the broad acceptance of men marrying non-Somali and non-Muslim African women, it is unlikely that Somalis subscribed to anything analogous to a biological notion of race or that they imagined themselves as “admixtures” of two or more “pure” racial types.
This is not to say that Somalis were unoccupied with fears of cultural loss through intermarriage (or that Somali men, like their European counterparts, were not anxious about female sexuality). During one interview, I was told about an incident in which several Isaaq subclans in Nairobi fought over women who had recently arrived from British Somaliland.48 Public conversations about descent also became increasingly mediated through the racialized discourses of colonial rule. On more than one occasion, I was told that during a colonial trial to determine their legal status, Somali leaders brought forth the lightest-skinned members of their group in order to “prove” their foreign origins. In the 1940s, Somali leaders in Uganda professed to colonial authorities that they had not intermarried with local women and thus should not be relegated to the status of “natives.”49 Ann Laura Stoler argues that racial difference in the colonial era was constituted through the management of intimate sexual relations.50 By denying the practice of exogamy, which was clearly widespread, Somali leaders tried to better approximate colonial ideas of racial purity.
The ways that Somalis understood their descent did not quite map onto European racial categories. Yet Somali intermediaries and European settlers were able to form a mutually beneficial, if asymmetric, relationship around a set of similar ideas. These working misunderstandings enabled settlers and colonial officials to cultivate a new notion of Somaliness, which painted Somalis as a more civilized “race” within an imperial theater of territories.
To this day, intermarriage is a contentious topic of discussion. Although several elder Somali women explained that girls today have far more choice over whom they will marry, those who choose to wed “African” men continue to face stigma. Many people also debated the degree to which past generations had intermarried with East Africans, and often my interviewees provided me with contradictory information. Some argued that the Isaaq preserved their cultural distinctiveness by not intermarrying with locals, instead bringing marriageable women from British Somaliland.51 Others emphasized that the Isaaq were more “flexible” and open to other Kenyans precisely because they had intermarried with locals over the years. These debates refract contemporary anxieties over assimilation and belonging and reveal how the specter of colonial-era racism continues to haunt social relations in East Africa.
One of the unintended consequences of British rule was to enable Isaaq and Harti voyagers to travel, expand their diaspora, and establish a range of fidelities to communities across the region. Endogamy enforced through restrictions on female sexuality very likely provided (and continues to provide) one of the most important countermeasures against deracination. Robin Cohen points out that diasporic consciousness is not a natural outcome of migration or cultural difference. Rather, diasporas unfold over time and require “a strong attachment to the past, or a block to assimilation in the present and future.”52 A much romanticized watchword of the late modern era, the term “diaspora” risks normalizing the idea of a fixed territorial homeland and, for this reason, may not be entirely fitting for Somali migrants in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, emigrants from British Somaliland, Aden, and Kismayo were able to develop a consciousness as a dispersed and translocal people. This was in no small measure due to the racially enforced colonial order. Attaining the privileges of non-native status allowed them to travel and maintain links to their kin abroad. Like white settlers and British colonialists, Somali urbanites also retained a public identity distinct from that of other African populations. British passports from the colonial era, which many children and grandchildren proudly held on to as memorabilia, were testament to this status and freedom of movement.53
In 1920, Somali leaders formed the Ishakia Association, which also facilitated the reproduction of this group identity.54 Oral testimony suggests that the Ishakia Association probably began as a welfare society. According to Duthi Jama, the women’s branch required monthly contributions from its members and provided a fund in cases of emergency or death.55 Ege Musa, one of the few Kenyan Somalis literate in English, became its president in the 1930s.56 According to one of my interlocutors who knew him well, Ege Musa was a well-traveled and worldly individual. Born in British Somaliland and raised in Aden, he took a position on a ship in 1889. After traveling the world, he settled in Durban and worked at a hotel run by two European women, through which he acquired an education in English. Musa parlayed this experience into a position serving as an English-Somali translator for the Kenya colonial government. Once settled in Kenya, he married a woman from British Somaliland.57 By traveling throughout the empire, becoming proficient in English, and joining the Somali community in Kenya, Musa embodied a unique cosmopolitanism that owed itself to both British colonialism and the regional practices of Northeast Africa.
Had he stayed in South Africa, his children may not have retained the same relationship with the wider Somali community. Many Isaaq and Harti people juxtaposed themselves with the Somalis who had settled in South Africa, whom they claimed did not “maintain their culture.”58 There is reason to be somewhat skeptical of assertions of this nature. Claims to have resisted assimilation were often ways for my interlocutors, as James Clifford puts it, to “stage authenticity in opposition to external, often dominating alternatives.”59 In addition, I was unable to speak to those who had assimilated into Kenya and had lost their identity as “Somalis”—thus becoming invisible to my methods of identifying “representative” members of the community.
While many colonial officials and settlers saw Isaaq and Harti subjects as a “hybrid” people—who disturbed the line between settler and native—it is much harder to unearth how Somalis of this era conceptualized ideas of “localness,” “mixture,” and cosmopolitanism. Did Somali immigrants to Kenya understand themselves as people somehow in between cultures? Through what vernacular terms did they debate who was local and foreign, who was uprooted and worldly, and who had lost and who had retained their “culture”? Not all pasts are recoverable, and some questions cannot be answered through a fragmented historical record. What is clear, however, is that claiming non-native status was about more than positioning oneself in a vertical racial hierarchy. It also allowed members of the Somali community to maintain horizontal solidarities that cut across colonial boundaries.
THE TENSIONS OF EMPIRE
Economic circuits had brought the Isaaq and the Harti to far-flung territories, where they fell under the jurisdiction of different legal orders. Perceived to be “out of place” in the various territories in which they settled, Somalis were often the locus of contention over racial boundaries. Battles over racial