British Somaliland

An Administrative History, 1920-1960

Brock Millman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780367868840
• eBook ISBN: 9781317975434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

British Somaliland provides a history of the administration of the British Somaliland Protectorate from the time when Somaliland first became governable, following the defeat of Abdullah Hassan, to independence.

Describing the interplay between general imperial policies, and greater realities and developments in Somaliland, the focus of the book remains on the mechanism by which the Protectorate was operated. The regime that developed was, in the end, a highly autocratic despotism, generally benign but occasionally predatory. Independence, when it arrived, was, in retrospect, a tragedy. Somaliland was absorbed into Somalia and a governmental style which suited the conditions of the Protectorate was dissolved into something very different. Since the collapse of Somalia, re-emergent Somaliland appears to be attempting to re-connect to a past remembered as something of a golden age.

Highly topical, as Somaliland is re-emerging, this book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of African History, Imperial History and British History.

1 Somaliland and Somalis

The ‘Horn of Africa’, the Somalia peninsula, is a hard-scrabble place inhabited by a hard-scrabble people, the Somalis. The Northern half of the Horn – that portion which later became the British Protectorate in Somaliland – is, in general, the least prepossessing of the Somali territories. Aside from a narrow coastal belt, bordering the sweltering Gulf of Aden, most of the country is of very little value to anyone, and is hard to love even for the nomads who live there still. The coastal belt is very constricted, and boxed in by the Karkaar Mountains. Beyond the mountains stretches the Somali plain – high, riverless, almost waterless, and featureless – which constitutes most of the country. These stretch beyond the current boundaries of Somalia up to the Ethiopian highlands, and are the nomadic Somalis’ natural range.

Temperatures throughout the Horn are often brutally hot, except in the mountains. In most of Somalia, daily temperature averages between 30 to 40° Celsius. In Somaliland, there is greater variance. Here, in December, there are days during which temperatures of 45° are possible on the humid coast, but by contrast. in the nearby mountains, the temperature can dip below zero.

In most years, most of the peninsula gets less than 20 inches of rain. In the North Eastern desert, six inches of rain makes an abundant year and as little as two paltry inches are possible. For the inhabitants, rainfall defines the seasons. Somalia experiences two rainy seasons, the gu from April to June (an individual Somali counts his time on Earth by the number of gus he has experienced) and the day in October and November. Dry spells intervene. The hagaa lasts from July to September. During the terrible jiilaal (December to March), life always trying and can become a veritable ordeal. Beyond the mountains, vegetation, as in other arid countries, is seasonal. In dry periods, little survives apart from thickets of thorny scrubs and occasional clusters of acacia trees. In rainy seasons, the thickets bloom, the trees come to life, and grasses abound, which are excellent for foraging. Because there is little standing water in Somaliland – no rivers, lakes or ponds – life depends on the rains. When the rains fail, life fails.

The Somalis are pastoralists, herders of sheep, camels and goats, and always have been. It is likely that for millennia their wealth has been measured in livestock; indeed, human life is measured in livestock (100 camels is the price for an adult man, and 50 for an adult woman). While the intrusion of the modern world has produced towns and a sedentary population, most of the inhabitants of Somaliland continue to live their lives by ancient patterns.¹

In their own minds, Somalis are Arabs, descendent from noble clans who emigrated from Arabia in the tenth century. Darood, the eponymous founder of the Darood tribal confederacy dominant in Somalia generally, is said to have led the emigration followed by his kinsmen Ishaak, founder of the Ishaak confederacy, and Dir, from whom the Esa and Gadabursi peoples claim descent. It seems likely, however, that a few Arabs imposed themselves on a more numerous African people, already resident, and already living in the manner in which most Somalis continue to live, and that Arab acculturation was more profound in the North than in the South.² Whatever the case, these patriarchal culture heroes are held to have founded tribes which continue to bear their names, and spawned sons who founded clans, grandsons, founders of sub-clans, and so it went. The nomadic nature of Somali life has reinforced the importance of clan and lineage. As is generally the case among nomads, clan becomes necessarily important in establishing identity as other factors – attachment to a particularly geographic patrimony, or nationality rooted in settled life – are simply not available.³

