Possible Spaces of Somali Belonging explores representations of Somali resettlement to understand the mechanics of contemporary belonging and the challenges faced by Western societies as they attempt to 'integrate' Somali migrants. How do particular representations contribute to or detract from Somali belonging?
In the contexts of Australia and Italy-taken as case studies-Somalis are marginalised in different ways. With a multi-disciplinary approach, this book examines different forms of Somali representation in Australia and Italy that engender a sense of belonging and expands exclusive definitions of nationhood.
Islamic Studies Series - Volume 21
Possible Spaces of Somali Belonging explores representations of Somali resettlement to understand the mechanics of contemporary belonging and the challenges faced by Western societies as they attempt to 'integrate' Somali migrants. How do particular representations contribute to or detract from Somali belonging?
In the contexts of Australia and Italy-taken as case studies-Somalis are marginalised in different ways. With a multi-disciplinary approach, this book examines different forms of Somali representation in Australia and Italy that engender a sense of belonging and expands exclusive definitions of nationhood.
Islamic Studies Series - Volume 21
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Overview
Possible Spaces of Somali Belonging explores representations of Somali resettlement to understand the mechanics of contemporary belonging and the challenges faced by Western societies as they attempt to 'integrate' Somali migrants. How do particular representations contribute to or detract from Somali belonging?
In the contexts of Australia and Italy-taken as case studies-Somalis are marginalised in different ways. With a multi-disciplinary approach, this book examines different forms of Somali representation in Australia and Italy that engender a sense of belonging and expands exclusive definitions of nationhood.
Islamic Studies Series - Volume 21
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780522869309 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Melbourne University Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/13/2016 |
| Series: | Islamic Studies Series |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 276 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Possible Spaces of Somali Belonging
By Vivian Gerrand
Melbourne University Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016 Vivian GerrandAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-522-86929-3
CHAPTER 1
Uprootings: A History of Somalia
In 1994 Shirin Ramanzali Fazel reflected on the land of her birth and the history of the country that had led her to write her memoir, Far Away from Mogadishu:
Somalia. The Egyptians baptized you 'Land of the Gods', and the Queen of Sheba loved your incense and your myrrh. In 1333 Ibn Battuta, in his travels, described Mogadishu as a large city, rich with trade. There, fabrics were woven and then exported to Egypt and other countries.
Somalia, land of trade with India and with China. You had your courts, kings and queens. The nomads wandered inland, free men with proud faces behind their caravans of camels.
Somalia, land of poets. Sufis and Saints departed from your shores to spread the word of Allah, until Vasco de Gama destroyed every last one of your sultanates, burning all that he could not take away with him.
Somalia, land of conquest. From that time on, no more trade. Your terrorized people fled inland. The European colonizers came and raped the land, sowing the seed of future horrors. After independence, dictatorships — puppet governments that are convenient for the superpowers.
Somalia, my land. Now you have exploded; you could not go on any longer! You no longer respect anything: not tradition, religion, or tribes ... Men no longer distinguish between brothers, sisters, children. With their kalashnikovs in hand they feel like gods. They rob, pillage, rape and kill. They impair their senses with drugs. You have neither mother nor father anymore. You have no compassion for anything. You destroy your people, the future and the past.
Somalia has been devastated by years of intractable conflict: the capital city Mogadishu's buildings were largely reduced to rubble by two decades of civil war; attempts at governance of the country have been, until very recently, ineffective. In order to understand the historical trajectories that inform the contours of possible spaces of belonging for Somalis who have fled the war and resettled in Italy and in Australia, this chapter draws on an existing body of scholarship to give an overview of Somali history, politics and society. After briefly outlining the nation's pre-colonial history, it emphasises the context of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa, which significantly shaped Somali culture and society. The divisions resulting from the colonial administration of Somalia are considered by many scholars to have contributed to the country's unrest.
