Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery

In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation—state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a half a million people and the flight of a million refugees.

During the civil war, scholarly and popular analyses explained Somalia's disintegration as the result of ancestral hatreds played out in warfare between various clans and subclans. In Unraveling Somalia, Catherine ...