Read an Excerpt
Making Refuge
Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine
By Catherine Besteman, Caroline Turnbull Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7472-5
CHAPTER 1
Becoming Refugees
In a world of globalization disengagement from Africa's violence is no longer an option.
— Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest
In 1988, Cali Osman lived behind our dwelling in Banta in a row of neat mud houses with his three wives, ten children, divorced sister, several nephews, and elderly widowed aunt. Caliyow Isaaq and his large family — three wives, twelve children — lived across the path from our compound; his wife Amina (pictured in the introduction, fig. I.13) was a frequent guest in our house. Sheikh Axmed Nur (pictured in the introduction, fig. I.9) lived across the village from us with his two wives and six children. Although each family lived at the barest subsistence level, surviving on what they grew on their farms and sold for a few hundred dollars each year, each was considered wealthy in family and by reputation. Cali Osman was a nationally recognized poet in a country where poetry is revered, viewed by his community as an intelligent and wise elder often sought for his mediation and oratory skills. We spent many happy evenings tucked into a circle with other villagers listening to his poetry as a bonfire roared. Caliyow Isaaq was a master carpenter and head chef for the village feasts, often called on for his surgical abilities as well. Sheikh Axmed Nur, a powerful healer and religious leader, was known far and wide for his curing skills and the ability to communicate with the spiritual domain. As my mentors in village life in 1987–88, these men and their families spent countless hours with me, so the survivors from these families were among the first people from Banta with whom I sought to reconnect. Recounting the experiences of these three families reveals how war arrived in Banta, how the farmers became refugees, and how Somalia's civil war is a global story.
From their photographs, one could imagine Cali Osman, Caliyow Isaaq, and Sheikh Axmed Nur as peasant-everymen living at the very edges of the world: remote, isolated Banta was hundreds of miles from any paved roads, inaccessible for half the year during the rainy season, and lacking in electricity, running water, and any electronic form of communication with the outside world except Caliyow Isaaq's battery-powered radio. The women in their families typically owned one dress each; their children worked in the fields since there was no local school. It might seem logical to conclude that families like these in a village like Banta lived more or less off the global grid — unaffected by global events, by larger political and economic currents sweeping the globe.
In fact, quite the opposite is true. As many anthropological accounts demonstrate, people in villages like Banta are profoundly affected by global processes and decisions made by elite world leaders. The roots of the conflict that tore apart Banta stretch back to the Indian Ocean slave trade (which was stimulated, in part, by the transatlantic slave trade), weave through the colonial era with the imposition of European domination that reshaped African borders and identities, were nurtured through the political alignments demanded by global superpowers during the Cold War, shifted again with the imposition of "development" initiatives by the world's wealthier countries to remake the world's poorer countries through capitalist interventions, and exploded with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The stories of what happened during the war to the families of Cali Osman, Caliyow Isaaq, and Sheikh Axmed Nur are simultaneously global and local; their fates were shaped at the intersection of global and local politics.
Race and Ancestry
In contexts of civil war, violence often absorbs and makes harmfully meaningful historically shaped ethnic, racial, kin-based, or religious differences. The same is true in Somalia, where race and ancestry became vital identity markers when Somalia's civil war spread to the Jubba Valley. Our story begins a century ago, when the parents of Cali Osman and Sheikh Axmed Nur were born in the upper Shabelle Valley, located in the border region where Ethiopia and Somalia now meet, a geographical area contested by the Somalis who lived there, Ethiopians, Italian and British colonial militaries, and anticolonial Somali dervish militias. The families of Cali Osman and Sheikh Axmed Nur were members of one of Somalia's ethnic minority groups who came under the authority of one of Somalia's prominent clans. Their ancestors probably preceded the arrival of Somali speakers in the region centuries ago; linguists and historians suggest that after Somali speakers moved into the Horn, autochthonous groups like those along the upper Shabelle converted to Islam and adopted one of the Somali languages, accepting a client status in relation to the more recently arrived Somali pastoralist clans.
The constant violence and conflict created by the international political actors trying to carve out colonies both under and independent of European control at the turn of the twentieth century produced a flow of refugees out of the upper Shabelle region, which included the parents of both Cali Osman and Sheikh Axmed Nur. As members of a Somali-speaking ethnic minority group, both families migrated into the Jubba River valley, where other ethnic minorities already lived, to settle in a farming village on the banks of the river.