This is a history that is crucial for understanding Somali imaginings of identity and belonging in the diaspora. In observations of Somalia, it is perhaps ironic that some scholars in their political and historical writings have proposed the country to be the perfect example of the nation state due to its perceived cultural and linguistic homogeneity. Somalia's 'pastoral democracy', a term coined by Africanist scholar I.M. Lewis in the 1950s, has been idealised by scholars such as Ernest Gellner. Gellner considered the country as classically post-colonial insofar as it was forced to adopt a postcolonial perception of history at the time of its inception, when, under colonial influence, prefabricated notions of the past, institutional models and political systems were inherited. During General Siad Barre's military rule in the 1980s, Gellner considered Somalia to be:
[O]ne of the examples of the blending of old tribalism based on social structure with the new, anonymous nationalism based on shared culture. The sense of lineage affiliation is strong and vigorous (notwithstanding the fact that it is officially reprobated, and its invocation actually proscribed), and it is indeed crucial for the understanding of internal politics.
Yet there is no consensus on this notion of shared culture and history. Lewis, for instance, has emphasised instead the social divisions within Somali society due to tribal paradigms that tended towards anarchy and fragmentation rather than unity. Lewis writes that attempts:
to devalue and even extirpate these internal divisions, which always threatened national solidarity, assumed many forms, ranging from denial to political suppression. The most colourful, perhaps, were the public burials (and other measures) instituted by the dictator General [Siad] at the height of his powers and in his 'Scientific Socialist' phase.
In turn US anthropologist Catherine Besteman has questioned Lewis' assertion that such loyalties always threatened national solidarity, drawing on her 1987 fieldwork research in the Middle Jubba Valley:
A unitary focus on clan rivalry as the destructive force fuelling genocidal conflict and state disintegration in Somalia overlooks the many other aspects of Somali society, politics and history that informed people's daily lives prior to 1991. It also fails to explain why clan tensions should suddenly erupt on so grand a scale and with such brutal devastation, apparently for the first time in history.
What is clear is that each of the different historical perspectives instils its own set of problems, creating multiple visions of reality that advance different solutions to the country's crises. Drawing on a body of historical literature on Somalia to help understand this complex situation, this chapter examines Somalia's pre-colonial history and extends the analysis then to colonial conquest and administration. In addition, it takes into account the period of Independence from 1960 and the Socialist epoch that began with Barre's coup in 1969. The chapter concludes by drawing together more recent perspectives that have emerged in the wake of civil war.
Pre-colonial History and the Partition of Africa
Situated in the north of East Africa within a region commonly called the Horn of Africa (see Figure 1.1), the pre-colonial history of the area now known as Somalia is multi-layered and, inevitably, contested. The name of the country is said to derive from the Somali Muslim Cushitic-speaking population who live within and beyond Somalia's borders. While there are a variety of cultures within the Horn of Africa, certain characteristics, such as geography and religion, are common to the entire region. Islam and Coptic Christianity are the two most widely practised religions within the Horn. Ethiopia was a home to Christianity until the fifteenth century when Islam expanded into the region from the Eritrean coast. Somalia is still considered an Islamic country.
Located near the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa has, for centuries, been a landing place subject to colonisation by populations from the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Arab tribes are said to have descended on the Gulf of Aden coast in the seventh century, establishing the Sultanate of Adal. During the sixteenth century, the Sultanate of Adal disintegrated into small states. The Arab colonisers who had settled along the coastline in successive waves gradually migrated from the north to the south towards the centre of the Somalian peninsula, superimposing themselves on the native populations, such as the Bantu, now a minority in Somalia. Writing at the time of the Italian colonisation of Somalia, Tommaso Carletti saw the activities of these colonisers as 'compact groups of Somalis' migrating 'from the dry, sandy and rocky terrain of the north towards the wetter regions touched by the Uebi Scebeli and Giuba [Jubba] rivers'. He believed these areas were likely to have appeared to the Arab colonisers as a kind of mirage or Promised Land.
Somalis are believed to have populated the Horn of Africa around 1000 AD. The majority of Somalis were nomadic pastoralists who, as a result of geographic and climactic factors, embarked on a vast movement inland from the Gulf of Aden. Those who settled among the Bantu cultivators in the south adjusted to a more sedentary existence built around agricultural activities, whereas the majority of Somalis continued a mainly pastoral existence. Prior to colonisation, Somalia's agricultural economies operated in autarky while the coastal centres of the north and south maintained commercial trade with the outside world. Without a fleet proper, these small centres of the country became landing docks for colonial and oriental empires rather than becoming actual commercial centres in their own right. Trade with the outside world was established through social networks and conducted in the currency of the visiting commercial partners or by bartering.
