Somali, “the” Isaaq, or as “Africans,” “Arabs,” and so on. The past weighed heavily on current generations, serving as both a resource for imagining new futures and a threatening reminder of dissident, outdated, or embarrassing subjectivities.
Moreover, carrying out interviews in different locations allowed me to let go of ideas that people naturally belong to specific “lands,” that fieldwork gives a scholar privileged access to “local knowledge,” or that one can simply enter or exit a defined “zone” of culture.83 Moving to such diverse sites was challenging (each time I traveled to a new area, I had to gain people’s trust anew and get accustomed to new cultural and linguistic norms). However, this productive disorientation also led to a heightened awareness of the missteps, misunderstandings, and negotiated power dynamics that color any research encounter.84
Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that “lived inequalities yield uneven historical power.”85 One way this manifested itself was in the gendered nature of my interviews, which were skewed toward men. Despite my best efforts, I had a difficult time speaking to women. Unless they were recognized community leaders, older women often directed me to elder men, who were widely seen to be the bearers of public history. Men also tended to have more experience with the performative aspects of history telling and more familiarity with the narrative expectations of being interviewed by a white foreigner. When I did speak to women, they sometimes told me stories that foregrounded the accomplishments of their male predecessors, thus reinforcing the widespread notion that it is men that make history. To some extent, such responses stemmed from the limitations of my own methodology and approach. Over time, I became much better at approaching women and asking questions that motivated them to talk about their experiences and understandings of the past. However, no feminist methodology can fully overcome the power imbalances that shape the interview encounter or the patriarchal dynamics that influence how women relate to narrative history (problems that are hardly exclusive to Africa or the Islamic world).86 In order to reconstruct the lives and experiences of women, I often had to turn to texts written by Europeans or oral testimony by men, which I have analyzed with attention toward traces of female authorship.
While oral testimony plays an important role in my analysis, this book also draws upon extensive archival research at the British National Archives and the Kenya National Archives. The bulk of my source material came from a range of low- to high-ranking bureaucrats in the East Africa Protectorate and, later, the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. I also relied upon records from officials in neighboring territories, such as the Protectorate of British Somaliland, and administrators in the Colonial, Foreign, and Home Offices in the United Kingdom. Africans wrought their influence on these archives in various ways, whether by writing letters and petitions directly to government officials or by affecting the knowledge and understanding of British administrators. Archival documents (and the scholarly work that draws upon them) also made their way into people’s hands, shaping oral testimony. Thinking about distinct oral and written domains or distinct “African” and “European” spheres of knowledge (a dichotomy that becomes even less relevant for the postcolonial archive) obscures their mutual imbrication.87 Treating sources (both oral and written) as situated performances (with different rules of inclusion and exclusion, privileged informants, and stylistic and rhetorical strategies) proved more analytically meaningful.88
Dispensing with the notion that there exists an authentic, objective, or unmediated voice, I instead focused on amassing a diversity of narratives.89 Woven throughout this text are multiple archives comprising colonial documents, transcribed oral histories, poetry, memoirs, and other sources. For more recent decades (when government archival records were either closed or less substantial), I relied more heavily on newspaper articles and human rights and NGO reports. Using such varied materials brought important methodological and political questions to the fore. How do people invoke the past in everyday life to comment upon and intervene in the present? Whose narratives do you privilege when writing a scholarly historical account? How does one read sources for hidden silences and elisions? In what ways did my race, comparative privilege, and disciplinary training shape the production of knowledge? Each chapter grapples with these questions and others. The structure of this book thus follows a traditional narrative and builds up an argument about epistemology.
Many of the chapters serve as mediations on the limits of historicism. Chapter 4, for instance, draws upon oral poetry, showing that Pan-Somali nationalism was not merely an elite project, but rather one shaped by and oriented toward rank-and-file nomadic people. Such sources resist easy historicism, as it is sometimes difficult to determine their exact date of production and authorship. They thus challenge certain scholarly conventions, including the commitment to liberal agency and historical time. However, these poems and songs also provide very important insight into idioms, metaphors, and discursive practices that cannot be easily grasped through the archives alone. Communities record and transmit the past in ways that may unsettle scholarly epistemologies, which require that historians consider the disciplinary limitations under which they operate.90 A number of chapters also examine the problems of politically irresponsible historicism. Acknowledging the dangers in authorizing a singular version of the past, this book points to different methods of analyzing politically sensitive topics (including through reference to divine intervention).
One of the greatest difficulties I encountered was carrying out research in a highly charged and politicized setting. Oral history is often endorsed as a means of democratizing history and giving “ordinary” people a voice.91 Yet various Kenyan and Somali political thinkers have used history to incite ethnonationalist and religious divisions, which in turn shaped the way ordinary people came to view their neighbors. Some Kenyan citizens regarded Somalis with suspicion and resented their presence in the country. By the same token, some Somalis had internalized derogatory views of other Kenyan ethnic groups and perpetuated the chauvinistic idea that they were not fully “African.” It is important, however, to recognize that such sentiments were far from universal. Since the start of the Somali civil war, Kenya has taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees—far more than any Western nation. While the country is not immune from anti-immigrant sentiments that plague nations throughout the world, it has also served as a refuge for people across the region and has often succeeded in accommodating very diverse ways of life.
Understanding these complex dynamics requires deconstructing the Manichaean division between colonizer and colonized. As Eve Troutt Powell reminds us, scholars must remain attentive to colonial forms of othering, while at the same time recognizing that colonized African subjects were also capable of excluding fellow Africans, reinforcing hierarchical forms of domination, and perpetuating colonial modes of racialization. African states like Egypt and Ethiopia have engaged in practices that have led some to label them as internal colonizers.92 Members of the Somali community have, at times, harbored racist views toward other East Africans, promoted the idea that they themselves were not “African,” and expressed religious chauvinism against Christians or other “inferior” Muslims. In the case of Kenya, however, discriminatory thinking has not always mapped onto political power. While some Somalis hold derogatory views of “Africans,” they also face marginalization and are often subjected to discriminatory treatment by the Kenyan state. By showing the ways in which prejudiced thinking intersects with structures of power, this book reveals the sometimes-blurry line between victim and victimizer, while remaining attuned to important distinctions between institutionalized racism and bigotry.93
Conducting oral history was also challenging because the past was a highly emotive topic for many people. After independence in 1963, Somalis endured significant trauma at the hands of Kenyan officials, who often acted with the tacit and sometimes explicit support of the British and the US governments. Many were eager to speak to me about these painful memories of state violence and repression. Though some were suspicious of my intentions or simply unwilling to revive such painful memories, others saw me as a potential mouthpiece for highlighting their stories of suffering and marginalization, or an advocate who could connect their stories to an international human rights agenda. Rather than simply “compiling a record of horror, a kind of case for the prosecution,” however, this book tries to uncover the logic that facilitated violence and made the relationship between