Detailed oral histories and early colonial documents describe how the Jubba Valley had been settled by people whose parents and grandparents had been slaves in Somalia. A robust Indian Ocean slave trade operated in the nineteenth century, bringing tens of thousands of slaves from the east coast of Africa up to Somalia, where they were put to work on Somali-owned plantations stretching south along the coast from Mogadishu. The plantations produced food for the Somali plantation owners but also for trade to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Slaves who eventually escaped or were manumitted, like Caliyow Isaaq's grandparents, fled into southern Somalia's Jubba River valley to form independent farming villages, where they were later joined by refugees from the violence along the upper Shabelle, including the families of Cali Osman and Sheikh Axmed Nur.
By the mid-twentieth century, slavery had officially ended under British and Italian colonization, and population movements had settled into a pattern: free farmers of slave or non- Somali ancestry lived in small sedentary villages along the river, and Somali pastoralists maintained a nomadic lifestyle on the plains stretching to either side of the river valley. Everyone in southern Somalia knew the status differences that separated those living in Jubba Valley farming villages from everyone else because of their stigmatized slave (or non-Somali) ancestry, linguistically recorded in the derogatory terms used to identify them, such as ooji and adoon. Riverine farmers were considered more "African," in contrast to the purported Arabic ancestry of ethnic Somalis, a difference recognized in the widespread use of mutually exclusive physical terms to define the two groups: jareer, which means "hard hair," described those of slave or non-Somali ancestry, and jileec, which means "soft," described those identified as ethnic Somalis. Although many Jubba Valley farmers shared languages, religion, and many cultural practices with other Somalis, a ban on intermarriage between the two groups maintained the former's inferior status, as did Italian colonial labor policies that targeted farmers, but not pastoralists, for forced labor requirements.
During my stay in Banta, I carefully documented the ways in which local residents mediated and managed the tensions provoked by Somali understandings of hierarchy and inequality that prized those of jileec status and subjugated those identified as jareer. Despite their non-Somali ancestry, everyone in Banta claimed membership in a Somali clan, either on the basis of the clan identity of the person who had originally enslaved their ancestors, or through an ancestor's later adoption into a clan for protection and identity within Somali society. Scholars describe Somali kinship as a segmentary lineage structure, in which every Somali is a member of one of five major clan families (Darood, Dir, Isaaq, Rahanweyn, and Hawiye), each of which encompasses large groups of lineages in a cascading set of lineage-based kinship groups determined patrilineally. Every Somali claims membership in a particular lineage of a particular clan, and can identify his or her relationship to every other Somali through tracing his or her connections through the overarching kinship system. The lineage and clan structure provided the basis for social and political life, including knowing one's enemies and allies when conflict occurred.
Banta included families who claimed membership in three of Somalia's five major clans (Darood, Rahanweyn, and Hawiye), although the connections between families of different clan membership far outweighed the distinctions among them. In Banta, people married and shared friendships across clan lines, and when compensation had to be paid for a crime committed by a villager against someone from outside the village, all of Banta's families contributed rather than just the offender's clan relatives. In short, lineage and clan membership was far more important for claiming membership within broader Somali society than it was for structuring life within the village.
The jareer villagers in Banta used their membership in Somali clans to negotiate their relationships with the jileec Somali pastoralists who lived on the plains stretching away from the riverbanks: the Darood to the west and the Rahanweyn and Hawiye to the east. Because of their social status above those farmers identified as jareer, Somali (jileec) pastoralists who entered Jubba Valley villages seeking water or food felt entitled to assault, harass, and intimidate local farmers with relative impunity. My field notes are filled with stories about pastoralists grazing their animals on farmers' ripening crops and assaulting those who attempted to defend their fields against invading hungry cows. My Banta neighbors usually explained this abuse as the behavior of particularly aggressive Somali individuals rather than as an expression of collective discrimination by pastoralist (jileec) Somalis against minority (jareer) farmers, and they attempted time and again to use the language of clan to seek compensation and mediation for their injuries.
While the majority of Banta villagers claimed to be affiliated with jileec Somali clans who lived to the east of the Jubba River valley, several Banta families maintained close ties with jileec Somali pastoralist families of the Darood clan, whose territory stretched to the west of the Jubba Valley. Xassan, the head of the village in whose compound I lived, had a close relationship with a Darood pastoralist family because his wife, Hamara, claimed Darood clan membership. Hamara's father, Bilaal, was a locally powerful elder from Kakole, a village near Banta also on the west bank of the Jubba River, which was almost entirely populated by his extended family, all of whom claimed Darood clan membership. During my year in Banta I spent dozens of hours interviewing Bilaal about local history, including the history of slavery that his family shared with most villagers in the Jubba Valley. His grandfather, captured in Tanzania for enslavement in Somalia, had assumed Darood clan identity after gaining his freedom, and his offspring continued to claim that identity, seeking solidarity with the Darood pastoralists who lived in the bush to the west of Banta and Kakole.