By the end of the eighteenth century, a Sultan from Muscat, Oman, who dominated Zanzibar island (off the Tanganyika coast), extended his authority and interests to several Benadir ports. (The noun 'Benadir' here denotes the entire southern Somalia.) At a time and place in which a sovereign or centralised statehood was unheard of, the Sultan's administration of the ports of Benadir constituted the sole power beside that of the traditional authorities customarily and autonomously formed by each tribe. It was into this geopolitical climate that the European colonisers entered at the end of the nineteenth century.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, France, Egypt and Britain successively occupied parts of the Somali coast. An Anglo-French agreement in 1888 would establish a border between different parts of the peninsula, later to be known as Djibouti and the British protectorate of Somaliland. During the 1880s, a recently unified Italy viewed Somalia as a potential bridge to access Ethiopia. The partition of Somaliland was 'virtually complete' by 1897 and, in theory, 'the frontiers of the new Somali territories had been defined'. Lewis summarises the various European interests at play in the division of East Africa:
Britain's interest in the Somali area stemmed from her possession of Aden which had been acquired by force in 1839 as a station on the short route to India ... The other powers who began to display interest in the Red Sea coast had more ... directly imperial ambitions. In 1859 the French consular agent at Aden obtained the cession of the Danakil port of Obock. Three years later a treaty was drawn up by which France purchased the port outright from the Afar and the French flag was hoisted ... Empowered by the Italian foreign minister to select a place on the Red Sea coast for an Italian settlement, Giuseppe Sapeto, a former missionary in Ethiopia, in 1869 obtained an interest in the port of Assab on the Eritrean coast. In the following year, Assab was bought outright from the local Afar by an Italian shipping company which proposed to run services through the Suez canal and the Red Sea to India.
An 1889 accord with Prussia and London granted Italy the Port of Chisimaio alongside another four Benadir ports and consolidated these with the southern part of the country that was surrendered by the Sultan of Zanzibar. In 1925 the Italian occupation of Southern Somalia extended into previously Kenyan territory east of the Jubba River. In 1936 a province of Italian East Africa was formed in conjunction with areas of Ethiopia in which Somali was spoken. At the time of the scramble for Africa, European powers had paid little attention to the settlement patterns of existing local cultures; thus the borders that were imposed to create the various nations reflected the interests of the European powers rather than those of the indigenous peoples of Somalia. The tragic consequences of this imposition can be noted in many border disputes between Ethiopia and Somalia, which gave rise to the 1977 Ogaden War (essentially a battle over whether eastern Ethiopia was in fact western Somalia), that continued for decades.
During the period of the colonial division of Somalia, most of the territory was allocated to Italy. The relative importance Italy attributed to Somalia — compared with, for instance, the Abyssinian Empire — determined its consequent development as a colony. Italian territorial conquest, a common feature of colonial politics during the Fascist regime more than at other times, would bear upon the formation of cultural and political categories of the Somalian state in important ways.
Unlike British Somaliland, which remained 'a neglected backwater' from 1900 until the 1920s, Italy consolidated its clout in the region by developing a colony of settlers which undertook commercial trading in the region between the Uebi Scebeli and Jubba rivers in southern Somalia. The Italian administration of Somalia served a number of Italian national interests. Helen Chapin Metz has noted that it was motivated by a threefold desire to, 'relieve population pressure at home', engage a 'civilizing Roman mission' and to increase Italian prestige through overseas colonisation.
The fact that the Horn of Africa was known to Italians as 'L'Africa Orientale Italiana' suggests the extent to which the Italian presence was formative for the countries in the region. Italian postcoloniality is an understudied area, according to Fabrizio De Donno and Neelam Srivastava. They attribute this fact to 'the impossibility of access to official colonial records for several decades' post-1945, and to 'the general refusal of the Italian governing class to engage in a sustained and public debate about colonialism, as had occurred in other European ex-colonial nations'. Alessandro Triulzi is concerned with what he terms the 'ambiguous displacements' of colonial memory within both Italian society and Italy's ex-colonies. Likening 'colonial memory and its renewed positioning' to 'back-up files which can be accessed according to convenience', he argues that the 'the legend of Italian colonialism as different, more tolerant, and more humane than other colonialisms remains obstinately at large', in spite of the re-emergence of Italian colonialism 'as a topic of heated debate'.