Even still, Somalis exhibit extreme clannishness, even relative to other segmentary groups. It is an ignorant child who cannot recite his lineage (abtirsiinyo) through the male line for at least 20 or 30 generations, although it is unusual for Somalis to proceed beyond 22 or 23 names unless they desire to stress the difference between themselves and somebody else in order to establish grounds for a quarrel.⁴ Rivalry between and within tribal groups is pronounced, and the Darood/Ishaak contention is notorious. In much of Somaliland, identity based on confederacy, tribe, clan and sub-clan is everything. The largely Ishaak inhabitants of Somaliland retain these features of all Somalis to the highest degree. It was through Somaliland that the Somalis were Arabicized – the process more complete in the North than in the South – and it is here that the tombs of the clan founders are found.⁵ As a consequence, Northerners and Ishaaks are considered by other Somalis to be more ‘belligerent, less law abiding, arrogant, [and] destructive. Here, a man without cattle is nothing. Here, fighting is really the only other widely accepted male role’.⁶ This is just to say that Somalilanders are held to be more typically ‘Somali’, for good and bad, than their kinsmen elsewhere.

Somalis, with very few exceptions, are Muslim and Islam is immensely important to Somali identity.⁷ Conversion appears to have occurred early, through the Northern ports and Islam quickly supplied the only high culture Somalis knew or ultimately wanted. In theory, Somalis are orthodox Shafiite Sunnis. In practice, popular Islam has been strongly influenced by tribal notions through the agency of Sufi orders which have provided something of a centripetal counterweight to the disintegrating effect of clannishness. If not everybody can be Habar Awal, for example, all male Muslims can seek entrance to the Salahiya order. In Somalia, Sufism and Islam more broadly have normally been difficult to separate, and indeed, local Sufism has come to share some features of Somaliness. Amongst Sufis, genealogy is as important as among Somalis generally. Local shayks draw their authority through a chain leading from the local founder of an order from whom they are often descended.⁸ At the local level, Sufi lodges are affiliated with tribes from which they acquire land and members and to which they recognise an obligation.⁹ Moreover, Sufi orders compete with some of the same vigour with which the clans compete. The Qadariya was the first established, and through the colonial period remained dominant and missionary. The Ahmadiya and derivative Salahiya were introduced into Somaliland in the latter nineteenth century, and during the colonial period, the Salahiya in particular became associated with Somali nationalism; indeed, it could almost be thought of as constituting pan-Somali nationalism in embryo. The Ahmadiya, introduced earlier, remained weakest but to some extent was most influential amongst the clans, given that it was primarily a teaching order and disproportionately assumed the responsibility of training wadads – itinerant bush-clergy responsible for providing such religious instruction as the nomads received, and in particular for teaching children to recite the necessary prayers and to read the Koran.¹⁰

Because the land is poor, it has never been able to support much government, and ‘government’ and ‘law’ are largely by-products of tribal society and practice, influenced by Islam. The Somali clans were poor, and necessarily nomadic. Settled life, especially in Somaliland, was very unusual and towns were very few. A few ports – Zeila and later Berbera on the Gulf of Aden – provided for the import of the few things the clansmen could afford and could not make for themselves. The Somalis generated no true nobility. It is true that clans had headmen, and that tribal confederacies sometimes had sultans. In reality, however, these were largely nominal positions, generating little respect and less privilege. Because notables were useful in helping resolve tribal disputes their voices might be given greater weight in tribal gatherings. For this reason, as well, they were not expected to participate in clan fights, or larger battles. Educated, cultivated men were too precious to risk. This did not mean, however, that they commanded obedience. On occasion the clans of a tribal section might rally behind a particularly charismatic notable to achieve some over-arching, collective objective. These purposes, however, were transitory, and when the aim was achieved, the authority disintegrated. The genius of the Somalis was essentially anarchic. Having never known government, the clansmen instinctively resisted it whenever some outside authority from time to time might seek to institute it.¹¹

Relations among the clans were guided by her (tribal custom), reinforced by religion. Contention within a clan was dealt with by a council (guurti) of notable men (birigageydo). If the issue could be equated to a precedent (gar curad) then the problem was generally resolved easily. If there was no precedent (gar ugub) then there was trouble, and other notables would be brought in to assist as arbitrators. The issue might even be referred to a Sultan for adjudication.¹² Very often, blood would be spilled in the interval before a solution, thus kicking off one of the interminable rounds of clan feuding so distressing for outsiders, but so integral to the Somali way. Disputes between lineage groups (rather than internal to them) almost invariably involved bloodshed. Lewis summarised:

In Somali lineage politics the assumption that might is right has overwhelming authority and personal rights, rights in livestock and rights of access to grazing and water, even if they are not always obtained by force, can only be defended against usurpation by force of arms. Political status is thus maintained by feud and war, and self-help – the resort of groups to the test of superior military power – is the ultimate arbiter in political relations. With this political philosophy it is not surprising that fighting in Northern Somaliland is a political institution of every-day life.¹³