In addition to the kinship and trading ties that many village families maintained with pastoralists living in the bush outside Banta, several former pastoralist Darood families had settled in Banta after losing their livestock to drought and disease, maintaining a neighborly but guarded relationship with other villagers. Maxamed Gedi, his brother Said, Xussein, and other Darood arrivals joined the village after receiving land grants from village elders. Although the male Darood village residents were recognized as rather severe and hostile personalities, they never caused any outright trouble within the village during my stay.
Despite the villagers' efforts to claim a foothold in Somalia's system of clans, I soon learned that the Darood pastoralist families with whom they traded in the bush outside Banta did not share their perception of membership in Somali society. After witnessing numerous instances of abuse by pastoralists against villagers, followed by mediation by clan and village elders to determine compensation, I began interviewing Darood pastoralist leaders from the bush surrounding Banta about their perception of shared clan allegiances with the villagers. In our interviews, they scoffed at the efforts of middle valley farmers to seek membership in Somali kin groups. One local Darood leader explained that the Jubba Valley farmers could never be treated as equal lineage members and avoided reenslavement by his clan only because of national laws against slavery. Siad Barre had in fact outlawed the entire clan system in Somalia, making clan- and slave-based hierarchies and distinctions illegal. Although it is hard to describe the dictator as a protector of human rights, the Somali Darood clan leaders living outside of Banta insisted that Barre's antislavery laws were the only thing keeping them from reenslaving Jubba Valley farmers.
So in 1987–88, a détente based on a mutually recognized inequality between jareer and jileec residents characterized life in the middle valley. While status differences gave jileec pastoralists the upper hand in compensation negotiations when they harmed villagers, shared clan membership between some pastoralist and farmer families provided a language to seek mediation and compensation, even if it was usually paltry and begrudging. Within the village, jileec former pastoralists of the Darood clan held no special power because they were so clearly in the minority and received land for farming only through the good graces of the jareer village elders. Banta farmers held allegiances to both their village and their clans; having never been forced to choose sides, they could maintain an imagined balance of clan and village associations that allowed them to navigate the status differences between jileec and jareer as best they could. No one in Banta realized how murderously meaningful the status hierarchy separating jareer from jileec would become.
The Cold War Comes to the Jubba Valley
When independence from colonial control arrived in 1960, the parents of Cali Osman, Caliyow Isaaq, and Sheikh Axmed Nur had survived the forced labor campaigns of the Italian colonizers in the Jubba Valley as well as the British-Italian skirmishes that passed control over the Jubba Valley back and forth between the British and the Italians until independence in 1960. The colonial-era conflict in the upper Shabelle region had come to an unquiet conclusion in the mid-twentieth century when international powers ultimately settled on a border between Somalia and Ethiopia that granted to Ethiopia a large chunk of Somali-inhabited territory. Somalis were understandably outraged, and a discourse of irredentism — a desire to reunite within one nation-state all the territory occupied by Somali speakers — pervaded nationalist Somali rhetoric after independence in 1960.
Siad Barre came to power as Somalia's president in a coup in 1969, advocating a political platform he called scientific socialism. He initially allied himself with the Soviet Union, from whom he received weaponry, military assistance, and economic support. Seeking to fulfill his irredentist goals, Barre launched an attack against Ethiopia in 1977 to reclaim the Somali- inhabited territory ceded to Ethiopia decades earlier. But when the Soviet Union chose to back Ethiopia, their other client in the Horn of Africa, Siad Barre expelled the Soviets from Somalia and turned to the United States for patronage, offering access to Somalia for military bases in return for massive foreign aid. In the context of Cold War geopolitics, the United States saw Somalia as a strategic prize because of its location on the Indian Ocean and its proximity to the Persian Gulf. During the 1980s, the United States made Somalia its second largest recipient of foreign aid in Africa, granting Barre hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars in military and economic aid. Analysts estimate that Barre received over a billion dollars in foreign aid from international sources during the 1980s, an astounding figure for a lightly populated, arid country with few natural resources.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making Refuge by Catherine Besteman, Caroline Turnbull. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