Italian colonial administration of Somalia, from the partition of Africa in the 1880s until Somalia's independence in 1960, has been regarded by Europeans as brief and benevolent in comparison with, for example, French and British colonialism. Indeed, alongside the notion of a 'weak colonialism', the Italiani, brava gente myth has been central to constructions of Italian identity. The writings of Robert Hess exemplify this perception:
Italian imperialist thought at the time of the partition of Africa had little connection with the generally accepted ideology of European imperialism. It had no place for theories of social Darwinism, Realpolitik, racism, or extreme nationalism. Its main theoretical arguments were drawn either from Risorgimento leaders like Giuseppe Mazzini, Vincenzo Gioberti, and Cesare Balbo or from the commercial expansionists.
More recent perspectives such as those of Alessandro Aruffo and Angelo Del Boca have countered the idea of a benign Italian colonial presence by reviewing the violence of Italian colonial expansion. Aruffo focuses on the trajectories of several key figures: he notes that the 'explorations' of traveller Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti (1888–91), who was financed by the Italian Geographic Society to explore the Somali Peninsula, 'were accompanied by gratuitous acts of violence inflicted on native populations and villages'. Likewise, Prince Eugenio Ruspoli instigated massacres whenever locals were in his way, authorising 'his indigenous troops to take the robbery of villages into their own hands'.
A civil member of the military expedition, Maurizio Sacchi, viewed attempts to 'civilise' Somalis as 'futile'. His attitude was that it was necessary to simply 'make them behave'. This, he purported, could not be achieved 'without guns or sticks'. The absence of a coherent political plan in the management of Benadir, which was controlled by over 500 mercenaries who were engaged in myriad commercial activities, led to ambitious projects to transform Benadir into a colony via militaristic advances.
Del Boca considers the hubristic aims of Cesare Maria De Vecchi, who governed Italian Somalia from 1923 until 1928, which appear as an extension of Sacchi's approach to the colonisation of Somalia. It was De Vecchi's intention to 're-make' the country, beginning in 1924 by ordering the disarmament of the locals in southern Somalia. Without any justification, De Vecchi set in motion the invasion of the Galgial Bersane and Badi Addo areas, which were conquered by cattle raids, the bombing of villages that were later set on fire and the killing of locals.
In fact, Colonial politics produced social effects and cultural influences that persist into present times. The widespread militarism that continues to characterise Somali political culture is one such effect and may be directly attributed to colonial politics during the Fascist period. Colonial troops collaborated with particular Somali subjects in a relationship of subordination rather than in one of entire subjection to colonial power.
In the agricultural colonisation of Benadir, on the other hand, the relationship was one of subjection of the rural populations of the southern agricultural areas. Through these differential relations a system of racial discrimination was formed, altering the ways in which ethnic groups related to one another. The mechanisation of agriculture on agrarian plantation farms, introduced by Italian agents, had this effect. While usefully performed in the production sector, which effectively increased exports, the mechanisation failed to infiltrate domestic agricultural methods practised by cereal growers, one of Somalia's most vulnerable groups alongside livestock farmers. The employees of these two sectors would be subjected, in various ways, to the actions of colonial policies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Possible Spaces of Somali Belonging by Vivian Gerrand. Copyright © 2016 Vivian Gerrand. Excerpted by permission of Melbourne University Publishing Limited.
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Table of Contents
- Chapter - 1: Uprootings: A History of Somalia
- Chapter - 2: Somalis in the Diaspora: Comparing Settlement Trajectories
- Chapter - 3: Media Framing, Representation and the Conditions of 'Taking Place' in Australia
- Chapter - 4: Acts of Citizenship: Italian Publishing Houses and Their Publications
- Chapter - 5: Re-groundings and Re-memberings: Belonging in Literature
- Chapter - 6: Bodies in Public Space
- Chapter - 7: Engrammatic Belongings? Imaging Somali Identities in Rome