After about six months, Gerald Hanley – once upon a time a District Officer – thought, you either got used to all the killing or you recognised that Somaliland was not for you. Even if you got use to it, the scale of the carnage was still angering, and yet there was nothing to be done. According to Hanley, it was simply the Somali way, and they were not going to change: they even liked it.¹⁴ Major Rayne, a predecessor, was more prosaic. The Somalis, he believed were quite simply ‘a race of maniacs’.¹⁵ Imperialism set itself to change this, as we shall see, and succeeded to an extent that is difficult to credit given the past or present of the region.

Somalis also knew war, generally civil war. It is not clear, in fact, that the notion ‘Somali’ even existed prior to the imperial period, as imperialists grouped together clans sharing a common language and ethnicity but divided to the knife by clan rivalry. Inter-clan disputes could sometimes reach dangerous proportions. Raiding became, effectively, open warfare. When the contending parties had inflicted enough damage on one another to satisfy honour, notables on each side would arrange an inter-tribal gathering at which the correct proportion of mag (blood money) would be assessed against each party, in accordance with custom and precedent. In the best case, an exchange of dia (weregeld: ‘man gold’) would take place and the issue would be resolved. In the worst case, the agreement would break down and a new round of raiding and counter-raiding, murder and reprisal would begin. Some feuds, as for example the unquenchable hostility between Ishaak and Darood tribesmen, were permanent fixtures of Somali politics.

Tribal raiding starkly illustrates, but also reinforces, the segmentary nature of Somali society. To inflict revenge, any kinsmen of an offender would serve the purpose: reprisal against the actual offender was not necessary. Similarly, Somali custom prescribed that dia was the responsibility of the collective rather than the individual, and for this purpose, clansmen divided themselves into voluntary dia-paying groups, perhaps the most critical and stable social unit recognised by tribal Somalis, as individuals bound themselves voluntarily to satisfy dia requirements incumbent upon member of the group. Among the tribal Ishaaks of Somaliland, Lewis counted 360 dia-paying groups in 1958.¹⁶ Similarly, when dia was paid, it did not pass in its entirety to the closest kin of the deceased but to the clan generally. The notion was, of course, that the loss of a man represented a material loss to the collective rather than simply to his dependents. Oddly for outsiders, as well, dia was payable regardless of the particulars of a case. Somali customary law simply did not recognise intent as an element of crime: a man killed purely by accident or even in self-defence was a loss to the collective just as certainly as a man deliberately murdered and compensation was required as certainly, demanded as confidently. However and why-ever it was shed, blood demanded suitable recompense. Tribal custom (her) was inexorable on this point. In most cases, her established the dia for an adult man at 100 camels, and for an adult woman at 50 camels.

Somali relations with the outer world were more than a little paradoxical. On the one hand, Somalis were natural xenophobes, a people of particular and peculiar characteristics inhabiting a remote land. Cultural prejudices, moreover, ran deep. It is probably important to remember in this regard, once again, that in their own minds Somalis believed themselves to be Arab aristocrats, surrounded in East Africa by unbelieving Blacks, the despised galla and kaffirs of whom the Ethiopians – traditional enemies of the Somalis – were the very epitome. It might be supposed that the Somalis would have some regard for their Arab kindred, and co-religionists, across the Gulf of Aden. In truth, the only Arabs that Somalis customarily met were Adeni traders, whom they despised.¹⁷ It might be, as well, that Somali tribes adopted foreigners useful to them, the Indian and Arab merchants of Zeila or Berbera for example, and by this means sought to normalise their status by drawing them into the web of mutual obligation so critical for Somalis.¹⁸ It was also true, however, that Somalis, as pastoralists, could not understand, and ultimately despised any way of life other than their own. Moreover, how could members of a society in which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Somaliland and Somalis
• 2 Administration 1920–1938: ‘Combining efficiency with cheapness’
• 3 Development 1920–1938
• 4 Fiasco 1938–1941
• 5 Military Administration 1941–1948
• 6 Development 1941–1948
• 7 Administration 1948–1960
• 8 Development 1948–1960
• 9 Constitutional development 1952–1960
• 10 After the end
• Conclusion
• Appendix A Map of the Somaliland Protectorate
• Appendix B Modern Map of Somalia Indicating Tribal Ranges
• Bibliography
• Index